DON'T LET A THOUSAND COMPROMISES BLOOM. The Senate's "compromise" bill on immigration is pretty bad, in addition to being poorly labeled. It's really a compromise thrice removed, as the proposed law it's supposedly compromising on was itself already a compromise bill fashioned by Republican Arlen Specter from the bipartisan McCain-Kennedy legislation and passed with a bipartisan majority out of the Judiciary Committee. Why we needed to compromise further right is a little unclear.

THE HIGH PRICE OF IDEALISM. Joe Stiglitz says the Iraq War will cost about $1 trillion if you're optimistic. Jeff Sachs says that ending poverty worldwide would, if other countries followed America's lead, require US government expenditures of about $60 billion per year. Even if other countries refused to up their foreign aide in response to an America-led poverty-eradication campaign, it only would have cost about $130 billion a year.

CNN VS. TPM. This is really something. First Josh Marshall catches CNN swiping the photo TPM Muckraker posted of Brian Doyle's mugshot. Seems CNN accidentally left the "TPM" logo in the picture.

Then, when TPM called out CNN on it, CNN posted a new version of the picture on their home-page-- apparently scrubbed clean of the logo. But there was just one problem: CNN forgot to clean up the photo on the story's site. TPM called CNN out on that, too.

A MORAL IMPERATIVE, INDEED. To add to Matt's point about John Kerry's op-ed today, I expected that there would be far more interest throughout the liberal blogosphere in the current Los Angeles Times series on wounded soldiers. The series has been extraordinary, a powerful and graphic illustration of Kerry's insistence that keeping the soldiers there without a serious effort to resolve the politics is "immoral."

GOOD FOR HIM. No doubt this is far too late to save his 2008 presidential campaign, but today's op-ed on Iraq from John Kerry is very good. Read it yourself if you want to know the policy details. I especially like that he's tapped into the old-school Kerry and brought a little outrage: "Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after America's leaders knew our strategy would not work. It was immoral then and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion." This is true, and most of the establishment pundits and policy types left-of-center in this town don't seem to me to be grappling with it: There's a real moral imperative here.

UHC COMES TO MA. We've got a meeting in a few minutes, so I've got to make this quick: Yesterday, Mitt Romney signed a bill bringing universal health care to Massachusetts. The state will now have an individual mandate, subsidization for low-income workers, and a minor penalty against employers who don't offer health benefits. In order to pass the program -- and make no mistake, "solving" a state's health care crisis is an achievement massive enough to anchor his 2008 presidential campaign -- Romney had to negotiate with a Democratic legislature and a powerful, long-standing statewide lobby for universal health coverage. And so he did. This was a compromise bill, not a Republican one.

JUST POSTED ON TAP: �Viva Aplacamiento! Remember when the Spanish �appeased� Islamic terrorists by withdrawing from Iraq? Two years later, they seem to be doing okay, explains Matt.

On a completely different subject, subscriptions are still available. It's a sweet deal for a sweet magazine.

--The Editors