EVEN MORE SOBERING. Larry Diamond, a former senior adviser to the coalition government in Iraq and a current fellow at the Hoover Institution, lays out where America went wrong in Iraq in a piece in today's San Jose Mercury News:

From the moment that Baghdad fell in April 2003 and much of the public infrastructure was systematically destroyed, the United States failed to fulfill the first overriding obligation of an occupying power: to establish and maintain order. Coalition (mainly American) forces failed to secure Iraq's cities, roads, electricity grids, oil pipelines and borders. The tenacious insurgency, fed and emboldened by an escalating influx of foreign jihadist terrorists, sabotaged roads and crucial facilities as rapidly as they were repaired.

Not surprising, Iraqis quickly lost confidence in the Americans. They now had to face, instead of Saddam, a new but still paralyzing fear _ of chaos, and of various possible forms of violent assault and sudden death.

Add to this central error epic hubris:

The coalition government relied heavily on a revolving door of diplomats and other personnel who would leave just as they had begun to develop local knowledge and ties, and on a large cadre of eager young neophytes whose brashness often gave offense in a very age- and status-conscious society. One young political appointee (a 24-year-old Ivy League graduate) argued that Iraq should not enshrine judicial review in its constitution because it might lead to the legalization of abortion. A much more senior Iraqi interlocutor (a widely experienced Iraqi-American lawyer) became so exasperated with the young man's audacity that he finally challenged him:

"You must have thoroughly studied the history of the British occupation of Iraq."

"Yes, I did," the young American replied proudly. "I thought so," said the Iraqi, "because you seem determined to repeat every one of their mistakes."

Such are the wages of sending junior Heritage Institute staffers abroad. Add to that the creation of mass unemployment and political dislocation:

And then there were major policy miscalculations, the most serious of which were the decisions in May 2003, upon the arrival of the American head of the occupation, L. Paul Bremer III, to disband the 400,000-member Iraqi army and disqualify from public employment a wide swath of Baath Party members. Both of these decisions flew in the face of numerous expert warnings that moving too precipitously in these ways would humiliate many Iraqis, alienate the Sunnis and destabilize the country, providing political fuel _ and a large number of recruits with weapons _ for an insurgency.

Some of these errors have since been partially rectified. Diamond’s two major recommendations now? More dialogue with the Sunni rebels and attempts to bring them into the political process, as per below. And, just as importantly, an “explicit commitment not to seek permanent military bases in Iraq.”

Perhaps no issue in the coming years will more clearly expose the real purpose of the Bush administration's postwar mission in Iraq: to build democracy or to obtain a new, regional military platform in the heart of the Arab world.

This is going to be a big debate. Consider yourselves duly warned.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

IRAQI INGENUITY IN ACTION. The Los Angeles Times' Carol J. Williams has a great piece out on the Iraq electricity situation today, and how Iraqis have turned to private gas-powered generators to make up for the public grid failure. Unfortunately, this has created a noxious crowd of exhaust over the Iraqi capital that is leading to health and respiratory problems:

BAGHDAD — A massive generator outside the Ministry of the Environment belches smoke, drips oil and roars above the noise of traffic, glaring testimony to the low priority given to protecting air quality in the warravaged Iraqi capital.

Gas flare-offs from oil fields, smoldering fires along sabotaged pipelines, groaning generators on every street corner have spread a gray haze over much of Iraq, aggravating respiratory problems and threatening caustic inversions as people brace for the dreaded heat of summer when temperatures climb past the 120-degree mark.

Electricity Minister Muhsin Shalash warned recently that the ad hoc gasoline-run electricity generators already blighting Baghdad would continue to proliferate as the mercury climbs between now and September and residents rely on them to run air conditioners and appliances.

"The situation is dire, and it won't improve for years," Shalash said, recalling that Iraq had the best electricity system in the Middle East before two decades of war and international sanctions derailed maintenance and investment....

With the nation's power plants producing about 65% of pre-invasion output, according to Shalash, tens of thousands of Iraqis have taken matters into their own hands by buying gas-powered generators or tapping into miniature electric stations set up illegally in their neighborhoods....

"You find at least two large generators in every street, and most homes have their own small one," said Hifa Abed Kareem Nosaif, a physicist and senior analyst at the Environment Ministry.

Nosaif estimates that the number of gas-fired generators has increased 50-fold in the capital, where wealthy and middle-class Iraqis can augment the paltry public power supply to run air conditioning and televisions, two services many consider vital now that traditional pastimes such as strolling and cafe visits are unsafe because of the ongoing insurgency....

In addition to the smog, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are being polluted by new and old industries that dump their wastes into the waterways, Nosaif said. The thriving cement and brick factories turning out construction supplies for the post-invasion repair boom are the worst culprits, he said....

Infectious diseases such as typhoid and hepatitis are on the rise from sewer-system damage that allows wastewater to mix with drinking water and from oil spills into the rivers caused by insurgent attacks on pipelines, he added.

Little progress has been made in repairing leaks and breakages, Nosaif said, because neither Iraqi technicians nor U.S.-led forces can work safely at the sites that, like the rest of the country, are vulnerable to insurgent bombings and drive-by shootings.

Sobering.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

SUNNI INSURGENTS FORM POLITICAL GROUP -- LED BY A U.S. CITIZEN, NO LESS. The latest from Iraq, via the AP, via Nexis:

U.S.-led forces detained more than a dozen suspected militants in a counterinsurgency sweep through western Anbar province as part of a sustained effort to disrupt the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, the military said Thursday.

Separately, a Sunni Arab politician who brokered secret talks between American officials and insurgents said he has formed a group to give political voice to Iraqi fighters, and he demanded a timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal.

Former Cabinet member Ayham al-Samarie announced the creation of the National Council for Unity and Construction of Iraq on Wednesday to give representation to Iraqi fighters. Al-Samarie, a dual Iraq-U.S. citizen, is believed to have strong tribal links in the so-called Sunni Triangle in central Iraq, where the Sunni branch of the insurgency is concentrated.

He was the target of a death threat issued Thursday on an Islamic Web site, claiming he was spreading lies.

The developments came amid growing violence that has killed more than 1,370 people - mostly civilians and Iraqi forces - since Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced his Shiite-led government April 28. With the Sunni Arab-dominated insurgency targeting the Shiite majority, the wave of killings has slowly been pushing the country toward civil war.

There have been several U.S.-led military campaigns trying to quell the sectarian bloodshed by taking aim at foreign fighter networks. (emphasis added)

I wish the president had explained on Tuesday how targeting the foreign terrorists undermines the Sunni insurgency that's pushing Iraq towards civil war. Because they kind of seem like two separate, if interrelated, problems, which we are, in point of fact, approaching from two different angles. Quoth the story:

The new political front is representing "resistance" fighters who have not targeted civilians, al-Samarie said. Nearly all car bomb and suicide attacks targeting Iraqis are believed to be the work of Islamic extremist groups such as al-Qaida in Iraq.

It's also worth noting that the broker of the talks between insurgents and the United States, Ayham al-Samarie, was none other than the electricity minister in the interim government.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BUT I HAVE A BOOK TO SELL! I kind of feel like I’m debating whether the earth is flat, but in two Weekly Standard pieces Stephen Hayes seems to have taken George W. Bush's cue that it's time to revive that old canard that Saddam Hussein was some how in active league with Al-Qeada.

As this debate is so spring 2004, I’ll just invite readers to take a journey back in time with me to those halcyon days when we had only just learned that Ahmed Chalabi might be an Iranian spy and when deputy defense secretaries still took hits off the Laurie Mylroie pipe. Reread Peter Bergen's and Judith Yaphe's comments from the transcript of a June 2004 AEI event promoting Hayes' book on the supposed connection (also discussed in our pages by Matt). You'll notice that Hayes neglects to offer a plausible explanation of why the administration would remain intent on keeping “evidence” of this explosive information so close to its chest.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: BOLTON AND IRAN. Dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions will be the top priority of the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Michael Tomasky argues that if John Bolton sneaks by in a recess appointment, his longstanding personal agenda may bring us one step closer to a military confrontation with that regime.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS. The good news is that the Army met its June recruiting target. The bad news is that they appear to have accomplished this by setting a really low target.

The Army needs 80,000 recruits per year. That's 6,666 or so recruits per month. The June target was set at 5,650, and they exceeded the target by enlisting 6,150 soldiers in June. That's still 500 fewer than they need. Or, rather, 500 fewer than they would have needed had there not been shortfalls in earlier months and were the summer not prime recruting time. On one level, I would caution liberals against making too much out of this. The plan is to try and meet the target by lowering recruiting standards and increasing enlistment bonuses, and there's no reason to think that's inherently unworkable. But it could take a lot of money and there's every reason to think the costs will keep accelerating as time goes on. Asking the public to send greeting cards to soldiers over the July 4 weekend isn't going to get the job done.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE SYRIAN BORDER. I think it's clear that if you're looking at purely military things that could make a real difference in Iraq, preventing the infiltration of foreign fighters (and, one assumes, supplies and money) from Syria would be the most useful thing. Andrew Sullivan has a series of posts on the subject that includes this moronic suggestion from some readers:

The first is that the open Syrian border is a deliberate policy, the fly-trap theory, if you will. According to this theory, we want the Jihadists from Saudi Arabia, Syria and elsewhere to come to Iraq so we can deal with them there.

One sees reasoning of this sort on display more and more nowadays. The key premise is that Bush never makes mistakes, so proponents need to undertake valiant efforts to prove that apparently disastrous goings-on are, in fact, part of a brilliant plan. This is what Imre Lakatos called a degenerative research program. Some of Sullivan's other correspondents propose a better answer to the question of why the border isn't sealed: We can't seal it. As readers may be aware, fairly huge quantities of people and illegal drugs manage to make their way into the United States each and every year. Iraq's borders are smaller, but then again it's a foreign country and a war zone, so it's harder to get things done.

This is a big part of the reason why it's so crucial to define the mission in Iraq in some more sensible way than "killing the bad people." If we insist on doing that, the war will never end. There's something to the "failure is not an option" cliché, but doing the impossible isn't an option, either. We should set some goals we can achieve, achieve them, and then go.

--Matthew Yglesias

ELECTRICITY IN IRAQ CAN'T BE OUTSOURCED. Following up on my post from yesterday on the declining, rather than improving, electric power supply in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, it's worth noting that a major source of the electricity problem is the Bush administration's insistence on farming out the reconstruction and reconstruction dollars to private companies and American contractors. This raises the possibility that the Bush administration, which has tried so hard to undermine goverment programs in the United States, may be uniquely ill-suited to nation-building because of its blind faith in the capacity of the private sector to fix problems. This simply is not working in Iraq, where foreign companies and Americans make easy and, to insurgents, appealing targets. It may well be that Iraqi problems are ultimately going to have to be solved by Iraqi talent, Iraqi ingenuity, and Iraqi companies (or at least novel Iraqi subsidiaries of foreign companies) -- or else they won't get solved at all.

According to a May story in the online news service The New Standard:

At the Al-Dora power station in Baghdad on May 3, the deputy manager of the plant, Bashir Khalaf Omair, said that electricity output in Iraq prior to the March, 2003 invasion was around 5,000 Megawatts (MW) a day.

Currently, even in the best neighbourhoods of Baghdad there is only twelve hours of electricity per day, and this only intermittently. Most areas of the city have between six and eight hours of power per 24 hours. ...

Baghdad resident Salam Obidy is frustrated by the unreliability of the electrical grid. "I have three hours on, and four hours off," he said. "Mostly it is completely unscheduled. Yesterday I spent all night not sleeping because it was so hot."

And it is only getting hotter. The temperature during the day in Baghdad is beginning to approach 100 degrees now. It consistently climbs to 110-120 degrees in July and August.

According to deputy manager Omair, Iraq has suffered from a shortage of electricity since the 1991 Gulf War during which American pilots bombed power plants. He added that prior to the 1991 war, Iraq was producing 9,500 MW of electricity per day.

"The parts we need come from Italy and Germany," Omair said, "and the security situation has made it more difficult to get these imported."

In addition to sabotage of gas and transmission lines in Iraq, as well a shortage of supplies, the reconstruction problems in Iraq have been underscored by the mass exodus of foreign contractors.

"Bechtel is responsible for the rehabilitation here," Omair explained. "The companies they subcontracted to, Siemens and Babcock, have pulled out their engineers. Without their presence, the Iraqi companies Al-Marjal and United Company, have been unable to do as much work."

Companies that were working on many of the electricity projects include U.S.-based Seimens-Westinghouse, Bechtel, and General Electric, along with two Russian companies, Tekhnopromexport and Inter Energo Servis (IES), according to the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity.

Yet, according to Al-Haris, the acting electricity minister, many of these companies began departing Iraq prior to the invasion in March, 2003 -- well before the most recent round of exits caused by the deteriorating security situation under the U.S. occupation.

"The work in these stations was started during the past regime," Al-Haris said, "but it was stopped before the war when the companies left Iraq, and the work is still stopped." Al-Haris added, "There are tens of trucks stopped on the border of Turkey, Jordan, and Syria, and they cannot enter because of the bad security situation. All the equipment in the trucks is very important to continue our work."

He reported that another problem is the huge consumption of electricity in Iraq and the huge quantity of electrical consumer goods people are buying. He said, "The annual increase of the consumption of the electricity in the entire world is about 3-5 percent, but in Iraq it is 30 percent."...

"Even if the German engineers who were working in the Al-Dora power plant returned tomorrow," said assistant plant manager Omair, "they would need four to five months to get our remaining two generators online."

Can't the United States provide security for or airlift in the necessary parts? Furthermore, if the security situation is making it too difficult to rely on foreign companies and foreign engineers, why not train more Iraqis to do it themselves?

Certainly that is something the United States can ask its allies in Europe to provide assistance on. Maybe we're not willing to allow Iraqi police or military to train abroad. But surely it wouldn't be a problem to have technical experts trained overseas. Why not create an international fellowship program of some kind to train a new generation of Iraqi engineers abroad and bring the world together around the project of Iraqi recovery and Iraqi technical independence? Take people who are already somewhat expert, bring them to the United States and Europe for six months to a year or however long it takes, then send them back to Iraq to fix the electricity problems.

Furthermore, if German engineers are going to be targets and German or American companies are too frightened by the security situation to work in Iraq, can't they be encouraged to create some kind of Iraqi subidiaries where they provide technical advice and support from abroad but allow the on-the-ground work and management to be done entirely by Iraqis?

The same goes for the oil companies. Along with the failing power grid, the inability to restart the Iraqi oil industry has been a major hindrance to reconstruction and to the stabilization of life in Iraq (not to mention the greater financial burden it's put on the United States). Can't there be some kind of public-private partnerships arranged with the U.S. oil industry to train Iraqi experts to manage the oil extraction industry? (With appropriate safeguards to insure that there's no appearance or risk of it being an American oil-company power grab.) And/or an international drive to donate needed parts?

Finally, if the oil and electrity problems are the two biggest issues in reconstruction, and the security situation is the obstacle to getting them up and running again, why not create an on-the-ground Iraqi security force that does nothing but defend oil and power installations? Even the United States has myriad types of police and military power it uses for specific tasks. Creating an Iraqi force to fight other Iraqis has been a big challenge for the United States. Might not a force that doesn't go after insurgents, police neighborhoods, or fight crime but instead only defends the electric grid and oil installations be a more popular job -- and one easier to train people for? Certainly these individuals would become targets for the insurgents, just like American-trained Iraqi police and army recruits have been. But I suspect people might fight more aggressively to defend their neighborhoods' power supplies than to capture and/or kill their anti-American neighbors.

Perhaps these are naive questions or ideas. But in the spirit of constructive criticism, as per James Taranto, there they are. Indeed, the idea of international fellowships and short-term trips has been totally underexplored as a method of buying goodwill in Iraq. Lobbyists and nations have successfully used such cultural and technical exchanges for generations (think Rhodes scholarships or Jack Abramoff's junkets) to buy goodwill and fellowship. And yet I know of none for Iraqis in the United States. How expensive could it be for Congress to create a series of two-week fellowships for Iraqi legislators to come see democracy in action in D.C.? For oil companies to invite Iraqi engineers on month-long residencies at their headquarters? For the New York City police department to create three-week fellowships in anti-terrorist strategy (certainly New York, of all places, would have an interest in preventing the growth of terrorist networks in Iraq)? Transportation security into and out of Iraq assured by the U.S. military, in all instances.

It's time for everybody to start thinking outside the box. What we've been doing hasn't been working. But that's no reason to think that there is nothing more -- and nothing positive -- that can be done.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHAT DID THE ITALIANS KNOW? Dana Priest reports the semi-expected development that at least some elements of the Italian intelligence community collaborated in the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" operation there, and it seems that the situation was similar in Canada and Sweden. See further analysis from Laura Rozen. It's not clear to me whether this makes any legal difference to the Italian criminal investigation into American activities. If Italian military intelligence came to America and did something here that violated U.S. law, it would still be illegal even if the CIA told them it was okay.

However that may be, this clearly isn't anything that anyone wanted to see flushed out into the open. Given public opinion in Europe, politicians are probably going to feel a lot of pressure to start reducing their level of counterterrorism cooperation with the American government.

--Matthew Yglesias

ETHICS AGREEMENT. The deal doesn't seem to have been sealed quite yet, but it certainly looks as if House ethics panel chairman Doc Hastings has finally backed off his plan to install his own top aide as the committee's new staff director; his retreat will break this last committee impasse and allow investigations to move forward.

It's worth mentioning that over the course of the entire struggle over ethics procedures in the House, Democrats have managed to win, completely, every fight they've picked, forcing the Republicans to back off of every single endeavor they've attempted to water the rules down. Republicans retreated on the party rule change shielding indicted leaders; then they retreated on the proposed ethics committee change revoking the 30-year-old rule requiring that House members behave in a manner that "reflects creditably" on the institution; they passed and then reversed the rule changes allowing for legal counsel to represent multiple targets of an ethics investigation and requiring a committee majority, or both the chairman and ranking member, to greenlight an investigation. Now they're backing off their attempt to politicize the committee's staff. This kind of victory is one Democrats will want to savor.

And now that they've successfully defended the long-standing independence and procedural integrity of the ethics committee, maybe now it's time to see that the panel actually carries out its job when necessary. The Tom DeLay investigation will begin gearing up in the coming months as this new agreement is worked out and new staff attorneys are hired. And, as a Hill piece mentions today, the panel "may also launch an investigation of Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-Calif.), who engaged in a real-estate transaction with a lobbyist who lost nearly $700,000 in the deal." Of course, the efforts of at least one House member to introduce this case to the committee would be a big help.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHAT IRAQIS WANT: STABILITY & AIR-CONDITIONING. Here's a radical idea: Restoring consistent electrical power to Iraq could help fight the insurgency. Think about it: The continuing instability of the power supply in Iraq has left Iraqis facing their third scorching summer in a row without air conditioning. And if the dynamics in Iraq are anything like every other area in the world, the episodic darkness into which parts of Baghdad and other cities are routinely plunged must also be contributing to criminal activity and an atmosphere of lawlessness. Darkness breeds crime -- it's such a fundamental truism that it's almost a law of nature. Lack of electricity hinders people's ability to cook for and feed their families, run refrigerators and preserve food, cool their homes, flush their toilets and run taps, light their communities, and engage in peacable indoor evening entertainments, like watching TV. Instead, it forces people into the streets and onto their roofs, in the darkness of night, where they congregate with their neighbors, complain about the Americans, and are more likely to be victims of crime. The electricity problems come up in almost every story I see about the quality of life in today's Iraq, just as they did in this latest AP story on Iraqi reaction to Bush' speech:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - For engineering professor Moayad Yasin al-Samaraie, President Bush's pledge to keep U.S. troops in Iraq until their mission is complete was the promise of order over chaos. But the assurance rang hollow for Mona Hussein, who woke up Wednesday without electricity or running water after spending the night on her roof trying to escape Baghdad's sweltering heat.

Iraqis on the street and the country's politicians seemed divided over Bush's refusal to provide a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops, along with his promises for a better life in this country of 26 million people.

"Iraq cannot be stable if the American and coalition forces leave," al-Samaraie said.

The 55-year-old said chaos could result "because Iraqi forces don't have the required level of training to protect the country."

But Hussein, also an engineer, said withdrawing foreign troops might restore the security their presence has so far failed to establish.

"The terrorists will continue to attack the Americans as long as they're here. They should leave so that there will be less explosions and more security," she said. "As long as they're here, we'll remain an occupied country, just like Palestine."

Many Iraqis said they didn't see the speech, which was broadcast just before dawn, and some who viewed excerpts of it considered it tailored to an American audience.

"It will make no difference. (Bush) has given speeches before, but we have not seen any results," said Hussein, a 25-year-old mother of two. "A discussion on electricity or oil would have been better than the Bush speech. Maybe more people would have paid attention then."...

In Baghdad, before the U.S.-led invasion, residents had about 20 hours of electricity a day. Today, they get about 9.4 hours daily, usually broken into two-hour chunks. There are also frequent fuel and drinking water shortages, and only 37 percent of the population has a working sewage system.

There's got to be some way of fixing the electricity problem. There just has to be. Indeed, this seems like a pretty good time for a congressional hearing on Iraqi reconstruction.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE END OF THE SMIRK. Media Life magazine notes that "Bush's Speech Tanks With Public", averaging only 19 million viewers across all four networks:

That’s down 41 percent from the 32.75 million who watched Bush on the Big Four during a primetime press conference in April... .

It may have been a smaller audience, but the legendary Bush smirk seemed to be gone, finally. The president appeared more sober than he has in some time. Unfortunately, he did not lay out for the American public what's really going on in Iraq or provide his listeners with a realistic sense of what lies ahead, except to say that America should expect more of the same, with no end in sight. I can only hope that his rhetoric was a work of (badly targeted) political stagecraft designed for a domestic audience, rather than an actual expression of U.S. operational strategy in Iraq.

The biggest problem with the speech was the president's attempt to promote the idea that U.S. forces are at war with Al-Qaeda terrorists and foreign fighters in Iraq, when in fact such individuals likely make up only 5 to 10 percent of the insurgents. The bulk of the insurgents are Iraqi Sunni Arabs, and their activities are concentrated largely in three of Iraq's 16 provinces. Collapsing the two groups -- foreign terrorists and Sunni Iraqis -- is a strategic mistake, as the Sunni insurgency is likely aggravated by the U.S. presence on the ground, which Bush last night justified as a response to the foreign terrorists in Iraq, and may well require a totally different strategy to quash. Separating out the two distinct insurgencies that U.S. and Iraqi forces are fighting -- and the distinct strategies needed to vanquish each -- would seem like a logical first step in explaining to the public the work that remains to be done in Iraq before the bulk of U.S. forces can leave. Already the United States has successfully rebuffed an earlier insurgency, that of the Shiite forces led by Moqtada al-Sadr, through a combination of military force and negotiation. And it scored a tactical victory against Sunni rebels at Fallujah last fall, though at a high price to the city and U.S. forces.

Indeed, it would seem that there are currently three major security problems in Iraq, each requiring a different approach and presenting different opportunities for international alliances, and each with different implications for the U.S. tenure in Iraq: an out-of-control crime wave; foreign terrorists; and Sunni rebels. Had the president addressed these seperate, but overlapping, problems, and laid out cleanly and clearly what the United States is doing about each of them, I suspect he'd have found a bigger audience than he got for his obfuscations last night. People don't want to hear about September 11 any more -- they want to hear, "We're going to win this thing and this is how." By refusing to get into specifics, the president deprived the American people of a narrative for what's happening in Iraq and failed to appeal to their pragmatism. As long as the situation in Iraq is described in vague and ill-defined terms, as it was last night, it cannot but seem a mess.

I actually think it's possible for Bush to win back the support of the American public for continuing involvement in Iraq (if not for the entry into the war). The fact that support for immediate withdrawal is so low (only 13 percent) is likely a testament to the seriousness with which the public takes the specter of failure, among other things. But to win back the public, Bush will have to first break free of his own stale rhetoric and obfuscations. He didn't do that last night.

The president needs to re-engage the American public in the war effort. One way to do that would be for him or Don Rumsfeld to give monthly progress reports full of specifics and short-term achievable goals. Make the American people get to know Iraq -- all 16 provinces -- and its people. Give them characters and give them a narrative. Bring Condi Rice and the State Department before the public to talk about reconstruction. Set public deadlines for restoring electricity in Baghdad and other rebuilding efforts. Give the Iraqi people and the American public something they can look forward to and the opportunity to feel a sense of achievement. If U.S. forces are going to stay in Iraq (and everything administration figures have said suggests that they are going to be there in large numbers for at least another year -- if not 12), then it would behoove the administration to give the public a renewed stake in what is happening, rather than leaving them to watch helplessly from the sidelines as the situation appears to spiral out of control.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE COLLEGE TRY. Over at TNR, Keelin McDonell chronicles the heated and extremely cut-throat race for College Republican National Committee (CRNC) chairman between treasury secretary Paul Gourley (who was tainted by some really astonishing fundraising shenanigans that occurred under his watch last year) and insurgent candidate Mike Davidson. (In a piece otherwise devoted to the pervasive chickenhawkery afflicting the ranks of College Republicans, Max Blumenthal offers some more fun details on the race.) Little did I know that my favorite House GOP freshman, the irascible pit bull Patrick McHenry, played an instrumental and not universally appreciated role in the fight. As a truly funny piece in The Hill reports today:

Freshman Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) made phone calls to at least two North Carolina College Republicans asking them to change their votes in the recent acrimonious College Republican national election, and the young people McHenry contacted said they felt pressured by the calls.

McHenry is a former College Republican National Conference (CRNC) treasurer whom the House GOP leadership has called on to speak on several high-priority issues this session. His office employs several CRNC alumni, and College Republicans worked together on McHenry's primary campaign in 2004 despite a plank in the group's constitution that bars the CRNC from endorsing a candidate running opposed in a primary.

The College Republicans' allegations against McHenry come in the midst of a public-relations firestorm for the group, which incorporated as a 527 for fundraising purposes in 2001. Among nearly $8 million in direct-mail solicitations the CRNC sent last year were letters targeting the elderly, using misleading language that made donors believe they were giving to the national GOP. The CRNC also transferred $10,000 in 2002 to former National Chairman Jack Abramoff, now under investigation for lobbying abuses.

...

Elizabeth Beck, the 24-year-old former regional director for the NCFCR, said McHenry was a crucial part of the Gourley campaign's whip strategy. Beck, who worked on McHenry's primary in the spring of 2004, said the lawmaker called her cell phone last month.

"He said, 'Elizabeth, I thought we were friends, that you cared about getting me elected,'" Beck said. Then, she added, McHenry warned her that he would not help her or her school's College Republicans in the future unless she voted for Gourley for CRNC chairman.

"It was requested from Gourley to McHenry. McHenry told me [that]," Beck said. "Basically, he said, 'Y'all are screwed.' It was one of the worst days of my life because I do like McHenry." She felt threatened and disappointed because "before that, I felt like I had a relationship, like I had connections, a career."

Another College Republican, who declined to be identified, was standing next to Beck during her conversation with McHenry and recalled that she was intimidated. "It was very pointed - if you don't do this, there will be consequences," she said, summarizing McHenry's words. "If you don't do this, it will be bad for your political career."

You'll really want to read the whole thing to get the flavor of this, but basically McHenry owed his extremely narrow primary victory last year to the network of College Republican volunteers who aided him, and wanted both to repay Gourley for his help and retaliate against College Republicans who had criticized that help.

That a United States congressman would become so involved in this race (going so far as to call bewildered kids on their cell phones out of the blue to intimidate them into changing their votes) is a nice reminder of the CRNC's institutional significance as a personnel feeder and launching pad for the big-boy GOP. (It's hard to imagine such dramatics accompanying a national race among the College Democrats, for instance.) Tactical ruthlessness combined with intellectual bankruptcy -- it's what the CRNC has inculcated in ambitious up-and-comers, and bestowed upon the Republican Party and the country, for decades.

--Sam Rosenfeld

DEMOCRACY NOW. Last night, George W. Bush yet again made the case that the conflict in Iraq has triggered a democracy domino effect. "Across the broader Middle East, people are claiming their freedom. In the last few months, we have witnessed elections in the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon. These elections are inspiring democratic reformers in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia," Bush said, in a variation on a theme the administration has advanced repeatedly.

Now, citizens of these countries are pushing for reform; take the Arab media's new steps to criticize dictatorships. But blithe applause lines aside, the courage of journalists has not translated into government tolerance, as this Christian Science Monitor story explains. Nor are reformers any more warmly received; look at Egypt, just for starters. As the Times reports today, Ayman Nour, the 40-year-old opposition candidate to president-for-life Hosni Mubarak, has pleaded "not guilty" to what seem to be trumped-up charges of forgery. Mubarak's government has consistently attempted to discredit Nour's Tomorrow Party.

To be sure, it's not like the administration hasn't noticed; Condoleezza Rice protested Nour's arrest in January, canceled her March visit to Egypt, and in Cairo earlier this month cautiously chided Mubarak. "President Mubarak has unlocked the door for change. Now, the Egyptian government must put its faith in its own people," Rice said. "The Egyptian government must fulfill the promise it has made to its people and to the entire world by giving its citizens the freedom to choose." But just a month before Rice's speech Laura Bush was calling Mubarak's stance "bold and wise."

It seems to me that the adminstration is trying to have it both ways -- putting Egypt in the column of democracy-spreading wins, while still claiming the option of chiding them into an actual embracing of democracy. I keep coming back to something French Islamic scholar Gilles Kepel said to me a few months ago. The Bush administration, he said, "mistook Baghdad for East Berlin." It's a useful image. It's hard to fake civil society; Kabuki democracy isn't democracy.

--Sarah Wildman

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: DOCUDRAMA. The John Bolton fight has become about more than just John Bolton. Mark Leon Goldberg explains why the balance of power between the coequal executive and legislative branches hangs on the administration's insistence on withholding documents from the Senate.

--Jeffrey Dubner

LUCK OF THE IRISH. Tom Friedman really needs to think harder about this stuff. After wowing the audience with the news that "Ireland today is the richest country in the European Union after Luxembourg" he informs us:

It tells you a lot about Europe today: all the innovation is happening on the periphery by those countries embracing globalization in their own ways - Ireland, Britain, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe - while those following the French-German social model are suffering high unemployment and low growth. ...

Ireland's advice is very simple: Make high school and college education free; make your corporate taxes low, simple and transparent; actively seek out global companies; open your economy to competition; speak English; keep your fiscal house in order; and build a consensus around the whole package with labor and management - then hang in there, because there will be bumps in the road - and you, too, can become one of the richest countries in Europe.

This observation about the geographical location of European economic growth is roughly accurate but it doesn't tell us anything about why France and Germany have grown so slowly. The implication of deriding the "French-German social model" while praising Ireland is to suggest that laissez faire is the key to riches. But look at the top five EU members by GDP per capita (with PPP adjustments): Luxembourg, Ireland, Denmark, Austria, Belgium. Alternatively, the top five in Europe the geographical region are (in order) Luxembourg, Norway, Ireland, Iceland, Denmark. Switzerland, Finland, and the Netherlands are also all richer than the more free market United Kingdom. Sweden is substantially poorer than the other Scandinavian countries. Italians are slightly richer than French people, but that masks sharp regional disparities; southern Italy is much poorer than France and northern Italy much richer.

The moral of the story is ... well, that it's not clear what the moral of the story is. Comparing Ireland to France seems to have a clear lesson, but the broader picture is extremely murky. Certainly, the specific lessons Friedman draws don't make much sense. American higher education is way less free than it is anywhere in Europe, and we're super rich. What's more, if you've been to France you'll know that French people take very long vacations and don't put in very many hours on the job compared to Americans. If they worked the same number of hours annually as we do, they'd be way richer in the sense of owning more stuff. On the other hand, they'd have a lot less leisure time. These divergent choices have far-reaching consequences, and I wouldn't want to adopt the French lifestyle, but it's not obvious that there's an objectively correct way to judge this tradeoff.

--Matthew Yglesias

KNOW YOUR ENEMY. Alex Tabarrok has some excellent follow-up criticism to the bad Paul Krugman column on China I criticized the other day. I think it's worth noting, however, that since the China hawks are probably the single most pernicious group of people with any non-trivial influence on the United States of America, Krugman isn't the real enemy here. It's possible that at some point in the future he'll emerge as a leading China-basher, but one column does not a China hawk make. If you're concerned about this phenomenon -- and I applaud Tabarrok for being concerned; too few people are -- you've got to keep your eye on the ball which, at the moment, means paying attention to The Weekly Standard, the Project for a New American Century, and the American Enterprise Institute.

--Matthew Yglesias

WILL BOLTON BE TOO DAMAGED TO REPRESENT THE UNITED STATES? One thing I've been wondering about lately is whether the three-month-long drama surrounding John Bolton's appointment to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has so damaged his credibility in international eyes that it will undermine his effectiveness in representing American interests at the UN. This is something that conservatives who want Bolton to get to the UN and knock heads together should worry about, too. Why should any international diplomat take his threats seriously anymore, now that they know him to be a "serial abuser" and vicious backstabber whose very appeareance has been adjudged an affront to the dignity of the U.S. Senate? And knowing that the nation that sent him does not back him?

Should Bolton be given a recess appointment, which now seems the only route through which he could take up the UN post, he will enter his new role not just as the only such ambassador in U.S. history not confirmed by the Senate, but he will be entering after a period of significant public controversy that has seriously eroded the credibility and respect he will likely be able to wield as an individual negotiator in the UN environment. Instead of sending a well-respected and powerful representative to the UN, the United States would be sending seriously damaged goods. Can such an individual negotiate the critical relationships and alliances that the United States will need in the coming months as it attempts to find an exit strategy in Iraq? Already, the Times of London has noted that "if [Bolton] does win confirmation, he will do so limping." And regardless of what anyone thinks of Bolton himself, that can't be good for America.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

RENDERING THE DEMOCRATS IRRELEVANT. Kevin Drum is spot-on in his analysis of the combination of White House incompetence and mendacity that led to yesterday's revelation of a $2.6 billion funding shortfall for veterans' healthcare, one that was hidden even from the recent emergency war supplemental. It needs to be stressed that the congressional Republicans who are now crying foul and piling on the administration really don't deserve a pass here. Last week the VA disclosed a $1 billion shortfall for health care this year, and yesterday Chet Edwards, ranking Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee on veterans affairs, proposed an amendment to restore that funding. The amendment was blocked by the ever-democratic House Rules Committee and the spending bill in question, sans amendment, passed along strict party lines. Recall also that Democrats who've long championed boosting health-care spending for veterans used to have a partner for such efforts in Chris Smith, the Republican ex-chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee, whom the leadership fired for precisely this reason. As Nancy Pelosi put it this morning:

"Over and over again in the last few months, Democrats have had initiative after initiative to fund veterans' health care. Just yesterday, Congressman Chet Edwards sought to offer an amendment to add $1 billion to VA health care. But as has happened over and over again, these increases in VA health care were rejected right down party lines.

"Now that all of a sudden the issue is too hot for the Republicans to handle, they are saying they didn't know about the shortfall. We want to be sure that they know about it; we want to be sure that they act upon it; and we want to be sure that our veterans have the services that they need and that we promised them. That is the least we can do to honor their service, their courage, their patriotism, and the sacrifice they are willing to make for our country.

Of course, Pelosi's expressed sentiment here is both principled and, from the perspective of her party's political interests, totally futile. The same Republicans who now profess shock and horror at the revelation of a funding shortfall knew all about that shortfall yesterday when they blocked Edwards' proposal; quite obviously, what matters to them above all else is ensuring that Democrats cannot, under any circumstances, take any part of the credit for restoring funding for the troops.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BUT I DIDN’T MEAN YOU GUYS! I ran into Markos Moulitsas at a New Politics Institute lunch Wednesday, and he gave me a bit of good-natured stick for a quasi-throwaway graf in my column Monday. I’d raised the specter of irresponsible bloggers who aren’t really journalists enjoying the cloak of First Amendment protection but, through their laggard practices, are hurting “real” journalism. Markos was a little mystified by the paragraph and told me others were as well.

OK, fair point. I didn’t mean to impugn the established liberal blogs, which I explained to Duncan Black when I ran into him just a few hours after seeing Markos. My list of bloggers to whom I was definitely not referring includes but is by no means limited to: Josh Marshall, Mark Schmitt, Matt (and all his cohorts, at Tapped of course and at TPMCafe), Markos, Duncan, Kevin Drum (and guests), Jerome Armstrong, Arianna Huffington et alia, Ezra Klein, &c &c &c.

My point, which I think remains valid, was that the blogosphere in general is a milieu that is somewhat more likely than the milieu of traditional journalism to produce reckless error. On the other hand, the gist of the column was about traditional “journalist” Ed Klein using a quote from my book, duly footnoting it, but changing it to suit his purposes. That’s never happened to me in the blogosphere, I must say.

--Michael Tomasky

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: IT'S ABOUT OSAMA. President Bush didn't say too much last night, but he made it clear that the same failed policies would continue in Iraq. Harold Meyerson explains why Bush was wrong -- and why we should be worried about more of the same.

--Jeffrey Dubner

WITHDRAWAL AS WELFARE REFORM. Slate's Will Saletan has a really excellent column putting the case for moving toward withdrawal from Iraq in the proper context. An open-ended commitment has become a kind of ill-designed safety net that impedes the resolution of the political issues that are at the root of the insurgency. Sunni leaders can ambiguate between opposition to American occupation of their country and opposition to democracy as such. Shiite and Kurdish leaders can pursue counterproductive maximalist agendas while counting on the U.S. Army to keep them in power. Fundamentally, this is a situation that only Iraqis can resolve and they need to be empowered/forced to resolve them theirselves.

The most useful thing the United States can do, counterinsurgency-wise, is to build the new Iraqi government's international legitimacy and put pressure on neighboring countries to stem the flow of men, money, and materiel to the insurgency. None of that, however, requires us to have tens of thousands of soldiers on the ground in Iraq. Indeed, even here the presence is somewhat counterproductive. Arab governments acknowledge that a total breakdown in Iraq would be bad for them, but they're reluctant to take action and strong public stances because doing so is unpopular. They'd rather shift the responsbility to the United States. Again, the only way to change this dynamic is to stop undertaking a limitless commitment to the cause. Saying we're willing to singlehandedly make this all come out alright would be fine if we really could single-handedly make it all come out alright, but we can't. Given a realistic view of our capacities, forcing the issue is the strategy most likely to bring about a decent outcome.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE BUSH TIME WARP. As readers may recall, the president's second inaugural address endorsed a Hegelian philosophy of history to justify its broad approach to foreign affairs. In last night's speech, George W. Bush tackled the tougher job of defending the details of his approach and, in particular, invading Iraq without a post-conflict reconstruction strategy. As a result, he's needed to invoke some more esoteric philosophical doctrines. Notably, the main theme of the speech seems to be that we needed to invade Iraq because the country is full of vicious terrorists who are running around killing all sorts of people. Needless to say, this is true. To many people, however, the fact that the "terrorists running around" factor didn't come into play until after the invasion demonstrates that Bush's misguided approach caused the terrorism problem, rather than the terrorism problem causing the invasion.

To save the administration you need to invoke the concept of backward causation -- the metaphysical view that causes need not precede their effects, chronologically speaking. Unlike many philosophical controversies, this one actually has a very brief history. Its first prominent exponent was Michael Dummett, an elderly British philosopher (coalition of the willing) who's still its most effective advocate. See, for example, his paper "Bringing About the Past." Sadly for Bush, though, even in defending the view that backwards causation is logically coherent Dummett still maintains it still never happens in the real world.

--Matthew Yglesias

TODAY'S BUZZWORD: STRATEGY! So is tonight's speech a chance for the president to explain his strategy for Iraq, or just to explain that he has a "strategy for success"?

[SCOTT MCCLELLAN]: Tomorrow, the President will also talk about the strategy for success. He will talk in a very specific way about the way forward. There is a clear path to victory. It is a two-track strategy: there is the military and political track. ...

Q Scott, are there new details in the strategy for success? Is there a new direction, or is the President basically summing up what he has said before?

MR. McCLELLAN: As I said, this is a new speech. And the President will be talking in a very specific way about the strategy for succeeding in Iraq. And he will talk about the two-track strategy that we have in place. ...

Q The question is, is there a new direction, though, or not?

MR. McCLELLAN: You're going to hear from the President tomorrow night. I think we have a clear strategy for success. He's going to be talking in a very specific way about what that strategy is. It's an opportunity for the American people to hear about the strategy. ...

Q I guess my question is, beyond discussing, perhaps in great detail, what's already going on right now, is he going to offer new ideas, new initiatives, either from the U.S. -- joint initiatives with the U.S. and other countries -- in order to make what he says the goal -- is possible?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think I would describe it the way I did. You're going to hear him talk about the strategy we have for succeeding in Iraq, the strategy we have for victory, and where we are in terms of implementing that strategy.

So, yeah, looks like the speech will be heavier on mentioning he has a strategy than on having a strategy. Then again, far be it from me to second guess the president's speechwriters. They put in a lot of hard work. They probably even think about it every day -- every single day. So I'm sure they'll have a strategy for success here.

--Jeffrey Dubner

WOULD IT HAVE BEEN WORTHWHILE ... After a week of cynical administration insinuations that liberals didn't back fighting terrorists after September 11, President George W. Bush will make a speech tonight that seems to go out of its way to conflate the 9-11 attacks with the "pre-emptive" war in Iraq, declaring that the war was "worth it." From the White House come these excerpts of tonight's speech to the nation:

"The work in Iraq is difficult and dangerous. Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Every picture is horrifying – and the suffering is real. Amid all this violence, I know Americans ask the question: Is the sacrifice worth it? It is worth it, and it is vital to the future security of our country. And tonight I will explain the reasons why."

While acknowledging that the new Iraqi government and coalition forces have experienced tough fighting and suicide bombings, the President will explain why the terrorists are failing:

"The terrorists can kill the innocent – but they cannot stop the advance of freedom. The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of September 11 … if we abandon the Iraqi people to men like Zarqawi … and if we yield the future of the Middle East to men like Bin Laden."

After detailing both our military and political strategy in Iraq, the President will provide the American people with a broader, strategic understanding of the stakes in Iraq, the enemy we face, and why he’s optimistic the Iraqi people and coalition forces will prevail:

"We have more work to do, and there will be tough moments that test America’s resolve. We are fighting against men with blind hatred – and armed with lethal weapons – who are capable of any atrocity. They wear no uniform; they respect no laws of warfare or morality. They take innocent lives to create chaos for the cameras. They are trying to shake our will in Iraq – just as they tried to shake our will on September 11, 2001. They will fail. The terrorists do not understand America. The American people do not falter under threat – and we will not allow our future to be determined by car bombers and assassins." (emphasis added)

According to the Associated Press, "for the first time, more North Carolinians think the war is not worthwhile than think it is." The speech is being given in North Carolina.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BUSH'S TANKING POLLS BUOYED BY THE RED STATES? President Bush has had persistently low poll numbers for some time, as this graphic posted by Kevin Drum demonstrates. Recently, he's received his lowest ratings yet. Still, he's polling in the low- to mid-40s, and it's worth recalling that his father had a job approval rating of only 34 percent in mid-1992, before his electoral loss to Bill Clinton. Even with such very low Bush Sr. numbers, Clinton was only able to garner 43 percent of the vote nationwide, and might well have lost the race had it not been for Ross Perot's third-party candidacy.

Once upon a time, having an approval rating of below 50 percent signaled that a candidate was in an electoral danger zone or had lost touch with public opinion. Republican strategist Matthew Dowd persuasively argued in April 2003 that this number no longer applied. The reelection of his candidate a year and a half later only adds greater weight to those contentions:

[I]n 2002, every major statewide candidate with a re-elect of 45% or higher --- won! The average actual result on election day 2002 showed incumbents finishing 5 to 10 points above their re-elect numbers. It is no longer accurate to suggest that a candidate is vulnerable based solely on an incumbent having a re-elect number under 50%.

In the June 2005 SurveyUSA figures, Bush has a weighted average job approval rating of 43 percent, and an unweighted approval rating of 45 percent. I parceled out those numbers between the red states and the blue states, and found that what's really going on in this SurveyUSA state-by-state break out is that Bush is doing considerably worse in the states that voted for Kerry than he is nationwide.

While the unweighted sample shows Bush with a 45-percent approval and 51-percent disapproval rating, dividing this out by 2004 voting patterns shows Bush with a higher-than-average unweighted approval rating of 49 percent in the states he won, but much lower-than-average approval of only 39 percent in the states he did not. Bush is only 4 points higher than the national average in the red states, but he's 6 points lower in the blue ones. I'm sure if I had the capacity to weight those states for population, you would see an even more significant gap.

Significantly, the only state Bush won where his approval rating in the SurveyUSA sample is now below 40 percent is Nevada. In short, though Bush appears to be viewed with increasing public disfavor nationwide, that disfavor may be of questionable relevance in Bush's base states, and, hence, to Republican strategists looking to determine whether Bush ought to change course in response to shifts in public opinion.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: RECESS DISAPPOINTMENT. Now that it's clear that the Senate doesn't support John Bolton, many conservatives are pushing for a recess appointment. But surprise, surprise -- back when Bill Clinton was president, a recess appointment was an "arrogant insult."

--Jeffrey Dubner

STAND BY YOUR SMEAR. We're still polling Republican senators to see whether Karl Rove's recent comments on liberals and September 11 accurately reflect their own position. Five more senators have responded: Elizabeth Dole, Chuck Hagel, Trent Lott, Mel Martinez, and Mike Crapo. But none of them would comment or take a position. Considering that Kay Bailey Hutchinson has embraced Rove's remarks and Rick Santorum has disavowed them, all the senators clearly could say what they think -- but they're all ducking. Same goes for five Republican congressmen in swing districts who we checked on: Rob Simmons, Jim Leach, Joel Hefley, John Kline, and Mark Kennedy. Are they really just going to let half their constituents think their representative feels that they're on the side of Al-Qaeda? That can't be good for 2006.

--Kelly Kinneen, Jordan Kline, Asheesh Siddique, Kay Steiger, Toshiro Sugihara, and Alyson Zureick

DEMAGOGUES AND DECALOGUES. I think the Post's editorial on the Ten Commandments decisions pretty well typifies what's gone wrong with liberal thinking on these questions. "When demagogues such as former Alabama chief justice Roy S. Moore stick monuments in government buildings," they write, "for the simple purpose of advancing religion, the First Amendment is certainly offended." This manages to completely mislocate judge Moore's demagoguery, which lay not in his placement of the monument in the courthouse but in his reaction to a federal court order to take it down. The name of the demagogic game, in other words, lies precisely in the pretense that these petty and unimportant disputes are first-order questions of conscience that everyone should lie awake at night worrying about. Sniffing piously about how "the First Amendment is certainly offended" by this or that mode of display is simply playing the demagogues' game.

Realistically, even if Kentucky had decided to stick up little signs reading "Christianity is Awesome!" in their public buildings it would hardly matter. Yes, it would be hard to square with a real commitment to nonestablishment. But, no, it wouldn't be the second coming of the Inquisition; it would just be a silly thing to do. As Brad Plumer writes, the extent to which Jews, Muslims, atheists, polytheists or what have you are going to feel alienated from the American mainstream is going to have everything to do with the level of tolerance and respect present in society at large, and virtually nothing to do with where monuments to the Ten Commandments are located.

Now if cranky people want to launch these sorts of lawsuits, there's nothing liberals can do to stop them. What's more, lawsuits, once initiated, should be settled in accordance with the law and judicial rulings should be enforced. But liberals neither must nor should act like we believe these things are really big deals or that suing over them makes you anything other than a crank.

--Matthew Yglesias

LOTT'S COMEBACK. It appears that Trent Lott is intent on running for Republican whip should Rick Santorum lose his reelection race next year. Even if he were to run it's not certain he'd win -- but The Hill's piece certainly makes it sound plausible.

Lott never endeared himself much as a leader to his party or conservatives; most agreed with Jonah Goldberg's sneering characterization of him as a pork-happy "deal-maker." But his replacement has turned out to be such a wet noodle that the party must be yearning for leaders with some shred of parliamentary acumen, and Lott could fit the bill.

The fact that Lott can now plausibly be discussed as a future top party leader tells you all you need to know about the basic impossibility of scandal and disgrace ever truly bringing down a Republican. Recall that Lott got in trouble for saying explicitly that the country would have been better off had a segregationist splinter party taken national power in 1948. Recall, too, that he very nearly avoided getting in any trouble in the first place for doing so.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE OTHER CASE. It got a bit lost in the shuffle yesterday, but the Supreme Court also handed down a ruling in Brand X. This was a complicated, multilayered situation involving whether or not the FCC was allowed to not force cable companies to open their last-mile loops to competitors. The specific dispute at hand relates to my most recent article for the print magazine, and I think the FCC policy the Court upheld was a bad one. On the other hand, my understanding is that the FCC did, in fact, have the right under the relevant statute to make a bad policy if they wanted to.

Susan Crawford at SCOTUSBlog suggests that giving the FCC this kind of broad discretion is going to create regulatory uncertainty and general chaos. That point has some force, but I think it's always worth reminding people that not every problem has a good judicial remedy. The Telecommunications Act and related laws are, by design, vague and kick a lot of questions over to regulatory agencies. To have the federal courts poach that delegated authority wouldn't really change anything. It might be nice if the courts could order Congress to pass less vague laws (key portions of the Copyright Act are essentially empty verbiage), but it doesn't work like that.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CONQUERING BY DIVIDING. Leaders used to promote national unity in the face of threatening enemies. Now, though, as Matthew Yglesias laments, our president sets out to divide and polarize instead. And it doesn't just show domestically -- it's making things tougher for us in North Korea and at the UN, as well.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THOU SHALT MUDDLE. You’ll find a very rich discussion of the Supreme Court’s Ten Commandments decisions here at the SCOTUS blog, and should also check out this sensible post by Scott Lemieux. This, of course, is one issue on which the Court’s jurisprudence has been a hopelessly incoherent muddle for decades, and it doesn’t look as if things got much clearer yesterday. Actual constitutional merits aside (a big aside, I realize), from a liberal political perspective, religious-symbol cases like these command huge popular majorities supporting public religious display, and at the same time tend to be the very least important kinds of religion-related First Amendment cases from the perspective of someone who cares about church-state Constitutional issues. So I tend to sympathize with Bert Neuborne's take:

To my mind, worrying about the symbols confuses cause and effect. As long as we insist on an equality principle - a Koranic verse at the Texas capitol, I don't see the value in offending many millions of Americans for whom the displays provide solace and meaning. That's particularly so when the cases enrage millions of persons who then forget about their economic best interests when they vote. I would hold my fire for the many settings when religious zealots use government to force people to behave a certain way.

Meanwhile, my daily email alert from the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins gives a sense of the religious right's frustration with the rulings. But after going through the requisite litany of ways in which the decisions imperil religious expression, Perkins makes this half-insightful point:

The two decisions lack the simple clarity of "thou shall" or "thou shall not," and, reading the dissent in McCreary by Justice Antonin Scalia, one can see why. Scalia believes that the anti-religion faction on the Court went so far, and no further, because they believe the country will go with them only so far. The majority, he says, does not apply any "consistently applied principle." Today's decisions stand, therefore, as monuments to the Supreme Court's inconsistency, an inconsistency that worsens every day as the liberal justices continue to unmoor themselves from our nation's traditional understanding of law and public life.

Perkins interprets the majority's flagrant absence of clear principle on the matter as a sign of a determined but canny secularist agenda -- advanced slowly, step by step, stopping just short enough not to elicit a major public backlash. It's perhaps more accurate to say that Stephen Breyer in particular was groping somewhat clumsily to find some kind of middle-ground consensus amidst the clutter and confusion of the Court's various past rulings and tests. But even Perkins' evocation, of an unprincipled "anti-religion" majority that would go further in pushing its agenda but for the bulwark of American public opinion impeding it, is a somewhat different judicial image than the one he and his allies usually conjure of an unelected band of tyrants running amok and usurping the people's authority in order to effect radical and unpopular policies.

The important truth that Perkins is close to touching here is the idea that the Supreme Court is very rarely, in fact, a counter-majoritarian institution in practice; rather, it's a body that, for a variety of reasons, tends to track the prevailing political consensus of the day.

--Sam Rosenfeld

KUDOS. To Armando over at DailyKos for standing up against the media-bashing hordes and decrying the Supreme Court's decision to refer the question of whether there is such a thing as reporter's privilege back to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which had ruled that there is not. The press-bashing on liberal blogs has gotten so out of hand of late that I've begun to worry that progressives are simply aiding and abetting right-wing attempts to undermine the whole concept of an independent and free media, instead of taking the historic liberal position of standing up for it at a time when it's under fire. It's nice to see at least one leading progressive blogger recognizing that press-bashing isn't always the way to go.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

FREEDOM FROM POLITICS. About a decade ago I spent a summer working in a laboratory alongside a virologist who had served in the Bulgarian navy in his youth. In addition to being among the most unflinchingly tough individuals I'd ever met, he was completely uninterested in American politics.

That, for him, was one of the attractions of America. After growing up in communist Bulgaria, where, as he explained it, everything was determined by party and politics, being free to ignore politics and not worry about party was a form of liberation. And being free to live in a world where decisions about jobs and housing and power were made on merit instead of corrupt connections with party officials was a privilege.

When we think of political freedom, we normally think of such rights as freedom of assembly or the right to vote. But freedom from politics is also an essential form of human liberty. And that means the freedom to engage in and pursue otherwise permitted commercial activities without agents of the state stepping in and demanding that transactions first be vetted for allegiance to party.

That's why the blatant attempt, reported in Roll Call (subscription only) this morning, to threaten Major League Baseball if they sell the Washington Nationals to hedge-fund billionaire and Democratic financier George Soros is so disturbing:

While the Soros-Ledecky group is not seen as the frontrunner to win the bidding for the Nationals, who should be awarded to their new owner at the end of the 2005 season, the very prospect that Soros could have a stake in the team is enough to irritate Congressional Republicans.

“I think Major League Baseball understands the stakes,” said Government Reform Chairman Tom Davis (R), the Northern Virginia lawmaker who recently convened high-profile steroid hearings. “I don’t think they want to get involved in a political fight.”

Davis, whose panel also oversees District of Columbia issues, said that if a Soros sale went through, “I don’t think it’s the Nats that get hurt. I think it’s Major League Baseball that gets hurt. They enjoy all sorts of exemptions” from anti-trust laws.

Indeed, Hill Republicans could potentially make life difficult for MLB in a variety of ways. ... The Nats, meanwhile, hope to have a publicly-funded stadium built soon, though money for that venture is expected to come through the sale of bonds rather than a federal outlay.

Still, Rep. John Sweeney (R-N.Y.), vice chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that covers the District of Columbia budget, said if Soros buys the team and seeks public funding for the new stadium or anything else, the GOP attitude would be, “Let him pay for it.”

Another senior Republican lawmaker who requested anonymity said that the league should be aware of the perception problem that might be associated with selling the Nats to Soros.

“Why would Major League Baseball want to get involved with George Soros?” said the lawmaker. “It’s about more than just the sale price.”

Certainly, Soros is an extraordinarily politically active individual, but the question at issue doesn't seem to be political activity per se but whether or not that activity supports the ruling party. Who are the leading competitors to buy the team? None other than a group of politically active Republicans.

Soros isn’t the only political big-shot looking to buy the Nats. The ownership group seen by many insiders as the frontrunner to buy the team includes Fred Malek, a close friend of President Bush, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Another bidding group includes ex-Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.).

Fred Malek's presence in the competing Republican buyer group makes the Republican threats against baseball if the Jewish, Democratic Soros becomes a buyer even creepier. Malek, lest readers forget, was Richard Nixon's official Jew counter. According to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book, The Final Days (via Slate):

Late in 1971, Nixon had summoned the White House personnel chief, Fred Malek, to his office to discuss a "Jewish cabal" in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The "cabal," Nixon said, was tilting economic figures to make his Administration look bad. How many Jews were there in the bureau? he wanted to know. Malek reported back on the number, and told the President that the bureau's methods of weighing statistics were normal procedure that had been in use for years.

Now, Malek has long been a booster of baseball in the Washington region, so it's not a huge surprise that he should be a lead competitor for the local team. But, according to Tim Noah's 2001 piece, "Malek is best known in political circles for resigning in 1988 as George Bush's hand-picked deputy chairman for the Republican National Committee after the Post's Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward reported that 17 years earlier Malek had, at Richard Nixon's request, counted the number of Jews then working for the Bureau of Labor Statistics." Malek was later rehabilitated by George W. Bush, whose syndicate to buy the Texas Rangers Malek joined in 1988.

Ragging on Soros isn't about keeping politics out of the game -- it's about furthering the interests of ruling party loyalists.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

ASKING FOR IT. My favorite House Republican pit bull, freshman Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, pops up again in another tiny incident that typifies the current Republican leadership’s approach to bipartisan exchange. Subscription-only CQ has the story:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, took a subtle jab at Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., by sending a freshman substitute to the floor on June 24 to conduct a colloquy on the schedule for the week ahead.

A surprised Hoyer cut short his remarks and walked away rather than joust with pinch-hitter Patrick T. McHenry, R-N.C.

The end-of-the-week exchange is traditionally the only opportunity for the House minority to publicly — and on C-SPAN — question and challenge the majority leadership.

DeLay, like majority leaders of both parties who have preceded him, regularly fields — and genially shrugs off — rhetorical questions from Hoyer that suggest the current GOP majority has neglected the needs of the nation and is indifferent to the rights of the House minority, among other offenses.

But an aide said Republican leaders were less than pleased when Hoyer used the June 17 colloquy to bring up the staffing dispute that is preventing the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct from conducting ethics investigations.

Note that that ethics committee standoff shows no signs of abating soon, particularly given new revelations of committee chairman Doc Hastings’ failure to disclose a corporate-funded trip he took last year.

In the meantime, even as the ethics panel remains stalemated, the failure of any Democratic member thus far to step forward and file an ethics complaint against Randy “Duke” Cunningham is, to say the least, troubling. Leaving aside the (hugely important and consequential) questions of electoral strategy, partisan politics, Democratic message, etc., and simply assessing the case on the merits, it seems obvious that the very purpose of a congressional ethics committee is to handle just such incidents of flagrant personal misconduct as this. I think Dems would win the ethics war they’re still so leery of commencing, but even if that’s not the case, Cunningham’s case really ought to make them feel obligated to take some action. If Young Turks like McHenry really are itching to pick a fight on behalf of the likes of Tom DeLay and a bought-and-paid-for blowhard from San Diego, that seems like an opportunity that Democrats shouldn’t want to pass up.

--Sam Rosenfeld

LIBERALISM CAUSES CHILD ABUSE. Via Andrew Sullivan comes one mighty outrageous Rick Santorum op-ed:

It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.

I don't think I'm going to bother trying to dispute the logic of that indefensible smear.

--Matthew Yglesias

GEOGRAPHY WITH THE SPEAKER. Sadly, this week-old Newt Gingrich effort in favor of John Bolton is too flimsy and obsessed with strawmen to actually find anything worth criticizing. Newt might want to think harder about his use of clichés, however, before he writes something like "John Bolton is not likely to be seduced by the salons on Embassy Row." Embassy Row, of course, is here in Washington while the UN is New York. What's more, the correct use of the term "salons" in psuedo-populist political commentary is "Georgetown salons".

In all seriousness, it's telling that Gingrich's catalogue of errors at the UN demonstrating the need for Bolton to lead the charge for reform includes "sex crimes against innocent civilians involving U.N. peacekeepers in the Congo, internal sexual-harassment allegations at the U.N., and mass murder and an unacknowledged genocide in Darfur." That's all bad stuff, but Bolton's solution is to not do peacekeeping missions which brings to mind something about a baby and bathwater. Indeed, it's striking that as with Janice Rogers Brown, defenses of Bolton seem to largely center on the notion that he does not, in fact, believe the things that he certainly seems to believe. And that's really the striking thing about all this. It's a pretty open secret that there was a lot of desire to make Bolton Deputy Secretary of State. The White House, quite rightly, rejected that option and has been following a newish course in foreign policy since the election. Then Bolton was sent to the UN as a consolation prize. Letting the Democrats kill the nomination so Bolton can live on as a neocon martyr ought to achieve pretty much all of the administration's goals here.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE LIMITS OF CREDULITY & DIVISIVENESS. A great American president is believed to have once said, "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."

The American public, having worked its way through phases one and two of that still-extant dymanic, seems to have finally reached phase three when it comes to considering the war in Iraq. That, I think, helps explain the growing rift between presidential rhetoric and public sentiment on the war:

A majority of Americans reject claims by the Bush administration that the insurgency in Iraq is weakening and are divided on whether victory over the insurgents will have a major impact on terrorism elsewhere in the world, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Barely one in five Americans -- 22 percent -- say they believe that the insurgency is getting weaker while 24 percent believe it is strengthening. More than half -- 53 percent -- say resistance to U.S. and Iraqi government forces has not changed.

The Post-ABC poll also found that few Americans agree with Vice President Cheney that the insurgency is in its "last throes."

Bush is in politically uncharted terrority for his administration here. The divisive rhetoric employed by administration figures against the president's political and policy critics was strategically and tactically effective when the nation was narrowly divided, and when war critics were holders of minority opinions. However, now that the majority of the public disagrees with the administration or does not believe it on key war-related questions, the exact same sorts of highly partisan attacks may well lead to less support for the administration, not more. It is now the majority's views that are being attacked, not those of a political minority. And it is difficult for any politician to insult and criticize the majority of the American public in highly inflammatory and divisive terms without shooting himself in the foot.

All of which raises an intriguing possibility. At long last, have we reached -- or even passed -- the final, outer limit at which the politics of division is a successful strategy?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CHAFEE’S REWARD? If $50,000 is all that Lincoln Chafee can wrestle from Republican big-wig donors, then he’s more of a sucker than I thought.

Some of President Bush’s biggest donors are hosting an event next week for Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.), a centrist Republican who has frequently opposed Bush’s top priorities.

Signaling that the White House is solidly behind Chafee’s candidacy, Andrew Card, Bush’s chief of staff, also will be on hand at the Charlie Palmer steakhouse Monday evening to help raise $50,000.

The Hill article cites Chafee’s non-Voinoviching the John Bolton nomination as a recent loyalty test (the only one, actually) that Chafee passed. But $50,000 seems kind of cheap to me. Those of us in the room during the Voinovich moment saw Chafee verge on tears as he realized that the risk he took in backing Bolton on May 13 would be compounded in the coming days as the Bolton nomination dragged on and on and on.

Chafee put himself on the line for this White House by supporting Bolton, and he should be due at least a few grand more. Heck, even Chris Shays netted $70,000 at a fundraiser with Dennis Hastert earlier this month -- and that was a week after he bucked House leadership on stem cells.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MOUSE YOU, BUDDY! How can you be sure that Ed Klein made stuff up for his new anti–Hillary tome? Read Michael Tomasky's latest article -- in which he catches Klein in a blatant and deliberate lie about something in Tomasky's own book.

--Jeffrey Dubner

CHINA'S TURNING JAPANESE. Irwin Steltzer in The Weekly Standard and Paul Krugman in The New York Times each consider the possibility that fears of China's takeover of UNOCAL are just like the '80s hype over Japanese purchases of American assets, and both conclude that the analogy is wrong and we should be worried. Here's Krugman:

The more important difference from Japan's investment is that China, unlike Japan, really does seem to be emerging as America's strategic rival and a competitor for scarce resources - which makes last week's other big Chinese offer more than just a business proposition.

Here's Steltzer:

The current Chinese takeover movement is different from the earlier buying spree by Japanese companies. Japan was not a rival for influence in Asia, or in the world; China is. Japan was not a major competitor for scarce resources such as oil; China is. Japanese companies were privately owned; China's acquirers are state-run entities. Japan is a democratic country, and by and large an American ally; China most definitely is not. Japan did not engage in the wholesale theft of intellectual property, China does. Japan did not buy strategic assets: ownership of New York real estate has no implication for national security; ownership of oil resources does.

I don't buy it. For one thing, while it's true that in retrospect Japan was not and is not a strategic rival of the United States, the whole point of Japanophobia is that people thought it was going to emerge as one. The reasons people thought that, meanwhile, were the same as the reasons people think China is going to be our rival. Except the Japan story made more sense -- its economy actually was very big, the second largest in the world. Today the number-two economy is ... well, still Japan, as it will continue to be for decades to come. Meanwhile, I can't begin to comprehend what definition of "competitor for scarce resources" would place China as our competitor but not Japan. Japan is a huge oil importer, just like China and the United States. Indeed, Japan once went so far as to launch a direct military attack on the United States in order to gain access to oil.

Which brings us to the second point: What is it, exactly, that we're afraid of? As past oil crises like the U.S.–Japan standoff before World War II, the Iranian Revolution, and the first Gulf War show, when someone really wants to throw down over control of oil it hardly matters who owns the fields; the question is who physically controls them. A little piece of paper that says "this is China's oil" has no strategic value.

What it does have is economic value. A country that owns oil can either sell that oil to its own citizens at a discount, sell the oil abroad at market prices to subsidize other consumption, or partake in some combination of the above. If you're talking about a country like, say, Saudi Arabia that just happens to be sitting on a bunch of oil, that's a good deal. But China's not sitting on any oil; it's buying an oil company at market prices. If oil companies become more valuable in the future, that will turn out to be a good decision. If they turn out to be less valuable, it will be a bad one. But that's just a normal investment decision -- you try to buy low and sell high. Arguably, equity in oil companies is currently underpriced, in which case you should imitate China and buy some oil stock. As national policy, maybe we ought to increase the size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and, like China, bet that oil is underpriced right now. But that's the only real question on the table. The only real argument for public-sector purchases of private equity is that stocks are systematically under-valued, but the policy implications of that have nothing in particular to do with the oil business.

--Matthew Yglesias

MAU-MAUING THE FACT CHECKERS. Via Atrios comes the dispiriting news of The New York Times' latest bid to appease the right-wing mau-mau brigades. To be sure, Bill Keller's recommendations to recruit staff with an eye toward getting a "range of experience" and "enrich[ing] the variety of backgrounds of our reporters and editors" look unobjectionable if taken in isolation; but given the context of the right's decades-long assault on the press and its effectiveness in distorting beyond recognition a proper discussion of the media's shortcomings, news like this can't help but depress.

For some background, read Todd Gitlin's recent account in the Prospect of a high-level meeting among Times editors, reporters, and outside media critics, at which the question of affirmative action for conservatives at elite media institutions was broached. Just another example of right-wingers' transformation into modern masters of identity politics. Persecuted Christians, marginalized campus conservatives, would-be journos facing discrimination and needing some affirmative help -- they shall overcome, some day.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: DEBUNKING THE DEBUNKERS. The Wall Street Journal wasted 1,000 words trying to maintain a pretense of doubt around global warming. Chris Mooney takes it all apart.

--Jeffrey Dubner

MAKING STUFF UP. I don't have especially warm feelings toward Chuck Hagel but QWQ seems to have the goods on Dick Cheney just making stuff up about him as what I can only assume is retaliation for some of his recent remarks to the press. Of course, this isn't the first time the vice president made something up in an interview, but that doesn't make it okay.

--Matthew Yglesias

MEDICAID: UP OR DOWN? The Times takes a look at efforts to restrain the growth in Medicaid spending, with a focus on the most rapidly growing component of the program: long-term care for middle-class elderly people. As the article notes, the current setup encourages people who aren't really poor per se to use a variety of means of squirreling assets away in order to qualify for coverage. The most respectable way to restrain spending, then, is to rejigger the eligibility rules to make this harder to do.

We can all agree that these attempts to game the system are bad, but from the liberal point of view this is one big reason why we prefer universal programs to means-tested ones. Means tests have dynamic impacts on behavior, create perverse incentives, and then lead to this kind of arms race between clever families and legislators to determine who does and does not get coverage. Providing a long-term care benefit for everyone would be expensive, but it would be an expense incurred in order to provide people with a valuable service, and would eliminate this sort of distorting impact on people's behavior.

At any rate, that's clearly not on the table right now. I'm pretty sure that when lawmakers look at it, they'll decide that the political costs of cutting benefits for middle-class people are too high and just screw the poor or near-poor, which is almost invariably how these budget battles play out.

--Matthew Yglesias

"SOME TIME." With our president busy flexing his Steady Leadership muscle by forswearing any loose talk of "timelines" for withdrawal from Iraq, it's left to loyal congressional Republicans to give the public some basic sense of when we might expect to start seeing American troops make it back home. House International Relations Committee member Dan Burton chatted with Neil Cavuto on Friday, and his words may have been less than reassuring to some people. From the Nexis transcript:

CAVUTO: Now, the president was saying it would be just as costly to set up a timetable right now, that the terrorists or the insurgents would seize on that. Do you agree?

BURTON: Oh, I sure I do, because, if you tell the enemy when you're going to pull out, when you are going to withdraw, it gives them the green light to hold off and attack at strategic moments.

(CROSSTALK)

CAVUTO: But, Congressman, eventually, we are going to be pulling out. We don't know when, right? So, when that is announced, it's going to be that, right ?

BURTON: Well, Neil, we have already reduced our troop force over there from 160,000 to 140,000. And as they build up their military, they're at 169,000 now, we will continue to reduce our force structure over there.

But we can't give them a timetable for the withdrawal. I think we're going to have an ancillary force over there supporting the Iraqi military for some time.

CAVUTO: What is some time?

BURTON: But it is in our national interest to do that

CAVUTO: What do you think is some time?

BURTON: I don't think we can give you a definite time.

CAVUTO: Yes.

BURTON: You know, in Korea, we have had troops there for a long, long time to make sure we maintain peace in that part of the world. We are going to have troops there for a while, but it is absolutely essential if we are to win this war against terror and to keep the battle in their backyard. [emphasis added]

Well, that's a relief! Sure, we've had tens of thousands of troops stationed in Korea for over half a century, but we're about to begin drawing down their numbers in the next few years. By that light, our boys should be out of Baghdad by 2060 or so at the latest, at which point we can finally board up those temporary military bases we've got over there ...

--Sam Rosenfeld

WEEKEND UPDATE. Drove in circles for 500 miles this weekend? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• Nicholas Kristof. Hey -- I just found out that Republicans love tax cuts and don't care about the budget.
• David Brooks. Promising aid money you don't deliver isn't a shameful broken promise, it's a clever attack on Enlightenment rationality -- but in a good way!
• John Tierney. If you factor out the main sources of violence in the Old West, it wasn't a very violent place.
• David Broder. The Republican leadership is pushing an irresponsible Social Security plan as a crass political plot, but unless Democrats negotiate with a backbench Republican unsupported by the White House to cut benefits, they're even worse in some unspecified way.
• Jim Hoagland. There's no point to this.
• Peter Beinart. If Democrats stop opposing a war they oppose, and Bush stops supporting the policies he support, then victory in Iraq will be within reach.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Charles Krohn on the future of the Army.

--Matthew Yglesias

RICK SANTORUM: ROVE DOESN'T SPEAK FOR ME. This afternoon, Tapped called the offices of every Republican senator and asked their press staff the following: “Does Karl Rove speak for Senator X in his recent comments on liberals and September 11?”

Several offices had no comment. Many transferred us into voicemail boxes, and we plan to call them back on Monday if they don’t respond. But we got two offices to react. While Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s staff told us she agrees with Rove’s remarks, Rick Santorum's communications director, Robert Traynham, suggested that the Pennsylvanian had a different reaction. He told me: “Karl Rove speaks for himself. He doesn’t speak for the senator. On 9-11, there was no such thing as a Republican or a Democrat, and that’s what the senator believes.”

--Asheesh Siddique

NEW JERSEY DEMOCRATS TAKE ON ROVE. Yesterday's Democratic political pushback to Karl Rove's remarks was led by the New York senators. Today the New Jersey House Dems got into the act. Via The Stakeholder, I see that seven members of the New Jersey delegation just sent the president a letter now calling on him, and not just Rove, to apologize:

Every public servant, Democrat or Republican, is committed to bringing those who kill innocent Americans to justice. For a senior White House official to suggest otherwise is perverse, insulting, and blatantly self-serving. By turning a national tragedy into a political football, your Administration has once again created partisan controversy when the American people were looking for national unity.

Unfortunately, far from apologizing for Mr. Rove's remarks, your White House has repeated and reiterated them, claiming that Mr. Rove "was simply pointing out the different philosophies and different approaches when it comes to winning the war on terrorism." We are forced to conclude that his statement was neither an unfortunate slip of the tongue nor a mere expression of personal opinion, but the endorsed position of you and your Administration...

Initially, we hoped that Mr. Rove would quickly apologize for his remarks. But now that official after official from your White House has rushed to the cameras to defend them, it is incumbent upon you to personally apologize for politicizing this tragedy. Republican, Democrat, or Independent, the families we represent deserve better leadership than your White House has shown in the past two days.

Rove's remarks are turning into the lightning bolt that started a prarie fire. The political environment for Democrats has been nothing but drought for a long time, and there is now just way too much dry tinder lying around for something like this not to leap up immediately into flame.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MOVEON CLARIFIES ITSELF ON THE AFGHAN WAR -- BUT IS THE DAMAGE ALREADY DONE? So I just got a press release from MoveOn.org that I've been expecting the group to issue ever since Peter Beinart attacked MoveOn.org in his New Republic article "A Fighting Faith" last December. It only took six months, but the group has finally got around to clarifying its position on the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and now declines to take responsibility for MoveOn leader Eli Pariser's post–September 11 petition conducted through a different group, 9-11Peace.org, and which predated his joining MoveOn. According to a statement MoveOn sent out today:

“[Karl Rove] and [Dan] Bartlett are lying about MoveOn’s record. The organization never opposed the attack on Afghanistan post 9/11. In urging a multi-pronged approach to fighting terrorism, the organization has always supported measured military action as part of the mix,” Pariser continued.

“My own then-unaffiliated web site, which I started prior to joining MoveOn, said U.S. response should be ‘moderate and restrained,’ to avoid provoking more terrorism and enmity against the U.S.,” he went on. “Only two days after the attack on the towers, with no proof of who was responsible, urging care was appropriate. Of course I believe the attack on the camps in Afghanistan, which came weeks later, was appropriate, as was other military action against Al Qaeda,” Pariser said.

MoveOn was founded in September 1998 but Pariser did not join the organization until the fall of 2002. A 2003 Mother Jones story on Pariser presents a muddled picture of his involvement until then:

[A]s the showdown with Iraq started heating up, Boyd hired Pariser to direct MoveOn's international campaigns. Working 18-hour days, Pariser organized 9,000 activists to meet with their representatives in Congress last November. He also helped raise more than $400,000 for anti-war advertising. The lanky, 6-foot-3-inch Pariser has since found himself in the company of some of the world's leading peaceniks. At February's rally he shared the podium with Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King III. His speech lacked the fiery idealism you'd expect from the youngest man onstage. "I don't want to be part of the Great Left Martyrdom story," Pariser explains, "where we simply say, 'We fought the good fight and we lost.' I don't want to be on the losing side."

If Pariser wants to avoid not just being part of, but actively contributing to, the Great Left Martyrdom story, however, he and MoveOn will have to do a much better -- and, frankly, less arrogant -- job of press management in the future. If MoveOn was going to clarify its position on the intervention in Afghanistan and distance itself from Pariser's pre-MoveOn activities, it should have done so cleanly and definitively last fall, when the issue first came up and it had an opportunity to respond in the pages of TNR, instead of waiting until the middle of a full-scale Republican attack to slowly dribble out a walk-back. And I do mean dribble: The first release the group send out yesterday said nothing about all of this; then Pariser made some remarks in The Washington Post this morning, where he "disputed Rove's characterization of the petition calling for moderation and restraint, saying that the petition was a personal project before he was affiliated with MoveOn and that it was not on the group's Web site at the time of the Afghanistan war;" then the group issued his clarifying statement.

You wouldn't know any of this if you went to the group's Web site, however. The last press release there that I can find is dated February 4, 2005, and the latest release, which I received by e-mail, is nowhere to be found. Further, over at MoveOn PAC, now the main vehicle for the group's activities, there isn't even a list of releases, or a press contact phone number.

My sense is that MoveOn has grown to the point that it needs a full-time, in-house communications person who knows Washington media, knows the brutal political power game, and can make sure its idealistic, energetic young leaders aren't unintentionally making unnecessary tactical mistakes that will redound to the harm of every elected Democratic leader on Capitol Hill. MoveOn is, as it has long aspired to be, now a player in Washington. It should start acting like it knows it, and realizing that every opportunity it gives the Republicans to attack it -- by, for example, failing to get its own house in order -- is going to be used against Democratic elected officials over time.

UPDATE: Whoops -- turns out MoveOn just hired an in-house communications director, their first, three weeks ago. Jennifer Lindenauer, formerly of Lindenauer Communications and GMMB, has worked on and run political campaigns in Michigan, Colorado, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. My apologies for the error.

The broader issue remains, however. The Republican Party has three central political targets -- Howard Dean, MoveOn, and Michael Moore -- that it's actively seeking to completely discredit and make ridiculous, in order to then tie every elected Democratic official and left/liberal thinker to them (rendering them discredited, in turn). That's part of the long-term strategy, and something MoveOn is going to have to learn how to deal with effectively on an ongoing basis. It won't be easy.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

NOTHING WRONG WITH KELO. I fully expected to disagree with the Big Five on Kelo v. New London, but after actually reading the decisions, it's pretty hard to have a problem with it. As Matt said elsewhere, the first thing to remember is that this ruling breaks no new ground whatsoever. The only way it appears to stretch allowable eminent domain takings further than did the preceding century of rulings is if you construe the recipient of the appropriated land as a private entity; that's the angle from which Sandra Day O'Connor, William Rehnquist, and Antonin Scalia criticize the ruling.

But the New London government didn't give the land to private developers to do with it as they please, with a vague hope that the profits would redound on the community; they shifted control to a development agency commissioned by the city to carry out a government-approved plan. Assuming that the city maintained proper oversight and authority over the developer's activities, this is not in any way a transfer to a private entity, so the great cry that a "law that takes property from A. and gives it to B ... is against all reason and justice" is misplaced and misleading.

Clarence Thomas' dissent seems more legitimate, though still arguable; he largely ignores the phony distinction between public and private execution and focuses on whether "public use" is to be interpreted as "public purpose." He says no; I haven't the foggiest what the most correct analysis is, but it bears mention that if Thomas is right, the Supreme Court has been wrong for the past 108 years.

With regard to the concern of conservative dissenters on and off the Court that deferring to local governments opens all sorts of corruption possibilities, give me a break. That's an argument for more transparency and stronger sunshine laws -- not for outlawing eminent domain. I absolutely agree with Thomas' concern that individual eminent domain cases can often burden "the least politically powerful." But again, how is it that this has greater implications for eminent domain than for clean elections and due process?

The only way that the Supreme Court could legitimately have found for Suzette Kelo et al. is by saying that takings with the "public purpose" of "economic development" are unconstitutional. That's a very short step away from saying that takings with the public purpose of, say, reducing poluttion are illegitimate as well. The libertarians at the Institute for Justice, who brought the case in the first place, know that full well.

UPDATE: On whether or not Thomas is right and Supreme Court majorities from the last 108 years are wrong, Jonathan Adler argues that it's just not so. He doesn't explain his full rationale, and his colleagues of course disagree, but worth noting. And he sticks to the honest line that the principle of "judicial restraint" calls for yesterday's result, a fact that led to some seriously facile claims of strawmanning from his cobloggers.

--Jeffrey Dubner

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: LEFTWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS. There's a new Christian lobby in town, and it's come to call the Falwells of the world out for what they are. Rob Garver profiles the newly launched Christian Alliance for Progress.

--Jeffrey Dubner

HOLD FAST TO YOUR DOGMA. Julian Sanchez wondered the other day whether, in the wake of the Raich and Kelo decisions, "some court-watchers on the left [will] begin to question the wisdom of having let economic freedom become the red-headed stepchild of modern jurisprudence?" I certainly hope not!

Here's the thing. It speaks well of the intelligence of the libertarian legal community that when they try and establish precedents that will make it much harder to regulate large corporations and wealthy individuals in the public interest that they don't choose the case of Mega Corp v. Cute Deer or Sick Child v. Giant Drug Company. Instead, they pick cases like Raich and Kelo, where liberal egalitarians may sympathize with plaintiffs ostensibly beseiged by Big Government. But the purpose of picking the cases is to establish broad principles and the important question is about the principles, not the specific cases. Some good things would happen if the Supreme Court took a narrow view of the Commerce Clause. Some good things would happen if the Court took a restrictive view of the government's "takings" power. But bad things would happen, too. There sadly isn't a legal regime that can guarantee good outcomes in all instances and in both cases, justice will be better served on the whole by the rules the Court devised than by the rules libertarian activists were looking for.

Matt Welch mocks this as the notion that "the unchecked government power to bulldoze your home and sell your property to Wal-Mart is the price we all must pay to avoid the scourge of 'property rights extremism.'" Pejorative rhetoric aside, that's absolutely correct. Matt, Julian, and co. down at Reason have an extreme and pernicious view of property rights that, if implemented in full, would have disastrous consequences for the country. Tolerating a certain amount of unwise regulation is the price you pay for allowing good regulations, just as a certain amount of wasteful spending is the inevitable consequence of beneficial spending.

--Matthew Yglesias

SCRAPING THE BOTTOM. Sometimes in this pundit life, somebody "on your side" does something you're not prepared to defend, but that you'd really rather not denounce. The standard way of handling such a situation is to just keep your head down and wait until the storm blows over. An alternative would be Byron York's approach to the Karl Rove controversy -- ignore the actually controversial remarks until the final graf of your column, concede that the criticism of those remarks is "fair," and spend 99 percent of your words defending Rove against a tangential claim.

It's an ... inventive approach, I'll grant him that.

Still, there's a real issue on the table here. Rove -- the long-time chief political advisor to the president of the United States who's recently been made the top policy aide to the White House as well -- thinks that liberals don't want to fight terrorists, and, more outrageously, that "putting our troops in greater danger" is what really motivates liberals. Does York agree with that or doesn't he?

--Matthew Yglesias

SMALL GOVERWHAT? An interesting Jonathan Rauch column wonders why Senate Republicans wouldn't defend Janice Rogers Brown's substantive libertarian views during the battle over her confirmation:

If Republicans hope to install small-government judges without publicly embracing small-government views, they are traveling the same road that led Democrats to political purgatory and made "liberal" a dirty word.

A second possibility is that Republicans ran from Brown's views because they regard them with ambivalence, or even embarrassment. On this theory, what Republicans support is not so much Brown's philosophy as her life story and the opportunity to put a conservative black woman on the federal bench. After all, Brown is a small-government ideologue in an age of Big Government conservatism. Republicans control the whole federal government and are not shy about using it. They want to be able to enact the sort of "economic, environmental, consumer, and labor regulations" that DeMint insisted Brown would uphold.

If so, Brown's nomination put Republicans in a bit of a pickle. Endorsing her philosophy would tie their hands; renouncing it would leave everyone wondering why they wanted her on the bench at all. Rather than confronting the tension between Big Government conservatism and small-government nominee, the Republicans pretended there was no tension. They maintained that Brown, like the Washington Republican Party itself, would denounce Big Government without actually doing anything about it.

That's about right, though it would be wrong to say the GOP seriously wants "economic, environmental, consumer, and labor regulations." It's more like they want to sell off pork and regulatory favors to the highest bidder or best golfer. What you have to wonder is what the various members of the conservative movement who aren't on the K Street gravy train think it is they're accomplishing?

--Matthew Yglesias

KARL ROVE, AMERICAN PROSPECT SUBSCRIBER? We'd heard through the D.C. grapevine some time ago that Karl Rove was a TAP reader, but now comes some unexpected proof, via his outrageous comments on liberal reactions to September 11. In his speech to the Conservative Party of New York State, according to a transcript provided by the White House, Rove was, apparently, specifically pointing a finger at this magazine when he was talking about liberals. Indeed, his whole controversial attack on and mischaracterization of liberalism begins with a nod to The American Prospect co-founder Paul Starr's essay from our 15th anniversary issue, "The Liberal Project Now" (emphasis added):

Let me now say a few words about the state of liberalism. Perhaps the place to begin is with this stinging indictment:

“Liberalism is at greater risk now than at any time in recent American history. The risk is of political marginality, even irrelevance.… [L]iberalism risks getting defined, as conservatism once was, entirely in negative terms.”

These are not the words of William F. Buckley, Jr. or Sean Hannity; they are the words of Paul Starr, co-editor of The American Prospect, a leading liberal publication.

There is much merit in what Mr. Starr writes – though he and I fundamentally disagree as to why liberalism is edging toward irrelevance. I believe the reason can be seen when comparing conservatism with liberalism.

Conservatives believe in lower taxes; liberals believe in higher taxes. We want few regulations; they want more. Conservatives measure the effectiveness of government programs by results; liberals measure the effectiveness of government programs by inputs. We believe in curbing the size of government; they believe in expanding the size of government. Conservatives believe in making America a less litigious society; liberals believe in making America a more litigious society. We believe in accountability and parental choice in education; they don’t. Conservatives believe in advancing what Pope John Paul II called a “culture of life”; liberals believe there is an absolute unlimited right to abortion.

But perhaps the most important difference between conservatives and liberals can be found in the area of national security. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to… submit a petition. I am not joking. Submitting a petition is precisely what Moveon.org did. It was a petition imploring the powers that be” to “use moderation and restraint in responding to the… terrorist attacks against the United States.” ...

Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said: we will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said: we must understand our enemies. Conservatives see the United States as a great nation engaged in a noble cause; liberals see the United States and they see … Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia.

Has there been a more revealing moment this year than when Democratic Senator Richard Durbin, speaking on the Senate floor, compared what Americans had done to prisoners in our control at Guantanamo Bay with what was done by Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot – three of the most brutal and malevolent figures in the 20th century?

Let me put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts to the region the words of Senator Durbin, certainly putting America’s men and women in uniform in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.

Since Rove's attempt to smear all liberals and the Democratic leadership began with an invocation of this magazine, let's make one thing clear: The editors of this magazine strongly supported military action in Afghanistan and America's right to self-defense. Here's Starr in our post–September 11 edition:

Let there be no doubt that America is justified in going to war against what President Bush describes as terrorism of "global reach." After September 11, we have to assume that any group willing to kill thousands of people in the World Trade Center's twin towers would be willing to use weapons of mass destruction. We have every right to defend ourselves by pursuing such terrorists not only in the United States and nations that ally themselves with us, but also in the countries that provide havens for them. ...

At this point, it is impossible to say what the scope of our objectives in Afghanistan should be. But daunting though it may be, we should not rule out a war aimed at changing the government, which has been a scourge to its own people as well as a threat to others. To leave the Taliban in control might well be to repeat the mistake we made of leaving Saddam Hussein in power at the end of the Gulf War. ...

[T]he Taliban have brought misery, denying women all rights and imposing an absolute tyranny over thought; so a wider war within Afghanistan may also save lives and restore liberties. If our forces become engaged in such a war, it will be for the sake of our own self-defense, but it is not irrelevant that we might do some good in Afghanistan itself.

There you have it. This "leading liberal publication," as Rove put it, explicitly argued for military intervention in Afghanistan against both the terrorists and the Taliban government that harbored them on the grounds of self-defense and just the sort of humanitarian idealism Rove now seeks to claim for the Republican Party alone. According to the Associated Press, Republican Party chairman Ken Mehlman said there was no need to apologize for Rove's mischaracterization of the liberal philosophy because "what Karl Rove said is true."

As you can see above, that is not the case. Liberals strongly supported the war in Afghanistan. Also worth re-reading, if you need further evidence of what prominent liberals were really thinking in the wake of 9-11, is Dissent board member Paul Berman's October 2001 TAP essay, "Terror and Liberalism", later a book of the same name. Or read Prospect co-founder Bob Kuttner's article in the same issue pledging that "[M]edieval Islam's ruthless assault on liberal democracy and its civilian population must be resisted totally, whatever the contributory causes."

Mainstream liberals strongly supported the war in Afghanistan and the president's assault on the illiberal radical insurgency that attacked us. To suggest otherwise is to attempt to rewrite history.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

1,380 DAYS AND COUNTING. It has been 1,380 days since the September 11 attacks, and Osama bin Laden remains at large. As I noted yesterday, the American involvement in World War II took less time than this. The United States defeated Hitler and all the Axis powers in the 1,365 long days that elapsed between the assault on Pearl Harbor and Japan's surrender.

Meanwhile, September 11 widow and national security activist Kristin Breitweiser weighs in on the burgeoning Karl Rove controversy over at the Huffington Post with some pointed questions for Rove.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TORTURE AND TRIBUNALS. Moving Ideas, a project of The American Prospect, just posted Torture and Tribunals: The Treatment and Status of Detainees Worldwide, a report detailing the current status of detainees worldwide as well as U.S. treatment of detainees. This "In the Fight" feature provides ways for activists to get involved, including information about this Sunday's Day of Action Against Torture.

More than 150 countries have had reported cases of torture or ill-treatment. Abuse was widespread or persistent in 70 of those countries, and in more than 80 countries people died from the abuse. People were tortured for reasons ranging from being an activist for human or civil rights to being a suspected criminal. In some countries, torture was even used as a weapon of fear.

In the United States, activists are calling for our own government to clean up its act. Human-rights groups are demanding an independent commission and special counsel to investigate U.S. treatment of its detainees. Civil-liberties groups and members of Congress, such as Vietnam POW John McCain, are calling for detainees to be given a trial or released. Furthermore, groups are urging the administration to allow detainees at least the full due process rights of regular military tribunals, and some groups are even recommending that Guantanamo Bay prison be closed.

Learn more and get in the fight!

--Diane Greenhalgh, Moving Ideas

ADMITTING YOU HAVE A PROBLEM. There's some good news in the Pew Global Attitudes survey this year, a marked change from the past few. On the one hand, sentiments about America are starting to recover a bit, more or less across the board. On the other hand, Americans are starting to display awareness of how low we've fallen in the eyes of others. And last but not least, there's convincing evidence that doing "good guy" things like leading the tsunami aid campaign last winter pay the sort of "soft power" dividends one would want to see.

The bad news is that we're less popular than ... China.

In part, that seems to me to reflect shortsightedness on the part of people elsewhere. Most of the things you can think of that people dislike about America -- the executions, the arbitrary detention, the torture, the inequality, the huffing and puffing on the world stage, etc. -- are far, far worse in China. Virtually nobody would actually be happier with a world in which the current Chinese regime, instead of the United States, was the hegemonic power. But of course China isn't the dominant global power, and that matters. There's been a certain line of thought out there that the United States can get away with acting like a superpower run amok without running the risk of provoking a counterbalancing coalition. The relative popularity of the objectively unappealing People's Republic goes to show, I think, that we have less leeway in this regard than we might like to think.

--Matthew Yglesias

AN ILLIBERAL RULING. It's hard to argue against John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer, but their ruling in Kelo v. New London is horrible. Regarding a dispute between residents of a working-class neighborhood and city developers who want to put up some luxury condos and an office park in order to raise the city’s tax revenues, Justice Stevens wrote:

“The city has carefully formulated an economic development that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including — but by no means limited to — new jobs and increased tax revenue,”

Now, eminent domain is an important principle and in limited application can serve an important public good. But this ruling is unduly wide. As I understand it, from this day forward, municipalities can drive poor people their homes so a developer can put up fancy complexes and high-end shopping malls -- all, of course, in the name of "benefiting a community" through "new jobs" and "tax revenue." As reader M.L. said, “it’s only a matter of time before some mayor in the pocket of a developer wipes out a neighborhood.”

Loose interpretations of a government's right of eminent domain is the sort of thing we expect in Harare -- not New London.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

FAMILIES OF SEPT. 11 CRITICAL OF ROVE. The non-partisan group Families of September 11 calls on Karl Rove to stop:

As families whose relatives were victims of the 9/11 terror attacks, we believe it is an outrage that any Democrat, any Republican, any conservative or any liberal, stakes a "high ground" position based upon the September 11th death and destruction. Doing so assumes that all those who died and their loved ones would agree. In truth, some would and some would not. By definition the conduct is divisive and, because it is intended to be self-serving and politicizes 9/11, it is offensive.

We are calling on Karl Rove to resist his temptations and stop trying to reap political gain in the tragic misfortune of others. His comments are not welcome.

Hear, hear.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

ROVE SHOULD APOLOGIZE. Last night Karl Rove told the Conservative Party of New York State that:

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

This is a blatant falsehood and an insult to all the liberal victims of September 11 in the New York region who still want nothing more than for our military to get Osama bin Laden. Harry Reid, Howard Dean, and House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer have already called for Rove to apologize. I heartily concur.

Instead of attacking the patriotism of liberal victims of 9-11, Rove and the president should focus on catching bin Laden. The United States defeated Adolf Hitler’s army and the Italian fascists in three and a half years, but nearly four years after we got hit by Al-Qaeda, bin Laden is still at large and there appears to be no concerted effort to find him, even though CIA chief Porter Goss recently said we have "an excellent idea" where he is.

Why is that? Has America become less capable of military victory since World War II? Or was it that Franklin Delano Roosevelt unified the nation behind a determined course of action to defeat our common enemy, while Bush has preferred to divide the nation, undermine the strength of our armed forces, and let our enemy roam free?

My father -- a liberal New Yorker who worked in the World Trade Center -- signed up for a combat infantry post during World War II even though he'd been offered a cushy non-combat position in the Army. He had barely just become a citizen but he was willing to fight and die for America and to defeat the fascist armies of Europe and Asia; he wound up taking four bullets to the gut during fighting in Bataan. Throughout human history, men have done the same -- signed up to fight and bleed for what they believe in. That's what national unity and "provid[ing] for the common defence" means, and that's what strong leadership results in. The decline in recruits willing to join our armed forces is a national shame, a reflection not just of youthful fears of death in combat, but of our present divisive leadership and a weak commander-in-chief who has left us adrift and plunged us into petty, partisan squabbles instead of unifying us in pursuit of our common foe.

Give men a strong leader and a just cause, and they will join up in droves. Just look at what Pat Tillman was willing to sacrifice. American men today do not lack the courage of their forefathers. Far from it. But when men see their enemy allowed his freedom and their leaders more concerned with steering contracts to war profiteers than with a clear course of military action, they will adjudge their lives more precious and stay home.

Instead of attacking liberal Americans, George W. Bush and Karl Rove should be focused on attacking the terrorists and getting bin Laden. That, and not Iraq or Social Security reform or Terri Schiavo, ought to be national job one. That was true at 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, and it is true today. The continuing freedom of Osama bin Laden is a national humiliation.

But it is one that remains within our power to rectify. This nation's strength has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout our history. A nation that defeated fascism in Europe can surely catch one cave-dwelling man hidden among the mountains of South Asia.

And until such time as we do, Karl Rove should stop making divisive remarks designed to undermine the national unity so necessary to winning the war on terrorism. And he should immediately apologize for his insulting statements last night.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

AMERICA: WE'RE PANSIES! To go along with what Mark and Matt were just saying, Robert Zoellick's announcement that we're not sending troops to Darfur is painful and humiliating.

The Bush administration is opposed to the dispatch of U.S. or European forces to help enhance security in Sudan's Darfur region because they could be vulnerable to attack by terrorists, the No. 2 State Department official said Wednesday.

The region is populated by "some bloodthirsty, cold-hearted killers," Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick said, mentioning Somalia in particular as one possible source.

On the one hand, you've got Mark's point that we don't really plan to do anything about Darfur. On the other hand, you've got Matt's point that we've squandered too much of the United States' muscle to confront other problems in the world. That clapping sound you hear is all the other bloodthirsty, cold-hearted killers in the world realizing they can do anything they want.

--Jeffrey Dubner

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. About a week ago, Robert Kagan argued that, when thinking about Iraq, we need to think not just about the costs of the war but about the costs that could have been entailed by inaction -- which, he thinks, would have been very threatening to the United States. Today, Spencer Ackerman offers a nice rejoinder on the narrow point at hand of what kind of threat Saddam Hussein could conceivably have posed.

The other point to be made, however, is that the price of the Iraq War -- in military strength, in dollars, in diplomatic capital, and in policymakers' attention -- are all resources that in a no-invasion scenario could have been deployed elsewhere. If there had been no invasion, we could have used the savings in military strength to mount a much smaller intervention in Sudan that would have saved countless lives. For much less than what we've spent (and will spend) in Iraq, we could have mounted a $100 billion carrot-and-stick program aimed at reducing opium-production in Afghanistan and building a stable state oriented around legitimate agriculture. Our diplomatic muscle could have been used to get Pakistan to actually cooperate in the A.Q. Khan investigation or in the search for Osama bin Laden. If policymakers hadn't been busy with Iraq, it's possible that the North Korea nuclear crisis could have been averted.

Admittedly, the last of those is only a "maybe," and the Pakistan stuff a "probably," but the first two are things we unquestionably could have accomplished. What's more, some of the better things the Bush administration has taken to doing in the Middle East with regard to Lebanon and Egypt could have been undertaken without the cloud of suspicion that "democracy" really means "invading countries for no reason," and they'd likely be reaping even bigger gains today than they are in fact. Last but by no means least, if we hadn't unleashed a dynamic where cooperating with the United States is a surefire electoral liability in every non-Israel democracy on the face of the planet, we'd be finding it easier to accomplish virtually everything we would like to do in global policy.

--Matthew Yglesias

SPEAK LOUDLY AND CARRY A POPSICLE STICK. Yesterday, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick (the administration’s point man on Sudan) told the House International Relations Committee that the crimes in Darfur amounted to “systematic genocide.” But don’t be fooled by the administration’s tough talk on Sudan -- accusing Khartoum of genocide is apparently meant only for domestic consumption. It is decidedly not any sort of indication of the administration’s Sudan policy. In fact, just the reverse is true; and as was apparent from the remainder of Zoellick’s presentation to Congress, our Sudan policy is heavy on the carrot and short on stick.

Zoellick's remarks are part of a troubling trend. The administration has become more comfortable with the term "genocide" since George W. Bush used it to describe the atrocities in Darfur 21 days ago. But comfort with saying "genocide" seems to be accompanied by a growing willingness to constructively engage the regime in Khartoum. The present trajectory of Sudan policy is quite clearly one of creeping rapprochement with the regime.

As Barbara Lee said at the hearing, there are rumors floating around that the administration may loosen our sanctions on Khartoum; I’ve heard the same about removing Khartoum from the list of state sponsors of terror. Further, it’s clear that the CIA is thoroughly enjoying its liaison with Sudan’s intelligence service, which is run by a key architect of Khartoum’s counterinsurgency-by-genocide strategy in Darfur. And as was evident at the hearing, the State Department views a constitutional restructuring in Khartoum as a momentous event that they hope can bring peace to Darfur. Of course, while the regime will have the new moniker of “national unity government,” for the most part Sudan will be run by the same people who brought you Darfur.

It seems that we are back to the bad old days of cold Cold-War calculations: The United States doesn’t care what happens inside the borders of a cooperative regime. That, at least, is the message the administration sends to the genocidaires in Khartoum -- while out of the other side of its mouth, it decries their genocide.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

OH BOY. This could be fun. Monday, it seems, the Supreme Court will issue decisions on the last six cases on its docket -- including two cases on public displays on the Ten Commandments. Later that week, if you believe Bill Kristol or the conventional wisdom pre–last week, a Supreme Court justice will resign. (If I remember right, recent resignations have often come on the day of the last announcements, which would mean one could come Monday.)

How the Ten Commandments cases will be decided is anybody's guess, but there's a decent chance that the Kentucky case (involving a display that at one time had the express purpose of "demonstrat[ing] America's Christian heritage") will find the display unconstitutional. If so -- even if by a unanimous decision with an opinion written by Clarence Thomas -- you can imagine the wingnut frenzy that will follow.

Just a public service announcement for anybody who was looking for a good reason to give up following the news for a week or so.

--Jeffrey Dubner

PLAN B. The New York State Senate just passed a bill that will allow the sale of the "morning-after pill," Plan B, without a prescription. This is fantastic news for New York. But like many reproductive personal-health issues, this is one in which the country will once again be divided between (largely coastal) states that allow women progressive options, and states dominated by retrogressive lawmakers. It creates an essentially two-tiered system where (mostly) blue-state women will be allowed to control their health and reproduction but women in the so-called flyover states will be constrained by their income levels and the capricious conservatism of their legislature.

--Sarah Wildman

THE REAL CHALLENGE. Not only would it be relatively easy for the White House to find a consensus nominee for the Supreme Court, but the real challenge facing the administration is the reverse -- how to find someone Democrats will fight. America's collective memory seems to have internalized all the wrong lessons from the Clarence Thomas nomination. Bush's father wanted to replace Thurgood Marshall, a very liberal justice who was quite literally a living legend of American history and legal achievement with a very conservative, under-qualified intellectual lightweight. Then allegations of criminal activity were raised against Thomas. And he was confirmed anyway, even though Democrats had a majority in the Senate at the time.

Right now, Democrats are in the minority and sensitive to the criticisim that they're too "obstructionist." The Justice to be replaced is a very conservative, mildly sleazy, Nixon-era Republican hack. Liberal interest groups won't be happy with anyone Bush could conceivably pick, but it would be extraordinarily simple to find a replacement for Rehnquist who would be regarded as no worse and who would, therefore, sail past a Democratic minority eager to save their fire for other things. But Bush likes picking dramatic fights with the Democrats in order to mobilize his base and shift blame for objective national problems off the people running the country and on to the marginalized minority party.

One good candidate for fight-picking would be Alberto Gonzalez, whose theory that in times of war there's no legal limit on the president's authority whatsoever (whether or no there's a declared war!) is not the kind of thing reasonable people are going to want to put up with. Unfortunately for Bush, Gonzalez's record of once being unwilling to set aside actual laws in favor of anti-choice dogmatism seems to have rendered him unacceptable to the base. So he'll need to really dig in deep to find somebody unacceptable and I, for one, will be very interested to see what he comes up with.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE OVERLOOKED SUMMIT. The summit between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas this week was, by most accounts, unsatisfying. Today's Ha'aretz editorial is worth reading in full, but this excerpt is telling:

It is doubtful Abbas will be capable of providing Israel with security, or even a promise of security, in the foreseeable future; and it is doubtful that Sharon is capable of promising the Palestinians a continuation of the diplomatic process after the withdrawal from Gaza. His political situation does not enable him to make promises. The hope is that the very fact of the withdrawal from Gaza will improve the atmosphere between the parties and set in motion the dynamic of the diplomatic process, and that a withdrawal successfully coordinated with the PA will open the door to a more optimistic next step.

"You're not as weak as you make yourself out to be," Sharon told Abbas, though the Americans' impression is that his weakness is real and the chaos in the Palestinian Authority is substantial. At this interim stage before the disengagement, Israel's goal must be to make life easier for the Palestinians in every area where this will not endanger security. Willingness to begin work on the new Gaza port and reopening the Palestinian airport are examples of practical gestures that would help to strengthen the PA without harming Israel. There is no reason to delay such gestures. There is also no reason to continue building in the settlements, thereby arousing Palestinian doubts about whether Israel really intends to implement the road map afterward.

The summit was particularly depressing in light of escalated hostilities and the arrest of a wanna-be suicide bomber at the Erez checkpoint. The woman was on her way for burn treatment at a Be'er Sheva hospital. As Ha'aretz points out, the juxtaposition of her foiled attempt and the summit points to the "fragility" of the situation. A bomber in a hospital -- what could be more egregious?

This summer, I fear, will be fraught with such tension. With the Gaza disengagement only 53 days away, Ha'aretz is running a "disengagement watch" on its site to keep tabs on, among other things, the attempts of Jewish settlers to thwart the move. Former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, the Quartet's envoy monitoring the disengagement, noted the other day that trust between Israelis and Palestinians was at a 10-year low point. I'm not sure we needed an expert to tell us that.

--Sarah Wildman

NAFTASIB: BACK AND WEIRDER THAN EVER. Over at The New Republic, Michael Crowley summarizes some newly released emails from the Senate Indian Affairs Committee's investigation into Jack Abramoff, et al. I find this bit especially intriguing:

There is one last, even more bizarre, twist to the new information about Abramoff's West Bank connection. It comes in the form of an email to Abramoff, which details prices of thermal vision devices, from a Russian man named Vadim. His complete email address has been redacted by the Indian Affairs Committee, but his email domain is still legible: naftasib.com. As Abramoff scandal junkies know, Naftasib is a Russian oil and gas company which helped to arrange and underwrite a murky and much-discussed 1997 trip Tom DeLay took to Moscow with Abramoff. According to the Post, DeLay met with Naftasib executives while in Moscow, for reasons that have never been entirely clear.

Why would someone at Naftasib be helping Abramoff procure military equipment? Well, the Post has also reported that Naftasib "has business ties with Russian security institutions." And the email from Abramoff's correspondent, Vadim, includes an email signature identifying him as "Assistant to Mrs. Nevskaya." That is presumably Marina Nevskaya, a Naftasib executive who reportedly served as an instructor at a Russian military intelligence school.

So there you have it. A rich Washington lobbyist apparently schemed to use money from Indian tribes to buy paramilitary equipment from Russian oil executives and send it to Israeli settlers in the West Bank. What could be simpler?

Now, in some ways, the notion that this was an international gun-running operation would be more palatable than the alternative theory that the Russian government was, via Naftasib, bribing Tom DeLay into opposing military action in Kosovo. Loyal readers will recall that Tapped was exploring various Naftasib-related strands back during the spring. Classic posts reveal that Abramoff-Naftasib ties date back at least to 1996, and that Naftasib's role in financing DeLay's trip was common knowledge in Russia before it was revealed to anyone in the United States. See also this 1997 report from the Russian Reform Monitor:

House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) goes to Russia on a "fact finding" trip bankrolled by influence peddlers tied to Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. The trip is part of a lobbying effort to promote Chernomyrdin among conservative leaders in Washington, paid for by Chelsea Commercial Enterprises Ltd., headquartered in the Bahamas but whose principals reside in Moscow. Washington lobbying operations are run from Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds, a large law firm registered since February with the clerk of the House as a paid agent of the Bahamian company to "generate support for [the] Russian government's policies" of what it calls "progressive market reforms" and for bilateral trade.

The Moscow portion of the DeLay trip is sponsored by A.O. NaftaSib, a Russian oil company tied to Chernomyrdin. NaftaSib describes itself as "a major shareholder" in Gazprom, and says that two of its "largest clients" have been the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). According to its promotional literature, "NaftaSib met all of the needs for oil products for the Black Sea Fleet, the Baikal Military district and the 14th Army located in Moldavia [sic] from 1992 to 1995." One of the escorts in Moscow is NaftaSib Executive Vice President Marina V. Nevskaya, whose NaftaSib biography describes her as having taught at the Military Diplomatic Academy. The Military Diplomatic Academy is a training school for GRU military intelligence.

"Moldavia" is actually Moldova, the much-forgotten 15th Soviet Republic, which, at the time, was under Russian military occupation in order to prevent the country from merging with, or otherwise falling under the influence of, Romania. The Russian Interior Ministry doesn't run parks like our Department of the Interior; it's a domestic security agency which oversees paramilitary and intelligence forces.

--Matthew Yglesias

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS. Well, the House leadership's gone and pulled the trigger on a variant of Social Security privatization whose irresponsibility is so prodigious as to beggar the imagination. The idea is that private accounts will be created, but only out of the Social Security surplus, so that nobody's benefits need to be cut. The consequences of such a course are bizarre and slightly horrifying. Every American will get an account, but the amount of cash in it will be tiny -- $400 to $600 a year. At that size, administrative fees will need to be an enormous percentage of account value for it to be worth anyone's while to manage them. Some unspecified new bureaucracy is going to have to be created to make it all work. And by 2018 or so the accounts will just go away along with the surplus.

In the meantime, however, there will be a massive increase in the government's unified deficit and the attendant public-sector dissavings rate, with an adverse impact on economic growth across the board. And with the surplus gone to finance the tiny accounts, there will be no way for Social Security to meet its obligations in the 2020s, 2030s, 2040s, and beyond. As Jason Furman says, it's "the worst of all worlds," with "all the problems of any private accounts proposal with none of the benefits for solvency."

Republican strategists are pretty open about the fact that they're pretending to think this is a good idea merely as a shameful ploy to try and force Democrats to negotiate some kind of deal. Basically, they're playing a game of policy chicken -- putting something superficially appealing but actually catastrophic on the table in the hopes that Democrats will thereby agree to a pernicious but non-crazy plan in order to save the country from disaster. I sincerely hope nobody will fall for it. It'll also be interesting to see if the "pain caucus" folks in the press who've spent the past 15 years greasing the skids for privatization decide to wake up and realize the folks they've been supporting are out of their minds. I won't be holding my breath, but you never know.

--Matthew Yglesias

THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT CONSENSUS. I usually love Legal Affairs' debate series, but this week's entry is just painful. A few weeks ago, they hosted two liberals for an inane conversation about what Supreme Court nominees could be confirmed 100-0; this week, presumably for equal time, they have two right-wingers discussing how little liberals believe in the Constitution.

The only thing worth noting in it is the scorn the participants heap on the idea that George W. Bush might want to make an appointment that both Republicans and Democrats could support. I'll grant that conservative and liberal interest groups could never agree on a nominee -- their whole raison d'être is to maximize gains -- but it's ridiculous to suggest that no sufficiently conservative nominee could pass easily. If Bush wanted an easy confirmation of a brilliant conservative, he could get one; a shred of consultation with the Democrats would go an incredibly long way. What Wendy Long says here is just incorrect:

By definition, those will never be "consensus" nominees. Justices Ginsburg and Breyer were not "consensus" nominees, nor should any Republican nominees be—particularly when Republicans control the Senate, for heaven's sake.

Reason (2): Practicality. Appeasement never works.

Fine, except Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer were consensus nominees. Orrin Hatch recommended them to Bill Clinton -- because Clinton consulted with him, even though Republicans were in the minority. As a result, Ginsburg was confirmed 96-3 and Breyer 87-9. Long's second point may be accurate -- Clinton's nod to the Republican minority didn't stop them from stonewalling his nominees when they were in the majority -- but the fact is that presidents have and should consult with the opposition, even if it's a minority opposition. Clinton could have confirmed somebody much more liberal than Ginsburg (who had seriously criticized Roe v. Wade, among other heresies) or Breyer (who was far, far more business-friendly than competing candidates like Bruce Babbitt), but he believed -- like everybody except for the conservative activist fringe -- that Supreme Court cases should be decided by open-minded, brilliant, relatively moderate legal minds rather than agenda-driven ideologues.

Sadly, the White House Office of Legal Counsel clearly agrees with the activist fringe, rather than the rest of the country, and they're certain to make this as ugly a fight as they can.

--Jeffrey Dubner

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MAS PROTEST. The left-wingers look like they're about to take power in Bolivia. But are they ready? Ryan Grim talked to top socialist leaders who say no, their party is still a ways off.

--Jeffrey Dubner

THE TROUBLE WITH DEFEATISM. I agree with Marshall Wittmann that Democrats shouldn't "identify with defeat" in talking about the Iraq War (although I suspect we don't really agree on some of the implications). I worry about things like this Kevin Drum post, which is designed to prove that Iraq's native military and police forces are nowhere near being able to keep a lid on things. Check out my colleague Harold Meyerson's column on how the absence of an anti-war movement has helped anti-war sentiment become mainstream, and I think you'll start to get a sense of the problem.

I think those of us who'd like to see the troops brought home soonish are going to need to choose between two things: a desire for a withdrawal schedule, and a desire to see George W. Bush admit that he was wrong about everything and he's a really bad president. The shortest route between where we are today and withdrawal is a positive, upbeat, adequately nationalistic argument that we've accomplished just about everything we can hope to accomplish and that it's time to move on to other things. Saddam Hussein is gone. His WMD programs are gone. In six months time, Iraq will have a democratically ratified constitution and a democratically elected government set up to implement it. There's no reason our troops should be in the country much longer than that at a time when we need to be rebuilding and transforming our military to counter other threats around the world.

If that strategy works, it means letting the president take a victory lap that liberals won't feel he deserves. That'll be a bitter pill to swallow, but the alternative is to absolutely ensure that the war continues through 2008. What's more, I don't think the Democrats will ever be able to win an election on a platform of defeatism that says it's hopeless and we should admit that we've lost sooner rather than later. Defeatism doesn't work at the polls. It never has, and it never will.

It also isn't really warranted. If Saddam had posed some kind of imminent threat to the United States, everyone would accept today's status quo as a suboptimal but okay outcome. The problem with the war continues to be what it always was -- that the threat was so vague and far down the horizon as to be nonexistent. But we can't unfight the war. We can, however, ensure that the new Iraqi government gets the sort of legitimacy that can only come from standing on its own feet without the taint of American occupation.

--Matthew Yglesias

DURBIN BACKS DOWN. It says disturbing things about the present political environment that Dick Durbin feels the need to issue a quasi-apology for his view that brutal and dehumanizing treatment of prisoners is more the sort of thing you would see in a totalitarian dictatorship than a reflection of the America we know and love. The right has succeeded in its inane point-scoring game at the cost of redefining the American ideal in a truly perverse manner. I hope everyone involved is proud of themselves and never finds themselves or someone they care about, say, detained on the basis of secret evidence without benefit of counsel, due process, or judicial oversight only to wind up chained to the floor drenched in their own excrement. Some of us, at least, don't think that's an acceptable way to treat human beings.

--Matthew Yglesias

BOLTON AND THE BENCH. Why has the White House dug in its heels on the documents Democrats want to see before they consent to John Bolton's confirmation? Could be that there's something nasty in there, although I've always thought it at least as likely that the administration was simply maintaining its habit of resisting constraints or oversight of the executive branch whenever possible. Rich Lowry suggests another motivation:

Also, the White House might be trying to set a precedent in advance of a fight over a Supreme Court nominee who has executive branch experience.

There's no reason that all three interpretations can't coexist, but it's worth watching for signs that Lowry's explanation is a central piece of the administration's thinking. If so, it would indicate that the administration is leaning toward a Supreme Court candidate with executive-branch experience: Alberto Gonzales, possibly, but also dark-horse candidates Ted Olson and Miguel Estrada. Since I first wondered why Olson never gets mentioned in the Rehnquist replacement speculation, I've noticed his name on more and more shortlists; it would seem he's at least being floated. Gonzales has been discussed extensively, and there's really nothing to add. Estrada hasn't gotten much press, but he'd be a perfect nominee for an administration that loves provocation; George W. Bush nominated him to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in his first term, but Estrada withdrew after Democrats voted against cloture because the administration wouldn't release documents Estrada drafted while in the solicitor general's office. (Sound familiar?) If the administration wants to force Democrats to the barricades and pressure Republican compromisers to scuttle the deal, Estrada would be one of the most effective nominees they could pick.

For any of these nominees, a failure to set a total-secrecy precedent on Bolton would make it much tougher to keep pertinent information from the Senate. Just food for thought.

--Jeffrey Dubner

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: PLAYOFF PUNDITRY. In basketball and in politics, it's tempting to make sweeping predictions based on who won the last game. But in both cases, it's wrong, observes Matthew Yglesias -- and liberals especially should stay aware of that fact.

--Jeffrey Dubner

WHERE'S THE BEEF? I'm working on a whole article about this general theme, but Steve Clemons' post on some recent remarks by Lindsey Graham strikes me as worth highlighting. Worth highlighting for the purposes of condemning. Look, it's nice that Graham is saying smart, dissenting things about the direction of national policy. But he keeps voting for the policy. Just like Chuck Hagel, Richard Lugar, and the rest of the gang, he has done nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to correct the situation. Instead, he's actively collaborated in generating the problems he cites. The things he claims to regret would have been somewhat mitigated had Graham lost his race to become a U.S. senator. He could help improve the situation tomorrow by resigning his seat and letting Mike Easley appoint a replacement.

A smaller step might be to use his votes on various committees to help restart the process of congressional oversight. But he hasn't done anything like that and he won't. I don't know exactly what's wrong with these people, but they deserve to be attacked more, not less, harshly than your ordinary party-line Republicans. Voting for bad policies you agree with is bad. Voting for bad policies that, when asked, you say are bad is ridiculous. Liberals should direct nothing but scorn at this crew unless and until they start doing something instead of offering nice remarks to film screening audiences.

CORRECTION. As several people have pointed out, Easley is the governor of North Carolina and Graham represents South Carolina in the Senate. I stand by the rest.

--Matthew Yglesias

JULY ISSUE NOW ONLINE! We've just released our new issue, which is packed with timely articles on pressing questions:

• Has the administration abandoned Darfur?
• Will public television be destroyed? (subscriber only)
• Can interrogations work without torture?
• Have the Democrats lost minority voters?
• Is the radical right all talk on judges? (subscriber only)

The centerpiece is John Gorenfeld's exposé of The Washington Times' ties to North Korea. How much influence does Sun Myung Moon have over the paper -- and how close is he to Kim Jong-Il?

Check out the whole issue and subscribe today!

--Jeffrey Dubner

AGREE TO DISAGREE? Yesterday on Democracy Arsenal, Heather Hurlburt tried to lay down some theses about which liberals of various stripes could agree with regard to Iraq. The key part:

I believe that we all agree that the US should not have permanent bases in Iraq, and should say so; that Iraqis, and no one else, should control Iraq's oil; that US activities in Iraq should promote the dignity of Iraqis, not debase them; and that large numbers of American troops should be in Iraq as long as the US has vital concerns there that cannot be protected through non-military means, and not one second longer.

As far as that goes, I think we can all agree. But the proposition that "large numbers of American troops should be in Iraq as long as the US has vital concerns there that cannot be protected through non-military means" has been phrased in such a way as to essentially preclude disagreement. To me, certain implications for this "how long?" question flow from her earlier points. Her feeling that "the US should not have permanent bases in Iraq, and should say so" partakes of an increasingly dubious conceit of "responsible" criticism of the Bush Iraq policy -- that the White House has unaccountably failed to communicate its lack of interest in securing permament military bases in Iraq.

It's clear for a variety of reasons that we haven't "said so" in a convincing way because the administration does, in fact, want a permanent military presence in Iraq. Former top CPA advisor Larry Diamond's new book doesn't really focus on this issue but provides some very telling evidence. And it's important to understand that the people inside the administration who'd like permanent bases aren't lunatics; the United States has lots of permanent military bases all around the world, and Iraq is auspiciously located in geographical terms for a large permanent American military presence. Nevertheless, as liberal critics have been saying for over a year now, the perception that this is our intent is having poisonous consequences on more important short-term goals, and that perception needs to be changed.

So we agree that we need to credibily signal an intention to leave Iraq free of a major American military presence and free to dispose of its oil according to its people's wishes. What better way than to announce a plan for removing our troops from Iraq at some point in the relatively near future? The alternative strategy of saying that the troops will be there until they "get the job done" combined with a vague and unrealistic definition of "the job" is, de facto, to say the troops are never leaving. My inclination at the moment is to say a calendar-based schedule for a withdrawal would be the best thing to do, but this sort of timetable does have its downsides. Maybe someone could devise a realistic benchmark-based schedule that would work better. The point, however, is that when you're trying to signal an intention to eventually end the occupation of a foreign country, there's simply no substitute for having a plan at hand for ending the occupation.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE NEW JEWS. I've had this pet theory for a while that one of the consequences of Christian Zionism and the subsequent embrace of a slightly addled philo-Semitism by the contemporary right has been for all the old anti-Semitic tropes to simply be refocused on gay people. Andrew Sullivan has much the same idea and spells it out a bit. He's also got a good post on conservative apologetics for torture.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE DURBIN DISTRACTION. Why is Dick Durbin's opinion on Guantanamo all over the news? Because if it's not, Republican failures might be. Michael Tomasky explains why the GOP and FOX News are flogging Durbin's comments so heavily.

--Jeffrey Dubner

IS BIG BROTHER WATCHING YOU? The Moving Ideas Network, a project of The American Prospect, just posted USA PATRIOT Act 2005: Big Brother is Watching, a report on the PATRIOT Act reauthorization bill making its way through Congress.

Think the government is spying on you? That's because they probably are. From surveillance cameras at traffic stops to the sweeping powers enacted by the USA PATRIOT Act just one month after September 11, 2001, government has the ability to take a peep into practically every aspect of our lives. Most disturbingly, the PATRIOT Act allows them to do so without telling you and with little oversight and accountability.

For example, the government can ask a doctor for your medical records using a special subpoena that doesn't require demonstrating probable cause. And your doctor cannot tell you that the government has been prying into your medical history. Such is the same for library, financial, educational, and other records. The House just voted to remove this provision as an amendment to an appropriations bill, but it is unlikely to survive in the final bill.

The sweeping powers of the PATRIOT Act aren't enough for the administration and congressional leaders, who hope to expand the surveillance powers of the PATRIOT Act when reauthorizing the law this year.

Learn more and take action today!

--Diane Greenhalgh, Moving Ideas

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: LOW-BALL WARMING. Has the administration finally gone too far in its effort to distort climate-change science? Chris Mooney recounts the latest developments and why this time, the administration may finally be held to account.

--Jeffrey Dubner

CORRECTIONS ON HERITAGE AND ABSTINENCE. I wrote a post last week criticizing a New York Times article about a Heritage Foundation study, expressing disquiet that the Bush administration was allocating federal money for such things. The Times has corrected the story to say it "referred imprecisely to the studies' financing," and while the CDC "helped pay for the survey on which the studies were based" they "did not finance the studies themselves." There's nothing objectionable about that; my apologies for relaying bad information and adding outrage.

The correction also resolves one of my (minor) complaints about the story and notes that Heritage fellow Robert Rector is not a doctor.

--Matthew Yglesias

THEIR POUND OF FLESH. Readers are probably already aware of this saga, but I don't think it's gotten any coverage on Tapped yet, so it's worth noting. A little while ago Dick Durbin noted on the Senate floor that torturing prisoners was the sort of thing Nazis or Communists would do, and that the United States, trying to be one of the world's good guys, should hold itself to a higher standard of conduct. The right-wing noise machine, deploying some now familiar tactics, decided that the correct response would be to deliberately misrepresent what Durbin was saying and express a lot of outrage that someone would fail to understand that contemporary America is not, in fact, just like Nazi Germany. Hugh Hewitt and Bill Kristol, both of whom I firmly believe know perfectly well that Durbin said nothing objectionable, fall over each other in The Weekly Standard to see who can win Hack of the Year prize by demanding ever-harsher retribution against Durbin.

It's interesting as a case study in the operation of the smear machine, but really more telling as an instance of the ethical black hole into which the contemporary right has fallen. Nowadays, every time somebody raises the topic of immoral torture-related policies undertaken by the Bush administration the instant conservative reaction is to transform the conversation into a debate about the appropriateness of the critics' rhetoric. Every time, the point of the defense is not to defend the conduct in question, but simply to note that someone, somewhere, at some time has done worse things. We're better than Saddam Hussein! Our prisons aren't as bad as Auschwitz! People may be detained arbitrarily without hearings, appeal, due process, or POW status, but it's no Gulag!

Meanwhile, via Alina Stefanescu I was reading Joseph Bottum's explanation in First Things of what the alliance of foreign-policy neo-imperialists and social conservatives is all about:

The opponents of abortion and euthanasia insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in domestic politics. The opponents of Islamofascism and rule by terror insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in international politics. Why shouldn't they grow toward each other? The desire to find intellectual and moral seriousness in one realm can breed the desire to find intellectual and moral seriousness in another.

This, then, is your "intellectual and moral seriousness," your eternal "truths about human life and dignity": if it's better than Hitler, it's a-okay with them. "The new moralism," as Bottum calls it, seems to be different from the old moralism in that morality, in the sense of not doing bad things, doesn't really play a role.

--Matthew Yglesias

WEEKEND UPDATE. Love your father too much to follow the news? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• Nicholas Kristof. Hey, Pakistan's messed up, too. Next week's column: it's cold in Canada!
• David Brooks. Sure Bill Frist is a bad senator and a bad majority leader, but just check out these irrelevant details about his personal life.
• John Tierney. TV dads are dumb because that's what men want to watch, although according to my column men don't actually watch the shows in question.
• Jim Hoagland. Tony Blair should give Scotland an army.
• Robert Kagan. It was important to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein might have started a WMD program at some point in the future. (Obviously, we need to invade Burma tomorrow because, hey, you never know what could happen.)
• George Will. Conservatives like me love civil-rights leaders. Look, look, over there! Gay people getting married! Somebody stop them!
• David Broder. Suburban Seattle is pretty.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Laura Wexler on lynching.

UPDATE: This post originally referred to "Robert Kaplan" instead of "Robert Kagan." Thanks to all those who caught the error.

--Matthew Yglesias

ALL ALTERNATIVES, EH? George W. Bush, June 9, asked about closing Gitmo:

[Neil] CAVUTO: But now President Carter has said, sir, shut it down. Joe Biden said shut it down. Do you think it should be shut down?

BUSH: Well, you know, we're exploring all alternatives as to how best to do the main objective, which is to protect America. What we don't want to do is let somebody out that comes back and harms us. And so we're looking at all alternatives and have been.

By "looking at all alternatives," of course, he meant expanding its capacity by 40 percent. I was pretty cynical about Bush's comment last week, but I never expected anything this shameless. He doesn't care at all about describing reality, does he?

--Jeffrey Dubner

AUTISM, ABC, AND ROBERT KENNEDY. Rolling Stone and Salon have a blockbuster piece by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the conspiracy to cover up links between the mercury-based vaccine additive thimerosal and the uptick in autism rates in children born between 1989 and 2003.

Based on documents he obtained from a secret meeting convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and attended by representatives from the FDA and all the major vaccine manufacturers, Kennedy reports on how a core group of scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and politicians have tried to keep the public misinformed on the science behind thimersoal research:

The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency’s massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines – thimerosal – appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. “I was actually stunned by what I saw,” Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants – in one case, within hours of birth – the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.

But it gets worse. As the parents of autistic children began suing vaccine manufacturers, their allies on the Hill, most notably Dr. Bill Frist, rose to defend the pharmaceutical industry from these meddlesome parents.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children. On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government’s vaccine-related documents – including the Simpsonwood transcripts – and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas. In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the “Eli Lilly Protection Act” into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. The measure was repealed by Congress in 2003 – but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders.

The bill to which Kennedy refers is the “Protecting America From the War on Terror Act 2005,” introduced by Judd Gregg in January and cosponsored by Frist. As I reported back in February, this industry-friendly bill also contains provisions (collectively known as BioShield II) that would shield vaccine manufacturers who make bioterror countermeasures from punitive lawsuits. This despite the fact that, as with the questions surrounding autism and thimerosal, the government has had an awfully hard time owning up to the fact that the anthrax vaccine poses a health risk to those forced to take it.

While Kennedy’s piece is interesting on its own, so too is the burgeoning controversy surrounding its publication. According to a source very close to the story, ABC News -- which had exclusive rights to the piece -- was ready to run with it on 20/20 on Wednesday, and Nightline and Good Morning America on Thursday. According to my source, all three pieces were ready to air but were killed at the last minute by someone at the highest level of ABC News. My source speculates that someone from the CDC may have warned ABC News that the story would cause a panic, with parents en masse refusing their infant’s inoculations and causing a resurgence of childhood diseases.

Now, according to the Huffington Post, ABC seems to have reversed themselves and will run the story. I'm told the Associated Press will have an article out on Monday, as well. Hopefully the content of Kennedy's investigation won't get lost in the emerging media story. The CDC does not come off looking like fair arbiters of scientific research, to say the least, and it's hard to see their actions as anything but a massive cover-up.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE CHAT ROOM JIHAD. If you haven't yet, read the long story in today's New York Times about Tashnuba Hayder, a 16-year-old Bangladeshi-born Muslim from Queens who was just deported from the United States. (She chose "voluntary departure" as a way to get out of detention, but there's not much that seems voluntary about it.) The FBI found Hayder after monitoring those who attend chat rooms on Islam and listen in to Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammed's daily broadcasts from London. With most court documents sealed, it's impossible to tell if the girl was "an imminent threat" -- a potential suicide bomber, like girls just slightly older in the West Bank, as FBI agents feared -- or if this was a massive screw-up, a targeting of a teenager and her parents who had nothing to do with terrorism.

The internet is a powerful tool for jihadists, as Harvard's terrorism expert Jessica Stern explained a couple years ago:

The Internet has also greatly facilitated the spread of "virtual" subcultures and has substantially increased the capacity of loosely networked terrorist organizations. For example, Beam's essay on the virtues of "leaderless resistance" has long been available on the Web and, according to researcher Michael Reynolds, has been highlighted by radical Muslim sites. Islamist Web sites also offer on-line training courses in the production of explosives and urge visitors to take action on their own. The "encyclopedia of jihad," parts of which are available on-line, provides instructions for creating "clandestine activity cells," with units for intelligence, supply, planning and preparation, and implementation.

The obstacles these Web sites pose for Western law enforcement are obvious. In one article on the "culture of jihad" available on-line, a Saudi Islamist urges bin Laden's sympathizers to take action without waiting for instructions. "I do not need to meet the Sheikh and ask his permission to carry out some operation," he writes, "the same as I do not need permission to pray, or to think about killing the Jews and the Crusaders that gather on our lands." Nor does it make any difference whether bin Laden is alive or dead: "There are a thousand bin Ladens in this nation. We should not abandon our way, which the Sheikh has paved for you, regardless of the existence of the Sheikh or his absence." And according to U.S. government officials, al Qaeda now uses chat rooms to recruit Latino Muslims with U.S. passports, in the belief that they will arouse less suspicion as operatives than would Arab-Americans. Finally, as the late neo-Nazi William Pierce once told me, using the Web to recruit "leaderless resisters" offers still another advantage: it attracts better-educated young people than do more traditional methods, such as radio programs.

What we do about those threats, though, is difficult to say. We're not going to detain every curious 16-year-old girl for seven weeks, are we? Read Tashnuba Hayder's thoughts on free speech and inquiry; she makes an incredibly sympathetic suspect. We certainly need to gather what evidence we can regarding virtual terrorism networks, but I've got to wonder if we've drawn the right boundaries.

--Sarah Wildman

FIGHTING TOOTH AND NAIL. Everybody's giddy about the possibility of impeachment all of a sudden. (Maybe it's something about the 33rd anniversary of the Watergate break-in.) For now, though, like Dana Milbank writes, it's just "a trip to the land of make-believe" -- not because the charges are necessarily that outlandish, but because of the predictably cooperative Republican majority:

The Democratic congressmen were relegated to a tiny room in the bottom of the Capitol and the Republicans who run the House scheduled 11 major votes to coincide with the afternoon event.

If Democrats beyond John Conyers and Co. decide that it's time to make something out of the Downing Street Memo, it'll be interesting to see how far Republicans go to keep them out of the limelight. Pretty far, I suspect.

In other not-long-for-Washington news, a friend from San Diego spotted this picture of Duke Cunningham with what appears to be Elizabeth Todd. The picture isn't quite worth 1,000 words, but still -- cable shows need something visual to crop and sensationalize, don't they?

--Jeffrey Dubner

TIMETABLE. I can understand why the White House would want us to believe that setting a timetable for withdrawal in Iraq would only “embolden the insurgents.” But it’s beyond me why Democrats would push this line as well. Take, for example, the sentiment captured by Sheryl Gay Stolberg in her piece yesterday on the bipartisan proposal for a withdrawal timeline.

Many Republicans - and a number of Democrats, including Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Democratic leader - oppose setting a specific timetable for troop withdrawal, saying that to do so would only embolden insurgents. But lawmakers are keeping an eye on the polls, which reflect growing discontent with the war.

She doesn’t use a direct quote, so I'd hesitate to lunge after Harry Reid. But if you ask me, the insurgency seems fairly emboldened already; just yesterday, an insurgent group demanded the release of Sunni women held in official custody and threatened to summarily execute 36 hostages should their demands not be met. And if the insurgents crudely measure their success by the number of U.S. forces killed each month, they're on pace to exceed May, when 80 Americans were killed.

Given the administration’s insistence on claiming that somehow -- 20 American deaths per week not withstanding -- the insurgency is in its last throes, it’s time for Reid et al. to inject some truth into this debate and lower our expectations on Iraq. Preparing Americans for the likelihood that we will leave Iraq under less than rosy circumstances is probably a thankless job, but it’s the honest thing to do. Absent a massive influx of U.S. troops we don’t have, foreign troops who aren't on offer, or trained Iraqi soldiers who don’t exist, a scheduled military withdrawal may be the least-bad option. And while the liberal in me fully endorses the idea that we "owe Iraq" now that we’ve invaded, it’s no longer clear that we're in much of a position to deliver on that ethical obligation.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

BEST OF LUCK, PAUL! While touring poverty-stricken Africa yesterday, new World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz announced that reductions in farm subsidies from Western nations would be on his agenda for the new round of WTO talks scheduled for later this year in Hong Kong.

"I think the key to tackling the problem of cotton subsidies which obviously hurts poor farmers in Burkina Faso and other poor countries is tackling agricultural subsidies across the board," Mr. Wolfowitz said.

"We will be having a strong voice in favor of reducing subsidies worldwide."

While it'd be nice to see Wolfowitz return to his long-lost global populist roots, I wouldn't get my hopes up about the results. Judging by the farm subsidies/food stamps bait and switch in this year's budget and the $73 billion the administration heaped onto food subsidies in election year 2002, I think it's safe to say that George W. Bush isn’t exactly rethinking farm subsidies for the 21st century. Even if Wolfowitz is considering reincarnating himself as a poverty messiah at the World Bank, it probably won't impact the administration’s policy decisions. And even then, who knows what magic could happen when a goal of "tackling agricultural subsidies across the board" meets Bush’s much overworked department of euphemisms.

--Jordan Kline

RAISING THE STAKES. The news that Republicans are seeking an exit strategy on Social Security privatization is welcome. Democrats, however, should be getting prepared for what to do next if the White House gets behind a "solvency-only" proposal that doesn't involve private accounts. I think the thing to do is to adopt a position inverse to the one maintained by conservative Republicans who say they'll support a solvency plan if and only if it does include private accounts -- acceptance of a solvency plan that's conditional on including something the GOP won't get behind. There are a couple of directions you could go with that, but the obvious one is to say that Democrats will support solvency for Social Security only in the context of a plan that also brings solvency to the general fund budget by, for example, repealing Bush's tax cuts. After all, it doesn't make any kind of sense to be closing a budget hole that will (allegedly) occur in 2041 while ignoring one that actually exists in 2005.

--Matthew Yglesias

BILL GATES, PANDA HUGGER. Via The Guardian's excellent NewsBlog, I see that Microsoft has agreed to a Chinese government request to ban insidious terms such as "democracy," "human rights," and "freedom" from the Chinese versions of its new blogging software, MSN Spaces. I don’t quite know what to say about this, except that any transnational corporation is obviously required to adhere to the domestic laws of each country in which it operates. But Microsoft is more than just any old company, and Bill Gates missed an opportunity to take a principled stand here.

It didn't take too much pressure to get Microsoft to flip its position on an anti-discrimination bill in Washington state. The same may well happen here if both sides of the American political blogosphere start denouncing its new blogging software, I would think.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

EXIT STRATEGY. There's an odd omission in Sheryl Gay Stolberg's New York Times piece on lawmakers who are starting to break the silence about devising an exit strategy for Iraq. She neglects to mention (as, indeed, most news outlets have) Nancy Pelosi's preposed resolution calling for the administration to report on a war strategy that delineates specific goals and benchmarks for gradual U.S. troop withdrawal. It's true that yesterday, in a shockingly uncharacteristic display of congressional Republican heavy-handedness, the Rules committee blocked her amendment from consideration as part of the military appropriations bill; but her proposal nonetheless stands as a significant, high-profile Democratic effort to put the exit strategy question on the table. (A few Republicans, led by Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones of North Carolina, are making similar noises; but most GOP lawmakers have another exit strategy on their minds at the moment.)

Needless to say, Pelosi's resolution is a tentative first step, and certainly doesn't lay out any kind of comprehensive Democratic stance on the Iraq war. But dismissing out of hand even the consideration of withdrawal from Iraq as some kind of unthinkable non-option, or castigating such discussions among Dems as mere political opportunism, is no longer a defensible position. We passed that point a long, long time ago. (Via Jesse Lee.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE FRUITS OF JUDGE-BASHING. Has this season of high-octane judge-bashing had much of an effect on the public's trust in the courts? A new Washington Post-ABC News poll (see full PDF here) touches on public views of the judiciary. Unsurprisingly, evangelical Republicans expressed the strongest disapproval of the courts and their decision-making role on the issues of abortion, gay marriage, and the death penalty. The overall numbers are less stark, and it's hard to get a sense of trend lines over the last few years from the poll. Meanwhile, Pew released a poll yesterday that shows an 11-point drop (from 68 percent to 57 percent) in the favorability of the Supreme Court among the general public between January 2001 and June 2005; the drops are steepest for conservative Republicans (19 percent) and white evangelicals (22 percent), though all categories listed showed a decline in approval of the Court.

Clearly the right has succeeded in mobilizing its own members around opposition to the judiciary, and has had at least some small success in instigating a broader questioning of the courts' legitimacy. (It should be noted that some portion of the across-the-board favorability decline since 2001, particlularly among Democrats, ought to be attributed to lingering fallout from the Bush v. Gore decision.) The Terri Schiavo Gotterdammerung, of course, turned out to be something of a fiasco (and recurring embarassment) for Republicans, but it has helped to set in motion, particularly in the House, a campaign against the judiciary that isn't over yet.

I have an article in the upcoming print issue of the Prospect that goes into this in a bit more detail, but basically the next phase in the campaign will be a lengthy series of House Judiciary Committee hearings in the next few months, analyzing our "runaway courts" and touching on all the major right-wing complaints. The hearings will provide an oppurtunity to further stoke and sustain the outrage of the Christian right while giving lawmakers a chance to try to chip away at the broader public’s faith in the legitimacy of the modern judiciary. The hope is that sustaining the debate will shift popular sentiments and lay the groundwork for future action. (Recall the high-profile congressional hearings in the late '90s cataloging the Gestapo tactics of the IRS, which preceded a rollback in funding for IRS audits and enforcement capacity.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

EMBARASSMENT OF RICHES. For a minority party in Congress seeking evidence to build a political case against the majority as arrogant, abusive, corrupt, and out of touch, this has been one hell of a banner week. There was the latest egregious tantrum from Jim Sensenbrenner (truly an abusive committee chairman of the old school), which has prompted Democrat Jerry Nadler to file a resolution demanding that the House condemn the Judiciary chair for breaking parliamentary practice when he shut down a hearing last week. Elsewhere among Judiciary Committee members, ranking Democrat John Conyers will be holding a shadow hearing today on the Downing Street Memo; the forum will be held in an unoccupied office, since Sensenbrenner has decided to bar Democrats from using hearing rooms for such purposes.

Meanwhile, Senator Ted Stevens and his wife appear to have made off like bandits through investments in businesses that Stevens helped out legislatively. A seemingly more blatant bribery scandal has been unfolding over the past few days, of course, as straight-talkin’ congressman Randall Cunningham tries to explain why the much-discussed national housing bubble seems to have already burst on his old property -- which he had sold for a fortune to a party with business pending before him in Congress -- but nowhere else. (Fortunately for Duke, the houseboat market has been just fine.) Cunningham’s case would seem to be a no-brainer for the House ethics committee to investigate, as would that of the Republican majority leader -- who, let us duly note, called Cunningham a hero. The problem is, that committee is still in deadlock, as the handpicked chairman continues to insist on breaking precedent by appointing his own longtime chief of staff to head up the committee office, and the Democratic members continue to cry foul. (Doc Hastings’s intransigence, solidly backed by the leadership, has now prompted the ranking member of the Rules committee, Louise Slaughter, to call for his resignation.)

And then there’s that tricky matter of the 15 Republican senators who harbor some as yet unexplained opposition to apologizing for the Senate’s history of blocking anti-lynching legislation -- not to mention the Senate leader who attempted to abet and hide his colleagues' misgivings through some procedural gimmickry.

And it’s only Thursday morning ...

--Sam Rosenfeld

DON'T ASK THE BIG QUESTION, DON'T TELL. I’m all for the military lifting its ban on openly gay and lesbian servicemembers, but it’s stretching it to argue that this would solve the armed forces’ serious recruiting shortfalls. What’s fueling the inability to successfully recruit volunteers isn’t that some groups are being blacklisted; it’s that fewer and fewer young people are willing to risk becoming bombing targets or hostages for insurgents.

The problem with the debate over how to deal with troop shortages is that the main question rarely gets discussed: could it be that, just maybe, there’s something seriously wrong with trying to fight terrorism and refashion the Arab world neocon-style? The entire dilemma is premised on the assumption that the administration’s current policy (primarily, its commitment in Iraq) is the right one. It's good to see conservatives floating proposals like lifting the recruitment ban on sexual minorities or making minor shifts in on-the-ground tactics, but few are seriously reconsidering the overarching Bush military strategy. Abandoning "don't ask, don't tell" may be worth doing on the merits, but it's no substitute for thinking about the first-order issue here.

--Asheesh Siddique

FALSE ACCUSATIONS AGAINST MICHAEL. No, I mean Michael Schiavo. Looks like he didn't strangle, beat, or drug Terri Schiavo -- all of which were offenses alleged against him -- and she may not even have suffered from the bulimia that he supposedly induced by mercilessly insulting her appearance while she was alive. (Examples of those disgusting charges and worse are fairly easy to Google, in case you feel the need.) It's hard to think of many things more nightmarish than what Michael Schiavo underwent -- to suffer not only the death of his wife and a 15-year battle with her parents, but to be repeatedly and brutally slandered on some of the most personal aspects of his life for his misfortune. John Derbyshire was exactly right about Schiavo back in March, just as he has things exactly right now.

--Jeffrey Dubner

A QUESTION OF INCENTIVES. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Guy Matsusaka makes the case for increased use of ballot initiatives:

Direct democracy is exploding because of fundamental demographic and technological changes over the last 40 years. When the republic was formed, ordinary citizens had little formal education, and many had only a tenuous grasp on reading. With communications that moved at the speed of a man on a horse, even a literate person had to struggle to be informed. It made perfect sense to appoint an elite group of educated representatives to meet in the state capitals and conduct the public's business.

Even 40 years ago, just over one-third of the adult population had a high school diploma. Now 85% of us are high school graduates, and more than a quarter of us have college degrees. Technology also allows us to tap vastly larger amounts of information now. The upshot is that the typical educated and informed citizen of the 21st century no longer sees his or her representatives as having a monopoly on knowledge or wisdom.

Adjusting to the new realities of democracy requires a change in mind-set. Many Californians still believe that legislators ought to make all the important decisions for the people and that when an issue ends up on the ballot, it means the Legislature has failed to do its job. But there is really no reason for the Legislature to be the first stop for important policy issues. Voters are no less capable of setting broad budget priorities or deciding if marijuana can be used for medical purposes, if gambling should be legal, if parents should be informed when minors request abortions and a host of other issues. These policy choices define a community's values, and it seems proper for the people to speak on them.

That strikes me as a hopelessly naive argument. The issue isn't whether or not people are capable in principle of understanding important questions and making informed decisions about them. The question is whether they're likely to do so in practice. One frequent problem in politics is that many ideas sound good but are, in fact, bad. Professional legislators have an incentive to vote for such ideas (they sound good), but they also have some pretty strong incentives to try and make sure they don't vote for them. If things turn out badly, voters will be unhappy and are likely to vote out legislators who voted in favor of the bad idea. A legislator who doesn't want to lose his job is going to have some reason to avoid measures that will have deleterious consequences for his constituents and seek out measures that will have beneficial ones.

Of course, an ordinary voter also has some reason to do this, but it's much weaker. Legislators can and will be punished for their votes even if the vote they cast wasn't decisive. For an ordinary voter in an initiative, however, the time costs of making an informed decision need to be stacked up against the reality that the chance of your vote being decisive is exceedingly small. In addition, the information costs to legislators are lower because they have less other stuff (like a job) to do and access to staff to do most of the work for them. Voters, by contrast, have every reason not to take the time to immerse themselves in policy details, and little reason to think that developing informed opinions on those subjects will benefit them.

The result is likely to be a much lower quality of policymaking, reflecting the sort of incoherence, preference cycling, or simple fickleness that you see in polls and focus groups. Populist posturing ("trust the people!") sounds good, but doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Sadly, direct democracy merely encourages even more of that sort of thing.

--Matthew Yglesias

CAN'T REMEMBER WHERE I HEARD THAT. It seems that some Republicans won't stand up to Christian fanatics at the Air Force Academy intent on harassing Jewish cadets, while others won't take a public position on whether or not lynchings were bad, lest they alienate their racist constituents. It's almost as if they're a white, Christian party that's not all that sensitive to the concerns of America's racial and religious minorities or something.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE PHASE-OUT DEATH RATTLES. While Chuck Grassley prepares to put together an anemic (if still cruel) Social Security reform package sans private accounts and other senators consider pushing a magic-time joke of a bill as a substitute, Bill Thomas is getting set to work his mojo in the House. The Thomas m.o. for passing controversial legislation is to lard it with obscene amounts of often unrelated “sweeteners” to bring folks on board and entice lobbyists to push hard for the bill. As subscription-only CQ reports today, Thomas is set to apply that formula to help lift the president’s private-accounts proposal off the ground:

On Tuesday, Thomas said his catchall legislation might ease restrictions on 401(k) plans and other retirement savings. “Currently, the tax code inhibits or prohibits . . . doing certain things,” he said.

With fewer restrictions, for example, life insurers could market hybrid annuities that can be converted to long-term health care plans.

Thomas’ allies say his plan builds on his success last year in loading up a corporate tax overhaul (PL 108-357) with sweeteners including a tobacco buyout. “You’ll see everything . . . except the kitchen sink,” a House Republican predicted.

…

Thomas would marry a restructuring of Social Security with popular retirement savings tax breaks and — to bring more lobbying muscle on board — more flexibility for unions and companies to deal with unfunded pension liabilities.

…

Thomas and Boehner offered a carrot to the Multiemployer Pension Coalition that could bring the support of a group including United Parcel Service Inc., the Teamsters, Associated General Contractors and the Motion Picture Association of America.

The chairmen offered to add to the bill that Boehner plans to mark up a provision to increase the amount of pension contributions companies may deduct from their taxable incomes to 140 percent of a plan’s liabilities.

…

Another potential sweetener would be help for struggling airlines. One possibility would be to incorporate a bipartisan bill (S 861) sponsored by Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., that would — if unions agree — give airlines 25 years to cover unfunded pension liabilities.

Offering that or some other inducement for companies with pension woes could be pivotal if a Social Security overhaul is to win support from Democrats and moderate Republicans.

Thomas and Ways and Means ally Jim McCrery, R-La., have also talked with colleagues about making room in a big-bill approach for provisions permitting larger contributions to individual retirement accounts and providing for automatic enrollment of employees in 401(k) retirement plans.

You get the drift. Some of these provisions are more defensible than others (bigger tax shelters for the rich, bad!; automatic 401(k) enrollment, good!), but at the center are private accounts carved out of Social Security. There’s little indication that this is still anything other than a non-starter, particularly in the Senate. Moreover, the CQ piece indicates that the House leadership might not even endorse Thomas’ approach, and that at any rate coordination among the different players here has pretty much broken down.

It is, incidentally, amusing to see last fall’s corporate-tax bill, a true business-giveaway monstrosity, touted so often these days by Republicans as a crowning example of their approach to tough legislation. (See Thomas Edsall’s recent report on Roy Blunt’s K-Street operation for more examples.) They’re right!

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: DARFUR IN DARKNESS. Conservatives seem to have dropped the ball on Darfur, Rob Garver reports, despite their pious promises. Now, liberal evangelicals are picking up the lobbying where their conservative counterparts left off.

--Jeffrey Dubner

IF YOU PRICK US… As Steve Clemons points out, Bill Frist's whining session yesterday on Democrats blocking John Bolton's confirmation (held with John McCain dutifully by his side) seems to have backfired. For one, using the f-word to describe Democratic strategy to block a full vote on Bolton and charging baselessly that Democrats have been "moving the goalposts" on the kind of materials they require from the White House before they’ll support a floor vote on Bolton seems to have pushed away Mark Pryor.

Pryor was one of the three Democrats (Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu being the other two) who voted with Republicans to support cloture on the Bolton debate on May 26. As Charles Babington reports today in the Washington Post:

Senate GOP leaders, acknowledging no apparent progress on Bolton, said they will call for another vote to end debate in a renewed effort to portray Democrats as obstructionists, probably this week. But one of the three Democrats who sided with them on an unsuccessful "cloture" vote on May 26, Sen. Mark Pryor (Ark.), said he may abandon the Republicans, leaving them farther from their goal than they were three weeks ago.

If Democrats "continue being reasonable [in their requests] and the White House won't provide the information, I want to reserve the right to change my vote," Pryor told reporters.

Funny enough, it turns out that heaping abuses on Democrats en masse precisely when you need only a small number of Democrats to vote with you is not such winning strategy. Who knew?

--Mark Leon Goldberg

QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS. Why would The New York Times report that two new studies "rebut" earlier peer-reviewed work on the effectiveness of virginity pledges when, according to the Times's own reporting, the study was not peer-reviewed, is unpublishable in real academic journals, uses an unreliable data source, and only supports the conclusion when you use a non-standard test for statistical significance? For that matter, why would they refer to Heritage's Robert Rector as "Dr. Robert Rector" when he has no Ph.D.? Why would you cover a study like that at all?

The only newsworthy information in the story is that the Bush Department of Health and Human Services has decided for some reason to start contracting out research on controversial questions to an ideological think tank that is non-partisan in name only, rather than to proper independent analysts. Can the Center for America Progress get a grant to revisit this topic? Will the Economic Policy Institute start getting taxpayer money to do research on the Bush tax cuts? I'm not going to hold my breath.

--Matthew Yglesias

NAME NAMES. Rather than pile on the profanity, how about a simple question for Tom Friedman: Which liberals, exactly, "don't want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don't want the Bush team to succeed"? Friedman's a pretty important guy and surely knows a lot of liberals, so he probably knows some liberals worth naming. This is a pretty serious allegation -- who's he talking about? If he would tell us, then maybe people would have a chance to defend themselves against this smear.

Or is he just making things up? The latter, I think. And who are even these liberals "who don't want to talk about Iraq"? Friedman's the only dedicated foreign-affairs writer I know of who ignored the subject for months in order to promote his new book.

--Matthew Yglesias

NOT FAIR: ASBESTOS BILL VALUES COMPANY PROFITS OVER WORKERS' LIVES. Moving Ideas, a project of The American Prospect, just posted Asbestos Bill Saves Companies Billions by Denying Victims Justice, a report about the asbestos trust fund legislation currently being spearheaded by Arlen Specter. The report details the history of asbestos poisoning and the asbestos industry's culpability through non-disclosure of its harmful effects as well as how the legislation disenfranchises asbestos victims and provides companies who knowingly poisoned their workers with enormous financial savings. The report also provides ways to get involved with organizations in the fight.

The so-called Fairness in Asbestos Injury Resolution (FAIR) Act, S. 852, establishes a trust fund that asbestos victims would have to apply to in order to receive compensation. Victims whose cases have not already been settled would lose their right to sue in court. The bill also preempts state laws that provide for speedy trials for terminally ill plaintiffs. Should the asbestos bill pass, hundreds would die waiting for court decisions.

The number of compensated victims would be reduced by convoluted, non-medical criteria and by making the trust fund only available until 2033. The asbestos industry would reap a $20.3 billion windfall while workers slowly lose any hope of justice for poisoning.

Asbestos victims deserve their day in court and just compensation for their suffering. Learn more and take action today!

--Ben Milder, Moving Ideas

MARK FELT, CHAIRMAN? Murray Waas has extended a very interesting scoop first reported by the Albany Times Union, of all places. Mark Felt may have been the actual man in the garage with Bob Woodward, but it seems likely that he was acting with three other highly placed FBI officials. The three officials have passed away, so it's going to pretty difficult to prove, but it's a fascinating investigation.

--Jeffrey Dubner

HUNGER OR MALNOURISHMENT? I think Mickey Kaus gets this issue right, and eliding the difference between a "hunger" problem (which the United States has basically solved) and a malnourishment problem does liberals no particular good. For one thing, pointing out that public action has essentially eliminated the once widesread problem of people not being able to get enough food to sustain themselves is the sort of thing liberals need to do more of: taking credit for the myriad ways in which big government solves problems and makes the world a better place.

Unfortunately, a new problem has arisen that, while less bad than actual starvation, is still bad. If people eat the wrong stuff they can still be malnourished even if they're getting enough calories to live. Some Prospect folks talked about just this issue with our neighbors at Third Way a while back, and it seems to me that liberals could do something politically appealing along the lines of making food aid programs more generous, but attaching more restrictions to them in terms of requiring that they be used to buy reasonably healthy food.

--Matthew Yglesias

OVER GROVER. Looks like Grover Norquist -- who has been fighting a Senate Indian Affairs Committee subpoena of records from his outfit, Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) -- won't be testifying about his connections to Jack Abramoff's lobbying shenanigans at the committee's upcoming hearing. (ATR helpfully served as a funneler of Indian gaming money to anti-gambling outfits involved in campaigns against competitors of Abramoff's clients.) Interestingly, the ACLU intervened on ATR's behalf to protest the committee subpoena of records of ATR's donors, whose identity Norquist has never revealed. Norquist's absense will seem strange, given that the June 22 hearing is intended to focus on the actions of ATR and Ralph Reed. Is committee chair John McCain backpedaling a bit?

Relatedly, Michael Crowley's new TNR report on the inevitable corruption the hugely lucrative and massively regulated Indian gaming industry has helped to bring about, both in Washington and back on the reservations, is worth a look.

--Sam Rosenfeld

PROFILES IN COURAGE. Do take a look at the lists currently offered by Chris Geidner and John Aravosis of the senators who chose not to put themselves on record in support of the resolution formally apologizing for the Senate's historic record of blocking anti-lynching legislation. There are plausible, reasonable explanations for this; a few hundred calls to each senators' office might help to clarify what those explanations are and who can credibly point to them. Note that John Cornyn of Texas (our 100th most popular senator) is on both lists; recall that his name is being floated as a prospect for a future Supreme Court nomination.

Meanwhile, let us commend the courage of George Allen for taking such a bold leading role in pushing for the resolution. It's never too late to see the light:

Others described the resolution as an act of expediency for Mr. Allen, who is a likely presidential candidate and who has been criticized for displaying a Confederate flag at his home and a noose in his law office.

Gotta love these guys.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FOREGONE FORETHOUGHT. Here's something you already knew: The Bush administration didn't plan for the aftermath of the invasion of Baghdad. Here's something you might not have known: Tony Blair knew it too -- when there was still time to do something about it. Matthew Yglesias relays the latest Downing Street Memo and what it tells us about the rush to war.

--Jeffrey Dubner

STRANGE DAYS. Apparently, we need to ratify CAFTA in order to save Central America from a takeover by Hugo Chavez. I've heard this several times now, but I've never seen anyone lay out exactly how that's supposed to work. Certainly, the National Review editorial doesn't do much to explain it. How is, for example, making generic prescription drugs less available in El Salvador supposed to help consolidate Central American democracy? Inquiring minds want to know.

The truth is that virtually everything in this deal could be done unilaterally by the Central American governments if they really deemed, say, deregulating provision of water services to be integral to sustaining political freedom. The main exceptions are that CAFTA will replace the quasi-enforceable labor standards of the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the Generalized System of Preferences with totally unenforceable ones (as the Bush administration keeps emphasizing, CBI and GSP already let the vast majority of Central American imports into the country duty-free), and very slightly raise sugar import quotas. That last bit really would be a minor boon to American consumers and possibly a major one to Central American producers -- except, as NR accurately says, "CAFTA is, in fact, embarrassingly deferential to the sugar lobby. It would increase sugar imports by only one percent in its first year. After 15 years, that number would rise to a staggering 1.4 percent."

The idea of a trade agreement with the countries in question is not, as such, a bad one. I would recommend these thoughts from the New Democrat Network on how a better bargain might be struck that could gain bipartisan support and do some good for both the American economy and our broader regional policy. Unfortunately, the administration seems more inclined to do the reverse and try to gain votes through further appeasement of the sugar industry, which will only make a bad deal worse.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE GOOD LIFE. Today's John Tierney column on how Social Security makes people fat and lazy sure is revealing. One could dispute some of Tierney's facts or point out that it's perverse to make a change -- raising the retirement age -- whose burdens will fall most heavily on the least well-off Americans, but in some ways it's better to grant him all that. Over and over again in his column he comes back to the point that people could work longer than they do, in the sense that they're physically capable.

But so what? This is a very wealthy country and, generally speaking, we're far past the point where most people are driven by actual economic necessity. Some folks really are living close to the edge, but when we say that middle-class families have trouble making ends meet, we don't mean they're on the verge of starvation. We mean they have trouble making ends meet in a manner consistent with a pretty lavish American lifestyle involving a big house, multiple cars, all kinds of household appliances and entertainment gadgets, cutting-edge health care, etc., etc., etc. It's nothing like the sense in which people in, say, Chad have trouble making ends meet.

And just as most Americans have way more stuff than they need, most Americans work somewhat less than they could. This is the privilege of living in a wealthy society -- we all have more stuff and more leisure than is strictly necessary to support life. And there's nothing wrong with that! It's a good thing -- an excellent thing, in fact. It's the thing that makes life worth living. Looking forward to a reasonably long, reasonably comfortable retirement is important to the very large number of people who don't have neat jobs as, say, op-ed columnists.

A solid work ethic is a wonderful thing, but Americans are by no means a lazy people. In fact, we work considerably harder than our developed-world peers in Europe. In exchange, we have more stuff. Some people think we should take a big step toward a more European-style balance. Personally, I'd be against that. But there's really no good argument for the country that's already the most tilted toward stuff over leisure to tilt even further in that direction unless you have some kind of weird opposition to people enjoying themselves.

--Matthew Yglesias

EARLY WARNING. Perhaps it’s an unfair representation of what was discussed at the recent House New Democrat Coalition meeting, but this Hill article from last week, written in what could be intentional tongue-in-cheek style, is laugh-out-loud hilarious and worth a read. These earnest Dems seem a bit blocked in their current efforts to come up with some -- any! -- bold, dynamic new ideas that will set them apart both from the majority and their Old Dem comrades; perhaps in part as a result, recourse is made to the kind of overcooked “frame” talk Mark Schmitt has been getting a bit tired of hearing recently.

At the very end of the article, though, following paragraph after paragraph of banalities and platitudes, we do get one reference to planned New Dem action on a specific issue:

Aside from considering their broader message, New Democrats also discussed a desire to weigh in soon on predatory lending, one attendee said.

Abusive subprime mortgage lending is indeed an important issue deserving of federal action. But it will be worth paying special attention to how the legislative process unfolds here, and what role the New Dems play in it, because there are currently two competing predatory lending reform bills being offered in the House. A bipartisan bill sponsored by Bob Ney and Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski and backed by the lending industry would override tougher state laws and actually weaken certain existing federal protections against predatory lending. (See this PDF analysis from the National Consumer Law Center.) A Democratic bill sponsored by Melvin Watt, Barney Frank, and Brad Miller, backed by civil-rights and consumer groups, is tougher across the board (PDF).

New Dems and Old are scattered among the cosponsors of both bills, it must be stressed, and subprime lending has indeed been a New Dem issue for a while at outfits like the Progressive Policy Institute. There really is an opportunity for them to play a constructive role here in pushing for a tough and expansive federal measure; but there is also going to be the dangerous opportunity to help grease the skids for a counterproductive “bipartisan” act that, like the bankruptcy bill this spring, serves the interests of industry in the guise of principled centrism. This will be worth watching, and hopefully Jon Lackow and others at Warren Reports will help us make sense of the issues in play.

--Sam Rosenfeld

FORWARD STRATEGY OF FREEDOM. It seemed a few months ago that the Bush administration had turned over a new leaf in regards to Uzbekistan. Guess not: "Defense officials from Russia and the United States last week helped block a new demand for an international probe into the Uzbekistan government's shooting of hundreds of protesters last month, according to U.S. and diplomatic officials." What can you say about a thing like that? Meanwhile, people haven't done nearly enough to give the White House credit for helping Hezbollah and pro-Syrian militias gain a popular mandate in Lebanon.

--Matthew Yglesias

CIAO. Italy's decision on in vitro fertilization has come in, and it is a victory for Pope Benedict XVI. According to the Associated Press, Italians simply didn't vote, which is what Benedict hoped would happen. Italian referendums require a 50-percent turnout but only 25 percent came out for the issue. (Imagine what the rule would mean here! It would be the rare referendum that would ever pass.) Interestingly, the Vatican had urged not voting -- knowing that turnout below 50 percent was a victory for the Vatican, but also knowing that Italians tend to like to keep the church out of state affairs. As one former EU commissioner and champion of the failed referendum, Emma Bonino, announced to the press: ''Today we have three victims: the secularism of the state, political authority, and the institution of the referendum." It remains to be seen if the law, which mandates that only three embryos can be created at any one time for a (heterosexual only) couple and that all three must be implanted at once -- will change Italy's precipitous drop in population. Is that what Benedict means by promoting family?

--Sarah Wildman

IN PRAISE OF SPECIAL INTERESTS. On the subject of Jeffrey Rosen's article, I think it's worth pointing out that denunciations of the way special interests thwart the will of the people have a remarkable tendency to degenerate into simple distaste for actually existing democracy. Thus you get Rosen offering article after article in praise of Sandra Day O'Connor's wackily unprincipled jurisprudence, divorced from any concern about the rule of law or her frequent scorn for legislatures.

The reality is that disproportionate influence by "special interests" -- otherwise known as groups of citizens and business that take disproportionate interest in particular issues -- is an inevitable part of representative government. That's why Arnold Schwarzenegger's gesture toward an interest-free California veers wildly between fronting for business interest groups and efforts to construct a Napoleon Bonaparte/Hugo Chavez-style plebiscitary autocracy ("I was always dreaming about very powerful people -- dictators and things like that."). Now I don't think the Governator really is a budding dictator (that's just not going to fly in America), but it means that insofar as there's any reality to his agenda it just amounts to substituting one set of interests for another.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I've been working on a piece about the FCC's telecommunications competition policy and how it's gone badly awry thanks to regulatory capture by local phone companies. The alternative to domination by that set of interests would be domination by another set -- Competitive Local Exchange Carriers, the smaller cell-phone companies, people who make network routers, etc. -- but it happens that an agenda favoring the second set of groups would better serve the public interest. This is what we call "politics;" it's not always pretty, but there's no viable alternative. There's no reason to think it's illegitimate for the groups most concerned about a given issue to exert disproportionate influence over it. Not only do interest groups help measure preference-intensity, they also embody a wildly disproportionate share of the actual information on the topics under their purview. This is why it's important, for example, to have strong labor unions and other sorts of interest groups that can counter business interests. Simply wishing the special interests away is a silly journalistic conceit, not a real plan of action.

--Matthew Yglesias

COMPOUNDING THE FUTILITY. Before it degenerates into an ill-considered paean to the Schwarzenegger centrists who will save our republic from demonic partisanship, Jeffrey Rosen’s piece in The New York Times Magazine comes within the ballpark of making an important point about the Supreme Court, one that relates to the religious right’s current full-throttle judicial strategy. This is basically a rewrite of his recent article in The New Republic, arguing that the country has reached a paradoxical moment where the unelected Supreme Court is more representative of the public’s political views than Congress is.

Rosen supports this assertion in his new article, as he did in his old one, with approximately zero relevant pieces of evidence. (The data he cites in the second paragraph of his Times piece simply does not show what he says it does.) This is somewhat unfortunate, since the kernel of truth he's touching on here is the insight that Robert Dahl made 50 years ago and that political scientists (and even such arch foes of judicial review as Mark Tushnet) have reconfirmed ever since: To a surprising degree, considering its supposed independence from partisan or public pressure, the Court rarely strays very far or very long from the prevailing political consensus in the country. (Even the activism of the Warren era didn’t significantly challenge this notion.)

This of course undermines the religious right’s pet narrative of an out-of-control tyrannical judiciary, thwarting the will of the people at every turn and in need of radical transformation. The important qualifier here is that, within broad parameters, the Court tends to skew toward the elite political consensus, as is nicely reflected in the moderate social liberalism and economic/regulatory conservatism characterizing the Rehnquist Court’s majority decisions. But of course that only serves to further underscore the futility of religious conservatives’ current, desperate preoccupation with the judiciary (which they arrived at in the first place out of a need to rationalize continued political activism in light of obvious Republican indifference to delivering for them legislatively). To the extent that the judiciary becomes increasingly right-wing, it appears likely that it will move more in the “Constitution in Exile” types' direction than the religious right’s. And thus the central dynamic of modern Republican politics -- social conservative activism and electoral muscle resulting in the enactment of economically conservative policies -- will be recapitulated in the judiciary. The futility of the Christian right cause will be compounded rather than transcended.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: SNOW JOB. When Republicans need to humanize their anti-science stem-cell position, they turn to the "Snowflake" kids. But the idea of embryo "adoption" is misleading, writes Chris Mooney -- and that's why it's so useful to its proponents.

--Jeffrey Dubner

WELDON ON MTP. As you may have seen, The American Prospect's recent coverage of Rep. Curt Weldon and the questionable background of his sources got some play on yesterday's Meet The Press broadcast. The co-authors of the article, Laura Rozen and Jeet Heer both provide some followup and reactions on Laura's blog.

For my part, I had some trouble making sense of Weldon's answers. I think he's conceding that Manucher Ghorbanifar is an unreliable source of information, but denying that "Ali" -- the source for his book -- is simply channeling Ghorbanifar. The evidence on this doesn't seem very ambiguous. Laura and Jeet say "Ali" is Fereidoun Mahdavi, which Weldon didn't bother to deny; they interviewed Mahdavi and he said:

"Many information that I have given to Weldon is coming from Ghorbanifar," said Mahdavi, who was reached in Paris by telephone on June 6. "Because Ghorbanifar used me, in fact, to pass that stuff because I know he has problems in Washington."

So if the Prospect has the story right, Weldon's information is coming from a source that Weldom himself agrees is unreliable. Weldon doesn't seem interested in denying any element of the story -- just in trying to somehow shift blame to the CIA. Well, the CIA's not perfect, but this is still Weldon's book, and Weldon's the one pushing this intelligence around town. It either comes from a source worth trusting, or it doesn't. And it seems that it doesn't.

--Matthew Yglesias

DEATH RATTLES. Last week, Josh Marshall aptly described Chuck Grassley's reported intention to produce a Social Security bill in the Senate Finance Committee that jettisons private accounts entirely as "the phase-out death rattle." The flailing among Republicans has indeed become desperate and harried; at the same time Grassley is moving toward ever more anemic iterations of a reform plan focusing entirely on solvency, some of his fellow senators seem interested in going in precisely the opposite direction.

According to subscription-only CQ, Jim DeMint has stepped up with a new "plan" that draws from the same magical well of lunacy as the Ryan-Sununu proposal in the House: New private accounts would be financed through the Social Security surplus (yes, the same Social Security surplus that doesn't exist and that has been used by the Republicans in power to mask the size of the general fund deficit for several years now). As this official from centrists.org puts it candidly (and, one would hope, in disapproval):

“The DeMint idea seems to be picking up momentum,” said Ed Lorenzen, executive director of Centrists.org, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that backs creating individual accounts in Social Security. “It’s based on the thought of, if we can’t get agreement among ourselves on [Social Security’s] solvency, and we can’t get Democrats to agree on accounts or negotiate a solvency package, maybe we should just abandon solvency [debate] and focus on accounts.”

Nobody at this point is making even a token effort to defend this proto-plan's math, which, as Matt says, is transparently bogus. But the rationale that supporters are offering does provide yet one more powerful illustration of the unseriousness of our governing party. Try to follow the logic here:

Indeed, in public meetings lawmakers have heard a frequent refrain from the public: Pay back the trust funds and stop using Social Security’s surplus to pay for other government programs. Congressional Democrats, while refusing to negotiate a Social Security overhaul, have said Congress should start by paying back the trust funds.

So embracing DeMint’s proposal, its backers say, would give Republicans a powerful talking point: that they want to stop Congress from “raiding” the trust funds and return the surplus to workers.

...

For conservatives, DeMint’s proposal would have another happy side effect: it would prevent the government from using the surplus to reduce the deficit. They believe that would lead to greater pressure to reduce spending.

This seems like an awfully circuitous way to fulfill the public's request for the trust fund to be paid back. An alternative solution would be for the Republicans running the government to, um, pay the trust fund back. They could do this by addressing the fiscal crisis in the general fund that they created and have disguised with the Social Security trust fund -- the same trust fund they say (a) doesn't exist and (b) should be used to fund new private accounts. But that last graf is the real kicker, a Republican classic: The only way for the Republicans in complete control of the federal government to finally, truly, at long last address the general fund deficit is ... to make the deficit bigger.

One often gets this sense from Republican lawmakers that they're unaware of being in control of everything. Roll Call has an article today about the Social Security woes among House Republicans, who are facing worsening poll numbers on the issue. They're stuck in a paralyzed holding pattern as they wait for someone, anyone -- the president, the Senate, or maybe Bill Thomas, with his genius for making big bills palatable by transforming them into corporate-whore monstrosities -- to come to their rescue at the last minute. Read this and see if it describes a governing party worthy of any respect:

On the communications front, House Republican strategists are somewhat frustrated with the current impasse because they have no plan to sell yet, making it impossible to craft a message that might boost the party’s sagging poll numbers.

Poor guys.

--Sam Rosenfeld

SIGHTS HIGH. Today's Paul Krugman column joins me in attacking from the left the various liberal folks and groups out there rushing to appease the insurance industry in the hopes of securing support for a universal health-care program. Krugman's rationale -- that single-payer can be easily explained with a slogan like "Medicare for all" -- is different from mine, but I think also valid. Realistically speaking, in politics you always wind up getting less than you asked for in the first place, but that's all the more reason not to trim too much with your initial proposal.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE MEMO FUN. The Washington Post ran a good front-page story by Walter Pincus yesterday on some new British memos providing further evidence that the administration was determined to go to war far earlier than it admitted, and that the British government was deeply worried about the inept planning undertaken for the coming conflict. Over at the Think Progress blog they've posted the briefing papers themselves along with some key excerpts that Pincus didn't use in his piece. There's plenty more material for further news coverage even without doing any further reporting besides reading the things.

--Matthew Yglesias

WEEKEND UPDATE. Ongoing conversion to Scientology keep you away from the papers? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• John Tierney. Stadiums are for suckers, or for Baltimore.
• Nicholas Kristof. Here's a whole different way being born in Africa sucks.
• David Brooks. Nick, they wouldn't have these problems if they just prayed more.
• George Will. Since Chris Cox isn't really an objectivist, obviously he'll be a great SEC chair. Anyone who says otherwise is a tool of the rich.
• Jim Hoagland. If only the Bush administration were more honest about Iraq, then people would love this policy. Ha!
• David Broder. No, this is funnier: Bush could become more popular by adopting economic policies that aren't tilted toward the rich!

The Op-ed You Actually Need To Read

• John Nields on Deep Throat.

--Matthew Yglesias

WOMEN AND THE VALUES DEBATE. I hear EMILY's List will be adding some fuel to the fire in the married women and values debate next week when they release some very interesting data from a post-election survey about what matters most to women voters. Also, let's remember that, even though women are more broadly socially liberal than men, their liberalism is a form of tolerance, not libertinism. Overall, women are much more behaviorally conservative than men -- they have fewer sex partners, start having sex later, are less likely to do drugs, commit crimes, etc. -- and their greater tolerance is an outgrowth of an ethos of personal restraint that respects and is sympathetic toward the autonomy of others, not necessarily out of a progressive political mindset. Men, meanwhile, are much more judgemental of others, even while being personally adventurous themselves (which is how you wind up with creatures like Bill O'Reilly of falafel fame).

ABC's Primetime Live reported some interesting differences between the sexes when it comes to what are in political circles known as values questions:

Women are more conservative about sex ... . They're more apt than men to say there's too much sex on TV, 84 percent to 62 percent. They're less likely than men to condone sex before marriage, 54 to 68 percent. And 61 percent of sexually active women, compared with 50 percent of men, call themselves sexually traditional, not adventurous. ...

In the online realm, men are more than three times as likely as women to have looked at a sexually explicit Web site, and doing so spikes among men under 30. Relatively few — but 11 percent of young men — have participated in sex chat rooms. Women are much more likely to regard either of these activities as "being unfaithful."

No great surprises there, but how could all of this not have some kind of political implications in an era where the culture is a matter for political contestation? Maybe it just takes until they have kids for women's greater conservatism on values questions to overide their greater tolerance and swing them over to the GOP side. But their greater conservatism is there from the get go.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

GRAY LADY GLITCHES. Two oddities in today's New York Times. The first comes in -- or anyway, next to -- Charles McGrath's book review of The Letters of Robert Lowell. Problem is, the photo accompanying the review in the print edition isn't of Lowell, arguably America's greatest poet of the past 60 years, but of Murray Kempton, arguably America's greatest journalist of the past 60 years.

Kempton isn't mentioned in the review, and even if he was, it's the Times' practice to illustrate their reviews with photos of the authors, not a guy who appears in the sixth graph. Kempton was a friend and neighbor of New York Review of Books editor Elizabeth Hardwick, who was Lowell's second wife, but that doesn't really seem to justify the confusion.

In at least several of his columns (which appeared in various New York papers from the mid-'40s through the mid-'90s; there were thousands of them), Kempton protested that the real writers were novelists and poets. His own work was the most decisive exception to that rule (if rule it be) we journalists have had. But that doesn't seem to justify the confusion, either.

The other eyebrow-raiser in today's paper comes in the ad that appears on the op-ed page, from the Sidney Hillman Foundation, announcing its annual awards for socially conscious journalism. (Full-disclosure stuff: I was one of the judges.) The text contains a four-sentence bio of Hillman, who founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and later, with John L. Lewis, the CIO.

What's curious is the third sentence: "Dissatisfied with the leadership of his union, he joined with other reformers who split to form a new organization [the Amalgamated], which elected him president." Under normal circumstances, the fact that 95 years ago, the Amalgamated split away from its fershlugginer predecessor, whose very existence is remembered by perhaps five labor historians, would hardly be worth noting in such a telegraphic account of Hillman's life. The Hillman Foundation, however, is a project of UNITE-HERE, the apparel and hotel workers union which the Amalgamated help form, and UNITE-HERE is currently threatening to split from the AFL-CIO unless all manner of reforms are adopted and a new president elected. The sentence is a tweak, a threat and a polemic in the form of a history: Hey, John Sweeney: You don't believe we're outta here? Splitting is in our DNA.

Kempton was a recipient of a Hillman Award once (and, like Lowell, of a Pulitzer, which still doesn't seem to justify the confusion), and at one point in the '50s, pondering the inability of unions to sink roots quite deep enough in American soil, wrote, "Who remembers Sidney Hillman?" (Hillman had died in 1946.) The larger American historical illiteracy came as no surprise to Kempton either, but I doubt he anticipated that the Times culture pages would mix him up with Robert Lowell. Coulda' been worse, I suppose. They could have run a photo of, say, Walter Winchell.

-- Harold Meyerson

A LITTLE CONTEXT FOR THOSE DEAN REMARKS. Some of Howard Dean's more pointed remarks about Republicans can easily be added to the general category of "not helpful," and some of his Democratic critics' comments fall under the category of "just making it worse." Over at MyDD, though, some bloggers have been rounding up documentary context for Dean's remarks that shows Republicans dish it out with the best of them. Check the shot of a bumper sticker on a Texas SUV reading "GOP: God's Own Party" (I'm guessing the God in question is a Christian one). And then there's the woman at a Bush event in Ohio who told a reporter, "We love the President. He's a Christian and these people are evil,'' referring to Democratic protestors. Sounds like Dean's not the only one polarizing the debate, now, is he?

UPDATE: Just to clarify, it's obviously a very different thing for a rank-and-file activist to mouth off in this fashion than for a chair of a party to do so. Still, the obvious hysteria and extremism of certain elements in the Republican rank-and-file strikes me as highly under-reported, especially as compared to Dean's every casual utterance. Yes, he's Dean, and yes, he's the chair -- but the amount of blatantly hateful and hostile talk by Republicans against Democrats and liberals ought to carry some weight in all this, too. I mean, didn't the House Majority Leader just call Democrats people with "no class"? There was some very, very tough talk about Democrats at the DeLay dinner just last month, and also at CPAC earlier in the year.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MONEY WHERE THEIR MOUTHS ARE. This Jonathan Cohn column gets at an issue I've been writing about repeatedly -- the fact that if liberals are going to construct a business-friendly universal health-care plan, we need business to actually be interested in it. Cohn takes a look at the actual attitude of an actual large employer to this issue: Wal-Mart:

But, in the last two decades or so, as medical costs have skyrocketed, unions have atrophied, and the pressure to squeeze labor costs has intensified, employers have been rethinking the commitment to employee benefits. Many companies engineered (or reengineered) their workforces so that fewer employees were eligible for coverage; others ratcheted back coverage, transferring more costs to employees. All of this has made Wal-Mart a model other companies emulate--if not out of admiration, then out of perceived necessity. The impetus for the 2003 strike by California grocery workers, for example, was employer pressure to cut health benefits in order to lower prices because Wal-Mart was coming to town. ...

The catch is that gutting the employer system requires a whole different set of reforms. It is extraordinarily difficult for somebody with previous medical conditions or a relatively low income to buy private health insurance today. If employers don't provide these people access to coverage, then the only realistic way to avoid leaving them without coverage would be to construct a government-run system with some combination of regulation (so that people with serious medical conditions can find insurance coverage) and taxes (so that people with lower incomes can have their coverage subsidized). This is precisely the kind of system that the business community and their conservative allies in the Republican Party have always fought.

And they're still fighting. In the last election cycle, 80 percent of the donations from Wal-Mart's political action committee and individuals associated with the company went to Republicans, whose opposition to anything resembling universal health care is well-known. While Wal-Mart itself has not taken an official position on national health insurance, it's not hard to guess what the company would think about it. Suffice to say you won't hear Wal-Mart championing France's universal health care system. Wal-Mart is entitled to its opinion, of course. But, as long as it blocks real health care reform, then it deserves every bit of grief it's getting.

The idea that these CEOs are sitting around wishing the country could have a universal health-care system if only liberals would be reasonable and compromise a bit about its structure strikes me as a bit odd. If Wal-Mart and whomever else want to draw up some kind of business-friendly universal care system, then encouraging liberals to sit down and work something out would make a lot of sense. But for now, all Wal-Mart is doing is trying to get more people elected who want to cut Medicaid spending. It's one thing to say business leaders should support health-care reform and another thing entirely to show that they actually do. And, indeed, they may have perfectly sound reasons for their opposition. Universal health care would save Wal-Mart some money in benefits and some hassles from its antagonists, but a VAT would cut into its sales.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHEN IS A BENEFIT CUT NOT A BENEFIT CUT? The Associated Press reports on the latest twists in the campaign against Social Security:

Republican officials familiar with the presentation said it included a gradual increase in the retirement age, as well as steps to hold down the cost of benefits paid to upper-wage earners who retire in the future.

Notably omitted from Grassley's presentation was an approach that Bush has cited favorably, these officials said. It would restrain the growth in benefits for middle-income as well as upper-income wage earners, and has drawn sharp criticism from Democrats as well as some Republicans.

Grassley is apparently leaning toward dropping privatization, which is very nice of him. But if you think this plan doesn't cut benefits for middle-income people, you need to think harder. What do you think a raise in the retirement age would be? Why, yes, that would be a benefit cut. But unlike a cut in dollars per year, a higher retirement age denies beneficiaries any flexibility in how to cope with it. If your annual benefits get cut, you might work a few years past the official retirement age, bank some wage income as well as a few years of reduced benefits, and then retire late and use those savings to cushion your retirement. Alternatively, if you just can't keep working, you could retire at the regular retirement age and make ends meet with less cash. Raise the retirement age and you've got no choice but to keep working, no matter how physically taxing your job may be.

Indeed, while Bush's plan contained many deplorable aspects, it really did protect very poor workers from feeling much pain. Under Grassley's plan, the poor feel the most pain, because they tend to have shorter life expectancies and work in occupational categories where it's harder to keep on plugging away into your late sixties. My advice to Democrats would be to respond to any such initiative with a ruthless campaign of "demagoguery," which is what they call factually accurate statements about the human consequences of cutting Social Security benefits here in Washington.

Right now, Social Security is in surplus and the rest of the budget is in deficit. Grassley wants to put Social Security further into surplus, which will make it easier to run an even bigger non-Social Security deficit in the short-term. That's dumb. If you want to do something on budget policy, it should be bringing the part of the budget that's running a deficit now closer to balance.

--Matthew Yglesias

TRAIN FOOD. I don't really know what to make about this Amtrak food-service issue except that they'd better not eliminate the cheese-and-cracker snack. Later on, though, comes a useful morsel:

In 1999, in an effort to save money, Amtrak laid off its commissary workers and hired a private contractor to buy and stock the food and put it on trains. Auditors from Amtrak and the Government Accountability Office, as well as Mr. Crosbie, agreed that the contract, which expires soon, is flawed because it gives the contractor no incentive to reduce costs.

This is a pretty widespread trend in the federal government. Agencies contract out some services "in an effort to save money" and wind up not saving any money. The issue, of course, is that this is not, in fact, done to save money. Rather, the Republican Party pressures agencies to do it because it creates profits for government contractors who donate money to the Republican Party. Traditionally, Democrats have stood up against this kind of thing for the equally cynical reason that public-sector employees are very loyal supporters of the party. Motives aside, however, Democratic-style cynicism does, in fact, get you a lot closer to good government than does Republican-style cynicism. Tragically, however, the Clinton administration was seized with a fit of enthusiasm for being able to claim that it had reduced the number of federal employees (which, if you don't note that you're replacing them with subcontractors, makes it seem like you're an awsomely efficient budget cutter) and had a tendency to go along with this sort of thing.

That's not the essence of Amtrak's financial problems, but it's a pretty widespread problem across the public sector nowadays.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CURT WELDON'S DEEP THROAT. Pennsylvania Rep. Curt Weldon has a little book coming out, in which he'll reveal Iranian terrorist threats and the CIA's refusal to take them seriously. As Laura Rozen reports, nobody was more surprised to hear about it than his main source, a man Weldon calls "Ali" -- and much of Ali's information came from a long-discredited Iranian agitator and Iran-Contra operative.

--Jeffrey Dubner

PEACE IN OUR TIME. Via the Coalition for Darfur, I see that Condoleezza Rice chimed in on Darfur yesterday:

But when you think about the fact that we've also managed to resolve a 25-year civil war in Sudan, this is a tremendous step forward. It provides now a political framework in which we believe Darfur and eastern Sudan might also be soluble.

Rice’s comments here reflect a driving belief behind the Bush administration’s second-term Sudan policy: that the north-south accord -- known as the Comprehensive Peace Agreement -- is key to unlocking a peace deal in Darfur. The thinking is that when leaders from other restive provinces see the South Sudanese rebel leader John Garang enter Khartoum as part of the new National Unity Government, they may be enticed to join peace talks. Similarly, now that Garang, a Grinnell College graduate turned Sudan People's Liberation Army leader, is an influence inside the government, he may be able to steer Khartoum away from its belligerent posture towards Darfur.

But the problem here is that while the north-south negotiations were at their height, so too was Khartoum’s counterinsurgency-by-genocide policy in Darfur. As Foggy Bottom scrambled to save the north-south accords (which were signed this January), Khartoum killed and displaced more than 2 million people in Sudan’s western region. A "tremendous step forward" this was not.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

HOW MUCH DOES TRADE MATTER? Disputes about trade agreements suck up an awful lot of oxygen in left-of-center circles, as you can see in this exchange in the Prospect's virtual letters section. It's not clear to me, however, that it's always worth the energy. Today in the blogosphere, Max Sawicky makes the case against the liberal free traders, and Brad DeLong argues for the defense that, among other things, "free trade is a very important pie-growing mechanism."

Trade enthusiast Daniel Drezner wrote a post the other day linking to a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) making the case that, to boost economic growth, OECD member nations ought to embark on a process of trade liberalization and regulatory reform. The authors are, naturally, very excited about the awesome benefits to be acquired through doing what they recommend, but when you get down to the numbers you're talking pretty modest stuff. The authors claim that if we did everything they want, per capita income in the United States would increase by between 1 percent and 2.5 percent. Right now, per capita GDP is $40,100, so we could boost that to something in the $40,500 to $41,100 range.

That's not nothing, but it's not a huge amount either. What's more, as Drezner says, "the bulk of the gains come from regulatory reforms" -- not from changes in trade policy. Nor is the number of job losses attributable to trade especially high: about 225,000 per year (that's gross, there are also new jobs created), of which half get re-employed quickly in a population of almost 300 million people. There's a tendency for companies to portray business failures, mass layoffs, or other cutbacks as trade-related whether or not they are because people don't like to take personal responsibility for problems or the infliction of pain.

Even trade has less to do with trade agreements than one might think. I found it instructive to talk a bit with a propagandist from the Virginia Port Authority a few months ago, who kept emphasizing the point that better shipping technology (bigger boats, roboticized cranes, etc.) has been a major driver of increased exchange of goods. The rise of offshore phone centers and the outsourcing of back-office tasks to India has more to do with plummeting data transfer costs thanks to technological improvements than to trade agreements.

Now that doesn't mean disputes about CAFTA and so forth are trivial -- this stuff still matters. But the issue doesn't strike me as worthy of the quasi-religious disputes it tends to engender.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MCSUED. You may think you've seen all the anti-McDonald's documentaries you need to see, but McLibel is worth trading in your Big Mac for a bucket of popcorn, writes Noy Thrupkaew. Ten years in the making, McLibel has all the potency of Super Size Me and none of the self-importance.

--Jeffrey Dubner

STRANGE CHIPS. When I read that "Canadian Court Chips Away at National Health Care" I started getting pretty nervous and thanked my lucky stars that in totalitarian Canada the parliament can overrule judicial review of legislation if it wants to. Reading the article, though, I wouldn't really call this much of a "chip." What they did was overturn a Québec law banning private-sector health insurance, which isn't really "an acute blow to the publicly financed national health care system." Lots of countries have a publicly financed national health-care system and also allow individuals to purchase private insurance to supplement the universal benefit. It's like how everyone gets a Social Security check, but you're not prohibited from saving money for your own retirement.

Near as I can tell, there isn't a real empirical case for private-insurance bans as somehow conducive to public health. Instead, it stems from a quasi-religious opposition to "a two-tier health care system" as Prime Minister Paul Martin put it. As the Times notes, two tiers work fine for Germany, France, and Switzerland (and, I think, Australia); they're a good way of ensuring, among other things, that market incentives continue to exist at the frontiers of medical innovation while allowing everyone access to basic treatments and preventative care.

--Matthew Yglesias

POT, KETTLE, BLACK. K-Lo reprints what seems to be an email from John Cornyn's office on judicial nominees. Saith the senator:

Sen. Schumer just lamented the “rubber stamp” approach to the President’s judicial nominees. He brought out his chart showing the overwhelming support by Republicans on judicial nominees. He said that “what I’m concerned about is a leader-led rubber stamp.” This is a curious complaint from a Senator who never voted against a single Clinton nominee.

He’s not alone, neither did the other Democrat Senators regularly heard speaking out on this issue.

For example, Sens. Kennedy, Feinstein, Murray, Biden, Durbin, Leahy, Dorgan and Dodd never voted against any Carter, Clinton (or in Sen. Kennedy’s case, Johnson or Kennedy) judicial nominees.

Of course, this is all just to obscure the fact that the entire Republican caucus has cast a total of two votes against George W. Bush's nominees: Lincoln Chafee's vote last week against Priscilla Owen, and Trent Lott's vote against Roger Gregory, a Bill Clinton nominee who Bush renominated as a show of pre–September 11 good will and who was supported by John Warner and George Allen. (And Lott's vote, it would seem, was just to resist the integration of the Fourth Circuit, which had never seen an African American judge; Republicans blocked four separate African American nominees during Clinton's presidency.)

So in the whole of the Bush administration, there have been two Republican votes against his 200-plus nominees. In his first term, there was just one nay vote cast, and a petty one at that. Scanning the roll from the 103rd Congress you can find out that six Democrats voted against just one of Clinton's nominees, H. Lee Sarokin, and there was also a Democratic vote against Rosemary Barkett -- meaning that in one session alone, Democrats more than tripled the number of nays Republicans have cast in the past four and a half years.

But hey, when has John Cornyn ever let facts get in his way?

--Jeffrey Dubner

WILDLIFE REFUGE THREATENED BY OIL DRILLING. Moving Ideas, a project of The American Prospect, just posted Oil Drilling in the Arctic: Wildlife Refuge at Risk, which explains the importance of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and details recent congressional attempts to open the preserve to oil drilling. The report provides ways for activists to get involved and links to other organizations in the fight.

ANWR, one of the last wilderness regions in the country, is home to animals such as polar bears, caribou, and musk oxen. Drilling would leave wildlife vulnerable to oil spills and habitat destruction. The Exxon Valdez disaster demonstrated how lethal an oil-related accident can be for the environment.

The oil in the refuge is only enough to supply the United States for a few months, so the drilling is just a temporary fix for our energy problems. To really wean the country off of foreign oil, environmental groups say, Congress should focus on long-term solutions like researching alternative energy sources and mandating tighter fuel-efficiency standards.

Learn more and take action today.

--Ben Milder, Moving Ideas

THE NON-REFUSAL REFUSAL. The breathless reaction to George W. Bush's Guantanamo comments yesterday is really pretty amusing. Here's what Bush said:

[Neil] CAVUTO: But now President Carter has said, sir, shut it down. Joe Biden said shut it down. Do you think it should be shut down?

BUSH: Well, you know, we're exploring all alternatives as to how best to do the main objective, which is to protect America. What we don't want to do is let somebody out that comes back and harms us. And so we're looking at all alternatives and have been.

It takes some pretty wishful thinking to turn this into the headline, "Bush considers closing Guantanamo prison." Headlines could just as easily read, "Bush dodges Guantanamo question." He said nothing of any specificity whatsoever, as could only have been expected. Sure, one can ignore the clear Bush administration policy of never reversing a policy (and certainly not a policy that Democrats have criticized!) and project onto the president a willingness to thoughtfully analyze key components of the war on terror. And that's clearly the spin he wanted -- but that doesn't mean it bears any resemblance to what he's actually doing. It just means he's not willing to tell the public his position or try to convince anyone he's right.

--Jeffrey Dubner

CHICKENS COME HOME. The all-volunteer force takes another blow:

For the fourth straight month, the Army missed its recruiting target. In May, it fell short by 1,700 recruits, off by 25 percent. And that's even after the Army lowered the target for the month. If the Army had stuck to its original goal of 8,000 recruits for May, it would have missed the mark by 38 percent.

At the same time, the Army National Guard again missed its target by 20 percent.

And without releasing figures, Marine Corps officials say for the first time in 10 years, the Marines missed their goal five months in a row.

The Army continues to fall further behind in recruiting, even though it's offering record incentives for signing up. New recruits can get up to a $20,000 signing bonus.

The military brass, rather heroically, is sticking to the line that economic growth is the cause and not, say, the war in Iraq. Derek Chollet reports that according to his sources the problem "will only get worse, especially if the situation in Iraq does not improve." As Justin Logan notes, this trend not only casts doubt on the administration's handling of America's long-term security, it also calls into question the feasibility of some of the "bigger Army" schemes we're increasingly seeing the Democratic security establishment push.

I was reading the Center for American Progress' excellent new Integrated Power national-security strategy which does, like most stuff you hear coming from the mainstream left nowadays, call for the addition of dedicated post-conflict reconstruction troops as well as significantly more special-operations forces. These are both good ideas on the merits. My guess is that you could square the manpower circle by cutting authorized personnel levels for the Air Force and Navy, both of which still employ an awful lot of people for the purpose of waging full-scale nuclear war against the Soviet Union. The really inside-baseball problem here is that, by tradition, you can't really reallocate resources from one service to another, even though I think it's pretty clear that we've entered a historical moment where most of the burdens are falling on the Army and the Marines. Meanwhile, the Navy seems to have launched an insurgent media campaign aimed at convincing people we need to gear up to fight China with lots and lots of boats when we probably need to be doing the reverse.

--Matthew Yglesias

CONSUMMATION. With Janice Rogers Brown's confirmation yesterday and Bill Pryor's imminent confirmation, all the positive, concrete parts of the filibuster compromise are done. We still won't know whether the deal was an overall winner until George W. Bush has appointed a Supreme Court justice or two, but I think the fact that Brown passed through with ayes from every Republican senator (Lincoln Chafee included) and Ben Nelson shows just how much was lost in hopes of a moderate-led miracle on the Supreme Court.

The Republican moderates, pretenses of statesmanship notwithstanding, collectively possess about a thimbleful of political capital. They squandered all of it to accomplish the rather insignificant act of making the confirmations of William Myers and Henry Saad slightly less likely. Now they're under tremendous pressure to prove that they're still committed, reliable Republicans, and they can't afford to criticize Brown or Pryor -- or, it would seem, Brett Kavanaugh or Terrence Boyle or any of the other wingers who are about to enter the stage. Nominees who moderate Republicans might previously have tried to quietly kill are now more likely to squeeze through committee and get floor votes. And moderate Republicans who might have vaguely considered pulling a George Voinovich will hold their tongues, as seen by yesterday's vote.

Sure, this might be worth it if there were some secret side agreement to draft Ed Prado. But that doesn't seem to have been the case. Like we've said before, all that really happened was that the Republican "moderates" obligated themselves to maintain the radical position that all of these nominees are acceptable, and the Democrats let them keep their respectability in doing so. A sad, sad outcome.

--Jeffrey Dubner

IS IT REALLY MORE FEASIBLE? I think it's excellent that Ezekiel Emanuel's been doing some blogging over on The Washington Monthly's website to offer further thoughts on the Universal Health Vouchers plan I criticized earlier this week. Kevin Drum made the clearest argument on the merits for UHVs over a single-payer system, but I'm not really convinced. As Brad Plumer's noodling on the subject shows, it really all comes down to the contention that government regulators can do a really, really good job of assessing how much bigger the vouchers given to older or sicker people should be than those that go to younger or healthier ones.

That strikes me as a kind of objectionable handwave, and my guess is that in practice there'd be all kinds of problems. But as Emanuel keeps urging, it would still be a big improvement over what we've got now, and my preferred alternative is politically infeasible at the moment. But what I'd like to know is why he thinks his plan is more feasible. Like all proponents of mixed approaches to universal health care, he asserts that various sorts of big businesses would find this approach congenial. But many have gone down that road before and met with tragedy.

To me, that's the big test for compromises -- show me the K Street enthusiasm! Any time a few large employers and a group of big insurance companies want to throw their political muscle behind something like UHVs, I think liberals would have to be crazy not to take the deal, and that's something we should all be clear about. But until this actually happens, I don't think it makes sense for politicians, policy wonks, writers, or anyone else to start preemptively surrending anything. If this plan is so business-friendly, where's the business support?

--Matthew Yglesias

A DEMOGRAPHIC CORRECTION. A couple of days ago I alleged that there were more people in the top quintile of households than in the bottom quintile. As reader B.B. points out, that's not true. Indeed, as you can see on this chart, the reverse is true. About 24.6 percent of the population resides in a top-quintile household, while just 14.3 percent resides in a bottom-quintile one. There's a strict progression as you move up the chain, with each quintile containing more people than the poorer ones and fewer than the richer ones.

Apologies for the error.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM. I still think, with all due respect to both Matt and the community of Greenwich Village cultural creatives in which we were both raised, that Matt's missing the point when he writes:

The fact that a lot of voters think something is a problem doesn't make it a problem. People have all sorts of wacky ideas. In practice, politicians must respect the public's right and desire to believe wacky things, but journalists ought, I think, to try and point out the reality of the situation.

The issue is not whether or not violent video games -- or TV shows, or movies -- have the same kind of impact on youth violence that the crack epidemic did. Just because something doesn't end in murder or assault or other significant physical consequences doesn't mean it can't be a real problem. Perceived cultural problems may not be considered real problems within the materialist framework that still rules within liberal circles, but they are nonetheless powerfully important within the broader framework of how people live their lives. The real question at issue is not, "what are the factually documented consequences of X cultural product?," but, "is this really how we want to live?" The first is an empirical question; the second is one of subjective judgement and values.

A lot of the cultural problems parents worry about are just that -- they are problems of culture. The whole point of having politicians talk about such issues is that culture is the product of human conversation and opinion and thought. It is the expression of our values. Public discussion is how people decide what their social norms are and who they are as a people, and how they reassert their values against those of the corporate culture factories. Just having a conversation about something in public is one way of changing cultural norms, and connecting with people who have concerns about society that are not simply material ones.

Indeed, when it comes to cultural issues, the simple act of acknowledging the concerns and taking people's assessments of the problem seriously can help to address whatever the problem is perceived to be. That may look like lip service from within a framework that assumes every problem must meet a legislative reply, but it's actually pretty significant. It's using the power of the political bully pulpit to effect social change and grant recognition; handled properly, it can actually allow politicians to avoid having to get the formal law involved. I'd wager that a number of our current social problems are problems of what Jonathan Rauch has called "hidden law," and have to be addressed on those terms -- through conversations and the other informal systems that govern most of our day-to-day behavior -- rather than solely, or even mainly, through new laws.

And with that, I'm happy to let the matter drop again for a while.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE TAIPEI 34. Justin Logan flags an article in The Hill about junkets taken by a bipartisan group of 34 members of Congress that seem to have essentially been paid for by the government of Taiwan. I'm not a big enthusiast for good-government issues, so it's important to emphasize that there's something real at stake here and not just some ethics rules.

It's no secret that America's foreign policy is often shaped by interest-group lobbies, and that this shaping is usually for the worse. It's crucial to understand that the stakes on Taiwan policy are far, far, far higher than the stakes on Cuba policy or even on Israel policy. The sort of policies being urged on the United States by Taipei have the consequence of marginally increasing the odds that the United States will, at some point, be engaged in armed conflict with the People's Republic of China. As we saw with Robert Kaplan's recent cover story for The Atlantic, some people are mighty nonchalant about this prospect and see it mostly as an opportunity to convince the taxpayer to shell out for a bigger navy. Everybody -- from magazine editors to junket-loving congressmen to Democrats looking to China as a source of cheap, imported Bush-bashing to even defense contractors -- needs to think much harder about this issue.

A U.S.-Chinese war is, obviously, an unlikely prospect. But it would be really, really, really bad. Much worse than anything else one can imagine happening due to bad policy. Much worse, even, than today's bete noir of nuclear terrorism. Honest disagreement on policy toward China and Taiwan is one thing. Important issues lead to important disagreements. But if you need to find a bunch of lobbyists to sell out to, please find some other issue. I hear the corn subsidy people pay well.

--Matthew Yglesias

GEORGE AND TONY. Check out the acid prose in this Washington Post piece on the latest George W. Bush–Tony Blair appearance, which demonstrated once again the degree to which this relationship mirrors the patterns of an abusive marriage. Two of the many issues on which the president has been screwing Blair recently are aid to Africa and global warming. On the former, read this sharp and pithy statement from Nancy Pelosi’s office on the shell-game Bush is running. On the latter, read the sadly unsurprising but still explosive scoop in The New York Times today.

--Sam Rosenfeld

ONCE MORE! Okay, I sort of don't want to get back into the "should Democrats attack popular culture to gain votes" debate, but allow me to briefly restate. There are three questions here that I think should be kept separate:

• Is there an actual problem with sex and/or violence in the popular culture that can be effectively addressed by having politicians complain about it?
• Would Democratic politicians do better on Election Day if they did more complaining?
• Is it necessary for Democrats to do more complaining in order to win elections?

My answers to those questions are "no," "yes," and "no." I'm never quite sure what the people I'm disagreeing with are trying to say on these issues. The fact that a lot of voters think something is a problem doesn't make it a problem. People have all sorts of wacky ideas. In practice, politicians must respect the public's right and desire to believe wacky things, but journalists ought, I think, to try and point out the reality of the situation. I don't flatter myself so much as to think that Tapped plays a crucial role in shaping popular perceptions of the Democratic Party, but if Hillary Clinton (or anyone else) wants to sell herself to Middle America as the kind of Democrat who'll crack down on cultural libertinism, then getting stridently attacked for it by the likes of me are only going to help her gain credibility.

That's the whole point of these kind of stunts. The Sister Souljah gambit wouldn't have worked if people hadn't criticized Bill Clinton from the left for it.

--Matthew Yglesias

IT'S GOOD TO KNOW THE LANGUAGE. It's certainly nice to see the CIA reevaluating security policies that seem to have rendered most Americans with Arabic language skills ineligible for work in the intelligence community. Obviously, one needs to be careful with who gets hired for these jobs, but there's no reason to believe each and every person with family living abroad is a security risk. As a heuristic, that kind of thing could be useful if we were talking about a situation in which there were tons and tons of Americans who spoke Arabic, but that's obviously not the case. Expending additional resources on more individuating security checks in order to expand the applicant pool seems like a very good idea.

This also raises the question of why, three and a half years after September 11, we still haven't seen serious investments in language training in this country. Back during the Cold War the government spent a lot of money on building up America's base of knowledge about Russia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. Near as I can tell the reason we haven't taken similar action to ensure people know Middle Eastern and Central Asian languages and history is that the conservative movement has developed a congenital distaste for universities and the people who work there and don't want to give them any more money. A combination of that and a belief (rather silly, if you think about it) that our problems will mysteriously vanish in the near future as Iraq turns the next corner are stopping us from making real progress.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE PARENT GAP. Another big gap in voting patterns is the so-called "parent gap," which is actually a marriage and parenthood gap, as single moms tend to be strongly Democratic. Progressive Policy Institute fellow and National Marriage Project co-director Barbara Dafoe Whitehead writes about it in the latest issue of the DLC's magazine, Blueprint, which got some comment when it came out in April but seems worth renewed discussion:

[M]arried parents of young children are slipping away from the Democratic Party. That's 28 percent of the electorate -- 33.6 million voters in 2004. The last two presidential elections revealed a dramatic and growing "parent gap." Al Gore lost married parents by 15 percentage points. John Kerry widened the gap, losing them by a whopping 19 points -- 59-40. And it could get worse.

Republicans have been targeting married parents with a conservative populism that depicts Democrats as amoral, secularizing elitists who are anti-God, anti-America, anti-family, and anti-heartland values. When it comes to the popular culture, the GOP has convinced parents that Democrats are more on the side of MTV than the PTA. Astonishingly, the Democratic response has been to sit back and take it, rather than to stage a counterattack.

Like white women, married parents (of all races and ethnicities) are a demographic category the Democrats have carried in the recent past. Bill Clinton won them in 1996, though only narrowly, after having lost them in 1992, also narrowly. Whitehead dubs them "life stage conservatives," and that sounds about right.

The conservatism of the married is another reason Democratic-voting younger cohorts evolve into to more conservative-voting ones in their 30s and 40s. Indeed, in addition to the impact of child-rearing on worldview, I also wonder what the gender gap in political affiliation means over the course of people's lives, since, statistically speaking, a lot of Democratic women must wind up dating and marrying Republican men. Their back and forth about politics over a lifetime has got to have some kind of impact.

Contra Howard Dean, if you're a married white woman in this country, a Republican is more likely to be your husband than a perceived "evil"-doer. That may sound like a provocative claim, but think about it -- if the majority of whites marry other whites (and they do), and the majority of white male voters vote Republican, and the married ones are even more conservative than the unmarried ones, well, that means your average married American white woman is probably married to a Republican, right? Which means that there are probably a lot of homes where our present political debates run more along the lines of a family feud than a pitched battle between fixed and geographically distant camps. And that the arguments that can compel single people to the polls may look a little different inside a political mileau that is more mixed.

But back to Whitehead:

"[L]ife stage conservatism" is rooted in the parental responsibility to teach children right from wrong. This sense of responsibility might explain the response of married parents to a now-famous question in the 2004 exit polls. Asked to name the one issue that mattered the most in their presidential voting decision, 27 percent of married parents chose "moral values" -- as opposed to 20 percent of the rest of the electorate.

Again, this seems intuitively true -- and should be obvious to those with kids. One thing that has changed on both sides of the aisle in recent years is that Congress is increasingly staffed by single people -- it was at 62 percent single on the Senate side by 2001, according to the Congressional Management Foundation -- compared to 57 percent in 1991 -- which means an increasing portion of the people setting national policies are not only childless but unmarried. My observation, based on living in this city for eight years, is that the Democrats get married a bit later than the Republicans, as well -- though that's a purely anecdotal observation -- and that very few prominent bloggers have kids, or, if under the age of 30, wives. That means that a lot of the conversation about families, on both sides of the aisle, is, for many of its most active participants, largely an academic question.

Why can't the Democratic Party bid for the votes of people engaged in the work of reproducing society -- as opposed to reinventing it -- and who are worried about how to do that? And how would or should the Dems do that? One sure way not to go about reaching out to married parents is to dismiss their concerns. And that means the folks at magazines like this one, too, need to consider their role in promoting an image of liberalism as utterly inconsiderate of their moral concerns. Tapped, in particular, went in for a lot of criticizing of Hillary Clinton when she spoke out on violent video games, which I found saddening. Not because I don't think there were valid and clever points to be made, but because it seemed so self-destructive for avowed liberals to adopt a kind of sophisticated adolescent libertarianism as their stance toward the world, and to cast political figures in the role of moralizing parents whose constraints must be cast aside.

The people who need to be -- and can be -- reached on these issues are neither adolescent nor libertarian, and I suspect that even the genuine adolescents who pull the levels for the Democrats -- the young women I wrote of yesterday -- will tell you if you ask them that there's some moralizing from the Democratic bully pulpits that could make their lives better, too. People don't always want smart policy proposals in response to their concerns, either. Or, at least, they'll have trouble hearing and believing such unless they first feel represented and understood. The "politics of recognition" extends to middle-class families, too.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

YOUNG WOMEN IN '04. Did the youth vote and the single female vote -- both of which boomed on the Democratic side in '04 -- overlap? The specific data on who exactly who voted last year isn't in yet, unfortunately, but Hans Riemer, Washington director of Rock the Vote says that he suspects much of the increase in youth participation in election '04 came from increased turnout by young women. All the group's surveys during the election season showed women having greater intensity on the issues they cared about, he says, and 70 percent of Rock the Vote's volunteers in the last cycle were women. Further, when 120,000 members responded to a post-election survey sent to the group's email list of 1.4 million people, 65 percent were female -- "which would make us the largest young women's political organization in the world," says Riemer.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

SOFTBALL. Chris Matthews had 11 of the Senate's Gang of 14 as guests on Hardball yesterday, and it was about as nauseating as one might expect. (Here's the transcript.) In fairness, virtually none of the senators were as egregious in their comments as Matthews was in his questions, which read like a parody of the press's drooling fetishization of compromise and bipartisanship. Some of them, like Mary Landrieu and John Warner, actually acquitted themselves quite well. (Robert Byrd, too, was passionate and eloquent in laying out a defense of the filibuster with which I disagree substantively.) But one of Ken Salazar's responses illustrates nicely the problem with the whole "let's stop carping and get down to the people's business" rhetoric that these Democrats use so often:

MATTHEWS: I want each of you to tell me what you’re saying to your constituents about what you want to get done now that the Senate has reached back into practicality and getting back to business.

Senator Salazar, what’s the most important thing to get done, now that you’re working together?

SALAZAR: The kinds of issues that every family in my state thinks about everyday when they get out of bed. They think about whether or not they’re going to have health insurance and whether they’re going to be able to afford it, the rising costs of gas to fill up the minivan, what we do with energy, what we do with transportation. It’s those issues that we ought to be doing in our nation’s council that affect all of our people that I hope our Senate can now get back and focus on those issues that affect American everyday.

This is very nice. The problem is that when the Republican Congress and Republican president stop the brinksmanship on something like the judical fight and decide to "get back to work," they're obviously not going to be addressing people's health care needs and they're not going to be producing serious energy legislation -- and Salazar knows that. So why perpetuate the notion that the regular order of business in this Congress, when extremists on both sides aren't gumming things up, is to serve Americans' interests in practical and obvious ways? You can be a bona fide moderate and still make it unequivocally clear that the Republicans in power aren't serving the people's business and your party would do things differently in the majority.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHITE MEN AND THE DEMS -- JUST HOW BAD IS IT? In 1996, according to a study cited by Anna Greenberg, only 16 percent of white male voters between 18 and 35 identified as Democrats. For younger white women, the Democratic ID was 32 percent. Indeed, a partial answer to my question about how it is that young voters often favor Democrats (52 percent for Bill Clinton in '92, and 54 percent for John Kerry in '04) but then grow up into a demographic that votes Republican (53 percent for George W. Bush in '04) is, apparently, the gender gap.

As in so much, women mature more rapidly than men and youth cohorts at the polls tend to be disproportionately female. Young women have had higher rates of voter registration and voter turnout in recent years than have young men, and the gap between young women voting and young men voting is significant -- 46 percent of white women between the ages of 18 and 24 turned out to vote in 2000, but only 41 of white men. As we know, young women tend to be, disproportionately, very low earners, and also single -- all of which means that they trend liberal. So, again, it's hard to tease out just how much of the "class" stuff getting measured is really age, or gender, or race, or marital status' documented simultaneous impact on "household income" and values questions. Similarly, it seems important to know what high voter turnout among young people signals narratively. There are always, in older liberal circles, hopes for the "valiant young men standing up against aged warmongers" storyline, but the reality seems a lot more like "dutiful young women voting their social liberalism."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

NOW WE'RE ANGRY? I appreciate the point that the Bush administration's giveaways to hyper-wealthy people racking in over a million bucks a year is aggravating, but The New York Times' whine about the tribulations of the merely rich goes too far:

Which brings us back to the super wealthy and the merely rich. The divide between rich and poor is unfortunately an old story, but income-class warfare among the top 20 percent of the scale is a newer phenomenon. One cause is that the further up the scale one goes, the more of one's income comes from investments, which under the Bush tax cuts enjoy about the lowest rates in the tax code. But many families making between $100,000 and $200,000 are not exactly on easy street. They don't face choices anywhere near as stark as those encountered further down the income ladder, but they face serious tradeoffs not experienced by the uppermost crust, particularly when hit with the triple whammy of college for the children, care for aging parents and preparing for their own retirement.

There is something deeply wrong about a system that calls into question a comfortable retirement or a top-notch education for people who have broken into the top 20 percent of income earners. It starts to seem politically explosive when you consider that in a decade, those making between $100,000 and $200,000 will pay about five to nine percentage points more of their income in federal taxes than those making more than $1 million, assuming the Bush tax cuts are made permanent.

I appreciate that lots of people earning $100,000 a year and supporting children feel like they have problems. Still, folks in this situation need to realize that 86.2 percent of families make less money than they do (see this pdf). Since poor households tend to have more people in them than do wealthy ones, that probably understates how well off you are if you make $100,000 a year. If you're at the bottom of the Times' scale, you're making something like 2.4 times what the median family earns. At 200 grand a year you're making almost five times the typical family. I've been advised by a political consultant who seemed to know what he was talking about that you can't refer to people making $100,000 to $200,000 a year as "rich." Well, fine. Call it the "upper middle class" if you like, and reserve "rich" for the top 5 percent. Any way you slice it, the problems faced by people in this category, though no doubt subjectively trying, are way less pressing than those of the typical family pulling down $40,000 or of the 13 percent of the population trying to make it on less than $25,000 a year.

(And, yes, cost of living varies. Median income in the Northeast is $45,716. Median income for people in metro areas but outside the inner city is $50,697. If you're making $150,000 a year you're still rich).

Now what's the point of all this? Well, the point is that while the Times is correct to say that it's unfair and a bit absurd for someone making $200,000 to pay a higher share of his income in taxes than does a person making $2 million a year, we're going to go quite far awry as a country if we make this case to people in a way that implies we need tax cuts for those making $100,000 or $200,000 a year. It's simply not possible to fund a robust liberal agenda purely by taxing the top 1 percent. The top 10 percent and, yes, the top 15 percent are going to need to pay, too. We can -- and should -- help the upper middle class by fixing the health-care system and continuing to guarantee a secure retirement. But there's only so much self-pity on the part of the nearly-elite that liberals can afford to indulge.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHY NEGOTIATE WITH OURSELVES? In the new Washington Monthly, Ezekiel Emanuel and Victor Fuchs make the case for a system of universal health-care vouchers (UHVs). Why not just good-old single-payer health care as seen in the wildly successful French and Canadian systems? Well:

Yet single-payer is no more politically feasible today than it was when President Clinton rejected it as a model for reform. Sure, a compelling case can be made that the Canadian or French system serves those countries' citizens better than the American system does ours. But an equally compelling case can be made that we'd be better off with an extra dollar-per-gallon tax on gasoline. These are, in the end, liberal sugarplum visions.

I agree. My ideal health-care system is infeasible as a political project. But why should we think UHVs are any more feasible?

The turnaround of the attitude of business towards reform is one of the biggest changes from 1994 and the first health-care fight. Large businesses opposed Clintoncare on the theory that managed care would keep their expenses in check. For the short term, it was a good bet. Managed care did restrain health-care costs until 1999. Since 2000, health-care costs have risen dramatically, breaking the backs of companies, and there are no more savings to wring out of the current system. In 2003, business health-care spending rose 12 percent, the fifth consecutive year of double digit rates of inflation. General Motors and Ford both had their debt rating slashed to junk status this May in large part because of their pension and health-care liabilities (Ford's liability in 2004 reached $12.3 billion or 70 percent of its market capitalization). Nearly half of 1,400 chief financial officers surveyed by Robert Half Management Resources said they expected health care to account for the biggest increase in their cost of doing business over the next year. Removing these costs from their balance sheets and restoring a measure of predictability to wage and benefit costs would be irresistible to businesses. While many CFOs might prefer to be relieved of the responsibility for health care altogether without any tax at all, most recognize that such a retreat (to the 1920s) is unlikely to happen.

Large insurance companies—whose opposition presented a significant stumbling block to Clintoncare—should support a UHV plan because it preserves the role of private insurers and brings 45 million new paying customers into the industry. They should be joined on the side of reform by doctors, who stand to benefit financially from reduced administrative costs associated with consolidation of the industry and from the end of charity care for uninsured patients, and who did, after all, enter their profession in order to care for the sick, not just wealthy sick people. Governors and state legislators would put their muscle behind the plan because it relieves them of the Medicaid costs.

Well, here's the thing. Maybe those groups would back UHVs or maybe they wouldn't. Lots of these groups ought to support a France/Canada-style system -- it would benefit them -- but they do not, in fact, support one. Some of these groups should have supported Bill Clinton's plan, but they did not, in fact, support it. The lesson to be learned, I think, is that we shouldn't negotiate with ourselves about this stuff. Single-payer is a perfectly good idea. UHVs have, I think, some non-obvious problems similar to the ones with self-insurance mandates and other efforts at a mixed system that eliminates the employer role. Nevertheless, it'd be a big improvement over the status quo. So any time the National Association of Manufacturers or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or America's Health Insurance Plans or any of the other major business interests say they think America should move to UHVs or some similar plan and they're ready to deliver Republican votes for it, I'll say "great!"

That's when the time will come to sit down at the table, start haggling over details, pass a bill, and then start the never-ending debate that will ensue over how to modify the system over the years. But until then, it's silly for liberals to engage in a guessing game over what business interests will accept. Progressives should always be willing to compromise in order to make improvements to American life. But it takes two to compromise. There's no sense in having people run around trying to make offers and strike deals with folks who don't want to bargain. We have an idea on the table -- a good one. Nobody thinks the status quo is defensible or sustainable. So the interests who don't like our idea should come up with one of their own. These kinds of articles should be coming from the right, not from the left.

--Matthew Yglesias

RACE MATTERS, BUT SECURITY AND GENDER MATTER TOO. Since my colleague Matt Yglesias is all up in arms about the problems the Democratic Party has with winning white people, it's probably worth recalling just who's been voting for the Democratic Party for the past 40 years. The Dems have been losing white male voters for four decades now. That's not news, Third Way report notwithstanding, and that's unlikely to change any time soon.

Furthermore, it's always tough to get a clear sense of the electorate when considering people unifactorally, whether by race, income, or education level. There's too much that goes into people's decision-making, and sometimes when you're measuring one thing it turns out you're really measuring something else. For example, men -- especially white men -- tend to earn more, and so the the Republican-voting, middle-class and upper-middle-class families of which we've been speaking tend to have more white men in them, period, than do other sorts of households. Married families also vote more conservatively, and white men have a higher marriage rate -- and much higher re-marriage rate -- than do African Americans. So do white male voting patterns stem from their racial/cultural demographic? Or their marriage status? Is it their gender? Or their geographic locale? Or some mix of the above?

Conversely, the very low income threshold at which white voters favored Republicans in 2004 was partly a reflection of the fact that low-earning, white, working-class women cast their lot with Bush this time around, giving George W. Bush a victory with white women as well as men. But, according to focus groups conducted by Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, one of their main issues was security, not -- as Matt suggested -- anything race-specific. So what can, from one angle, look like working-class whites having some kind of racialized rationale for avoiding the Dems was really, in fact, lower-income white women being scared about security issues and not trusting John Kerry in 2004 to keep them safe.

Unlike white men, white women don't always favor the Republican in presidential contests. Bill Clinton won white women in 1996, for example, and white women have flickered back and forth in their support for Democratic presidential nominees since the late 1960s. Further mixing things up is the fact that southern white women have often been more Democratic than their northern counterparts, even as their husbands, boyfriends, and brothers became staunch Republicans.

Though racial questions launched the white flight from the Democratic Party in the 1960s, it has since been rather conclusively demonstrated that security, morality, and disputes over the proper role of government are what have kept whites -- especially white men -- from returning to the Dems. If you take a look at Anna Greenberg's insightful 2000 paper "Why Men Leave: Gender and Partisanship in the 1990s," what you see is that while white men left the Democratic Party in droves between 1964 and 1968 because of racial issues, they stayed away in the 1970s and 1980s because of genuine changes in the Democratic Party's stances on defense spending, the role of the military, and the Vietnam War. They stayed away because they believed in an ethos of self-sufficiency and independence at odds with the Democratic Party's post-Great Society social welfare, regulatory, and tax policies.

White women grew cold to the Democratic Party in the 1960s, thanks to the same racial dynamics that drove men away -- but then they warmed up again by the 1980s, because as less economically secure individuals they favor a government that takes a stronger role and works to protect the poor and vulnerable, as well as reign in the excesses of the market through regulation. Women are much more strongly environmentalist than men, as well, and more skeptical of military entanglements and defense build-ups.

The reason everyone is now so concerned about the decline in Latino support for the Democrats in 2004 -- and among foreign-born Hispanics, support for the Democratic nominee dropped a stunning 30 points between 1996 and 2004, according to research conducted by Bendixen and Associates for NDN -- is that the Democratic electoral coalition in existence since the mid-1960s has relied on very high margins in small populations to make up for roughly split support among white women and the consistent loss of white male voters. If the Democrats cannot sustain their current high margins -- and not just margins of a few points -- among minority voters, their entire coalition falls apart.

Critically, the Democratic Party's southern white male leaders -- the ones with the historically proven best shot at winning the presidency -- depend on this electoral dynamic more than any other group. John Edwards lost white voters in North Carolina in his 1998 Senate race, but won election nonetheless because of unusually high turnout among among African Americans outraged by the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Edwards' margin of victory came from blacks. And what's one of the fastest-growing population groups throughout the South? Latinos. Democrats have long hoped that Latinos would, as they grew as a political force, become a pillar of Democratic support like African Americans. But as the last election showed, that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

SELLING WASHINGTON. For those who haven’t read it yet, Elizabeth Drew’s new article in the New York Review of Books on the Republicans’ K Street Project is really worth a look. The basic point of the article won’t surprise anyone, and is summed up well by an associate of Drew’s who works with lobbyists and reports that "There are no restraints now; business groups and lobbyists are going crazy -- they're in every room on Capitol Hill writing the legislation. You can't move on the Hill without giving money."

More than a rehashing of old material and K Street Project greatest hits, the piece includes several episodes in the recent history of the GOP’s takeover of the lobbying world that I hadn’t heard before. My favorite:

In one instance well known among lobbyists, the Ohio Republican Michael Oxley, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, put pressure on the Investment Company Institute, a consortium of mutual fund companies, to fire its top lobbyist, a Democrat, and hire a Republican to replace her. According to a Washington Post story on February 15, 2003, six sources, both Democratic and Republican, said that members of Oxley's staff told the institute that a pending congressional investigation of mutual fund companies "might ease up if the mutual fund trade group complies with their wishes." It apparently didn't matter to them that House ethics rules prohibit congressmen or their staff "from bestowing benefits on the basis of the recipient's status as a supporter or contributor, or partisan affiliation." A Republican now holds the top job at the Investment Company Institute.

Drew also delves into the subject of congressional trips, which always struck me as a fairly petty, if attention-grabbing, manifestation of the modern climate of corruption and abuse. But Drew shows the central importance such trips have attained in the post–McCain-Feingold lobbying world, serving as a crucial mechanism for access and influence. Here she details the transformation of the Ripon Educational Fund, an offshoot of the moderate Republican public-policy outfit called the Ripon Society, into a shell organization through which lobbyists and business associations fund lavish trips for legislators:

Like other policy groups that also lobby, Ripon has set up an ostensibly separate "educational" group, or 501(c)(3), to which contributors can make tax-deductible donations. The Ripon Educational Fund sponsors a large annual "Transatlantic Conference," held in such pleasant places as Rome, London, and Budapest, to which it invites between 150 and 200 US citizens. These are vaguely described in the filings by the members of Congress who participated in them as "listening tour," or "fact finding."

The Ripon trips are famous among lobbyists for the opportunities they present for pressing their cases with members of Congress. A Republican lobbyist says that a Ripon Fund excursion has "become the trip to go on, because of the luxury and the access." The Washington Post reported that a Ripon Educational Fund trip to London in 2003 was attended by more than a hundred lobbyists, including representatives from American Express, AOL/Time Warner, and General Motors. They pay the Ripon Fund an annual membership fee of $9,500, and in addition finance their own trips abroad to Fund meetings.

Both the Ripon Society and the Ripon Educational Fund are headed by lobbyists. Former Representative Susan Molinari, of Staten Island, New York, a lobbyist whose clients now include Exxon, the Association of American Railroads, and Freddie Mac, is the chair of the Educational Fund. The president of the society itself is Richard Kessler, whose lobbying firm's clients include drug and cigarette companies. According to The Hill, the other Capitol Hill newspaper, Kessler's firm paid for a trip by five members of Congress to Ireland in August 2003, including four days at Ashford Castle, where the elegant grounds include a golf course. Of the members of Congress who went on Ripon Educational Fund trips, almost all took along their wives, an additional perk that contributes to the holiday atmosphere of the excursions. While lobbyists are prohibited from paying directly for congressional trips, trade associations and private corporations are allowed to do so—not much of an ethical distinction, since practically all of them engage in lobbying.

The whole piece is really worth a look. Drew tries a bit too hard to stoke our sympathy for the poor, aggrieved Democratic business lobbyists who are finding it difficult these days to ply their noble, public-spirited trade. (Tim Noah is right to caution against such sentiments, just as Nathan Newman may be right to welcome the purifying effect of Republicans choking Dems off their old pipelines to industry.) But she manages to convey the institutional effect on Congress of the Republicans' takeover of the business lobby, and for that the piece is invaluable.

For all the attention being paid to congressional ethics issues at the moment, the net result of a systematic campaign like the K Street Project and the full absorption of lobbyists into every facet of the legislative process too often gets obscured: It’s a closed-circuit patronage system, and the legislation it produces has little connection either to the general welfare or even to any kind of serious ideological agenda. As Thomas B. Edsall shows in his brilliant and important recent profile of Majority Whip Roy Blunt and the K Street whip operation he’s put together, the bills that come out of the K Street system tend to be precisely the Bush-era measures that are the biggest, most bloated messes -- the Medicare drug law, the energy bill, the 2004 corporate-tax behemoth (Blunt’s recent, crowning achievement). Policymaking like this amounts to little more than looting -- or to thousands of termites devouring the federal coffers like so much plywood.

Marty Meehan and Rahm Emanuel have introduced an ethics reform bill that touches on some of these issues; it offers slightly watered-down versions of some of the proposals listed by Bruce Reed in a good new piece in Blueprint. Good-government measures in and of themselves don’t actually stand a chance of fixing these problems, obviously. Election losses are all that do, and on that front, there’s at least some modest cause for hope.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MMM ... HILLARY HATING. The inimitable K-Lo excerpts a bit from the latest Hillary Clinton–bashing tome:

Hillary said, "Because I had a bill that would protect the teaching hospitals—"

"Hillary!," Liz interrupted. "That's Pat's bill."

"Oh," said Hillary, "did he have one, too?"

Hillary wasn't an elected official, and yet, according to the insider, she was talking as though she had introduced her own bill. And she was looking right at Liz Moynihan and comparing herself to Pat Moynihan, who had one of the most distinguished records in the history of the U.S. Senate.

At that point, Pat Moynihan had had enough. "You have to excuse me," he said to Hillary, getting up slowly from his chair, favoring his back. "I told them I would go to the Senate today."

He left the room. But he did not go to the Senate. He went to an adjoining room and waited for Hillary to leave.

Maybe it's just me, but doesn't that anecdote (on the assumption that it actually happened) make Pat Moynihan look bad? Here he is sabotaging work on a crucially important health-care bill out of some bizarre fit of personal pique that Clinton would refer to something as "my bill" rather than "the bill that I support" or whatever. Years ago, Mark Schmitt predicted that "Someday a vicious biography will be written of Moynihan, undoubtedly by a liberal. It will catalog his opportunism, his flip-flops, and moments when he seemed more interested in being right (or getting the credit for being right) than in getting things done." Sounds like a good book to me.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE RIGHT WAY TO CHANGE THINGS. I was pretty pleased with the outcome of the Raich case, because I don't like to see liberals anywhere near the notion of "federalism." Still, like most people on the left, I find it hard not to be sympathetic to the goal of relaxing marijuana laws. But the way to do it is with federal legislation, not with judicially imposed notions of "states' rights." Radley Balko describes some worthwhile bills on this subject pending in Congress that readers may be interested in. There's never been any reason to think that nationwide public opinion is massively opposed to the medical marijuana cause -- or even opposed at all -- so my guess would be that if people start focusing attention on the Hill rather than on state-level ballot initiatives, they could start getting something done.

--Matthew Yglesias

YOUNG TURK. North Carolina freshman congressman Patrick McHenry -- at 29, the youngest member of Congress -- knows how to use his mouth. A hardcore Tom DeLay loyalist (see his recent response to a MoveOn-sponsored DeLay petition to get the general flavor of his remarks on the subject), for months now he's been on the leading edge of Republican pushback efforts on ethics issues. Whereas the leadership and most conference members appear to have calculated that a full-throttle ethics war would be bad news for the party at this moment, McHenry and a band of a few dozen fellow Ultras have been pushing to commence hostilities immediately. Subscription-only Roll Call has the latest:

Freshman Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) continued his assault on Democratic House leaders last week, questioning whether Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her advisers violated House rules by discussing a Mississippi Congressional race in their Capitol Hill offices.

McHenry, who earlier this year accused House Democrats of hypocrisy on ethics, penned a letter to Pelosi Friday in response to a May 24 Roll Call article on the Leader’s possible intervention in a primary challenge to Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.).

That article described deliberations among Pelosi and staff concerning efforts to head off a looming primary challenge against Thompson. A memo was reportedly prepared for Pelosi on the subject.

In his letter to Pelosi, McHenry said the memo — whose author’s identity was blacked out in a copy provided to Roll Call — “raises a number of questions about whether official resources have been improperly used for political purposes.”

He asks whether the memo was prepared by a Congressional staffer working on official time and using equipment in a Congressional office, and wonders whether the discussion of the primary was convened in a House office.

“Your answers are crucial if we are to ensure that House rules are indeed being practiced by you and your staff at the highest levels of Congress,” McHenry’s letter concludes.

...

Although just five months into his first House term, McHenry — the youngest Member of Congress at age 29 — has proven himself to be a major thorn in the side of Democratic House leaders. Several weeks ago, the freshman accused Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) of hypocrisy for their rhetoric on ethics in the wake of reports that some Democratic House Members had taken out-of-town trips paid for by lobbyists.

Daly said Pelosi has never received the previous letters McHenry has claimed to have written to her. “This is a guy who no one’s ever heard of who writes letters that no one ever sees,” Daly said. “He’s all talk and no action.”

It's likely McHenry has been puffed up a bit by papers like Roll Call and is enjoying the attention, but that's part of the reason he's worth keeping an eye on. The goofy ethics micro-issue he's latching onto, the outsized rhetoric, the angry letters -- this is classic Newt Gingrich-style bomb-throwing, and the fact that it's a deep backbencher lobbing the bombs only enhances the comparison. As the check-kiting scandal showed, the point is the relentlessness and the tenor of the attacks, not the significance of the charges. We'll likely see a lot more of this kind of silliness in the next year or so, particularly if more GOP members decide it's finally time to take the gloves off.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE KINK IN THE MACHINE. Today’s Bob Novak column includes a lot of very bogus analysis (helpfully catalogued and skewered by the DCCC’s Jesse Lee here), but its subject is in fact a very real and significant phenomenon: George W. Bush’s crappy congressional outreach. This White House has never devoted much energy to establishing effective structures for consulting with and keeping tabs on lawmakers’ wants, needs, fears, etc. And to a shocking degree during the first term, it really didn’t need to, given the ruthlessness with which congressional Republicans managed to ram through legislation despite having only thin majorities. (This very efficiency, much more so than the actual content of the legislation itself, could be said to be the real fruit of the modern GOP’s transformation into an ideologically driven movement party. In 2001, congressional Republicans understood -- to a far greater extent than the Democratic majorities of 1993-1994, needless to say -- that lockstep unity was necessary and a Republican president’s agenda had to be their agenda if they wanted to take advantage of the moment.)

But it’s lame-duck time now, and without anointing a successor, the administration lacks its usual levers to enforce some organization and discipline in Congress. Meanwhile, the president decided this is the time to grab the third rail of American politics without adjusting even slightly his administration’s complacent, one-way communications approach to Capitol Hill. And so you have the spectacle of Bush’s deranged Social Security reform stump campaign, which is playing out as some kind of perverse homage to Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour, while the prospects of action in Congress become ever dimmer. Social Security was omitted from Majority Whip Roy Blunt’s list of “priority legislation” for the House this summer, and as for the Senate -- well, this passage from Congressional Quarterly shouldn’t exactly fill privatizers with confidence that action is looming:

Senate Finance Chairman Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa said House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif., can quickly move a bill because he can count on party-line support in his committee. Grassley said he wants to move his own legislation this month or next, but is uncertain whether he will have enough support within his committee.

Grassley said the timing for Senate floor action will depend on Frist, who must find time for must-pass spending measures, while leaving room for likely fights over judicial nominees and for debate on difficult issues including a proposal (S 852) to create a $140 billion trust fund to settle asbestos claims.

Leaving aside the basic and unshakeable unpopularity of Bush’s privatization proposal (and other agenda items of his), there’s little evidence that the White House has even been thinking about any of these second-order considerations: When will the Senate have the time to take up this issue? How does something like the judicial nominations fight or the John Bolton controversy complicate the timing and dynamics of a Social Security push? One could go on. It’s not as if the president can sit back and let a parliamentary master in the Senate make sure everything works out -- recall that he handpicked something of a doofus to run things there.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ELECTIONS AFTER ARAFAT. What will Israeli elections be like in the Abu Mazen era? Amir Peretz is counting on a move back to pocketbook concerns, writes Jo-Ann Mort, and he may be the candidate who can start that shift.

--Jeffrey Dubner

DREAMING OF LEGAL LIBERTARIANISM. Via Will Baude, an intriguing paper (pdf) by Adrian Vermeule asks "Does Commerce Clause Review Have Perverse Effects?" His hypothesis, which looks pretty good after today's decision in the medical marijuana case, is that the Rehnquist Court's federalism doctrine, by striking down some federal regulations but permitting regulation of local conduct if it's part of a broader regulatory scheme, will simply encourage Congress to enact more far-reaching regulations.

Now what I wonder is whether even more robust judicial federalism wouldn't have even more "perverse" effects, at least by the lights of misguided small-government types. Nobody disputes, for example, that the federal government lacks the authority to mandate that every public school force every sixth grader to take a standardized test in reading. So instead the federal government increases the amount of money it spends on financial assistance to local schools and then attaches a whole bunch of strings (including testing mandates, etc.) to the cash. No governor dares turn down the money; states can't opt out of the taxes, so they may as well ensure that they get some of the green stuff. Next arise a lot of complaints that this is an "unfunded mandate" on the grounds that federal assistance is too good to turn down, but too stingy to get the job done right. The end result will almost certainly be even more federal spending on education to help schools design and administer tests, to handle No Child Left Behind's crisis-intervention mandates, perhaps to targeted funding toward schools with lots of poor kids, etc., etc., etc.

If the federal government didn't have constitutional restrictions placed on its ability to regulate education, it might well just issue directives. Instead, in the field of education, it needs to spend a lot of money to get its way. To my big-government sensibilities, that's all for the best, but I doubt it's an example most federalism advocates would want to see followed in other areas. Which once again raises the question of what, exactly, the conservative plan is for implementing the small-government agenda. Electing Republicans to run every aspect of the government isn't getting the job done. Appointing sympathetic judges seems to be a promising alternative, but I seriously doubt that will work, either. And if the main plank of your ideology is doomed to failure, it seems that you have a serious problem.

--Matthew Yglesias

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH WHITE PEOPLE. Just to clarify, contra Kenneth Baer, I don't think "that since Latinos are poor and will stay poor, that Democrats need not worry." What I do think is that, since Democrats win Latinos making less than $50,000 a year by a big margin and win Latinos making more than $50,000 a year by a small margin, the Latino vote per se should not be a huge source of worry. If all voters were Latino voters, Democrats would be winning every election by a healthy margin. There's every reason to think that the economic status of Latino families will improve over the coming years (although with income mobility on the decline, and the country essentially importing large numbers of very poor people from Mexico every year, it probably won't go up all that quickly), but unless America magically becomes a country where every family is above average, winning the under-$50,000 crowd by a big margin and the over-$50,000 crowd by a small one is a winning situation.

Now obviously, the problem is that the electorate doesn't consist entirely of Latinos. It mostly consists of white people. What the Latino data shows isn't, I think, that Democrats are doing badly among this group. What it shows instead is that Democrats aren't going to rack up the sort of supermajorities that might make it viable to write white folks (or, to be technical about it, non-Hispanic whites) off.

All of which just returns us to the question of why white people don't like the Democrats very much. The economic problems of a white family making $40,000 a year, a black family making $40,000 a year, and a Hispanic family making $40,000 a year aren't all that different. But their voting behaviors are very different. A lot of post-election analysis has suggested that white people at around this income level are voting Republican because of religious/moral issues. Obviously, that's a factor. But blacks and Latinos aren't more secular than white people, they're less secular. Which is just to say rather banally that race seems to account for differential racial voting patterns. And while Democrats shouldn't be complacent about their performance with non-whites (it is getting worse), it remains the case that if your average white person voted the way your average non-white person does then, irrespective of income or religiosity, Democrats would be winning.

My evidence-free guess is that non-whites are less nationalistic than are Caucuasian Americans and therefore find the Bush administration's approach to national security less appealing. But one way or another, explanations of this phenomenon need to have some kind of racial element to them. References to economic categories like "the middle class" don't really capture what's happening.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: RELIVING HISTORY. What do David Rosen and Mark Felt have in common? The right desperately needs them to be bad guys, according to Michael Tomasky, and they'll say anything to make it so.

--Jeffrey Dubner

DON'T CRY FOR ME, GEORGE VOINOVICH. In a move unlikely to re-ingratiate him with his conservative base, Ohio Senator George Voinovich apparently started crying while talking about his opposition to John Bolton's nomination as UN ambassador. I think I might cry, too, if I had to count as one of my constituents the Reverend Russell Johnson, who takes the semi-fascist view that "criticizing and undermining the president weakens the war on terror." Perhaps we should just eliminate this tiresome business of having elections along with our freedom of speech.

But the thing to remember about Voinovich is that if he had wanted to kill the Bolton nomination, it would be dead. He could have refused to release him from committee and that, in all likelihood, would have been the end of it. Instead, he chose to act in a way that made it much more likely he would get the job, and then spend the week crying about it. So it's a bit hard for me to disagree with right-wing radio host Bill Cunningham's assessment that the "man is a clown, a crying clown ... an embarrassment."

-- Matthew Yglesias

WEEKEND UPDATE. Spent the weekend sitting out with a bruised rib? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• Nicholas Kristof. Sudan: still very, very bad.
• John Tierney. If only the American press were up to the high ethical standards of British tabloids.
• David Brooks. I am a bitter old man.
• David Broder. Criminals, man, they're just not very ethical.
• Jim Hoagland. The real lesson of Watergate is that we need to do more to cover up the neocons' mishandling of classified information.
• George Will. With the government run entirely by Republicans from Texas, a former Democratic congressman is obviously to blame for bad regulations.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Norton Grubb on education in Finland.

--Matthew Yglesias

RACE MATTERS. With all this loose talk about Democrats having a "huge Hispanic problem" running around various blogs I'm affiliated with, I think it's worth refocusing attention on white people. This purported Hispanic problem isn't all that problematic. Poor Latinos are overwhelmingly Democratic, and even among Latino households making more than $50,000 a year Democrats have a 10-point advantage. This is basically the class politics of liberal dreams, and it suggests that if the electorate consisted entirely of Hispanics, Democrats would win every time. Expecting the kind of loyalty Democrats enjoy from African Americans is just unrealistic, unless Tom Tancredo gets the 2008 GOP nomination.

The shocking thing in that Third Way report was the finding that "The economic tipping point -- the household income level at which whites were more likely to vote for Republicans than Democrats -- was $23,700." That's a total fiasco and I don't really want to know where the tipping point drops to if we look at white, non-union households. For whatever reason, it seems to be considered impolitic nowadays to point out how central race is to American politics, but it's right there in the numbers. The conventional wisdom is that Democrats have problems with these relatively downscale voters because of the dread moral values, but according to everything I've ever seen, African Americans and Latinos are more conservative on your sex-and-death issues (and more religious generally) than are white folks, so that explanation only gets you so far.

We've seen a marked decline in explicitly racial themes in the political arena over the past several years, but it's pretty obvious that race still matters -- a lot -- in American politics and that it's not possible to explain what's going on without reference to it.

--Matthew Yglesias

BUSH'S LATINO MEDIA STRATEGIST ON '08. But first, a link to Kenny Baer's item sussing out some more of the implications of the Third Way memo I discussed earlier in the week, which also crunches the data on new voting patterns among ethnic and racial minorities. Says Kenny:

Hispanic voters are becoming more like ethnic voters of times passed – e.g. Irish and Italians – than like black voters. As Hispanics earn more, they vote more Republican -- and Hispanics are earning more. Their income levels have increased at twice the rate as the rest of the nation. In 1996, only one in four Hispanic voters lived in households that earned over $50,000, in 2004, one in two Hispanic voters lived in these households. So while Kerry beat Bush by 21 point among low-income Hispanics, his margin over Bush was only 10 points among the middle class and zero points among those with household incomes greater than $50,000.

The bottom line is: Democrats have a huge Hispanic problem. Many in the party recognize it, but unfortunately their answer will be more of the same: interest-group base appeals that center on "Hispanic" issues. While some issues may cut in this community more than others (such as immigration and that not always how you think), Dems need to lose the politics of victimhood if they don’t want to lose the Hispanic vote. Let's hope that the next Democratic presidential campaign does away with a "Hispanic desk," and instead integrates the appeal for Hispanic voters seamlessly and seriously into his – or her – overall strategy. There is no other choice.

I spoke to Republican Hispanic media strategist Lionel Sosa earlier in the week, and he had some surprising things to say about the Democratic Party and Hispanic voters that should give the Dems equal cause for alarm and optimism. Sosa, based in San Antonio, Texas, has served as a Hispanic media consultant for six presidential campaigns, including Ronald Reagan's (like George W. Bush, Reagan did well with Hispanic voters) and founded the largest Hispanic-advertising agency in America, Sosa, Bromley, Aguilar & Associates (now Bromley Communications). He's worked with Bush since his '98 gubernatorial campaign and is a central figure in the Republican Party's quest to win 50 percent of the Hispanic vote in '08 and future presidential elections.

After being very critical of John Kerry for lacking the kind of interpersonal warmth Hispanic voters want to see in a candidate -- and consequently the kind of credible, optimistic messaging -- Sosa seemed surprisingly bullish on Hillary Clinton.

Here's some of what Sosa had to say on Kerry:

"We were foreigners to him. ... He never built a bond and so he had the folks that were advising him feed the words in his mouth and he would say them and try to speak Spanish and they just came across as false. If he seemed wooden to mainstream voters, he seemed much more wooden to Hispanics who as a community expect a more personal and emotional bond."

So what does he see happening to the Demcrats going forward?

"Democrats haven't found their voice and haven't found a really strong individual leader, a combination of George Bush and Karl Rove. They are being pulled in a million different directions by consultants and special interest groups. Let's say that in 2008 they get a voice and it's Hillary and she finds a voice and a direction. ... I would think they would need a charismatic strong leader with solutions. They're so used to whining and complaining they can't seem to get out of it. They whine because Republicans are owning the American dream and faith and morality and they whine about it as if they can't do it, too. They haven’t found a voice and they haven’t found a leader."

And how would Hillary play with Hispanics?

"I think she would play well, very well. [Rudy] Giuliani, [John] McCain, Laura Bush, Condi Rice would all play well."

How about Bill Frist?

"I know him, I love him, but he doesn’t have the charisma and personality" to appeal to Hispanic voters. "Intellectually he understands everything ... emotionally, he wouldn’t be the one."

Sosa's overall assessment is very much in sync with Baer's one, perhaps because the community of Hispanic political media professionals, pollsters, and elected officials is small enough that its Democratic and Republican members talk to each other with greater frequency than people like, say, Mark Mellman and Ken Mehlman do, and so Baer is talking to some of the same Democrats Sosa is.

The take-home message from both sides of that conversation: optimistic messages that appeal to Hispanics' economic aspirations, love of family, faith in God, and belief in America as the place to build a better life work powerfully to encourage political affiliation. Messages that say that Hispanics are powerless victims who need politicians to protect their access to a slice of the goverment pie and specific issue messages are less effective.

It all comes down to self-image. As Sosa told me, "We may not be millionaires, but as long as the door is open we are equal to anybody in America." That's what people want to hear -- and how they want to be treated, too.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

DEPT. OF BRIGHT IDEAS. Via Political Wire comes evidence of one of the funniest, phoniest uses of political Photoshopping in a long time. I would think it would go without saying that if you're a Republican running for office, it's best not to steal your crowd shots from Howard Dean.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

USEFUL IDIOTS. David Bosco "helpfully" points out in The New Republic that the American-run network of detention centers is not, in fact, as bad as Joseph Stalin's gulag, as a recently Amnesty International report claimed it was if you willfully misinterpret it. I call foul. Nobody was genuinely confused on this point, and focusing on Amnesty's overheated word choice on this point was and is very obviously nothing but a White House effort to throw a smokescreen over the fact that the government is now run by men who believe that their subordinates should be allowed to torture human beings with impunity.

To discuss this controversy while keeping any issue other than the Bush administration's evident desire to cover up, deny, and downplay many serious acts of abuse and violations of the rule of law is just to make yourself part of the problem. Amnesty International is not the group of people in the wrong here, and everyone knows it.

--Matthew Yglesias

NIGHT OF THE LIVING POLICY INITIATIVE. There's really nothing new in it, but David Sanger's article on the never-ending privatization road show does have this creepy moment:

So Thursday, in Hopkinsville, Ky., Mr. Bush described his next tactic: the endless Social Security tour.

After explaining that he was going to visit his ranch in Crawford, Tex., he said:

"But after that I'm going to head back out again, and I'm going to spend time talking about Social Security every week until something gets done - because that's my job."

That's a very curious conception of what the president's job is, but there you have it. There does, however, seem to be a method in the madness. When George W. Bush first started talking about Social Security, virtually everything he said was false, and virtually nothing he said was challenged by reporters. Then Democrats, bloggers, etc. started a big hue and cry and all of a sudden it was getting challenged. Then everyone got bored with the whole thing. But Bush just kept on plodding. Now he's still saying all the same stuff that was discredited months ago, but isn't getting challenged on it as much -- either from liberals or from the press. So even though just about everyone in the world except me seems bored by this issue already, I still think it's crucially important not to lose focus.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHAT TO DO? Kevin Drum asks us Darfur advocates if we’d be willing to support the extended deployment of combat troops there. It’s an important question, but first I think it’s useful to take stock of the situation on the ground right now so we understand what the theoretical mission might look like.

Despite reports of sporadic attacks, the outright slaughter has generally subsided in recent months. This is not because Khartoum has seen the light; rather, after killing or displacing 2 million people, the regime in Khartoum is busy consolidating the gains achieved in their highly successful strategy of battling a counterinsurgency by wiping out the population base from where that insurgency comes.

On June 10, talks are scheduled between Khartoum and the two Darfur rebel groups -- who by now have been thoroughly squashed and will be forced to negotiate from a weak position. (That is, of course, if they negotiate at all. There are rumors that the two rebel groups are now battling each other, so they may not make it to the table next week.)

In the meantime, Khartoum has moved to phase two of its strategy of counterinsurgency by genocide: genocide by attrition. This includes, but is not limited to, obstructing humanitarian access to the 150 or so internally displaced person (IDP) camps in Darfur in advance of the rainy season, for which food must be pre-positioned because the dried river beds flood and make roads un-passable. Additionally, Khartoum has made a fine art out of bureaucratic harassment of foreign aid workers. The arrest of the head of MSF-Holland two days ago and the occasional accusations in the state-run media that specific aid organizations are arming the rebels are just two examples of Khartoum’s effort to scare away foreign aid organizations.

So what to do about this?

Right now there are a paltry 2,300 African Union monitors in Darfur. The present course has that number being augmented by about 5,000 more AU monitors in the fall, but this is still an insufficient number given the size of the region. Even more problematic, the AU's mission in Darfur is only mandated to monitor and verify the (non-existent) cease-fire. This leaves the protection of the civilians in Darfur under the jurisdiction of Khartoum, which is akin to letting the SS guard the Warsaw ghetto. If the current course is maintained, these AU monitors will probably be relegated to being the in-house police force for the IDP camps, and will not be able to effectively make sure that roads are open for humanitarian travel.

The International Crisis Group estimates that 12,000 to 15,000 personnel are needed within the next 60 days. That’s a pipe dream to implement, but a realistic assessment were force strength actually dictated by the humanitarian needs on the ground. The AU, of course, could not deploy this number of troops quickly, so the Crisis Group suggests a NATO bridge force until the AU is able to muster the requisite number of troops. So, to answer Drum’s question, I’d be willing to support a limited deployment of NATO troops to act as a bridge until the AU can take over.

But frankly, the actual deployment of troops may not be neccesary, for the regime in Khartoum buckles under American pressure quite easily. So the threat of NATO deployment, if credibly backed up, may be enough of a deterrent to prevent Khartoum from arresting any more aid workers and keeping its fleet of gunships on the ground. And, if credibly threatened, perhaps Khartoum would even take some proactive measures, like reining in the Janjaweed militia.

The problem with the administration’s Sudan policy, however, is that it tends to prize constructive engagement with Khartoum above threats and isolation. This is particularly evident as Khartoum gears up for the entry into force of a new power-sharing arrangement that will include the leader of the southern Sudan rebels in the governing structure of Khartoum. Since the north-south deal was signed in January, the administration has been unwilling to let the unfolding genocide in Darfur impede its progress. In this context, I think that the occasional mentions of genocide by the former secretary of state (and more recently the president himself) seem to have been a domestic political ploy rather than a call for action.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

LET THE FLIP-FLOPPING BEGIN. Little as I want my home state to be known as nothing but a bunch of flip-floppers, I'm really enjoying Mitt Romney's early contortions. The latest:

Governor Mitt Romney's top political strategist has told a prominent conservative magazine that his client has been ''faking" his support of abortion rights in Massachusetts.

''He's been a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly," Romney adviser Michael Murphy told the National Review in a cover story hitting newstands today titled ''Matinee Mitt."

Murphy, a prominent Republican consultant, issued a statement of regret yesterday afternoon ... . ''The quote in the National Review article was not what I meant to communicate," Murphy's statement said. ''I was discussing a characterization the governor's critics use. I regret the quote and any confusion it might have caused."

I imagine they're already printing up the "Mitt Romney: Faking It" bumper stickers up in Quincy. This comes not too long after Romney proposed closing a number of corporate-tax loopholes and then backed off under pressure from the Norquistadoras. (He did, it should be noted, do a commendable job of reforming this part of the MA tax code in 2003 and 2004.) And his position on stem-cell research, while more defensible than the president's, is difficult to explain and just screams out, "I voted for it before I voted against it." And this is before he's had to truly tack right for conservative primary voters.

--Jeffrey Dubner

GREAT NEWS! George W. Bush is about to nominate 20 or so more judges. Boy, this'll be fun! I expect that he'll be consulting with Democratic and Republican senators, as the compromise requested?

The Bush team indicated that it plans no changes in its selection process in the wake of the Senate deal. Senate Democrats said they have not been consulted on any new nominations.

Oh. I stand corrected. We'll see whether Lindsay Graham and Mike DeWine posture as if Democrats have no right to question the propriety of any nominations, in light of the White House's indifference to the deal's terms and in the (oh-so-unlikely!) event that a nominee believes, say, that the Constitution explicitly prohibits paying employees.

On a related note, I see via Josh Marhsall that one of the Power Line guys is playing fact-checker again. He's pretty blatantly incorrect, but he states his case with such smug certainty that I really wonder if he just doesn't know the facts here. His basic case is that if the Republicans filibustered any of Bill Clinton's nominees, it was only Richard Paez and nobody more; and that even in that case, there was no filibuster -- only a failed cloture vote.

This is remarkably easy to bat down. Pretending for the moment that the only thing that qualifies as a "filibuster" is an attempt to defeat cloture or block a vote after cloture, Paez was filibustered along with Marsha Berzon in March of 2000. And were they, technically speaking, filibustered? Absolutely. As I've said before, read Republican Senator Bob Smith's floor statements on the two nominees. On March 9, he said that "it is no secret that I have been the person who has filibustered these two nominees." And then, the cloture vote having passed easily, Jeff Sessions still brought up a motion "to postpone indefinitely the nomination of Richard Paez," which 34 Republican senators voted for. It's not that they didn't filibuster; it's just that they failed.

I have no problem with arguments that this all started with Ronald Reagan's or George W. Bush's nominees; I disagree, but that's an honest argument to attempt. But the Power Line brand of revisionist history is just disgusting.

--Jeffrey Dubner

COX GUARDING THE HEN HOUSE. Today’s New York Times offers a rough-and-ready rundown on the record of the president’s new pick for SEC chief, California congressman (and devoted Randian) Chris Cox. For all the gory details, though, you won’t want to miss this special edition of the Progress Report, called “The Case Against Chris Cox.”

The current SEC chair is Bill Donaldson, who was appointed to replace the shameless stooge Harvey Pitt two and a half years ago as a face-saving move, but with the expectation that he wouldn’t rock the corporate-friendly boat on the panel. Instead, he became (as the Times puts it) something of the David Souter of business Republicans, siding with the two Democratic panelists on a number of regulatory decisions over the past few years. Donaldson is now set to relinquish the reins to a man who, in 1995, called securities law "a legal torture chamber ... more suitable to the pages of Charles Dickens' 'Bleak House' than a nation dedicated to equal justice under law." Recall, of course, from Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, the president’s famous declaration to then–Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that the continued sluggishness of the economy in 2002 was attributable to “SEC overreach.” As Suskind wrote:

O'Neill couldn't quite believe what he was hearing -- SEC overreach? No wonder the White House had backed off from the toughest medicine for crooked executives and eventually ceded the corporate governance debate to Congress. How, though, could the President believe that the largely overwhelmed SEC had any significant effect on the vast US economy?

If Bush still believes such things, he must anticipate some mighty impressive economic growth coming up once Cox finally rights the SEC ship.

--Sam Rosenfeld

DEMOCRATS DID IT TOO! It's not clear to me what the point of today's Washington Post article "revealing" that Democrats got money from Indian tribes represented by Jack Abramoff is supposed to be. Folks like Bob Ney who've been implicated in this scandal don't stand accused of having gotten money from Indian tribes. That stuff's a longstanding matter of public record, and while fundraising is always a bit seedy there's nothing remotely criminal about it. The point is that Ney, Abramoff, Ralph Reed and others were part of an elaborate shakedown scheme that seems to have involved various sorts of illegal conduct on the part of various parties.

Delving into the specifics here, Tom Daschle and Byron Dorgan both represent states with large Native American populations, and count Native Americans as among their most loyal constituents. That's made them both champions of Native American issues on a variety of fronts and, naturally enough, recipients of Native American money. This is like the "revelation" that Democrats from states with large African American populations get a lot of support from the black community. I'm less familiar with Patty Murray's record on this front, but I do know that former Senator Slade Gorton was long considered Public Enemy Number One by Native America, so financial support for leaders of the Washington Democratic Party isn't shocking.

Now, contra what Jim Manley told the Post Harry Reid is not, in fact, a member of the Indian Affairs Committee, but he used to be. I'm pretty sure the record will reflect that Reid, as a senator from Nevada, which, as you may have heard, has a pretty robust gambling industry, is not a big Indian gaming enthusiast. The fewer Indian casinos that open, the better for Las Vegas and the better for Reid.

--Matthew Yglesias

REMEMBER THE BUSH DOCTRINE? Not the new model Bush doctrine about spreading freedom around the world, the original Bush doctrine about using preemptive military force to strike at our adversaries, especially as a way of preventing them from going nuclear. Sure you do. As Michael Signer points out, however, the Bush administration seems to have forgotten all about it when it comes to North Korea. Which is not to say that we should invade North Korea just for the sake of consistency. Rather, what we're seeing here (and in Iran for that matter) is how utterly unworkable, unrealistic, and ultimately pointless that entire Bush doctrine episode in American national-security policy was.

Unfortunately, adopting it even just once involved taking on the risk that it would prove viable in the future, since it's served to undermine the other sorts of options besides preventative war that could have helped us deal with Iran, North Korea, and other global problems. Now we need to choose between either sitting by passively in the face of nuclear proliferation (which seems to be what we're doing), or else deploying military options that will only be possible if we take some truly drastic steps in light of the ongoing burden of occupying Iraq.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOT MOLTEN FAMINE. You won't want to miss Tom Friedman's column today for what has to be one of his all-time greatest mixed metaphors. (Regular Friedman readers will know that that is saying a lot):

Indeed, there is a huge famine breaking out all over India today, an incredible hunger. But it is not for food. It is a hunger for opportunity that has been pent up like volcanic lava under four decades of socialism, and it's now just bursting out with India's young generation.

That's some powerful capitalist hunger-lava. Also, didn't David Brooks write this column yesterday? Nothing quite like an EU referendum to serve as a pretext for massively crude generalizations about European social policy. And the great thing about the EU process is that these referenda have to happen constantly, and basically never cease -- it's endless fodder for lazy pundits!

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR. One of the other consequences of the baby boomer's nostalgia for the battles of their youths is, on the left side of the spectrum, an obsession with rebuilding youth movements and doing political outreach to "the next generation." This is something I've heard and seen people talking about -- and doing work on -- for more than a decade now, but which strikes me as fundamentally missing the point about what's been happening in this country.

Let's get one thing straight: When a bunch of men -- and it is usually men -- in their fifties decide to bring along "the next generation" and then reach out to 19-year-olds, to easily locatable college students and somtimes even kids in high schools, what they're actually doing is reaching out to a group that's two or three generations away from them in age. They are NOT creating a system that encourages political affiliation and involvement over the course of the entire life cycle. And they've already lost the actual "next generation."

Think about it: The age group John Kerry did second-to-worst with was 30-44 year olds -- and were they not the liberal youth of tomorrow just ten to 15 years ago? I recall rather distinctly a time when my generation of young people was going to be the wave of the future, whose politics portended a solid Democratic majority candidates would be able to rely on for years to come. Why, Bill Clinton was the first candidate we'd ever cast ballots for! Democrats for life! Clinton won 52 percent of voters under 25 in 1992, but only 43 percent of voters overall. And now we're the second-most conservative voter age group in the country, after senior citizens.

What happened? Did the Democrats and liberals in the demographic just stop voting? Did they change their votes or affiliations? If so, based on what issues? Did they marry and have kids and decide the world looked different on the other side of those commitments, or even just on the other side of 30? Did they move inside the United States and adopt the political norms of their new environments? Or was it simply that their more conservative age cohorts took longer to pick up the habit of voting, waiting until they were older to join the electoral fray?

Even members of the actual baby boom generation -- the generation that gave us the original liberal youth movement, whose replication has been a kind of Holy Grail ever since in certain political circles -- didn't cast a majority of ballots for Kerry last year.

Voters between, say, 30 and 55 -- years when careers hit their stride, when people marry and divorce, when they have kids and homes and run things -- are a central part of the electorate and yet also a mysteriously neglected one.

I've long thought that there is only one question that really matters when it comes to reviving Democratic politics, and it is this: What does the Democratic Party offer people between the ages of 30 and 55 who are not poor, not rich, and not in unions? Normally the answer one gets in response to this question -- and I've asked it of a number of politicians -- is something like "culture", "values," or "choice." But articulated values are stances toward the world, not policies or ideas or promises for how to create a society you want to live in. Stances are not the means to make things happen; they are what precedes the means. And the real answer to the question, Democratic political operatives will usually admit when asked on background, is that the party does not offer such voters very much, or at least does not do so very directly.

Social Security is important to them, surely, but still a bit of a distant prospect. The minimum wage is not their issue. Not that many of them work in sectors where jobs are getting outsourced, though they may still be worried about general job-security questions. Their insurance plans cover prescription drugs, though maybe not their kids. Their main beef with the world if often that they'd like to have more money -- to send their kids to college with, to get out of debt with, and to make their lives just that much better. And they don't like their private worlds to be interfered with by either the state or invasive and foreign-seeming pop-culture products.

What's in the Democratic agenda for them?

It's well and good and necessary to have training programs for the young -- such as the Center for American Progress' "Campus Progress" program and the Progressive Majority's training sessions for "the next generation of leaders," going on now in D.C. alongside the Campaign for America's Future conference -- but until the Democrats rediscover how to target people who are not young and not old, not rich and not poor, they can scarsely hope for more than the voter pluralities they have received even in their victorious national elections, no matter how promising the youth vote may seem.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

AIDS? NOT! As this New York Times article suggests, the forthcoming G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, will feature a showdown between Tony Blair and George W. Bush over the prime minister’s insistence that industrialized nations substantially increase their aid to Africa. That itself is not much of a surprise, for Blair’s African project is indeed generous and, according to the article, Bush believes that "It doesn't fit our budgetary process."

But we can be sure that if Bush is successful in killing Blair’s Africa agenda, he’ll no doubt try to deflect criticism by touting his 2003 pledge to spend $15 billion over the following five years to combat AIDS -- most of which is pledged for sub-Saharan Africa.

Alas, the devil is in the details here. As Geraldine Sealey reports in the forthcoming issue of Rolling Stone:

Dubbed the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the ambitious agenda provided the administration with some much-needed PR at the very moment it was preparing to defy international will by invading Iraq. But from the start, Bush has failed to deliver on the funding he promised -- and what little money he has provided is being used to promote a right-wing agenda that undercuts international efforts and puts millions of people in AIDS-ravaged countries at greater risk of infection and death.

Thanks to the president's foot-dragging, his "emergency plan" took its sweet time getting going. Bush requested only $2 billion for PEPFAR in its first year -- a billion less than one would expect. Then, when Congress decided to approve $400 million more than the president asked for, Bush unsuccessfully fought to block the increase. By the time the first relief funds arrived in Africa, nearly a year and a half had passed since the president announced his plan -- a costly delay in fighting an epidemic that claims 8,500 lives every day.

But wait -- there’s more: It seems that the influx of funds, once it finally reaches its destination, can actually do more harm than good. Exhibit A: Uganda.

By aggressively promoting condom use and sex education, Uganda has managed to cut its HIV rate from fifteen percent of the population to barely six percent during the past decade, making it Africa's biggest success story. But under pressure from the Bush administration, Uganda has taken a dangerous turn toward an abstinence-only approach. In April, the country's Ministry of Education banned the promotion and distribution of condoms in public schools. To make matters worse, the government has even engineered a nationwide shortage of condoms, issuing a recall of all state-supplied condoms and impounding boxes of condoms imported from other countries at the airport, claiming they need to be tested for quality control. As of this year, a top health official announced, the government will "be less involved in condom importation but more involved in awareness campaigns: abstinence and behavior change."

The Bush administration is supporting the shift by pumping $10 million into abstinence-only programs in Uganda. "One can put a dollar figure on the political pressure," says Cohen, who has closely studied the initiatives in Uganda. "Groups know the more they talk about abstinence, the more they'll get U.S. funding. And they fear that if they talk about condoms they'll lose funding -- or, worse, get kicked out of the country."

Erika Casriel documented the problems with PEPFAR at an earlier stage last summer, and it's just as depressing a year later.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

EMBRYO SCARES. Over at TNR, Michelle Cottle has a piece that I wish I'd written. George W. Bush is, as he's wont to do, disregarding the facts about embryos in America:

[T]he president's self-righteous babbling about the immoral destruction of life inherent in stem-cell research smacks of either rank hypocrisy or willful blindness.

As the president well knows, the embryos addressed by the current House bill are those generated by the increasingly popular fertility treatment of in vitro fertilization. In vitro is tricky, not to mention expensive, business, and doctors like to sock away several extra fertilized eggs from their clients just in case the first batch of implants doesn't stick--or a client later wants to defrost another couple of kids. A single round of in vitro can leave one client with a dozen or two surplus embryos in the deep freeze. As a result, there are currently close to a half-million zygotes frozen in limbo, with more and more added every year. There is simply no chance--none--that more than a tiny fraction of these will ever find a warm womb to call home.

Oddly enough, however, you don't hear President Bush or House Majority Leader Tom DeLay or Senator Rick Santorum or any of Washington's other spokesmen for American morality railing against the rampant rise of in vitro in the United States. With characteristic flair, DeLay recently denounced supporters of stem-cell research as advocating "the dismemberment of living, distinct human beings for the purposes of medical experimentation." But where is the Hammer's outrage at supporters of in vitro, which, following his logic, entails the destruction of thousands of "living, distinct human beings" in the service of infertile couples' selfish desire to bear biologically related offspring? Surely if it's wrong to appropriate an existing, soon-to-be-discarded embryo for use in medical research that could one day save millions of people suffering from horrible illnesses, then it is an exponentially greater abomination for a couple to actively create and then discard a dozen or so new embryos just to carry on the family blood line.

In an aside, Cottle points out that if they cared so much, they could push for what has happened in Italy. I've been wondering for some time when we would notice that Italy has taken a significantly stricter course regarding the ethics of embryos. In 2004, a country that had been at the cutting edge of fertility technologies suddenly found itself with a law that forbids the freezing of embryos at all, allows (only heterosexual) couples to fertilize no more than three eggs at a time, and mandates that all three eggs must be implanted. The new pope has just expressed his support for keeping this law in place, even as the rest of the country chafes under its strictures. As The New York Times reported earlier this week:

[O]pponents say the church is aiming at something more fundamental: repealing Italy's abortion law, which was the subject of a hard-fought referendum in 1981. A key section of the new fertility law defines life as beginning at conception - an idea that opponents say opens the door, by definition, to repealing the abortion law. ...

To combat the law - which opponents say has sent a stream of couples to fertility clinics elsewhere - the referendum would repeal crucial sections: those that define life as beginning at conception, ban donated sperm and eggs and surrogate parenthood, prohibit all research involving human embryos, and require for couples seeking in vitro fertilization that no more than three eggs may be fertilized at a time and that they must be implanted in the uterus together.

Cottle's point is that Bush and Tom DeLay won't be able to get this far -- popular support for in vitro fertilization in America, and the knots that conservatives tie themselves into in their support for family but opposition to the creation of families, pose too much of an ethical and electoral (not to mention market-based) bind. But I'm not so sure it won't get uglier before it gets better.

--Sarah Wildman

WHAT HE SAID. The inimitable Ed Kilgore gets right to the heart of things:

On behalf of the small but worthy minority of political junkies who were bored to tears, if not death, by the minute coverage of Watergate when it was actually happening, I have to speak up and say how boring it remains the second time around.

When it comes to scandals, the Casino Shakedown Scam, involving half the leadership of the latter-day conservative movement, is more my cup of tea.

A lot of us around these halls missed it the first time around but still find it fairly uninteresting right now. I realize the uncovering of Deep Throat is historically significant and a big news story, but this moment feels a little like that phase in the Kerry campaign when suddenly everyone was talking about Vietnam instead of Iraq. Will there ever be a day when the press stops elevating the golden stories and controversies from when baby boomers were young above our present times and concerns?

As Marshall Wittman also notes: "Once again we are fighting the culture war of the '60s and early '70s." Recall, though, TAP editor Mike Tomasky's argument that it is the right, not the left, that is keeping the controversies of the '60s and '70s alive:

[E]motionally, the entire [Swift Boat] assault draws its energy from one of the central missions that contemporary conservatism assigns itself: keeping the country divided over the legacy of the 1960s. ... We’ve fought over Vietnam -- fights always instigated by the right -- in most of our recent presidential elections, and we’ll keep fighting over Vietnam for as long as the media are willing to let the right get away with it.

That dynamic is back in action, alas.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BALANCE, CABLE NEWS–STYLE. Others have been taking up the weirdness of the Deep Throat coverage on cable news in the last two days, and it’s a good thing. (Here’s The Daily Show’s take.) Nothing quite captures the storied revolving-door problem in American political punditry like seeing old Watergate players themselves (or, in the case of Pat Buchanan, not a Watergate participant but certainly a loyal Richard Nixon soldier) playing disinterested pundit-analysts on one talking-head show after another discussing Mark Felt. At this point maybe it shouldn’t seem so bizarre to me to see Chris Matthews chatting with G. Gordon Liddy about this story as if they were David Brinkley and Chet Huntley chewing over the day’s headlines.

That these characters have carte blanche on the cable chat shows to serve as credible Felt naysayers is just one more illustration of the wonderful cloak of immunity enjoyed by all right-wingers in the clubby, insular D.C. punditry world. Lying, stealing, prison time -- literally nothing can discredit a conservative gabber enough to cancel their membership card to the commentariat. And today we have Peggy Noonan to thank for granting some establishment pundit legitimacy to Ben Stein’s thoughtful Deep Throat-as-genocidaire thesis. Can’t wait to hear Liddy’s thoughts on it tonight on Hardball.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHATS THE MATTER WITH HOLLAND? There are overlapping and complex reasons for the wholesale rejection of the EU constitution in the Netherlands. For one, parties on the far right and far left each have concerns for their prospects in an ever-expanding union. But in Holland it was also clear that the rejection of the constitution was at least in part a function of popular discontent with the mainstream political parties on the center-left and center-right that all endorsed the constitution.

As it happens, no one in Holland voices this popular discontent more clearly than the far-right maverick politician Geert Wilders, who rose to fame by filling the xenophobic void left in the wake of the assassination of Pim Fortuyn in 2002. I’ve always considered Wilders to be something of a racist blowhard whose popularity is best explained by the mainstream political parties’ utter failure to integrate North African immigrants into Dutch society. Using this public-policy failure as a pretext, Wilders whips up anti-immigrant sentiment (often using over-the-top racist rhetoric) to win Dutch over to his cause du jour. It’s a classic race-bait and switch, which he used effectively in the constitution debate by warning of the darker-than-white immigrants that would flow into Holland should they vote “ja.”

But what if Wilders' race baiting obscures a more sinister economic agenda? Following the assassination of Theo van Gogh in November by a Muslim extremist (a politically fortuitous event for Wilders), Wilders teamed up with the Edmund Burke foundation -- an arch-conservative Dutch think tank that seeks to limit the spread of Europe across Europe. He's also a darling of some American conservatives and libertarians, who welcomed him with open arms in his trip to the states in January. As the New York Observer reported (via the Dutch Report):

During his week-long tour, Mr. Wilder’s packed agenda includes the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, and the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform in Washington, D.C. He also plans to meet with Tim Goeglein, deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, who was described in a recent Washington Post profile as "a virtual middleman between the White House and conservatives of all stripes seeking to shape its policies."

So at least in part, it seems that Wilders has an ulterior agenda other than simply immigrant bashing. (Indeed, this includes the libertarian wet dream of reducing by half the number of civil servants on the payroll.) Sadly, it seems that there is no politician in Europe who’s better at the bait and switch than Wilders -- and the “nee” vote is clearly a victory for him.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

BANAL EU POINT. David Adesnik has a nice roundup of the "EU Rorshach Test" where American pundits of various stripes are more or less seeing what they want to see in the Franco-Dutch rejection of the new constitution. I'd like to make the banal point that there may not be very much to understand here. France is one country. Add the Netherlands and you've got two countries. The EU has a lot of members. Significantly more countries have approved the constitution than rejected it. Looking at the rejectors and drawing broad conclusions about why "Europe" turned against the constitution is a bit like looking at the 2004 election and wondering why Americans turned sour on George W. Bush. You'd have a hard time answering the question, of course, because they didn't turn sour.

The European Union simply has an extremely cumbersome mechanism for making fundamental changes. Each and every member state needs to agree, and there are a lot of member states. There's a pretty good reason for making it that cumbersome, but when something fails to pass the high procedural bars that says more about the process than anything else. The U.S. Constitution is very hard to amend. The treaties governing the EU are much harder to amend. So when people propose big changes, those changes are likely to fail. This has a lot of implications for European integration as such, but probably not much in the way of implications for broader trends in European opinion.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUDICIAL REVIEW. Today is another slow news day in what may shape up to be a whole slow news summer, so you might want to check out this Legal Affairs debate on the subject of whether or not judicial review is a good idea. Lately, the "anti" position has mostly been pushed by social conservatives, but there's a venerable tradition of attacks from the left on this concept, and Mark Tushnet is advancing that case. I've been a left opponent of judicial review since I read Jeremy Waldron's work (see, e.g., this PDF file) and have succeeded in convincing approximately zero of the people I know that Waldron and Tushnet are right about this.

My friend Julian Sanchez wrote a defense of judicial review for Reason a little while back that I also think is worth reading. The thing about Julian, though, is that he's a libertarian and Reason is a libertarian magazine. If I, like him, subscribed to a morally bankrupt fringe ideology I, too, would be a judicial review enthusiast because fundamentally (in the common-law context) it's a libertarian institution providing an additional check against government activism in all spheres. My preference would be for a system like Canada's, where courts review legislation's compatibility with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms but the Notwithstanding Clause allows legislatures to temporarily override judicial strikedowns and indefinitely extend such overrides if the political consensus holds up.

Needless to say, this falls under the category of "things that really, really, really" aren't going to happen and I have some less wildly unrealistic (but still pretty damn unrealistic) political reforms I'd like to push (multiple-member constituencies for House elections, unicameral state legislatures, etc.) so perhaps it's best not to waste too much time on this topic.

--Matthew Yglesias

ADD-ONS, YES; NEGOTIATIONS, NO. In an excellent column, Gene Sperling explains why even those of us who are enthusiastic about the idea of add-on savings vehicles and other such things should still dogmatically hold the line on the question of carved-out accounts.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WATERGATE'S LOST LEGACY. Bob Woodward can't be faulted for never again reaching the heights of investigative journalism as he did during Watergate. But he can -- and should -- be faulted for helping turn D.C. journalism into a sycophantic self-parody, David Sirota laments.

--Jeffrey Dubner

NOTHING PERSONAL, JUST BIDNESS. It turns out -- shocker! -- that when it comes to choosing a chairman for the SEC, George W. Bush really does prefer the slavish business stoogery of a Harvey Pitt to the independence of the man he picked to replace Pitt two and a half years ago, Bush family friend William Donaldson. In the face of business grumblings and the continued concern of Donaldson’s fellow Republican panelists that he was a little too serious about actually doing his job, Bush canned him yesterday. Donaldson’s replacement will be California congressman and uber–economic conservative Chris Cox, whose trailblazing 1996 tort reform bill, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, which weakened investor protections and “limited the liability of accountants who blew audits and of others who were found guilty of fraud,” made him an obvious choice for this administration. Let the rollbacks begin!

--Sam Rosenfeld

CDBG LIVES. Over at his new digs, Matt recently plugged this Richmond Times-Dispatch article on Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) and the threat they face from George W. Bush’s budget. The piece provides a helpful picture of the kinds of functions the grants serve, which extend well beyond projects targeted directly at the poor to include infrastructure, public services, and just general hole-plugging for city budgets. As Alyssa Katz discussed in a Prospect piece last month, there are plenty of problems with the administration and allocation of these grants, but they often serve as a needed source of revenue for municipalities in an era of budget austerity at the state and local levels.

The Bush administration proposed to consolidate CDBG and related HUD programs into a single, much smaller initiative run by the (traditionally more business-friendly) Commerce Department. The smart money was always on Congress bucking the White House on this move, and as subscription-only CQ reports today, the smart money was right:

Also on a fast track to oblivion is a Bush proposal to consolidate 18 economic development programs into one Commerce Department program. Mayors quickly denounced the idea because it would effectively eliminate the popular Community Development Block Grant program they strongly support and would cut overall funding for these programs. Commerce still plans on pushing the idea when it submits a more detailed proposal to Congress, but the House Science-State-Justice-Commerce bill already has sailed without it.

This is news to be cheered, though I can’t resist using it to point out for the trillionth time how truly pathetic the modern GOP has become on these budget issues, from a small-government conservative's perspective. Discretionary spending on poverty is supposed to be the first casualty of any garden-variety starve-the-beast gambit, and on the margins one could say that this has been the case in the past few years. But if a unified Republican government running enormous deficits can’t manage to make even a dent in a program targeted at impoverished neighborhoods and their predominantly Democratic municipal governments, exactly how seriously should we take that party’s supposed governing philosophy?

--Sam Rosenfeld

EDWARDS MOVES INTO THE NEW MEDIA SPACE. John Edwards isn't just taking to blogging like a fish to water over at TPMCafe, he's also doing some pretty serious outreach to those who occupy the new media space more generally. Last night the former vice-presidential candidate had a bunch of the political bloggers over for dinner at his D.C. house, I'm told, to meet with him, his internet team, and his wife. Attendees included: Taegan Goddard, Matt Stoller, Stirling Newberry, Ezra Klein, and Oliver Willis, among others.

Focusing on the blogosphere is a pretty smart way for Edwards to keep his name in print and before the eyes of the mainstream media over the next few years. And with Howard Dean declining an '08 run, there's room for a new player in the blogosphere/new media space that used to be exclusively his. Gaining the loyalty of bloggers -- which is not that hard to do if you just talk to them -- could have implications for Edwards' future fundraising and media strategies, should he decide to run for office again, either nationally or in North Carolina. And it will certainly give him a higher media profile on an ongoing basis if his goal is to be a Democratic Party and issue leader rather than a candidate. The one thing I'd note is that he did not seem to reach out to any of the women bloggers. Perhaps he should have a word with Kevin Drum about where that can lead.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

NEW ATTACK IN DARFUR. It’s somewhat bizarre to be breaking news about an attack in Darfur on a blog, but as this is the most immediate forum at my disposal, here we go:

I just got off the phone with David Brown of Aegis Trust, a British NGO dedicated to confronting genocide around the world. As part of the organization’s mandate, Aegis documents crimes against humanity. To that end they’ve had contacts on the ground in Darfur collecting information on the ongoing genocide.

Brown told me that on Friday, May 27, a contact reported to Aegis Trust that he saw four Sudanese military helicopter gunships take off from an airbase near El Fashir in Northern Darfur. The observer then heard the gunships fire and saw evidence of civilian casualties, including a young girl who was evacuated to a hospital. (The number of casualties at this point remains unclear.) Other than saying that the witness was not Darfuri, Brown could not reveal his identity for fear that it would put his life at risk. Interestingly, he says that an international organization could confirm details of the attack, but it may not do so publicly for fear of reprisals on its staff.

Now, in the grand scheme of things, this attack in Northern Darfur would not be all that significant. These kinds of attacks have occurred frequently in Darfur. Indeed, aerial attacks by helicopter gunships and bombings by Antonov aircrafts have been Khartoum's modi operandi over the past few years in killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and making refugees of millions more.

But while this attack was ordinary in nature, its timing was anything but. First, it occurred while Kofi Annan was in Khartoum. Second, the gunships attacked on the same day that Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick -- the administration’s point man on Sudan policy -- told a gathering of reporters over in Foggy Bottom that Sudan had grounded its fleet of gunships. At 4 p.m. on Friday, in preparation for this week's trip to Sudan, Zoellick embraced the government of Sudan's efforts to find a political solution to the conflict in Darfur and claimed that "they have stood down the helicopters and the gunships, they've stopped their offensives, but you still do have some of the friction with the militias and the Jingaweit."

I haven't heard back from the State Department yet to confirm details of the attack, but if I do, I'll post. In the meantime, Zoellick may want to ask the genocidaires that he'll meet this week why they're determined to make him look like such a fool.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

SHOULD YOU BUY A HYBRID CAR? No, according to a new study which says that despite rising gasoline prices, the additional cost of buying a hybrid still trumps the savings at the pump. A few interesting conclusions follow from this. One is that if we really want to see more people adopt this fuel-efficient technology, we'd better go in for some combination of higher gasoline taxes and a bigger hybrid tax credit. My preference is for gas taxes because the government needs more revenue rather than less.

But another consequence is that perhaps we shouldn't be too worried about the prospect that gas prices will keep rising fairly rapidly for the next several years. A lot of people I know seem to feel that car buyers irrationally underestimate the financial impact of fuel economy when making their purchasing decisions, and that this gives us reason to fear that market mechanisms alone won't make everything balance out in the long run. The fact that people are, in fact, buying hybrids even though they aren't worth the additional money seems to indicate the reverse -- consumers either irrationally overestimate the financial benefits of fuel efficiency, or else have non-monetary preferences (about, e.g., the environment or national security) that factor in favor of buying fuel-efficient cars. This suggests that there's plenty of room for growth in the hybrid market and that many more people will start buying these cars as gas prices drift upwards. Even better, most everyone seems to agree that if demand for hybrids goes up, per-unit construction costs (and therefore resale prices) will start dropping, pushing sales higher.

--Matthew Yglesias

WORST ... BOOK ... EVER. If you're looking for a good, multifaceted glimpse at wingnut dementia you can't do better than peruse Human Events' list of the 10 most harmful books of human history, in which we learn that John Maynard Keynes' General Theory and Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique are roughly on a par with Mein Kampf. The Origin of Species didn't quite make the top 10 list, but it was a pretty close call.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: AMMO FOR THE ENEMY. Religious degradation wasn't just a byproduct of detentions at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. It was a policy. Deborah Pearlstein recounts the evidence and explains why it's bad for our morality and our security.

--Jeffrey Dubner

SO FAIR, SO BALANCED, SO WRONG. Ah, Matt Miller, what will we do with you? Today's column quite rightly skewers the GOP's "big government" fraud and then goes on for a fair and balanced attack on the Democrats:

And imagine if Democrats said it was time to stop scaring seniors about the G.O.P.'s nefarious plans for Medicare. Truly "new" Democrats would instead teach party activists something different: that the enemy of liberal causes a decade from now will not be the evil heirs of Newt Gingrich, but Medicare itself. That's because every dollar spent on soaring Medicare bills that isn't needed for quality care (in our wasteful health system) is a dollar that liberals won't be able to spend on a poor child.

For one thing, the notion that there's a one-to-one tradeoff between spending on health care for senior citizens and spending on poor children is pretty silly and someone who used to work in the OMB ought to know better. More substantively, though, this portrait of a Democratic Party hell-bent on making Medicare as expensive as possible is simply outdated. Not only did the Republican Party recently pass into law a massively expensive Medicare "reform" package, but the Democratic alternative would have cost less money. Not only did the GOP's new prescription-drug entitlement cost a bundle of money, but their various, allegedly cost-controlling reforms overwhelmingly involve increasing subsidies to various corporations and serve to make Medicare even more expensive.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE AMNESTY FLIP-FLOP. The gang at Think Progress points out that not long ago the Bush administration, like seemingly everyone else this side of Hu Jintao, thought Amnesty International was a credible source of information about human-rights abuses around the world. But now that Amnesty is criticizing the administration's policies with regard to detainees, we hear that Dick Cheney doesn't "take them seriously," Scott McClellan thinks their work is "ridiculous," and Richard Myers calls it "irresponsible." Cheney, at least, is telling the truth -- he doesn't now and never has taken human-rights issues seriously, he's just pretended to do so now and again in order to score political points.

I think it's fair to say that there's some overheated rhetoric in that Amnesty report. That notwithstanding, however, there's still every reason to take the information contained therein seriously.

--Matthew Yglesias