REAL SOLUTIONS, REAL SAVINGS. Over at The Angry Bear, Kash, the blogosphere's second most prolific provider of health care wonkery, writes about the likely costs incurred (or saved) in a switch to single-payer:

another useful data point we can examine the case of Taiwan, a country that replaced a collection of different insurance schemes with a National Health Insurance program in 1995. The percent of Taiwanese with health insurance rose from about 60% in 1994 to 96% a few years later. It turns out that in Taiwan's case, the forces that would increase costs roughly balanced the forces that would decrease costs.[...]

the evidence suggests that single-payer systems are cheaper than the US's system. While this is not conclusive evidence for what might happen if the US were to adopt a single-payer plan, it does seem to place the burden of proof on those who would argue that such a plan would increase medical spending in the US.

This tracks with past GAO and CBO reports, the experiences of all other relevant countries, and pure common sense. In a single-payer system, there will be some increased costs -- namely, full insurance for 60-70 million folks who are either under- or uninsured -- but many more savings, mainly through lower service and pharmaceutical expenses, efficiencies of scale, increased preventive medicine, and administrative efficiencies. I should also mention that everyone will have health coverage, even though that's not one of those values that the media tends to judge important. Apparently, the time Jesus spent providing free health care across the Galilean countryside wasn't brought up when the evangelicals set their legislative priorities.

Tonight, the president will offer some tweaks in the tax deductibility of health insurance and the contribution limits of HSA's. It's not enough. It will not give the 46 million uninsured Americans health insurance, it will not slow the rapid growth of health costs, and it will not save our health system. Bush has, in the past, gotten a lot of mileage out of his reputation for Big Ideas and Transformative Thinking. Tonight, his ideas will be small and regressive, as useless as they are objectionable. Bush's job will be convincing a compliant media otherwise.

--Ezra Klein

CHINA VERSUS INDIA. MIT professor Hasheng Huang mounts a convincing argument that India is actually better positioned than China for strong economic growth over the medium term. I would only add that India is unquestionably better positioned for the medium-term political stability that's a prerequisite for sustained economic growth.

--Matthew Yglesias

BLUNT'S TEST. The Hill's article about how this week's House vote on the truly vile budget reconciliation bill relates to Roy Blunt's prospects as the favored candidate for Majority Leader is actually quite interesting. This bill (on which Democrats used a clever procedural gambit to force one last, inconveniently timed vote in the House) has always commanded razor-thin margins of majority support. The Hill mentions a few of the Republican moderates who may defect and switch their vote from yea to nay (Rob Simmons is the only one who has explicitly announced his plan to do so); on top of political calculations related to the bill itself, horse race considerations pertaining to the leadership race may play a part here. Certain lawmakers may be calculating that foiling the bill's passage could undermine Blunt's authority as a whip counter and effective conference leader -- and thus undermine the appeal of his candidacy for Majority Leader. It is an extreme longshot that such a dynamic might actually result in the bill's failure to pass, but it will nevertheless be worth watching closely how Blunt manages to whip this vote at the same time he's locked in such a hotly contested leadership race.

As a side note, the most significant organizational opposition to this bill has come from the Emergency Campaign for America's Priorities (ECAP), which was created using much of the infrastructure and personnel of the liberal coalition Americans United to Protect Social Security (AUPSS). Even while ECAP is functioning as its own temporary offshoot, however, AUPSS is itself relaunching as a broader-focused liberal advocacy outfit called simply Americans United, which is currently initiating a campaign to highlight GOP ethics scandals. When it comes to political advocacy work, organizational stability and brand clarity certainly have their virtues, but I must admit I've been rather intrigued by this chameleonlike liberal outfit lurking in the shadows and changing its name and focus as different issues pop up. It's like the Keyser Soze of left-wing political opposition.

UPDATE: Mike Fitzpatrick and Chris Shays are two other moderates who are publicly mulling switching their votes from yea to nay. I should be clear that those two as well as Simmons are all public Blunt supporters, so the dynamic I'm speculating about -- wherein folks think about foiling the bill so as to foil Blunt's candidacy -- doesn't apply to them. And this dynamic is, I stress, entirely speculative.

UPDATE II: Okay, Simmons is not a public Blunt supporter. Lordy!

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHEN THINK TANKS GO BAD. Over at Think Tank Town, the Washington Post blog focusing on the D.C. ideas industry, Ron Nessen is shocked -- shocked! -- to see the Center for American Progress (full disclosure: I've occasionally written for their subsidiary, Campus Progress) prejudging George Bush's State of the Union. He sniffs:

Think tanks are supposed to contribute new and original ideas, insights, and recommendations for solving America’s most pressing challenges.

Whatever its sophomoric reply-before-the-speech is supposed to achieve, the Center for American Progress is not offering new and original ideas, insights, and recommendations.

Yeesh. That prebuttal must have really ruined tea time. Unfortunately, Nessen's at a disadvantage from the beginning: this isn't a think tank town; it's a Republican one. And until the right cures its allergy to bipartisanship or the left starts winning some elections, not a single idea that CAP could stomach will make a smidge of difference. Banging his spoon over their childish involvement in the political sphere, then, is intentionally naive.

Of course, it takes a truly mediacentric perspective to believe that a think tank oversteps its bounds and diminishes its integrity if it dares to contextualize a coming speech. Sections on Bush's substantive record on energy policy, the actual distributive impacts of his tax cuts, and the mechanics of Health Savings Accounts are the sort of things SOTU coverage could use more, not less, of. Instead, every year, this newborn babe named Bush toddles to the podium, everyone ooh's and aah's over his prodigious performance, and last year's speech, not to mention the last term's record, vanishes down the memory hole.

If you want ideas, The Center for American Progress has a worthy set in their progressive priorities series. In fact, their homepage is anchored by a massive button on the top right that blares "15 NEW IDEAS!" You can't miss it. Nessen, somehow, did. But then, while I've found the Center's health, tax, and energy plans particularly appealing, I've not noticed them netting much coverage in The Washington Post. I blame my poor reading comprehension (a product of public schools, for which CAP also has a comprehensive set of ideas on); I don't really know what his excuse is.

--Ezra Klein

GAMBLING WITH THE PUNDITS. After several years of screwing up Iran policy, the Bush administration finally seems to have settled on a fairly prudent course of semi-effective diplomacy and is so far rejecting the lie-like-crazy strategy preferred by conservative pundits. For that reason, my judgment is that the Iranian nuclear program probably won't come up in the State of the Union speech. What the White House is doing right now is too similar to the much-derided (by the White House) John Kerry policy to want to huff and puff about, but I don't think the crazy faction inside the administration is going to take control this week. My colleague Mark Goldberg disagrees and we have $10 riding on the question. If commenters want to get in on the action, we can consider transitioning this site away from boring, old political commentary into the web's premiere gambling outlet.

--Matthew Yglesias

GOOGLING IN CHINESE. There's a bit of a controversy afoot about Google's decision to launch a semi-censored version of their search engine for China. I think it's a good sign for the world that people are a bit discomfited with what Google's doing here, but at the end of the day it's hard to see how they're making the wrong call. Even the censored Google is going to provide China's population with more access to information than no Google at all would have.

This, it seems to me, is how the general issue of "engagement" with China plays out. It involves distasteful compromises, but at the end of the day, even a dictatorship as small and weak as Cuba hasn't cracked under 40 years of hardball tactics and there's every reason to think China is going to be much less vulnerable to that sort of thing. Thanks to the increasing sophistication of authoritarian regimes and their ability to pressure private companies, economic integration and technological progress don't turn out to undermine dictatorships to nearly the extent that one might have hoped they would ten years ago. But, still, at least some of the hoped-for effect is present and, obviously, if history teaches us anything, it's that access to a fully enabled native language version of Google is not a fundamental prerequisite for democracy. Despite all the problems, a Chinese person in 2005 has much more ability to acquire accurate information than did a resident of any of your traditional 20th century dictatorships.

--Matthew Yglesias

A FOOLISH CONSISTENCY. The prize for most wrongheaded Iran commentary of the week goes to Jeffrey Bell, who seems to think we ought to go to war purely because to do otherwise would be to prove that the administration isn't seriously committed to the so-called "Bush doctrine." But of course the administration isn't seriously committed to the Bush doctrine. This has come in several different forms, but depending on which formulation you prefer, it implies that we ought to go to war not only with Iran, but also with Pakistan and China (or maybe both) which is crazy. You need to judge our policy options on their merits, not by comparison with overheated years-old rhetoric.

Note also Bell's description of Iran's president as "a man who says the Jewish Holocaust never happened and muses about the possibility of correcting that Nazi failure by dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel." The Holocaust denial is real enough, but this musing about an unprovoked nuclear first strike on Israel simply never happened.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHEN THE CONTRAS STRIKE BACK. Here’s an A10 story that should have been on A1: A little noticed provision of the 2006 Defense Authorization act lets the Pentagon distribute foreign military aid in the service of “counter-terrorism" and "stability operations” without any of those pesky conditions, like human rights guarantees, that are typically tied to foreign military assistance. According to The Post, some $200 million in the Pentagon’s budget can now go directly to foreign armies without having to weave its way through the series of regulations that generally accompany these kinds of transactions. Further, the direct Pentagon-to-foreign-military line diminishes the State Department’s role in foreign policy formation. Generals and Pentagon civilians, not diplomats, can set their own terms for foreign military assistance.

Knowing the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, it’s not too much of a stretch to think that some unsavory regime on the horn of Africa or elsewhere can use the historic rivalries between the State Department and the Pentagon to their advantage, forgoing State’s human rights and big-picture foreign policy concerns while securing Pentagon cash. Further, orders to disburse the funds must come directly from the president, making this stash his own discretionary fund for financing armies here and there across the world -- their commitment to democracy and human rights be damned.

I suppose (to coin a neologism) this “Pentagonization” of American foreign policy is to be expected when we live in an era of endless war. And I suppose too that circumventing traditional military aid assistance conventions is to be expected from the Iran Contra alums in our foreign policy establishment. But what’s truly intriguing about this measure is how it mirrors the way that China now approaches the developing world; they have the single priority of securing the unfettered flow of natural resources from Africa, and to that end shower certain unsavory regimes, like Sudan and Zimbabwe, with their largesse. Now, if the Pentagon decides (and the president concurs), we too can eliminate human rights and democratization concerns as a factor when deciding what small scale wars others can wage in the name of counter-terrorism. Hurray for progress!

--Mark Leon Goldberg

CHANGE YOUR MIND, HUH? AARP is apparently seeking redemption for their shameful support of the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit bill by demanding inclusion of all the critical elements originally left out: government authority to negotiate prices, legal reimportation of Canadian drugs, less stringent asset-inclusion when determining subsidization levels, and so forth. All good ideas, though the level of the pander is really revealed by the fact that two of them, both popular, contradict: if the government could bargain drug prices, Canadian reimportation would be redundant. Nevertheless, these would be fundamental changes in the right direction, and if AARP could obtain them in advance of the 2006 election, it would be to their credit.

But good as it is to see AARP returning to the light, their complicity in the bill's creation and passage shouldn't be forgotten. The best recounting of their betrayal came from Barbara Dreyfuss who detailed the Republican seduction of AARP for The American Prospect's June 2004 issue. It was understood then, as now, that AARP had hoped their support would lead to increased influence in the Republican Party. But as Bush' Social Security push proved, that wasn't quite the case. Now, as AARP returns to lobby on the benefit they helped pass, we'll see if their strategy bears any more fruit, and eventually creates a decent prescription drug benefit for their members. Somehow, I'm not optimistic.

Update: It's probably worth linking here to my Devil in the Details on AARP's attempts to profit off the confusion of their own bill. It's one thing to grudgingly accept a private health provider structure, it's fully another to help pass it then participate in the market -- that's the role of the insurance industry, not a supposedly nonpartial advocacy group. Click here and scroll down to "Drug Beneficiary" for the sordid little tale. Happily, the day I called AARP for comment, they killed the Google ads. See? Journamalism can change the world.

--Ezra Klein

SPENDING CUTS: NOT ACTUALLY POPULAR. Subscription-only CQ alerts us to the GOP's secret plan to win the midterms:

Lawmakers still haven’t finished fighting last year’s budget battles but are preparing this week for the fiscal 2007 budget process, which is expected to include further belt-tightening even in the charged atmosphere of election-year politicking.

With President Bush pledging to again hold the line on non-security domestic discretionary spending in the plan he will deliver Feb. 6, lawmakers are bracing for another year of tight appropriations and the prospect of another savings package aimed at entitlement programs including Medicare and Medicaid…

[Senate Budget Committee Chairman] Gregg maintains that Republicans should make cutting the budget their “cause celebre” and view it as a positive, not a negative factor for their election campaigns.

That's some ace political advice from the New Hampshire senator! I hardly think anyone should be holding their breath for major budget-cutting boldness this year. But to the extent that the recent bout of introspective GOP soul-searching has focused attention on the party's abandonment of core conservative small-government principles, liberals and Democrats have all the reason in the world to hope that Republicans do decide to actually put in an effort to redeem themselves and revive some of the old time religion.

Reading some of the conservative paeans to John Shadegg's candidacy in this week's House leadership race, you'd get the impression that Tom DeLay and George W. Bush and other Republican leaders somehow neglected to cut government spending in the last five years by mistake, or merely as a result of personal perfidy and corruption. That's quite silly. Spending hasn't been cut because spending cuts are unpopular. The modern Republican Party's well-oiled political machinery took the shape it did partly as a result of the very unpopularity of the party's small-government ideological mission. The agenda of the Republican Study Committee -- the band of House Republican ultras before whom all three Majority Leader candidates are auditioning today in Baltimore -- would be grossly unpopular if implemented, and Democrats could only be so lucky as to watch a Majority Leader Shadegg put in a good-faith effort to steer conference policy in the RSC's direction.

On a similar note, a Republican Hill staffer hinted excitedly to me a few weeks ago about the explosive budget and spending-related initiatives Bush would be unveiling in his State of the Union address (initiatives that would go beyond holding the line on discretionary spending). The staffer's tone indicated that he thought the political salability of such budget-cutting proposals was self-evident. I strongly suspect that the political operation inside the White House hasn't in fact gone sufficiently haywire for the president's political strategists actually to deem a renewed commitment to serious spending cuts a stellar idea in an election year -- but one can always hope.

--Sam Rosenfeld

GET ANGRY, GUYS. Over at Huffington Post, Arianna imagines what would happen if Tim Russert grilled members of the Bush administration with the kind of heat Oprah used to fricassee James Frey. She quotes Oprah as follows:

WINFREY: I really feel duped. I feel duped. ... I feel that you betrayed millions...I feel that you conned us all...

FREY: I've struggled with the idea of it, and...

WINFREY: No, the lie of it. That's a lie. It's not an idea, James, that's a lie.

Arianna's obviously being fanciful, and Lord knows Oprah shouldn't be the press corps's role model, but in a funny way Arianna's onto something. Oprah's reaction to being lied to was to get angry. In recent months, Bush administration officials have used the major networks or newspapers -- whether in speeches or in interviews -- to broadcast an extraordinary array of lies, the most visible being the assertion that Congress had access to the same intelligence they did before Iraq, and the immense falsehood that Democrats oppose the wiretapping of terrorists. There's little question that most members of the media view their role with some seriousness and see themselves as serving their audiences by holding public officials accountable to the truth. But these officials have demonstrated nothing but contempt for them as professionals, nothing but contempt for their mission, and nothing but contempt for their audiences. When are these media mavens -- David Gregory aside -- going to get angry?

In All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein describe a press conference where Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register angrily confronts Nixon campaign official Clark MacGregor at a moment of extreme stonewalling during Watergate:

MacGregor and Mollenhoff looked like two giants getting ready to lay clubs on each other. "What credibility do you have?" Mollenhoff shouted..."What documents have you seen?" Mollenhoff demanded. "Because if you can't gell us, you have no right to stand there." ... Others were shouting at him now, though none as vigorously as Mollenhoff. "Why should we sit here and listen to you, why should we print a word you say?" he insisted.

No question -- there were plenty of failings during that supposed golden age of journalism, and in some ways the craft of reporting has never been better. But still, you have to wonder -- when are Russert and the gang going to decide that enough is enough and really, seriously get angry about being lied to all the time?

-- Greg Sargent

WHAT THE QDR SHOULD SAY. I've been despairing a bit lately about the Democratic national security establishment in this town, but I'm fairly impressed by the Center for American Progress' in-house Quadrennial Defense Review. The real QDR is something the Pentagon does every four years and it's enormously important for setting budgetary priorities which, in turn, help determine the strategic priorities of the future. It's also the sort of thing that liberal institutions haven't traditionally focused on because it doesn't have any obvious short-term political implications and doesn't especially impact any of the most important liberal interest groups in the country. But those habits of neglect wind up creating crippling political problems in the long run.

Not only is it good to see attention being paid to the topic, but the CAP QDR seems substantively smart to me as well. Hopefully some Democratic politicians are paying attention.

--Matthew Yglesias

BEYOND GERRYMANDERING. Here's a weird but important source of Republican electoral strength -- the census counts prisoners as residents of wherever their prison is located. At the same time, prisoners can't vote and prisons are usually located in sparsely-populated conservative areas. The upshot of this is to pad a lot of Republican legislative districts with phantom constituents. The impact on congressional districts is smallish, but the impact on state legislature districts is often quite big.

--Matthew Yglesias

SEDUCTIONS OF THE MERITOCRACY. There's some real insight in David Ignatius's column from Davos, but this really cheeses me off:

"We want the brilliant mathematician whose mother is a chambermaid in Romania," says [Harvard President Larry] Summers. That's the most attractive face of globalization -- the idea that the great universities are creating a colorblind meritocracy that doesn't care where you're from as long as you did well on the SAT.

People need to think harder before holding this up as a worthy ideal. Suppose we were creating "an intelligence-blind pigmentocracy that doesn't care how well you did on the SAT, as long as you were born with pale skin." That would be bad, right? Since people shouldn't have crappy lives just because they have dark skin. So why should people have crappy lives just because they're in the bottom 30 percent of the intelligence distribution curve? Granted, unlike with skin color, it's good to have some inequality determined by "merit," because if you didn't allow any, it would be hard to generate any kind of economic activity and absolute living standards everywhere would be very low. But there are real limits to how far that rationale can take you. People should read Michael Young's book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, in which the term was coined -- meritocracy was supposed to be a bad thing.

Worst of all, in some ways, is that a social/economic system that affords unjustly high levels of reward to the clever is likely to attract a huge number of extremely clever defenders. It further invites these people to confuse "merit" -- the possession of skills that happen to be demanded at a high level by people who can afford to buy them -- with the intuitive idea of merit as meaning something like "goodness." In the famous dream where people would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” standardized test scores didn't enter into the picture.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE ON THE PORK DODGE. We obviously don't see eye to eye on the big-picture questions here, but it is nice to see some Cornerites noting that much more is being made of brave, "principled" calls for earmark reform than is really deserved.

This recent, incessant conflation of opposition to domestic discretionary pork with a serious, thoroughgoing commitment to fiscal responsibility or true small-government conservatism is getting mighty annoying. While it's true that lobbyist-fuelled earmarking has metastasized under GOP rule, it is only one element (and not a central one) in the systemic and quite novel machinery of corruption that Republicans instituted on Capitol Hill in the last decade and that underlies the array of scandal stories now dominating the news. And efforts to cast "porkbusting" as central to a serious small government vision are even more absurd. Like harping on government waste to justify massive tax cuts, obsessing over pork helps conservatives to obscure and evade basic choices about revenue and outlays as they actually exist in the real world.

The Heritage Foundation's budget policy guru, Brian Riedl, has a new six-part proposal to "restrain lobbyists and special interests" that illustrates the point. Items one through four consist of small-bore reforms pertaining to earmarking and appropriations. Then, suddenly, in the fifth and sixth items you get some real small-government red meat -- suggestions for structural entitlement caps and a federal version of Colorado's disastrous Taxpayer's Bill of Rights that, if implemented, would result in truly massive, cruel, and almost comically unpopular spending cuts. (John Shadegg's close ally Jeb Hensarling has proposed these kinds of spending cap reforms for years; here's a 2004 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities assessment of the damage they would wreak.) Earmarks are a red herring.

--Sam Rosenfeld

TASTY, TASTY SOCIALISM. EPI says we're all on the dole:

Based on Defense Department estimates of the number of private-sector jobs created by its own spending, we project that additional defense spending will account for a 1.495 million gain in private sector jobs between FY2001 and FY2006. Furthermore, increases in non-defense discretionary spending since 2001 will have added yet another 1.325 million jobs in the private sector, for a total of 2.82 million jobs created by increased government spending. Increased mandatory government spending—which is not even included in these estimates or the accompanying chart—would account for even more job creation. The mere fact that the projected job growth resulting from increased defense and other government spending exceeds the actual number of jobs projected to be added to the economy through 2006 clearly indicates that the tax cuts hardly seem plausible as the engine of the modest job growth in the economy since 2001.

Intriguing. Meanwhile, the Joint Economic Council attributes today's bad growth numbers to "an unexpected 7.0 percent drop in government spending (lead largely by decreased defense spending)."

CORRECTION: Reader B.B. notes that it's the Joint Economic Committee, an arm of congress. Apologies for the error.

--Matthew Yglesias

DEMOCRACY SPRINGS, ATTACKS. I think Andrew Sullivan makes a relevant point about Palestine here, although he doesn't quite mention that it applies primarily to the writings of Andrew Sullivan. The neoconservatives' rapturous musings on the virtues of democracy have tended to conflate the ability to vote with the propensity to choose liberal, pluralistic governments. One problem: that's not the case.

In unstable or frustrated societies, democracy is actually the most dangerous of all systems, as reckless demagogues who would normally be repelled by the institutionalized defenders of the status quo need merely whip up a sufficient mass of the populace to take office, which is exactly the sort of thing reckless demagogues are good at doing. Moreover, during this period of widespread, deep-seated anti-Americanism, even more acceptable candidates and contenders will feel electoral pressure to out-anti-American their competitors, as demonizing us emerges as an easy, costless method of attracting support. Face it: we're now the gay marriage of the Muslim world, so waxing lyrical over the benefits Arab democracy will bring us is a little silly.

--Ezra Klein

POLITICIZE AWAY! The Hill ran a piece yesterday about how House Democrats still, at this late date, are maintaining the ethics truce and refraining from filing complaints against Republican members. There's a political strategy of a sort underlying this, though I don't find it very persuasive:

“The Justice Department is moving, and there’s no reason to interfere and give the Republicans a tool to say the investigation is being politicized,” the Democratic lawmaker said. “That’s not in their rhetoric, and right now they have to answer the Justice Department’s charges. Once it looks like it’s political, they don’t have to answer that.”

Democrats also said that they would not move forward because the panel remains shuttered after a months-long partisan disagreement over how to staff the committee and that the committee would not pursue an investigation in tandem with the Justice Department.

The full piece offers further details on how the Democrats might actually benefit from keeping the ethics panel in continual limbo, since they can make accusations without filing official complaints and still express outrage about the stalemate that's preventing investigations from going forward.

As I've written before, I think this delicate thread-the-needle strategy on ethics, wherein Democrats try to reap political rewards from the issue without appearing to "politicize" it too explicitly (and, of course, without risking losing any of their own incumbents as collateral damage), is fairly dubious; nine months away from a critical election is surely the time for some go-for-broke recklessness on this front if Democrats actually want to shake things up. And the Justice Department investigation excuse is a red herring; there are endless non-Abramoff-related scandals or potential scandals that Democrats could be working to spotlight. CREW just drafted a complaint against Roy Blunt for sleazy lobbying-related malfeasance that has nothing to do with anything currently under federal investigation. If Democrats wanted to stir the pot a bit more aggressively on ethics, they could.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHO HATES THE DEMOCRATS? Yet another poll shows that yet again, disgruntlement with the GOP doesn't necessarily mean approval of the Democrats. But this made me wonder:

Just 36% expressed a favorable opinion of congressional Democrats, whereas 45% viewed them unfavorably. That's statistically the same as the showing for congressional Republicans, who were viewed favorably by 38% and unfavorably by 44%.

"I was watching the news … and I heard nothing from the Democrats," said Dez Jackson, 20, a cashier in Greenville, S.C., who was sharply critical of the president in the survey. "What are they, afraid to speak up?"

Jackson's just expressing a kind of typical liberal bitchiness here that I think we can all sympathize with. There's a big difference between this sentiment and the sort of genuine doubts about the Democrats' capacity to lead that proved to be their undoing in 2004. It would be good to see some kind of breakout that distinguished between liberal disapproval of the Democrats à la Jackson, and moderate disapproval -- the two have rather different electoral implications.

--Matthew Yglesias

CHRISTMAS FOR THE CREDIT INDUSTRY. It's looking like HSAs, much like Social Security privatization, contain a not-so-surprising point of convergence between national policy and massive giveaways to Wall Street:

Banks and others are drawn by the promise of lucrative fees they can generate by offering consumers mutual funds and other investment vehicles as their account balances grow. Most also charge $50 to $75 to set up a health savings account, and they collect perhaps $40 or more each year in maintenance charges and service fees.

Not since the creation of the individual retirement account in the mid-1970's has such a potentially huge mountain of money landed in the lap of the financial services industry.

I'm sure the $14.1 million raised by the financial services industry for the Bush reelection campaign didn't hurt matters. But wait, it gets even more awesome. As The New American Foundation's Cindy Zeldin noticed, HSAs are going to be putting the credit card industry's children through school while massively raising the real costs of health care for ordinary Americans. This is really as regressive as policy gets.

Here's how it works: About half of HSA holders don't put any money in their accounts. Many of the others sock away only paltry funds. And the national savings rate is at -- wait for it -- zero. So when health emergencies hit, HSA users, faced with massive deductibles and no stored wealth to combat it, charge them. Hospitals, ERs, and doctors now take credit cards, allowing health care costs to become interest-gathering debt. Indeed, in an effort to take maximum advantage of the trend, banks and health care companies are offering health credit cards with interest rates of up to 23 percent. So, for many, health costs won't merely be the original expense, but the years of accumulated interest payments afterwards. In real terms, operation X could, over time, end up costing the poor double, triple, or quadruple what the well-off can pay upfront.

For the lower middle class, to say nothing of the genuinely poor, that's what HSAs will look like: periods of financial calm interrupted by medical catastrophe that rapidly transforms itself into crushing, long-term debt. Currently, more than half of bankruptcies are traceable to medical costs. Let's just say I wouldn't expect that number to go down under a system of HSAs. I do, however, expect the financial industry to post record profits. Silver linings and all that.

--Ezra Klein

AN IMPORTANT POST ABOUT CENTRAL ASIA. The human rights situation in Uzbekistan has continued to deteriorate as local authorities ban fur-lined underwear, citing the risk of "unbridled fantasies."

--Matthew Yglesias

DEPARTMENT OF THE OBVIOUS. Thank God for The New York Times's crack public opinion research bringing us polls whose "results suggest that Americans' view of the program depends in large part on whether they perceive it as a bulwark in the fight against terrorism, as Mr. Bush has sought to cast it, or as an unnecessary and unwarranted infringement on civil liberties, as critics have said." Who could have guessed? Were they expecting strong support for unnecessary, unwarranted infringements of civil liberties and massive public skepticism of counterterrorist bulwarks?

At any rate, public opinion on this seems sensitive to question wording, and it's noteworthy that neither of the questions the Times asked mentioned the small matter that the program is in direct contravention of a clearly worded, duly passed law.

--Matthew Yglesias

"SOME HAVE EVEN CALLED IT ILLEGAL." The "officials say X while their critics say Y" convention of political journalism is obviously well-entrenched, but the NSA spying program debate -- specifically the debate over its legality -- illustrates once more how awkward and distorted that convention can sometimes render news coverage. The president's press conference this morning showed how weirdly difficult it is for journalists to discuss the wiretapping issue with administration officials using plain English. That's because the debate over whether the program is illegal isn't actually a debate at all.

George W. Bush answers every question on the matter by asserting that the NSA program is absolutely legal -- and then explains why he needed to violate the FISA statute to implement it. Forget for a minute that the administration refused to revise FISA when legislative action was proposed; instead, just consider his explanation (elaborated by Al Gonzales) on its own terms. There simply isn't an actual dispute between the administration and its critics about the legality of the spying program. The president himself says, in so many words, that FISA was inadequate to the task at hand, so they broke that law. To be sure, he then hammers the podium and yells out a meaningless "This program is legal!" But the substance of what he's saying doesn't even dispute that the program is, in fact, technically illegal. It's a bit odd. The only possible way to construe the logic of the administration's argument for the legality of the NSA program is to interpret it as an argument that the original FISA statute, still on the books, is simply unconstitutional. Either FISA is illegal or the NSA program is. As Richard Posner puts it succinctly in his otherwise problematic TNR article, "The administration and its defenders have responded that the program is perfectly legal; if it does violate FISA (the administration denies that it does), then, to that extent, the law is unconstitutional." (See more on this in Jacob Weissberg's shrill-to-the-max piece in Slate.)

But of course, Bush never actually says that. In so many words, his argument is that the NSA program may be illegal, but it's the right thing to do, and as the president he has an obligation to do it. And yet, invariably, what you read in the press is that "some critics have even questioned the program's legality."

--Sam Rosenfeld

ON THE OTHER HAND. Mark takes the approved optimist line on the Hamas election win. The other side of the story, however, is this: Hamas winning provides Israeli politicians who've never believed in the utility of negotiating with the Palestinians just the cover they've historically lacked in the international arena. After all, the Palestinian people have spoken and they've chosen Hamas, so what's to bargain about? Cliff May can be relied upon to relay the thinking of Israeli hawks, and he takes that line here as does Efraim Karsh here in The New Republic.

I think it's a bit hard to argue with the logic of the May/Karsh position on this. Israel refusing to negotiate with the Palestinians is, I think, bad for America but it seems to me like a reasonable posture for Israel to take. Insofar as the Hamas win can be used to shake off whatever international pressure exists for Israeli concessions, it makes perfect sense for the Israeli government to seize the opportunity. I think this is just one of those instances where American and Israeli interests diverge.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOW TO DEFEAT TERRORISTS… …Let them win elections.

To the extent that voters backed Hamas not because of their hard line politics, but because of their demonstrated ability to deliver key services on the local level, the Hamas victory ought not be seen as a popular expression for the support of terrorism. Indeed, the Hamas victory might even portend a great shift towards moderation in Palestinian politics; now that Hamas is the Palestinian government, they become beholden to the largesse of the EU and to a lesser extent the United States.

Hamas has a choice they have never faced before: renounce terrorism and receive foreign development assistance, or keep up the rhetoric and loose the confidence of foreign donors. Until they renounce terror, every dollar of development assistance given to the Palestinian authority ought to be thought of as investments in suicide belts. And if donors make that clear to Hamas, we might just see a huge breakthrough in the peace process.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE MOUSTACHE OF MISUNDERSTANDING. Oy. It sure would be nice if Robert Samuelson, the domestic policy columnist at The Washington Post, knew what he was talking about:

Now, some say that because the "market" has failed, greater government control is the answer. Private insurance has high overhead costs and generates too much paperwork. True. Still, there's not much evidence that over long periods government controls health spending any better. From 1970 to 2003, Medicare spending rose an average of 9 percent annually, reports the Kaiser Family Foundation. In the same years, private insurance costs rose 10.1 percent annually. Part of the gap reflected private insurance's greater generosity. It covered drugs while Medicare didn't.

Okay, one time, but slowly: Medicare is government-funded insurance, not government health care. Sheesh. Here’s some context: there is a standard Samuelson column moaning about health care's intractable dilemmas, namely that care costs money and folks don't like to spend it. Fair enough. And yet, care in other countries costs a whole lot less money and creates outcomes that are a whole lot better. I've even got a table:

Bemoan Medicare if you want, but don't mix up government-paid insurance operating within a private medical industrial complex with an actual government-run health system. We pay more and get less than other countries, a state of affairs that quite swiftly disproves Samuelson's concerned mustache-stroking over the impossible tradeoffs between care and cost. Our costs are artificially high and our care artificially low as compared to most every country with a nationalized system. Generally, when everyone else does X and gets better results than when you do Y, normal people conclude that the differences between X and Y are creating inefficiencies and needless costs. Robert Samuelson, unfortunately, sees things differently, and instead concludes Y to be an immutable state of affairs. I guess out-of-the-box thinking like that is why he gets paid the big bucks.

Update: It also occurs to me that he should read up on the Veteran's Health Administration, the only actual example of socialized health care in the country. It's also, it turns out, the best health care available in America.

You know, for a very reasonable hourly fee, I'm happy to tutor on this stuff.

--Ezra Klein.

BLOGOSPHERE: ACTUALLY ACCOMPLISHING SOMETHING! Bloggers often adopt a pose of self-importance that's all out of proportion to reality, but Glenn Greenwald's word on the NSA issue is actually making a difference. See this from The Washington Post, this from the LA Times, and this from Knight-Ridder. Good work!

To make a long story short, some gumshoe research by Greenwald has produced the goods demonstrating that the Bush administration was not, in fact, blind to the basic reality that violating (or "bypassing" as they say nowadays) the law is illegal. They just wanted to break the law, and so they did.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE WIDE NET. I'm not super-familiar with his work, but when I was in college I read a certain amount of Tariq Ramadan's writing and couldn't say I was a huge admirer of his way of thinking. That said, this business of barring him from entering the country for, in essence, having unpopular views of American foreign policy while being Muslim is a raw deal.

It's worth noting that this broad-brush approach to who is and is not a terrorist or a terrorist supporter (or, in NSA terms, an "associate" of an al-Qaeda "affiliate") is not merely unfair to individuals, but potentially counterproductive on a massive scale. One major reason the United States has not, as many feared, been plagued with post-9/11 terrorist attacks is that the American Muslim community doesn't contain lots of terror-loving radicals or people eager to blow themselves up in the name of jihad. Maintaining that status quo is of paramount importance to America's security, and painting too many people as terrorists is the easiest way to create a situation where every Muslim with out-of-the-mainstream opinions about this or that really does become a terrorist sympathizer. That would be a disaster.

--Matthew Yglesias

ENOUGH, BRODER. David Broder has done it again. In this morning’s Washington Post, Broder has written what must be his hundredth column bemoaning increasing partisan divisiveness in Washington as the main ill afflicting the republic. As evidence, he refers to several recent roll-call votes where the House or Senate tended to split along partisan lines, and concludes, yet again, that this outbreak of intense partisanship is ruining the country. He refers to the good old days of greater bi-partisanship and concludes that the present pattern is “likely to continue -- at least until the American public really rebels against this extreme partisanship and finds a way to demand a different approach to governing.”

But Broder, the genial dean of Washington pundits, gets it spectacularly wrong. He suggests, as he always does in this recurring column, that the evil is symmetrical. What has really happened in recent years, however, is a shift by tightly disciplined Republicans to the hard right, while Democrats have become more moderate and centrist. With the exception of old-line Dixiecrats, now largely replaced by southern Republicans, the congressional Democratic Party used to be a largely progressive party. Now, it’s divided between liberals and New Dems. And in case Broder missed it, dozens of Democrats actually voted with Bush on the president’s top priorities -- the Iraq War, the tax cuts, the Medicare Drug bill, and confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts.

The most important political science book in a decade, Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker’s Off Center, demolishes Broder and others who espoused the idea that symmetrical partisanship is wrecking democracy. Hacker and Pierson use voting data going back several decades to demonstrate what really happened.

Bi-partisanship flourished in the early Nixon era, when Nixon worked with both parties (and a Democratic Congress) to get environmental and consumer legislation, and in the Carter and Clinton presidencies, when the Democratic White House was more centrist, and reached out to Republicans. Under LBJ, however, Democrats were united and a passel of landmark progressive legislation was enacted, from Medicare to the great Civil Rights acts. The issue is less partisanship than whether the governing party is delivering good or bad policy. Whether or not you think bi-partisanship is a good thing, what’s killing partisan cooperation and solutions to national ills is not both parties becoming more cohesive, but one party becoming more extreme. Broder should get this disabling cliché out of his computer, and address America’s real political crisis.

--Robert Kuttner

THE HEALTH CARE MIX-UP. The New York Times has an excellent article on how the right's cherished health savings accounts have fared in the real world. The answer? Not as awesomely as Newt Gingrich hoped:

But in many cases, people have evidently signed up not because they are eager to direct their own medical spending but because the plan looked cheap or they had no other insurance option. And at least half of those enrolled have not put money in their health savings accounts. So there will be no money building up for next year's out-of-pocket expenses — a big selling point for these health plans.

And of the 50 percent who did sock away a couple bucks, odds are a large portion of them deposited very little. So let's be clear here: Health savings accounts do not work if people do not save. The equivalent concept would be a system of 401(k)s with no Social Security. A rightwing dreamland, I know, but one in which overwhelming numbers of Americans would find they've reached retirement with no way to pay for it. Similarly, HSAs, which ask a culture adverse to saving to start hiding their cash beneath a tax-exempt mattress, will end up a fine choice for a few healthy, prudent folks but a financial disaster for the majority. It's a grasshopper and the ant problem; HSA's only work for studious, forward-thinking ants. Unfortunately, they primarily attract grasshoppers.

The fatal flaw comes at step one: adoption. As the article notes and every health expert knows, the attraction of HSAs are lower monthly premiums. The tradeoff? Far less comprehensive coverage. The plans attract the cheap and the reckless, those who can't pay for standard health care or don't expect to utilize it. It then expects them to act like the risk alert and save large amounts of money for an eventuality they, by definition, don't believe to be likely. The segment of the population that does worry about their health and would've saved conscientiously already decided, in large part, to sacrifice more of their paychecks to purchase comprehensive, standard coverage. And that's the weird mix-up at the heart of HSAs: they expect the healthy to act like the sick and the unconcerned to become neurotic. It doesn't work like that. Most of those who would correctly utilize HSAs don't want them, and the group adopting the accounts is exactly the demographic you'd want in traditional insurance. It's a brave new world we're about to be living in.

--Ezra Klein

MATCHUP MATTERS. In today's New York Sun, reporter Josh Gerstein throws a big chunk of meat to those arguing against Hillary's electability, interviewing various Dems around the country who are panicked about her chances in 2008. But Gerstein also spoke to Dem strategist Chris Lehane, who brought up a factor that, inexplicably to my mind, is frequently absent from can-Hillary-win musings.

Specifically, Lehane made the rather obvious point that her viability depends partly on the small detail of who her opponent is. The Sun article didn't give him room to elaborate on that, so I dropped Lehane a line to hear more of his thoughts. He said he thought that in particular, Hillary would have a very good shot at beating Bill Frist or George Allen.

”They'd be very easy for her to define as Bush lite," Lehane said. He added that against them, she might have particular luck portraying herself as a kind of Democratic Margaret Thatcher. "She can credibly take a tough line on Iran, North Korea and Bin Laden in ways that other Dems can't. And every time she's challenged by the left it only enhances that viability."

Counterintuitively, Lehane said he even thought she might have a chance against John McCain. "McCain will be a very different person in 2008 than he is now. If he does the types of things you need to do to win a Republican primary in places like South Carolina, it will be very hard for him to portray himself as the straight talker that he's seen as now." It's a lot easier to agree with Lehane about Frist than about McCain, to be sure, but his remarks are nothing if not intriguing.

Relatedly, over at The Plank, Noam Scheiber writes in an interesting post that moderate GOP women could hold the key to her viability:

[Moderate Republican women are the group to watch in Hillary's case...it was precisely this demographic of affluent, moderate, Republican-leaning women who pulled her across the finish line thanks to abortion and various gender-related concerns. It's not crazy to think it could happen again.

On that score, I wanted to pass on a personal anecdote. Last spring, after watching Hillary speak to a Chamber of Commerce in a small town north of Albany, I spoke to a few such GOP women outside. They all said they'd gone in there expecting to see the fire-breathing Hillary of Dick Morris's nightmares. But they'd been stunned by what they'd seen. Hillary had spoken to them simply and directly, they said, and above all, Hillary hadn't condescended to them.

Before the tomatoes start flying, let me quickly say that I tend to fall in the Hillary's-unelectable camp -- yes, there are enormous differences between upstate and red- or swing-state America, and yes, it's true that retail politics matters far less in presidential races than TV, a medium, to put it charitably, in which Hillary doesn't exactly shine. Still, what was striking about these women was that they were persuadable -- they were prepared to abandon the profound dislike and suspicion ingrained in them by years of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the like, and replace it with the image Hillary herself had given them. Just tossing this out there for discussion.

-- Greg Sargent

CHIMPEACHMENT. Yesterday, The Carpetbagger Report noted the continued oddity of Washington Times-offshoot Insight magazine's publication of hyperbolic "insider" accounts of doom and disaster in the Bush administration; the latest example is this report of White House preparations for an impending congressional push for impeachment. The article is likely not to be taken seriously, but percolating impeachment talk on the left is not, in fact, a made-up phenomenon. Our Prospect colleague/superior Harold Meyerson's Washington Post column today offers a particularly aggressive Bush critique, and he reports that the response it has already garnered includes a remarkable amount of pro-impeachment sentiments.

There's been quite a lot of non-discussion discussion among liberals about impeachable offenses and so forth, but now that we have comments on Tapped, I'd like to hear a bit more from folks about what, if anything, they'd like to see people actually do on this front. The office consensus here seems to be that the substantive merits of an impeachment case are real enough, but that an actual push to impeach the president is, um, a spectacularly misguided idea on many levels. Level 1 can surely be summarized in three words: "President Dick Cheney." Then you get into a lot of slightly subtler questions about political strategy and backlash and what lessons ought to be learned from the Clinton impeachment, etc. This certainly seems like an idea that ought to be nipped in the bud early. At any rate, what do people think? Is an impeachment push something liberals are or should be seriously considering?

--Sam Rosenfeld

ONE OTHER POINT. This just came up in conversation with my colleague Matt, but it occurs to me that many folks may not realize it, so here we go: About 50 million low-income taxpayers pay no federal income taxes (poke around here for interesting breakdowns on that). They pay a lot of payroll, state, and local taxes, and tend to end up with similar overall burdens to folks in higher income brackets, but they pay no federal income taxes. Making health costs deductible thus does them no good. In that way, Bush's proposal, shockingly, is overwhelmingly regressive. Now, if it could be coupled with a tax credit scheme, that'd be a bit more interesting. On the other hand, we're sort of in a zero-sum game here where depriving the federal government of tax revenue is going to eventually mean cuts in Medicare and Medicaid benefits or massive, broad-based tax hikes, but that's a different issue.

Update: Commentor TW is right. By "different issue", I actually mean "exactly the same issue, but I don't feel like talking about the country's looming fiscal destruction right now." Sorry for the confusion.

--Ezra Klein

ONE MORE BUZZWORD. To riff off Matt's points a bit, it's poorly understood how much of conservative rhetoric on health care is, quite self-consciously, nothing more than conservative rhetoric on health care. The modern crop of Republicans approach the issue much like a loudmouth cocktail attendee with nothing to say, only they talk ceaselessly so no one else can say anything.

There's little doubt that the country is moving towards a government-run, fairly universal system. The trick for ideologues and interests opposed to that future is to fight a rearguard, stalling action, continually responding to concerns about cost inflation and access with ever more complicated, buzzwordy solutions that'll buy the system a few more years. Managed care was the most recent of these; HSA's are the next. Neat tricks like tax deductibility are party pleasers that Republicans hope will diffuse the issue in the near term by filling the media with complicated, competing solutions the general public isn't qualified to choose between.

But considering the driving force behind health care as a political issue is cost of services, proposals that push more of the burden onto individuals while reducing their ability to bargain down costs (as happens in large pools or government systems) simply ensures the problem's continued resonance. These ideas might buy conservatives a year or two and give them "new ideas" to flaunt in the 2006 midterms, but the essential dynamics pushing towards a new system will only be strengthened. Consumers are surprisingly sensitive to perceived insecurity on the health costs front, so any "fix" that lowers premiums generally but ensures a critical mass of horror stories will actually leave more, rather than less, dissatisfaction in its wake. Separating the sick from the healthy, as happens in Bush's current ideas, is exactly the sort of segregational solution that lends itself to Reader's Digest sob stories and long, Pulitzer-baiting, anecdote-based articles. For Republicans attempting to head off a structural overhaul, this is precisely the wrong strategy.

--Ezra Klein

PANDA HUGGING BACK IN FASHION. At a forward-looking American Enterprise Institute foreign policy event following President Bush’s re-election, AEI’s military expert and PNAC Senior Fellow Thomas Donnelly cited the “Panda Huggers” within the State Department as an insidious group that ought to be purged in the second Bush administration. It was a memorable statement, and was chronicled on TAPPED at the time. It would appear, however, that Condoleezza Rice didn’t heed his advice, for since then, the former US trade representative Robert Zoellick was promoted to the number two spot at State -- and he’s taken to cuddling with the creatures. Says the caption to this delightful picture:

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick cuddles a 5-month-old panda cub during a trip to a research center in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan province, Wednesday, Jan 25. 2006. The trip highlighted a sentimental U.S.-Chinese tie amid strains over trade, human rights and other issues."For more than 30 years, pandas have been a very practical symbol of the conservation relationship between the United States and China," Zoellick told reporters later, standing beside an outdoor pen as two adult pandas wrestled inside. (AP Photo/Elizabeth Dalziel)

Now if only he showed the same empathy for genocide victims in western Sudan…

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE LONG GAME. Ezra's doing other things, so I'll offer my thoughts on health care policy in lieu of his insights. As I see it, the way this issue works is that there are only two genuinely possible outcomes in the long-run -- either the country will adopt a system of universal, government-funded health care or else we need to adopt a system wherein people are left to die in hospital waiting rooms when they run out of money. Since we're not going to move to option number two, every substantial policy shift actually has the impact of moving us in the long-run toward option one, even when the shifts are initiated by politicians who don't mean to do that. For example, "President Bush will propose that Americans be allowed to take tax deductions on more of their out-of pocket medical expenses, as part of an initiative the White House believes will rein in soaring health costs by shifting responsibility toward individuals." As libertarian economist Tyler Cowen remarks:

This idea is slightly funny. The premise is that people don't pay enough of their medical bills when they have private insurance. The way to get them out of insurance is to...um...pick up part of their medical bill. Admittedly the percentage of third-party payment would fall, at least if this works as planned. But note we are making the government the new insurer. I also predict the tax deduction will evolve into a credit which will evolve into...Yikes!

But not yikes . . . hooray! Here's the thing of it. Policy matters. But big, abstract ideas also matter. Liberals' idea is that the federal government has a responsibility to ensure that all Americans receive an adequate level of health care, regardless of income. That idea drives policy -- inexorably -- in the direction of a government-run health care system. The only way for conservatives to get us off the path of slow-but-steady drift toward socialized medicine is to mount a successful public challenge to that idea. But they won't even try, so they're doomed to fail.

--Matthew Yglesias

TO DATA MINE OR NOT TO DATA MINE? Wondering how to reconcile early reports that the illegal domestic spying program involved data mining with more recent reports that it's just standard-issue oversight-free illegal wiretapping? I think Sifu Tweety has the answer:

People have been talking about “data mining” like it’s a be-all-end-all surveillance technique. It’s not. All data mining (or pattern analysis, or whatever) is going to give you is a list of potential targets. As others have noted, this isn’t the same thing as eavesdropping, and is arguably less invasive of privacy. It does seem as if the NSA was passing some of these results directly to the FBI, without any follow-up wiretapping, because the FBI agents quoted in the weekend’s NYT story talked about getting “thousands” of bunk leads, which is pretty much what data mining would give you (as others have pointed out, look at the stunning accuracy of, e.g. Wal-Mart’s recommendation engine for a clue as to how accurate these automated techniques are). What seems most likely to me, and what was seemingly confirmed by General Hayden (and certainly has been strongly hinted at by James Risen), is that the results of this data mining were being used, without DOJ or judicial intervention, to make decisions about who to eavesdrop on.

Sounds right to me. Meanwhile, I would add that talk of changing the burden of proof from "probable cause" to "reasonable basis" is largely a red herring. The important thing that changed was that the NSA shifted from a position where they needed to convince a judge that they had probable cause to one where they had to decide for themselves that they had a reasonable basis for initiating some wiretapping. There's a world of difference between a self-enforced standard and an externally-enforced one.

--Matthew Yglesias

TNR THROWS DOWN. Well, they started it.

--Ezra Klein

ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART GROW FONDER. On the plus side for Hillary, the White House is really barking up the wrong tree here. From The Hotline (subscription-only):

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) began a "busy campaign-like week" 1/23 with a new attack on the Bush admin, this time over health care, during a stop at Rochester's Strong Memorial Hospital. She accused the WH of "botching" the new Medicare prescription drug program, "driving up" medical costs and leaving 45M Americans uninsured. She also "launched a preemptive strike" at Bush over any health care plans he may present in his SOTU address. HRC: "I would sum up his message to American families in three words: 'On your own.'"

WH spokesperson Trent Duffy reacted saying that the U.S. doesn't want a "Hillary-run health care plan that has led to rationing and the other things we've seen in Canada." He noted that "the American people and the Congress rejected her proposal [12 years ago] because it's the wrong prescription for America" (McAuliff, New York Daily News, 1/24).

Earlier this year, Democracy Corps asked:

(As you may remember, Bill Clinton proposed a national health care reform plan in 1993 that was never passed by Congress. Given what we have seen with health care, do you feel our country would be better off or worse off today if we had passed the Clinton health care plan?) (If Better/Worse, ask:) Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat

Fifty-three percent of Americans thought they'd be better off, 37 percent thought so strongly. Of the doubters, 15 percent had no opinion and 29 percent thought passing the Clinton plan would've made them worse off. So in fact, Duffy, a majority of Americans regret the defeat of Hillary's plan. Given that, the real question isn't why Duffy is smearing Clinton, but why Clinton isn't resurrecting a modernized form of her proposal and using it to preempt Bush and ensure herself a leading role in the post-SOTU health care conversation.

--Ezra Klein

DIONNE NAILS IT. In a passage that Marshall Wittman and Joe Lieberman should cut out, laminate and attach to their chests right next to their Democratic donkey lapel pins, E.J. Dionne writes this in today's Washington Post:

Rove has always counted on Bush's capacity to intimidate some Democrats into breaking with their party and saying something like: "Oh, no, I'm not like those weak Democrats over there. I'm a tough Democrat." The Republicans use such Democrats to bash the rest of the party.

Dionne continues:

Moreover, these early Rove speeches turn Democratic strategists into defeatists. The typical Democratic consultant says: "Hey, national security is a Republican issue. We shouldn't engage on that. We should change the subject. By not engaging the national security debate, Democrats cede to Rove the power to frame it... What Democrats should have learned is that they cannot evade the security debate. They must challenge the terms under which Rove and Bush would conduct it. Imagine, for example, directly taking on that line about Sept. 11. Does having a "post-9/11 worldview" mean allowing Bush to do absolutely anything he wants, any time he wants, without having to answer to the courts, Congress or the public? Most Americans -- including a lot of libertarian-leaning Republicans -- reject such an anti-constitutional view of presidential power. If Democrats aren't willing to take on this issue, what's the point of being an opposition party?

Howard Dean's response to Karl Rove, while welcome for its go-for-the-jugular effort to undercutting Rove's credibility, fell well short of Dionne's imperative.

So, a few questions: Isn't Dionne right? Yes, Dems have been arguing that Bush is unlawfully allowing himself unbridled executive power, but have they really risen to Dionne's challenge? Do Dems even agree with Dionne's approach? If so, are there any signs that they're serious about developing a coordinated strategy to engage the debate with the vigor he calls for? If not, does anyone have any better ideas? These are not rhetorical questions. There are ten months to go until Election Day, and Bush and Rove have their strategy more or less in place. Heck, they've even been so kind as to share it with the rest of us.

So Dems, what's the plan? Howard? Rahm? Chuck? Hillary? Bill?

-- Greg Sargent

HILLARY GETS A D ON PART D. Arianna Huffington hops up to the anti-Hillary plate today, providing a quick rundown of recent articles detailing the rapid erosion in her myth of inevitability and popularity among the base. We here at Tapped, in an effort to destroy any possible working relationship with the coming Clinton administration, have been writing about Hillary a lot, arguing that her prominent gestures towards the middle need to be coupled with serious leadership on the left. And today's New York Times article on her criticisms of the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit proves the point.

Clinton, like all Democrats, is enthusiastically swinging at George Bush's Part D piñata, comparing the program's disastrous implementation to Katrina and demanding accountability. And I'm happy to see her join with Rep. John Dingell to protest the closed-door giveaway to insurance companies I wrote about earlier today. But Clinton's criticisms and complaints never take that crucial step past functional and into forward-thinking.

Clinton, with her star power, history on the issue, and press coverage, is just the pol to descend on the Sunday morning shows and kickstart a conversation on full repeal of the bill. Democrats agree on both the necessity and desirability of that position, but Clinton, who could score points with the base and raise her own profile by suggesting a simplified Medicare Drug Benefit, has not seen fit to lead on the issue. The dissonance between her willingness to break ranks on abortion, flag-burning, and obscenity but reluctance to break away from the pack on as fundamental and politically-advantageous an issue as Medicare is worrying, and almost fully to blame for the dynamic described by Arianna. Now, make no mistake, 2008 is a long ways away, and Hillary could surely repair all intra-left rifts long before the primaries. But with each major opportunity missed, her chances to restore confidence and prove herself a leader, rather than merely a star, dwindle.

--Ezra Klein

OPPOSITION PARTY. As an addendum to Ezra's post, see here and here for more examples of conference committee shenanigans that the GOP employed late last year during the fight over the same spending reconciliation bill. It's worth noting, since it's sometimes easy to overlook, that precisely because of such tactics in the service of such odious policies, Democrats were unanimous in opposing this budget bill; not a single Democrat voted for it. Moreover, Senate and House Dems maneuvered to force the House to vote for the bill once more when lawmakers reconvene early next month, just prior to consideration of the regressive tax-cutting reconciliation measure that Republicans have tried manfully to keep separate from the spending cuts in the public eye. With this Post article on the insurance industry swindle, Democrats have another issue to highlight when the bill comes back up for a vote.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE 36 PERCENT MANDATE. The Weekly Standard's blog has a kind of astounding track record of wrongness that, in my opinion, far exceeds the standards set by other conservative blogs. Take this:

"Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party defeated the long entrenched Liberal Party in Canadian elections on Monday," the New York Times reports. "A Conservative victory is a striking turn in the country's politics and is likely to improve Canada's strained relations with the Bush administration."

But it wasn't supposed to be this way. Remember after the March 14, 2004 Spanish election when voters replaced Prime Minister José María Aznar with the Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero? Liberal editorialists and politicians claimed that other pro-Bush leaders were likely to follow Aznar's fate.

But look here -- Steven Harper's Conservatives got . . . 36 percent of the vote against four other "anti-American" political parties. That was good enough to win about 40 percent of the seats in parliament, which is good enough for Harper to form a minority government as prime minister. But this is hardly a ringing Canadian endorsement of the Bush administration. Instead, voters fed up with Liberal corruption split their votes between two left-of-center parties (the combined Liberal-NDP vote total and seat-count exceeds the Conservatives'), allowing Harper to slip into office.

--Matthew Yglesias

K STREET IN ACTION. For those of you routinely depressed by mealy-mouthed, cowardly reporting on important stories, The Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman has a blistering expose on industry machinations to reverse cuts in Medicare reimbursements. If you're looking to see congressional corruption in action, the shell-game of reconciliation committees, the spinelessness of the "moderates,” the dominance of industry, and all the other moving parts of the K Street Project operating as a coherent whole, you could do no better than to follow Weisman's story.

The tale begins, actually, back in October, when Chuck Grassley managed to eke some savings out of Medicare without penalizing beneficiaries. At the time, I lauded his proposals, which, through some technical adjustments to the way HMO's were reimbursed, would've stopped them from making their patients appear sicker than they really were. The HMO's, predictably, argued that they would never even think of doing such a thing, but nevertheless went to war against the regulatory change.

They decided to focus their assault in the conference committee, the closed door meeting where House and Senate negotiators convene to hash out differences between their legislation. Generally, the Senate passes more moderate proposals, the House more extreme bills, and the two "compromise" by passing the House's version. It's a sweet deal: Senators get to pass quasi-centrist legislation when the issue is hot and the cameras are recording, and then, when attention has died down, greenlight industry wishlists that stimulate interest-group erogenous zones. The strategy erases the tension between netting good coverage from a media infatuated with moderation and ensuring steady campaign contributions from corporate backers interested in their own bottom line.

It was no different here. Behind the conference committee's double doors, lobbyists demanded and received a slight change in the bill's rules on HMO reimbursements, cutting projected savings from $26 billion to $4 billion -- money, obviously, that neither taxpayers nor government coffers had any use for. Grassley, predictably, quickly adopted a tone of studied ignorance, pretending the original legislation relied on a simple accounting quirk, as if the difference between his original and the final bill was a rounding error. House Republicans, shameless as always, are happy to have another win for corporate backers. But when Republican health care lobbyists are providing blind quotes on the opacity and corruption of the process and a perfectly sound bit of legislation just lost $22 billion of its savings, chuckling comments on the CBO's inability to do math simply don't convince. Weisman's piece is a devastating tour through the process, and anyone interested in tracing the real life path of corruption should give it a read.

--Ezra Klein

EERILY FAMILIAR. E.J. Dionne's column today on Karl Rove's pre-announced campaign strategy of national security demagoguery is worth a read. His key point: "What Democrats should have learned is that they cannot evade the security debate." I've long been on record advocating that Democrats need to unleash a relentless, reckless, maximalist scorched-earth Gingrichian campaign on ethics and corruption if they hope to spark a national electoral wave sufficient to win them control of the House or Senate. Clearly the party is now committed to a coordinated ethics campaign, even if it remains a bit more hedged and circumscribed than I'd like. But it's increasingly clear that they have put in close to zero thinking about a plan B strategy for dealing with security questions -- particularly Iran -- in any kind of coherent or coordinated matter during the election, even as it's become trivially obvious that Republicans are gearing up to run on the issue. Dionne advocates connecting the corruption narrative with security questions, but that's hardly going to suffice.

The way the Iran non-debate debate has been unfolding in the last month or so is so reminiscent of the run-up to the Iraq war it's positively spooky. Right-wing writers and outfits steadily beat the war drums, mostly without coming out and saying that's what they're advocating. Center-left foreign policy experts and journalists devote a rather excessive amount of time and energy to shooting down dovish arguments to their left, while some Democrats position themselves to attack the Bush administration from the right on the question, and the rest offer deafening silence and painfully obvious evasion. Corruption is great, and the prescription drug debacle really does provide a gigantic opportunity for Democrats. And, needless to say, the atmosphere and context for national-security demagoguery are genuinely different and less favorable for Republicans in 2006 than in 2002. But surely there's still something valuable to be learned from Democrats' strategy of ignoring national security issues at all costs and running on prescription drugs during the last mid-term elections. If you'll recall, that didn't really work.

UPDATE: Lordy it's annoying doing Tapped with these quick-draw multi-bloggers.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WATCH WHAT YOU WISH FOR. A friend in Washington's deeply marginalized dove community likes to say that the good thing about the neoconservative obsession with conquering the Middle East is that it's distracted attention from the neoconservative obsession with attacking China. Justin Logan, another dovish pal, reads about the forthcoming Quadrennial Defense Review and observes that the good thing about the Defense Department's obsession with attacking China is that it's undermining neoconservative efforts to conquer the Middle East.

Personally, if you were to put a gun to my head, I'd say invading Syria and Iran is a less-bad idea than invading China. That these are the choices we're facing, however, says a lot about how screwed-up the thinking about security priorities is in this country. Faced with the demise of the Soviet threat, we're reacting not by taking advantage of America's newfound and unprecedented lack of vulnerability to foreign adversaries, but instead by dreaming up new ones in order to counteract the threat that a sober view of the situation would pose to the defense budget.

--Matthew Yglesias

DEMS NEED TO WIN THE ARGUMENT. In response to this post below, a number of folks have written in to protest that Howard Dean was right to respond to Karl Rove's speech the way he did. Let me quickly clear something up. If I suggested that Dems shouldn't hammer away at the messenger and try to discredit him, I didn't mean to. I was simply saying that that's not enough -- Dems also need to aggressively and forcefully rebut the substance of the attack. They need a coordinated argument that not only casts doubt on their attackers but also is substantively true and defeats the GOP argument on the facts by revealing it to be false. Dems can do both.

Dems shouldn't convince themselves that voters will dismiss the White House's latest pushback or that Dems shouldn't engage it substantively lest they legitimize it. Anyone remember the Swift Boat vets? Karl Rove's salvo is just the beginning. Soon enough we'll be hearing from many other GOP worthies that Dems don't want Bush to use all the tools at his disposal to fight terrorism. Meanwhile, the GOP's surrogates in the media will all shout in unison that Republicans believe in wiretapping terrorists and Dems believe in protecting the civil liberties of terrorists. Why not knock this argument down before it takes hold, particularly since it's 100 percent false? Why let an enormous falsehood which is the very foundation of the GOP's case against the Dems go unchallenged? Can't Dems do that and undercut the White House's credibility by pointing out the GOP's many national security failings at the same time?

-- Greg Sargent

HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB. One thing that should be said as we plunge toward confrontation with Iran, is that one important school of thought in the international relations literature holds that nuclear proliferation is a good thing. I don't find that super-persuasive at the end of the day, but insofar as the theory has any truth to it (and I think it has some) that ought to change our calculus about these matters. Fred Kaplan, who's really too good for this, offers a glib dismissal of the theory:

Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has openly expansive ambitions across the Middle East, not least to "wipe Israel off the face of the map." Some political scientists have argued that the spread of nuclear weapons is a good thing, that it makes countries more responsible. Could anyone still argue that the theory, dubious enough in general, applies to Iran?

Um . . . but:

1. Ahmadinejad doesn't run Iranian foreign policy.
2. Nobody ever said nuclear weapons would stop countries from engaging in irresponsible rhetoric.
3. Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons.

Point three is especially important! The argument is that if Iran does get nuclear weapons, then Iran will become more responsible, not that Iran's likely future acquisition of nuclear weapons makes it more responsible today. The case in point here would be the India-Pakistan conflict, which has gotten less tense since the two adversaries went nuclear, even though India elected a stridently nationalistic government for a while and even though the Pakistani regime has all kinds of historic links to madmen and murderous fanatics.

I liked the rest of Kaplan's column, though.

--Matthew Yglesias

HILLARY: LURCHING LEFT? Over at The Politicker, Ben Smith has a small crack at partially challenging Marisa Katz's much-discussed New Republic piece on Hillary. Ben notes:

National elections aren't fought by sweeping whole states; they're won and lost on the margins, and Hillary's narrow defeat upstate was -- in that sense -- quite a victory. And since then, she's defused some of the suspicion and dislike.

The same point applies to the argument that Upstate is more liberal than America. Sure it's more liberal than Alabama; but the central question of "electibility" is whether Hillary can pull a few more votes in Ohio than John Kerry.

Ben's objections aren't huge ones, but I think they're worth noting. Those making the case for Hillary's electability usually point to her upstate successes as proof that she can be competitive in swing states, not bright red ones. This is not at all to argue for Hillary's electability, but it would be interesting to hear what public opinion experts -- and anyone else, for that matter -- have to say about the similarities and differences between, on the one hand, upstate traditional Dems and moderate Republicans, and on the other, swing voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida (home to not a few transplanted New Yorkers, after all), not to mention in the upper Midwest.

In other, related Hillary news, The New York Post writes up a Congressional Quarterly study saying that Hillary votes with Senate Dem leaders 96 percent of the time, second only to John Kerry among prospective 2008 candidates. The Post predictably spins this as a sign that she's more liberal than her moderate feints show. Easy party-line votes that don't require risk or political sacrifice are of course hardly a substitute for venturing big progressive ideas of her own, and I agree with Matt's point that liberals are getting little on that score in exchange for tolerating all her positioning. Still, the fact that liberal groups tend to give her voting very high liberal ratings deserves at least an occasional mention as part of this ongoing dialogue.

-- Greg Sargent

RIPON AND MODERATE REPUBLICANS. We've mentioned the Ripon Society before -- the hollowed-out "moderate Republican" policy outfit that now serves as a laundering operation for lobbyists to fund lavish trips for lawmakers. The indispensable Thomas Edsall takes a look at the operation in today's Washington Post. Beyond its relevance to the current lobbying scandals, Ripon's relatively unheralded evolution over the last decade offers an insight into moderate Republicanism, something that was a subtext of both Elizabeth Drew's 2005 piece on corruption and Mark and Matt's article on the Fraud Caucus: High-profile (if largely ineffectual) liberal positions on social issues are usually enough to win GOP lawmakers reputations as moderates. Meanwhile, they've been free to cash in to corporate interests as thoroughly as their most "extremist" colleagues without losing their reputations for thoughtful moderation.

--Sam Rosenfeld

VACUOUS AFRICAN SOLUTIONS. Throughout the crisis in Darfur, American and international officials have often called for “African solutions for African problems.” As a motto, that sounds nice. But in Darfur, this refrain has all too often served to absolve the international community from its responsibility to protect Darfuris being slaughtered at the hands of their own government.

This week, the premier regional organization in Africa, the African Union (AU), is poised to hand its chairmanship to Omar al-Bashir, the head of the ruling National Islamic Front of Sudan that planned the genocide in Darfur. For those keeping score, the AU has a small force in Darfur with a mandate that does not adequately provide for civilian protection. These troops, after all, are only in Sudan at the invitation of Bashir. As a result, they are resigned to be feckless monitors of a non-existent cease fire. Nonetheless, despite opposition by some African leaders who point to the absurdity of Sudan leading the African Union, petty regional political rivalries may yet propel Khartoum to the AU presidency.

For the sake of the victims of the genocide in Darfur, I actually hope that the AU selects Bashir. Maybe then, members of the international community and the Bush administration alike will be forced to abandon their preference for African solutions to the crisis in Darfur. Maybe then, the optics of Sudan leading an AU force intended to prevent the Sudanese government from attacking its own civilians will be too hard to ignore. And maybe then, the Security Council will summon the resolve to authorize a robust blue-helmeted peace-keeping force with a mandate to protect civilians. In the meantime, however, I won’t hold my breath.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

MEMO TO DEAN: NEXT TIME, REBUT ROVE'S ARGUMENT. So how should Democrats respond to the GOP's decision to make national security a key issue in the midterm elections? Here's a starting point: Whenever Republicans misrepresent Democratic positions on security issues, Dems shouldn't let the falsehoods go unchallenged. Instead, Democrats should forcefully rebut them.

You'd think that would be a no-brainer. But consider Howard Dean's response to Karl Rove's speech on Friday. Discussing the warantless wiretapping program, Rove said:

Let me be as clear as I can be. President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why. Some important Democrats clearly disagree.

This statement is simply false. Can anyone name a single Democrat who's on record opposing the wiretapping of calls from Al Qaeda to America? In reality, Dems don't oppose wiretapping. They simply think Bush should get a warrant first -- and think it's illegal if he doesn't. This misrepresentation is a key piece of the foundation of the GOP's argument against Dems on the wiretapping scandal. If voters aren't convinced of this lie, Republicans are no longer defending a hard-core approach to terror. They're simply left defending presidential lawbreaking.

Yet here was Howard Dean's response on Friday:

Karl Rove only has a White House job and a security clearance because President Bush has refused to keep his promise to fire anyone involved in revealing the identity of an undercover CIA operative. Rove's political standing gets him an invitation to address Republicans in Washington, DC today, but it doesn't give him the credibility to question Democrats' commitment to national security. The truth is, Karl Rove breached our national security for partisan gain and that is both unpatriotic and wrong.

That's not good enough. It doesn't really counter Rove's attack in any way. In his effort to damage the messenger, Dean is leaving Rove's message untouched. Instead, Dems also need to forcefully challenge -- and rebut -- the argument itself. To his credit, John Kerry has started arguing that Rove and the White House are willfully distorting the Dem position. More Dems might consider heeding Kerry's approach, and -- God forbid -- even might consider developing it as part of a centralized message, especially at a time when Bush's "trustworthy" numbers are low. Because if Republicans do succeed in convincing the electorate that Dems oppose all wiretapping -- and hence are opposed to an aggressive war on terror -- they stand a decent chance of winning the entire argument.

-- Greg Sargent

A PRE-STATE OF THE UNION PRIMER. Another day, another detailed preview of George W. Bush's State of the Union health care proposals. This morning's iteration comes from the LA Times’ Peter Gosselin, one of the best social policy reporters in the country. But even the best reporters are hamstrung and hogtied by demands for objectivity and spacial constraints, so though Gosselin's tour through the proposals is sure-footed and clearly-written, it doesn't offer much in the way of context or analysis. So we'll do that here.

Setting aside the miscellanea of medical malpractice and various portability tweaks, Bush's major proposals encourage the spread of Health Savings Accounts and render most out-of-pocket spending tax deductible (attentive news junkies will note the dissonance with the November recommendations of Bush's tax commission, which sought to limit health care deductions). This is a rethink of the entire health care system: no more risk pooling; instead, you sock away cash in tax-advantaged accounts, spending it only when you get sick. So no (or very low) premiums. But when you fall ill, there'll be no insurance company defraying the costs, not until you've spent $10,000 or so.

The idea here is simple. Conservatives believe Americans have too much health insurance, that they spend heedlessly and wastefully on care, procedures, and medications they would simply forego if insurance plans didn't pick up the tab. Ergo, HSA's, which end risk pooling, forcing care to come directly from pockets. Newly responsible for their medical bills, consumers will be spurred by the Magic of the Market to make smarter decisions, show more prudence, lead healthier lifestyles, smile more often, and smell springtime fresh. It's gonna be awesome.

At least if you're healthy. Because what HSA's really do is separate the young from the old, the well from the sick. Currently, insurance operates off of the concept of risk pooling. Since health costs tend to be unpredictable and illness isn't thought a moral failing, we all pay a bit more than we expect to use in order to subsidize those who end up needing much more than they ever thought possible. The well subsidize the sick, the young subsidize the old, and we all accept the arrangement because one day we will be old, and one day we will be sick, and no one wants to shoulder that alone.

But HSA's slice right through this intergenerational, redistributionist arrangement: they're a great deal for young, healthy folks because they don't force subsidization. Just don't get sick. And if you're already sick, don't think you can hide by remaining in traditional insurance plans: when the healthy rush towards HSA's, older plans will hold only the ill, and insurance companies will send premiums skyrocketing to recoup the difference.

Thankfully, when you're old, sick, poor, and bitter, schadenfreude will keep you warm. Eventually all those young bucks who left you for their HSA's will get sick, and when they do, it's all coming out of their pocket. And if, like most Americans, they're not terribly good savers and their HSA only has a couple thousand (or hundred) in it, it's all coming out of their bank accounts. Currently, more than half of all bankruptcies are due to medical costs. Post-HSA's, expect that number to rocket upwards. Lucky thing, then, that the financial industry, along with a compliant Congress, just made it harder and costlier to declare bankruptcy.

HSA's, also, will not solve, halt, or slow medical spending in this country. Health costs follows the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the money goes towards 20 percent of the people. A healthy person spends virtually nothing in a year, but a cancer patient or car crash victim will lay down hundreds of thousands of dollars. And since each HSA is coupled with a high-deductible insurance policy, none of that care will be skipped; the patients will just be bankrupted en route to the limit.

Nor will HSA's cut down on unnecessary care. A famous RAND study looked into usage of these plans and found that patients did indeed use a bit less care, but they had no way to separate necessary care from unnecessary care. So instead of foregoing useless procedures, they simply neglected their hypertension (for example). Long-term, that means more strokes and heart attacks, which in turn cost the system orders of magnitude more than blood pressure medications and regular check-ups. Save a penny today, pay a pound tomorrow.

But that's not to say HSA's are useless. They're not. What they achieve is massive, large-scale cost-shifting, generally from employer to employee. Where businesses used to pay for insurance (and thus for treatment), now they'll simply help employees found HSA's and let them pay their own health costs. And that's really what this push is about. Businesses don't like paying for health care. The Bush administration, as always, heard and heeded the corporate complaints, and is set to propose a policy agenda that'll help employers wiggle out of insurance costs. But someone, always, is left holding the bag, and if businesses let go of it, their employees will have to pick up the slack. For the lucky, healthy ones, the changeover won't affect them much; it may even leave them better off, at least for awhile. But for the old or the ill (all of us, eventually), costs will skyrocket.

Bush wants to bring about the end of risk pooling, the end of health security. The question voters will have to ask is if they think their lives, and bank accounts, need a massive infusion of instability.

--Ezra Klein

LESS APOLOGIZING, MORE STRATEGIZING. In today's Associated Press piece taking the temperature of GOPers at the two-day RNC meeting, Ron Fornier writes:

...private polling for Republicans suggest that government spending and political fallout from the Iraq war are causing anxiety among GOP voters. Senior party officials inside and outside the White House fear that Washington scandal may hurt GOP turnout if average Republican voters believe that Congress' spending habits are partly the result of corruption.

And:

That may be one reason why national party chairman Ken Mehlman told RNC members that corrupt politicians in either party should be rooted out and punished. "The public trust is more important than party," he said in a speech prepared for delivery Friday.

Lest the opportunity presented by these scandals slip away, it's time Dems got serious about tying GOP corruption to a larger story about GOP incompetence, runaway GOP spending and GOP slavishness to corporate interests, particularly in the health care and energy industries.

As Mehlman's speech shows, the GOP is working hard to push the line that "there are bad apples in both parties and we should all do our part to root them out." If I were Harry Reid, I'd be spending less time apologizing and more time worrying about how to prevent this pushback from working. The GOP well knows that the trick to effective propaganda is less about having facts on your side than about telling people a story they would rather believe than the one being told by the other side. And my guess is that independents -- and of course moderate GOP voters -- revolted by the scandals would rather believe it's afflicting both parties. As one Dem official involved in planning DCCC strategy told me recently, “Right now, the American people kind of hate them more than they hate us. It’s a slight edge, not a huge one." Needless to say, Reid's apology probably didn't do much to widen that gap.

One story line independents and GOPers are inclined to believe, however, is that government spends too much -- and there's no way GOP leaders can deflect blame for that, since they're running the place. Admittedly, it's not easy to get GOP voters to recognize their own party's failings -- particularly with GOP leaders successfully drowning out all criticism with the constant chant of "war on terror, war on terror," which will only grow louder, and perhaps more effective, in the wake of Osama's latest catch-me-if-you-can appearance. Still, one failure some Republicans and conservatives seem prepared to acknowledge about their own party is that runaway spending is a clear betrayal of their alleged principles. So the party officials who spoke to Fornier are right to worry, because tying spending to the scandals isn't that hard to do: GOP fealty to energy and health care interests has morphed into a corrupt alliance which has produced bad legislation and runaway spending -- and we're the ones getting stuck with the bill.

-- Greg Sargent

UPSTATE MYTHS. Marisa Katz has done herself a disservice by getting her point across so succinctly:

Although the junior senator from New York hasn't said anything yet about a return to the White House, a run appears likely. And, in anticipation, her champions are making upstate their best defense against doubts about her "electability"--a term popular with Democratic primary voters last time around. But, before the Hillary-can-do-it-because-she-did-it-upstate narrative gets any more airtime, it's worth pointing out its fatal flaws. Namely, upstate New York is not that conservative. Clinton hasn't done all that well here--in fact, she lost the region in 2000 and remains a highly polarizing figure. And, when she has won people over, it's been through retail politics at a very local level.

You'll find more arguments and evidence on this question if you read the whole piece, but really that's what you need to know about this. I would say it's also worth pointing out that those of Clinton's advisors making this argument surely know it's bogus. It's hard to imagine anyone could work professionally in New York State politics and not notice that Clinton ran well behind Al Gore in the region, and so there's no reason to think she has any ability to improve on his performance in Red America. Of course, nominating a not-so-electable candidate might be a good idea anyway if she were not-so-electable because of her awesomely liberal substantive views. But she ain't got 'em! As Jon Chait has written:

Clinton's supporters like to note that she's not as liberal as people think. That's exactly the problem. I can see the logic behind nominating a liberal whom voters see as moderate. Nominating a moderate whom voters see as liberal is kind of backward, isn't it?

Well-said.

--Matthew Yglesias

BLOOPER. We’re all prone to web bloopers, but Minority Whip Steny Hoyer really ought to be more careful, especially in light of the recent push to rebrand the Democrats as the party of ethics. In the “In the News” section of his website, you can find a reprinted version of a Roll Call article from May 2003 that discusses Hoyer’s efforts to form a Democratic version of the K Street Project. Garance even pointed out earlier this week that the article is part of the Republican’s opposition research, and yet there it is, right on the Whip’s website. Of course one could just as easily go to the Roll Call archives and look it up, but still Hoyer shouldn’t be publicizing this sort of thing.

As The Hotline notes, it’s time to start scrubbing those websites.

--Alec Oveis

UNPOPULAR BY DESIGN? Here's Jonah Goldberg at The Corner:

I didn't like Bush's Medicare plan before. I like it even less now. If Democrats passed such a plan, at least we would be able to say "look, Big Government doesn't work." But we can't even get that much of a teaching moment going, because liberals can claim that this merely proves they're the only ones "competent" enough to create giant new entitlements.

Correct!

Meanwhile, Mark Schmitt makes the latest case for the notion that Republicans deliberately designed a bad bill with the intention of benefiting from the ensuing anti-government backlash. This is that perverse, "bad Republican governance makes good Republican politics" dynamic we've all seen before (remember how the botched federal response to Katrina just went to show that government doesn't work?), and of course it would be foolish to deny that this dynamic isn't a powerful and insidious force in American politics. But there really is no evidence that Republicans were thinking along those lines when they designed and passed the Medicare drug bill. Schmitt mentions The Hill's retrospective account of the battle to pass the bill, and while it's true that participants in the process wouldn't be keen to go on record acknowledging they had such Machiavellian discussions about how to capitalize off of potential future backlash, I really get the sense from reading the piece that Republicans truly weren't thinking through matters in that way.

All you hear from these accounts is how the House leadership cajoled reluctant members, either through crude political exhortations ("the president needs this one!") or moronic, completely misguided substantive appeals about how a failure to pass this "market-friendly" Republican bill would ensure that a more expensive "big government" Democratic bill would end up passing instead. The whole thing was just a huge screw-up. Ordinary Republican malevolence, ordinary Republican policy idiocy, and ordinary Republican corruption produced it. The notion of some hidden long-range master strategy underlying all the madness only serves to provide conservatives with a bit of post-hoc justification for plainly unprincipled lawmaking and bad governance. It's becoming increasingly clear, moreover, that the same can be said for "starve the beast."

--Sam Rosenfeld

VIRTUAL SORE. Canada’s election is on Monday and the long dominant Liberal party looks doomed. But according to this gushy Guardian profile, the future for Liberal party candidate Michael Ignatieff seems bright. It also seems that the academic knows how to throw a few elbows.

Ignatieff's party nomination late last year was a particularly ugly affair. At the time, the local Liberal association was dominated by the Ukrainian-Canadian community, a relatively small but vocal minority in this part of greater Toronto, who wanted to put forward their own candidates. However, senior party officials gave them only 24 hours to put their applications together. When the local party figures arrived with their forms at the offices in downtown Toronto, they found the doors locked. "They wouldn't open the doors, even though I could see they were inside and they were answering the phone," Ron Chyczij, the association president and would-be rival candidate, recalls.

What human rights professors will do to get elected...

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE POST STRIKES BACK. From the New York Times:

The Post's blog, open to the public since Nov. 21, was shut indefinitely yesterday afternoon with a notice from Jim Brady, executive editor of www.washingtonpost.com.

Mr. Brady wrote that he had expected criticism of The Post on the site, but that the public had violated rules against personal attacks and profanity.

Personal attacks. Profanity. Isn’t that what blogs are all about?

On a serious note though, this is the second time that a major news outlet has shut down its blog because of the content left by commenters. If the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the other major outlets really want to commit to this new medium, as they say they do, then they ought play by the rules already established and let people say what they will, no matter how vicious and hateful it may be. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, even though the Washington Post may think otherwise.

Speaking of comments, I have to disagree with the point that my last post was the “worst post ever” on TAPPED. I’ve already written some duds worse than that in my short time here. But condemning me to a life at TNR? That just hurt.

UPDATE: I didn't click "allow comments" on that post. Let the comments begin.

--Alec Oveis

THE NEW REGIME. The counting is done, and Iraq's elections turned out to change nothing at all. It's worth noting that the people in charge of Iraq policy in the Bush administration continue to understand the country so poorly that they called this one completely wrong. More to the point, though liberals may not want to hear it, the White House is no longer the prime obstacle to a political settlement in Iraq. The strategy they're pursuing of trying to cajole the Shiite coalition into making concessions to the Sunni parties is the right one. The problem is that it isn't working, because the Shiite parties don't want to do it.

There's nothing wrong with continuing to try over the next several weeks but if, as seems likely, the administration fails then there's really nothing more we can do there. Insofar as the Iraqi government doesn't want to implement what most outsiders think is the right policy, that's their right. But by the same token, there's no sense in us continuing to provide an open-ended commitment to a government that won't try and do the sensible thing. If Iraq's leaders don't want our advice politically, we should leave them to their own devices militarily.

--Matthew Yglesias

PICKING TARGETS. A new Quinnipiac poll has sparked another round of discussions about a possible primary challenge against Sen. Joe Lieberman, but I think there are some more worthy targets for primary attacks in the gubernatorial races. Two in particular come to mind.

In Tennessee, Phil Bredesen booted some 191,000 needy recipients off TennCare, the state’s Medicaid waiver program, and then told an audience at the National Press Club in June that Congress should essentially dismantle Medicaid. Those comments, not surprisingly, elicited calls from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid to the DGA, complaining about his remarks. Yet no Republican challenger, let along a Democratic one, has stepped forward, which all but guarantees that Bredesen will coast to a second term in November.

And in a year in which ethics will surely be a top issue, Democrats will have to come up with some crafty defenses for Governor Rod Blagojevich and his scandal-plagued administration. Investigations have been launched into Blagojevich’s ties to a fundraising scandal involving the Illinois Teachers Retirement System; the administration’s hiring practices; and alleged mishandling of tax dollars by state agencies, among other things. Despite his claims of having the “testicular virility” to cleanup Springfield, Blagojevich has proven to be nothing but a disappointment to Democrats, and thankfully, former Chicago Alderman Edwin Eisendrath is challenging him for the nomination. Blagojevich’s fundraising, though, makes him a formidable candidate; as of August, the governor had put together a $14 million war chest, leaving him with more than double the amount raised by all eight Republican candidates put together.

If Democrats really want to take aim at one of their own, why not go after one of these governors, who actually does have some executive control, and quit bullying Lieberman.

--Alec Oveis

BUT TELL US WHAT YOU REALLY THINK. The Justice Department, in an attempt to bat back the torrent of legal opinions declaring the NSA wiretapping program unlawful, has released a full-throated defense of the program. Their answer?

The Bush administration today offered its fullest defense of the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, saying that congressional authorization to defeat Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks "places the president at the zenith of his powers in authorizing the N.S.A. activities."

In a 42-page white paper, the Justice Department expanded on its past arguments in laying out the legal rationale for why the N.S.A. program does not violate federal wiretap law and why the president is the nation's "sole organ" for foreign affairs.

I do like this new policy of honest arguments from the White House. Used to be that they'd do bad things and lie, distort, and spin their way out. Now they just suggest their critics are traitors helping the other side, respond to allegations of domestic spying by saying, essentially, "damn right we're spying on you," open McCarthyesque investigations into whoever leaks their illegal secrets, and justify their actions on the theory that the president can do as he damn well pleases. It's refreshing. And so's the paper, which simply reprises arguments the Congressional Research Service report demolished weeks ago. Such a Focaultian willingness to deny the authority of legal experts is a welcome display of postmodern thinking from an administration all too often trapped in absolutes. As I said, refreshing.

--Ezra Klein

THEN AND NOW. Jon Cohn, on the Bush administration's reaction to the Medicare Part D mess:

The administration's initial response will be familiar to anyone who recalls the early months of the Iraqi insurgency or the first few days after Hurricane Katrina. "This is going very well," a spokesman at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said on January 4, with apparent seriousness. When the difficulties became too widespread for even the Bush administration to ignore, officials fell back on another well-rehearsed excuse: Glitches were inevitable given the nature of the task. "We know there are going to be bumps in the road," another CMS spokesman said. "It's a new program."

He also went back and did a little compare-and-contrast with the original implementation of Medicare. Seems that that Lyndon Johnson character wasn't so bad after all:

consider what happened when the Johnson administration rolled out Medicare for the first time in July 1966. Back then, the obstacles were even more daunting than they are today. Rather than simply adding a benefit for a relatively narrow class of services (prescription drugs), introducing Medicare meant establishing an entirely new insurance program in just eleven months. There were concerns about hospital capacity: What if seniors held off on medical treatment until the benefit kicked in and then flooded facilities? There were also racial complications: LBJ had insisted that Medicare refuse payments to hospitals that didn't abide by federal civil rights guidelines. Since many Southern hospitals remained segregated, senior citizens there might have had no place to go.

So what happened on the day that this complex program was implemented? Thousands of senior citizens simply went to the hospital and got the health care they needed. "There were no crises that I remember," says Yale University political scientist Theodore Marmor, who worked in the office overseeing Medicare implementation and went on to write The Politics of Medicare, the program's definitive history. Newspaper accounts from the '60s back him up. Under the headline "medicare takes over easily," a Post writer described the program's first day as "a smooth transition, undramatic as a bed change." Three weeks later, the Times affirmed that "medicare's start has been smooth."

What did Johnson do right that Bush did wrong? Start with the people he put in charge. Today, the man directly responsible for Medicare is Mark McClellan, a physician and former Stanford economist. Though hardly a Michael Brown, McClellan has no prior experience when it comes to implementing social insurance programs. (His predecessor, Tom Scully, left CMS to become a lobbyist almost immediately after the Medicare bill passed.) The man Johnson tapped to run Medicare was Robert Ball, a longtime civil servant who had worked his way up through the Social Security Administration starting in 1939. He and other veterans helped design the program--urging, among other things, that the law take effect in summer, when hospitals would be least crowded.

Another difference between the two administrations is their willingness to take initiative. Last year, experts repeatedly warned the Bush administration that it had inadequate contingency plans in place, culminating in a December Government Accountability Office report that predicted with eerie accuracy exactly what has happened at pharmacies around the country these past two weeks. LBJ's team was far more cautious. Although confident that hospitals could handle any potential surges, it still drew up plans for transferring patients to overflow facilities, even lining up helicopters in Texas to provide speedy transport.

Medicare Part D, as I explained earlier today, is a bad bill. But a bad bill can be smoothly implemented. What the bungled rollout shows is that, in addition to Medicare Part D being bad legislation, the administration implementing it is totally, repeatedly, incompetent. So I'm opening this one up to commentors. The administration has failed to effectively implement No Child Left Behind, the Iraq War, and Medicare Part D. Has there been one major Bush administration initiative that, whatever you think of it on the merits, was competently rolled out?

--Ezra Klein

THE THOMAS FACTOR. Via Atrios comes more indication that "health care reform" -- i.e., expanded use of Health Savings Accounts and medical malpractice caps -- will be the centerpiece of the president's State of the Union speech and his agenda this year. One person to watch on this score will be Bill Thomas, the powerful and mercurial chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. A Thomas staffer told me recently the following: Thomas really, really wants to leave a big legacy as chairman, and this year is his last chance to do it (his chairmanship term limit is coming up). Tax reform was supposed to be that big-ticket legacy item, but the universally unpopular proposals made by the president's tax commission and the overall political environment have combined to take that completely off the agenda for 2006. And so Thomas is itching to involve himself in H.S.A.-related health care legislation this year as a second-best alternative legacy project. Thomas was, it's worth recalling, the legislative shepherd of the Medicare drug bill. We should expect great things this year.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE NEW ALLIANCE IS THE OLD ALLIANCE. I want to draw particular attention to the always clear-eyed Ed Kilgore's recent post at TPMCafe, "The Enemy of my Enemy -- Also My Enemy" because I think his point is really important:

There's been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about a new group calling itself Patriots To Restore Checks and Balances, featuring several conservative icons and organizations who have come out against the administration's Patriot Act extension proposal.

While this is interesting and politically important, and it's fine to note a split in conservative ranks over an issue where Democrats have been largely alone in objecting to the Bushies' egregious overreaching, there's a tone creeping into some of the liberal commentary that is disturbing....

Perhaps I'm overreacting to a handful of blog posts, but there's a New Coalition scent in the wind that bears some reconsideration. And Lord knows there's something wrong when a guy like me, who's often suspected of insufficiently vicious partisanship, has to point out that Grover Norquist and Paul Weyrich are by any standard far across the barricades from anything progressive.

I happened to be seated next to Grover Norquist at a conference dinner last September (the same one at which Matt talked to him), and after he described The Prospect to me as the magazine that had the package on "why we should be nice to bad kids" (that would have been our Juvenile Justice Reform special supplement), we got to talking a bit about his vision for a conservative version of the ACLU, which he said he thought was increasingly necessary. The basic problem was that, because of the right's successful decades-long struggle to demonize the ACLU, Republicans in Congress no longer paid any attention to it, and conservatives would have to set up their own civil liberties lobbying groups if they wanted Republican congressmen to protect civil liberties.

It was an intriguing and provocative idea, and I thought it sounded like a great story, which I pitched internally as a piece "on how conservative civil libertarians are realizing that once you cut the Democrats out of everything, you start to lose things you value, too." But my subsequent reporting failed to turn up any real evidence of major new organizations being founded, and I learned that the idea of a conservative ACLU had been batted around for a very long time without some of its strongest proponents being willing to let go of their tax reform agenda long enough to do much about it. The exception my sources all pointed to was former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr. But rather than founding a conservative ACLU, he had worked with the original one, taking an advisory position with it after failing to win re-election in 2002. I filed the idea away under "to keep an eye on."

When "news" hit the blogosphere yesterday about Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances, I had to kick myself. Why hadn't my sources told me about it if it was in development? A quick look at the site, though -- and an e-mail to an in-the-know source that failed to turn up anything about recent organizing efforts -- showed that, far from being the new conservative ACLU that Norquist was advocating, Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances is the same Barr-vehicle that's been in existence since March 22, 2005, and that has previously been reported on in newspapers across the country.

The coalition of conservatives affiliated with Patriots has been working together since at least 2003, according to a Nov. 2003 Chicago Tribune article:

For a growing number of conservative libertarians, the Patriot Act and the Bush administration's "big government" war on terrorism are becoming wedge issues that threaten to separate them from the Republican Party and President Bush.

Those worried about this include Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, David Keane of the American Conservative Union and Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum.

"We all want to continue to fight and win the war against terrorism, but there is absolutely no need to sacrifice civil liberties," said Bob Barr, a former congressman who works with the ACU and ACLU.

And, in early 2005, they banded together to create the Patriot group, according to this Chicago Tribune story:

Skeptics aren't limited to left-leaning civil libertarians. On March 22, a half-dozen conservative groups, from the American Conservative Union to the Gun Owners of America, joined the ACLU in forming Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances to lobby Congress to modify the Patriot Act.

"We agree that much of the Patriot Act is necessary ... to defeat terrorism," the coalition's members wrote President Bush. "But we remain very concerned that some of its provisions . . . infringe on the rights of law-abiding Americans."

Now a group that contains the original ACLU cannot, by definition, be "a conservative ACLU." That said, the group has managed to get great deal of positive press with very little in the way of actual staff or effort. An April 8, 2005 Indiana Chronicle-Tribune story on the group could well have been written yesterday:

It's not very often you can find Bob Barr, the former very conservative Republican congressman from Georgia, the Second Amendment Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union all on the same side of an issue.

You can on this one, though.

A few days ago, Barr, the Second Amendment Foundation, the ACLU, as well as David Keens of the American Conservative Union, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and others created Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances, a group campaigning to reform the USA Patriot Act.

The efforts of Barr or any of those groups acting alone would raise skepticism in reasonable people, but their joint efforts give them much more credibility....

The left-right coalition of the Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances has the right idea.

The Patriots brought on Dittus Communications to handle its PR, according to a story in PR Week magazine, with Laura Brinker as the senior account executive. She sent out the press release yesterday that Atrios posted, which led to a day of front-page praise for conservatives at some of the top liberal blogs. I say give that woman a raise.

To his credit, Atrios was only doing what I call "spaghetti-blogging" -- he posted the press release without commentary or context, in the common blogospheric practice of flinging things up against the wall to see what sticks, and letting the reader decide.

Still, I think some context is helpful here. I don't doubt that there are principled conservatives who genuinely disagree with the president's approach to civil liberties issues. Nonetheless, I think what we are seeing is a policy disagreement, not a division in the conservative coalition. The net outcome may be that Congress may enact more civil-liberties friendly policies. But no one is going to leave the Republican coalition over this.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

FIGHTING DEMS FIGHTING WASHINGTON? I’ll agree with Alec’s second point that simply recruiting vets ought not be a substitute for the hard intellectual slog that the Democrats seem to be avoiding when it comes to debating a national security agenda. But even if optics is the DCCC's recruitment goal here, I think it’s wrong to think of the "Fighting Dems" only as window dressing for national security issues. For example, to the extent that the Democrats plan on forming something of a national message around the “culture of corruption,” candidates with non-political backgrounds give some natural credence to the narrative that the Democrats are outsiders ready to take on Washington. Iraq and Afghanistan vets don't have the same taint of Washington as candidates drawn from professions typical of your average candidate, and thus can be more authentic voices of antagonism to beltway politics-as-usual.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE PORK DODGE. I was all set to write a lengthy argument about why the growing, conservative-led jihad against earmarks is a ridiculously beside-the-point dodge from the actual issues at hand in the current corruption scandals and in the crisis of modern Republicanism, but then I saw that some writer named Matthew Yglesias has just done so elsewhere. The basic point: Curbing earmarks may be a reasonable enough policy goal, but efforts to portray it either as a central response to Republicans' systemic corruption or as a key pillar of a genuine conservative small-government agenda are bogus. As I said earlier, appropriations earmarks last year cost a total of $27 billion, while the federal budget totaled about $2.5 trillion. You could eliminate every single one of those local projects and shrink government by a whopping one percent.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE IMMIGRATION DUD? Tamar Jacoby, one of your more pro-immigration conservatives, has a Weekly Standard article arguing that contrary to the hopes of many restrictionist conservatives and the fears of many liberals, immigration restriction will not be an electoral boon to the GOP in 2006.

Somewhat oddly, she neglects the most compelling reason for immigration skepticism -- the simple fact that, as her article's existence demonstrates, immigration is a much more divisive issue for the conservative coalition than for the progressive one. There is some restrictionist sentiment among rank-and-file Democratic voters, but party elites across the board are reasonably unified around a pro-immigration stance. On the right . . . not so much. As Ezra's said before, this is the GOP version of perennial Democratic hang-ups about trade policy, pitting faction against faction with a massive legacy of bitterness built up over many years. The saliency problems Jacoby points to are possibly surmountable, but in the course of surmounting them I think you'd wind up increasing intra-party tensions to a pretty destructive level.

--Matthew Yglesias

CREEPING COLLEGE REPUBLICANISM. In its delightful descent into dirty trickery and rumor-mongering, the House Majority Leader race is beginning to resemble a College Republican leadership race. From subscription-only Roll Call:

The House Majority Leader race has turned into mudslinging city. In one of the latest examples, a supporter of Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) really stirred the pot when he declared at the crowded bar of Bobby Van’s steakhouse the other night that Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) is the “freaking bride of Frankenstein.”

Let’s just say, that was too blunt for the Blunt camp.

We’re not sure who exactly heard the insult. But the offending party, who requested to remain anonymous in hopes of keeping both of his legs, says he’s certain somebody in the Blunt camp heard him. Because on Wednesday, he says, “they had somebody call me.”

The Boehner supporter, a former GOP aide who works in the private sector, says somebody who called him on his cell phone “threatened” him. Allegedly, the caller, whose identity was marked “unavailable” on caller ID, asked whether the Boehner supporter really wanted to be “out there if Roy Blunt becomes Majority Leader.”

The Boehner guy said the caller also added, “I just wanted to let you know ... you have to be careful.” Once the Boehner guy demanded to know who was calling, the line went dead...

In another sign of the mudslinging -- by Republicans themselves and Democrats anxious to watch them implode -- old rumors have resurfaced over the past week or so about a titillating story involving Shadegg and [former Rep. Jon] Christensen’s ex-wife, a story based on a false rumor.

Elsewhere in Roll Call we hear about how ace reform candidates Roy Blunt and John Boehner are "leaning on their extensive networks of K Streeters for help with winning votes." Of course!

--Sam Rosenfeld

REVISITING THE FIGHTING DEMS. Plenty of attention has been given to the so-called Fighting Dems by Kos and others, but the DCCC’s tactic of recruiting as many veteran candidates as possible won’t produce the electoral gains that I’m afraid some people expect. One obvious problem is the risk of having a whole bunch of one-issue candidates on the ticket who can speak authoritatively on war and security but come off as naïve and inexperienced on issues like healthcare and education. Another problem is that, in districts where other Democrats have announced their candidacies and entered the race (like the case of IL-06), the DCCC comes off as an intrusive outsider meddling in local affairs. It just reinforces the image of bossy DC elites telling district officials how best to run their local races.

Aside from this, there’s a larger problem at hand. Recruiting veterans is one way for Democrats to deal with national security only on a superficial level, while leaving the party’s more substantive problems on this issue untouched. If the party ever wants to be taken seriously on this matter, it’ll have to do more than just nominate a few veterans; it’ll need some solid policy proposals.

--Alec Oveis

WHO NEEDS MONEY? There's been lots of talk that Medicare Part D, Keystone Kops-style implementation aside, is a poorly conceived bill that attempts to offer prescription drug coverage through nauseatingly inefficient means. And that's true. But we'd not yet seen a rigorous comparison between the Bush administration's "let a thousand insurance plans bloom" strategy and a more sensible, single-payer structure. Now, thanks to The Center for Economic and Policy Research's Dean Baker (PDF), we've got the data.

Medicare Part D's great innovation was supposedly its competitive aspect. Dozens of private plans would battle to the death in a sort of health policy thunderdome which only the most comprehensive, well-priced, and easy-to-use would survive to create lower costs and better service than a bloated government bureaucracy. Much as the right thinks Wal-Mart is far too big and dominant to offer low prices or efficient service, Medicare Part D would fail as a singular entity able to leverage its size and market share to lower drug costs and create a distribution infrastructure. So the pharmaceutical industry Bush administration explicitly prohibited it from negotiating with drug providers, a strategy fairly similar to asking Shaq to play basketball on his knees. And so Medicare, which is orders of magnitude larger than the Veteran's Administration health system, pays 49 percent more for drugs than they do, and enjoys similar markups compared to every and any country with a national system.

Baker, clever economist that he is, compared Medicare Part D's projected pharmaceutical costs to Congressional Budget Office data on what other countries pay. In 2006, Medicare beneficiaries will spend an estimated $113 billion on drugs. If their costs were equivalent to the next most expensive country, they'd be paying only $86 billion. If they got the prices of the cheapest country, they'd spend $61 billion. And if, as one would expect, they used their larger size to get proportionately larger savings, they'd only spend $42 billion. Over a seven year projection, the standard benefit would cost $1.361 trillion, the high estimate in a single-payer system would cost $834 billion, the middle estimate $602 billion, and the low estimate $418 billion. And those numbers include adjustment for increased drug usage due to lower costs. Add in, too, the $38 billion savings in administrative costs and you've got quite a chunk of money -- in the optimistic estimate, almost a trillion dollars -- the Bush administration passed up on. But if that's getting you down, remember: money can't buy happiness. Only things like good health, often gained through the purchase of exorbitantly expensive pharmaceuticals, can do that.

--Ezra Klein

DEPARTMENT OF THE COALITION OF THE DWINDLING. Italy sets a timetable. From the AP:

Defense Minister Antonio Martino said in an address to a parliamentary committee that the mission ''will be considered concluded at the end of the year having definitively completed its mission.''

Italy has some 2,600 troops in Iraq, making it the fourth largest contingent in the coalition. Let the scurrilous attacks on Silvio Burlusconi begin!

--Mark Leon Goldberg

HILLARY AND THE FLAG. Aha! My relentless denigrating of Hillary Clinton has finally provoked a response from Hillaryland, where one staffer corrects my implication here that Clinton supports a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. In fact, she favors legislation that would ban flag burning, and that may be the best way to pre-empt a constitutional amendment that's apparently only one vote away from having the level of support it would need to pass the Senate.

To restate my nuanced view on the flag-burning question, I'm not really for either an amendment or a law. On the other hand, I don't have a serious problem with either approach. Given that such measures are likely to be popular, I'd prefer Democrats to move to the right on this issue than to do so on more consequential issues like reproductive rights or gay and lesbian equality. My main issue with Clinton's embrace of such causes as non-burning of flags and regulation of video games is that these don't seem to be concessions she's making to the right in exchange for anything. Give me one or two big, good, progressive ideas and I'll happily embrace a candidate who also has some conservative-leaning micro-initiatives. And it's only January 2006, so Clinton has plenty of time left to impress me with her good ideas. So far, though, she hasn't been doing so.

--Matthew Yglesias

BLACKWELL DEFIANT. The Columbus Dispatch is reporting that Republican gubernatorial frontrunner and Christian right favorite Ken Blackwell is undeterred by the complaint to the IRS by 31 Ohio clergy that Rod Parsley and another Ohio pastor, Russell Johnson, have violated their churches’ tax-exempt status by illegally campaigning for him. According to the Dispatch, Blackwell, appearing at an event with Johnson in the wake of the Martin Luther King Day announcement of the IRS complaint, is likening the effort to bring his campaign into church to a civil rights struggle. “Tell those 31 bullies that you aren’t about to be whupped,” Blackwell (who is black) told a meeting of Johnson’s Ohio Restoration Project. Johnson, for his part, added, “On the day we celebrated Martin Luther King’s accomplishments as a leader and minister, the religious left sent people to the back of the bus. They wanted to muzzle people of faith.”

This rhetoric echoes Parsley’s outspoken contempt for the IRS rules that prohibit clergy from electioneering from the pulpit. He supports North Carolina Republican Walter Jones’ Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act, which, if passed, would lift the ban. He says it’s “persecution” when “the IRS believes it has the right to tell me what I can say at the pulpit.” Parsley, too, loves to invoke the civil rights movement; he frequently talks about his “revolution” -– one that would bring a "spiritual revival" to his state and ultimately the country –- by using rhetoric like “somebody had to refuse to sit in the back of the bus,” “free at last,” and “content of his character.” His fevered depictions of the persecuted Christian are designed to strike fear in his followers that, as Blackwell put it yesterday, “political and social and cultural forces are trying to run God out of the public square.”

--Sarah Posner

HARDBALL. House and Senate Democrats held a joint event today to unveil their corruption and reform package, and I thought the presentation itself was remarkably well done by their standards. Hundreds of House members and senators gathered at the Library of Congress. (One conspicuous no-show was Steny Hoyer, who's absence certainly piqued my interest; his spokesman told me Hoyer had a prior obligation in Florida and that he supports the package 100 percent.) Barack Obama and Louise Slaughter have been tapped as point people for the Dems on reform and ethics this year, and they're both well-suited to it. Their speeches as well as Harry Reid's and Nancy Pelosi's were all aggressive and politicized, replete with a nicely unsubtle recurring motif about Republicans and the mafia. (Reid lingered ominously over his account of the Vegas mob's attempts to blow up his car and murder his family back in the Seventies, then segued immediately back to discussing Tom DeLay and the rest of the gang.) The Dems are also taking pains to connect the corruption issue to bad legislative outcomes, particularly on energy and prescription drugs.

And anyone worried that the Democrats would make the mistake of entering into this debate with an eye toward reaching a constructive compromise with Republicans and producing real reform legislation can rest easy. It's not just the rhetoric (as Slaughter said, "The same Republican members of Congress who put America up for sale have neither the ability nor the credibility to lead us in a new direction, and they shouldn't even try."). The Democrats' reform package has GOP labels for each proposal: “The Tony Rudy Reform” to close the revolving door; “The Ralph Reed Reform” to toughen lobbying disclosure; “The Jack Abramoff Reform” to ban gifts and travel; “The Grover Norquist Reform” to end the K Street Project; “The Scully & Tauzin Reform” to require disclosure of outside job negotiations; “The Frist and Hastert Reform,” which pertains to procedural rules governing conference committees and floor activity, etc.; “The Brownie Reform”; and "The Halliburton Reform." It's that kind of package.

I tend to advocate a 100 percent political, substantively unserious approach to the "lobbying reform" issue, not only because anything else is futile under Republican majorities but also because I don't take very seriously the notion that any of these procedural reforms will produce better governance and substantive policy outcomes. I haven't yet read this radical campaign finance overhaul proposal by Paul Begala and James Carville, but maybe they've got a more compelling case to make.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WELL THEN, THAT SETTLES IT. The Republican National Committee's expected oppo dump on Democrats who are pressing for lobbying reform includes this brilliant little bit of argumentation:

An Unnamed Democrat Lobbyist Involved In The Effort: "Hoyer Has Taken A Page Out Of The Republican Playbook ..." (Brody Mullins, "Hoyer's Own 'K St. Project,'" Roll Call, 5/21/03)

Well then. The Republican corruption playbook is only missing one page, is it?

I should also note that this is the first time I've ever seen a piece from The Nation magazine cited by the RNC in an oppo circular. Strange times.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BAMBOOZLED SENIORS. A commentator on Josh Marshall's site has pointed out the similarities -- and critical differences -- between the administration's current effort to smooth over the Medicare problems with smooth words and its effort to sell Social Security privatization last year:

the Bamboozlepalooza tour is worse this time and even more insulting. With Social Security, Bush was pushing his proposed change in basic program of Social Security. With Medicare Part D, the Administration and its minions are fanning out on a PR CAMPAIGN regarding a program that is currently being implemented and causing serious problems and raising a number of issues. What they SHOULD be doing, is staying in DC and fixing the problems

Kevin Drum, meanwhile, implies that the situation reminds him of the decision to go to war in Iraq:

You know, that sounds familiar. The Bush administration is warned that its planning is inadequate but it ignores the advice and plows ahead without listening.

Very familiar. It's on the tip of my tongue. Help me out here.

To me, it seems more like what happened with Hurricane Katrina. A large number of vulnerable people relied on the government for their safety and security, and got screwed. Sadly, the administration's first instincts still run to waging P.R. wars, rather than on-the-ground actions.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

SCARE STORIES. I find the Bush administration's half-truths a lot more frustrating than the lies:

[State Department Counterterrorism Coordinator Harry] Crumpton said a biological attack was potentially the most troubling scenario. He said evidence from Afghanistan suggested al-Qaeda had been seeking to develop anthrax before the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001. . . .

"As catastrophic as a nuclear attack would be, it would be self-contained. But if you look at a worst-case scenario for a biological attack, it would be difficult to determine whether or not it was a terrorist attack, and it would be far more difficult to contain."

What we have here is a classic conflation of two unrelated things. The "worst-case scenario for a biological attack" would, indeed, be almost impossible to contain because it would involve a highly contagious disease. Anthrax is, indeed, a biological weapon. Al-Qaeda does seem to have been trying to develop anthrax. But anthrax isn't highly contagious! It's a biological weapon that works like a pretty conventional one. You need to actually hit the target with the anthrax to make him sick. So while anthrax is dangerous, it's no more dangerous than, say, a normal bomb. There's no need to panic, and the threat is much, much less than the threat of a nuclear attack.

What you would want to worry about would be a terrorist with an infectious genetically engineered super-virus capable of wiping out huge numbers of people. The good news is that there's genuinely no reason to think al-Qaeda has any interest in doing that. Contagious diseases are useless for the same reason they're so dangerous -- you can't target them, so you can't use them to try and advance any sort of political agenda.

--Matthew Yglesias

AT LEAST THEY STAND ON PRINCIPLE. The Washington Post’s business columnist Steve Pearlstein writes:

Unfortunately, by framing the debate as an ideological choice between individual control and more government, Bush is setting himself up for another Social Security-like failure.

The White House line that we need to get government out of the health care business, or that we'd have better, cheaper health care from an unregulated market, is not only nonsense. It is also the kind of ideologically charged rhetoric that will immediately ensure that Democrats oppose anything that follows it.[...]

So, please, let's dispense with the free market, personal choice rhetoric. Economically, its inappropriate. Politically, its just stupid. It didn't work with Social Security and -- trust me on this one -- it really won't work with health care.

Ouch. Pearlstein's prescription -- that Bush demand universal coverage and achieve it through hefty employer mandate -- is, of course, nonsensical in the context of this administration. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be good politics.

Indeed, what's always baffled me about the Bush administration is that despite their unconcerned, craven approach to policy-making, they refuse to capture enormously popular issues by correctly appropriating liberal policies. When they try, as on Medicare Part D, they end up talking like progressives, but legislating like transdimensional beings composed entirely of greed. Meanwhile, actually pushing through some sort of quasi-sane health care solution would be an enormously popular, legacy-building idea. And given the "plantation" that is the Congress, a coalition of moderate Democrats and establishment Republicans could easily pass a bland, useful proposal, boost Bush's domestic numbers, and give the GOP a real accomplishment and/or agenda item as they enter 2006. History, of course, instructs that there's a near-zero chance that the Bush administration will adopt such a moderate, responsible approach. Nevertheless, for many columnists, Pearlstein among them, hope springs eternal.

--Ezra Klein

CAKED. During the whole Niger-Yellowcake brouhaha, one thing that always puzzled me was precisely how, in logistical terms, the mythical Nigerian yellowcake was supposed to make it across a continent to Iraq. Fortunately, folks at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research -- the one intelligence agency seemingly free to cast doubts on Iraq’s WMD ambitions -- were asking just that question back in March 2002. Now, thanks to a FOIA request from a conservative activist group, we know the answer:

A high-level intelligence assessment by the Bush administration concluded in early 2002 that the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq was "unlikely" because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles, according to a secret memo that was recently declassified by the State Department.

Among other problems that made such a sale improbable, the assessment by the State Department's intelligence analysts concluded, was that it would have required Niger to send "25 hard-to-conceal 10-ton tractor-trailers" filled with uranium across 1,000 miles and at least one international border…. [And] that the Niger was "probably not planning to sell uranium to Iraq," in part because France controlled the uranium industry in the country and could block such a sale.

The Times says that Colin Powell himself signed off on the report and distributed it to various high-level officials. No one apparently took notice (or wanted to), which isn’t exactly shocking news at this point. Nonetheless, it’s always interesting to see yet more primary sources that historians will no doubt cite when they try to explain exactly how Americans were hoodwinked into this war.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

POISON PILL. Mike Crowley smartly suggests that Democrats be sure to include in their lobbying reform package at least one provision that Republicans won't be able to stomach supporting. Certainly that's what Republicans are doing with their reform proposal:

In addition, House Republicans also intend to use the legislation to put new campaign spending and reporting restrictions on independent advocacy groups that have been seen as beneficial to Democrats, a move that could spark resistance.

This is just going to be the latest round in Republican efforts to go after liberal 527s. Count on that being a major feature of their "lobbying reform" agenda.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A RAISE MAKES. Brad Plumer writes:

Immigrants end up "dragging down" wages and working conditions for other workers precisely when, as is the case now, businesses are given free rein to abuse "guest workers" who can't speak out for fear of being deported. Now in practice, it's debatable whether immigrants actually take jobs from native workers or pull down wages in predominantly native industries—there's certainly decent evidence that immigrants do the jobs no native worker will accept, as the saying goes.

There's an interesting chicken-and-egg problem here. If being a farmworker, or a janitor, or a domestic servant paid $50,000 and benefits, those jobs would start looking mighty attractive to the same native workers currently passing them by. But the wide usage of immigrant labor ensures that compensation in those industries remains laughably meager, and the total lack of workplace rights or effective labor unions (see the recent UFW critiques) for folks in those industries effectively chokes off any chance of future changes. The exceptions that prove the rule are the SEIU campaigns like Justice for Janitors, which have extracted enough wage increases and benefit concessions in largely migrant industries that native workers have begun applying for the positions.

That's why the Drum Major Institute's report (PDF) is such an important piece of work. Rather than another attempt to quantify immigration, they're trying to reconceptualize it, and their framework makes a lot of sense. They've created a two-tier test for evaluating immigration laws: Does it retain the various benefits immigration provides for the middle class? And does it strengthen the rights of immigrants in the workplace? Arguments over immigration too often forget the broadly positive impact of migrant labor and fail to realize that most of the negative economic pressures ascribed to Hispanic immigration are attributable to the powerlessness of immigrants in the workplace. It's a shame that the immigration debate is so muddled that simply separating the good from the bad is a necessary, and even novel, service, but be that as it may, the Drum Major Institute has done it, and if their framework were adopted, some of these sectors currently reserved for exploitable immigrants may rapidly open up to native workers.

--Ezra Klein

CHECKS AND BALANCES. Our office is across the street from Grover Norquist's headquarters and there's a protest outside right now timed to coincide with Americans For Tax Reform's infamous Wednesday breakfast. I always think that if liberals knew the whole Norquist, they might be a bit more sympathetic to him. Several months ago I heard he had this idea -- and it sounded like a good one -- of creating a conservative civil liberties outfit that would shy away from some of the ACLU's more controversially left-wing causes (gay rights, etc.), espouse some distinctly right-wing causes (no gun control), and collaborate on areas of overlapping concern raised by the massive growth in executive power in the post-9/11 years. And now it's happened -- here's the website of Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances. Former Rep. Bob Barr, who, unlike Norquist, isn't under a massive cloud of corruption, is the chairman, which is probably for the best. Here's their press release on why it's bad for the president to break the law:

Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances (PRCB) today called upon Congress to hold open, substantive oversight hearings examining the President's authorization of the National Security Agency (NSA) to violate domestic surveillance requirements outlined in the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, chairman of PRCB, was joined by fellow conservatives Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR); David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union; Paul Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation and Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, in urging lawmakers to use NSA hearings to establish a solid foundation for restoring much needed constitutional checks and balances to intelligence law.

We could use more of this, please.

--Matthew Yglesias

IT'S CATCHY! During this afternoon's blogger conference call with Harry Reid, someone asked about the Dems' recently agreed-upon slogan:

Blogger: You've taken a fair amount of flack in the blogosphere for the slogan, "America, together we can do better," and --

Reid: The slogan is, "Together, America can do better."

Blogger: -- well, uhh.

Of course, the exchange rather illustrated the problem with the slogan. Reid went on to tout the amount of work and thought that had gone into it. This never bothered me as much as it did others, though a simple "We can do better" always seemed preferable.

At another point during the call, Reid described the chances of Senate Democrats deciding -- at tomorrow's caucus meeting -- to filibuster Sam Alito as "no more than fifty percent. Fifty percent at most." I took that to mean "zero percent, definitely."

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE LAMENESS OF THE LEFT. This may seem like one of those small intra-New York left controversies, and yet it is the kind of thing that happens so frequently in so-called progressive circles around the country that it's worth noting, because it's just this kind of thing that makes people wonder if the men of the left actually prefer being a small, insular clique of out-of-power individuals above adopting the values they publicly espouse.

The "Saving Our Democracy" conference, sponsored by The Nation Institute and The New Democracy Project and scheduled for Jan. 21, has somehow managed to arrange a forum about the future of democracy in which only two of the 24 scheduled speakers are female -- and in so doing begun a minor controversy. Nation columnist Katha Pollitt wrote the organizers this agitated letter:

Dear Organizers of the New Democracy conference,

I notice that only two speakers (in 25!) at the upcoming conference are women. How does that fit the project of rescuing democracy? Even congress--even the supreme court! -- has a better male-female ratio than that. Please don't reply that you asked a lot of women and they said no. The world is full of women who are the equals and more of the men in your lineup. There are women who would do credit to every topic you list. Moreover, as things stand, you have no one to specifically address reproductive rights, abortion rights, the rollback of feminist gains, 'family values' as an attack on women, or the specific role of gender politics in the rise of the Christian and Republican right. That topic isn't even on your agenda.

I am just disgusted that in 2006 women are still invisible to so-called progressives. Maybe that's one reason they keep losing elections.

Sincerely yours,
Katha Pollitt

Lisa Jervis, the publisher of Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, followed with:

Dear New Democracy Project folks--

I am very much in support of your mission to promote "democratic participation, economic fairness and social justice," but I'm curious as to how you think you're going to do that without the participation of a diverse range of progressives. The lineup for your Saving Our Democracy event suggests that democracy can be saved by a bunch of white dudes with a few token white women and men of color.

I applaud your recognition that "the political left's routine responses to the traditional conservative arguments are no longer sufficient." You might find more energetic responses if you took a look at the work of people outside your small circle of the usual suspects....

Until supposedly general interest progressive organizations consciously and purposefully become truly inclusive and diverse, the movement will be stymied. It's about more than bean counting. While it's true that getting a range of communities represented at events like Saving Our Democracy is important, what your lineup reveals more than anything is a myopic view of democracy that sees no place for feminist issues or gender analysis, and very little for civil rights and anti-racist work. That doesn't look like democracy to most of us.

Lisa Jervis

The New Democracy Project describes itself as a counterpoint to the right-wing's network of think tanks and reminds that "Today’s controversy is tomorrow’s consensus."

Now, as I said, this particular brand of controversy erupts all too frequently on the left, and I've watched too many male organizers and funders rolling their eyes from the backs of rooms as women raised similar concerns at other forums to think questions like this are unique to the New Democracy Project or this particular conference. (Most recently, I've seen similar criticism leveled by audience members at an NDN event, for example.)

And yet, it is a source of great perplexity to me that otherwise clear-headed men who are genuinely committed to promoting Democrats or "the progressive movement" should be so blind when it comes to understanding why the Democratic Party and the left even continue to exist. The Democratic Party and left exist because of female voters and volunteers. No ifs, ands, or buts.

As I noted in detail last summer, virtually every left organization that relies on volunteer labor succeeds because of the labor of female volunteers, who comprise the vast bulk of such low-level workers, and when Democrats have won at the national level in the past 40 years, it has been because of their appeal to female voters.

It's true that the progressive movement, such as it is, has not made great use of its human resources. But to the extent that the progressive base is about 60 percent female, according to research by The Breakthrough Institute, progressive conferences in 2006 that are 92 percent male would seem to suggest that something even more problematic than a lack of resources is undermining the left's ability to strategically invest in human capital.

On top of which, controversies like this benefit no one. They make women feel diminished and excluded, and men feel like they're never going to be able to organize a simple public conversation with their professional friends without getting hit over the head with identity politics. And yet the same sad script keeps playing out, over and over again, until everyone feels like throwing up their hands in despair.

The grown-up solution, of course, would be for people on the left or center left who run institutions to figure out ways to organize forums as diverse as the left itself. After all, living your values is the best way to convince people that you have some.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

OVERSIGHT. As someone who's often offered contrarian defenses of the Republicans' transformation of Congress into a tightly disciplined parliamentary-style institution, I should stress that one key component of that transformation -- the near-total disappearance of Congressional oversight of the executive branch -- is an unambiguously bad development. Actual parliamentary systems have votes of no confidence and direct, regular questioning of the prime minister by the opposition that serve as substituting mechanisms for the lack of a clear separation of powers; unified GOP control of the U.S. government has given us parliamentary-style lockstep lawmaking and partisanship without any oversight whatsoever. Noah Feldman wrote a recent piece on the subject for The New York Times Magazine, and Henry Waxman's staff has released a new report (PDF) detailing 15 issues for which Republican lawmakers have abdicated all oversight responsibility. Now TAP alumnus Drake Bennett offers a typically thoughtful, historically-minded take on the subject in the Boston Globes' Ideas section. (Thanks to reader S.M.)

The fact of unified party control over both branches obviously goes far in explaining the current situation, and the rather historically unique degree of militant partisan discipline that characterizes the modern governing Republican Party pretty much does the rest. One can expect Congressional Republicans' institutional self-muzzlement to diminish at least a little bit over the next few years as the president becomes a lamer and lamer duck. (On national security-related issues, of course, the right tends to disavow much of a Congressional check on the executive for substantive reasons as well. Republicans often sang a different tune during the Clinton years, but not always: Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde pushed to repeal the War Powers Resolution in 1995, for instance.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

YOU STEPPED IN WHAT? Starting today, TAPPED is inviting its readers to comment on posts. The next few days we’ll be ironing out some of the inevitable glitches, but ultimately we look forward to hearing what you have to say. Stay tuned for other developments around TAPPED.

--Alec Oveis

FRANKLIN AND THE EARLY AMERICAN PRESS. Since we are all celebrating dear old Ben, I thought I'd share this excerpt from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which, like most early autobiographies and some more recent ones, took some liberties with the truth. Of particular interest to bloggers will be the troubles caused by Franklin's early, anonymous newspaper writings, which ultimately led him to flee from his brother's care in Boston and seek his fortune in Philadelphia -- but not before his brother went to jail to protect his anonymity. From Chapter Two:

My brother had, in 1720 or 1721, begun to print a newspaper. It was the second that appeared in America, and was called the New England Courant. The only one before it was the Boston News-Letter. I remember his being dissuaded by some of his friends from the undertaking, as not likely to succeed, one newspaper being, in their judgment, enough for America. At this time (1771) there are not less than five-and-twenty. He went on, however, with the undertaking, and after having worked in composing the types and printing off the sheets, I was employed to carry the papers thro' the streets to the customers.

He had some ingenious men among his friends, who amus'd themselves by writing little pieces for this paper, which gain'd it credit and made it more in demand, and these gentlemen often visited us. Hearing their conversations, and their accounts of the approbation their papers were received with, I was excited to try my hand among them; but, being still a boy, and suspecting that my brother would object to printing anything of mine in his paper if he knew it to be mine, I contrived to disguise my hand, and, writing an anonymous paper, I put it in at night under the door of the printing-house. It was found in the morning, and communicated to his writing friends when they call'd in as usual. They read it, commented on it in my hearing, and I had the exquisite pleasure of finding it met with their approbation, and that, in their different guesses at the author, none were named but men of some character among us for learning and ingenuity. I suppose now that I was rather lucky in my judges, and that perhaps they were not really so very good ones as I then esteem'd them.

Encourag'd, however, by this, I wrote and convey'd in the same way to the press several more papers which were equally approv'd...

One of the pieces in our newspaper on some political point, which I have now forgotten, gave offense to the Assembly. He was taken up, censur'd, and imprison'd for a month, by the speaker's warrant, I suppose, because he would not discover his author. I too was taken up and examin'd before the council; but, tho' I did not give them any satisfaction, they content'd themselves with admonishing me, and dismissed me, considering me, perhaps, as an apprentice, who was bound to keep his master's secrets.

During my brother's confinement, which I resented a good deal, notwithstanding our private differences, I had the management of the paper; and I made bold to give our rulers some rubs in it, which my brother took very kindly, while others began to consider me in an unfavorable light, as a young genius that had a turn for libelling and satyr. My brother's discharge was accompany'd with an order of the House (a very odd one), that "James Franklin should no longer print the paper called the New England Courant."

There was a consultation held in our printing-house among his friends, what he should do in this case. Some proposed to evade the order by changing the name of the paper; but my brother, seeing inconveniences in that, it was finally concluded on as a better way, to let it be printed for the future under the name of Benjamin Franklin; and to avoid the censure of the Assembly, that might fall on him as still printing it by his apprentice, the contrivance was that my old indenture should be return'd to me, with a full discharge on the back of it, to be shown on occasion, but to secure to him the benefit of my service, I was to sign new indentures for the remainder of the term, which were to be kept private. A very flimsy scheme it was; however, it was immediately executed, and the paper went on accordingly, under my name for several months.

At length, a fresh difference arising between my brother and me, I took upon me to assert my freedom...

And so begins a great tale of a rich life, the likes of which none of us will ever see in this era of greater specialization and more clearly codified laws and ethical rules.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

REIMAGINING IMMIGRATION. Nathan Newman catches a Drum Major Institute study (PDF) arguing that legalization and regulation of immigration, rather than further attempts to choke off the cross-border flow, would be the best strategy for addressing the negative economic effects of migrant workers.

The rationale is simple: immigrants are to corporations as Los Angeles is to the NFL. Just as the robber barons presiding over NFL franchises continually extort more from their host cities by threatening a move to franchise-less LA, businesses keep migrant wages low by threatening legal reprisals and domestic wages capped by threatening to hire more immigrants. In response, the white working class grouses about the Mexicans taking their jobs when they should really be pointing pitchforks at the corporate executives giving them away. Legalizing and regulating immigrant labor would (hopefully) squelch business's ability to intimidate migrants, and thus end the downward pressure immigrants put on wages. Sign me up!

But The Drum Major Institute's paper is most interesting when disaggregating the current forces in the immigration debate:

The immigration agenda of the big business lobby—allowing more immigrants but consigning them to a subordinate position in the labor market—is understandably driven by what will bolster the corporate bottom line. Middle-class voters can be forgiven for being skeptical of the notion that what’s best for Wall Street will also be best for Main Street.

Similarly, since immigrant advocates speak for immigrants, it’s reasonable to assume that they have a vested interest in claiming that their agenda—more immigration and more rights for immigrants—is also the right agenda for middle America, whether that is actually the case or not.

The voices in the debate that make the most direct claim to speaking for working and middle-class Americans are often those who favor the most restrictive immigration policies. They speak to middle-class economic anxieties about competition for jobs, higher taxes, growing welfare rolls and more crime. Popular CNN Anchor Lou Dobbs, who includes a segment on the nation’s “broken borders” on his show almost every evening, goes so far as to argue that “U.S. immigration policy is a tragic joke at the expense of hard-working middle-class Americans.”1 While we should reject the growing current of xenophobia that is fueling anti-immigrant sentiment, no one should dismiss out-of-hand the valid concerns of working and middle-class Americans. It is not inherently xenophobic to worry about earning a living that provides enough to take care of your family during a time of increased illegal immigration.

Just so. The trick is in keeping the motivations of the various groups straight. Illegal immigrants are not inherently problematic for most workers, but they become dangerous when corporations hire them and use their status to force compensation concessions that regulated workers would never accept. Given that dynamic, it's easy to see why the white working class, for totally non-xenophobic reasons, resents the cheap labor flooding into the country. But the villain there is the corporation illegally pursuing cheap labor, not the migrant looking for a better life. Convincing the working class of this is key to rationalizing the immigration debate.

On another note, congratulations to my frequent critic Nathan Newman on both his recent marriage and decision to become the Progressive Legislative Action Network's first policy director, best of luck on all fronts.

--Ezra Klein

THE NEW ANDREW. It looks so much like him, and yet, at the same time, it really doesn't.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BETTER PERKS NEEDED? Byron York posts some of the latest info on privately funded congressional travel. Some of this is potentially innocent, but other items look mighty fishy. Representative Steven LaTourette and his wife, for example, got a $5,947 trip to Las Vegas from the Nuclear Energy Institute which is a pretty straightforward lobbying shop for the nuclear power industry. Now as it happens, NEI seems to have a lot of stances on issues that I agree with on the merits, but there you have it.

A somewhat more interesting case is the Congressional Economic Leadership Institute, which sent some folks to Brazil. If you check out the group's website, you'll see that for a 501 (c) 3 non-profit they appear to do essentially no policy research whatsoever. Instead, their main function is to organize "study trips" for members of Congress. The group isn't a lobbying outfit for anyone in particular, but instead gets its money from a miscellaneous grab-bag of corporations, most of whom are involved in government contracting or highly-regulated businesses. They have a standing relationship with a bipartisan group called the Congressional Competitiveness Caucus. All in all, it looks to be no good and fall rather squarely into the "legal but shouldn't be" category.

That said, it would be a shame if the upshot of efforts at reform were that members of Congress never travel abroad. Indeed, it would probably be better for congressmen to travel more than they do. Derek Chollet has some ideas on ways to clean up the travel process without killing it. The most straightforward thing, I would think, would simply be to create an official congressional travel budget, but if that's politically impossible, other solutions may be possible.

--Matthew Yglesias

PARSLEY, CONT. Sarah Posner writes in to give more info on Rod Parsley and his connection to Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell:

Pastor Rod Parsley, the self-proclaimed Christocrat profiled in the November issue of the magazine, may soon come under I.R.S. scrutiny for engaging in prohibited campaigning for Republican gubernatorial candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell. A group of Ohio clergy has filed a complaint with the I.R.S., alleging that Parsley and another Ohio pastor, Russell Johnson, are improperly using their churches for election activities. Whether the I.R.S. actually does anything about Parsley or Johnson will itself depend on political considerations, particularly the perception of some Parsley supporters that Bush may owe him for helping to deliver Ohio’s crucial electoral votes in 2004. Since Blackwell, the Ohio Secretary of State who also served as Bush’s state campaign co-chair, announced he was running for governor, Parsley has been walking a fine line with advocating Blackwell’s candidacy, raising the possibility of an it-depends-what-your-definition-of-an-endorsement-is defense. During a breakfast meeting of about 1,300 pastors at his church last summer, for example, Parsley shared a table with Blackwell as they dined on eggs, croissants (“Sounds French,” sneered a Parsley deputy), and sausages (“Made right here in the United States,” he added). Parsley gloated to the receptive crowd that Blackwell was ahead in both polls and fundraising, adding, as he turned to the candidate, “I’m very proud to call you my friend.”

--Alec Oveis

NO RARE COINS THIS TIME. While Linda Hirshman’s piece ("Homeward Bound") from the December issue has already provoked a very heated debate over the merits and demerits “choice feminism,” another recent Prospect piece will surely draw a lot of attention soon for its early work on Rod Parsley and the World Harvest Church.

Rod Parsley, as Sarah Posner reported in the November issue, is “a rising star of the Christian right who was lifted from political obscurity onto the national stage for his role in mobilizing voters in favor of [Ohio’s] gay-marriage ban,” which proved quite helpful to the Bush campaign in winning that state. Parsley has also had remarkable success in reaching out to the burgeoning black evangelical community -- a success due in part to his close work with Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell on the anti-gay initiative.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported in November that, for the past year, the IRS has been looking into the political activity of certain tax-exempt organization, including some churches, and investigating whether during the 2004 election these groups violated campaign restrictions.

Then yesterday, on the front page of the National Report, The New York Times reported on possible campaign violations by World Harvest Church as well as Fairfield Christian Church, another Columbus-area church. A group of religious leaders, inspired by the LA Times piece, wrote to the IRS, asking it to investigate whether these churches illegally promoted the gubernatorial candidacy of Parsley ally Kenneth Blackwell.

While the LA Times piece focused on the unlikely alliance that had formed between the left- and right-leaning churches as a result of this investigation, the Times piece noted that the letter’s signatories consisted of 31 clergy members from a variety of Jewish and Christian denominations. Does this mean that the left-right alliance has collapsed, and there will now be a mudslinging campaign within the religious community? More likely, this was the action of an independent group interested in protecting the boundaries between church and state. But in either case, it should be interesting to watch as yet another prominent figure from Ohio goes down in disgrace.

--Alec Oveis

SUE THE PRIVATE SECTOR. Two interesting and related developments in the push-back against NSA spying suggest, to me, the possible existence of another approach. First, former Vice President Al Gore gave a fiery and though-provoking speech (PDF) at DAR Constitution Hall on domestic surveillance, which he concluded with five recommendations, including this one:

[A]ny telecommunications company that has provided the government with access to private information concerning the communications of Americans without a proper warrant should immediately cease and desist their complicity in this apparently illegal invasion of the privacy of American citizens.

Meanwhile, two civil liberties groups filed the first suits against the U.S. government:

The two lawsuits, which are being filed separately by the American Civil Liberties Union in Federal District Court in Detroit and the Center for Constitutional Rights in Federal District Court in Manhattan, are the first major court challenges to the eavesdropping program.

Both groups are seeking to have the courts order an immediate end to the program, which the groups say is illegal and unconstitutional. The Bush administration has strongly defended the legality and necessity of the surveillance program, and officials said the Justice Department would probably vigorously oppose the lawsuits on national security grounds.

Now, the Prospect's own Tara McKelvey is a party to the ACLU suit, but Gore's recommendation makes me wonder if there aren't also real legal consequences to be faced by the private companies involved in the illegal surveillance. Of course, we do not yet know the identities of the companies involved, but I suspect that some of them might be located in or have offices in jurisdictions where prosecutors might wish to contest the companies' right to give private information to the government without a warrant, and the individuals monitored might well be able to mount civil claims against the communications companies.

While the Bush administration may be eager to use congressional hearings into the surveillance as another opportunity to bash Democrats as weak on national security, I suspect that this program will actually look worse and worse to the American public the more the actual facts about it are known. If any of the large internet or telephone communications companies are revealed to have been complicit in the surveillance -- such as (completely hypothetically) Verizon or AOL -- the national uproar will be deafening.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

HILLARY BRINGS THE HEAT. Harsh words for the Bush administration from Hillary Clinton, harsh but true. Back during the 2004 campaign, one theory (pushed notably by Noam Scheiber as I recall) held it that one strength Howard Dean had was that he was able to appeal to the Democratic base largely through shrill rhetoric, leaving him able to hew to a fairly centrist line on substantive matters. I tend to suspect Clinton of trying to take a similar strategy, which, as our own Ezra has written, is the kind of thing bloggers are prone to falling for.

I would urge people to resist the temptation. My heart, too, thrills to such lines as "I predict to you that this administration will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country," but at the end of the day I'd rather have a candidate with a good foreign policy and an ambitious health care agenda who talks like a moderate than someone who's got a bad foreign policy, a flag-burning amendment, and a fiery speech.

--Mathew Yglesias

NSA WIRETAPPING UNEARTHS "CALLS TO PIZZA HUT." The New York Times is reporting that the NSA warrantless surveillance program has not, according to the FBI sources tasked with following up on the leads it generated, produced anything but a mound of dead-ends:

President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program, which focused on the international communications of some Americans and others in the United States, as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives."

But the results of the program looked very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret eavesdropping program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

"We'd chase a number, find it's a school teacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former FBI official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration."

Far from being used to monitor overseas actors with links to terrorism or U.S.-based Al Qaeda cells, this program of illegal spying was used as the basis for domestic surveillance of innocent Americans.

The law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said the program had uncovered no active Qaeda networks inside the United States planning attacks. "There were no imminent plots - not inside the United States," the former F.B.I. official said.

The flaws in the program likely arose from the very broad-brush nature of the surveillance, the same characteristics that might have made a FISA court reject a warrant. FISA does not, to the best of my understanding, license fishing expeditions based on data-mining for key words, though it might have licensed surveillance of individuals thus identified.

Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic numbers to other numbers called. In other cases, lists of phone numbers appeared to result from the agency's computerized scanning of communications coming in and out of the country for names and keywords that might be of interest. The deliberate blurring of the source of the tips caused some frustration among those who had to follow up.

F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor, who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs, said intelligence officials turning over the tips "would always say that we had information whose source we can't share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Al Qaeda operative." He said, "I would always wonder, what does 'suspected' mean?"

Over time, as the tips failed to pan out over and over again, the NSA program seriously undermined the agency's authority as a terrorism-fighting group with people at the F.B.I.:

in bureau field offices, the N.S.A. material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more "calls to Pizza Hut," one official, who supervised field agents, said.

More "calls to Pizza Hut." That about says it all.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

HANG TOUGH, DEMS. Via Kevin Drum, Slate’s John Dickerson notes that George Bush wants hearings on warrantless wiretapping so that he can dust off the national security cudgel from 2002 and use it again in 2006. Dickerson writes:

But that's precisely why George Bush wants hearings on domestic spying. He's inviting Democrats to another round of self-immolation. In 2002, the Republican Party used the debate over the Department of Homeland Security to attack Democrats in the off-year election by arguing the party was soft on terror. The president and his aides hope the NSA hearings will offer the same opportunity in 2006.

That sounds right to me, but it’s worth noting that the political atmosphere right now is dramatically different than it was in the fall of 2002. Dickerson points out that Bush’s approval rating was nearly twice (twice!) as high as today, and that domestic spying is far less of a slam dunk issue for the GOP than the struggle over the Homeland Security department was in 2002. But there are a host of other things to consider, too.

In the fall of 2002, the Trade Center attacks had happened just one year ago; this fall, it will have been five years. Recall, too, that the battle over Homeland Security was stacked in favor of the GOP in a way the wiretapping story isn’t; the Dems were fumbling around with bureaucratic arguments for why they opposed Bush’s version of the department. By contrast, the Dem position on wiretapping – i.e., if it’s illegal, don’t do it -- can be argued far more clearly.

Finally and most importantly, in the fall of 2002 the war in Iraq hadn’t started. The GOP’s dems-are-soft-on-national-security argument wasn’t just about Homeland Security; it was getting a major boost from the partisan skirmishing around the October 2002 war resolution vote. Because the Iraq fiasco hadn’t happened yet and the smoldering towers were still in everyone's nightmares, the electorate was far more willing to unquestioningly support Bush on national security issues.

Since then, there's been Mission Accomplished, no WMD found, over 2,000 Americans dead, some 50,000 badly wounded, bad body armor, continued bloodshed in Iraq, John Murtha -- and on top of that, the wiretapping scandal. Yes, polls might show Bush still doing OK on terror. Nonetheless, I’d be very surprised if sophisticated polling didn’t reveal significant erosion in the electorate's gut-level sense of the GOP's competence on national security issues (there may be public polling on this I've missed). At the very least, it seems very likely that voters are far less willing to reflexively take that competence for granted and are less willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt on them – far less, especially, than in 2002.

All this is not to say that Kevin isn’t right that the Dems had better come up with a “more crowd-pleasing answer on this subject than they did in 2002 and 2004.” It just seems like Dems shouldn’t let those bad memories psych them out -- they should stick to their principles, especially on an issue as serious as combating unchecked executive power, and hope that the electorate has learned a thing or two about this administration in the past four years. And yes -- it wouldn't hurt if Dems tried a bit harder to make their case in a somewhat more “crowd-pleasing" manner.

-- Greg Sargent

YOU DON'T GET TO PICK THE ISSUES. A welcomed point from Kevin Drum -- much as Democrats want the 2006 elections to be all about corruption, the GOP is going to want them to be all about national security, and there's a very strong chance that they'll get their way. Not only does fear of imminent death have a way of crowding other concerns off the table, but an incumbent president has a lot of tools at his disposal to raise the salience of whatever he wants to put on the table. People need to be ready for this, and "try to deflect the issue and change the topic" doesn't count as being ready.

--Matthew Yglesias

SHADEGG'S IN. Reports subscription-only Roll Call:

House Republican Policy Committee Chairman John Shadegg (Ariz.) announced his entry into the race for Majority Leader this morning, complicating the path to victory for Reps. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and John Boehner (R-Ohio) and potentially forcing a second ballot when the vote occurs Feb. 2.

Significantly, Shadegg vowed to resign his Policy chairmanship to focus on the Majority Leader contest, a move that could put pressure on Blunt to give up his hold on the Majority Whip position. Four candidates are currently running for Whip, but Blunt has said he would retain that job if he loses the Majority Leader race.

“I personally believe it is not appropriate to try to retain one position in our elected leadership while running for another,” Shadegg said.

Roy Blunt has been trying to hog his dual positions of Whip and Majority Leader to guarantee himself a leadership spot regardless of the latter race's outcome, and that's clearly rankled folks. Shadegg 's move nicely undermines Blunt's position while also badly damaging the faux-reformist appeal of John "Me. Now." Boehner.

Shadegg, a freshman in the '94 takeover, preceded Mike Pence as head of the 100-strong Republican Study Committee, the House's hard-right caucus. He's a tenacious partisan and a pretty stalwart defender of DeLay, but certainly compared to Boehner his bona fides as a principled right-wing outsider are real. As K-Lo notes, he's tied up in a modest amount of Abramoff money, and he was one of 33 members who signed letters to the Interior Department opposing the opening of the Jena Choctaw's casino in Louisiana. The connections are real but comparatively limited. (Of the legal, everyday corruption variety, Shadegg's longtime seat on the Energy and Commerce Committee has made him an extremely reliable servant of the energy, oil, and gas industries and a regular recipient of their money.)

But all in all, he's about as legitimate a standard-bearer for "principled" conservatism as one might realistically find in the House conference, and that's what would make a Shadegg takeover in the leadership a godsend for Democrats. To the extent he could manage to shift conference policy and legislation in the RSC's direction, he would be promoting some seriously odious and unpopular positions.

UPDATE: I seem to have spoken too soon on the whole "man of principle" thing.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BAD POLICY, GREAT POLITICS. For liberal Wal-Mart watchers, this morning’s headlines offered a helping of pre-breakfast schadenfreude. Mmmm...more filling. Over in Maryland, the Democratic legislature overruled the governor’s veto (a veto, you'll remember, that furnished a delightful Kodak moment) and passed a law forcing the Big Box behemoth to pay eight percent of its payroll into health care. Wal-Mart, who’s fairly close to the magic number eight already, will pay the difference into a state Medicaid fund to help cover their hordes of workers leaning on the program. Cue celebration.

My take, sure to trigger a flood of enraged e-mails, is that this law is terrible policy but terrific politics. Putting aside questions about the utility of entrenching the corporate welfare state, Wal-Mart simply does not abuse Medicaid. The retail sector as a whole sees an average six percent of its employees relying on Medicaid; Wal-Mart averages five percent. As for the children of employees, who do rely disproportionately on state services (though for perfectly good reasons), kids of Wal-Mart employees use government health care 27 percent of the time; for the retail sector as a whole, that number is 36 percent.

With numbers like those, it’s a bit unclear why this law should be so narrowly tailored as to only apply to Wal-Mart. If you want retail employees to have health care and think that the financial responsibility rests on the shoulders of their employers, mandate that eight percent of payroll go to a state health fund across the board. In the end, a Wal-Mart employee on Medicaid is no different than a small business employee on Medicaid, and what applies to the one should go for the other. In health speak, this is called an employer mandate; it works perfectly well in Germany and Japan, it was the centerpiece of the Clinton plan, and if that’s the structure Americans prefer, there’s no reason we can’t institute it here. But a mandate that only applies to Wal-Mart, well, that’s just a duck.

On the other hand, I’m all for watching 50 states pass bad policies much like this one. And only partly because I'm a hack. The end game here isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, better health benefits from Wal-Mart, but an eventual national insurance policy that severs the tie between employers and health care and brings coherency to our fractured, inefficient, and inequitable system. But until behemoths like Wal-Mart and the smaller businesses exempted from this mandate lose their ability to hide from health costs, they’ll never sign on. Force them to pay, however, and the choice becomes expending precious resources to administer their own plans or paying a smaller surcharge to let the government do it for them. And that should clarify things real quick.

--Ezra Klein

JOHN BOEHNER (R - SALLIE MAE). More from The Chronicle of Higher Education on the "reform" candidate for Majority Leader's ties to Sallie Mae and the student loan industry:

According to Federal Election Commission records, Sallie Mae officials contributed more than $100,000, both individually and through political-action committees, to Mr. Boehner during the 2003-4 election cycle -- a time in which he was drafting legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, the law that governs most federal student-aid programs. That total is equal to about 40 percent of the $259,000 that the student-loan industry as a whole donated to the congressman during that period of time.

On several occasions, Mr. Boehner has been a guest of Albert L. Lord, Sallie Mae's chief executive officer, on the corporate jet, primarily for golf outings in Florida. The company also helped sponsor a party that Mr. Boehner threw in New York at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

In addition, Mr. Boehner's daughter, Tricia, works for General Revenue Corporation, a loan-collection company owned by Sallie Mae.

There's still no real evidence of anything that you'd call illegal here, but I certainly wouldn't call it the height of ethical conduct or clean government either.

--Matthew Yglesias

OF MOMENTUM AND MOVEMENTS. Matt's right, of course, that undoing Roe v. Wade is a long-standing goal of both the conservative movement and the Republican Party, whose grip on government, scandals notwithstanding, remains secure and broad, and that the election of 2004 was the real deciding factor in Alito's nomination. At the same time, though, what's happening now with regard to abortion rights is not a simple matter of electoral politics. It's a matter of movement ones.

Politicians' positions are lagging social indicators, and the historical record shows pretty clearly that the fundamental dynamic of social change in American democracy over the past 45 years has been the movement from margin to center. Society is led by its margins and transformed by its extremists; trickle down as an economic theory doesn't work, but it's an apt description of how social change happens.

Abortion is legal in America, not because of the wisdom and fairness of its judges or righteousness of its politicians; it's legal because thousands -- millions -- of women worked for decades to challenge their partners, their families, their elected representatives, and society as a whole about the wisdom of keeping it illegal. Countless hours and sleepless nights and marches and arrests and speeches went into that work; endless conferences and fundraising efforts and legal challenges undergirded it. It was not an easy accomplishment.

Looking at some other movements for social change, it took 82 year of fighting for women to get the vote in this country, and more than 70 years for abolitionists to win their battle to outlaw slavery (not to mention a civil war). Close to a century and a half after that, the nation has not yet managed to achieve full equality between black and white. The tremendous social progress toward equality there has been over the past 50 years grew out of another bitterly contested, often violently opposed movement. The passionate work of civil rights activists, coupled with quiet day-to-day shifts in actions and sentiments by less forward individuals, finally led the legal and political system to come around. And the legal decisions, in turn, acted like electric transformers to amplify the energy for a new social direction.

Social change in a large, geographically dispersed democracy is a tough, tough business, and controversial social changes often take decades to reach the point of electoral and judicial codification -- at which point such codifications act to ratify changes that have already occurred or else are well underway.

The anticipated unraveling of Roe v. Wade cannot be blamed on election 2004 alone, nor on Bush, nor solely on the beliefs of the newly constituted Supreme Court, which, as Matt points out, he was certain to appoint. If Roe v. Wade is ultimately overturned, or rendered substantially moot, it will be as a result of the incessant and passionate work of the anti-choice movement and conservative activists over the course of the past 33 years. The conservative movement, as one smart observer told me this past weekend, ought to be understood as the latest of America's new social movements, the great upgatherings of people that have, in wave after wave, led to significant social changes and political shifts in the past 40 years. From 1964 to today, it has moved from margin to center, from the sidelines to power, trailing politicians and judges in its wake.

Opposing it, in recent years, have been the institutional remnants of previous generations' social movements on the left, from the newly fractured unions in existence since the hey-day of the labor movement in the 1930s to the pro-choice and women's groups founded in the 1960s and 1970s. And oppose it they have, fiercely. Yet it has not been enough. The grassroots energy is always with those pushing change, rather than those defending an existing order. (Though power is always with the existing order, which is why change is slow.) To the extent that Republicans have, since the 1990s, ruled the roost, new networks and organizations have sprung up on the left -- such as the activist bloggers -- to oppose them.

Should abortion rights as we know them soon be over-ruled, the fight to restore them will not be a matter of what happens on election days in 2006 or 2008. Abortion is one of the big, slow-moving social change fights; it could take another three decades to work through the battles that ensue after a new court ruling, and restore a social order akin to the freedom of choice women have had for the past 33 years. Or it could never happen. Nothing in history is inevitable.

I don't always agree with Peter Daou's critiques of the press, but I think he's exactly right in this strategic critique of the way the Alito nomination was handled by the Democrats, if, in fact, they wanted to register more than technical opposition to Alito. Given the difficulty of repairing the egg of abortion rights once it falls off the judicial wall, the least the remaining interest groups and elected officials could have done was start whatever push to oppose Alito they were going to engage in "weeks before the hearings."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

"LET THE HOLY SPIRIT DESCEND AND RENEW THE FACE OF THE LAND." The Roy Blunt-John Boehner race for House Majority Leader is intensifying, while the prospect of stalwart conservative John Shadegg entering the race remains in flux. The depth of sentiment from fence-straddling members in favor of a Shadegg candidacy certainly indicates that actual rank-and-file Republicans don't have any illusions about Boehner's outsider/reformist bona fides. (That Bob Ney endorsement doesn't exactly offer Boehner's campaign much cosmetic appeal.)

This is an old subject by now, but I really think that Boehner's agenda blueprint, "For a Majority that Matters" (PDF), hasn't come in for sufficient ridicule. Matt noted its utter vapidity and Mike Crowley pointed out an especially humorous example of rhetorical grandiloquence. But what about its use of that particularly annoying corporate power-point cliché, portentous quotations from historical figures? Here's how Boehner opens his section on the need for House Republicans to have a vision (this section is called "VISION: The City on the Hill"):

“If we look to the answer as to why, for so many years, we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here, in this land, we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before.” Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, Washington, DC, January 20, 1981.

“We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defense of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war of domination or imperial aggrandizement or material gain; no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.” Winston S. Churchill, September 3, 1939.

"Do not be afraid to tell the truth. Do not be afraid of the system. People are created not to enmity but to solidarity. Let the Holy Spirit descend and renew the face of the land, this land." Pope John Paul II, Warsaw, Poland, June 2, 1979.

"A vision is a beacon that lights the way to the future," Boehner himself then goes on to explain:

A vision doesn’t have to be achievable in the foreseeable future…But you never know. If a vision is powerful enough and the commitment to it great enough, it might even come true. President Reagan left the White House with America much as he hoped it would be in that first inaugural address. The Nazis were defeated. And in August 1989, Poland became free.

Mind you, all this talk about Nazis and Poles is in relation to the U.S. House Republican Conference's need to get a vision and bounce back from the bad P.R. of the Jack Abramoff scandals. It only gets better. Here's how he opens the section, "Setting Big Goals: Putting Vision to Work" -- note the source of the third quote:

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” John F. Kennedy, Houston, Texas, September 12, 1962.

“Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating the talents of those who work for us and pointing them toward a certain goal.” Walt Disney, 1954.

“The most powerful limitations are those we put on ourselves.” Me. Now.

Lordy! Who was the staffer who thought up that last touch? The entire 37-page memo really is somewhat startling -- this is supposedly directed at sitting members of Congress, who surely have some level of grizzled veteran knowledge about their own jobs and aren't going to find wide-eyed platitudes on the level of a conservative college freshman particularly compelling. As a way of positioning himself as the reform candidate while signaling to his conference that of course he doesn't actually plan on reforming anything, Boehner's memo might have been a neat trick, but did it have to sound so juvenile?

--Sam Rosenfeld

IF EVERY PROBLEM IS A NAIL… Thanks to Anne Marie Slaughter for flagging this scathing report (pdf) about US counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, published by none other than the US Army in Military Review. It’s a fascinating read, and instructive of how our preferred tactics in fighting the insurgency have undermined Iraqi popular support for the coalition.

The author is Nigel Alwin-Foster, a British army officer who is the deputy commander in charge of training Iraqi security forces. He argues that the US military is “too inclined to consider offensive operations and destruction of the insurgent as the key to a given situation, and conversely failed to understand its downside.” The flipside is a doctrinal approach that devalues the use of force and subordinates military actions to the political goal of using the civilian population to your advantage. The problem with the American approach, he says, is that the U.S. relies too heavily on the use of force and places more importance on killing the insurgents than winning the support of the civilian ranks from which they are drawn.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that force is not sometimes justified. It sometimes certainly is. But the problem that Alwin-Foster identifies is that US commanders’ default response to a given situation tends to favor killing the insurgent, without much consideration given to the adverse political consequences of that action.

If you are not convinced, consider this story which made page A12 of the Washington Post last week:

A U.S. military statement said that an unmanned U.S. drone detected three men digging a hole in a road in the area. Insurgents regularly bury bombs along roads in the area to target U.S. or Iraqi convoys. The three men were tracked to a building, which U.S. forces then hit with precision-guided munitions, the statement said.

Problem is, living in that building was a family of 12 who were killed in their sleep in the dead of night by the US air strike. A preference for a strategy of a war of attrition with the insurgents -- a strategy which values the destruction of the insurgent highest -- clearly has not done much to quell the insurgency. Worse, it leads to these kinds of mistakes that make life miserable for ordinary Iraqis and hardens the popular opposition to Americans in Iraq.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

APPLIANCE ECONOMICS. The folks over at The Heritage Foundation are very excited about yet another study explaining that the poor aren't, well, poor:

The computer has surpassed the dishwasher as a standard household appliance. The poorest Americans have posted a sharp rise in access to air conditioning. The richest Americans still own the most cars, but they are choosing to own slightly fewer of them than they used to.

And 60 percent have access to a computer! 76 percent have AC! 97 percent have color TV! Poor people in 2005 have access to more technology than rich people in 1612! In fact, they're not poor!

Among right-wing think tanks, there's a surprisingly vibrant subset of poverty experts who attempt to disprove the idea that the poor are poor by listing off their appliances. The general of this churlish army is Heritage's Robert Rector, who once made news for claiming that tens of thousands of poor folks had pools and Jacuzzis. The implicit aim is to crush the concept of material deprivation, thus destabilizing the liberal attitude that poverty is, in large part, an issue relating to lack of money. Rector and his ilk would rather claim it as caused by single-mother households or an uncivilized, unemployable underclass.

Of course, the economics of poverty don't work like that. Folks aren't rational economic actors, and even impoverished households max-out the credit card on a fridge, or TV, or dishwasher now and again. That's why the poor have so much credit debt. And poverty, too, is a transient phenomenon, with bust times bringing good jobs, cash windfalls, and large purchases before leaner periods force debt, deprivation, and even bankruptcy. Add in that major sources of income, notably the Earned Income Tax Credit, are given in one lump sum that's generally spent on big-ticket items, and the appliance counterargument to poverty begins looking fairly unpersuasive.

Nevertheless, I always like to imagine a Thai incarnation of Robert Rector, stamping his feet and insisting that since 79 percent of poor villagers have mortars and pestles, while only 40 percent of rich urbanites had them in 1922, no one in Thailand is poor. Poverty's complicated and America should be proud to know that there's little in the way of severe material deprivation, but, nevertheless, a refrigerator does not a middle class make.

--Ezra Klein

TIMING THE LOSS. I'm going to have to disagree with Garance's assertion that the problem with trying to beat Samuel Alito is that "momentum against this nomination was lost sometime in the late fall." Realistically, hopes of keeping Alito off the bench were lost in late fall 2004, when George W. Bush was re-elected and the GOP expanded its Senate majority. Bringing "abortion rights as we know them" to an end is a well-known goal of conservatives, who have been given unified control of the federal government, and there's very little non-conservatives can do to stop them from putting judges on the bench who will facilitate that goal. Realistically, the question facing the Alito nomination has always been whether Alito will be confirmed and the nuclear option implemented or whether Alito will be confirmed without the GOP needing to break a filibuster. But a congressional minority can't actually stop the Republicans from doing what they want to do.

To be clear about the nature of my defeatism, I don't like it any more than you. I'm not of the school of thought that says the issues at stake here are trivial or that substantially rolling back the Roe and Casey precedents will generate an electoral windfall for Democrats. Confirming Alito will be a bad thing, and almost certainly an unmitigated bad thing. But I think it's wrong to blame liberal interest groups, Democratic senators, progressive bloggers, or anyone else's insufficient savvy or zeal for the problem. The Republicans won a majority, the Republicans are bad people, and so they're going to do something bad. It's their fault, and the only remedy is better performance on Election Day.

--Matthew Yglesias

CONSERVATIVE IDENTITY POLITICS. I sort of stopped following this beat a while ago, but David Brooks's column trafficked in a certain kind of conservative identity politics that's worth noting. Brooks uses the Sam Alito hearings to retell the very familiar story of the Democrats' twentieth century drift from a white ethnic working-class constituency to a white professional, educated, culturally liberal one. (African-Americans -- the other Democratic constituency -- doesn't really feature in Brooks's retelling of the party's transformation, though back on planet Earth race played a rather significant role in the change.) The gist of the column is this:

If he'd been born a little earlier, Sam Alito would probably have been a Democrat. In the 1950's, the middle-class and lower-middle-class whites in places like Trenton, where Alito grew up, were the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.

But by the late 1960's, cultural politics replaced New Deal politics, and liberal Democrats did their best to repel Northern white ethnic voters...

The big story of American politics, which was underlined by every hour of the Alito hearings, is that sometime between 1932 and 1968, the DNA of the Democratic Party fundamentally changed. In 1932, the Democrats had working-class DNA. Today, the Democrats have different DNA, the DNA of a minority party.

There are a million things to say about these claims -- and Brooks isn't 100 percent mistaken in his argument about the "big story" of American politics -- but here I just wanted to note a line he slips into the middle of the column. Discussing Ted Kennedy's grilling of Alito on race issues, Brooks writes: "But those wild accusations don't carry weight any more. Rich liberals have been calling white ethnics bigots for 40 years."

Is this -- by any stretch of the meaning of arguments conservatives have articulated for years in condemnation of rhetorical attacks based on identity group grievances -- a fair thing to write? Can it be interpreted any other way than as a piece of classic identity politics rhetoric -- an effort to deligitamize questions about discrimination and race merely by pointing out the respective identity-group profiles of the questioner and the questioned? The notion that Democrats have been trafficking in Sixties-vintage New Left stereotypes of white ethnics when attacking Alito seems absurd to me; that's not a subtext I've detected whatsoever throughout this fight, notwithstanding Orrin Hatch's self-parodic attempts to invoke it. And lest we forget, Ted Kennedy is himself a white ethnic.

UPDATE: My apologies to an unusually pissed-seeming Kevin Drum.

--Sam Rosenfeld

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE. It’s looking increasingly like the liberal interest groups, who wanted Judge Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court shot down , have whiffed their handling of it, just as the Democratic senators now conducting the hearings are doing, with their alternately soporific and self-importantly theatrical approaches.

Alito's responses under questioning remind me of a corporate attorney who pads out his billable hours by giving clients extensive, detailed, and unilluminating answers when they are simply looking for a “yes” or “no” response to a question and to get off the phone. It is a tried and true legal tactic, and it's working brilliantly for him. Requests for clarity are met with a vague and unrevealing taffy of words. The more he talks, the less he says and the more intolerable it is to listen to the hearings. At the same time, the more the senators talk, the less Alito says, and the more the hearings become about them rather than him.

Dahlia Lithwick hit the nail on the head in Slate Tuesday when she wrote:

There are, it seems, better and worse ways to game your Supreme Court confirmation hearings. John Roberts charmed his way through the proceedings. Sam Alito has chosen to simply bore his way through, and as a consequence, two days into the hearings, the Democrats on the judiciary committee have hardly laid a glove on him.

The same is true now on day four. There is, as yet, no smoking gun, no salacious or previously hidden detail that will suddenly galvanize public opinion against him, even as the threat he may pose to Roe v. Wade has become more clear. And so, as David Stout notes in The New York Times:

Judge Alito would still appear to have an excellent chance at confirmation, if by a less decisive margin than the 78-to-22 vote that elevated Judge Roberts.

The momentum against this nomination was lost sometime in the late fall. That's why some very high-profile parts of the left blogopshere have reacted to the hearings with a mix of fatalism and radio silence. If Alito's ascendance to the court really means what the interest groups and senators believe it means, then 33 years after Roe v. Wade, abortion rights as we know them may soon come to an end -- not with a bang, but with the whimper of these hearings.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WELL, MY JOB JUST GOT A LOT SAFER. According to The Wall Street Journal, George W. Bush's top 2006 priority is going to be health care. Unfortunately, Bush's ideas for addressing health care don't quite mean what Americans think they mean.

The president is likely to sound similar themes in the State of the Union address later this month. In Louisville, Ky., yesterday, Mr. Bush called health care "an unmanageable cost" for businesses. Rejecting government-directed care as a solution, he said the ideal health system "is one in which there is a direct connect between provider and customer, [and] where there's transparency in the pricing system." In a likely signal of what is to come, the president urged Congress to expand health savings accounts, or HSAs. Created in 2003, HSAs allow Americans to set aside money tax-free to pay health costs if they choose high-deductible health insurance.

Among the proposals Mr. Bush is considering are:

• Providing bigger tax breaks for Americans who buy their own health insurance to balance tax breaks available to workers who get health insurance through employers.
• Encouraging broader use of HSAs in the hope that giving consumers more control over their health-care spending will make them more cost-conscious.
• Helping consumers get more information about health-care providers' prices and performance to make them better shoppers.

Opinion polls show health care near the top of Americans' concerns. Last month's Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, for example, showed health care ranking behind only the war in Iraq on the list of issues the public wants the federal government to address. While 41% identified the war as a top priority for Washington, 33% identified health care, exceeding the 28% who pointed to job creation and economic growth.

Put another way, if you liked the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, you’ll love this. Where consumers are worried by the rapid deterioration on their health benefits, Bush is courageously offering to shift ever more of the cost onto their backs. If that’s not a political winner, I don’t know what is.

But if his proposals appear weird, that’s because The WSJ is complicit in an administration lie. There are two groups deeply concerned about health costs in this country: individuals and their employers. And individuals, as Kaiser’s polling found, are primarily worried about “having to pay more for health care.” Businesses, on the other hand, are worried that employees won't pay more for health care. This is a zero sum problem under the current system: individuals want their employers to stop shifting health costs onto their backs, and employers want to keep forcing their employees to pay more out-of-pocket. Barring a total restructuring that severs health insurance from employment, for one to gain, the other has to lose.

And if HSA’s are to be the centerpiece of the Bush agenda, we already know who'll lose. HSA's are cost-shifting devices; they redistribute medical bills from employers to employees. And so here’s your lie: Bush is going to focus on health care in 2006 -- that much is true. But he’s only pretending to hear the concerns of voters. In fact, business is upset about health costs and Bush, true to form, is answering their call. The question, politically, is whether he can walk that tightrope. If the electorate ever understands that these programs are actually aimed at hastening exactly the trend they fear, the backlash will make Social Security privatization look like the very softest of setbacks. But if the media decides the policy issues are too complicated to explain, the storyline will be "Bush addresses health care costs" and the electorate will simply assume he's addressing their expenses, not increasing them. We'll see.

--Ezra Klein

WHAT WOULD DEPORTATION COST? USA Today reports:

In an unprecedented crackdown on more than 500,000 illegal immigrants who have not followed deportation orders, U.S. authorities this year are nearly tripling the number of federal officers assigned to round up such fugitives.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will deploy 52 fugitive-hunting teams across the nation by December, up from 17 teams last year, says John Torres, the agency's acting director of detention and removal.

Teams generally are made up of five to eight agents. They focus on rounding up and deporting immigrants who have been ordered by a judge to leave the USA because they are here illegally or have violated the conditions of their stay by committing crimes.

"It is one of our top priorities," Torres says. "The message for absconders is this: While they think they may be able to flout immigration laws, this is not the case. They may get a knock on their doors very early in the morning."

Of course, those are only the 500,000 illegal immigrants we've tracked down and handed deportation orders to. As for the other 10,000,000 or so, we should probably deport them, too. No use having a law that lacks consistency. The only question is, how do you enforce a law you can't afford?

Rajeev Goyle and David Jaeger recently created a cost assessment for a national deportation program. The average cost of apprehending an illegal immigrant at his workplace is, currently, around $17,600. That includes salary for the officer, preliminary investigation, gas for the truck, etc. And that probably radically understates the figure: amidst a massive deportation program, illegal immigrants would probably put more effort into remaining beneath-the-radar and obtaining convincing fake documents. So $17,600 is really the cost of the low-hanging fruit, but let's give the deporters the benefit of the doubt. Factored up to the numbers we're talking about and you get a lowball estimate of $141-158 billion for apprehension.

The secondary benefit of a national deportation scheme is that a certain percentage of illegal immigrants would exit voluntarily. Some estimates put this at 10 percent; more optimistic predictions foresee 20 percent. But of those not hoofing it on their own, the captured will require detention periods, generally around 40 days or so while the process works itself out. Given the numbers involved, we'd need to construct between 166,000 and 189,000 news beds at a cost (minimum) of $14,000 per bed, or $2.33-2.66 billion total. Currently, the actual detention period costs $90 per day, per deportee, meaning the average deportation process racks up about $3,800 in lodging costs. Scaled up, we're talking between $30 billion and $34 billion for detention. Add in legal costs ($9.5-10.7 billion) and transportation back to Mexico ($8-9 billion) and you're looking at total expenditures between $191,296,000,000 and $215,245,000,000, depending on whether 10 or 20 percent leave voluntarily. Tight border security that'd choke off crossborder flow, assuming it's possible, would cost around $15 billion more.

None of this, of course, engages the massive hit our economy would take in lost labor or the plummeting tax revenues from illegal immigrants, who shore up our entitlement programs by paying into trust funds but leave before they can collect the benefits. And the actual costs of the apprehension and deportation programs would likely prove much higher, as the illegal immigrant community would put far more effort into evading the INS. So while such a program is, in theory, financially feasible, the costs are prohibitive, best understood on the scale of the Iraq War, total expenditures on Medicaid, or $800 per American. Moreover, the only lasting impact would be an economic drain, as tax revenue fled, prices rose, and the agricultural sector found itself unable to complete its harvest. But that's fine. If conservatives want deportation, they should make the argument for the policy, and doing so means facing up to the expense. Inveighing against the evils of illegals is all well and good, but it's long past time the conversation moved beyond demagoguery and into cost-benefit analyses.

--Ezra Klein

MIGRANT RIGHTS. The Washington Post reports that General Geoffrey Miller, the Guantanamo Bay commanding officer who Pentagon officials sent to Iraq to “Gitmo-ize” detention and interrogation procedures there, asserted the military law equivalent of his Fifth Amendment right when called as a witness in the courts-marshal of two Abu Ghraib dog handlers. Incidentally, Miller’s decision comes days after Col. Thomas Pappas, the highest ranking low-level official singled out for court-marshal, struck an immunity deal in exchange for his testimony at upcoming courts-marshal.

As Spencer Ackerman explained back in August 2004, Miller was the principal vector by which certain interrogation techniques used on Gitmo detainees (whom the administration says are not protected by the Geneva Convention) “migrated” to Iraq (where the administration says prisoners of war are legally protected). Given Miller’s courtroom silence, it’s not much of a stretch to think that Pappas’ testimony will be fairly damaging. And should Miller, in turn, seek to save his own skin by naming names, for once in this sad affair, dung might yet flow up-hill.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE NEW BOSS. If you're interested in how Rep. John Boehner screwed up student loan policy in exchange for $238,000 in campaign contributions from lenders and for-profit educational institutions check out this July 2004 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (and see here how the cash sloshed through the rest of the GOP machine). Over a year later, Congress was considering ways to reduce the budget deficit, and some members thought wasteful giveaways to the student loan industry might be a good target for cuts. But not Boehner. “Know that I have all of you in my two trusted hands," he told assembled members of the Consumer Banking Association, reassuring them that he's an honest politician in the "stays bought" sense of the term.

And, of course, you'll recall that of the two candidate to succeed Tom DeLay, Boehner is the "reformer" in the race. This all, of course, also falls under the "perfectly legal" category of de facto corrupt behavior.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE LONG TENTACLES OF THE RIGHT. Ted Kennedy and Arlen Specter got into a dust-up today during the Samuel Alito confirmation hearings about access to the historical records of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which may shed more light on the extent of Alito's involvement with the group. Kennedy wanted the Judiciary Cmte. to subpoena those records, maintained by the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress in a private collection, the "Papers of William A Rusher 1940-1989." According to the letter Kennedy sent Specter in December requesting assistance in gaining access to the files:

The Congressional Research Service has attempted to gain access to these files, following its usual policy of not disclosing its requestor, but Mr. Rusher has refused to permit access unless he is told which member(s) or committee(s) are seeking it, and unless he can control the use of the materials released.

Now, Rusher was the publisher of The National Review from 1957-1988, and, far from being retired from public life, retains a position as an elder statesman at the Claremont Institute and writer of a column for right-wing Web site World Net Daily.

There is no question that Rusher refused to provide access to CAP's papers because he believed that doing so might undermine Bush's best chance "to move the Court perceptibly to the right," as he wrote in this Sept. column on the battle for the Court. Though Alito had not yet been nominated when Rusher wrote that column, or this July one on the battle for the O'Connor seat, he has made his beliefs about the importance of undermining liberal goals with her replacement plain:

…there is simply no question that her replacement by a truly dependable conservative will make it far harder for the liberals to amass a five-vote majority for their judicial preferences. Their only hope, in fact, will be Justice Anthony Kennedy, who like Justice O'Connor, has occasionally wobbled into the liberal camp.

So the first battle over a Bush nomination to the Court, far from being one in which the liberals have little to lose, has suddenly become one that liberals must wage with all their might. On the other side of the coin, Bush realizes that winning the battle to replace O'Connor with a steadfast conservative is very probably the only chance he will have to make a meaningful change in the Court's complexion.

For either side, therefore, a loss may truly be Armageddon.

Alito, Rusher wrote in November, 2005:

is probably the person Bush would have nominated if someone or something (maybe Reid) hadn't given him what must have struck him as the brilliant inspiration to choose Harriet Miers instead. Alito has accumulated, in his many years on the bench, a paper trail so long that Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., has given his colleagues on the Judiciary Committee two whole months to go over it, before hearings even begin. It contains plenty of evidence that Alito is a superb lawyer and a meticulous judge, but above all it testifies that he is a rock-ribbed judicial conservative.

Perhaps those files show nothing, or prove that Alito had only tangential involvement with the group, as news reports suggest. But perhaps they show more. What's clear is that Rusher was playing politics with the public's right to know.

In any event, the situation is now resolved. Specter has agreed to assist Kennedy in obtaining Rusher's records, and in the end the only beneficiary of this senatorial tussle may be The National Review itself, which has now published a Q & A with Rusher about the papers, including this bon mot, "My only regret is that CAP didn't have a bigger effect on Princeton."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHAT IS THE SUDANESE ISLAMIC ARMY? Earlier this week, I noted that one problem with Steven Hayes's latest hyping of the Iraq/al-Qaeda connection is that one of the terrorist groups Saddam was said to sponsor, the Sudanese Islamic Army, appears not to exist. Today, on The Weekly Standard's website, fellow connection enthusiast Dan Darling tries to fill in some details:

The exact identity of the Sudanese Islamic Army is a bit more murky, but there are two likely possibilities. The first is that the Sudanese Islamic Army refers to bin Laden's al Qaeda terror network (called the "Islamic Army Shura" by the 9/11 Commission report) while it was headquartered in Sudan between 1991 and 1996--though this would seem somewhat counterintuitive given that both the Algerian GIA and later the GSPC were members of the Shura.

It is far more likely that the Sudanese Islamic Army are in fact members of the Sudanese Popular Defense Forces (PDF), which Dutch counterterrorism expert Ronald Sandee has described as a Sudanese "pro-government militia" that "was used to militarily support the power of the Khartoum regime, often taking the brunt of the fighting against SPLA, and later was used in the Numamai Mountains to fight against the Nure people." He notes that "we also see Sudanese who were trained in PDF camps turning up at the border with Israel."

Sandee quotes Sudanese President Omar Bashir as saying, "We now order the Popular Defense Forces and all the political and military leaders to now open all the military camps to be opened in estates and villages. No peace with the Jews or surrender to the Jews, for war is jihad, jihad is jihad." According to the 9/11 Commission, bin Laden "agreed to help [Sudanese political leader] Turabi in an ongoing war against Christian separatists in southern Sudan," activities that would have almost certainly resulted in a close alliance between al Qaeda and the PDF.

The admission that "connection"-hypers themselves don't know what the alleged Sudanese Islamic Army is, is fairly stunning in its own terms. In some ways, I think it tells us all we need to know about the quality of the intelligence analysis on offer here. The Popular Defense Forces, if that is indeed what we're talking about, aren't what you'd call nice people, but they're obviously no sort of threat to the United States of America, which, in case you haven't noticed, isn't located in southern Sudan.

It's also worth noting the context of the 9/11 Commission's assertion that's quoted here. This happened in 1989. By the time the Iraq War started, al-Qaeda had long ago had a falling out with the government of Sudan. Indeed, one of the current dilemmas facing American policy is that the very same Sudanese government prosecuting a genocide in Darfur is providing us with considerable help against al-Qaeda.

--Matthew Yglesias

BLOGGING FOR CHOICE. NARAL Pro-Choice America has gathered some of the more interesting pro-choice bloggers on the web together at BushvChoice.com, a "pro-choice anti-Bush action center," to blog the Samuel Alito hearings. The forum is being hosted by Jessica Valenti of feministing.com, one of smartest of the new feminist sites that have sprung up and forged networks over the past two years, as if in answer to the whole women in blogging debate. Also featured are Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and bloggers from Feministe, Bitch PhD, LiberalOasis, Majikthise, Pseudo-Adrienne's Liberal Feminism Bias, Blackfeminism, I Blame the Patriarchy, TalkLeft, MediaGirl, and Pacific Views.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BROKEN RECORD TIME. Via Kevin Drum, The Weekly Standard offers excerpts from Paul Bremer's book, indicating that Bremer repeatedly warned his masters that troop levels in Iraq were insufficient, only for his complaints to fall on deaf ears. Bremer even seems to have specifically mentioned my favorite RAND Study on troop strength in post-conflict situations -- the very same study Sam and I mentioned in our discussion of this issue in "The Incompetence Dodge".

And I still have the same boring old point to make about this -- Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, and co. didn't send the number of troops Bremer wanted or RAND indicated we needed because it wasn't possible -- the United States Army simply isn't big enough. The Standard's thinking on this is particular odd, because they were prone to pre-9/11 editorializing about how the Army was too small. They wanted to make it bigger because they correctly saw that, at its current size, the military wouldn't be able to implement the sort of grandiose neoconservative foreign policy the Standard favored. Then came 9/11 and the Afghan War, which consumed resources and brought us further than ever from having the capacity to implement neocon dream policies. Then the neocons got their way and we invaded Iraq. It hasn't turned out so well. So now liberal hawks, the Standard faction of neoconservatism, and Bremer are saying we should have sent more troops. But these people knew perfectly well before the war that there weren't enough troops to send! None of the various brands of hawks come out looking well once you understand this question properly.

--Matthew Yglesias

NO COMPROMISE. It had been widely hoped that the post-election Iraqi government would agree to some constitutional amendments aimed at addressing Sunni Arab disgruntlement with Iraq's political structure. Today, SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim says no deal; the constitution as written passed fair and square in a referendum and he likes the status quo just fine. And it seems to me that he's entitled to do so. But if the Iraqi government doesn't want to implement the Bush administration's political strategy in Iraq, then what's the point in extending an open-ended military commitment to that government? If American leaders and Iraqi leaders disagree as to what should be done, as seems to be the case, why not go our separate ways?

--Matthew Yglesias

AN ENTERTAINING SOTO VOCE TIFF AT THE DLC. Over at NewDonkey.com, Ed Kilgore has given his DLC colleague Marshall Wittman a gentlemanly chiding for his continued insistence that Dems should sheathe their stilettos on the NSA warrantless eavesdropping scandal. Based on my somewhat limited reading of Wittman's Bull Moose Blog, it seems to me that Wittman is generally reluctant to directly engage his critics' arguments. Instead, he tends to regard said critics as little more than slime-covered creatures dredged up from what, if memory serves, he likes to call the blogosphere's "fever swamps."

But now his colleague has gone and said what many have been shouting from those same disease-infested depths: Specifically, that it's possible to keep two ideas in our heads at the same time. Says Kilgore:

You can be hard-core on the War on Terror and still be hard-edged in criticizing the administration's we'll-do-what-we-see-fit position, and even those who agree with Bush on this particular subject need to begin with the presumption that his critics have a legitimate and patriotic case to make.

Wittman's response was intriguing. After a bit of throat-clearing praise for Kilgore, he asserted that Bush's actions were legal, and added:

One can question the legal rationale that was employed by President, but there is absolutely no evidence that he was attempting to do anything else but protect America.

And:

Some context is desperately in order. Lest we forget, less than five years ago, Al Qaeda slaughtered thousands of Americans on our own soil.

But Kilgore never even questioned Bush's motives in the manner Wittman alluded to. What's more, his response fails the basic test of logic: Bringing up 9-11 might have been germane if Kilgore had argued against an aggressive war on terror. But he didn't -- he argued for a "hard-core" one that doesn't stray into giving "blank-checks" to the executive -- and indeed continued that congressional oversight of executive counter-terror activities would make the war on terror more "effective."

No matter how hard GOP apologists and Democratic hawks try to obscure, ignore, and obfuscate it, the central question in this debate remains this: Is it possible to support an aggressive war on terror and simultaneously oppose ceding to the president essentially unlimited executive powers? The answer, as Kilgore notes, is yes. Wittman's respect for Kilgore, unfortunately, didn't spill over into respect for his argument -- something Wittman might have shown by simply engaging it.

-- Greg Sargent

THE HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL. Today, at the United Nations, negotiations will begin in earnest over the composition and mandate of a new human rights council that will replace the much maligned and discredited human rights commission. Creating the council has been on the UN reform agenda for quite some time now, and it was one of the pillars of reform that went unfulfilled at the UN summit last September. But as of today, UN member states are redoubling their effort to create a newly empowered human rights organ -- and spoiler countries, like Pakistan, Cuba, Venezuela and India, are doing their utmost to stall this work.

The US is a strong backer of the idea of replacing the commission. But as the US voice in Turtle Bay, John Bolton has staked a negotiating position that makes progress in these negations even more difficult: he is insisting that all five permanent members of the UN Security Council have permanent seats on the new human rights council.

Of course, the main problem with the old commission was its inability to condemn its own members. Now it seems that the US would like to guarantee itself a seat on the council for the same cynical reasons that Libya and Sudan sought to be members of the old commission: to save themselves from condemnation. To that end, Bolton is pushing for P-5 membership to the council because he thinks having Russia and China on a human rights council is a worthy enough price for the United States to pay to make sure that it can block any action the council might take against the US -- say condemning the US practice of rendition.

But Bolton’s fears of a UN Human Rights Council empowered to take action against the US I think are somewhat unfounded. It’s doubtful that the new council will do anything that may rock the US boat. Like most flimsy international institutions (and the International Criminal Court is a good example here), it will most likely only target weak, underdeveloped countries in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia. The biggest threat to the US from a council without US membership -- though one that is surely stacked with our staunchest friends and allies -- is that the new council pens some vaguely embarrassing report about the US. On the flipside, if the new council is filled with countries with decent human rights records, condemnations of actions of weaker countries antagonistic to the US could turn into real action. The council, for example, could set its sights on the suppression of political dissent in Burma, North Korea, or any other backwater country that the US thinks would be better off with a different regime.

The point is, a UN human rights council filled with countries with decent human rights records is not something that the US should fear. And that’s not because we don’t do things that deserve condemnation. We most certainly do. But so do other, weaker countries with out the power or international standing to coerce and cajole members of the council to look elsewhere.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

WHEW. The Daily News reports:

Gennifer Flowers lost a bid yesterday to revive a defamation case against Sen. Hillary Clinton and former presidential aides George Stephanopoulos and James Carville. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals spurned a motion by the former cabaret singer, who claims the trio falsely accused her of lying when she went public with her relationship with Bill Clinton in 1992.

Finally, our long national nightmare is over.

--Ezra Klein

IS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY TAKING THE SOUTH FOR GRANTED? That’s perhaps the conclusion you’d reach after looking at the Republican House leadership roster. With DeLay’s fall, southern Republicans have no other representation in the leadership, except maybe Eric Cantor of Virginia. Cantor, though, may not have such a firm hold on the majority whip spot, despite claims of having 24 more supporters than the 116 he would need to win the position; Mike Rogers of Michigan and Todd Tiahrt of Kansas are calling his bluff and have entered the race. Other than that, you have Roy Blunt and John Boehner of Missouri and Ohio, respectively, running for the top spot; and if the rest of the leadership stays on, it will consist of Deborah Price of Ohio, John Shadegg of Arizona (more West than South), and Tom Reynolds of New York. Southern Republicans can’t be pleased with this.

--Alec Oveis

PUNCH THAT AIR! What a truly bizarre statement by Sebastian Mallaby:

Of course, attacking Bushonomics is too easy, like shooting a lame duck. So I want to focus instead on Democrats' response to the Bush chest-thumping.

George W. Bush is the President of the United States of America. His party, the Republican Party, controls the House of Representatives and the United States Senate. Justices nominated by Republicans enjoy a majority on the Supreme Court. Whether or not attacking Bushonomics requires pathetically little mental exertion, his economic policy is the only relevant economic policy in American government. Given that, if his policies are, indeed, so awful that their manifold flaws are self-evident, it's incumbent on pundits to publicly eviscerate them until they cease being self-actualizing, not to stroll off and find more worthy targets for their giant, giant brains.

Sometimes, it truly seems that the class of folks paid to comment on D.C.'s doings haven't yet adjusted to the fact that this is a one-party town. Drawing some manner of weird equivalence between the powerless Democratic Party and the dominant Republican majority is like a psychiatrist evaluating a rambunctious toddler and his neglectful parent and commenting that, since the parent's flaws are so obvious, he'll focus on the kid. The child has no agency, he can't make anything happen. Criticizing him is a useless task, though it may leave the shrink feeling worldly and superior, much as I imagine Samuelson's bromide left him feeling. It used to be that journalists were charged with speaking truth to power; now they don't even bother to distinguish the overwhelmingly empowered from the functionally powerless.

--Ezra Klein

SPREADING DEMOCRACY LOBBYISTS ABROAD. Indeed, it’s been a bad few weeks for Republican lobbyists, so why not add this bit of fuel to the fire. From the WSJ’s revamped Washington Wire:

In a hush-hush deal, longtime Republican lobbyist Paul Manafort signs on as a behind-the-scenes campaign adviser for the much-maligned Ukrainian opposition figure and close friend of the Kremlin, Viktor Yanukovych, who earned the scorn of the White House during the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought his opponent to power in Kiev.

Somewhere, somehow, there must be an Abramoff tie-in.

--Alec Oveis

WILL ON BOEHNER. Check out the last graf of George Will's column today, where he implicitly endorses John Boehner for Majority Leader over Roy Blunt, given the former's aversion to pork and the latter's adherence to "Delay, Inc." practices. As I said yesterday, we'll hear more stuff like this in the coming weeks.

That Mr. K Street Cabinet is the one to purge the Republicans of their unprincipled collaboration with lobbyists and restore them to small-government conservative principles is, of course, a silly proposition. Also silly is conservatives' all-too-frequent tendency to portray opposition to congressional earmarks -- a perfectly noble conservative stance in itself -- as the end-all and be-all of a small government agenda. According to the advocacy outfit Citizens Against Government Waste, appropriations earmarks cost taxpayers $27 billion last year. If you were to eliminate every single one of those 14,000 earmarked projects, you'd cut one percent out of the total federal budget in 2005. There's your small government. Some Republicans -- those associated with the Republican Study Committee -- are actually willing to advocate taking at least a small chunk out of the entitlements that dominate domestic federal spending. Even the cuts they advocate wouldn't in any really serious sense "shrink the government," but they're plenty heinous, and I would dearly love to see the Republicans as a whole try to survive politically pushing them.

--Sam Rosenfeld

RELL AT ODDS WITH HOMETOWN CHURCH. I was glancing over at my hometown paper, the Danbury News Times, and read that one local Episcopal church is among those Episcopal churches that have decided to re-brand themselves “Anglican” since the openly-gay Gene Robinson was consecrated Bishop of New Hampshire. That, in itself, is not particularly noteworthy (Brookfield is fairly conservative), but this is the same church attended by Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell, who last year signed into law civil-union legislation. Sounds like a story for an enterprising News Times reporter to pursue.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE DELAY ROAD TO RE-ELECTION. Please, don’t shed any tears for Tom DeLay quite yet. Though he has stepped down as Majority Leader, DeLay has decided to reclaim his seat on the Appropriations committee, which he gave up at the start of 108th Congress. Any worries that one may have concerning his inability to steer pork back to his district now that he’s out of the leadership should be put to rest.

But it gets better. Subcommittee chairmanships are generally determined based on full committee seniority, and DeLay currently ranks as the sixth most senior member on the committee, making him eligible for a subcommittee chairmanship. DeLay has pledged not to oust any of the sitting “cardinals” – the 11 subcommittee heads -- but he’s open to the idea of taking over one of the spots in the 110th Congress, that is if he wins re-election. That’s where the subcommittee chair comes into play. Due to the term limits placed on chairmanships, Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia will be giving up his seat as head of Science-State-Justice-Commerce Appropriations Subcommittee, which governs over, among other things, NASA’s budget. It just so happens that DeLay’s district is home to the Johnson Space Center, which employs roughly 15,000 people, and his post at the head of SSJC would obviously make him a very valuable asset to the district even outside of the leadership. Come November, this will surely weigh heavily on the minds of the voters of TX-22.

--Alec Oveis

WHAT IS ARLEN SPECTER DOING? I see a whole range of attitudes I could imagine a U.S. Senator reasonably adopting vis-à-vis Samuel Alito's nomination, but I can't help but notice that Arlen Specter seems to be groping toward none of them. Very clearly, Alito will, on the bench, vote to allow abortion rights to be curtailed to a significantly greater extent than did Sandra Day O'Connor. One might oppose his confirmation for this reason, or one might support his confirmation for this reason, or one might support his confirmation despite this reality because you think it's not so important or that the president is owed deference or whatever.

But at yesterday's hearings, Specter seemed to be taking the rather different angle whereby Alito, despite all indications, is secretly going to uphold abortion rights. This is pretty idiotic, but it's also rather baffling. Specter's in his last term -- he has no particular need to pretend to be pro-choice to broaden his appeal in general elections or to be slavishly loyal to the conservative base to ward off primary challenges. If he doesn't want to confirm an anti-choice justice, he doesn't need to. If he doesn't really care that Alito's anti-choice, he can say so. Nobody can stop him. So why does he want making a fool of himself to be his legacy?

--Matthew Yglesias

THE APPEAL OF WARNER. The Washington Post profiles popular Virginia Gov. Mark Warner today, and reveals some little known facts that may assume great importance should the outgoing governor run for the presidency in 2007-2008.

The first little known fact is very much related to one of the first questions many Democrats have about Warner: How is he on television? A national race is entirely a television game, and the ability to adeptly handle live television appearances and the Sunday talkies will be critical, even in the primaries. Recounts the Post:

That fall [2002], he gave a somber speech to Virginians -- the only time he went on live television during his term -- to describe the cuts he was implementing to deal with the budget crisis.

So the answer is that Warner, in fact, became a successful governor through a tried and true gubernatorial strategy that could stand him in good stead in Iowa but which ultimately reveals little about his television skills: when his governorship got off to a rocky start, he held lots and lots of townhall meetings and avoided TV.

For months, he hosted town hall meetings across the state, becoming Virginia's PowerPoint governor. He compiled binders listing moderate Republicans he thought he could sway, then wined and dined them. Once, he sent a private helicopter to pick up the Senate's leading Republican and whisk him to a dinner at a Williamsburg resort.

Worth recalling is that former Gov. Howard Dean followed much the same townhall strategy in the state of Vermont as a way of quelling public anger over his decision to support civil unions for gays. And as governor, Dean too had a reputation for being a bi-partisan centrist. That didn't last once he took the national stage and started taking positions on national issues, such as the war in Iraq. Warner, of course, is far more moderate in manner than Dean ever was -- even in Vermont, Dean had a reputation for bluntness -- but it's also worth recalling that Dean floundered once the campaign cycle moved from townhalls to television toward the end of the pre-primary cycle, and that it was television (the debates, the scream), that ultimate proved his electoral undoing. Warner seems an unlikely candidate for that kind of public campaign meltdown, but how he will do on television remains a very open question.

Warner is also micro-manager, according to the Post, but his obsessive attention to detail and work ethos have worked for him and others:

On the campaign trail, he was more obsessive than Kaine. At parades, he shook more hands and frequently egged Kaine on. In the motorcades, he whipped out his cell phone to demand more information from staffers, while the more mellow -- and less worried -- Kaine grabbed some shut-eye.

"That trait of mine often drove Mark nuts," Kaine said. "He would give me trouble, saying, 'We get in the car going from one meeting to the next and you immediately just fall asleep.' And I'd say: 'Yeah, I fall asleep. You sit in front and tell the guy when to put on his turn signal. Now, which is the better leadership trait?' "

Pundits agree that it was, in part, Warner's efforts and his 75 percent approval rating that lifted Kaine to victory Nov. 8.

Again, these skills will stand Warner in good stead during the earlier, more retail politics-heavy parts of the primary cycle but may prove less important once the race goes wholesale. Finally, Warner is already positioned as a wildcard in the 2008 Democratic primary race.

Warner is starting at 1 percent in the national polls, with far less money than most contenders, and with a political resume that is admittedly thin -- one term in office, no foreign-policy experience, few positions on national issues.

Like many of the other hopefuls, he is also way behind Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) in fundraising. She could have $30 million to start a presidential bid.

"He's an Internet stock right now," said Chuck Todd, editor-in-chief of the Hotline, a political newsletter. "A lot of potential, but we're not sure whether there's a good business model there or not."

As in 2003-2004, the race may come down to a senator versus a governor and a well-connected insider versus an upstart outsider. With reporters looking for someone to play the anti-Hillary role in a campaign narrative that is already, a year and a half before the serious primary positioning and plotting begins, pretty much set, Warner would seem well cast for the available part.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

GODSPEED, JOHN KITZHABER. GODSPEED. Reacting to the news that American health care costs once again rose far faster than income with no corresponding increase in quality, Kevin Drum muses:

It sort of feels like whistling into the wind to keep harping on this, but it's still hard to believe that more Democrats aren't willing to put their reputations behind a genuinely sane, comprehensive, modern national healthcare plan. Not a patch, not "catastrophic insurance," and certainly not HSAs. Lots of countries already have decent systems for us to borrow ideas from, and citizens in those countries generally have greater choice of physicians, better (and more equal) care, lower costs, wider coverage, and better outcomes. Only a madman would prefer our bizarre hodgepode system.

Or a politician. Kevin wonders why so few Democrats are willing to stake their reputations on a true reconstruction of the system. The answer, largely, is other Democrats. The incremental, yawn-inducing plans dreamed up by most Democrats are visionless and small, precisely because their supposedly liberal primary competitors are so eager to stick a knife in anything that strays from the post-1994 mainstream.

When Bill Bradley proposed a universal health care plan in 2000, Al Gore disingenuously pounced, complaining that, in a time of expansion and surplus, we lacked the $65 billion it would cost. Meanwhile, Gore's tax cuts had a price tag of $460 billion and, shortly after the election, he endorsed single-payer health care, a much more progressive, fundamental, and (in the short-term) expensive vision than anything in Bradley's platform. Gore knew perfectly well that Bradley's plan was better than his own, that it was affordable, and that it was necessary. But he saw Bradley running left and decided he, the establishment candidate, would have to dart right. And so we had the odd spectacle of the first serious attempt at universal coverage since Bill Clinton's being buried by not only a fellow Democrat, but a member of the Clinton administration. The Republicans never needed to fire a shot.

So in answer to Kevin's question, health care is one of those issues where Democrats tend to lop off their nose to spite their face. "Moderate" candidates win primaries, but they do so by discrediting their own agenda. And that leaves more progressive candidates, particularly serious ones hoping to win national elections, a little shy about chaining themselves to a comprehensive solution that'll just become target practice for every primary opponent who wants to look like a deficit hawk.

Thankfully, there's some evidence this dynamic is beginning to reverse itself. In Oregon, John Kitzhaber, the Democratic governor from 1995-2003, is threatening to mount a primary challenge to his successor, Democrat Ted Kulongoski. His sole issue? The need for a modern national health care plan. His sole idea? Creating one in Oregon. Stay tuned.

--Ezra Klein

MORE FATALISM. I thought Samuel Alito got off to a rocky start this morning, particularly under Pat Leahy's questioning. He seemed nervous and defensive, and it should probably go without saying that he was cartoonishly evasive in his answers.

But regardless, the Democrats aren't going to filibuster him. Democrats have already gone out of their way to say that the degree of their opposition hinges on what Alito says at the hearings. But of course, he is going to continue to say nothing damning and to mock the Senate's role in this process through stonewalling and evasion. Democrats would then be justified in filibustering on the grounds that Alito made a mockery of the hearing process, but if enough of them were already reluctant to filibuster him on substantive grounds, they'll certainly be reluctant to do it on procedural ones.

It's hardly self-evident to me that mere cowardice and a desire to please David Broder are the only possible explanations for a reluctance to filibuster here. Filibustering a Supreme Court nominee, as we all know, would not be unprecedented. It would be highly non-standard. It would be a huge, huge deal. And it would take work, particularly since there's nowhere close to the kind of momentum and context in place right now for such an action, given the array of other stories that have dominated the headlines and occupied Democrats' attention in the last several months. To pull off a filibuster in this context would take a huge amount of resources and effort, with the leadership whipping members and compelling them to stay in line while Dems and outside groups coordinate on media strategy and press the gas full-bore. (Recall the resources expended on and energies devoted exclusively to the nuclear option fight last spring; this would be bigger.)

Necessarily and indisputably, that would mean that Democrats would not be able to focus on the array of stories and issues that currently loom large and have been crippling the Republicans. Some folks will judge that it would still be worth doing despite the costs, and there's certainly a case to be made. But the costs are real, and should be acknowledged. Even if Democratic action regarding Alito has no direct impact on voters' decisions in November, decisions to focus on one fight over another affect the party's political strategy and campaign narrative in different ways. Maximally effective and high-profile opposition to the majority party on each and every issue at each and every moment is impossible, and it's not impossible due simply to a lack of Democratic will.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE SIX MONTH ITCH. An interesting idea from former Al Gore national security advisor Leon Fuerth:

That leaves many other Democrats searching for principled middle ground. They are inclined to keep U.S. troops in Iraq long enough to help the Iraqi people find a political path away from their nascent civil war. Yet they have no confidence in the administration's capacity to manage policy effectively or in its willingness to conduct political debate honestly. That's why centrist Democrats in Congress should consider offering the administration a deal: For six months, they would give Bush continued support for funding and prosecuting the war, without demanding a specific date for withdrawal of U.S. troops.

In exchange, the administration would have to provide radical improvements in the flow of information to the Congress and the American people. At the end of six months, Democrats would have to decide whether to renew the deal or call for a troop-withdrawal date.

This has appeal, and you should read the rest. Here's my concern, however. To a certain frame of mind, a positive assessment of events in Iraq indicates that we should continue the war. After all, we're winning. At the same time, a negative assessment of events in Iraq indicates that we should continue the war. After all, we can't leave yet -- there are all these problems. Unless we can escape from that rhetorical house of mirrors, I don't think emphasis on benchmarks, metrics, information, or whatever is going to do us much good. It doesn't make sense to focus on metrics unless you first decide what question the metrics are supposed to answer. If the administration can't hit its targets, does that mean it's time to give up, or time to redouble our efforts?

--Matthew Yglesias

NOW THAT'S HOW YOU WIN A CAUCUS. According to the WSJ:

Although they've been working on vehicles that run on ethanol for more than a decade, Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp. are now making an aggressive push into the alternative fuel.

Last week GM ran its first national advertising campaign promoting one of its so-called flex-fuel vehicles, the Chevy Tahoe. Ford last month began selling flex-fuel versions of its popular F-150 pickup. Vehicles that are designated flex-fuel are capable of running on gasoline but can use the alternative E85, a fuel mix that is 85% ethanol and 15% gas.

Both auto makers are also helping to increase the number of ethanol fueling pumps at gas stations around the country. At least five million vehicles that can run on E85 fuel already are on U.S. roads -- but most operate on gasoline alone because of the unavailability of ethanol.

In related news, Bill Ford, Jr., is now polling at 92 percent in Iowa, and is considered the early frontrunner.

--Ezra Klein

ONE LAST POINT ON JOE KLEIN -- NO, REALLY. In his response to Joe Klein’s latest Time magazine column, Kevin Drum observes that the NSA domestic spying program is “a legitimately tough issue for Democrats,” adding:

Politically, I continue to think Democrats should make it absolutely clear that what they're attacking isn't necessarily the NSA program itself, but the fact that the president unilaterally decided that he could approve the program without congressional authorization even though Congress had specifically forbidden it. In the world of 10-second sound bites, that might end up being a difficult distinction to make, but it's worth making it over and over anyway. We're not opposed to cranking up our intelligence efforts, but we are opposed to a president who thinks that a vague and indefinite state of war gives him the authority to do anything he wants.

Agreed. But the salient point here, I'd argue, is that pundits like Joe Klein are to blame for creating conditions that make it harder for voters to appreciate the critical distinction Kevin raises -- thereby helping make this a "tough issue" for Dems.

Yes, the NSA program itself may be a legit response to 9/11, and yes, Klein takes the Bush administration to task for its "tendency to play fast and loose on issues of war and peace." But in general, when it comes to national security issues, Klein's recent columns have unfairly created confusion about Dems where he should be striving for clarity. Klein trimmed a quote from Howard Dean to make him – and, by extension, Dems -- look anti-American. He described opposition to the updated Patriot Act as purely Democratic when in fact it was bipartisan. And he asserted, startlingly, that “the terrorists have modified their behavior, hampering our efforts to keep track of them” since the NSA story broke -- with little to no apparent evidence. Sorry to flog these points yet again, but these bits of rhetorical trickery add up, actively helping frame our ongoing national discussion of security in a way that makes substantive understanding of the issues at hand more difficult.

Klein also writes:

...until the Democrats make clear that they will err on the side of aggressiveness in the war against al-Qaeda, they will probably not regain the majority in Congress or the country.

The underlying point, obviously, is that Dems are reluctant to be “aggressive” in the war on terror. Yet Dems don't oppose the aggressive prosecution of terrorists, simply the unlawful prosecution of them -- a distinction, again, that Klein obfuscates. Thus Klein's prediction of continued Democratic failure is not merely a disinterested prognostication. He's encouraging confusion in a way that makes his prediction more likely to come to pass.

Not to naively imagine the likelihood of getting action here, but pundits who indulge in these sorts of obfuscations, omissions and distortions need to be called out again and again until they stop.

-- Greg Sargent

AT WAR WITH WHOM? Stanley Kurtz, taking a break from the imminent collapse of the family, opines on Iran:

We are at war. We are not losing the war, but if Iran goes nuclear we will be. Iran is acting because it knows that Europe is weak, and because it sees the United States as paralyzed by domestic opposition to the war. During the presidential campaign, the Democrats wanted to offer Iran a “grand bargain:” we’ll give you nuclear facilities if you send us the spent fuel for safe-keeping. It’s obvious now (as it should have been then) that such a bargain is hopeless. Iran wants the bomb, and nothing but a military strike will deter it. Read that piece by Robbins and you’ll see what’s at stake. Reflecting on the question of a military strike, it seems that the main argument against it is political: Dovish Europeans, the America’s Democratic Party, and Middle Eastern countries will be angry at us for resorting to military means. This strikes me as a bad reason to hold back. The doves will be discredited when we see what comes of a nuclear Iran. But by then it will be too late.

But who are we at war with? Al-Qaeda? Iraq? Iran? What's going on here? To be sure, the Iranian government and al-Qaeda are not hermetically sealed entities with no relationship or contacts of any kind, but by the same token the Iranian government has ties to the governments of Russia and China -- are we at war with them, too? Now I will happily agree that Iran getting nuclear weapons, as looks increasingly likely, will be detrimental to American policy in the Persian Gulf. But the best reason to avoid starting a war with Iran isn't "political"; it's that Iran, more or less, has us by the balls in the case of an escalation of hostilities, thanks to the situation in Iraq. You can't blame "the doves" for this situation. The hawks have been running the country for five years now, and what they've done is gotten consistently outplayed by the Teheran regime and put themselves in a position where they can't do anything to stop them from going nuclear at some point down the road.

--Matthew Yglesias

GIVING UP THE GAME. Throughout Marshall Wittman's series of bizarre defenses of the Bush administration's secret, illegal surveillance operations he's at least managed to insist that if proof were produced that the program was being abused, he'd change his mind. Of course, abuses would never come to light if Bush and Wittman had their way. But in today's installment, he proposes that "we should not cripple electronic intelligence in a partisan pique the way we hobbled human intelligence in the 1970's." When, as Garance was writing a little while back, the intelligence reforms of the 1970s weren't adopted in a fit of partisan pique, they were adopted in response to revelations of massive, systematic abuse of the intelligence apparatus by Richard Nixon.

It's also important to understand that Nixon wasn't alone in this. The pattern of abuse started before Nixon took office. What he did was expand and aggravate a pattern of abuse that predated him. This is what happens when checks and balances are absent, even if their absence initially begins with the purest of motives. The temptation for abuse exists, and whether it happens quickly or slowly, gradually or suddenly, the opportunity will eventually be exploited.

One should also note that, despite our allegedly "hobbled" HUMINT capabilities, we won the Cold War just fine. Nor is there any real reason to believe that a paucity of data points has been the source of any serious intelligence failings in recent history. Rather, the limiting factor is the ability of the intelligence apparatus to process and analyze the data it already has. Now it may well be the case that the NSA has invented something that it ought to be allowed to use but that FISA prohibits. If that's the case, then the administration ought to be able to lay the argument out to Congress (in closed session, if appropriate) and get the law changed. But the administration seems to believe that whatever it is they wanted to do wouldn't have been able to pass Congress, even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, which makes me suspect that it's not actually such a hot idea. It would be nice to have a more definitive judgment on the policy question, but I don't have codeword clearance, and unlike the program's defenders in the punditocracy I don't feel like using my "pretend I know stuff I don't" clearance to obtain the relevant details.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE CYBERSTALKING. Just since writing this item, I discovered I am not even the only woman in this office who knows from personal experience why an anti-cyberstalking law is necessary. There's a reason the provision got rolled into the Violence Against Women Act. No matter how much people like to pretend that gender does not matter as much online as off, sometimes men like very much to remind women that they are, in fact, women, and the new technologies provide such individuals with a wealth of new tools.

Atrios says he's still not convinced that the law is narrowly written enough and says:

The thing is that an anonymous annoying phone call is something quite different from an email or blog comment or, hell, even a blog post. An anonymous annoying phone call is almost by definition right up to the edge of harrassment (sic), especially if it's repeated at all. I can easily see some local pol getting pissed off that a local blogger is on their case anonymously and then trying to use this statute to shut him/her down.

I happen to think that, if a pol were stupid enough to want to go after a blogger who was making his life difficult, he could very likely find a legal means for doing so, even without the new law. And I don't think the new law would be applicable in the situation Atrios lays out, except if someone wanted to file a nuisance lawsuit; such precedent as exists in this area has protected anonymous online political speech, and, as I understand it, this precedent would have to be taken into consideration in any future lawsuits. According to the First Amendment Center:

In the relatively few cases involving anonymous online libel, courts have dismissed the lawsuits and/or have refused to have the identity of the anonymous critic revealed.

The seminal (and only federal) case on this issue is Doe v. 2TheMart.com, Inc. In this 2001 case, shareholders of 2TheMart.com filed suit against the company amid allegations of fraud. Some of the disgruntled shareholders made their discontent known by posting messages critical of 2TheMart.com on Internet bulletin boards. The bulletin boards were created and maintained by InfoSpace, an ISP to which these shareholders subscribed. The messages, one of which referred to officials of 2TheMart.com as “lying, cheating, thieving, stealing lowlife criminals,” were posted anonymously or by people using such pseudonyms as “Truthseeker,” “Cuemaster” and “NoGuano.” 2TheMart.com responded by presenting a subpoena to InfoSpace in an attempt to obtain the identities of these people.

A U.S. District Court in Washington state allowed NoGuano to object to the subpoena (as “John Doe”) and the court sustained the objection. The First Amendment, said the court, protects the anonymity of Internet speech. It called anonymous speech a “great tradition that is woven into the fabric of this nation’s history,” and added that “the ability to speak one’s mind on the Internet without the burden of the other party knowing all the facts about one’s identity can foster open communication and robust debate."

“People who have committed no wrongdoing should be free to participate in online forums without fear that their identity will be exposed under the authority of the court,” the district court said.

Just as in libel law, the standards and precedents in cases involving the intent to annoy or harm private individuals are different from cases involving public figures, which all politicians, by definition, are. Additionally, the recent F.E.C. decisions to treat bloggers under the media exemption would -- I would think -- greatly complicate attempts by politicians to shut down bloggers by using the online cyberstalking statute against them.

I'm just going to have to disagree with Atrios that "an anonymous annoying phone call is something quite different from an email or blog comment or, hell, even a blog post." People don't file these claims lightly. And to the list of states that include language already banning the electronic communications intended to "annoy," let me add California, which has had the most comprehensive stalking and cyberstalking laws in the country since 1999:

Every person who, with intent to annoy, telephones or makes contact by means of an electronic communication device with another and addresses to or about the other person any obscene language or addresses to the other person any threat to inflict injury to the person or property of the person addressed or any member of his or her family, is guilty of a misdemeanor. Nothing in this subdivision shall apply to telephone calls or electronic contacts made in good faith.

So these laws are already on the books in some of America's largest states, and have been since before the birth of the blogosphere. Atrios, Markos, Josh Marshall -- just to take three of the biggest liberal blogs -- are already working out of states that have cyberstalking statutes that bar online activity with an intent to annoy. I see no evidence that such laws have done them -- or any bloggers in those states -- any harm.

This anonymous blogger seems to have a good grasp of the legal issues, and argues that the federal statute, even if challenged, would likely be upheld.

UPDATE: Atrios responds. He's right there's been no final FEC opinion on bloggers, but the general trend has increasingly been to treat bloggers as media and that should have some impact on whether or not they can be prosecuted for stalking, either anonymously or otherwise. In practice, it's virtually impossible to successfully sue a journalist or newspaper for harassment, even though journalists do sometimes make repeated unwanted calls to story subjects or hang around outside people's houses, which is much more stalkerish behavior than posting repeatedly about someone online. More importantly, if you really wanted to go after a blogger, the "Communicates repeatedly at extremely inconvenient hours" provision Atrios highlights in the Pennsylvania law would seem to be the way to go.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JOE KLEIN PHONES IT IN -- AGAIN. Ezra is right to shred Joe Klein’s column below -- because it’s only the latest example of the Time columnist's regurgitation of the GOP talking point that Dem criticism of the Bush administration amounts to nothing more than opposition to fighting terrorists. Dropping an obligatory snide generalization -- or an outright distortion -- about liberal Dems into his columns seems to be an occupational requirement for him these days.

A couple of months back, for instance, in a column about Jack Murtha, Klein wrote:

The most passionate discussions in Washington last week were about the past--whether the President intentionally misled the country into war--not the future. They are a waste of time.

So a top columnist at a major newsweekly doesn’t think the question of whether the President lied the country into a war that’s claimed over 2,000 American lives is an important one? One has to wonder -- does Time managing editor Jim Kelly agree?

More recently, Klein trimmed a quote from Howard Dean, removing a word that would have undercut the columnist's assertion -- made with no evidence whatsoever -- that Dean was “gleeful” that America couldn’t win the war in Iraq.

And in this latest opus, as Ezra notes, Klein is saying that Dems shouldn’t question the right of President Bush to do, well, whatever he wants, regardless of the law. But as always, Klein (Joe, that is) has to go beyond arguing against the substance of the Dem position. He needs to take that extra step of regurgitating the GOP’s Dems-are-weak-on-terror trope:

The latest version of the absolutely necessary Patriot Act, which updates the laws regulating the war on terrorism and contains civil-liberties improvements over the first edition, was nearly killed by a stampede of Senate Democrats. Most polls indicate that a strong majority of Americans favor the act, and I suspect that a strong majority would favor the NSA program as well, if its details were declassified and made known.

Klein omits the fact that some Republicans joined Dems in their "stampede" of opposition to the Patriot Act. He also doesn’t bother mentioning a recent Associated Press poll which -- unlike other surveys -- actually asks the essential question: “Should the Bush administration be required to get a warrant” before wiretapping? Fifty-six percent said yes.

Memo to Jim Kelly: These omissions and distortions are beginning to suggest a pattern which borders, at best, on professional negligence, and at worst, on rank dishonesty.

-- Greg Sargent

THE CLEANERS. There are big fish to fry, so it's understandable that folks would want to focus on the lawmakers and top operatives implicated in the various Jack Abramoff scandals. But I always have been fascinated by the various 501(c) outfits that helped launder Abramoff money and serve as fronts. Questions remain: Just how basically rotten were/are these various organizations? Were they all aware of what Abramoff was doing with them the whole time?

This was tucked into today's story about an Abramoff-orchestrated scheme on behalf of the Magazine Publishers Association:

The magazine association made another payment that is under scrutiny.

In 2000, the association made a $25,000 contribution to a nonprofit group called Toward Tradition, an alliance of Jews and evangelical Christians, based on what Mr. Rubenstein called a directive from Preston Gates. People involved in the investigation have said that Mr. Abramoff funneled money through Toward Tradition to the wife of his associate, Tony C. Rudy, a former top aide to Representative Tom Delay, Republican of Texas.

"They had absolutely no knowledge of how that money would be used, and if it turns out that it was used for an improper purpose, the M.P.A. would be, quite frankly, outraged," Mr. Rubenstein said.

Toward Tradition is run by a radio talk-show host and Abramoff associate named Daniel Lapin. The outfit had come up in previous episodes of the Abramoff saga, most notably that time that Lapin hooked his pal up with a phony retroactive award to boost his resume for a posh D.C. society club:

…And there was Exhibit 31, an e-mail from Abramoff to a rabbi friend.

"I hate to ask you for your help with something so silly but I've been nominated for membership in the Cosmos Club, which is a very distinguished club in Washington, DC, comprised of Nobel Prize winners, etc.," Abramoff wrote. "Problem for me is that most prospective members have received awards and I have received none. I was wondering if you thought it possible that I could put that I have received an award from Toward Tradition with a sufficiently academic title, perhaps something like Scholar of Talmudic Studies?"

There were titters in the audience as Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) read aloud the e-mail, then outright laughter as he continued reading: "Indeed, it would be even better if it were possible that I received these in years past, if you know what I mean."

The rabbi, conservative radio host Daniel Lapin, gave his blessing. "I just need to know what needs to be produced," he wrote. "Letters? Plaques?"

And now we see that Toward Tradition was also serving as a clean, non-profit conduit for money between Abramoff's clients and his cronies, just as the National Center for Public Policy Research helped underwrite lavish overseas trips actually paid for by Abramoff's tribal clients. The extreme, cartoonish version of such 501(c) fronts for slush money was, of course, the American International Center, the Rehoboth Beach "think tank" Mike Scanlon established and staffed with his lifeguard buddy. But there have been plenty of other cases of legitimate advocacy or policy outfits that end up devolving into hollowed-out shells for lobbyists. My favorite modern example is unrelated to Abramoff -- it's the Ripon Society, a once-serious moderate Republican policy group that had become, by the 1990s, a celebrated laundering operation for business lobbyists looking to win over lawmakers through lavish retreats. Elizabeth Drew wrote about Ripon last year, and Matt and Mark followed her up in their piece on the Fraud Caucus.

--Sam Rosenfeld

DEFINING MODERATION DOWN. Rich Lowry relays some analysis:

A conservative who observes the Hill closely: "My sense of it right now is that conservatives are kind of holding back, wondering whether this dynamic [a Blunt v. Boehner race] is going to change. The only conservative who would have a chance would be Shadegg. He's not in now. He'd needs something to happen."

"Between Boehner and Blunt, the choice for conservatives is Boehner. He's more ideological than Blunt, although that's not saying much."

If Boehner's no conservative and Blunt even less so, then what are they? Moderates? Hardly seems right to me. It's a genuine question -- Lowry didn't object to the characterization, and Boehner and Blunt both seem like pretty standard-issue Republicans and both are unquestionably big players in the GOP caucus. So if conservatives don't think generic House Republicans are conservative, then what do they think they are? Who's governing this country?

--Matthew Yglesias

THE CYBERSTALKING BILL. Atrios and Kos are up in arms about new cyberstalking provisions to the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. I think it would be a terrible mistake if the blogosphere's first response to a necessary crime-prevention measure were to attack it without considering the legal history behind the wording at issue.

Here's the controversial passage:

Whoever...utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet... without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person...who receives the communications...shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

Now, this guide to state cyberstalking laws shows that the federal language, far from being anything secretively designed to inhibit online comments or blogging, is derived from the boilerplate language of harassment law as adopted by a variety of states, including: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Indiana, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.

On balance, this federal law is a mitzvah and thank God it has been passed, I say. I have had the not uncommon journalistic experience of dealing with someone who decided to come after me in a most unpleasant manner, both online and by e-mail, under cover of what I believe to be false names. Since I became aware of his behavior, more than a year ago, this individual has been convicted of felony stalking in another case and also had a major judgment decided against him in a civil suit filed by that other victim. Indeed, there were so many other individuals, in such disparate localities, who believed themselves to be victims of this man's attentions that, for a time, there was some discussion with prosecutors about making a federal case out of the situation.

It would be a terrible outcome for the men and women who need this law if it were eventually overturned because it was too broadly worded and/or corporations decided to try to use it against critical online writers. But I believe there is little risk of this. The prevalence of the "annoy" section in existing harassment and anti-cyberstalking laws is testament to the fact that lower courts have held that it is not an unconstitutionally vague standard, because such statues have "defined the offense with particularized standards to limit the scope of the offense" or "since the statute requires specific intent." The federal statute requires intent, which would seem to obviate this concern, expressed in the CNet News story that got the ball rolling:

"The use of the word 'annoy' is particularly problematic," says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "What's annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else."

Victimized men and women need a federal law to defend themselves against on-line stalkers who have turned their lives upside down, and I would hope that all those bloggers who intend, through their various online coalitions, to advocate for a change in this law's language remember the importance of providing them with justice.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE CASE FOR IDEOLOGY. Ed Kilgore writes, "Contra those Democratic commentators who say we should just forget about corruption and focus on the GOP's ideology and policy positions, I strongly believe the GOP three-pronged defense can and must be countered in ways that constantly connect corruption to the ideology and money-driven political strategy of the entire Republican Party from top to bottom." On some level, I don't think anyone disagrees here. As Ed himself is fond of saying, Democrats need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time -- make the case for progressive ideological goals and take advantage of such non-ideological opportunities as GOP malfeasance has provided.

But since disagreements -- or even just "disagreements" -- about political strategy can often lapse into disingenuousness, I think it's worth being clear that the main reason I can almost always be found urging Democrats to get more ideological is that I'm rather fond of my ideology. I like it, and want to see it succeed. I'd like to break the trench warfare dynamic that's ruled domestic policy since the dual failures of the Clinton health plan in 1994 and the Gingrich Medicare cuts in 1995, not just shore up our lines of defense. These considerations make me worry about the counsel Democrats get from Ed's corner of the universe.

America's not a very ideological country at the end of the day, and when you operate on a really grand ideological scale, it tends to be a somewhat conservative one. Liberalism's strength comes on policy specifics, but it's hard to work details into a campaign message. So some non-ideological themes -- e.g., responsibility, accountability, honesty, competence -- are a necessary component of the stew, especially when the opposition gives you so many ingredients. But at the end of the day, you never accomplish anything without trying. Insofar as people got into this business to accomplish big, important, progressive things for the country, they're only going to be accomplished by spending a fair amount of time talking about those things and not just the transcendent importance of not being on the take.

--Matthew Yglesias

TRUST, DON'T VERIFY. Useful liberal Joe Klein (no relation) has played to type and unveiled a call to disarm on the NSA scandal, poorly laying out the legal and constitutional problems with the program:

But these concerns pale before the importance of the program. It would have been a scandal if the NSA had not been using these tools to track down the bad guys. There is evidence that the information harvested helped foil several plots and disrupt al-Qaeda operations.

There is also evidence, according to U.S. intelligence officials, that since the New York Times broke the story, the terrorists have modified their behavior, hampering our efforts to keep track of them—but also, on the plus side, hampering their ability to communicate with one another.[...]

The latest version of the absolutely necessary Patriot Act, which updates the laws regulating the war on terrorism and contains civil-liberties improvements over the first edition, was nearly killed by a stampede of Senate Democrats. Most polls indicate that a strong majority of Americans favor the act, and I suspect that a strong majority would favor the NSA program as well, if its details were declassified and made known.

The base controversy here, as anyone following it knows, is legal, rather than operational. I'm on the mailing list for quite a few liberal organizations, politicians, pundits, and bloggers, and not a single one has demanded the NSA program's dismantlement. Instead, there's a persistent drumbeat calling for the president to seek and receive statutory authority for the program, rather than setting the precedent that the executive can, at will, act in flagrant violation of U.S. law. And in case there was any question on that point, the nonpartisan, highly-respected Congressional Research Service just released a memo (pdf) calmly, methodically demolishing the flimsy, fatuous legal arguments advanced by the administration and its defenders. But this is of apparently little interest to Klein. Nor does he appear to consider a middle ground between unchecked presidential power and total congressional constraint: Klein can apparently imagine no similar program that stands atop a solid statutory foundation and contains, as safeguard, an independent oversight agency. History, after all, furnishes no examples of presidential malfeasance, and so concerns about executive overreach can be safely dismissed.

And that's what makes Klein's column so ugly. Beneath the artfully chosen language and "even-a-liberal-like-me" pretense, his base contention is this: the president has an unlimited array of powers that require neither statutory authority nor independent oversight, and Democrats would be wise, on pain of electoral loss, to leave this state of affairs unquestioned. Of course, this advice, if followed, would surely not prevent Klein from writing a column in late November of 2006, crucifying the cowed, beaten Democrats for lacking the courage of their convictions and losing the election because they stood for nothing. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and Klein has no need for such constraints.

--Ezra Klein

SPECTERISM. Just a bit ago Arlen Specter, looking dapper and well-recovered from last year's illness, gave an opening statement at the Sam Alito hearing that emphasized abortion and boldly brought up Alito's smoking-gun 1985 memo. As esteemed TAP alumnus Jeff Dubner just wrote to me, "Specter seems pretty content to ask a question about abortion and confirm Alito whatever the answer." Indeed. This is the problem with Arlen.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE COMING BOEHNER HYPE. The Hammer has stepped down, and the House Majority Leader race will pit Roy Blunt of Missouri against John Boehner of Ohio. Given his history and the circumstances of his temporary ascension to the Majority Leader post, Blunt is obviously the leadership establishment candidate here. Meanwhile, longtime DeLay stalwart Eric Cantor is launching a bid for Majority Whip that depends on Blunt winning his race for that position to open up -- and so is linked with Blunt in a sort of unofficial leadership-insider ticket. (Blunt's been doing double duty as whip and leader since DeLay stepped down in September.) Thus, assuming conservative hard-liners and occasional leadership critics Mike Pence and John Shadegg decide to stay out of the race, it seems most likely that reform-minded "principled" conservatives will coalesce around Boehner's candidacy.

That means we'll likely begin to see a narrative emerge that associates Boehner with the supposedly corruption-free conservative golden age of Speaker Newt Gingrich's tenure, during which time Boehner was in the leadership and DeLay had yet to sully the Republican Revolution's principles. As Matt and Greg have already noted, this whole revisionist theory of Gingrichian GOP integrity is bunk, and of all people Boehner is the last man to deserve the mantle of reform against corporate-friendly government-by-lobbyists. As Republican Conference chair from 1995 to 1998, Boehner himself initiated the formalized, semi-official marriage of lobbyists and GOP lawmakers now commonly associated with DeLay: in the words of David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf in their history of the Gingrich years, Boehner served as the leadership's "liaison to business," conceiving of and hosting the Thursday Group, a "weekly strategy session with business and trade association leaders." In 2004 Jeff Birnbaum described Boehner's Thursday Group as "the granddaddy of all [the] mutual-back-scratching sessions" between lawmakers and lobbyists that now occur on a daily, regularly scheduled basis.

What gives him a patina of principled reformism and associates him with Pence's Republican Study Committee crowd, as Mike Crowley recently noted, is his opposition to congressional pork and earmarks. Opposing pork is the modern-day "principled" Republican's version of small government conservatism, though it's a position that has nothing to do with actually making the government significantly smaller. If Boehner does become the standard-bearer for the conference's conservative reformers, that says more about the bankruptcy of modern conservatism than it does about the special corruption of the leadership establishment in the House.

UPDATE: Jesse Lee reminds me of this Hill piece on Boehner's "K Street cabinet."

--Sam Rosenfeld

HAYES STRIKES AGAIN. Check out posts from Jason Zengerle and Marc Lynch on Steve Hayes's latest adventure in selective leak-propagation. I would only add one observation to what they've said: one of the allegedly Saddam-sponsored terrorist groups Hayes mentions is the Sudanese Islamic Army. Unlike the other three he name-checks -- Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the GSPC, and Ansar al-Islam -- I'd never heard of a Sudanese Islamic Army. The quick research method of Googling for "Sudanese Islamic Army" offers no indication that any such group exists. Now I assume nobody just invented a fake terrorist organization here. Rather, we probably have a non-standard translation of some Arabic phrase on our hands or something. But it's pretty hard to evaluate the seriousness of claims about the group with no way of telling which group, exactly, we're supposed to be talking about or what they do.

--Matthew Yglesias

ANOTHER VICTIM OF 9/11. This was treated as just a small news item over the weekend, but the Sept. 11 attacks have, more than four years later, apparently claimed another life:

A retired, 34-year-old New York City police detective who spent hundreds of hours searching for Sept. 11 victims at ground zero has died of a respiratory disease related to the cleanup, union officials said.

James Zadroga is believed to be the first emergency responder to die as a result of exposure to World Trade Center dust and debris, said Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives' Endowment Association....

Zadroga had developed black lung disease and mercury on the brain as a result of working at ground zero, Palladino said. Palladino said Zadroga had worked up to 16 hours a day in rescue and recovery efforts the first month after the Sept. 11, 2001, collapse of the trade center towers.

He developed shortness of breath and other respiratory problems in the months after the attacks, and retired on disability in 2004.

His union representatives believe he may be the first in a wave of emergency responders whose lives will end prematurely as a result of Sept. 11-related health problems. A sad reminder that for those most intimately affected by the attack, the tragedy continues.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TRUST US. Talk about your anonymous sources! Michael Ledeen reports:

And, according to Iranians I trust, Osama bin Laden finally departed this world in mid-December. The al Qaeda leader died of kidney failure and was buried in Iran, where he had spent most of his time since the destruction of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Iranians who reported this note that this year's message in conjunction with the Muslim Haj came from his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for the first time.

You can take that to the bank! It's not as if Ledeen's ever shown poor judgment in the "which Iranians should I trust?" department before or anything. Although I must say that if I were a betting man, I, too, would guess that OBL is dead already.

--Matthew Yglesias

ALITO FATALISM. The Sam Alito hearings begin today, and it's worth pointing readers to a speech I saw Chuck Schumer give on the Hill last week making a meticulously logical case for Alito's obligation to answer questions forthrightly on a number of issues. Schumer makes the important point that even under the dubious "Ginsburg precedent," endorsed by the White House and Senate Republicans during the John Roberts hearings, Alito has no excuses to dodge questions regarding issues on which he has an extensive written record. Scott Lemieux has been eloquent as always, arguing for the legitimacy of ideological considerations in nomination fights. And, needless to say, he and many others have powerfully laid out the substantive problems with the Alito nomination and the stakes of his nomination.

All that said -- and notwithstanding the compelling calls to arms of my boss -- it's hard to shake a sense of fatalism here. To state the obvious, the political scene in the last few months has been unusually packed with other issues that have prevented any kind of serious anti-Alito momentum from gathering real head-steam. Democrats clearly feel that they are enjoying quite a bit of momentum at the moment on a number of other fronts and are reluctant to risk losing it in an uphill nomination fight that could merely polarize partisans along familiar and not-particularly-beneficial lines. This isn't the bravest kind of tactical logic -- and of course pointing to the "lack of momentum" in one fight or the other is always a circular way of rationalizing not working to build that momentum -- but I still find it pretty compelling. That's because the Supreme Court "fights" we've seen so far in the last half year have already revealed the basic mistake of the longstanding conventional wisdom that post-Breyer nomination fights would inevitably be gonzo partisan battle royals. In fact, we've relearned that the presidency enjoys an immense degree of built-in advantage and deference on nominations that makes effective opposition prohibitively difficult, except under very rare circumstances. (This is all particularly true when the opposition party is the minority in the Senate.)

Moreover, the constant refrain that "it all comes down to the hearings" and that the whole dynamic of the fight might change this week seems delusional. The Roberts hearings should have made it abundantly clear that the most disgraceful amount of obfuscation and unjustifiable dodging in no way endangers a nominee's prospects for confirmation. Roberts' performance sparked unanimous Democratic grumbling about his giving short shrift to the Senate's role in the process -- and then a bunch of Democrats voted for him. Just because the logic compelling Alito to be forthcoming is even more air-tight and unanswerable doesn't mean he will, in fact, be forthcoming. Democrats are unlikely to find it a politically compelling proposition to mount a filibuster mainly on procedural grounds, but without that threat there's no leverage to get Alito to actually say anything.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE GREATEST TRANSGRESSION: LOSING. One last point to add to the argument made here and here that GOP apologists are trying to portray the Newt Gingrich era as a vanished era of reform-minded, corruption-free Republicanism.

It's worth recalling that Gingrich didn’t resign -- or get pushed out -- in the wake of any of his many ethical transgressions. He only stepped down after losing -- that is, after his party took a beating in the 1998 midterms as a result of partisan overreaching and other miscalculations.

In that supposed golden age of clean GOP government, Newt’s $4.5 million book deal with Rupert Murdoch’s Harper Collins wasn’t enough to lead to his ouster. Nor was giving false information to the House ethics committee. Nor was his frequent use of taxpayer-funded organizations for GOP recruiting and other hyper-partisan activities. Losing was a far greater failing in the end than any piddling ethical scrape -- then, and now. Only the real prospect of defeat could get GOPers to suddenly sound pious calls for reform.

Not to sound hopelessly naive, but it's still surprising to those of us far away from D.C. when conservatives, even as they're calling for more ethical behavior, don't even bother to disguise the fact that it's all about winning. As David Brooks put it yesterday in a passage that attracted surprisingly little attention:

Republicans need to steal David Obey and Barney Frank's lobbying-reform ideas. For some insane reason, having to do with their own special interests, Democrats have been slow to trumpet the ideas coming from their own party. Republicans have a chance to hijack them before the country notices. (emphasis added)

So the GOP should pursue its newfound emphasis on ethics by "stealing" and "hijacking" ideas "before the country notices." It doesn’t get any clearer than that, does it?

-- Greg Sargent

CORRUPT LEADING THE CORRUPT, PART II. As we've had occasion to mention before, likely Tom DeLay successor Roy Blunt is just as covered in muck as the Hammer himself. Today's Washington Post points to John Boehner as the most likely successor if the GOP decides to go in an outsider direction:

But Boehner's record has some blemishes that could be used against him by his opponents. In 1995, Boehner raised eyebrows by distributing campaign checks from tobacco lobbyists on the House floor. Since 2000, his political action committee, the Freedom Project, has raised $31,500 from four of Abramoff's tribal clients.

Note the date on that ugly little incident of handing out cash on the House floor -- 1995, Year Zero of the new Republican ascendancy. Also note that Boehner was a key Newt Gingrich ally, and only left the leadership when Gingrich himself got the boot. Gingrich and many other conservatives are now trying to re-write history and portray the 1995-98 Gingrich Interregnum as an era of integrity before the DeLay Fall. But insofar as the GOP was less corrupt back then, that's merely a signpost of how things went. Turning the government of the country over to business lobbyists was always the plan. The Class of '94 did have a political reform agenda, but it was one aimed at facilitating, rather than inhibiting, government-by-lobbyist. One main prong was to strengthen the leadership vis-à-vis the rank and file, and another was aimed at curtailing Congress's power to engage in independent policy analysis by limiting staff budgets, term limits, etc. The relevant chapters of Chris Mooney's Republican War on Science tell a nice chunk of this tale.

--Matthew Yglesias

ECONOMIC INSECURITY GOES MAINSTREAM Jonathan Tasinin gets the significance of IBM's switch from defined-benefit to 401k pension plans just right:

IBM's annoucement will rock the entire pension system because IBM's plan was fully funded and solvent; the plan was not in an airline, steel or auto industry crisis where the underlying business was losing billions of dollars. IBM simply decided that this was a good place to cut costs and generate more corporate profits. In the Times' story (registration required), Mary Williams Walsh writes, "But the move by I.B.M., a financially healthy company, shows that even some of the most secure businesses in the country no longer want to bear the risk or the expense of providing a firm promise of a lifetime pension.

The end of the corporate welfare state: it's not just for GM anymore. This decision is further proof that rapidly shrinking benefit packages are not just the inevitable death howl of anachronistic auto manufacturers, but an advancing trend that's as much ideological as economic. Retaining a private welfare state is being quickly excised from the list of corporate responsibilities, and so even healthy, adequately-capitalized companies are junking their onerous benefit schemes. Why pay more when they can pay less?

Progressives talk often about the coming politics of economic insecurity, where average, middle-class Americans begin experiencing the tension and uncertainties of the poor and start voting based on economic fears rather than hopes. If class warfare doesn't work because so many voters think they'll soon be rich, trickle down economics is going to find itself mighty unpopular when large numbers of voters think they'll soon be poor. Watching healthy, iconic companies shrink their compensation packages may well trigger that psychic shift. First they came for the auto workers, but few spoke out because they were not and never would be auto workers. If IBM's well-educated, upwardly-mobile employees are next to the gallows, however, the comfy fiction that insecurity was contained to a couple of dying industries evaporates.

--Ezra Klein

STRATEGERY. From Hotline:

Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) will not return his Jack Abramoff money because he "refuses to give even the slightest appearance of something wrong."

Once you've got Jack Abramoff cash in the bank, you've already done something wrong. Stubbornly hanging onto it is simply a principled refusal to dispose of the evidence.

--Ezra Klein

WE WELCOME OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS. How is Japan coping with an aging society? Robots:

Many workers from low-wage countries are eager to work in Japan. The Philippines, for example, has over 350,000 trained nurses, and has been pleading with Japan—which accepts only a token few—to let more in. Foreign pundits keep telling Japan to do itself a favour and make better use of cheap imported labour. But the consensus among Japanese is that visions of a future in which immigrant workers live harmoniously and unobtrusively in Japan are pure fancy. Making humanoid robots is clearly the simple and practical way to go.

Japan certainly has the technology. It is already the world leader in making industrial robots, which look nothing like pets or people but increasingly do much of the work in its factories. Japan is also racing far ahead of other countries in developing robots with more human features, or that can interact more easily with people. A government report released this May estimated that the market for “service robots” will reach ¥1.1 trillion ($10 billion) within a decade.

In all seriousness, I think this is why you shouldn't take prediction of looming boomer-retirement-imposed bankruptcy all that seriously. In the future, robots will do all the work. The thing to worry about is a Matrix/Terminator/Battlestar style robot revolution aimed at enslaving the human race. Note that all the electronic surveillance and data mining in the world won't save us when our minions rise up.

--Matthew Yglesias

IRAQ: BAD. As part of the administration's weird new candor initiative, the top general in Iraq reveals to The New York Times that the country's all screwed up and sectarianism is a serious problem. It's almost funny to hear this stuff. For years now, the administration's public line has tracked what people who aren't know-nothing propagandists have been saying pretty closely. But they're invariably six to twelve months behind the curve. All the people getting killed isn't all that funny, I guess.

--Matthew Yglesias

STRANGE DENIAL. CNN's David Ensor reports that there's no truth to the story that the NSA was spying on Christiane Amanpour. Well, he sort of does.

A senior US intelligence official tells use that our colleague Christiane Amanpour has never been targetted by the National Security Agency, and nor has any other CNN journalist. Now, the NSA as you know is the eavesdropping intelligence agency, the US government's big ear, and from time to time, the official says, wiretaps overseas or other intercepts turn out to include Americans, or what they call 'US persons', which includes people who works for US companies, it does so inadvertently. But if the NSA finds it has tape and transcript of such a person, by law, it is required to be immediately erased, deleted, gotten rid of. US intelligence officials rarely comment on who they may or may not have collected information about, but because of all the web blogosphere attention this was getting today, this senior official was willing to look into it for us, and to be quite clear in his denial -- frankly, I get the impression the NSA is as puzzled by Andrea Mitchell's question, and NBC's decision to put it out on the web, as we were.

That's demented. Yes, we do know that the NSA "by law" is supposed to eliminate unintentional surveillance of "US persons." The reason we all know that is that there was recently a big story about how the NSA was doing a whole bunch of illegal surveillance and the Bush administration thought that was great. The issue is whether the NSA was monitoring journalists, not whether the NSA was legally monitoring journalists. Plenty of illegal stuff is going down nowadays.

--Matthew Yglesias

ALLEN'S COUP. With no heir apparent yet on the Republican side for ’08 (Condoleezza Rice and Jeb Bush have shown no sign of joining the race), prospective candidates are scurrying around, trying to snatch up the big-time donors that fund a major presidential campaign. Sen. John McCain, until now, led the donor race. Potential candidates are going after the approximately 700 Pioneer and Ranger donors who each brought in at least $100,000 and $200,000 respectively for the Bush campaign, and McCain has gotten some of the more prominent names on that list -- people like former Rep. Tom Loeffler (R-TX) and wife Nancy Loeffler as well as former Republican Governors Association finance chair Sig Rogich.

By picking up some of the bigger names in Republican fundraising circles, McCain hoped to bring the smaller donors on board; as Ronald Kaufman of the lobbying firm Dutko Worldwide told the National Journal, “the GOP donor world is on alert for any sign that key members of Bush's money team are breaking toward a particular candidate. That's why Loeffler's decision generated buzz.” McCain, it seemed, was trying to model his fundraising machine after Bush’s, and thus avoid some of the financial missteps of his first presidential bid.

Meanwhile, the National Journal (subsciprtion only) had this to say about Sen. George Allen, who for the past year has been considered the Republican front-runner among Washington insiders:

At first glance, Sen. George Allen, R-Va., would seem perfectly positioned to be a money magnet. He was a popular governor of a donor-rich state. When he was chief of the NRSC, Republicans picked up five Senate seats. The son of a legendary football coach, Allen is the only potential 2008 candidate who has attracted contributions from both Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Former Allen Chief of Staff Jay Timmons is the National Association of Manufacturers' top lobbyist. Heading up Allen's Senate re-election committee is Bush Ranger Dirk Van Dongen, president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors. Bush Ranger John Sherman is treasurer of Allen's PAC, called Good Government for America. Allen's new chief of staff, Dick Wadhams, is a veteran of Republican campaigns in the Midwest.

But Allen's friends and associates worry that he lacks the patience to raise the necessary tens of millions of dollars. "He is better at closing the deal than making the sale," said one Republican who is in regular contact with top GOP fundraisers. By choice and temperament, Allen is not close to his party's major fundraisers. When he chaired the NRSC, other Republican officials complained that he repeatedly failed to show up for scheduled fundraising call sessions. Unlike virtually every other candidate who is thinking about running in 2008, Allen does not have a deep bench of fundraisers seeking commitments on his behalf. And he has no single fundraising sherpa to guide his strategy. GOP donors familiar with Allen's history predict that he will try to attract donations by virtue of his popularity with the party's political insiders and its conservative base.

The Hotline, though, had two major news items today regarding Allen’s fundraising strategy. First, Ed Gillepsie has signed on to serve as treasurer of Allen’s PAC through ’06, suggesting that Gillepsie, who himself may want to seek a Senate or gubernatorial bid in Virginia, may instead stay on for an Allen presidential run. On top of that, Allen’s PAC has contributed $10,000 to Rep. Jim Nussle’s campaign for governor in Iowa, making him the biggest contributor of all the potential presidential candidates. Nussle, right now, leads the Democratic candidates in the polls, and his help, as governor of Iowa, would obviously come in hand should Allen decide to run. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out among the Republican rank and file in March at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.

--Alec Oveis

NOTHING GOING RIGHT. A big story in The Guardian today claims that Sudan was a conduit for A.Q. Khan’s nuclear bazaar. According to the report, from 1999-2001, the Sudanese government set up front companies to import sensitive nuclear equipment and became a “warehouse” for Khan before the equipment was shipped off to Tehran, Tripoli, and Pyongyang.

Meanwhile, Darfur is on the verge of erupting into civil war once again. Via the Coalition for Darfur, I see that the UN announced today that it’s pulling all non-essential personnel from northern Darfur as soldiers and rebels are beginning to mass on the border. And just to the east, Chad’s President Idriss Deby has all but declared war on Sudan for “exporting the Darfur conflict” to his country, following an attack on Chadian government forces by rebels backed by Khartoum.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE TIPPING POINT. Shrill Bush bashing has crossed over to the section of the media where it really counts: the sports pages. Here's Sal Paolantonio on the Philadelphia Eagles' management structure:

More important, no one is fighting for the players on the field. There is a fine line between building a consensus and creating a cabal -- an echo chamber where the tough questions don't get asked because the answers are all the same. (See: Bush White House.)

Bloggers, being political junkies, naturally tend to focus their attention and ire on the more elite segments of the media. Realistically, though, the voters most likely to be swayed by media coverage are precisely the people who don't read The Washington Post or watch CNN or Meet The Press. People who follow the news that intently tend to have relatively well-developed ideological views and vote for the guy whose beliefs closest match theirs. The sort of people whose main access to political commentary is late night TV jokes or offhand remarks in articles about football, on the other hand, have much vaguer views and are much more likely to be swayed by the personal characteristics of candidates or, more to the point, the way those characteristics get portrayed.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE END OF ETHICS. Mark Kleiman writes:

As long as the Democrats on the Hill maintain the "ethics truce," its going to be hard to make the Republican sleazemobile a central issue this November. If the DeLay/Abramoff/Norquist/Rove plot is really a menace to republican government, why aren't our leaders acting appropriately?

Exactly right. There are two choices here: break the cowardly, counter-productive "ethics truce" that currently keeps the two parties from launching probes into each other or take Michelle Cottle's advice and blow the place up. My instincts run towards the latter course of action, both because I like pyrotechnics and because the politics of making the neutered watchdog a symbol for the GOP's total betrayal of their reform mandate appeal to me. There is, of course, a third option: protecting the truce, corrupt Democrats, and the party's minority status all at once. We'll see.

--Ezra Klein

THE GHOST OF GOP CORRUPTION PAST. Before we rush to applaud David Brooks for blasting the GOP today for corruption, let’s pause to note a sly piece of rhetorical chicanery he smuggled into this morning’s column.

I’m talking about the subtle but unmistakable effort to resurrect Newt Gingrich as a spokesman for some sort of vanished moment when the Republican Party was supposedly reform-minded and corruption-free.

After quoting Gingrich’s ideas for reform, Brooks adds:

Back in the dim recesses of my mind, I remember a party that thought of itself as a reform, or even a revolutionary, movement. That party used to be known as the Republican Party. I wonder if it still exists.

What a touching moment of nostalgic musing. Presumably Brooks is talking about the Gingrich era, right? OK, then -- let’s indulge in a bit of nostalgic musing of our own. Anybody remember what Gingrich did during this period when the GOP allegedly thought of itself as a “reform movement” -- that is, in the run-up to and during his tenure as Speaker? He agreed to a $4.5 million book advance from Harper Collins, owned by Rupert Murdoch, at a time when Murdoch had many matters before Congress. Then there were the allegations that an outfit set up by Gingrich, which paid kids to read books, was used to enrich a Gingrich crony. Gingrich, recall, was also formally reprimanded by the House and fined $300,000 for giving the ethics committee false information. He was also nailed for extensive use of taxpayer-financed programs to boost the GOP. The Gingrich era wasn’t about reform; it was about perfecting the art of partisan warfare to seize power, consolidate it both for himself and for the GOP, and divide the spoils.

In that sense, nothing’s changed all that much: That is exactly what today’s scandals emanating from the larger K Street culture are all about. If Gingrich is the Ghost of GOP Corruption Past, than Abramoff is the Ghost of GOP Corruption Present -- and who knows what the future will bring?

Sure, Brooks deserves credit for blasting the GOP the way he did. But he also asks us to see today’s corruption as somehow a sign that the GOP has become unmoored from some more principled, admirable past -- a view, no doubt, that will be supported by other GOP apologists in the days to come. But the GOP's approach to ethics might best be summed up as "win for the team at any cost" -- both now, and then. Come to think of it, when Brooks talks about a way for the GOP to “emerge with their self-respect or electoral prospects intact” with a “comprehensive reform offensive” -- a notion that’s suddenly on the lips of other GOPers, too -- it’s at bottom really just about winning, too.

-- Greg Sargent

LEAVE NO DEATH UNEXPLOITED. Why does George W. Bush hate mine workers:

Jack Spadaro, former director of the MSHA National Mine Safety Academy, said inspectors told him privately that Labor Department opposition to vigorous safety regulation has hindered their work.

"Two weeks before this explosion, I was told by an inspector, 'Jack, there's going to be another disaster because we can't do our jobs,' " he said in an interview.

That's via ThinkProgress. Ellen Smith has more, and, indeed, more on this.

--Matthew Yglesias

AND A HUNDRED MICHAEL BROWNS WILL BLOOM. Steve Benen has a good post on the motley assortment of incompetents, apparatchiks, and fools Bush snuck in through recess appointments this week. Some favorites:

• Ellen R. Sauerbrey, of Maryland, to be Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration — Sauerbrey has literally no background in setting up refugee camps, delivering emergency supplies, and mobilizing international responses to humanitarian crises. Her only "qualification" seems to be that she's a Republican activist looking for a job in the administration.

• Hans Von Spakovsky, of Georgia, to be a Member of the Federal Election Commission — Republicans in Georgia created a new "voter-identification law" last year, which was ultimately struck down by a federal court, which forced Georgians without driver's licenses (disproportionately poor, black and elderly citizens) to pay for a state ID card in order to vote. The city of Atlanta, with a large African-American population, did not have a single facility where the cards were sold. Hans Von Spakovsky, Bush's choice for the Federal Election Commission, helped create Georgia's system.

• Julie L. Myers, of Kansas, to be Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security, Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — The ICE bureau is responsible for hunting down money launderers, sanctions busters, and human traffickers, and is the sole enforcer of immigration laws inside the country. Myers has no management experience at any level. As Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) said during Myers' confirmation hearing, "I think that we ought to have a meeting with (Homeland Security Secretary) Mike Chertoff … to ask him… why he thinks you're qualified for the job. Because based on your resume, I don't think you are."

There are more, and Benen's got the bios.

--Ezra Klein

CRONYISM REDUX. After Katrina, even conservatives started getting upset at the White House's habit of filling posts with unqualified cronies. The administration's response? Give unqualified appointees recess appointments to avoid awkward debate. Read Max Sawicky on Ellen Sauerbrey. One can find any number of denunciations of Julie Myers. Try this from National Review. Or this on DailyKos.

--Matthew Yglesias

AFTER SHARON. Ariel Sharon's stroke has thrown Israeli politics into a state of chaos just a couple of months before a landmark election. The new political party he formed, Kadima, lacks such things as a succession procedure or, indeed, any sort of party rules and infrastructure. It also lacks a real ideology, tradition, or party program beyond trust in Sharon's leadership and a somewhat ill-defined, pragmatic orientation. That notwithstanding, before the stroke, it was in a dominant position in the polls and it's not clear how much Sharon's ailing health changes things. Jonathan Edelstein has some enlightening analysis here, including a look at the leading candidates to succeed Sharon as Kadima's leader, most of whom aren't especially familiar to an American audience. This, from Jonathan Zasloff, is also interesting.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once noted, the states are the “laboratories of democracy,” and they’ve certainly proven themselves to be such when it comes to universal health care coverage (or at least trying to be). Ezra’s post from yesterday on state-wide efforts to provide universal coverage elicited a fair number of responses from readers, who wrote in to tell us about some of the other state-level projects going on around the country. Reader DD mentioned former Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber’s potential gubernatorial bid against fellow Democrat Governor Ted Kulongoski, and his plan to create and promote what would essentially be a state-run health care program for all Oregonians. Meanwhile, reader AM writes: “[A]n organization in New Mexico is pursuing legislative options to begin such a program here. The basic thinking is that New Mexico's rural makeup and small population would help decrease overall costs for statewide coverage.” And just yesterday, Iowa’s former economic development director and current gubernatorial candidate Mike Blouin offered a proposal that would increase access to health insurance for children, partly by lowering the eligibility standards for low-income families -- not quite universal coverage, but a step in the right direction.

Another area in which the states have taken the lead in progressive reform is the minimum wage, at least according to two recent New York Times articles. Voters passed referendums on minimum wage increases in Florida and Nevada in 2004, and seven states will potentially vote on similar measures in 2006. Nationwide, the public overwhelmingly favors a minimum wage hike, as shown for instance in the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released today that found 83% of respondents supporting some sort of hypothetical raise. (Surprisingly, a plurality thought that the minimum wage was somewhere between $6 and $7, and still felt it should be raised.)

If Democrats are unable to get what they want at the national level because, well, they’re the minority party, then perhaps their efforts would be better put to use at the state level. For now, as the Times puts it, “state-level initiatives are the only game in town,” and they seem to be working.

--Alec Oveis

ON SHARON. Obviously, news of Ariel Sharon’s worsening condition makes is likely that he will not, as previously announced, lead his new Kadima party in the March elections. The question on my mind is whether Kadima will hold without Sharon, and if so, whether Shimon Peres has the wherewithal to hold this motley coalition together. Whereas Sharon would have siphoned off votes from Benjamin Netanyahu to his right, a centrist party headed by Peres may end up draining some support from Labor’s dovish candidate, Amir Peretz. Perhaps, rather unwittingly, this will lead to the kind of victory by a Netanyahu-led Likud that Sharon tried to preempt in the first place.

This is obviously a sad day for Sharon’s family. But worse, it may herald hard times ahead for those Israelis hoping for reconciliation with their Palestinian neighbors and compatriots.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

JONAH VERSUS THE BOSSES. Jonah Goldberg, by way of dismissing the Jack Abramoff story, remarks:

There are lots of important stories that I can't get worked up about. This is one of them. Perhaps that will change. If it turns out that Kosites and Tapped crowd are right and this has major political legs or if some important politicians go down because of what Abramoff tells the prosecution, then, by all means I'll be more interested. But do keep in mind, these are the same voices who swore that gay escort guy was a huge story. This is obviously a bigger story than that, but I think there are lots of people eager for a feeding frenzy that serves purposes well beyond the Abramoff story.

I actually don't think the "Tapped crowd" is all that interested in this, relatively speaking. We've got principles. You need to visit The Plank to find some magazine writers ready to elevate this to world-historical importance. But, of course, a new National Review editorial thinks Tom DeLay is being unfairly persecuted by Ronnie Earle, but ought to step down as majority leader over this Abramoff stuff: "Republicans underestimate the potential impact of the Abramoff scandal at their peril." Jonah, puzzlingly, says that "sounds right" to him.

To my eyes, insofar as DeLay is involved, I don't see how one can minimize this, even though I don't actually find the caper all that interesting as such. DeLay has, for years, been the leading figure in the House Republican caucus. To the extent that he's corrupted, all his henchmen are corrupt too, even if they weren't so clever as to personally pocket any cash. The point, after all, of the Russia/IMF bribes wasn't to get DeLay to vote for the appropriation; it was to get DeLay to get the Republicans to vote for it. DeLay's great strength as a congressional leader has been the discipline with which he's led his troops. He said "jump" and they asked "how high?" As a consequence, all the troops are tarnished by their leader's sins.

--Matthew Yglesias

DIRTY TRICKS. I’m a one-stop shopping kind of guy, which is how I found myself in a Boston-area Target one Saturday afternoon last September. Upon exiting the store I was greeted by a pleasant-seeming woman with a petition table. Would I be interested, she asked me, in signing a petition to permit grocery stores to start stocking beer and wine?

Being a one-stop shopping kind of guy, I thought it was a good idea. It would simplify my provision runs. Massachusetts is still very puritanical in many ways, and several “Blue Laws” regarding the sale of alcohol, enacted in the 1600’s, are still on the books. It was only within the last few years that liquor stores were even permitted to be open on Sundays, and then only with restrictions.

So I signed the petition, once on the petition itself, and once on what I was told was a “backup copy.”

Imagine my dismay to discover, more recently, that I have become a victim of a far-reaching political fraud. That “backup copy” I signed was in fact Amendment Petition 05-02. This petition calls for a strict definition of legal marriage as between a man and a woman, and makes no provisions for same-sex civil unions – in essence, banning same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, reversing the progress made on this front over the last two years. Imagine my dismay. And outrage.

All I wanted was a way to simplify my beer runs.

Agencies such as MassEquality (who happen to be next-door neighbors of the Prospect’s Boston office) and the controversial KnowThyNeighbor.org have been conscientious about tracking down people who may have signed this petition under false pretenses. It was through MassEquality that I discovered I was listed as a petition signer. It’s a comfort – albeit a cold one – to know that I’m not alone. This petition drive has netted over 100,000 signatures, and who knows how many were collected under fraudulent circumstances. At least one, that’s for sure, and where there’s one there’s sure to be others: People like me, lured by the promise of convenient one-stop shopping, then duped into becoming pawns in a very disturbing game.

The Attorney General’s Office of Massachusetts could not be reached for comment, but the petition – with its record-breaking number of signatures – has been approved and will be a ballot question in the 2008 elections. And I think I’ll be shopping at Walgreen’s from now on.

--Tim O’Brien

IN-Q-TEL AND CHILDHOOD BULLIES. I always find it strange to read about someone I know in the newspaper, especially when that someone is the oldest brother of my closest friend from childhood, who just happened to be named the CEO of In-Q-Tel, the venture-capital arm of the CIA. Amit Yoran previously served as the cyber-security chief for the Department of Homeland Security, and quit in response to the low priority given to cyber security by the Bush administration. But I knew him as the one older brother of my friend who didn’t beat us up every time I visited.

Two years ago I worked for Dow Jones covering the venture capital market, and it was well known there that any story involving a company in In-Q-Tel’s portfolio was a dead end, because, for obvious reasons, the company would be very reluctant to discuss its technology. I’m now, however, prepared to offer a deal: Amit, I’ll forgive all the abuse I suffered at the hands of your other brothers, as long as you give me the inside scoop on In-Q-Tel. I’m all ears.

--Alec Oveis

PART D, GRADE F. The AARP study Sam flags below is, impressively, even more galling and dishonest than he notes. The study purports to show that seniors will save money by eschewing reimportation in favor of certain plans offered by the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. This, however, is an apples-to-oranges comparison. When seniors buy drugs from Canada, they pay the total cost, as reimportation is inexplicably illegal (though you hardly hear pro-CAFTA and NAFTA Republicans complaining about that bit of protectionism). Under the new insurance benefit, they pay premiums and a co-pay, so long as they're not in the coverage gap. So AARP's big study shows that using Medicare Part D's insurance is sometimes less expensive than heading out to Canada with no insurance at all. What a bill!

As Kate notes, this makes the plan doubly beneficial for the pharmaceutical industry: not only does it forbid Medicare from using its size and strength to negotiate lower drug prices (a practice that accounts for both Canada's cheap prices and the Veteran Administration's pharmaceutical costs, which are 48.2 percent lower than Medicare Part D's) but it also saps strength from the reimportation movement. Bravo! All your bases are covered by PhRMA.

AARP, of course, is touting their study as proof of the bill's essential worth. In fact, the report proves the opposite. Canada's system, which serves fewer people than Medicare alone, is able to leverage their size and market share to push prices low enough that paying the full cost out-of-pocket for pharmaceuticals in Canada is only occasionally more expensive than purchasing through Medicare's insurance plans. Medicare could bargain prices far lower than Canada and provide excellent deals and discounts to America's seniors, but Big Pharma, with the help of a co-opted AARP, rendered that illegal.

That's an important piece of the prescription drug benefit puzzle: folks sometimes wonder why a Republican pushed for and signed such a liberal piece of legislation. Partially it was political -- an attempt to deprive Democrats of a viable campaign issue. But in a larger sense, it was prophylactic. A Medicare drug benefit was an inevitability; the only question was who would design the program and write the legislation. Big Pharma, smartly, made sure the answer to both questions was them, and the quickest path to that outcome ran through their "compassionate conservative" homeboys in the White House.

--Ezra Klein

BEYOND BANDOW. Doug Bandow, late of the Cato Institute and linked to Jack Abramoff in a cash-for-columns scheme, has an interesting op-ed in the LA Times that included the query, "isn't it a little unseemly for Washington to be suddenly shocked, shocked at the fact that those with interests in what government does (such as Abramoff and his clients) seek out like-minded advocates (such as me and hundreds of other commentators and organizations)?" This is true. That such arrangements existed -- and continue to exist -- was fairly well-known before this story broke. Similarly, when it did break everyone observed that Bandow couldn’t have been the only one taking money from someone. But as far as I can tell, there's been almost no further scrutiny of the issue and there certainly ought to be.

--Matthew Yglesias

BUT WHO WAS RUNNING CURRENT TV? An interesting report from Steven Hayward, who attended the latest Grover Norquist breakfast and got to see a special guest:

Indeed, the former vice president did turn up at Grover's Wednesday Group meeting, apparently at his own request, to give an abbreviated version of his global warming presentation. As Grover's meetings are off-the-record, I won't relay any of the Gore specific remarks (beyond repeating what I think he'd want Cornerites to hear -- that global warming and the potential harm it may do to the planet should be recognized as a moral challenge by everyone, especially conservatives). But I think I can stay within the rules to make a few general observations about the experience.

First, Gore was funny, relaxed, and self-effacing, and he was received by the Group with the utmost politeness and courtesy, as he should be. John Miller is right to praise the guy for seeking to meet with a group of people not one of whom likely voted for him. His Powerpoint presentation on global warming was superbly done--the best I have ever seen either on this or any topic. (He has some dazzling graphics, and uses Powerpoint as it ought to be used.)

Gore took on all comers for about 25 minutes after the speech, and I thought most of his responses were not strong. He graciously acknowledged the merits of good points and some challenges put to him (including two from me, if I can boast a bit). But most of his answers, I thought, sounded like canned bits of the rest of his speech that he left out, and he didn't, with few exceptions, join the fundamental premises at the heart of the questions. He also is not up to date on a few aspects of the climate change debate, but this is entirely forgiveable in my mind because it is almost impossible to keep up with this fast-moving scene.

Above all, Gore the practical politician may have come to realize something the environmental movement is resolutely clueless about: there can be no serious progress on any environmental issues without the participation of conservatives, for the obvious reason that the conservative movement is a potent force that is not going away any time soon. And with most other foreign conservative parties having joined the green/global warming bandwagon to some extent, this leaves the American conservative movement as the most significant remaining holdout. Most environmentalists want to demonize conservatives; Gore says he wants to talk to us. Good for him.

One final observation: I got the impression, simply from body language and maybe even a facial tic, that Gore doesn't much like Hillary Clinton.

Interesting to see Al Gore reemerge to make the case for global warming. Searching for portents in this particular mess of pig entrails is probably a fruitless task, but it does hint that the guy hasn't completely tamped down his instincts to influence public policy.

--Ezra Klein

AARP: BACKING OFF REIMPORTATION? The Hill reports on irate liberal reaction to a new AARP memo arguing that savings reaped from the Medicare prescription drug plan exceeds those from buying imported Canadian drugs:

In a move that is already attracting criticism from some lawmakers, AARP last week softened its support of drug reimportation legislation by saying that the new Medicare drug benefit saves senior citizens more than buying pharmaceuticals from Canada.

The powerful consumer group has previously endorsed reimportating drugs, but its revised position could severely damage momentum for legislation pending in Congress.

It could also alleviate political pressure on the White House and the pharmaceutical industry, which have opposed reimportation even though it is supported by a majority of members of Congress.

I can't really speak with much authority on the political significance of AARP's report, but I can point readers to Barbara Dreyfuss's must-read 2004 account in the Prospect of the long-range Republican seduction of AARP, which culminated in the organization's decisive endorsement of the Medicare drug bill in 2003. Dreyfuss particularly emphasized the role of Bill Novelli, a former P.R. man who became AARP's CEO in 2001 and likes to work closely with Republicans; today's Hill story quotes from Novelli's December 29 press release touting the "watershed" that is the new prescription drug law and pointing out that the savings it offers beat Canadian imports.

--Sam Rosenfeld

DON'T FEAR THE DRAGON. Egad, an AEI foreign policy op-ed that I almost entirely agree with. My only real concern is with this: "For China to pose a real long-term economic threat to the US, China would need to match the US's sustained productivity performance, which has long been the envy of the world." One has to ask oneself what a "long-term economic threat" is supposed to be. The claim I agree with here is that for China to overtake the U.S. economy in the long-run, it would need to match the U.S.'s sustained productivity growth. But there's no "threat" here. German workers are more productive on a per-hour basis than are American workers. Americans would be better off if we achieved German levels of per-hour productivity, but closing the gap by reducing German productivity wouldn't help Americans. Similarly, Chinese people becoming as rich and DVD-laden as Americans wouldn't threaten anything. Indeed, it would be good, since if Chinese people were richer, they would presumably buy more American stuff.

--Matthew Yglesias

TO CATCH A THIEF. Hilarious lede from Byron York:

Republican leaders in the Senate have had a plan in place for the last two months to "get ahead of" the Jack Abramoff scandal by coming up with a new proposal for lobbying reform. The leadership "decided in November that lobby reform for the Senate was a priority for this session," and Majority Leader Bill Frist placed Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum in charge of it, Senate sources tell National Review Online.

I take it that this is the same Bill Frist under SEC investigation for blind trust shenanigans that, at a minimum, he repeatedly lied to the public about. Rick Santorum, meanwhile, is best known for his hard-edged brand of social conservatism, but he also runs the K Street Project. York's article also contains the curious contention that 21st century Republicanism has been a model of non-partisan governance and zealous oversight.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE GOLIATH EPIDEMIC. Thomas Friedman presents what's got to be the worst argument for slashing Social Security benefits ever:

In a smart and original new book, "The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the 21st Century," Mr. Mandelbaum argues that while U.S. foreign policy is hardly perfect, it is America - through its vast military deployments, diplomatic engagements and vital role in buttressing the global economy and its rules - that provides the basic governance that keeps the world stable and on a decent track.

Most countries in the world like this situation, he contends. They like it because they know that the U.S. is not a predatory power, so they are not afraid of the order it provides. They like it because this global order is helpful to every country in the world, but the cost of it is borne largely by U.S. taxpayers. And they like it because they can criticize the U.S. and still enjoy all the benefits it provides. . . .

No other country could play this crucial stabilizing role. But its continuation depends on "American taxpayers' being willing to keep paying for it," Mr. Mandelbaum said - and that gets us back to our runaway entitlements.

Suffice it to say that our entitlements turn out to be "runaway" in the sense that we cannot afford to fully finance promised benefits while simultaneously spending enough to maintain global military hegemony and keeping our tax rates at the lowest level in post-war American history (or the lowest level in the Western world, depending on how you want to look at it). As Anatol Lieven writes in our non-virtual pages this month: "Michael Mandelbaum’s latest book is a superficial symptom of a grave, even potentially deadly disease: the inability of the overwhelming majority of the U. S. establishment to contemplate a limited scaling down of America’s struggle for world dominance, even when the maximalist version of that goal has been clearly shown to be unsustainable."

--Matthew Yglesias

COLLATERAL DAMAGE. This passage caught my eye in Sheryl Gay Stolberg's piece assessing the response on Capitol Hill to Jack Abramoff's plea yesterday:

While Mr. Abramoff is most closely linked to Republicans, even Democrats, many of whom also benefited from his largesse, acted skittish.

"We're talking about people who have longstanding careers in Congress who took contributions from somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew Jack Abramoff," said a Democratic Congressional aide who insisted on anonymity so as not to drag his boss into the scandal. "Now they're panicked. The hope is that this investigation will root out the wrongdoing without innocent people getting hit with the ricochet."

I've heard similar sentiments expressed by Democratic staffers about this scandal, and the reflexive nervousness is pretty revealing -- not to say dispiriting. Obviously specific Democratic incumbents who've taken Abramoff money or have had staff go work for him are only being rational to worry about the fallout here. But surely the first priority of the minority party itself is to become the majority party. Hesitance and nervousness regarding an enormous and overwhelmingly Republican corruption scandal are hardly the emotions one should expect from Democrats. I and others have beaten to death the historical parallel of Newt Gingrich and the House bank scandal, but it's worth revisiting once more a New York Times piece from March 17, 1992, to drive the point home:

Unlike the nonconfrontational Republicans who have led the minority party in the House, Mr. Gingrich says the best way to save Congress is to destroy its reputation by any means necessary. That is what the bank scandal is mostly about for Mr. Gingrich, and why he is seemingly unconcerned that Republicans will be embarrassed by the disclosure that they, too, overdrew their accounts…

Mr. Gingrich, who has admitted to having written 20 overdrafts, began his campaign to link the bank scandal to the Democrats five months ago by quietly encouraging a group of insurgent freshmen Republicans who call themselves the Gang of Seven to offer a resolution to close the bank and start an ethics investigation.

From his perch as the No. 2 Republican in the House, he counseled them on parliamentary procedures and on tactics like how to get the attention of the press, until public opinion forced a reluctant Speaker Thomas S. Foley to support the initiative.

Mr. Gingrich eclipsed his minority leader, Robert H. Michel of Illinois, who had hoped to work with Mr. Foley to limit disclosure of members who had merely overdrawn their accounts by a few dollars. And once the extent of the scandal became known, Mr. Gingrich embarrassed a majority of Democratic members into abandoning Mr. Foley and demanding a full accounting of all members who wrote overdrafts, by accusing them of promoting a cover-up…

But there are also Republicans who worry about the long-term price of victory, even as they share the excitement of triumph. "We have to be very careful not to act like piranhas," said Representative Jim Leach of Iowa.

Republicans smartly decided to take Gingrich's lead rather than Leach's and act like piranhas. The result was the downfall in 1992 of some important Republican incumbents like Mickey Edwards and Vin Weber as part of the fallout from the bank scandal, but also a net Republican gain of 10 House seats in the same election that brought Bill Clinton to power. Gingrich and his allies kept up the piranha act for two more years, and the rest is history.

Historical parallels can be dicey, but Democrats would do well to consider some math here: Let's say, as has been hinted for the last month or so, that a dozen people end up facing indictments due to the Abramoff probe. (As one FBI official put it to Anne Kornblut, "With most cases, the plea is the end, but with Abramoff, the plea is just the beginning.") Would Democrats see this as a scandal worth pushing -- and running on -- if, say, two out the 12 were Dems? How about a 3 to 9 Dem-to-Republican ratio? One can imagine the answer Newt would give if the situation were reversed. Achieving a "throw the bums out" congressional takeover is not a delicate business -- you can't do it carefully threading a needle. Either Democrats run on ethics full-bore and accept the collateral damage, or they don't run on ethics to win.

--Sam Rosenfeld

PELOSI SPOKE UP. There's been a certain amount of talk out there about how congressional Democrats knew all about the illegal surveillance program and didn't start complaining until recently. But it seems Nancy Pelosi did complain as soon as she got wind of something that appears to be related, way back in October 2001. It's just that when all your briefings are classified, it's impossible to raise anything publicly (all the more reason, incidentally, why there's no good security rationale for breaking the law rather than asking Congress to amend it).

--Matthew Yglesias

AN EXPANDING BATTLEFIELD. Adam Nagourney on Sunday dismissed any hopes that Democrats may have for taking back the House, but laid out the plan that Democrats are looking at for winning back the Senate. With the Republicans holding 55 seats in the Senate, Democrats will need to hold New Jersey, Minnesota and Maryland while winning any six of the following seven states: Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Ohio, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, and Arizona. And who knows, maybe even Mississippi will come into play, should Trent Lott bow out and Mike Moore enter. The math is a bit fuzzy, considering that Arizona, Ohio, Missouri, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Montana, and most likely Mississippi all have incumbents running, and Harold Ford, Jr., is plagued by family scandal and trails two of his three Republican opponents (though by small margins) -- but sure, it’s conceivable.

Another way, though, that the Democrats could go about this would be to expand the battlefield and put Republicans on the defensive on their home turf. Here are two examples:

Remember those stories questioning Jim Bunnings’ mental health and the rumors suggesting he suffered from dementia? For a brief period of time, it made Bunnings’ 2004 Senate race competitive, and some even believed he’d go down in defeat. Bob Bernick, of the Desert Morning News, predicts something similar will happen to Orin Hatch in Utah:

Hatch has had what fellow-U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett calls some "senior moments" over the past year.

Hatch clearly forgot the names of U.S. representatives (and fellow Republicans) Chris Cannon and Rob Bishop during a speech at the GOP state convention in August, even though both men were sitting on the stage behind him.

He confused Vietnam with Iraq in a public statement — a mistake that Hatch's staff had to correct later.

Hatch has reportedly had some angry moments with members of his staff, as well.

Another potential weak spot for Republicans is Virginia. Shortly after Tim Kaine won the governor’s race in November, Chuck Schumer mentioned that the DSCC would take a second look at Virginia and hinted at a “very strong and exciting candidate” that many believed to be Harris Miller, a close ally of Governor Mark Warner. Today it came out that Miller, the top choice of Virginia’s Democratic leadership, will indeed run.

(On a sidenote, it appears both Miller and Hatch’s opponent, Pete Ashdown, will run on their tech backgrounds. Miller currently serves as the CEO of the Information Technology Association of America and Ashdown made his millions founding XMision, an internet service provider.)

None of this is to say the Democrats have a good shot in either Virginia or Utah. They’re both long shots. But it’s one approach to putting Republicans on the defensive and draining resources from some of the more competitive races.

--Alec Oveis

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION. Justin Logan wants me to highlight the upcoming Cato book forum about Jack Snyder and Edward Mansfield's interesting new book, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War. The subtitle explains the thesis pretty well, and they seem to have the data to back it up. The obvious backdrop is the Iraq War, but a more relevant implication today may concern Iran which seems pretty committed to developing its nuclear program.

Several National Review contributors offered New Year's predictions of a democratic revolution in Iran. This sort of thing is widely believed to offer a potential solution (see, e.g., these remarks from Mickey Kaus) to the long-running US-Iranian conflict that seems to be coming to a head. It's hard to see, however, what could justify this view other than the extremely naive brand of democratic peace theory (roughly speaking, "if elections are held, then peace and happiness will follow") that Snyder and Mansfield are challenging. Even if Iran does see regime change in the short run (which most credible people seem to think is unlikely), the result wouldn't be a fully-realized, stable, long-entrenched liberal democracy integrated into the American security system. It would be just the sort of somewhat chaotic "emerging" democracy whose leaders "attempt to rally support by invoking external threats and resorting to belligerent, nationalist rhetoric."

Similarly, there's no reason to believe in any kind of "democratic non-proliferation theory." More countries have acquired nukes under elected governments (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, India) than under un-elected ones (Russia, China, Pakistan, and maybe North Korea), and the Pakistani nuclear program continued apace under elected governments. Similarly, I'm not aware of any evidence that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's anti-Israeli posturing and Holocaust denials are anything other than popular in Iran. Indeed, it seems much more likely that he's using such rhetoric because it's popular than despite some putative wellspring of philo-semitism among the Iranian masses. Iran tries to screw American consumers at the gas station because doing so generates revenue for the Iranian government, a dynamic that wouldn't change under a new regime. Iran tries to influence the direction of Iraqi politics because Iraq is next to Iran and under foreign military occupation. Most fundamentally, the United States and Iran are in conflict because the United States wants to be the dominant power in the Persian Gulf, whereas Iran, located as it is in the Persian Gulf, wants Iran to be the dominant power. A major waning of nationalist sentiment in the Iranian government (or a sea change in American policy) could change that dynamic, but why would you think shifting from "corrupt dictatorship" to "emerging democracy" would produce that result?

--Matthew Yglesias

TINTED TRANSPARENCY. Via Kate Steadman, this is rich. In 2000, as part of an FDA monitoring overhaul, the Feds created www.ClinicalTrials.gov, an online repository of, well, clinical trials conducted by pharmaceutical companies. In an effort to aid the effort for increased transparency, a variety of leading medical journals declared they'd no longer publish studies and reports that weren't simultaneously made available on the public registry. Good work all around, a new era was dawning, a new morning arriving, etc. and so forth.

The only problem? The new regulations didn't require that the pharmaceutical companies identify the drugs being studied. And you can imagine how useful detailed results of early-stage trials for "investigational drug" are. So, with only 73 percent of trials being reported and a percentage of those remaining useless, you can see how ironclad the new transparency regulations are. Say what you will about lobbyists, but whoever's doing the work for Pharma is definitely earning their checks...

--Ezra Klein

ABRAMOFF SCANDAL: BAD FOR THE DEMS. So Jack Abramoff is squealing? Who cares? Certainly not the Democratic leadership. If the past is any indication of how the party will react to the newest twist in the tale of congressional Republican corruption, they will drone on and on about a “culture of corruption” on the Sunday morning shows -- and on Monday morning do nothing about it.

Meanwhile, poll after poll shows that for all the talk of a culture of corruption, there has been no see-saw effect for Democrats. A drop in Republican congressional standing has not been met with a commensurate rise with the Democrats; Tom DeLelay’s indictment, Duke Cunningham’s kickbacks, Bill Frist’s not-so-blind trust, and Bob Ney’s casino boat shenanigans on their own have not improved congressional Democrats’ popularity.

Each new revelation of entrenched Republican corruption seems to have made the Democrats lazy. Their continuing failure to articulate a substantive reform message makes me think that they are happy to simply sit back and watch the Republicans in Congress implode. And while that strategy may satisfy risk-averse Democratic strategists and their leadership, it is not doing much to improve the Democrats chances in November. Abramoff’s forthcoming testimony may help convince the voting public that Republican corruption is entrenched. But the Democrats, so far, are not telling those same voters that they are the alternative.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

WHEREFORE THE STATES? Finally, something Arnold Kling and I can agree on!

I recently wrote that Massachusetts should adopt single-payer health care. One thing this would do is help resolve the issue of whether state-run health care truly is efficient.

Of course, doing so is easier said than done. In Vermont, the legislature recently endorsed universal health care, and in California, a single payer bill passed both the House and the Senate. But insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms are even more powerful in state houses than they are in the federal government, and these votes were symbolic choices by Democratic legislatures attempting to put Republican governors in a bind, not serious steps towards a universal care plan.

Certain governors, like Rod Blagojevich in Illinois or Howard Dean (heard of him?) in Vermont, have extended state insurance to almost all children, but there's been little effort to lower the eligibility bars and expand those pools into universal programs. Nevertheless, creating a new health care paradigm would seem like just the thing for an ambitious young governor. If nothing else, a successful restructuring would prove more than enough to base a presidential campaign off of. To some degree, that's what Mitt Romney is attempting with his plan in Massachusetts, but his program is incremental, not transformative. So it'll fall to the new crop of smart, visible liberals set to ascend into governorships (like Phil Angelides in California or Elliot Spitzer in New York) to take the next step. Here's hoping they rise to the challenge.

--Ezra Klein

YOUNG HICKORY. From the Department of Unanticipated Analogies, Ron Brownstein says George W. Bush is like . . . James K. Polk:

When Mexico wouldn't sell him the territory, Polk claimed that the border of Texas extended much farther South than when it had been a Mexican state, and provocatively sent U.S. troops to occupy the disputed terrain. Mexico, which had rattled sabers itself, attacked and war began. It didn't end for nearly two years, proving much costlier and bloodier than the president had anticipated. . . .

Much separates Polk's war with Mexico from Bush's with Iraq. But obvious echoes reverberate. Much like Polk with continental expansion, Bush has focused his presidency on a single goal: fighting Islamic terrorism, largely by encouraging the spread of democracy. In pursuit of that vision, Bush, like Polk, launched a war whose initial justification has spawned bitter dispute. And, like Polk, Bush has seen that war become more grueling and divisive than he had expected.

Polk's alleged single-minded focus seems to me to sell him short. As the classic TMBG song recounts, Polk played an important role in putting the American financial system on a sound footing after Andrew Jackson had made a mess of things:

In four short years he met his every goal
He seized the whole southwest from Mexico
Made sure the tarriffs fell
And made the English sell the Oregon territory
He built an independent treasury
Having done all this he sought no second term

Brownstein sees the poor leadership style of Polk/Bush in contrast to the consensus-oriented Abraham Lincoln. This strikes me as unfair -- it's easier to forge a consensus when your most strident political opponents seceded from the country and you get to burn their houses down. There's also the question of the substantive merits of the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the Iraq War respectively. If Lincoln had gotten the country embroiled in a costly war for no good reason, I doubt his approach to cabinet governance would have sufficed to overcome the resulting problems. Polk, meanwhile, was a great political success in his day. He's become a "forgotten" President because wars of conquest have fallen into ill-repute, not because he was ineffective at the time.

--Matthew Yglesias

NOTHING LEFT TO BLOG. I feel compelled qua political blogger to link to the story about Jack Abramoff's plea deal, but what are you supposed to say? The article is tragically lacking in juicy nuggets. Who will he implicate? Nobody knows! I do, however, agree with this TPM reader that Democrats probably shouldn't count on the Justice Department to win the 2006 election for them. There's clearly a legal-criminal element to this story, and that'll help, but the Republican machine is fundamentally a moral-political problem; gaining political power requires pitching a narrative in those terms, and federal prosecutors (appropriately) aren't going to do that.

--Matthew Yglesias