JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Alex Rossmiller argues that the debate over Hillary Clinton's refusal to apologize for her 2002 Iraq war vote misses the point; the crucial question for all the Democratic candidates is what have they actually learned from the war's failure.

Meanwhile, Mark Leon Goldberg explains how the ICC investigation of Darfur offenders can be used as constructive inducement to Sudan's cooperation with international peacekeepers. (In this, he concurs with Council on Foreign Relations member Angelina Jolie.)

--The Editors

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S IMMIGRATION RECORD. Interesting graph from The Wall Street Journal tracking immigration enforcement over the last few years:

As you can see, enforcement drops through the first few years of the Bush presidency. That is, in part, probably a function of the tax cuts. When you defund government, government has less money to do things like employ border enforcement offers and conduct workplace raids. Also interesting is the 2006 jump, as the Administration decides the base needs to be stroked and so they exponentially accelerate arrests. Quite the sound immigration policy they've got there. It's worth wondering what would've happened if, post-2004, Bush had used his "mandate" to push comprehensive immigration reform rather than Social Security privatization. The electoral landscape could, today, look a whole hell of a lot different.

While I'm on the subject, the Drum Major Institute is releasing the second version of their Immigrant Principles report, which offers the clearest and most sophisticated progressive take I've seen on the issue.

--Ezra Klein

IT'S ALIVE. I have seen the future of jazz 'n' soul, and her name is Alison Crockett. (Okay, okay; I couldn't resist. Apologies to Landau and Springsteen.)

At a tribute on Friday to Keter Betts, Washington's late, great bass player, Crockett, a stranger to most in a room jam-packed with serious jazz fans, proved a deserving heir to Ella Fitzgerald, for whom Betts was the regular bass player -- not by channeling Ella's ghost, but by inviting the ancestress to guide her as Crockett brought a new sensibility to the straight-ahead form. It was a breathtaking tightrope act that Crockett performed before a not-so-young audience Friday night at Southwest D.C.'s Westminster Presbyterian Church, weaving together melodic scats with the sort of vocal technique that developed much later in such iconic but hard-to-define acts as Bobby McFerrin, Tuck and Patti, and Sweet Honey in the Rock. In a particularly daring feat, Crockett quoted (without parroting) a famous Fitzgerald scat, "How High the Moon," from a 1949 live recording from Carnegie Hall.

I had come to see Buck Hill, the legendary saxophonist, play with Keter's cats, who were joined by bassist James King. Watching Crockett, before my eyes, win the respect of such grand elders as Hill and drummer Harold Mann gave me hope that jazz just might survive, after all, as a living, breathing art form.

--Adele M. Stan

WANK 2 D XTREME. I'd be inclined to go a bit easy on Richard Cohen re. Al Gore, if only because some of the examples culled by Media Matters could generously be described as Cohen defending Gore in a singularly unhelpful and damaging way. But since Cohen is responsible for the craziest damned Gore/Bush column of them all, I'm, well, disinclined.

--Sam Rosenfeld

GORE'S OBSTACLE. Media Matters has a good response to Richard Cohen, who blames nameless "colleagues" for the interminable media smear campaign against Al Gore in 1999 and 2000, while conveniently forgetting his own frequent participation in said campaign. This does remind us of a point indirectly raised by Ed Kilgore. Not only is Gore exceptionally well-qualified for the office, he's somebody who can generate support in the Democratic Party from the netroots to Marty Peretz -- one would think that this would be a compelling reason for him to run. But even among people (like me) who would unquestionably be Gore supporters if he joined the race, there has to be serious concern about whether we'd be in for 18 months of Love Canal and Earth Tones and I Invented The Internet and God knows what other crap people would invent out of whole cloth. It is possible that the countless foreign and domestic policy disasters of the Bush administration may convince some people in the media that presidential election campaigns should be judged by different standards than elections for treasurer of a junior high school Jessica Simpson fan club. There's a possibility that the beat reporters covering him, at least, would be more professional and responsible than Ceci Connolly and Kit Seelye, if only on the grounds that standards have pretty much nowhere to go but up. But, still, a lot of the damage has already been done, and the fact that Maureen Dowd -- who culminated her attempt to recycle (and sometimes invent herself) every asinine anti-Gore pseudo-scandal in the book with an idiotic multi-part series imagining a conversation between Gore and his bald spot -- is still inexplicably cashing paychecks from West 43rd Street isn't a good sign. My guess is still that Gore won't run, and while I can say that's regrettable, what's even worse is that I can't say it's unwise.

--Scott Lemieux

FIRST TIME AS TRAGEDY, SECOND TIME..., THIRD TIME...? There's a lot of long-form reading out there this week: Seymour Hersh's article on the "redirection" of U.S. policy toward a war on Shiites -- even as we supposedly are on the side of the Shi'a government we installed in Baghdad -- is mind-boggling. As Josh Marshall wrote yesterday, at this point, we actually don't even know whose side we're on in Iraq. Imagine sending more American troops into a situation in which they are told their mission is to support a government that we are simultaneously wishing to be rid of!

When you finish Hersh's article, though, make your way through the lengthy quasi-biography of Donald Rumsfeld by Roger Morris posted last week in two parts on the "TomDispatch" site now sponsored by the Nation Instititute.  This is probably the longest piece of online writing I've ever read, but entirely worth it, capturing not just Rumsfeld's particular brand of lunacy, but the political and social milieu that created him, and his sidekick Dick Cheney.

The second part of the essay begins with Rumsfeld's role as special envoy to Iraq in the early Reagan years, the role which led to the famous photo of Rumsfeld and Saddam. This is often described, as by the NY Times, as seeing Iraq as "an important counter-balance to Iran," and potentially a moderate Arab state, at other times just an example of arms sales and oil deals driving U.S. policy. But Morris -- once a member of Henry Kissinger's NSC staff and a biographer of Nixon -- puts it more bluntly: the rising neocons and the Israel lobby "cynically pushed both for Reagan administration aid to Iraq and for covert arms-dealing with Iran (later exposed in the Iran-Contra scandal), viewing the ongoing no-winners carnage of two Islamic states as a boon," and describes the episode as "Washington's furtive arming of one tyranny to bleed another, with untold casualties on each side." At the time Rumsfeld visited Baghdad, Iraq was at risk of losing the war and had already offered peace terms; we propped them back up.

Later came the Iran-Contra scandal, which drew so much attention to bizarre anecdotes, such as National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane's trip to Tehran with a cake and a bible, and the violation of the ban on funding the contras, that the underlying policy was overlooked: Now that Iraq had won some military victories in the long million-death war, we turned back to Iran. I've never seen it stated so plainly, but this has seemed to me one of the great crimes of American foreign policy, one attributable to realists such as Brent Scowcroft as much as to neo-cons like Richard Perle.

And so it goes, to today, when as Hersh quotes an expert, "the only army capable of containing Iran”—the Iraqi Army—“has been destroyed by the United States," we now must turn back to the Sunnis to stop a resurgent "Shi'a Crescent." Back and forth we go, "arming one tyranny to bleed another," an astonishing policy.

At first, at the time of the Rumsfeld trip, it is immoral.

By the time of Iran-contra, it was illegal.

And now, with hundreds of thousands of our own troops thrown into the middle of the carnage, it is simply insane.

-- Mark Schmitt.

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: A TALE OF TWO LOSERS. In his column this week, Mike assesses Tom Vilsack and Mitt Romney -- two candidacies whose rationales have a musty, outdated feel to them.

--The Editors

STABBING BLINDLY.Max Boot blunders into an interesting point. In denouncing our allies for being insufficiently militaristic, he manages to ask an interesting question. Here's the dreck:

Britain is hardly alone in its unilateral disarmament. A similar trend can be discerned among virtually all of the major U.S. allies, aside from Japan. Canada is a particularly poignant case in point. At the end of World War II, Canada had more than a million men under arms and operated the world's third-biggest navy (behind the U.S. and Britain), with more than 400 ships. Today, it has all of 62,000 personnel on active duty, and its navy has just 19 warships and 23 support vessels, making it one-fourth the size of the U.S. Coast Guard.

US Military Personnel (active duty)
1945: 12123000
1955: 2935000
1965: 2666000
1975: 2098000
1985: 2244000
1995: 1620000
2007: 1426713

But here's the interesting question: Why is it that the United Kingdom, which is in an absolute sense far more wealthy now than it was in 1930, having difficulty maintaining a foreign deployment of about 10,000 total in Iraq and Afghanistan, while in 1930 it deployed many multiples of that total all over the world, plus colonial auxiliaries who were partially paid for by the Crown? The relative increase in the effectiveness of insurgency strategies isn't just a consequence of the spread of the AK-47 or of the further development of nationalism in the non-western world; it's also a consequence of the fact that modern, wealthy states can now deploy far, far lower numbers of troops than they could fifty years ago. Indeed, in 1965 the United States (with a smaller and much poorer population in absolute terms) managed to deploy half a million troops to Vietnam while at the same time maintaining large contingents in West Germany and South Korea.

Part of this trend is in response to a general increase in the affluence of North American and European populations. Along with the elimination of conscription, this has worked to make individual soldiers far more expensive than they used to be. Improvements in military technology have also rendered weapon systems more complicated, necessitating longer training, and thus increasing the investment that a state needs to make in an individual soldier. A general shift from mass to firepower, especially since the end of the Cold War and particularly in the United States, has served to cut the boots per buck. This last has a political rationale (more firepower means fewer friendly casualties, and firepower tends to be a more capital intensive investment than mass), but has particularly damaging consequences for counter-insurgency efforts.

I suspect, though, that there's no going back, at least in the current political climate. Unless we want to follow Niall Ferguson's suggestion and combine high immigration with slashed social services and education, creating a large and potentially irritable underclass to do our imperial bidding, the era of mass armies seems to be over.

Kingdaddy had some interesting thoughts on these questions awhile ago.

--Robert Farley

HIGH ANXIETY There was a bit of high anxiety at the courthouse today in the Scooter Libby trial. At the end of the day yesterday the jury sent the judge a note with a question, and the judge put off until this morning discussing it with the parties before responding to the jury. Nobody knew what the question was. Everything got started late today, and then the judge declared himself unclear on the jury's request for clarification and sent back to the jurors for clarification on their unclarity. Meanwhile, it turned out that the jury seems to have performed self-clarification and voided its question, which, it turned out, had to do with the nature of Count Three, the false statement charge bearing on whether Libby lied when he told investigators that he merely relayed Matt Cooper of TIME magazine on July 12, 2003 that all the reporters were telling the administration that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and that he, Libby, did not know if it was true. As you can see, there are statements nested inside statements involved, and that seems to have tripped up the jury. Count Three is probably one of the weaker charges against Libby, but as for what the question means, I do not know. Are the jurors going through the charges sequentially, meaning that they're about half way through deliberations? Or did they leave the toughest call for last, meaning they're almost done? As for whether this gives any indication as to which way they are leaning, it does not to me, but maybe someone else with more experience reading a jury may have some more insight. And so we resume waiting.

--Jeff Lomonaco

GIULIANI AND RELIGIOUS PANDERING. I agree with Ezra and Mike Tomasky that Rudy Giuliani would be a primarily right-wing president. Mike makes a strong case over at TNR today that Giuliani's supposed political moderation during his mayoral tenure was really just a demonstration of his ideological malleability. Mike writes,

This came home to me in early 2000, when Giuliani was running (however half-heartedly) against Hillary Clinton for Senate. I'm sure you remember the incident of the provocative, eight-page, fund-raising letter sent out that February to conservatives on the mayor's behalf by Richard Viguerie, which invoked the left's "relentless thirty-year war" on "America's religious heritage" and scorned "liberal judges" who wouldn't allow the posting of the Ten Commandments in the schools. This was a significant and telling event. Giuliani, as mayor, had never talked about religious values.

Actually, on one infamous occasion Giuliani did play the religion card. That would be when he tried to revoke the Brooklyn Museum's city funding because it had an exhibit that featured a non-traditional depiction of the Virgin Mary. Giuliani demagogued this silly issue to appeal to his outer-borough white Catholic base. I think it supports Mike's point: Giuliani's a panderer on social issues and if he's elected with support from the Republican Party, he'll pander to them in office.

--Ben Adler

PLA COUNTER-INSURGENCY. Over at Ezra's place, Dymaxion John had an interesting post about the PLA and Islamic insurgents in Western China. The idea of the PLA developing counter-insurgency doctrine fascinates me from a military culture point of view, since the PLA originated as an insurgent organization, and its leaders developed much of the theoretical foundation of the insurgency strategy. How well did they make the switch from being guerrillas to hunting guerrillas? The PLA fought a successful counter-insurgency campaign against Tibetan rebels who were being supported by India, Taiwan, and the U.S. in the 1950s, although it took about ten years. Information about the campaign is predictably sparse. I have to suspect, though, that as the PLA has made the transition to a modern, conventional military organization it's lost much of whatever counter-insurgency capability it may once have had. Still, the article John highlights indicates some success, which may mean that the expertise the PLA developed is still somewhere in its intellectual roots and doctrinal toolkit.

--Robert Farley

THE RIGHT TO DENTAL. Generally, when I speak about universal health care, I'm implicitly including universal dental care, as the idea that the health of your teeth is somehow separate from the health of your joints seems self-evidently ridiculous. Maybe I need to be more clear:

Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.

A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.

If his mother had been insured.

If his family had not lost its Medicaid.

If Medicaid dentists weren't so hard to find.

If his mother hadn't been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth.[...]

Deamonte's death and the ultimate cost of his care, which could total more than $250,000, underscore an often-overlooked concern in the debate over universal health coverage: dental care.

--Ezra Klein

THE REAL RUDY. Bossman Tomasky and Fred Siegel are debating Giuliani's candidacy and and presidential prospects over at The New Republic, and Mike concludes with a point I want to amplify. "[Giuliani will] need the right's support to function as president," he writes, "and I believe his track record shows us that he'll act accordingly far more often than most people think he will." To repeat a point I made in a recent BloggingHeads with Ross Douthat, the question isn't whether he'll make compromises, it's where he'll want to compromise. Which issues doesn't he care about? And if you look at his record and emphases, it's pretty clear that the issues he's indifferent towards are the exact areas responsible for the myth of his moderation.

He'll probably not budge on the War on Terror, where he actually appears to agree with the hardliners on the right. Crime and education, where he's also reliably Republican, are dear to his heart as well. He's not amassed any sort of liberal record on health care, or drug rehabilitation, or affirmative action, or tax policy. He's semi-moderate on immigration, and I expect him to muddle along much as Bush has. But in the end, the entirety of the case for Rudy's moderation comes on social issues and gun control. He's "pro-choice," moderate on gays, and anti-gun. But does anyone who's viewed his record believe he entered politics to protect abortion, codify civil unions, or confiscate fire arms? Of course not. So he'll happily compromise on those issues, promising to appoint strict constructionists to the Supreme Court and leave semiautomatics to the states. And that'll be that. Just as the 2006 Democrats could oppose NAFTA but be called centrists because they were cool to abortion, Rudy can be an unreconstructed NeoCon and a fiscal conservative but get labeled a moderate because he occasionally dresses in drag (see below). It's a huge shell game that obscures his style of authoritarian neoconservatism, and it's dangerous to ignore.

--Ezra Klein

CHENEY: ME-NOT-ME DON'T PLAY THAT WAY. A day after Richard V. Cheney shook his finger at Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for not doing enough to rid Pakistan's border region of Taliban and al-Qaeda, Cheney got a taste of what it's like to be Musharraf when a Taliban suicide bomber detonated, within Cheney's earshot, a device that killed 23 people at the U.S. base at Bagram Airport. But the latest twist, in a story that gets more bizarre by the minute, is an interview given by "a senior administration official" who would only allow him or herself to be identified that way, using the first person to discuss the way in which the vice president operates. From the AP:

"Let me just make one editorial comment here," the official said. "I've seen some press reporting says, 'Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them.' That's not the way I work. I don't know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn't know what I'm doing, or isn't involved in it. But the idea that I'd go in and threaten someone is an invalid misreading of the way I do business.

With their attempt on Cheney, the Taliban make their point just as the U.S. plans a mini-surge in Afghanistan, and NATO continues its campaign in the country's southern region.

Between the Bagram bomb, the "anonymous official" on Air Force Two talking about Cheney in the first person, and that anonymous official's notable double negative (I wonder what the valid misreading of the anonymous guy's SOP would sound like), the case grows ever stronger for keeping Cheney sequestered in his bunker with a case of O'Doul's.

--Adele M. Stan

IF KIDS COULD VOTE ... The Children's Defense Fund started a faux presidential campaign supporting a 10-year-old girl named Suzie Flynn for president. The press stunt is largely targeted at drawing attention to funding cuts for the state program called SCHIP, the State Children's Health Insurance Program. It's currently scheduled to expire in September, and governors have gathered testimony from mothers around the country to support federal funding for the program.

-- Kay Steiger

EITC VS. THE MINIMUM WAGE. You often hear conservatives argue that we shouldn't increase the minimum wage, we should raise the Earned Income Tax Credit. Setting aside the claim's disingenuousness -- not much in the way of EITC increases after six years of Republican governance, I fear -- it's not true that the two policies are interchangeable. The minimum wage has uses and benefits that tax credits don't, and vice-versa. Over at EPI, Max Sawicky has a paper laying those variations out in full.

He concludes that while simplifying and expanding tax credits may be a worthwhile policy objective, "boosting incomes with a higher minimum wage avoids the dangers of reduced work incentives and larger marriage penalties in the income tax, escapes the burden of offsetting the cost of an expanded credit under the pay-as-you-go rules, foregoes the complexity of redesigning the tax system, and provides a benefit in plain view of the worker." That PayGo bit is particularly important, as the Republicans left the budget in such a mess there's really not much room for new spending (which Republicans will also fight). Boosting the EITC may be a good thing -- I certainly am sold on it -- but it's not an either/or choice, and a serious expansion/reform of the EITC and tax code are, in the short term, considerably less achievable than a boost in the minimum wage. Indeed, if Republicans were really serious about blocking the wage increase but helping poor people, they could have ratcheted down the pressure by increasing tax credits during their years of unified governmental control. That they showed no interest in doing so is further evidence that the sudden affection for the EITC is a diversionary tactic.

--Ezra Klein

THIS AIN'T NO KOREMATSU, THIS AIN"T NO FOOLING AROUND. The Canadian lawblogger Pithlord has a good analysis of the Supreme Court of Canada's recent Charkaoui decision, which held that the Canadian government's procedures for detaining and deporting terrorist suspects were insufficient to meet the requirements of fundamental justice. As he said, the decision is judicial review "at its best": "[t]he Court encouraged a more moderate response to a serious problem, one that has the potential to reduce miscarriages of justice." The Court's meticulous balancing of legitimate state interests and constitutional rights is particularly instructive in light of Benjamin Wittes' world-weary sneering about the inherent incapacity of courts to make reasonable legal judgments during times of war.

--Scott Lemieux

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE GAY GRENADE. In the fight to garner popular support for a revitalized ERA campaign in select states, some proponents have taken to reassuring voters that the ERA in no way guarantees gays the right to marry. Keely Savoie explains why this approach isn't good for gay rights OR women's rights activists.

--The Editors

EDWARDS EVOLVES AGAIN. John Edwards's latest on Iran, according to ABCNews:

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards told a group of New Hampshire voters Saturday that he would consider pursuing a nonaggression pact between the United States and Iran.

Edwards' statement came in answer to a voter's question at a house party in Nashua on Saturday morning. Asked about it later in an interview with ABC News, Edwards confirmed that he views such a treaty -- in which the United States would promise not to attack Iran -- as "a possibility down the road." But he emphasized that the Iranian government would first have to change its behavior in several areas.

"I wouldn't give away anything until it became clear what the intent of Iran was, that they've given up any nuclear ambition, that they would no longer sponsor Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorist organizations," Edwards told ABC News, in an interview to be broadcast on "Nightline" Monday night. "So there would be huge jumps and these things would all have to be verifiable. We'd have to be certain that they were occurring in order to get to that stage. But I think we would consider all of our relations on the table."

These nuances, I suspect, will be lost in the domestic political discussion, where Edwards' statements will get interpreted, depending on the analyst, as either a gross pander to ignorance or a brave effort to transform American rhetoric on Iran from all stick to some carrot, while leaving the threat of force on the table. At some point, it would be useful if Edwards could unpack all this in a detailed foreign policy speech.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

AGAINST FALSE COMPLACENCY. Brad Plumer has a good piece about how any Republican President will almost certainly try to replace John Paul Stevens with a doctrinaire reactionary in the mold of Sam Alito. To add to his point, I think it's easy to be lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that most landmark liberal precedents survived a significant number of Republican appointments (even leaving aside the fact that this is, as Brad notes, a misleading metric - -the Rehnquist Court's strategy was to largely drain precedents of substantial content rather than overturn them outright). First, you will often hear the idea that many Republican appointments have been "disappointments," with the implication that it's more likely than not that a new swing appointment will be surprisingly liberal (indeed, a few people -- despite a complete lack of evidence -- made this claim about Alito himself.) But this is misleading -- conservative justices selected for ideological reasons have, in fact, mostly worked out as expected. The "disappointments" were all selected for primarily demographic and/or political reasons -- Earl Warren was promised an appointment for delivering California to Eisenhower, William Brennan (a well-known liberal Democrat) was nominated because Ike was trying to attract liberal votes, Sandra Day O'Connor was selected because Reagan promised a female appointment, and Harry Blackmun and Anthony Kennedy were third choices who were confirmable partly because they were correctly perceived as more moderate than the previous nominees. (Souter we'll get to in a second.) So attempts to nominate a staunch conservative are likely to be successful, and Brad is correct that, if anything, a president whose moderation leads to a distrust of cultural conservatives will be more constrained to nominate an ideological conservative.

Secondly, on the subject of Roe, Jan Crawford Greenburg's new book Supreme Conflict reminds us that, while it's tempting to see it as inevitable in retrospect, there was always a great deal of luck involved in Roe's survival in the first place. Had Reagan appointed Robert Bork first and then Antonin Scalia, it is very likely he would have gotten both; Scalia, who was the first Italian-American appointee and didn't have a paper trial that included things like arguing that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional, would have been much harder to stop. And David Souter was nominated instead of Ken Starr largely because of a strange confluence of internal machinations within the Bush administration that could have worked out differently at slightly different times. If a Republican president is given another opportunity to put a very conservative median vote on the Court, don't bet on getting lucky again.

--Scott Lemieux

NOW WITH THE PIGEONS. Coming hard upon the heels of the Chinese anti-satellite test, and the report of US Navy foolin' around with sharks, it appears that China is attempting to create an army of cyborg pigeons.

Scientists with the Robot Engineering Technology Research Center of east China's Shandong University of Science and Technology say they implanted micro electrodes in the brain of a pigeon so they can command it to fly right or left or up or down.

The implants stimulated different areas of the pigeon's brain according to signals sent by the scientists via computer, and forced the bird to comply with their commands.

I, for one, am outraged. Those of us growing up in New York know that there is nothing nastier than the swarming, disease-ridden, flying rats who turn every public place into a fight for room to breathe. Now China is looking to engineer a fleet of cyborg pigeon slaves? Damn them. And damn those old ladies who feed the pigeons, in the first place.

--Robert Farley

POLITICIZED NATIONAL SECURITY, CIRCA 2003. Yesterday, I was traveling back from my unsuccessful effort to -- no joke -- talk to Al Gore at the Governor's Ball (he didn't show before I left), so I missed the excitement in the Scooter Libby trial over the juror who got booted for exposure to media coverage of the trial and the happy reaction from the defense. (For what it's worth, I got the very strong impression from Sunday night that Gore will not be running for president -- who needs the hassle when you're on an inexorable march to sainthood?)

While I was traveling, I had a chance to look back over Libby's grand jury testimony, and was struck again by just how involved, in ways that continue to surprise, Cheney was in the politicization of national security in July 2003. A small but interesting example that didn't even come up at the trial concerns a topic I have discussed before: Libby and Cheney's story that they were really concerned with the declassification of the October 2002 NIE, and not at all with the disclosure of Plame's CIA identity.

Libby told a story that in order to release portions of the classified NIE to Judith Miller on July 8, 2003, he and Cheney had President Bush explicitly authorize Libby to leak it to reporters -- thereby, according to the legal opinion Libby got from the VP's then-Counsel David Addington, effectively declassifying the NIE. Fitzgerald evidently had suspicions about this story, and spent a lot of time in the grand jury questioning Libby about it. One of the odd things was that this presidential declassification remained subterranean and secret at the very time that the White House was working to have the document, along with a few others, declassified the formal way in order to respond to Wilson and the CIA in the blame game over botched intelligence. In this connection, in an April 2006 pretrial filing that is rich in information (the pdf can be found here), Fitzgerald noted that Libby testified that

at the time of his conversations with Miller and Cooper, he understood that only three people -- the President, the Vice President and defendant -- knew that the key judgments of the NIE had been declassified. Defendant testified in the grand jury that he understood that even in the days following his conversation with Ms. Miller [on July 8], other key officials -- including Cabinet level officials -- were not made aware of the earlier declassification even as those officials were pressed to carry out a declassification of the NIE, the report about Wilson's trip and another classified document dated January 24, 2003.

Why, Fitzgerald must have wondered, wouldn't Cheney simply tell them that the document was already declassified? Fitzgerald pressed Libby on this matter. But Libby insisted it was not that unusual for he and the Vice President to keep information from other cabinet members, or others to keep information from them. Fitzgerald's suspicion must have been that this was in fact part of the pair's use of the NIE as a cover story for the unseemly conduct they were involved in: planning to leak Valerie Plame's CIA identity to Judith Miller.

And I think there is little doubt Fitzgerald continues to hold that suspicion. But in this instance, he may simply have underestimated the extent to which Libby and Cheney were operating as free agents uninterested in cooperating with other members of the administration. He may also have underestimated the extent to which Cheney and Libby saw themselves as at war with the CIA, which might explain why Cheney would not disclose to Tenet that he had pressed the president to authorize his deputy to leak the NIE. Fitzgerald, in other words, may simply have underestimated the sheer dysfunction the Vice President's office brought to the way the White House governed -- and the Vice President's willingness to politicize national security and selectively leak national security information -- completely apart from whether or not Cheney directed Libby to leak classified information about Plame.

--Jeff Lomonaco

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CHENEY FOLLIES. In his column this week, Matt ruminates on Vice President Dick Cheney -- national joke, national nightmare.

--The Editors

PRIMAL FEAR. As Ezra notes, questions about Mitt Romney's religion could be getting too much attention, given the fact that it is Romney as an individual people will either be voting for or against. But the Romney campaign is obviously acutely aware of the question of whether conservatives will consider Romney "one of us" or not. Today's Boston Globe has an article on that most delicious of campaign stories, the leaked strategy Powerpoint:

The plan, for instance, indicates that Romney will define himself in part by focusing on and highlighting enemies and adversaries, such common political targets as "jihadism," the "Washington establishment," and taxes, but also Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, "European-style socialism," and, specifically, France. Even Massachusetts, where Romney has lived for almost 40 years, is listed as one of those "bogeymen," alongside liberalism and Hollywood values.

Indeed, a page titled "Primal Code for Brand Romney" said that Romney should define himself as a foil to Bay State Democrats such as Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John Kerry and former governor Michael Dukakis.

Rick Perlstein recently argued that Romney's decision to announce his candidacy at a museum honoring noted xenophobic anti-Semite Henry Ford was a calculated piece of tribal signaling, akin to Ronald Reagan's 1980 announcement speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. With all three of the leading Republican candidates facing questions about their conservative bona fides, the race on the GOP side is likely to go through a couple of stages. First, each one will work to convince voters that he really, really can't stand gay family-destroyers, decadent Hollywood pornography-mongers, and anyone else who gets conservatives' blood pumping (Romney will certainly be taking a bold stand when he goes after the French). Then they'll turn their guns on each other, arguing that the other guys are the ones who embody all the values conservatives hate. It should be surpassingly ugly, and fun to watch.

--Paul Waldman

PLAN B-ACKLASH. There's apparently hell to pay when you point out that there's no scientific or medical reason to deny women over-the-counter access to emergency contraception. Although the Bush administration and Congress requested and allocated a full $4 million in funding for the Office of Women's Health, the FDA plans to withhold more than a quarter of that money -- $1.2 million.

Martha R. Nolan, a vice president at the Society for Women's Health Research, a Washington advocacy group, said that big budget bites in Washington are often the beginning of the end and that she worries that this is retribution for the Plan B controversy.

"We fear this is the first step toward eliminating the Office of Women's Health," Nolan said. "We must not allow this office to be eliminated or reduced to an empty shell that has no program funding."

But if the funding cut becomes official, the office is going to be in a bind now, not just in the future. They've already spent or allocated the remaining portion of their budget for this fiscal year, which means that program operations will come to a grinding halt if they don't receive the additional $1.2 million they were counting on. That'll teach them to stand up to the FDA.

--Ann Friedman

FIND BETTER EXAMPLES, PLEASE. David Greenberg, who's a really smart guy and TAP contributor, makes the case for letting Scooter Libby walk in the latest New Republic. Because liberals are "supposed to be champions of the First Amendment and foes of overzealous prosecutors," he argues, they should have avoided "partaking in some hypocrisy of their own" by championing Patrick Fitzgerald's case: "In fact, applauding it actually benefits the Bush administration -- and future regimes of its ilk -- by further sanctifying secrecy and demonizing the press." I have disagreements with most of Greenberg's argument, which seems to me to skip too quickly to meta commentary about what liberals are "supposed" to champion in the abstract, but frankly all I wanted to flag here is this part:

Besides the value of airing secrets, liberals also used to defend something else: the Fourth Estate. While conservatives demonized the mainstream press, liberals -- though aware of the elusiveness of objectivity and the institutional flaws of big media -- insisted on the value of news organizations that aspire to neutrality and professionalism. In the Libby affair, however, progressives have pummeled "establishment" reporters as administration shills. One result is that they're again aiding the right's cause -- not by justifying secrecy in the name of security but by delegitimizing the very idea of an establishment media that plays a democratic role…

Take Novak. Given the "Prince of Darkness" persona he adopts for his TV punditry -- smirkingly churlish, playfully abrasive, forever promoting a staunch conservative line -- it's no surprise that he irks liberal viewers. But those with longer memories should also respect his distinguished career. Though his syndicated pieces may no longer be required reading for understanding Washington, for years Novak and his partner, Rowland Evans, served up the rare, news-filled column that rested on hard reporting. Even liberals could appreciate the inside dope the pair delivered; it just meant screening out the right-wing asides.

You would think! Crazy, I know. Amy Sullivan wrote a very good piece back in 2004 that makes a strong, example-filled case for the idea that, "for about as long as Novak has been a first-string Washington pundit and raconteur… he's been dealing in factual mistakes, ethical slips, and personal attacks that would have done in a less well-positioned journalist. Today, he thrives thanks largely to his prominence, his independence, and the clubby support of a media elite whose standards he openly mocks." I'll just recommend revisiting that piece rather than filling this post with any more block-quoted excerpts. Suffice it to say that, even in Novak's old "Evans-and-Novak" column days, those columns involved plenty of newsy information culled from political gossip Novak would discuss with his congressional sources, that that information indeed could be interesting, but that there's genuinely nothing about the guy's "code of conduct" that has ever been worthy of veneration.

--Sam Rosenfeld

OSCAR UPDRAFT. I checked the total signatures at DraftGore.com on Saturday, around noon, the day before the Oscars. The total number of signatories was roughly 39,300.

As of noon today, the total is up to 44,470, or about a 13.15 percent jump in just 72 hours.

--Tom Schaller

IS THAT DIXIE BEHIND US, AND WHISTLING I HEAR? Things can get a bit buried here at Tapped, so let me recommend that folks click down to Schaller's convincing post on how, at the Senate level, the non-Southern strategy is already occurring, and will probably accelerate as we enter 2008. Indeed, I've long thought Tom's analysis persuasive at the Senate level and irresistible at the presidential level but less clear as you move down to governorships, House seats, and state legislatures. That, to me, always seemed the possible place for compromise: You don't want to stop party building or supporting outposts of populism, but nor do you want to waste money on lost causes. So you actually support the local races and the winnable districts (which build party and assure you outposts) while focusing Senate and national money elsewhere. Tom?

--Ezra Klein

A MAN IS MORE THAN HIS BIO LINE. I think Karen Tumulty gets this exactly right:

That same USA Today story had a poll in which 24% of those surveyed said they wouldn't vote for a Mormon. By comparison, only 11% felt that way about a woman candidate and 5% about a black. That's the bad news for Romney. The good news is that descriptions of his top two opponents in the Republican primary got even greater resistance: 42% wouldn't vote for a 72-year-old candidate and 30% wouldn't vote for one who was married three times. Romney argues--and he's right I think--that these kinds of descriptions don't mean much in polls unless there are real people attached to them. He says, for instance, that most Republicans in 1980 probably would have told a pollster they wouldn't vote for a divorced actor.

--Ezra Klein

MY NEW ANALYTICAL TECHNIQUE IS UNSTOPPABLE. Via Atrios, Laura Bush took to the teevee yesterday to offer this glittering insight on the Iraq War:

Many parts of Iraq are stable now. But, uh, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everyone.

--Ezra Klein

THAT EXPLAINS IT. Newsweek reports on the origins of the David Geffen flap and talks to MoDo about her interview:

Dowd says she was the one who brought up questions about Bill Clinton's past as a campaign issue.

Credit where due, after all.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE HALF-TRILLION DOLLAR SOLUTION. Professor Bruce Ackerman and Congressman David Wu propose a way for Congress to force the president to bring his war to an end: place a fixed cap on his Iraq appropriations:

"Fanaticism," George Santayana famously observed, "consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim." There is nothing which sobers the mind more than a fixed budget.

Even the administration concedes that Congress has the constitutional power to cut off funds. The challenge is to use this power creatively -- both protecting the troops and requiring the president to end his war on his watch. The key point is to establish the principle that President Bush is responsible for leading America out of the impasse he created. A budget cap will also create a framework encouraging Congress to focus on the big picture, rather than engage in constant criticism of particular strategic decisions. We have fixed our ceiling at a level which assures that all troops will leave Iraq by inauguration day of 2009. But our proposal provides a framework for a debate over a more rapid redeployment: if Congress wanted a quicker termination, it need only impose a rider to the next appropriations bill that specified some smaller number (say, $450 billion) as the appropriate budgetary ceiling for our tragic misadventure.

This seems a more profitable focus than a series of debates over the next round of strategic maneuvering that will follow the president's surge. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is already assuring us that if the surge doesn't work, he is pondering the next Plan B. But Plan B is really Plan Q, or maybe Z. It is time to call this endless series of rationalizations to an end.

--The Editors

DSCC TARGETS FOR 2008. At the risk of beating a dead donkey, here’s part of a recent fund-raising email sent out by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s J.B. Poersch, listing the DSCC’s top Senate targets for 2008. Mind you, this isn’t me handicapping the races; these are the DSCC's targets:

Democratic Pickup Opportunities In Colorado, where Republican Senator Wayne Allard is retiring, Democrats have a golden opportunity to capture a seat in a state that has been trending Democratic for years…But there are also many opportunities to defeat Republican incumbents…John Sununu (NH), Susan Collins (ME), Gordon Smith (OR), and Norm Coleman (MN) have all continued to carry water for George Bush against the will of their constituents.They are all vulnerable and the DSCC is working actively in each of those states to field competitive Democratic challengers...

Where Republicans Will Attack “Republicans have already made it abundantly clear that they will try to defeat Democratic incumbents in primarily red and southern states. Sen. Mary Landrieu (LA), Sen. Max Baucus (MT) and Sen. Mark Pryor (AR) will all undoubtedly be the target of ruthless Republican attacks.”

With the Democrats already at 46 non-southern senators (if VT’s Bernie Sanders and CT’s Joe Lieberman are counted among them) out of 51, and Republicans defending 21 seats overall to just 12 for the Democrats, the Democrats can fairly be expected to gain 3-4 seats. That means that by January 2009 they could have 49 non-southern senators out of 53. (People like former DNC chairman Don Fowler will, of course, still scream at me about how those four southern senators are essential.)

The non-southern strategy is happening, right before our very eyes. People may not like to call it that, or speak about it publicly. But it is what it is.

--Tom Schaller

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: EXECUTIVE OUTCOMES. What's a president to do when he faces a hostile Congress? As Genevieve Smith reports, he pushes key elements of his agenda more and more through executive orders and regulatory edicts:

In fact, such efforts may already be underway. In January, the White House released an executive order updating guidelines for federal regulatory agencies. The new executive order increases the administration's hold on the rulemaking process by requiring a political appointee within each agency to approve all new regulations and White House review of agency guidance documents.

Guidance, in Washington speak, is an informal interpretation or clarification of existing policy -- including suggestions for best practices and technical descriptions -- that tells businesses how the agency plans to enforce the regulation. In tandem with the executive order, the White House's Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum to agencies offering new best practices for agency guidance documents. OMB's "Good Guidance Practice Bulletin" would require internal review of significant guidance documents by senior agency officials, as well as notice and comment on guidance documents deemed "economically significant."

Together with the executive order, the bulletin extends the reach of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a little-known but powerful office of the White House, into an area of policy that had in the past been left up to experts within the agency...

--The Editors

LET IT BREED. Ben, Mark and Ezra have missed an important point. David Brooks is annoyed with selfish, liberal, urban hipster-parents because if procreating becomes cool, the trend will eventually take the wind out of his "new red-diaper babies" theory. After all, hipster babies grow into kindergarten scenesters (see Cobrasnake photos below) and, eventually, adult urban liberals.

Though Brooks shouldn't despair just yet. If the looks on this kid's face are any indication, it's likely that hipster spawn are at high risk for rebelling -- and becoming born-again "values voters".

--Ann Friedman

HOLY SON OF JESUS. Oscar award-winning director James Cameron is working on a new documentary that focuses on the tomb of the alleged son of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. No doubt that Christians around the world will be up in arms about it. The subject of debate is located near Jerusalem. More religious tension in the Middle East is surely exactly what we need.

-- Kay Steiger

RE: BROOKS. But Mark, that's David Brooks' whole schtick! He hints at progressivism so he can criticize it, proclaims his BoBo-ness so he can mock it, plays up his youth so he can deride the "counterculture." It is, of course, pure rhetorical affectation. Does anyone think David Brooks' has spent enough time smearing fluids on Wall Street Journal archives to proclaim Dash Snow's counterculture a doppelganger of some other underground moment? But this is his approach, time and again. By adopting a tone of bemused sympathy for whatever he's marginalizing, Brooks' criticisms appear superficially loving, and thus all the more credible. But you shouldn't confuse what Brooks' does with writing about culture. He's writing about liberals -- or at least a particular stereotype of liberals -- and calling it culture, because doing so allows him to evade the political filters that would easily sift through his insinuations and leave only a couple cute neologisms and some adjectives. In this case, liberals are not only bad parents, but they're the same irresponsible louts who mucked up the Democratic convention in 1968. Were he to say it explicitly, of course, it would look like an absurd partisan attack. Better to look crotchety and be called a bad culture writer. Such descriptors in no way to degrade his ability to be a partisan and launch effective political attacks.

--Ezra Klein

SMALL WORLD DEPT. New York newspapers are abuzz today with the revelation that the Rev. Al Sharpton's great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton Snr., was a slave owned by Sen. Strom Thurmond's relative Julia Ann Thurmond, with whom the late senator shared a great-great-grandfather. After the initial shock of the news -- the story was pushed forward by The New York Daily News and the sleuthing of Ancestry.com -- Sharpton decided to push further and is calling for DNA tests to see if he's related to the Thurmonds. At first glance, it seems a little unlikely, in that Sharpton's ancestor who was owned by the female Thurmond relative was male. Generally speaking, it was white masters who imposed themselves sexually on female black slaves, not white mistresses. Still, it's possible that Sharpton is related to the white, slave-owning Sharpton family from which he received his surname, or that a female partner of Coleman Sharpton was raped or sexually coerced by a male Thurmond relative. (Strom Thurmond himself had a sexual relationship with an African-American maid when he was 22, resulting in a daughter whom he kept secret for decades.)

If Sharpton goes ahead with the testing, I'd be extremely surprised if he doesn't find some white relatives or ancestors. A substantial minority of African-Americans are part European genetically, with about 30 pecent finding that they have European genes descended from a white male ancestor, and a smaller fraction of white Americans have African genetic markers, as well. Indeed, the new availability of genetic testing has led to some surprising findings for those looking to learn about their African roots and mixed race ancestry. African-American studies professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., for example, went looking for proof of the white male patriarch believed to have fathered children with one of his slave ancestors -- and found instead that his mitochodrial (maternal) DNA led back to a white female Ashkenazi Jew, an experience he detailed in the squib "My Yiddishe Mama".

The most interesting DNA history in America, though, has got to be that of America's unofficial "first black president", Bill Clinton. Given his Southern origins, it's entirely possible that he's got some African genetic ancestry, too. And boy would revelations of that add an interesting twist into the Hillary-Obama race.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

DAVID BROOKS: THE VOICE OF YOUNG AMERICA. I like Ben Adler's headline, "David Brooks Does Andy Rooney..." It captures the most annoying undertone of Brooks' column on "hipster parents" (which was not totally unfunny -- let's be honest, there are parents who go too far in trying to make their kids into replicas of their own hipper selves; I confess I might have played some role in the fact that my 5-yr-old declares her favorite type of music to be "post-punk"). But when someone harrumphs like this --

I’m not against the indie/alternative lifestyle. There is nothing more reassuringly traditionalist than the counterculture. For 30 years, the music, the fashions, the poses and the urban weeklies have all been the same. Everything in this society changes except nonconformity.

One reason David Brooks drives everyone crazy when his dentures get loose and he goes on like this is that he speaks for us. His is the voice of youth on these op-ed pages! Here are the regular op-ed columnists for the New York Times and the Washington Post in ascending order of age:

Anne Applebaum, Washington Post, 42. (Does not live in the U.S.)

Sebastian Mallaby, Washington Post, early 40s, graduated Oxford 1986.

David Brooks, Times, 45

Nick Kristof, Times, 48

It's also notable that of the Times/Post columnists under 50, all but Kristof are basically conservative, though Mallaby is more of an economic neoliberal than anything else. At a time when young people are overwhelmingly liberal, once again, the only voices reflecting their politics are those of Baby Boomers.

--Mark Schmitt

MORE ON THE EFP. David at Danger Room has a couple very good posts on the possible origins of the EFPs being found in Iraq. He points out, as Andrew Cockburn noted last week, that the construction of these devices is easily within the means of any Iraqi insurgent with access to a machine shop. David also points out that the case that the military is trying to make regarding these parts is simply incoherent. The fact that Hezbollah has used devices similar to the ones found in Iraq does not prove, or even really suggest, that the parts are being shipped from Iran. At best, it implies that collaboration between Hezbollah and Iraqi insurgents (or between Iraqi insurgents and Iranian go-betweens) has led to similar tactics in Iraq and Lebanon. Note this non-response:

Could copper discs be manufactured with the required precision in Iraq? “You can never be certain,” Major Weber said. But he said that “having studied all these groups, I’ve only seen E.F.P.’s used in two areas of the world: The Levant and here,” meaning in Hezbollah areas of Lebanon and in Iraq. Hezbollah is thought to be armed and trained by Iran.

The distinction between Iranian facilitated techniques and direct support is hardly trivial. Even if Iran supplied the know-how or enabled its transfer, the genie is out of the bottle. If Shiite (and presumably Sunni) militias in Iraq can figure out how to make the EFP disks, then closing off the Iran-Iraq border or even bombing Iran back to the Stone Age wouldn't make a whit of difference for Iraq. I suspect that Iran probably did have some role, if only through facilitating contact and the transfer of information between insurgent groups, but that's hardly important now.

--Robert Farley

MORE OSCARS. To continue on the Bossman's comments, I never understand why anybody tunes in early to the Oscars. I started watching around 11 and didn't miss a single award I was interested in. Are folks really so eager to watch the unbearably, inevitably lame opening montages?

Meanwhile, last night's show really didn't have A Moment, in the way so many of them do. There was no Cuba Gooding Jr. acceptance, or Benigni theatrics, or J-Lo dress. It was nice to see Gore get so much adulation, and it was a bit hilarious when lesbian-mother-of-four Melissa Etheridge dedicated her award to him, but nothing really stuck in my mind. At the same time, though, nothing was bad. I mostly agreed with the major awards and I find Ellen a warm, genial personality. So yes! Least offensive Oscars ever!

--Ezra Klein

SPRINGING FORWARD, OR MAYBE BACKWARD. Interesting that George Bush and Dick Cheney are finally talking tough with Pervez Musharraf, no? Bush has warned the Pakistani prez that Congress, now in unfriendly Democratic hands, might cut offaid to Pakistan if the Musharraf regime doesn’t get more aggressive about hunting down al-Qaeda operatives within its borders (so it takes the presence of the “soft-on-terror” Democrats to make Bush tell his man in the region to get tough on terrorists!). Cheney made a surprise visit (does he make any other kinds?) to Islamabad today to drive the point home.

What’s happening here has to do, of course, with the coming expected spring offensive of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Both the United States and Britain are worried and moving troops there from Iraq.

Can we actually “lose” Afghanistan? In the sense that Kabul and the Karzai government would fall, probably not. But in the sense that the Taliban would control a majority of the country and al-Qeada training camps could pop up thither and yon, certainly yes. And it could happen this year. If it does, the worst-presidency-ever title will no longer be open to the small amount of debate it currently is.

--Michael Tomasky

BRAVO DEL TORO. I’m with Comrade Lemieux on Gump, although agnostic on The Departed (it’s just a weird personal thing; I got kinda bored with mob movies around the time of Goodfellas and I don’t go see that many of them, although this one sounds a little different than most).

But the great victory of the night was the three statues for Pan’s Labyrinth, which is a genuine work of art. To weave together fascism and fantasy in the way director Guillermo del Toro did isn’t easy; but he made it look that way, and the result was rich and profound beyond my ability to describe. I didn’t want it to end, and I thought about it for days after I saw it.

As a show, the Oscars were deeply boring. They really need to limit it to the 10 or 12 awards that people actually care about, plus the Thalberg award and the songs, and be done with it in two hours. The movie-going public would be delirious with gratitude.

--Michael Tomasky

BRIEFLY, ON PIRACY. Tom Zeller arrives late at the piracy party. Piracy off the coast of Somalia and in the Straits of Malacca has received a lot of attention in the past three or four years. The pirates, typically, travel in small gangs in small boats armed with AKs and occasionally RPGs. Most modern cargo vessels have very small crews, making it easy to seize a ship even with a small contingent of pirates. There have a been a few big profile incidents, including an attack on a cruise ship and an encounter between a small pirate boat and a USN cruiser and destroyer.

After a few years of serious increase, however, the piracy problem in the Straits of Malacca (critical to world trade) seems to be taking care of itself, as attacks have dropped dramatically. The USN and regional navies have increased the attention that they give to piracy, with good effect. The new big area is Somalia, where the ICU promised to try to reduce piracy prior to its ouster, but failed. With the ICU gone, it's quite unlikely that the provisional government will be able to rein in the attacks. The remaining open question is whether the problem is serious enough to justify the devotion of additional resources.

--Robert Farley

WHY SPECIFICS? Krugman warms my heart today with a column calling for substance from the presidential hopefuls and laying out an array of issues on which the electorate deserves to know specifics from those seeking to lead. I'm also fascinated by the counterargument he identifies, in which candidates need to be elected and adapt to changing circumstances and so cannot offer defined policy choices without limiting their appeal or constraining their future options. This has always struck me as bunk.

That said, I don't quite agree with Krugman when he says that "[t]he best way to judge politicians is by how they respond to hard policy questions," as I remember Bush promising a humble foreign policy that would eschew nation building. It's simply not clear to me that policy answers offer much in the way of personal insight. But they do create markers, mandates, a public record which candidates can be held to and attacked with. The downside of reneging on a promise is certainly somewhat higher than the downside of disappointing a supporter's hunch, and so, since I don't trust my candidates to present their truest selves, I'd at least like to force them to offer a self that's relatively difficult to deviate from. Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge doesn't keep all Republicans from raising taxes, but it scares a certain number of them into avoiding it, and it's an easy symbol to use in a future campaign. In other words, it makes deviation from conservative policy preferences more politically troublesome. It may not help you know your candidate's innermost self, but it maximizes the chances that you know what she'll actually do. And, in the end, that's the important thing.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: DEMOCRATIC STARS ALIGNING. Robert Kuttner marvels at the strength of the Democratic presidential field for '08 and the crappiness of the GOP's line-up.

--The Editors

POLITICS IS CONFLICT. I see David Broder has penned yet another paean to the "bold" Unity '08 project. (Broder's next column: it would be a really "bold" idea to have a sitcom in which a dumb fat guy is married to a supermodel.) This whole thing is so stupid that it almost lends it too much dignity to even criticize it, but it is instructive of the way in which High Broderism simply can't understand that people strongly disagreeing isn't some sort of social crisis -- it is simply inherent to politics. If it's too hard to get things done, that's about American political institutions, not ineluctable "partisan bickering." It must be said, however, that this iteration does contain one new twist. Normally, the affluent male pundits who are the only people who care about Unity '08 suggest candidates that are real fiscal conservatives and nominal social liberals, assuming (quite erroneously) that the majority position among pundits is the majority position of the electorate. This is presumably why Broder, in naming Democratic and GOP candidates whose nomination by their respective parties would undercut the rationale for a Unity '08 alternative, touts the notably shy and conflict-averse Rudy Giuliani. But Broder also argues that the same thing might be achieved by ... flat-out right-winger Mike Huckabee. Yeah, partisan conflicts sure would vanish the day he become president....

--Scott Lemieux

THE POOR ARE GETTING POORER. So suggests a new McClatchy Newspapers analysis of the 2005 Census:

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. McClatchy's review also found statistically significant increases in the percentage of the population in severe poverty in 65 of 215 large U.S. counties, and similar increases in 28 states. The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor residents isn't confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas.

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.

These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation's 37 million poor people into deep poverty - the highest rate since at least 1975.

A deeply ironic use of the term "unusual economic expansion"? An expansion which increases the number of the very poor, hardly budges the earnings of most of the remaining workers, but allows the profits to skyrocket deserves a funnier name. Perhaps something honoring the tax cuts to the wealthy would do. Taxcutpansion?

The topic is anything but funny, and though economists can argue about how well the Census figures measure poverty it is clear that deep poverty has risen and that many more are falling through the cracks in the floorboards of our welfare system:

The Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation shows that, in a given month, only 10 percent of severely poor Americans received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in 2003 -- the latest year available -- and that only 36 percent received food stamps.

Many could have exhausted their eligibility for welfare or decided that the new program requirements were too onerous. But the low participation rates are troubling because the worst byproducts of poverty, such as higher crime and violence rates and poor health, nutrition and educational outcomes, are worse for those in deep poverty.

Over the last two decades, America has had the highest or near-highest poverty rates for children, individual adults and families among 31 developed countries, according to the Luxembourg Income Study, a 23-year project that compares poverty and income data from 31 industrial nations.

That is one international competition the U.S. probably doesn't want to win.

--J. Goodrich

THANK GOD FOR THE RAIN TO WASH THE TRASH FROM THE SIDEWALK. When it came out, I assumed that The Departed was too good and too alive to be competitive for Best Picture; I'm happy to be wrong, and it's good that the greatest living American director got his award. I still can't quite believe that this happened with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but it's gratifying that he won for his best film in nearly two decades rather than for something like The Aviator. It's partly a testament to Scorsese and partly a testament to the kind of middlebrow doorstops (and, sometimes, utter crap) that the Academy generally likes that, while it obviously doesn't rank with his very greatest work, I think it's by far the best film to be so honored in the last decade (well, OK, that's also partly a testament to the fact that I don't get Tolkien.) Indeed, although this is idiosyncratic almost to the point of perversity, the last Best Picture I unequivocally prefer is Annie Hall, granting that 1)Schindler's List is (at least before its last 20 minutes or so, and John Williams in that context, ugh) a tough case, underrated by some cineastes, 2)The Silence of the Lambs is a good thriller, and 3)I know my belief that Unforgiven is merely very good will get catcalls.

My other question: I know there were a lot of other strong candidates -- Children of Men in particular was visually magnificent -- but how on earth did Scorsese's great cinematographer Michael Ballhaus not even secure a nomination?

--Scott Lemieux

DAVID BROOKS DOES ANDY ROONEY: In a typical display of the utter vacuity of conervative punditry in general and his shtick in particular, David Brooks wastes his New York Times column on a cranky, silly rant today. Instead of addressing any real crises in the world, like the escalating civil war in Iraq, or even a substantial problem facing American families, Brooks indulges his narcissistic obsession with "Bobos'" parenting habits.

Brooks, who resides in a posh D.C. suburb, opens with a scurrilous attack on some supposed denizens of my native Park Slope, Brooklyn. Says Brooks:

Can we please see the end of Park Slope alternative Stepford Moms in their black-on-black materinty tunics who turn their babies into fashion-forward, anti-corporate indie-infants in order to stay one step ahead of the cool police.

Can we stop hearing about downtown parents who dress their babies in black skull slippers, Punky Monkey t-shirts and camo toddler ponchos until the little ones end up looking like sad parody clones of mom and dad?

And, of course, his description of the trend and what's wrong with it, like most conservative cultural moral panic attacks, is totally non-sensical and bereft of any empirical evidence. Stepford Moms don't have jobs, but in my 23 years of living in Park Slope the overwhelming majority of mothers I knew worked, and Brooks cites no evidence to prove otherwise. I also tutored the children of some of those hip downtown parents Brooks rails against. I saw no negative impact on their behavior, educational outcomes or psychological well-being from the trendy attire their parents purchased, and, of course, Brooks offers no evidence that there is any. He merely asserts that parents who dress their children like themselves are failing to respect "the dignity of youth." Who knew Oshkosh Bigosh overalls were so dignified?

More importantly, why is the Times indulging this pabulum? Their Sunday paper is widely read by the country's elite. They have Nicholas Kristof reporting from Ethiopa on one page and Brooks bloviating on fluffy topics on the other. OK, so it's good to balance Kristof's depressing dispatches with something lighter. That's why they have an acerbic politcal-cultural critic in Frank Rich on the Sunday op-ed page. And if they want a conservative they should find one who can offer something of value to the readers who shell out five dollars for a Sunday paper.

--Ben Adler

WHAT WE LOST WITH VILSACK: Of course everyone's initial reaction to Tom Vilsack dropping out was to assume that nothing of substance was missing. Just another moderate technocrat to fail, right? But as Brad Plumer pointed out yesterday, Vilsack did have one thing going for him, "hands down, the most ambitious energy and climate-change plan of any candidate in the field thus far." Now granted, Jason Zengerle portrayed this policy in his delightful profile of Vilsack as motivated at least partly by his affection for corn-based alternative fuels like ethanol that are popular in Iowa.

But I agree with Brad that if Vilsack had been elected on a platform of proposing a 75 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gases by 2050 he'd have a real mandate for aggressively addressing climate change. There's no question that radical action is needed on this issue, and, if you look at most major initiatives in American history they could not have happened without leadership from the president--think New Deal era programs like Social Security, or the 1960'S Civil Rights legislation. But there has never been a president who took on the environment the way FDR took on poverty and LBJ took on civil rights.

Even if Vilsack had lost the primary, his presence could have pushed the other candidates to embrace a more aggressive anti-global warming platform, like the way Kerry and Edwards became more critical of the Iraq War to head off Howard Dean's challenge. Unless Al Gore gets in, I'm afraid no one will be the environmental candidate in '08.

--Ben Adler

SUMMER INTERNSHIPS AT THE PROSPECT. The Prospect is accepting applications for summer internships in our D.C. office. Any Tapped readers out there who are interested in (or who know someone who might be interested in) spending the summer working at the office, helping out with the magazine and the site, should definitely apply. The deadline for applications is March 15, so act fast.

--The Editors

A MAN AFTER HIS TIME. I think Badler's belief that Vilsack dropped out because he couldn't fund up is only half the story. If Schwarzenegger could run, he'd have no problems fundraising. Romney, who is running, has no problem fundraising. Hell, even Huckabee's pulling in some dough. So while it's of course true that candidates who can't fundraise can't survive, the question at hand is why experienced, moderate governors like Vilsack are proving so financially hapless. And on that question, the roster of candidates who've already dropped out is instructive. Mark Warner and Evan Bayh, two deeply credible, DLC-type moderates, exited early into the race, and not for lack of funds. Rather, they realized this wasn't a year that could support moderate technocrats. Democratic voters are looking for progressive vision and assertiveness, not small promises and managerial acumen. Vilsack, I'd bet, realized the same thing.

Five years ago, if a candidate had broached Social Security price indexing, the punditocracy would've put a checkmark next to "fiscal responsibility." This time, progressives roared in outrage, and Vilsack had to rapidly walk it back. It's just not an environment he's suited for. Add in that there are three hugely credible candidates sucking up media and financial oxygen, two of whom are leftier than he, and there just wasn't room. Vilsack may have dropped out because he had no money, but he had no money because he's ideologically and temperamentally unsuited to the moment.

--Ezra Klein

A DISTRACTOR STORY. E.J. Dionne's column this morning on the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama-David Geffen throw-down over who dissed who to whom made me really wonder about where this campaign season is heading. The whole flap is completely uninteresting and will, in six months, be as long forgotten as the Edwards blogger controversy, which I've been amused to find has gone unnoted by many even inside Washington, where we political obsessives do not, contrary to popular myth, make up the whole town.

I have almost nothing to add to the Geffen-gate commentary, except for a completely gratuitous story about hanging out at the pool of Geffen's beach house on Fire Island one afternoon 16 years ago. Based on the conversation that afternoon, where a friend with whom Geffen was flirting was trying to convince him to a) come out of the closet publicly and b) commit money to AIDS groups -- both of which Geffen ultimately did, becoming one of the nation's leading AIDS philanthropists and an out gay man at a time when Hollywood was far less gay-friendly than it is today -- I think it's fair to say that Geffen is a very direct and up-front speaker, and perfectly comfortable talking smack in ways that would make us prim Washington types blush. Maureen Dowd didn't get Geffen to open up -- she had a conversation with a gruff, charming, blunt, opinionated man who, you'll learn if you Google around, is well-know for his disarmingly pointed and personal statements. (Best denial ever: " 'I never thought he was an anti-Semite!' Geffen later fumed [about Ahmet Ertegun]. 'I think he's a prick. It's a very different thing.'")

In terms of the win-loss on this fight, I'd say Clinton and Obama were both equally damaged (which is to say, neither really was). Again, no one outside the political obsessive class is paying attention, and even then, who cares? The two most damaging things to come out of this were that a) Clinton looked a little thin-skinned, as Joel Achenbach noted on his always amusing Achenblog, and b) Jerome Armstrong dredged up Obama communications director Robert Gibbs' role in an extremely nasty 2004 anti-Howard Dean television spot. Of the two hits, I'd say the Gibbs reminder is going to have longer legs. One day, I will write the story of how every fight in contemporary Democratic politics can be traced back to something that happened during the Dean campaign. But for now, I'll just say that Armstrong's reminder about Gibbs has much more sullying potential than did Howard Wolfson's jabs.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

VILSACK, RICHARDSON, AND MATT. I think Tom Vilsack's departure from the race provides an answer to the question Matt posed in his column the other day: Why is a popular second term governor from a swing state, like Bill Richardson, not being taken seriously by the national media? As Matt points out, those are the guys who used to win elections, and Vilsack meets that definition as much as Richardson. Matt argues that the media now only treats celebrities as serious candidates.

Well, Vilsack's failure to gain traction hardly disproves that thesis, but I think Matt's is only a partial explanation. The real reason is a related one: It costs a staggering amount of money to compete in presidential elections these days, and neither Vilsack nor Richardson has raised very much money. Indeed, the cw is that Vilsack dropped out in large part because he couldn't raise enough to compete. Of course, celebrity candidates have an infinitely easier time raising money, but if, say, Jon Corzine ran a self-financed campaign he could probably hang on long enough to get taken seriously (I think Mike Bloomberg's financial resources are as much the reason that he is treated more seriously as a potential contender than he deserves to be as the explanation Matt offered -- his presence in the media capital of the world.)

--Ben Adler

MORE RAPE ALLEGATIONS IN IRAQ. Yet another woman has come forward with rape allegations against Iraqi security forces. Four soldiers allegedly raped the 50-year-old Sunni woman and attempted to rape her two daughters in Tal Afar. The fifth soldier, standing guard outside, came in and held his fellow soldiers at gunpoint to make them stop. The four soldiers have confessed.

Rape is an ugly and increasingly better-documented part of war. And our continued military involvement in Iraq isn't going to protect these women.

-- Kay Steiger

THE PRISON RAPE PANELISTS. Further adventures in the crimes statistics search led to the discovery that a Review Panel on Prison Rape was empanelled on March 29, 2006 over at the Department of Justice, and that one of its three members is Steven McFarland, a faith-based bureaucrat at DoJ. In light of the prison rape blogging of recent weeks, that's probably something worth looking into.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

GIANT SQUID! Ok, so not really "giant," so much as "colossal." Some long-line fishermen hooked the hefty cephalopod in the Ross Sea near Antarctica. Just how big is this thing? Dr. Steve O'Shea, the squid-hunter made famous by this awesome New Yorker profile from 2004, said if calamari were made from the squid, the rings would be the size of tractor tires.

So cool. Pharyngula's got more photos.

--Ann Friedman

TOMMENTUM! So Tom Vilsack is apparently dropping out of the race, which is probably the best thing for all involved. This just isn't a year that favors centrist technocrats who want to price index Social Security. The immediate impact of his decision will be to make Iowa significantly more important than it would otherwise be, even if he were to lose it. The absence of an obvious hometown boy will eliminate excuses for losing the state, and so it'll remain nearly a must-win for all involved. My current guess is that Edwards can't survive a second place finish there, Clinton can't survive a third, and Kucinich needs to place at least eleventh. Obama remains such a wild card -- and New Hampshire likes wild cards -- that he's a bit trickier to handicap.

--Ezra Klein.

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CAN FREE TRADE BE A FAIR DEAL? It is in northern European countries, with their open trade and lavish welfare states. As Harold describes today, for the United States to achieve that same balance would take more than anyone in mainstream politics is proposing at the moment.

--The Editors

INTERFERENCE. Regarding the reports that the United States continues to actively discourage Israel from engaging with Syria, it's worth re-reading this Jo-Ann Mort piece from late July, "The Roadblock to Damascus." The roadblock in question was, of course, the United States.

--Sam Rosenfeld

READING IS FUNDAMENTAL...AND INCREASINGLY RARE. Dana Goldstein first pointed to these results in a depressing post on American illiteracy yesterday, but I want to go through them in a bit more detail. According to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, the share of 12th graders lacking basic reading skills -- meaning they can't do simple things like extract train fares from a brochure -- jumped from 20% in 1992 to 27% in 2005, and that's an understatement, as it doesn't count the many who've dropped out long before the 12th grade. What's so discouraging, though, is that this deterioration came amidst improvements on a variety of other metrics that could've been expected to cause or signal educational progress. In 2005, for instance, 12th graders averaged 360 more hours of classroom insturction time than they did in 1990. Grades, too had, increased, by about .33 of a grade, though this could be a function of increased competition at the top. Indeed, the share of students taking the standard curriculum or better increased by 28%, to almost 70%.

Of course, by the time you're a high school senior without reading skills, the damage is already done, and you're just being channeled through the system in order to pad the graduation rates. Margaret Spelling is right to hype NCLB in this context, as it's at least focusing on the correct subgroup, but Dana's similary correct to acidly wonder if that means the Bush administration will "actually [be] providing states with the funding and programmatic supports to enact NCLB's requirements, such as putting a high-quality teacher with a subject specific degree in every classroom?" Without dipping too deep into educational policy disputes (though I'd like to hear what these folks think), this isn't just an educational disgrace, it's a civic and economic emergency. Basic literacy is a prerequisite for functioning in contemporary American society, for understanding your financial plans and your mortgage terms and your health bills and those fact sheets you get at the doctor explaining what a hysterectomy is. Without that foundation, the question isn't even how much advancement will be denied, but how many catastrophes will be caused.

--Ezra Klein

WHIFFLE BALL. Slate’s John Dickerson gets it completely backwards on the question of who won the Obama-Clinton scuffle this week. His verdict? Clinton won. His reasoning? Clinton called for Obama to apologize for remarks made by liberal media mogul David Geffen and, because Obama responded (though refusing to apologize), she one-upped him. Huh?

Let’s review: A rich, high-profile non-candidate donor who is a former Clinton ally but not a formal member of Team Obama, makes some very damaging, on-the-record remarks about Clinton to the columnist ideally suited to broadcast such grievance, the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. Those remarks and that column generate next-day, major media stories which, in unison, raise questions about whether Clinton and her husband have lost their Hollywood luster. The Clinton campaign responds, somewhat huffily, by referring to Geffen (incorrectly) as affiliated with her opponent’s campaign, and asking Obama to apology on Geffen’s behalf. This, by Dickerson’s logic, does not constitute the Clinton team taking Geffen’s bait. However, when Obama -- who, again, is not a donor but Clinton’s actual opponent -- responds to Clinton’s de facto bait-taking and, no less, one-ups Clinton by reminding the media, for the second time in weeks, that she has formally aligned herself with a black South Carolina state legislator Robert Ford, who said Obama’s candidacy would endanger the Democrats’ 2008 general election chances because Obama is black, thereby potentially causing damage to her among a constituency she is depending upon. Then, for good measure, he scoffs at Clinton’s request to offer some lame-ass apology on Geffen’s behalf. Dickerson takes that to be evidence that Obama was goaded.

Dickerson seems not to understand the nature of goading. A fighter in the ring can, of course, be goaded by his opponent into over-reaching and, thus, making a mistake. But a fighter who allows somebody sitting in the audience -- even if they have front-row seats, as Geffen surely does -- to distract them has, by definition, been goaded. As Daily Kos diarist Pontificator remarked, “Damn: That one’s gonna leave a mark.” Finally, the bogus parallels Dickerson tries to draw to the earlier scuffle over Ford’s remarks are wrong, too: Ford’s remarks were damaging to Clinton and so were Geffen’s. (Geffen did not say Clinton is potentially hazardous to the Democrats because she’s unelectable as a woman; indeed, his point is that she’s a hazard because she’s eminently electable.) Obama delivered a splendid left-right combo to Clinton’s chin while she was peering through the ropes at Geffen, yet Dickerson saw Obama whiff. Somebody whiffed, that’s for sure.

--Tom Schaller

HEY JOE: DON'T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU ON THE WAY OUT. Here is my plea to Senator Joe Lieberman, a politician I've admired since I was seven years old: Please switch parties. We're tired of the game where you keep dancing ever close to the edge, hoping someone will pay attention to you. Just switch. The issue of our moment is the Iraq war, the pro-war side is the Republican Party. That's your side. Don't do Harry Reid any favors -- he'll manage just fine without you.

(Since writing this post, I've learned from Time that "last month, after Lieberman told Reid he had stopped attending the weekly Democratic lunch because he didn't feel comfortable discussing Iraq there, Reid offered to hold those discussions at another time. Lieberman has started attending again." If I'm parsing this sentence correctly, Reid agreed not to discuss Iraq at the weekly Democratic lunch -- which is absolutely the only time that all or most Democratic Senators get together for any kind of discussion -- because you "didn't feel comfortable"? It's one thing to disagree with most of your party on the central issue of our time. But if you don't even feel comfortable discussing it with them, then what are you doing in that party?)

You've always prided yourself on honor and principle, so please retain a sliver of that dignity by modeling yourself on your new party-mate, former Senator Phil Gramm, and respect that the voters of Connecticut chose to elect you on the belief, and on your own insistence, that you were a Democrat. When Gramm switched parties in 1981, he did the honorable thing of resigning from the House and running again for his seat in a special election. You don't even need to go that far. Here is what you can do: Resign from the Senate, leaving a vacancy that can be filled by Republican Governor Jodi Rell. Ask Governor Rell to appoint you to the seat as a Republican. I'm sure she would be happy to do so; she's spoken highly of you, and you share political consultants. And then, in November of 2008, let the voters of Connecticut decide whether they want to be represented by their incumbent Republican Senator Lieberman or someone else.

If you're not willing to do that honorable thing, then please just quit talking about how you just might possibly have to consider, with deep regret, switching parties, not because you've changed but because of the tragedy that the party has left you, become objectively pro-terrorist, blah blah blah. It's an act that got old a long time ago.

-- Mark Schmitt

A SYSTEM OF CHECK AND BALANCES (WORKING CLASS ONLY) Steven Greenhouse has a very peculiarly written story (why isn't the bill named or described till halfway through?) on the coming clash over the Employee Free Choice Act. For now, implementation of the act looks basically impossible, as Democrats can't break a Senate filibuster or overturn the promised presidential veto. Remarkable how our legislature found it so easy to heighten the obstacles for declaring bankruptcy but seems totally stymied when aiding workers who want to join a union without being fired, penalized, or browbeaten in captive meetings.

Towards the end of the article we get back into the debate over whether card check -- wherein workers simply sign cards to join the union -- is a legitimate process, or if, by denying the employer a distinct NLRB vote it can intimidate and sabotage, it exposes workers to union intimidation. Happily, there's actually data out there capable of settling the point. Given that the country has had elections of both types, the Eagleton Research Center and Rutgers University surveyed workers to see how they compared.

22% of workers surveyed said management "coerced them a great deal" during union elections. 6% said unions did the same. During the NLRB election, 46% of workers complained of management pressure. During card check elections, 14% complained of union pressure. Workers in NLRB elections were twice as likely as workers in card check elections to report that management coerced them to oppose -- and even in card-check elections, 23% of workers complained of management coercion, more than complained of union coercion! Workers in NLRB elections were more than 53% as likely to report that management threatened to eliminate their jobs.

Even more interesting, fewer workers in card check campaigns said coworkers pressured them to join the union (17% to 22%). Workers in card check elections were more than twice as likely to report the employer took a neutral stance and let the workers decide. But, rather hilariously, anti-union Labor Secretary Elaine Chao concludes that, "a worker’s right to a secret ballot election is an intrinsic right in our democracy that should not be legislated away at the behest of special interest groups.” A worker's right to organize, conversely, can be swiftly sacrificed atop the altar of business interests.

--Ezra Klein

SOMEBODY CALL MATT AND SAM! This is the most brazen incompetence dodge I've seen in a very, very long time. From Friedman's latest column:

The irony of Iraq is that it’s the one place where Mr. Bush decisively chose regime change, but he then executed it so poorly, with insufficient troops, that Iraq never stood a chance. If Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had spent as much time plotting the toppling of Saddam Hussein as they did the toppling of Colin Powell, Iraq today would be Switzerland.

--Ezra Klein

RAPE IN IRAQ. In a horrifying convergence of events this week, Iraqi women are taking the center stage as rape victims. Two soldiers pleaded guilty to raping a 14-year-old Iraqi teenager and murdering her along with her family. From yesterday's testimony:

"I lifted up her skirt and took off her stockings while Barker held her hands with his knees," [Sgt. Paul E. Cortez, 24] said before admitting that he raped the teenager as she screamed. "After I was done, myself and [Spec. James P. Barker] switched spots."

Meanwhile, Iraq has been roiled by a 20-year-old married woman named Sabrine al-Janabi who says she was sexually assaulted by Iraqi security forces. Political leaders have accused al-Janabi (a Sunni woman) of lying in order to make the Shiite-dominated security forces look bad. She was examined at an American hospital, which leaked part of her medical records (only one page out of a multi-page report that simply says there were "no vaginal lacerations or obvious injury") to the Iraqi government. In a country where doctors are often used to establish their patients' virginity (as George Packer reported in his book) I'm doubtful that the OB-GYN was particularly sympathetic to the victim. Baghdad Burning makes the point that this woman is one of many -- she is just one of the few who is brave enough to say something. It's highly unlikely Iraqi woman would lie about rape because the cost is too great. It's sad that politicians (all male) have decided to paint this as a sectarian conflict between the Sunni and the Shiites.

Even in the U.S., sexual assault victims face huge amounts of skepticism when they tell their stories. It an obvious (but often forgotten) point that women have nothing to gain in lying about rape. Nothing. If anything, a woman subjects herself to a barrage of criticism, doubt, and peering into her sexual history. As the news continues to leak out about rapes and assaults perpetrated by U.S. soldiers and U.S.-trained Iraqi police, it's not surprising that women like al-Janabi face such ardent criticism. Makes you proud, doesn't it?

--Kay Steiger

GLENN BECK AND DINESH D'SOUZA AGREE WITH BIN LADEN. It is our horrible promiscuity that upsets right-thinking Muslims everywhere, and both Beck and D'Souza kinda sorta see their point. Here is Beck:

BECK: You know, there`s a new poll out that Muslims, the higher educated Muslims in the Middle East are more likely to be extremists? More and more Muslims now hate us all across the world, and it really has not a lot to do with anything other than our morals.

The things that they were saying about us were true. Our morals are just out the window. We`re a society on the verge of moral collapse. And our promiscuity is off the charts.

Now I don`t think that we should fly airplanes into buildings or behead people because of it, but that's the prevailing feeling of Muslims in the Middle East. And you know what? They`re right.

Beck then cites approvingly the extremely biased poll which supposedly demonstrates that the majority of Americans support staying in Iraq "to get the job finished", the one I discussed in an earlier post. Given this, I would dearly love to know more about the supposed poll in Muslim opinions Beck mentions in the above quote. For example, does it ask anything about the morals of Americans or is the reference just part of Beck's own opinions?

All this is interesting, given the attention liberal and progressive bloggers are receiving in the mainstream media as angry and possibly biased sources of propaganda. For some reason the same mainstream media gives the angry and biased propaganda of certain right-wing voices an almost complete pass from proper criticism. Well, that and a seat at the table, too. Don't forget that Beck has a very large audience.

-- J. Goodrich

LIEBERMAN (DUH-CT). According to The Politico, Joe Lieberman is suggesting that a Democratic vote against war funding would spur him to complete his transformation into a full-blown Republican and switch parties. This is somewhat less dangerous for Democrats than it appears, as Lieberman already votes how he'll vote and the Committee chairs and leadership positions are already locked in. Be quite a betrayal to his Connecticut constituents, however, who were clearly told that they'd get an independent Democrat rather than a picqued Republican.

--Ezra Klein

WAPO GOOD, BAD, AND FUNNY. While the White House anxiously awaits word on Scooter Libby's legal fate, it's really worth checking out Dan Froomkin's column from yesterday at washingtonpost.com, which focuses on the Cheney angle in Fitzgerald's closing yesterday. For a little comic relief, read the long Outlook columnby Victoria Toensing in the WaPo on Sunday, which basically smears everyone outside the White House involved in the CIA leak investigation and rests its argument that no crime could have been committed in the case on ignoring the fact that Fitzgerald was investigating possible violations of statutes beyond the Intelligence Identities Protections Act (IIPA) (not to mention making a contentious, questionable interpretation of IIPA itself, notwithstanding her participation as a congressional staffer in its original drafting). Then look at the first question she was asked during her online chat
at the Post online during the lunch break yesterday:

Washington: You were sitting at the defense lawyers' table at this morning's session of the trial, were you not?

Does that mean you are part of the defense team? Shouldn't that have been mentioned with your Outlook article?

Victoria Toensing: I'm not a part of the defense team -- there was an overflow, we were in the overflow room and lawyers can sit at that table. There were other lawyers there who were not part of the defense team, like Jake Stein.

When a questioner sought to follow up, asking Toensing, "Did you communicate at all with [Libby pr person Barbara] Comstock or others working on behalf of Libby about your Washington Post piece before it was published?" Toensing gave a classic non-denial denial: "I did not talk to Barbara Comstock about this op-ed. I've been writing op-eds on this matter for two years, prior to Comstock or anybody being hired by Scooter Libby. But I am friends with her socially, and I'm not going to stop seeing her socially for three or four months." Part of Libby's defense fund's job is to mount a public relations effort on Libby's behalf, and there's nothing wrong with that; Libby is fortunate to have powerful enough friends to mount this effort. But the public should know when that's what we're getting.

--Jeff Lomonaco

MEANS AND MEDIANS. I was thinking through Robert Reich's proposal to mandate that countries who want to trade with us set a minimum wage of half their median wage, and I ended up digging into some median wage statistics* domestically. For those fuzzy on the terms here, median means, essentially, in the middle. If I make $6, and Matt makes $7, and Tom Friedman makes $150, the median wage is $7. The mean is the average, so in this example, it would be $54.33. If we outsource Tom's job to a bright Bangladeshi making $1, my wage is now the median, and the mean is $4.66.

America's mean wage in 2005 was $35,448.93. That's the number you generally hear quoted. Its median, however, was $23,962.20. And if you want another example of rising inequality, in 1990, the median was 71% of the mean. In 2005, it was 67%. Indeed, over the same time period, the mean wage increased by 75%. The median only increased by 65%.

*This is why I'm fun at parties.

--Ezra Klein

THE ETHICS OF APOLOGY. I dunno, Ezra, I rather thought Mike Tomasky made a really smart point in his column this week:

We all know of circumstances in life when apologies don't really count for much....

Yet in politics, an apology is somehow supposed to be worth more. I suppose this is chiefly because our expectations of politicians are far lower than our expectations of our dear ones. It also has to do with the way the media need to fit things into clean categories -- he did it; now he's sorry he did it; okay then, next issue. But whatever the reason, when a politician utters the magic words, it usually carries more weight than, in my estimation, it deserves.

And so here we have two of the three leading Democratic contenders providing stark contrasts in the art. Hillary Clinton will not apologize for her vote for the Iraq war, for reasons I've discussed elsewhere. John Edwards, for reasons that are more obvious (as he positions himself in the comfort zone of Democratic primary voters and caucus goers), has uttered the magic words.

Readers, and voters, will decide for themselves who's being more honest. For my part, I've decided: Neither is....

I don't buy Clinton's rationalization of her vote, which Richard Cohen demolished last week. But I don't go for Edwards' story either, all that blather about the faulty intelligence and how was he to know. Nonsense. The WMD argument was just one of several lies the administration was peddling at the time. Anyone with the eyes to see and the nose to smell knew that an invasion of Iraq was the longstanding intention of the people who filled key White House, Defense Department, and State Department posts in the administration, and that once 9-11 happened, they were handed a forgiving rationale. It was obvious from about December 2001 that Iraq was the end, and war was the preferred means.

Does it matter that Edwards apologized? A little, sure. But he and Clinton and 27 of their colleagues each own their little piece of the blame for what's happened here, and the bottom line is that they were scared out of their socks to do anything but vote yes. So let's move forward, but let's never forget that.

In the real world, apologies do not resolve us of accountability for our actions. Our entire justice system is based on this understanding (though with statutes of limitation). And forgiveness is always partial, the mixing of generosity of spirit with newfound distrust. But none of that really matters, because this is politics, not an episode of Oprah, and politics always has an end. And so John Edwards' statement ysterday that "We need a leader who will be open and honest with you...Who will tell the truth when they've made a mistake" wasn't just a reflection of his personal moral beliefs, but a carefully constructed rhetorical trap designed (and extremely well designed, at that) to hurt a political competitor. It's increasingly clear that Edwards laid out a trap for Hillary Clinton in 2005 when he began to frame his 2002 vote as something he could absolve himself of with the direct statement, "I was wrong" -- and that she, with all her fancy advisors and years of preparation, tumbled right into it.

How do we know this? Because there is only one top tier Democrat running who had the courage to be right from the start, Barack Obama, and he is not making whether or not other candidates apologize for their 2002 votes into a major campaign issue in the same way Edwards is. He doesn't have to, because he didn't get it wrong in the first place -- but he could still do it if he wanted to. Rather than pressing his opponents to echo his own contrite phrases (or rather, Edwards' contrite phrases), however, Obama has quietly beaten Clinton to the punch in offering real legislation to get America out of Iraq. And he's beaten Edwards on this, too, in that Edwards no longer has a formal political role through which he can influence American foreign policy. Edwards, of course, has to keep tightening the rhetorical noose around Clinton, because he has no real power to address the war except rhetorically. Obama, on the other hand, has the Senate.

So, sure, America could use someone who's able to admit mistakes, and, yes, apologies only count for so much. What America could really use, though, is someone who had the courage to stand up for truth-telling when it really mattered, as it did in 2002 -- and who now uses his high-ranking political post to take action to end the war. Obama's test -- his trap -- will be whether or not he can do more than introduce well-written and well-intentioned legislation which dies without a vote.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

PRESS RELEASES FOR DUMMIES. I recall blogging about this during the last presidential cycle, to no apparent effect, so I'd like to again make a brief on behalf of plain English and clarity to all those campaign workers who write press releases. Once upon a time press releases were delivered by hand or by mail. Then it was by fax, and then everything switched over to e-mail. And now reporters get press releases on computers and hand-held devices. Hand-held devices have really small screens. If a press secretary writes a release with the header "Sen./Gov./etc. So-and-so for president campaign announces statement on XYZ," no one can tell from the header what's in the release unless they click through, first, because all that will show up on their hand-held screen is "Sen./Gov./etc. So-and-so for," and second, because the header doesn't say what that candidate said. In a world where newspapers assigned reporters to cover only specific candidates, that was fine. People would still click through and read even the most garbled releases. But we don't live in that world any more.

Today, there is a very large population of people, including most bloggers, who don't cover just one candidate, and who get releases from a dozen or more different campaigns. They do not work for newspapers of record. They will cover candidates when they do or say something interesting or controversial, and ignore them the rest of the time. And they are under no professional obligation to read every last thing that's sent out, because they are not on a specific candidate's beat. Nor will they always call for comment before writing (indeed, the fraction of people who blog who make reporting phone calls before commenting on something is vanishingly small).

It would benefit everyone -- and most especially candidates -- if press secretaries learned to write for this new technological and media environment. For example, if sending out a scheduling update, it is quite helpful to make the first word of the release, "Schedule." "Must Read" and "Breaking" are useful designations if you really want people to read something urgently. If the candidate has said something of interest, "Remarks" or "Statement" also work pretty well. (That's how the White House does it.) So does: "So-and-so Responds to XYZ." A recent DNC release chose a different but also admirably clear approach: "Dean: Bush Administration Still Out of Touch on Iraq." Same with this from the Majority Leader's office: "Reid: We Must Address America's Healthcare Crisis." The message, and the messenger, are all right there in one short line. No one has to click-through to get the message, but they know exactly what's in the release if they want more information. Nor is that an accident -- there's actually an art to writing e-mails with high click-through rates, and Reid and the DNC have hired some of the field's best practitioners.

Hemming and hawing with a long string of formalities in an e-mail header will only obscure a candidate's message. Just compare the Reid example above with this hypothetical: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Announces Statement on Healthcare Crisis." The first header gets the message out, the second is all pointless formalities. There is never any need to repeat the candidate's first name, title, or job goals in headers sent to reporters. Reporters and bloggers know who the candidates are already, and they can tell which campaign is sending them a message just from the name of the press person who is doing the e-mailing. Get to the point. And for God's sakes, don't send out releases headlined, "Press Release." Of course it's a press release. The point of the release is to communicate what new thing the candidate is saying or doing, and the header is the campaign's first shot at getting that done quickly. It's worth taking advantage of that.

That is all.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE TINIEST VIOLIN IN THE WORLD...I'm always amazed at how similarly the left and the right perceive each other. Here's The American Spectator's Quin Hillyer complaining about liberal incivility:

The Left can dish it out (with frequent use of "f" words and direct questioning of conservatives' motives, not just our reasoning), but they just can't take it. Again and again, they can and have called GOP stances "un-American" and the like, but on the other hand, again and again they take a conservative statement that only addresses the likely RESULTS of lefty actions, not their motives, and accuse the conservatives of questioning their patriotism. It's a total, absolute crock.

--Ezra Klein

A 'LARRY SUMMERS MOMENT'. Amy Hoffman, editor-in-chief of the Women's Review of Books, recently reported that she attended a lecture at the Radcliffe Institute by Barry Gewen, an editor at the New York Times Book Review. In what even he described as a "Larry Summers moment" he explained that the reason so few women reviewers appear in the NYTBR is that they just can't write for a general audience about such topics as military history. He explained that NYTBR editors find reviewers by talking to colleagues and reading publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New Republic, insisting that he and his colleagues are not overtly prejudiced people but admitted they might have subconscious prejudices.

In the Harvard Crimson's account, Gewen acknowledged his staff wasn't “doing the outreach they should” in order to recruit more women and minorities.

“Looking for reviewers of a certain ethnicity simply because of an ethnicity makes me a little squeamish,” Gewen, a 17-year veteran of the Book Review, said.

During the Q&A session, Hoffman suggested that it wasn't necessary for the editors to psychoanalyze themselves to find the source of the problem -- all they had to do was look at their process for finding reviewers, which guarantees that they'll find the same old guys to say the same old thing.

--Ann Friedman

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE STANDARD ISSUE. Robert Reich offers a specific proposal for what kinds of labor standards we should want included in trade deals.

--The Editors

HONEST STUPIDITY. Now that he no longer stalks the Prospect's halls with a whip and a red pen, I feel free to say that ol' Bossman's Tomasky's latest column strikes me as rather strange. Call it post-pre-war revisionism, but I think Mike's rundown of how disingenuous most war supporters were forgets too much about the intellectual atmosphere in the moment, particularly in Washington, and how addled the conversation really was.

Mike argues that, "I don't believe for a second that any of them [liberal-leaning Senators] thought that handing George W. Bush the authority to launch a preemptive war was in any conceivable way a good idea." But that, sadly, wasn't the question. Had Democrats been thinking more clearly, they would have considered Bush's record, his competence, his instincts, and just said no. The moment, however, was not one conducive to clear thought. And the question was never framed or explained quite like that. Rather, an array of foreign policy wisemen and self-styled Iraq experts fanned out to speak to those politicians they were closest with and convinced them to vote for the resolution as a way of voting for their personal wars. So the number earnestly voting for Tom Friedman's war, or Kenneth Pollack's war, or Christopher Hitchen's's war, was really quite large. These were the folks Democratic politicians invited into the dining rooms and offices to advise them, and these folks, publicly as well as privately, sold their personal Iraq Wars, rather than George W. Bush's war. That's not to say the Democrats who voted wrongly -- nor the pundits or individuals, like me, who thought wrongly -- were anything but stupid for it. But the support wasn't disingenuous. Indeed, in some ways, that makes it all the worse.

--Ezra Klein

KEEPING THE OPTIONS OPEN. I'm very late to this debate, but since Ezra asked...

I don't think that the argument that a Democratic presidential candidate needs to keep his/her options open regarding war against Iran holds much water. The logic behind this arguments seems to go like this; if Barack Obama or whoever else declares military action against Iran off limits, then one of his diplomatic tools is off the table when he finally needs to start dealing with Iran. The argument that the threat of force can grease the wheels of diplomacy isn't wholly unreasonable, although some have pointed out, correctly, that the threat of force can often limit diplomatic options. However, the assumption that a statement made during a campaign is binding once someone becomes president is simply absurd. Woodrow Wilson went to war in Europe only six months after winning election on a no war pledge. Richard Nixon kept the Vietnam War going for four years in spite of a pledge to end it in short order. Neither paid any significant domestic political price, nor did the pledges notably affect their international credibility. If President Obama wants to put military action back on the table after winning election all he needs to do is declare that Iranian interference in Iraq has become too much to bear, or that Iranian support for Hezbollah is now actionable, or whatever.

So, I don't think that there's any cost at all to, right now, declaring war against Iran off limits. I'm unconvinced that there's much benefit, either, since I still don't believe that we're going to go to war against Iran. Even if we were, the statements of Democratic presidential candidates aren't going to have a meaningful effect either way, but I suppose that being on record in opposition to the war might be politically helpful in the wake of the inevitable disaster that such a conflict would produce.

--Robert Farley

FRED HIATT: NOT THE MEDIAN DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY VOTER. In addition to being bad on the merits, what puzzles me about Tom Vilsack's decision to end his campaign yesterday by endorsing price indexing for Social Security is what makes him think it would work. I'll admit that I'm no political consultant; I don't have a strong idea of what would appeal to Middle America (TM) except to say that you probably want to analyze how I express ideas and do the precise opposite. But I do understand at least one thing: running to the right on an extremely popular entitlement program in a Democratic primary is remarkably stupid. Just ask Joe Lieberman.

--Scott Lemieux

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. In his column this week, Mike takes a hard look at the 2002 Iraq war resolution in the Senate, and finds a lot for which mere apology won't suffice. Meanwhile, Mark Schmitt weighs in on the debate over building a viable politics for universal health care.

--The Editors

PAGING HARRY FRANKFURT. A good post about the Pelosi non-scandal by ex-TAPPER Greg Sargent. GOP Rep Adam Putnam "now acknowledges he had no personal knowledge of any Pelosi request," and remains unapologetic about having spread the false smear. As Greg said, this is even more worse for the media (including various bloggers) promoting the non-scandal, especially after the letter from the Sergeant at Arms was released. And, of course, this indifference about the accuracy of tales that fit conveniently into pre-packaged Republican smear narratives was a hallmark of the various pseudo-scandals the press used against Clinton and Gore. I'm reminded of what Joe Conason said when confronting Ed Klein about repeating the long-debunked "Clinton held up traffic at LAX getting a haircut!" fake-scandal: "What's peculiar to me is, you don't seem to care whether you get these things right or not."

--Scott Lemieux

WHAT POLLS TELL. A new poll seems to suggest that Americans like the surge in Iraq, after all:

In a dramatic finding, a new poll shows a solid majority of Americans still wants to win the war in Iraq - and keep U.S. troops there until the Baghdad government can take over.

Strong majorities also say victory is vital to the War on Terror and that Americans should support President Bush even if they have concerns about the way the war is being handled, according to the survey conducted by Public Opinion Strategies.

The poll found that 57 percent of Americans supported "finishing the job in Iraq" - keeping U.S. troops there until the Iraqis can provide security on their own. Forty-one percent disagreed.

The first finding -- that 57 % support "finishing the job" -- is based on asking respondents whether they agree or disagree with the following statement: "I support finishing the job in Iraq, that is, keeping the troops there until the Iraqi government can maintain control and provide security for its people." What does Johnson, the pollster I spoke to, think about this question?

"It's designed to elicit a positive response by putting respondents in the position of saying that they don't support 'finishing a job,'" Johnson says. "It's not a straightforward wording at all. It's also put in the first person to personalize it. In polling when you use the first person you generally get a more positive response."

-- J. Goodrich

WHO NEEDS THE HPV VACCINE? Merrill Goozner opposes mandatory HPV vaccination for sixth-grade girls in the U.S. He writes:

By insisting that all young women get this vaccine, public health officials (the Centers for Disease Control last June endorsed universal vaccination, although its recommendations are not binding on the states, which carry out public health policy in the U.S.) are in essence saying it is impossible for the health care system to identify and treat older women who have already become infected and are at risk of getting cervical cancer.

Attempting universal vaccination is NOT the same thing as saying it's impossible to treat those at risk. Sure, HPV is not likely to be deadly for upper-class women who are well insured and getting regular reproductive health care. But women who find out they have one of the strains of HPV that is likely to cause cervical cancer must return to the gynecologist multiple times a year for pap smears. Because we're talking about upper-class, insured women, they can likely bear the financial cost. The time and discomfort involved are another matter. I know Goozner has never had one, but pap smears aren't exactly a picnic in the park. I know I'm not in the highest-risk group for dying of cervical cancer, but I'm getting the vaccine because I'd like to avoid having to return to the gyno over and over again to ensure cervical cancer has not developed. Maybe Goozner would feel differently if he faced the prospect of having his penis swabbed every three months.

He also writes,

Since we don't yet know the long term risks, if any, from this vaccine, from a medical point of view it makes the most sense to give it to young women who are most at risk from the disease, for whom the reward-risk ratio is highest.

I agree. But, in my mind, this only strengthens the argument in favor of making it mandatory for school entrance. As I wrote in my TAP Online column a few weeks ago, mandatory vaccination is the best way to reach these lower-income girls who are most likely to have limited access to reproductive health care later in life. Drop-out rates begin at 13, and historically, requiring vaccines for school attendance has helped to close racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic gaps in immunization rates.

Will it be expensive to require this vaccine? Absolutely. But the alternative, if our goal is preventing cervical cancer deaths, is an overhaul of our health care system to ensure that all lower-income women are getting regular pap screenings for the disease. I definitely wouldn't oppose such an effort, but I doubt it would be a cheaper option than widespread vaccination.

Goozner is perfectly comfortable with not having his own daughter vaccinated, presumably because she's currently 13 years old and said "yuck" when she was told that HPV is spread by sexual contact. But I highly doubt that she is going to tell her father immediately when she does become sexually active. "Hey pops, I'm ready for that HPV shot now!" Yeah, I just don't see it happening, even if he's very close to his daughter. Even so, all states allow families to say no to required school-entry vaccines if they object for medical, moral, or religious reasons. So Goozner is welcome to opt out and wait to have his daughter vaccinated until he thinks the time is right.

--Ann Friedman

SIGH. There'll be no live debate blogging because our TV doesn't get C-SPAN and C-SPAN's online streaming is super spotty. I bet The Weekly Standard has digital cable...

--Ezra Klein

AWAITING THE VERDICT The Scooter Libby case has gone to the jury. While waiting for the verdict, it's worth highlighting something pretty extraordinary from Fitzgerald's closing rebuttal yesterday. Fitzgerald repeatedly raised the claim that Libby obstructed the investigation into Cheney's role, and even seemed to suggest it might have been in coordination with Cheney. As the Washington Post
put it: "He [Fitzgerald] added that Libby's lies had 'left a cloud over the vice president' because Cheney's role in the leak remained unclear." Fitzgerald also raised the question of why it was that in the fall of 2003, when the investigation was just announced and the president had asked that anyone from the administration with information come forward, Libby shared only one relevant piece of information, out of all the relevant information he had, with one person: he told Cheney, his original source, of his purported recollection that Tim Russert was in fact his source. After seeing a document with evidence that he had in fact learned it from Cheney, Libby went back to the vice president and told him this information. In both cases, Cheney did little more than cock his head. Fitzgerald also walked the jury through the way the OVP's talking points on Joe Wilson changed to reflect Cheney's own response to Wilson's op-ed, which meant, among other things, that the question of who sent Wilson became a top talking point -- and of course the answer that Cheney offered in his own notes to Wilson's op-ed and the answer that Libby is accused of offering to Judy Miller on July 8, talking with her at the behest of the vice president, was Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame.

All of this, of course, was designed by Fitzgerald to serve the purpose of making the case to the jury that Libby is guilty of obstruction of justice, perjury, and false statements. But it is impossible not to see it as Fitzgerald also taking advantage of the rare opportunity to begin publicly legitimating the idea that Cheney himself might be an object of suspicion and even, if it were to come to that, indictment. Yesterday, I suggested Fitzgerald had a lot of work to do in this regard if he were still focused on Cheney as a subject of his investigation, as Murray Waas' reporting indicated, and only one real opportunity to make the case -- his public comment upon the verdict. (I just got a hilariously laconic email from Fitzgerald's spokesman, Randall Samborn, clarifying, "in response to numerous inquiries," that "Mr. Fitzgerald will not be available after a verdict for one-on-one interviews or talk shows.") Evidently Fitzgerald acted sooner.

None of this means, of course, that Fitzgerald is headed in Cheney's direction, even if Libby is convicted. And I still think Fitzgerald has a lot of work to do to make the notion publicly palatable. But it certainly seems to me that Fitzgerald has put the public and the press on notice that he might be headed in the vice president's direction. I would hope the press notices and, particularly if Libby is convicted, does some more reporting on what Fitzgerald's investigation has disclosed about the Libby-Cheney connection and what it might yet produce.

--Jeff Lomonaco

EDWARDS & VARIETY. Actually, I was apparently suffering from blogger dyslexia in the item below, and did not make the chronology clear. The Peter Bart article is from January 19th, referencing an event that took place even earlier in January, while the Herzliya speech was given on January 22nd, and Edwards talked to Ezra on February 2nd. While the appearance and circulation of this article at this time smacks of oppo research -- fair oppo research, as the month-old story had no correction -- the article itself predated any controversy about Edwards' Iran policy statements, and so whoever Bart's sources were, if they erred, did so without any intention of excerbating this particular controversy, which did not then exist. They may well have wanted to gin up some different controversy, however, which they have now done on an extremely micro-scale. In any event, I'd never have bothered posting such a contended story had I read Edwards' denial first, and have called event host Adam Venit, whom the Edwards campaign says will corroborate the campaign's story, as well as reached out to Bart about when the Edwards team first asked for a correction, and will update if/when I hear back. Obviously, if Edwards says he never said it -- and I agree with Ezra's take that Edwards is not given to off the cuff pronouncements -- and Bart says his source says he did, well, then, in the absence of any independent corroborration either way, it's a wash and the whole story should be ignored (including by people who have been using it to argue for Edwards' non-hawkish credentials).

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MORE ON TAUSCHER. To add on to Atrios here, the case of Rep. Ellen Tauscher is interesting. Here's a centrist Democrat who wrested a swing seat from a rock-ribbed Republican. A couple years later, though, her seat was redistricted, becoming overwhelmingly Democratic. Her own vote totals show the shift. In 1996, she wins with 49%. In 1998 and 2000, she takes 53% of the vote. In 2002, however, she's redistricted and gets 76%. In 2004, she gets 66%.

In American Congressional politics, incumbency is a huge advantage. And, as Atrios says, "[primary challenges] provide one of the very few checks on legislator behavior that the people have." Now, you could argue that Tauscher was accurately reflecting her district even a few years ago, but there's a perfectly fair case to be made that, since the redistricting, she's too conservative. Hell, she's made it: She bitterly opposed that particular redistricting for the precise reason that it would expose her record to more liberal voters. So why should a respect for incumbency overwhelm the actual opinions of her constituents? Why shouldn't, just as a democratic matter, there be enthusiasm for a decently-funded, more liberal challenger who can claim to better represent the district?

--Ezra Klein

MORE ON TAP AND THE WAR. This'll be the last time I discuss Brendan O'Neill's column about TAP's alleged pro-war editorial history, promise. But, re-reading this October 2002 piece written by editors Paul Starr, Robert Kuttner, and Harold Meyerson, I'm pretty damned impressed by its prescience and feel compelled to highlight some passages:

... No new information about Saddam Hussein's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and no actions taken by Iraq seem to have precipitated this shift. The Iraqi regime has not changed since early in the Bush administration, when its great priority was building a missile defense shield, nor even since the 2000 election, when Bush said he would emphasize "humility" in foreign policy and opposed nation building.

Nor has evidence been disclosed that ties Iraq to al-Qaeda or to the events of September 11. Indeed, war with Iraq is as likely to aggravate the problem of terrorism as it is to reduce it: It threatens to deflect our efforts from the struggle against terrorism, jeopardize cooperation from our allies, intensify hostility in the Arab world, and entangle us in further conflicts in the region ...

When the United States entered the war in Kosovo, Bill Clinton's Republican critics demanded to know what our "exit strategy" was. It's a fair question now. Once American forces defeat Hussein's army and his Baath party, we will have eliminated the Iraqi state's capacity to maintain control of the country and defend itself (against, for example, Iran). Because effective state authority cannot be manufactured overnight, the American military will have to supply it. We will have to install and defend a new government and, in the process, we are likely to enmesh ourselves in Iraq's ethnic and religious conflicts. Even groups that don't like Hussein, such as the Shiites in the south, may not accept the regime we establish.

All this will be happening next door to Iran, another designated member of the "axis of evil," whose forces will be staring at ours across the terrain where Iran and Iraq fought a long and terrible war not that many years ago. Threatened by the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan, Iran may accelerate its own nuclear-arms program in the belief that those are just the weapons it needs to deter a future American attack. And what will we do then -- move on from Baghdad to Tehran in another preemptive war? ...

As Congress debates war with Iraq and the new Bush doctrine, it must look beyond November and beyond Baghdad and ask if the direction the administration wants to take America in actually will bring us the security Bush promises. The administration's unilateral determination to overthrow Hussein is already taking us down a dangerous path. Overthrowing the system of international law and security that has worked for the past half-century is more dangerous still. If Al Gore, who voted for Operation Desert Storm in 1991, can raise his voice against a new war with Iraq, so can others. The members of Congress who feel they are being stampeded into a rush toward war can still separate themselves from the herd.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: BARRIER METHODS. An outdated and little-used contraceptive is being redesigned for the 21st century. The diaphragm, which (for good reason) has not been popular among American women since the advent of the birth control pill, may soon be easier-to-use and available over-the-counter -- if a group of researchers has their way. And more importantly, it could also be a tool against HIV infection in Africa. Read Beth Schwartzapfel's report here.

--The Editors

OBAMA V. CLINTON. After his brutal smackdown of Australia's prime minister John Howard, his evisceration of Robert Ford, and his right hook to Hillary Clinton today, it's becoming satisfyingly clear that the Obama campaign can throw a devastating counterpunch. Good for them. This shows, too, that the campaign is looking for the win, not the vice-presidential slot, as some have speculated. The real shame, though, is that amidst all this Obama-Clinton enmity, Obama is skipping today's Democratic presidential primary forum in Nevada. Everyone else will be there, though, and I'll be liveblogging it right here at Tapped. Tune in around 3 eastern for the fun.

--Ezra Klein

Re: EDWARDS AND IRAN. I'm having a bit of trouble buying the Variety article Garance references below. I've heard Edwards talk about Israel dozens of times now, in response to all different sorts of audiences, and he's been vehemently pro-Israel before every single one. I've heard him talk about Iran a number more, and even conducted an interview with him on the subject, and he's again been consistently concerned about an Iranian nuclear weapon, and committed to stopping it -- often in terms I disagreed with. Add in that the Edwards campaign isn't simply disputing the context of the article, they're actually denying its accuracy. According to a press release sent out last night: "The January 19th Variety article is erroneous. Senator Edwards did not say nor does he believe that the greatest short-term threat to world peace is the possibility that Israel would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. Senator Edwards said, as he has in the past, that Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon is one of the greatest short-term threats to world peace."

That doesn't mean it isn't true -- or that Edwards didn't awkwardly phrase a more benign argument and accidentally make this interpretation true -- but I wouldn't treat it as gospel just yet. If Edwards wanted to flip this aggressively on Israel and Iran, he wouldn't be disputing the article's accuracy. Which is a shame, as it certainly seems to me that an Israeli bombing of Iran is a helluva threat to short term world peace.

Update: And this is probably a good time to link to my feature profile of Edwards in the new issue. So let there be links!

--Ezra Klein

PUTTING PRINCIPLES OVER PARTY. Over at The Swampland, the Other Klein is unimpressed with efforts to primary centrist Democrat Ellen Tauscher and suggests, by way of a Robespierre reference, that such efforts will shed a lot of blood for no good reason. But recent history doesn't back Klein up. As the article relates:

[Jane] Harman used to be a constant irritant, a go-to quote for reporters looking for a Democrat to tweak liberals -- until she had to fight off a primary challenge from the left in 2006. "She's been great ever since," [Kos] said. Now Harman even writes on the liberal Huffington Post blog.

Kos can imagine a day when Tauscher still holds her seat but is no longer distasteful to the left. "That's what victory would look like -- a more responsive representative," he said. So when Tauscher praises Pelosi as "perfect on substance, perfect on optics," it's hard to know if that's a result of personal evolution, political trends, or blogospheric pressure, but it's music to Kos's ears. It's helpful to Democratic leaders, too.

--Ezra Klein

THAT WAS FAST. Was it really just a month ago that John Edwards was speaking to an Israeli audience at Herzliya and saying this?

I saw firsthand the threats you face every day. I feel that I understand on a very personal level those threats. The challenges in your own backyard -- rise of Islamic radicalism, use of terrorism, and the spread of nuclear technology and weapons of mass destruction-- represent an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel.

At the top of these threats is Iran. Iran threatens the security of Israel and the entire world. Let me be clear: Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons. For years, the US hasn’t done enough to deal with what I have seen as a threat from Iran. As my country stayed on the sidelines, these problems got worse. To a large extent, the US abdicated its responsibility to the Europeans. This was a mistake. The Iranian president’s statements such as his description of the Holocaust as a myth and his goals to wipe Israel off the map indicate that Iran is serious about its threats....

Iran must know that the world won’t back down ... To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep ALL options on the table, Let me reiterate -- ALL options must remain on the table.

Adam Venit, a honcho at Endeavor, hosted a reception for John Edwards at his agency the other day....

The aggressively photogenic John Edwards was cruising along, detailing his litany of liberal causes last week until, during question time, he invoked the "I" word -- Israel. Perhaps the greatest short-term threat to world peace, Edwards remarked, was the possibility that Israel would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. As a chill descended on the gathering, the Edwards event was brought to a polite close.

As John Judis noted, "It's not that [Edwards] has a fairly definite foreign policy, but adjusts his views to audiences and the circumstances. He has none, zero."

UPDATE: John Edwards says the Variety article is erroneous. His campaign released a statement saying that Edwards "did not say nor does he believe that the greatest threat to world peace is the possibility that Israel would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. Senator Edwards said, as he has in the past, that Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon is one of the greatest short-threats to world peace." There's been no retraction yet from Variety.

UPDATE 2: Variety says it is sticking by its story.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

ROSIN’S PREDICAMENT. Reading Hanna Rosin’s piece on the “God gap” in last month’s Atlantic, along with the transcript of a Pew-sponsored forum convened last December on the subject of religious voters and the 2006 election, one quickly realizes that the real problem on the religion-and-politics beat, post-2006, is not so much that the Democrats won, but how they won and the magnitude of their victories.

In 2006, at least in terms of the religious splits, Democrats won because: (a.) the secular and/or infrequent church attendee vote expanded as a share of the electorate [and that’s not even accounting for respondent bias that surely leads people to lie about how frequently they attend church]; and (b.) Democratic support itself grew among that growing share of seculars. But the magnitude of the electoral victory was the real bell-ringer: Democrats netted 6 new governors, 6 new senators, 30 new house members, and flipped 10 new legislative chambers -- a secular-led victory of far greater magnitude than we saw in the evangelical-driven Republican "triumph" of 2004 (i.e., zero net new governors, just 4 net new senators and 3 House members, and a net loss of state chambers). Seeing the election-night results first, one imagines folks like Rosin and the Key West conferees rushing to the 2006 exit polls, certain there would be this giant surge in evangelical support for Democrats. They had spent so much time diligently learning the language and behaviors of the vaunted evangelical voters, they just had to be pivotal.

But then, like the three-day-old, half-deflated balloon in the corner that never popped, there it was: a measly, 3-point bump for Democrats -- an "increase" that, because it fell within the polling margin of error, cannot with statistical confidence even be called an increase. “Given how well Democrats did in the midterm elections, it’s surprising how little they narrowed what is melodically called the “God gap” -- the overwhelming Republican advantage among religious voters,” Rosin opens her piece. Surprising, sure, unless you've noticed that, according to the American Religious Identification Survey, the national share of agnostics/atheists/non-demonationals was 8% in 1990, rose to 14% by 2001, and probably approaches 16% today -- doubling, therefore, in just a decade and a half. Predictably, Rosin goes "deeper" to look at specific races, like Ted Strickland's big victory in the Ohio gubernatorial race. I’d argue that focusing on this race was a bad choice: Strickland’s margin was so wide he would still have won without a surge among the religious. (Notice how the emphasis is always on Strickland's preacher background whereas the inconvenient fact that Ken Blackwell was, arguably, the most overtly religious right Republican candidate in the country in 2006, at any level, is quickly glossed over.)

One could argue that the Blackwell-Strickland results prove that evangelicals are bolting the GOP. Alternatively, one could argue that evangelicals are decreasingly pivotal precisely because the secular voting share is growing. Unspoken media norms prevent arguing the latter, however. And, alas, the 2006 exit polls prevent arguing the former. Therein we find Rosin’s predicament.

--Tom Schaller

ALL BY OURSELVES. It's been said that British foreign policy since WWII is animated by the principle of "figuring out what the United States wants, and doing it before asked." No longer: Tony Blair has announced that the Brits will eventually be pulling out of Iraq.

President Bush has now exhausted the patience of our last (or, rather, first) global ally. And that means it is time to cue the Eric Carmen's appearance on Dick Clark's American Bandstand. (Worth watching just to see Carmen's collar-up jeans outfit and horrible lip-syncing.)

--Tom Schaller

THE MYTH OF GUILIANI'S FOREIGN POLICY CRED: Jonathan Chait argues convincingly that Rudy Giuliani is totally undeserving of the widespread assumption that he is some sort of expert on fighting global terrorism. I would differ slightly in my reasons though. Chait says,

The normal rule in American politics is that if you run for president and your experience comes at the state level, most people will assume that foreign policy is your weak point.... One would presume that this applies even more to presidential candidates whose highest office reached is mayor. And yet we have the strange case of Rudolph Giuliani.

What are Giuliani's credentials? Everybody knows the basics. On Sept. 11, 2001, he rolled up his shirt sleeves and gave reassuring speeches. He has a tough guy persona. He expresses extremely strong disapproval for enemies of the United States. (For instance, Giuliani has bragged about asking President Bush to let him personally execute Osama bin Laden.)

The World Trade Center itself was attacked in 1993. And yet Giuliani did not show any particular prescience during his tenure at preparing for the possibility of another attack. Indeed, he put an important emergency managent office in one of the towers. It's true that New York's government functioned admirably under his leadership after the fact. But, much as it pains me say this because I fear he too may run for president, the New York mayor who has really done an impressive job of re-orienting city agencies around anti-terrorist work is Mike Bloomberg.

Also, while governing a global city like New York may give you some foreign policy experience, it is only worth bragging about if you were successful in your dealings with your diverse constituents. One need look no farther than Giuliani's clunky handling of the murder of African immigrant Amadou Diallo by New York police officers, and the way it enraged immigrant communities across the city, to see that Giuliani is no diplomat. Here's hoping that others in the media are, like Chait, brave enough to take on the "9/11 Mayor's" reputation.

--Ben Adler

NADER SPOILERISM: My post on the Ralph Nader documentary received an interesting range of comments in response.

A few canards were raised, though, that I think need to be refuted as we prepare for the unholy prospect of a Nader '08 run. First, Nader supporters seem to assume that saying Nader cost Gore Florida and thus the election implies that you think Bush won Florida fair and square. I, for one, believe no such thing. Of course Bush stole Florida. But if Nader hadn't run Florida would not have been close enough to steal. So defending Nader's candidacy by demanding to know why one doesn't fixate instead on Bush's electoral shenanigans is an irrelevant response.

Also, at least one commenter defended the notion that Nader did not concentrate his efforts in swing states prior to the election. I refer any who are interested to Todd Gitlin's recent debunking of this argument. As Professor Gitlin points out, that whole reasoning depends on the dubious assumption that where a candidate physically campaigns, as opposed to, say, where he buys ads or sends literature or any number of methods that reach more people, is the way that he focuses on a given area. Kudos, also to Gitlin for bringing up Nader's triumphalist post-election press conference in 2000, in which he bragged about teaching Democrats a lesson (you can judge for yourself how that worked out), and his recent praise of likely anti-Democrat spoiler candidate Mike Bloomberg, as evidence that he really does enjoy throwing presidential elections to Republicans.

--Ben Adler

HOT OFF THE PRESSES: THE MARCH PRINT ISSUE. The latest print issue of the Prospect has just come out; be sure to take a look. Our cover story, "America's China Fantasy," is by Rise of the Vulcans author James Mann. The fantasy he describes is the notion, adhered to dogmatically by our political and business elites, that opening China economically will eventually liberalize China politically.

Thus, when America's leading officials and CEOs speak so breezily of integrating China into the international community, listeners should ask: If China remains unchanged [in 30 years], what sort of international community will that be? Will it favor the right to dissent? Will it protect freedom of expression? Or will it simply protect free trade and the right to invest? …

A few years ago, the New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof gave voice to one of the most common American misconceptions about China's political future. Reflecting on how China had progressed and where it was headed, Kristof wrote, "[Hard-liners] knew that after the Chinese could watch Eddie Murphy, wear tight pink dresses and struggle over what to order at Starbucks, the revolution was finished. No middle class is content with more choices of coffees than of candidates on a ballot."

Once people are eating at McDonald's or wearing clothes from The Gap, American writers rush to proclaim that these people are becoming like us, and that their political system is therefore becoming like ours. But will the newly enriched, Starbucks-sipping, condo-buying, car-driving denizens of China's largest cities in fact become the vanguard for democracy in China? Or is it possible that China's middle-class elite will either fail to embrace calls for a democratic China or turn out to be a driving force in opposition to democracy?

• A major profile of John Edwards by our own Ezra Klein;
  
• A dispatch from Vietnam on the clash between art, commerce, and state repression, by Noy Thrupkaew;
  
• Charles Taylor's contrarian take on Clint Eastwood's ascendance to "American Master" status in cinema;
  
• A review essay by Robert Kuttner on trade, inequality, and the European way; and
  
• A special package of pieces on work/family issues and policy. Authors include our own Ann Friedman, Joan C. Williams, Heather Boushey, and Tamara Draut.

But for the rest, you're going to have to subscribe. And you should! It's really cheap.

--The Editors

PROTECTIONISM. If you haven't already, read Dean on copyright.

--Sam Rosenfeld

PLAYING THE RELIGION CARD. Atrios has had a week of posts on religion and its role in politics, and in particular in progressive or liberal politics. Today's posts are especially interesting, having to do with the proper way of incorporating the religious left into the movement.

So sad that the religious right has successfully appropriated the term "religion", especially as it is now applied to only a very narrow segment of possible religions: Only fundamental Christian sects which focus on the banning of abortion and the defense of marriage against gays and lesbians are really seen as religions in most political debates, and the unstated assumption is that conservatives are religious and that liberals are not. It is as if two or three political stances (and caring about the poor is not one of those) have been turned around and now stand as the qualifier of what is regarded as religious.

This article about a Wiccan Army Chaplain and his tribulations in yesterday's Washington Post is a good reminder of the fact that not all religions are seen as equally worthwhile, especially among the so-called Religious Right, and that we have been swallowing the Luntz framing in most of the religious debates.

--J. Goodrich

CAJUN POLITICS. Last week came the rumor that former Democratic Senator John Breaux may come out of retirement to run for governor, because incumbent Democratic Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco is in a danger of losing re-election. I’ve got a new Salon piece out on the Democrats’ declining fortunes in Louisiana. A few key excerpts for the non-subscribers:

It was not long ago that Louisiana, like a soothing balm applied to an injury, was the state that gave bruised and battered Democrats some small measure of post-election relief. In December 2002, a month after Republicans secured a sufficient number of U.S. Senate seats to forge a Jim Jeffords-defection-proof majority, Democrats were buoyed when Landrieu eked out a four-point runoff win to retain her Senate seat. A year later, just 11 days after Democrats lost the only two other gubernatorial races of the 2003 off-year cycle, in Kentucky and Mississippi, Blanco's victory over Jindal prevented a GOP sweep…

If Louisiana once provided the Democrats' silver lining in cloudier moments, it is perhaps fitting that this most contrarian of states is now trending away from Democrats at the very moment they have regained majorities in both chambers of Congress, among governors and in the state legislatures. What's more, it is ironic that Hurricane Katrina -- the event that finally demolished the claims of governing competence long advanced by George W. Bush and national Republicans -- has accelerated the collapse of the state's Democrats.

As Gallup's latest survey of partisan self-identification reveals, largely because of Katrina Louisiana is the only state in which Democrats lost ground relative to Republicans since 2005, reclassifying it from a Democratic-leaning state to "competitive."

--Tom Schaller

CLOSING ARGUMENTS. The prosecution has offered its summation in the Libby trial and the defense is in the midst of its own summation, then Patrick Fitzgerald will offer the prosecution's rebuttal closing out the afternoon. It is riveting stuff. (Marcy Wheeler's liveblogging of them is here, here, and here.) The judge will give the jury its instructions and the jury will begin deliberations tomorrow.

Meanwhile, some of what the trial has disclosed about the Office of the Vice President is nicely treated in Jim Rutenberg's article in the Times today. The key bit:

The evidence in the trial shows Vice President Dick Cheney and Mr. Libby, his former chief of staff, countermanding and even occasionally misleading colleagues at the highest levels of Mr. Bush's inner circle as the two pursued their own goal of clearing the vice president's name in connection with flawed intelligence used in the case for war.

After Scooter Libby knew he was going to be questioned by the FBI he devised a cover story. And who did he share it with?

You guessed it: Cheney. Why? Because knowing that Cheney was going to be questioned, too, Libby wanted to be sure both of them were on the same page, telling the same cover story. If Libby is convicted, expect Fitzgerald to vigorously pursue whether Cheney knowingly allowed -- or worse -- even encouraged Libby to lie to the FBI and a federal grand jury.

There has to be some kind of account of new information that has been gained since Libby's indictment. Perhaps the prosecution is hoping that, if Libby is convicted, he either would agree or could be compelled to be more forthcoming. I'm skeptical. Has the prosecution gained new information from the man who just barely escaped prosecution, Karl Rove, and whom prosecutors were probably hoping to play off against Libby when they intended to indict him in October 2005 before Rove's lawyer pulled off a last-minute deferral? I'm skeptical too. If Fitzgerald is going to pursue Cheney upon a possible conviction of Libby, he's going to have to lay the groundwork for that; the only chance he will have is with what he has to say on the courthouse steps if Libby is indeed convicted.

--Jeff Lomonaco

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FITTING THE BILL. Matt wonders just what it is that makes Bill Richardson's presidential candidacy so "unserious," and concludes that we've moved to a "new era in which, to be president, you need to be a famous celebrity."

--The Editors

MATH IS HARD! More evidence for the social construction of women's "natural" abilities comes in the form of an American Psychological Association study on the impact of sexualized media on girls and young women. Salon's Broadsheet blog reports:

The report also mentions a particularly fascinating study in which college students were put into dressing rooms and asked to "try on and evaluate" either sweaters or bathing suits. Then the subjects were left alone for 10 minutes, while still wearing the sweaters or the bathing suits, and asked to complete a math test. The women wearing swimsuits did "significantly worse" than their sweater-wearing counterparts; among men, there was no difference in performance. The APA concludes that this study demonstrates that "thinking about the body and comparing it to sexualized cultural ideals disrupted mental capacity" -- which happens more frequently in young women than in men.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

DEFINING ROMNEY. Rich Lowry's take on Mitt Romney seems very smart:

A couple of (uncommitted in '08) friends have made good points about Romney lately. One was telling me the other day that Romney is the victim of the rules changing. It used to be that it was expected that Republicans would become more conservative when they ran for the nomination, and conservatives would welcome it. But Romney has changed on so much so recently, in the age of YouTube and especially against the back-drop of the recent assault on Kerry's flip-flops, that he's getting hammered.

Another friend, on the other hand, pointed out that conservatives usually don't run national races on just being conservative. They bring a flavor and a spin to their conservatism. It isn't a check-the-box exercise. They apply their conservatism to the problems of the day and come up with their own variety—Bush, Newt, and Reagan all did this. Romney hasn't yet.

--Ezra Klein

EL CRUJIR DE DIENTES. Slate's Molly McCloy has a nice little piece today about the common practice in the southern border states of dealing with America's health care affordability crisis by going to Mexico for medical care. Molly and her parents crossed the border from Arizona in search of elaborate dentalwork, just as my parents used to do when they lived in New Mexico and my dad needed things like bridges that weren't covered by the Veteran's Administration system he relied on for the rest of his care. This led my parents to one of their many dark jokes:

"What do you get when you cross NAFTA with the Clinton Healthcare Plan? Affordable health care for everyone -- you just have to go to Mexico to get it."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

NEW FRONT IN WAR ON TERROR: G.O.P. DONORS The AP has just reported the arrest of a donor to the Republican Party -- a self-described lifetime member of National Republican Senatorial Committee's ''Inner Circle" and appointee to the NRCC's ''White House Business Advisory Committee'' has been indicted on terrorism charges for allegedly providing aid to an Afghan terrorism training camp. His name is either Michael Mixon or Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari, depending on the day and hour.

One can't help but wonder just how long the U.S. attorneys who brought these charges will last, given the recent firings of seven who dared to take cases that made the G.O.P. look bad. (Now we know why the administration was so quick to yank the collective bargaining rights of U.S. attorneys.)

--Adele M. Stan

NEWS OR PROPAGANDA? A writer for Britain's The New Statesman is reporting that the U.S. has completed preparations for an invasion of Iran and that "military operations for a major conventional war with Iran could be implemented any day. They extend far beyond targeting suspect WMD facilities and will enable President Bush to destroy Iran's military, political and economic infrastructure overnight using conventional weapons."

Every single military, CIA, or NGO affiliate I've spoken with in the past six months about Iran tells me that it would a.) be somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible for the U.S. to launch a ground invasion given our present military capabilities and b.) a very bad idea to do so, even if we could. The interesting question to me is where articles like the above are coming from. Who are these anonymous British officers talking to Dan Plesch, a radical left (his term, not mine) security commentator? Who is feeding them their information about American plans? And what is their agenda?

I fear we have entered the moment of propaganda warfare between the U.S. and Iran, where stories like this are designed to telecast power, rather than real plans. Even neoconservative regime change drum-beater Michael Ledeen says he opposes an invasion of Iran, and I know enough about D.C. neoconservative foreign policy thinkers to know that the quickest way to drive them into hysterics is to suggest you think they advocate a conventional military invasion of Iran, rather than targeted military strikes.

Meanwhile, there is a real worry (amongst the people who worry about such things) that an accurate Iranian picture of the current constraints on American power is something that can only further encourage Iranian defiance of the international community and the pursuit of nuclear weaponry. This makes telegraphing an inaccurate picture of American power and intentions a part of the stand-off between the two nations, and means that readers looking for the truth about our own nation's intentions (as well as Iran's) are going to have to be especially skeptical of anonymous reports in the media -- and doubly so when it comes to anonymous leaks in the foreign press about American plans, since those organs do not fall under U.S. prohibitions on using the press to distribute U.S. government propaganda.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

LIKE CATS AND DOGS. I'm all sorts of with Tom on this one. Pet perfection, thy name is canine. And having met Tom's dog before, I can attest to the inevitability of such feeling within him. But are we atypical, or evidence of a larger liberal affection for pups? Well, the fine folks at Neuroscience did some surveying on this very subject awhile back and, to my great disappointment, they found that liberals are cat people, while the staunchest pup partisans are the most conservative Americans:

So very conservative men and conservative women exhibit the highest preference for dogs, while very liberal women are very liberal cat ladies. There are, of course, some confounding factors here, including the concentration of liberals in urban areas where cat ownership is more plausible, while conservatives are over-represented in spacious exurbs and rural areas. Plus, liberals are more content to provide food and shelter for recipients who will do nothing to deserve it, while conservatives want waves of gratitude and the clear learning of tricks. Or so hears this soft, coastal dog lover who mainly likes pets for the self-esteem boost.

--Ezra Klein

I UNDERSTAND THAT TRYING TO INFER LOGIC FROM INSTAPUNDITRY IS FUTILE, BUT... Glenn Reynolds asserts that Iran has been at war with the United States "since 1979." My question: when does he start calling for Michael Ledeen to be put on trial for high treason for helping to sell arms to a country the U.S. is at war with?

--Scott Lemieux

ALITO: STILL WORSE THAN SCALIA. David Savage has a very good article in today's Los Angeles Times about Antonin Scalia and the effect of appointing Sam Alito. It carefully explains the areas of law where replacing the centrist Sandra Day O'Connor with the doctrinaire reactionary Alito is likely to have an immediate impact. One good thing about it is that, rather than taking Scalia's claims of "originalism" and "textualism" at face value, it brings up the obvious anomalies in his record (such as the claim -- farcical from an originalist perspective -- that the 5th Amendment's Due Process clause prohibits the federal government from using any racial classifications.)

Having said this, however, the fact that Scalia's (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Clarence Thomas's) commitment to grand legal theories can be sporadic doesn't mean that it's irrelevant. This is evident in a case handed down today. The Court, in a 5-4 ruling with an unusual coalition (Breyer and Souter being joined by Kennedy and the two Bush appointees, while Scalia and Thomas joined Ruth Bader Ginsburg's primary dissent), vacated a punitive damages award against Phillip Morris, arguing that the state court violated the corporation's due process rights by basing punishment in part on harm done to parties not before the court. Although the decision did not directly address the question of whether punitive damage awards can be "excessive" under the 14th Amendment, as Thomas noted in dissent, "[i]t matters not that the Court styles today’s holding as “procedural” because the “procedural” rule is simply a confusing implementation of the substantive due process regime this Court has created for punitive damages."

The split among the Court's right wing here is therefore very instructive. During the Alito nomination, some court watchers argued that because Alito was a "minimalist" who abjured the broad theoretical claims of Thomas and Scalia, liberals shouldn't worry much about his appointment. As today's case demonstrates, this gets things exactly backwards. Scalia and Thomas, at least when there's no conflict with strongly held policy preferences, will have their ideological conservatism constrained by legal policy goals which don't always produce conservative results. Alito and Roberts, conversely, are free to be much more slavishly pro-business -- marrying O'Connor-style unprincipled "minimalism" to a much more conservative ideology is the most dangerous combination of all. If you're a left-liberal, you'd much rather have Scalia or Thomas than Alito.

--Scott Lemieux

DIXIE-CATS. Hmmm. Cat ownership is highest in the Republican South. Tom Schaller is a dog person. Tom Schaller wants Democrats to try to win without the South. Coincidence?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WORKING MOMS OR CONGRESSWOMEN? ALWAYS BOTH. The NYT features a profile today of freshman Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand. The article points out the balance of campaigning while in office and the struggles of Democrats to differentiate themselves from their Republican counterparts on Iraq, but the article also notes that Gillibrand is a wife and mother of a 3-year-old son. This leads me to wonder, how often do profiles of male politicians point out that they are husbands and fathers? It seems not nearly as often as profiles of female politicians. The reason for this is partially that it is somewhat politically advantageous to position oneself as a "working mother" in government, but it is also because women find themselves bound to their personal lives more than men. For men, it is an easy division, for women, it seems impossible to separate the two.

--Kay Steiger

FUNNY IF YOU KNOW FARSI? A friend forwarded me this YouTube video forwarded to him by a professional contact in the Iranian government, Atom Ahmadinejad, which is apparently making the rounds in Iran, and which mocks the president's nuclear aspirations to the tune of an Iranian children's song. No word on who made the video, or where it was made (it could have been any place from Los Angeles to Tehran). Since it's the second one in the Atom Ahmadinejad series, though, and can also be found on a YouTube page full of videos mocking the mullahs and Ahmadinejad and celebrating those who lost their lives fighting for democracy, I'm guessing it's part of somebody's propaganda war efforts.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BLACK VELVET. I know this may generate a storm of "cat-hater" invective directed at me, but frankly, I don’t care: My name is Tom Schaller, and I’m a Dog Person.

My wife and I have a gorgeous, 90-pound black lab named Max. He was rescued by the Silver Spring’s (MD) Lab Rescue after being found roaming the streets in Delaware. He was thin, sickly and had a horrible cough. We adopted him four years ago, on February 17, 2003. The lab rescue folks estimated his age at one year, so that means Max turned five on Saturday. He now has a coat that shines like, well, velvet.

"Velvet" also happens to be the name of the black lab stranded on Oregon’s Mt. Hood with the three climbers who were finally rescued yesterday. One of the rescue team members asserts that, by laying across the cold climbers, Velvet probably saved the climbers' lives. No cat is ever going to do that. But I firmly believe that, were he in the same situation, Max would act as bravely as Velvet.

My name is Tom Schaller, and I’m a Dog Person.

--Tom Schaller

WASHINGTON: THE FIRST DECIDER. I find George W. Bush's tendency to butcher presidential history one of his most irritating traits. Praising George Washington's unbreakable will, ability to stand up to multiple challenges, and belief that freedoms ought not to be enjoyed by American's alone, President Bush stopped just short of asserting that President Washington would have supported the Iraq War, although he did suggest that the Iraq War and the Revolutionary War were of essentially the same character. Bush also tried to turn Washington into Harry Truman, saying:

My attitude is, if they’re still analyzing No. 1, 43 ought not to worry about it and just do what he thinks is right, and make the tough choices necessary.

President Bush and his supporters might also learn something from President Washington's Farewell Address, a speech that makes a cogent defense of a modest foreign policy. Washington certainly believed that people other than Americans deserved freedom, but he just as certainly thought that America should lead by example, rather than through direct interference in the politics of foreign nations. His words:

So, likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld; and it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity, gilding with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation...

--Robert Farley

MIDDLE CLASS, OR SWING VOTERS? To much fanfare, including a glowing column from David Brooks, the new report from the "strategy center for progressives" known as Third Way has arrived: The New Rules Economy: A Policy Framework for the 21st Century." expands the argument that Third Way has made elsewhere, which is mostly that the middle class is doing fine, and Democrats should stop trying to sell pessimism, and instead adopt the inspiring philosophy they call "progressive realism."

The first ten pages of the report detail and reject "The Myths of Neopopulism" -- the view that the middle class is in trouble. (Incidentally, the only current "leading neopopulist" mentioned by name is TAP founder Bob Kuttner, whose comments regarding Third Way's Stephen Rose led to this TAP Online exchange.) To rebut the pessimism, "New Rules" points out such fun facts as that in 1979, only 12% of "prime-age households" (that is, singles or couples age 25-59) earned more than $100,000, today, 24% of such households have crossed the $100,000 line. Except for "the very poor," they say, everyone's doing okay. (The Third Way authors don't define "the very poor," but it looks to me like they mean roughly 40-45% of the country.)

And then there are four half-hearted pages dismissing "The Myths of Conservatism," because of course you can hardly call yourself Third Way unless there are two other ways.

Then, they present the "New Rules" and the policies that go with them. Just to give you the flavor of it: the "old rule" was, "The American Dream meant owning a home"; the "new rule" is "The American Dream means owning a home and a stock portfolio." Old rule: "Good jobs are in factories." New rule: "Good jobs are in offices." And various other aphorisms worthy to stand beside "To thine own self be true" and "Plastics."

There's plenty to be said about the empirical portion of the paper, in addition to the points made in the earlier debate, but I'll leave that for others. (I hope they will take on Third Way's repeated innuendo that "neopopulists" don't think women should work.) Frankly, there are some useful correctives here, and the economic picture is not bleak for many Americans. Life above the median income is really pretty good, and there's not much of a golden age when it was much better. So let's assume it's all true. All you need to do is go to college, watch CNBC and buy yourself some stocks, get your cubicle at Initech, and the American Dream can be yours.

What then is "the new policy framework" that responds to all this good news? Some of it is great, such as providing every newborn with an asset account at birth. Some of it is unobjectionable, such as, "Encourage more companies to provide investment advice to their workers." But the bulk of the policy framework amounts to: Let's "reflect the hope and optimism" of those shiny happy middle-class families by throwing some money at them through more tax deductions and tax credits: "Tax deductions and credits aimed at middle class families" for college tuition. A "new baby tax credit." "Double the tax break for child care."

None of those things are terrible, if we had all the money in the world, but they are terribly inefficient. Making college tuition tax deductible, for example, even leaving aside the inflationary effect on tuitions that would wipe out the benefit, would not open the door of college to one single student who cannot attend already. (According to the Department of Education, a student from a high-income family with low test scores is more likely to complete college than a student with high test scores from a low-income family.) The other tax breaks are not as egregious, but at a time of staggering budget deficits and 45 million uninsured, they would hardly be a high priority on policy grounds, and without the magic words "refundable," they would provide no value at all to the 42 million households that don't owe income tax.

But details aside, here's my question: if the middle class is doing so well, why do we need to throw money at them? Why not just give them a round of applause for doing so well that a quarter of them now make over $100,000? Maybe given their great optimism we could even ask the $100,000+ earners to pay a bit more taxes to help those who have the least, to make our society better? What is the theory of social justice that says, the middle class is doing great, so let's borrow more money from future generations in order to give them some extra tax breaks? And meanwhile, we'll just ignore "the very poor" who aren't doing so well, by which they mean roughly 40 percent of the country.

Of course, I'm being willfully naďve. Substitute the word "swing voters" for "middle class" in the Third Way report, and it all makes sense. The affluent swing voters are doing great, and we Democrats need to "reflect their hope and optimism," in order to get them to vote for Democrats. How do we do that? Just as it's always been done: throw some bennies their way.

This is not policy analysis that seeks to determine actual problems and needs, and then craft policies that respond to them. Let's be blunt: It is the decade-old political analysis of pollster-turned-PR mogul Mark Penn -- in which affluent white women are key -- dressed up in the clothing of economics and policy.

There are five ways you could talk about the middle class in the current economy:

1. You could argue that the middle class faces serious economic stresses and anxieties, and government should help them deal with those things. That's kind of the position Senator Schumer has taken with his book Positively American, and with it, he's embraced some of the same policies, such as making college tuition deductible. I disagree with Schumer about his approach, but at least his solution fits his diagnosis of the problem.



2. You could argue that both the middle class and the working poor face increasing stresses, anxieties and insecurities, and there's a need for either universal programs that address that shared experience of insecurity (universal health care, wage insurance) or fundamental macroeconomic changes that would lead to a tighter labor market. That's more or less the position represented by, say, the Economic Policy Institute's "Shared Prosperity" project.



3. You could argue that the middle class is doing okay, but those below the median income – not just the poor, but those hanging on the precipice of the middle class and trying to climb up – are having a hard time of it, and we need policies that help their mobility, out of a moral obligation and out of our vision of America as a land of opportunity. This would be more or less John Edwards' "Two Americas" of 2004. (And not totally incompatible with option 2.)



4. You could argue that the middle class is doing fine, and therefore we should just keep doing what we've been doing, keep taxes and regulations low and let people "keep more of what they earn." This is Republican orthodoxy at the moment.



5. You could argue that the middle class is doing just fine, but we Democrats should throw a bunch of expensive tax credits and other benefit stheir way anyway because maybe they'll like us and vote for us.

--Mark Schmitt

PARTY LIKE IT'S 1983. In response to U.S. plans to base anti-ballistic missile interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic, a Russian general yesterday hinted that Russia might withdraw from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Force Treaty, and even start building SS-20s again. General Solovtsov also said that Poland and the Czech Republic will find themselves targeted by additional Russian missiles.

The interceptors and the radar system are intended to counter a missile launch from a Middle Eastern country (Iran, one must presume), but Russia is concerned that they can be upgraded to threaten Russian missiles. Poland and the Czech Republic are going along with this in order to cement their relationships with the United States, although it's hard to see how preventing an Iranian attack (startlingly unlikely; aren't the Iranians going to fire all their missiles at Israel?) is worth increasing Russian hostility. On the other hand, the Poles and Czechs may simply assume that Russia is going to be hostile anyway, a position that's hardly unreasonable.

Still, it's fascinating to see that we're almost back to the 1980s, with Russia threatening to ramp up production of SS-20s. The SS-20 was a particularly scary mobile intermediate range ballistic missile the development of which helped catalyze the arms control agreements of the second half of the 1980s. The INF Treaty demonstrated that the Soviet Union and the United States could work together, and contributed in an important way to the disintegration of the Soviet Union's national security state.

--Robert Farley

INTRIGUING NEWS If you have any interest in the Scooter Libby trial, or in the past and future of the Vice President, you'll want to check out this piece from Murray Waas, who has consistently done the best reporting on the CIA leak case.

--Jeff Lomonaco

UNIONBUSTING IN OP-ED FORM. Kevin already did important yeoman's work pointing out some of the simple factual inaccuracies riddling Russell Roberts' anti-union screed, but it's worth noting what a conceptual mess the article is. Roberts writes, "When more than 90% of the private-sector labor force isn't unionized, why do 97% of us earn above the minimum wage? If our bargaining power is so pitiful, why don't greedy employers exploit us and drive wages down to the legal minimum?"

This seems like a discussion question at the end of an Introduction to Economics textbook chapter. And Roberts' answer is about as illuminating. Meanwhile, the issue with unions is, in the immortal words of Samuel Gompers, "more." Just because the median laborer is clearing $5.15 doesn't mean he's making as much he theoretically could. Distribution matters. Unions get more for their workers, a "more" that would otherwise fall into executive pockets and corporate profits. The question isn't whether they save us from economic dystopia, but whether they make the economy better for the median participant.

Indeed, Roberts' final conclusion eviscerates his point. "A better way to increase wages [than unions]," he writes, "is to make workers more productive. That lifts everyone's standard of living." At least it did. In the post-war era, worker salaries tracked productivity increases rather precisely. This was also the high period of union density in America. Post-1979 or so, that link shattered. "Coincidentally," this is around when Reagan and his merry band of plutocrats effectively legalized and encouraged unionbusting. In the past few decades, economists have shown that productivity increases are going almost entirely to the top tenth, while median incomes stagnate or retreat. Without unions and robust worker bargaining power, those magic productivity increases haven't been doing much for workers. But Roberts, of course, doesn't tell you that.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE TRADE QUAGMIRE. Robert Kuttner tells us about the coming four-way collision over trade policy.

--The Editors

FORWARD-LOOKING INSURERS? Tyler Cowen's argument against Medicare-For-All is really quite strange. He writes that "Private insurance has been covering prescription drugs for -- what -- about twenty-five years?...So when it comes to the one thing that really works, government insurance was twenty or more years behind private insurance." Let's argue this in a numbered, Cowen-esque way.

1) The example proves the point. Medicare was barred from covering prescription drugs -- and is currently kept from negotiating down their prices -- by the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, who spent hundreds of millions lobbying against Medicare's entrance into this most profitable market. Those millions, passed onto consumers through premiums and prices, added no value to the system, but kept the elderly from getting necessary drugs at affordable prices. This all goes to show the essential undesirability of a prviate insurance system, and the necessity of a Medicare-for-All structure.

2) Medicare's eventual entrance into prescription drugs, over the screeching opposition of the industry, was evidence of the insurers' failure to hold down the cost of drugs. As the recent Lewin Group report on American health care spending found, we overpay for prescription drugs by $66 billion. If you compare brand name drugs in the US and Canada, the same drug will cost you a full 60% more here. If you restrict that to the top selling drugs, you find we pay 230% more than anyone else. For generics, the difference evaporates. So on average, we overpay by 60-70% for pharmaceuticals. So somehow, all those other countries with systems more similar to Medicare-for-All were squeezing discounts of 50%-70% compared to America's private delivery systems. For years, domestic insurers were politically successful in blocking Medicare's entrance but absolutely incompetent at holding down costs. Eventually, their failure overwhelmed their political success.

3) Medicare Part D, which most everyone agrees is an oddly-designed program that sidesteps Medicare's natural economies of scale and bargaining power, has already scared insurers into providing better service, and so their premiums have clocked in below expectations. That's not only because the insurers fear the more aggressive entrance of Medicare, but because Medicare has been managing them. As Nobel Laureate Daniel McFadden found, "First, the success of Part D depends substantially on thoughtful and muscular management of the market...A health insurance market like Part D probably requires this level of active management to work well; after-the-fact oversight in the style of the SEC or FTC is inadequate. If privatization is going to work elsewhere in health care, active market management will be needed."

On no level, in no way, have private insurers proven uniquely or even particularly capable of effectively delivering pharmaceuticals at a low cost. Indeed, their basic strategy of simply channeling increases into premiums while ignoring the cost-savings offered by formularies and tough negotiations has allowed a flowering of me-too drugs and comparative gouging. Medicare's late entrance into the market was part and parcel of this inefficiency -- the insurers spent hundreds of millions in consumer dollars preventing it, eventually lost, and have been better behaved as the threat of government competition loomed larger. And even now, they are putting money and resources into preventing Medicare from bargaining down prices. Medicare's tardiness is not a lack of foresight, it's evidence of how the insurers are not working in the best interests of consumers.

--Ezra Klein

JOHN MCCAIN'S CONSISTENT OPPOSITION TO REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM. Given the news that John McCain has forcefully denounced Roe v. Wade, the understandable liberal reaction is to point out the inconsistency of this legendary Straight Talker (TM). And I agree, in general, that the media myths about McCain's increasingly risible claims to independence need debunking. Given the unpopularity of his position, though, when it comes to forced pregnancy it should be pointed out that his record is in fact fundamentally consistent: he's for it. He has a 0% NARAL rating. He's never met a federal abortion regulation he doesn't like. He voted for Robert Bork, which would have meant Roe being overturned 15 years ago. He favors a constitutional amendment banning abortion. It's true that he has said that he wouldn't want his daughter forced by the state to carry a pregnancy to term, but basically all American social conservatism comes with an implicit self-exemption for rich white people, and John McCain's daughter won't have a problem obtaining a safe abortion if Roe is overturned.

So while McCain made some egregious panders about abortion when running in a primary in which his major opponent already had the social conservative vote locked up, McCain is in fact a consistent supporter of criminalized abortion.

--Scott Lemieux

WE ARE THE DEADLY WARRIORS. David Brooks's recent column (behind a firewall but I summarize it here sufficiently, I hope) on how the conservatives are correct about human nature is hilarious. In short, he argues that we humans (though I think he really means male humans) are malevolent brutes, intent on status competition and clubbing the cavewoman out before dragging her off to a life of housewifery in the cave. Well, I added that last bit, but I have an excuse, because the whole article encourages such humorous additions.

Take this paragraph, for example:

Over the past 30 years or so, however, this belief in natural goodness has been discarded. It began to lose favor because of the failure of just about every social program that was inspired by it, from the communes to progressive education on up. But the big blow came at the hands of science.

From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it has become clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest. Humanity did not come before status contests. Status contests came before humanity, and are embedded deep in human relations. People in hunter-gatherer societies were deadly warriors, not sexually liberated pacifists. As Steven Pinker has put it, Hobbes was more right than Rousseau.

And what about the "lessons from evolutionary biology"? It is actually evolutionary psychology Brooks appeals to here, and not biology. That he adds stuff about "neurons" is just intended to make his arguments look more scientific. But as far as I know, all the theories from evolutionary psychology are just that: theories and conjectures, not based on genetic information at all. It's impossible to go back in time to gather the necessary evidence. Were "people" in hunter-gatherer societies "deadly warriors" as Brooks argues? All of them? Even the women? Why are those societies called hunter-gatherers, then? And didn't I read somewhere that the current hunter-gatherer societies get most of their foods from gathering? The deadly warriors clubbing the mushrooms?

In any case, many evolutionary psychologists see and study quite different aspects of human behavior in the past. Altruism, for example. But mentioning such studies would have blunted Brooks's point, which is that the conservatives are always right about human nature. And according to Brooks, human nature is inelastic. It can't change. The band will snap. Now, this part doesn't even appear to require any evidence, though it's a crucial link in his argument. Never mind the enormous flexibility human beings are continuously demonstrating in all sorts of different ways. In Brooks's world I'm typing this with a club. Or I would be if I were a man.

The culmination of his piece is probably this bit:

Today, parents don't seek to liberate their children; they supervise, coach and instruct every element of their lives. Today, there really is no antinomian counterculture -- even the artists and rock stars are bourgeois strivers. Today, communes and utopian schemes are out of favor. People are mostly skeptical of social engineering efforts and jaundiced about revolutionaries who promise to herald a new dawn. Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state.

But might I point out that the situation in Iraq is not exactly the kind which usually exists in a country. Brooks suggests that we would see something just like Iraq if Iceland suddenly lost its government, for example. I very much doubt it. Iraq was invaded, after a long period of rule which favored one group in the society over other groups, and in the post-invasion period the country was used as the flytrap for all the Islamic terrorists out there. That much of this was done by the very same conservatives Brooks so agrees with is ignored in his column. Something that should be seen as a great failure of American neoconservatism is written by him as a proof that conservatism was correct. Sigh.

For a much more elegant treatment of Brooks's column, see Power of Narrative.

--J. Goodrich

AN UNREASONABLE ARGUMENT: So I saw "An Unreasonable Man," the documentary on Ralph Nader that is coming out this week. From the previews I was expecting a sharply produced even-handed examination of Nader and his legacy. What I got instead was a kitschy piece of propaganda. The film, which was filled with unintentionally comical images flying across the screen and oddball music choices, gave an impression of Nader that was absurdly skewed in his favor.

While the early parts of the film that discussed his work as a consumer advocate were reasonably interesting, its second half was totally bizarre. It said nothing about what Nader has done since the mid 1980s besides run for president four times. It treats the fact that Nader runs every four years with a seriousness it would never show other perenial candidates like, say, Harry Browne. Most egregiously it gives considerable air time to factually false and intellectually dishonest arguements in support of Nader's 2000 presidential candidacy. A few examples:

--You see Katie Couric declaring on election night that Nader voters mostly would not have voted if he had not run so he probably did not swing the outcome. There is no mention of the fact that the definitive exit polls results showed that twice as many of his voters said they would have voted for Gore than for Bush had he not been on the ballot, so clearly his candidacy did cost Gore more votes than Bush, and more than Bush's margin in Florida.

--An irate Nader supporter demands to know why Democrats complain about Nader instead of noting the millions of Democrats who voted for Bush, or the fact that Gore didn't carry Tennessee or Arkansas. Well, Democrats who voted for Bush, or swing voters in TN or AR presumbaly found Gore too liberal. The way to win them over would have been to tack to the right, which would only have further incensed Nader. So this complaint from a Nader partisan is pure intellectual dishonesty.

-A political scientist claims that based on his analysis of which states Nader visited he sees no evidence of an attempt to be a spoiler on Nader's part, that he was just maximizing votes. He does not bother to address the question of whether Nader's candidacy itself was simply a spoiler run.

--The film argues that Nader's exclusion from the presidential debates in 2000 was unjust, as if the notion that only allowing candidates who might actually win the election is self-evidently absurd. Why, the film asks, does a candidate who will clearly impact the outcome and can draw thousands to a rally get excluded? The answer, obviously, is that it would be total chaos to allow anyone who might impact the outcome, which is to say anyone on the ballot, in the debates. Do we really need the Right-to-Life candidate to get as much airtime as the major party candidates? If you let in the Green you have to let in the rightwing loonies also.

Even the title, "An Unreasonable Man," is actually an unequivocal compliment since the movie opens with a quote explaining why only unreasonable people are responsible for any progress in the world. In sum, this movie is sloppy, wet kiss to a cranky old man who does more harm than good these days. And it will be especially pernicious if it persuades gullible viewers to support his next quixotic misadventure.

--Ben Adler

Clinton and Executive Power -- Enough, Already! The Times’ man on the Clinton beat, Patrick Healy, has an interesting story this morning on Senator Clinton’s new approach to the question of whether she should apologize for her 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq War, and the fight within Hillaryland on the subject. Apparently the winning strategy is to use a firm refusal to apologize as a symbol of her toughness and resolve. I have a feeling that strategy won’t hold for long -- not just because it won’t satisfy Democratic primary voters, but because it is exactly the definition of toughness that got us into this mess -- but I was more alarmed by the following passages:

Mrs. Clinton’s belief in executive power and authority is another factor weighing against an apology, advisers said. As a candidate, Mrs. Clinton likes to think and formulate ideas as if she were president - her ’responsibility gene,’ she has called it. In that vein, she believes that a president usually deserves the benefit of the doubt from Congress on matters of executive authority....

Her approach to leadership and national security was forged during her eight years in the White House: She believes in executive authority and Congressional deference, her advisers say, and is careful about suggesting that Congress can overrule a commander in chief.

I’m sympathetic to the fact that Clinton’s view of leadership was forged during a period when the president was besieged by a hostile, vicious Congress. And I accept that every president will have a somewhat aggressive view of executive power. All presidents, for example, refuse to completely accept the constitutionality of the War Powers Act, and all presidents would like to have the Line-Item Veto.

Further, I as much as anyone would like to see the next president have the power as well as the political capital to get things done -- to end the war, enact universal health care, etc.

However, we have just gone through a period of the most staggering expansion of executive power in history, and I suspect that we don’t know the half of it. The setup that was the Iraq resolution, the manipulation of the executive branch itself in order to deceive Congress was one example of it. The next president will have to comb through a mass of undisclosed executive orders, secret legal opinions, bizarre theories, manipulative structures, embedded political appointees, excessive classification, and let some daylight back in. The last thing we need at this moment is yet another president who "believes in executive authority and Congressional deference." We need a president who respects separation of powers and democracy. After all, the next president will not be our last.

These are not quotes from Senator Clinton herself, so I’ll look for further clarification, but it seems that in effect they would endorse the view that Bush did not even have an obligation to go to Congress to seek authorization for the use of force. If the question was legitimately before Congress, and as a Senator she had free will to vote yes or no based on the information available to her, then she should take Edwards’ approach and admit being misled. On the other hand, if she "is careful about suggesting that Congress can overrule a commander in chief can overrule a commander in chief," then is she saying that when Congress was given the opportunity to "overrule" Bush -- by refusing the 2002 authorization of use of force -- it would not have been legitimate to use it?

This is a very big issue for me, and Senator Clinton’s actual view of executive power should perhaps be a bigger issue than the "apology" itself for voters who are weighing the candidates.

-- Mark Schmitt.

WHITE HISTORY MONTH?: I think Gary Younge is really onto something in his column in this week's Nation. Writing about how February is Black History Month, he arges that there is a crucial component missing: examination of who the pepetrators of racism themselves have been. For instance, there is much discussion of Rosa Parks and what motivated her, but none of James Blake, the bus driver who told her to give up her seat. Says Younge:

So much of Black History Month takes place in the passive voice. Leaders "get assassinated," patrons "are refused" service, women "are ejected" from public transport. So the objects of racism are many but the subjects few. In removing the instigators, the historians remove the agency and, in the final reckoning, the historical responsibility.

--Ben Adler

A BLAST FROM THE PAST. One of the many list-servs I'm on is the Women, Action, & the Media list run by The Center for New Words in Boston. In the context of a broader discussion about women's worries about being seen as too pushy, I remarked that virtually every powerful woman in Washington about whom I know anything has a behind the scenes reputation as being either crazy or a bitch, and so perhaps people ought not to be so cowed by that word. In reply, Catherine Orenstein suggested that it has been ever thus, and that I read "Joreen" Jo Freeman's 1968 "The BITCH Manifesto". And so I did. Freeman wrote:

A true Bitch is self-determined, but the term "bitch" is usually applied with less discrimination. It is a popular derogation to put down uppity women that was created by man and adopted by women. Like the term "n*****," "bitch" serves the social function of isolating and discrediting a class of people who do not conform to the socially accepted patterns of behavior....

A Bitch is blunt, direct, arrogant, at times egoistic. She has no liking for the indirect, subtle, mysterious ways of the "eternal feminine." She disdains the vicarious life deemed natural to women because she wants to live a life of her own.

Our society has defined humanity as male, and female as something other than male. In this way, females could be human only by living vicariously thru a male. To be able to live, a woman has to agree to serve, honor, and obey a man and what she gets in exchange is at best a shadow life. Bitches refuse to serve, honor or obey anyone. They demand to be fully functioning human beings, not just shadows. They want to be both female and human. This makes them social contradictions.

Freeman herself seems like an interesting character. I'd never heard of her before yesterday, but she's apparently been active in American politics since the early 1960s, first as a student activist in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, then joining Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and working for a year and a half as a field organizer in Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi, before briefly serving as an assistant to Corretta Scott King and then moving to Chicago. There, she tried to become a journalist, but couldn't get a job because, as she says she was told, "girls couldn't cover riots." She started working for a trade magazine and founded the first branch of the National Organization of Women in Chicago, and the first second-wave feminist newsletter, the Voice of the women's liberation movement, from which the overall movement took its name. Freeman was (temporarily) driven out of the women's movement in 1970 (perhaps for being too much of an, um, bitch), and responded with some of the roughest condemnations of 1960s utopian social organizing you've ever read (click here for a condemnation of how women trash each other, and here for a blistering critique of the tyranny of so-called leaderless organizations.) After earning a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1973, her study of the women's movement won an American Political Science Association award, and identified a divide worth remembering today in light of contemporary demands that D.C. women's groups take on a new role in progressive organizing:

It identified two origins of the women's movement, one in the larger "Movement" of civil rights, youth and anti-war activists, and another in the network created by the President's and State Commissions on Women. From these came two branches, with different styles, structure and orientations. The "younger branch" worked through small, autonomous "rap" groups, creating numerous projects and publications. It was the source of most of the movement's ideas. The "older branch" formed national organizations such as NOW and WEAL, which lobbied, mounted major demonstrations, and translated feminist ideas into laws and regulations.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WSJ? I'm a bit freaked out to read such a cogent and smartly argued health care op-ed on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, but Nobel Laureate Daniel McFadden goes ahead and shocks me anyway. The piece recounts the author's research group, which has tracked the implementation and performance of Medicare Part D. McFadden, like most of us, is relatively pleased with Part D's performance, though it's worth saying that he seems to think liberals believed the program wouldn't work at all, rather than would simply cost more than it had to. The left made the latter charge, and I think it remains correct.

Regardless, these are quibbles, particularly in the face of such an anti-WSJ conclusion. First, he notes the cost benefits increased insulation from certain prices can bring:

Dana Goldman at RAND Corporation has found that making at least some drugs available to seniors at lower cost more than pays for itself in decreased incidence and cost of health problems. For example, reducing the copay on statins to $10 from $45 for a 30-day supply increased plan prescription drug payments, but the increased adherence of patients to the therapy at the lower copayment reduced cardiovascular incidents and attendant hospitalization costs, so that total annual health costs per patient in his study fell to $5,180 from $5,470.

A recent study of the VA population indicates that statins increase adult life expectancy by nearly two years, apparently because they act as anti-inflamatories as well as reducing cholesterol. Anecdotal evidence indicates that Part D coverage will reduce medical problems and hospitalization costs enough to offset a significant portion of its cost. However, reduced adherence to therapies by consumers who hit the gap will probably have a significant adverse effect on health outcomes that we will begin to see in 2007. A humorous proposal is that employers could lower their total health-care bills by putting statins and anti-hypertensives in the water cooler.

the success of Part D depends substantially on thoughtful and muscular management of the market. The former head of Medicare, Mark McClellan, and a dynamic, no-nonsense 75-year-old government bureaucrat, Abby Block, bullied insurers to make sure there were, in her words, "no bad choices." It is unclear whether their successors will be as successful in standing toe-to-toe with the industry and making sure consumers' interests are protected.

A health insurance market like Part D probably requires this level of active management to work well; after-the-fact oversight in the style of the SEC or FTC is inadequate. If privatization is going to work elsewhere in health care, active market management will be needed.

--Ezra Klein

A MODEST QUESTION. To ruthlessly steal from Scott and his earlier post about the Edwards bloggers and Joan Walsh of the Salon: I have a question, and it has to do with this quote by Walsh:

Clinton hired Peter Daou, who'd run John Kerry's Internet operation and later licensed his Daou Report to Salon (it is now the Blog Report, run by Steve Benen). But given the netroots' distrust of Clinton, especially her failure to firmly repudiate her vote authorizing the Iraq war, Edwards was emerging as a possible blogger favorite, especially after he hired the swashbuckling and unabashedly feminist Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan to blog for him. When I heard the news I found myself thinking, boy, Edwards is really running a ballsy campaign. And then the thought quickly followed: Has he or his top staff ever really read those bloggers?

The posts that got them in trouble were intemperate in their take on Catholicism, but that's not the only thing they've been intemperate about. They are young and brash. Like many of us, they sometimes blogged first and asked questions later. Their blogs are passionate and sometimes funny; the writing is uneven, but the commitment to candor and to street-fighting the right wing are not.

Although I'm an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised. And I despise anyone who insults the sustaining values and symbol system of so many millions of people of different races around the world. An authentically avant-garde artist today would show his or her daring by treating religion sympathetically. Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents. When will artists climb out of the postmodernist ditch and accept their high mission to address a general audience? An art of chic coteries, whether in rococo aristocratic France or in drearily ironic, nervously posturing New York, ends up in a mental mousehole.

--J. Goodrich

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ALL SMILES AND WHEN COUNTRY WENT RIGHT. Terry Samuel gives us yet another reason why everyone seems to love Barack Obama:

Heart-warning, inclusive, all-American. The bad, racial-hatred part of the story never comes. Obama's emphasis is not on the horrors of the past injustice but on a kind of human decency that transcended it. And it is exactly this lack of grievance in Obama's politics that has made some call his "blackness" into question.

Also, ethnomusicologist J. Lester Feder explains that country music and conservatism haven't always gone hand-in-hand. In the pre-Nixon era, the Dixie Chicks would have fit right into the country music mainstream.

--The Editors

A MODEST REQUEST. Would it be possible for people discussing the Edwards blog pseudo-scandal to stop discussing Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan as if they're the same person? OK, from Dan Gerstein, what do you expect, but could Joan Walsh get this straight? In context, isn't it kind of important that one of these two women, as far as I can tell, never wrote specifically about Catholicism--the ostensible basis of the "bigotry" charges--at all? Do all young liberal women just look and write alike? Yeesh.

--Scott Lemieux

GLAD TO SEE IT. The NBA has responded to Tim Hardaway's homophobic rantings by bouncing him from all promotions for this weekend's All Start Game. Good for them.

--Ezra Klein

OCCAM'S POLITICIAN. Thank God for Badler in the post below. I really don't know why people keep trying to chalk up Hillary's opinions to pandering and circumstances rather than admitting that she's simply not all that progressive, but it's long past time to face reality. Plenty of folks in the country may agree with her cautious hawkishness, and even more may believe an incrementalist, technocratic approach is the right way to use the presidency -- but there's really no reason to think either position of hers is insincere, and even less to invent new explanations for the ideological preferences she consistently demonstrates. She has a bunch of semi-hawkish advisors because she's semi-hawkish -- whether they made her that way or they all just agree is really neither here nor there. Meanwhile, I don't really know what Big Mike means when he suggests that HRC is desperate to retain the favor of the establishment types. She is the establishment, and whoever's currently in her favor gets a laminated card making them a member, too.

--Ezra Klein

HRC AND THE FOREIGN POLICY ELITE. Far be it from me to disagree with our erstwhile boss man, Mike Tomasky, but I was intrigued by his post on "Comment is Free," the online opinion page of the Guardian. Mike argues that the reason Hillary Clinton refuses to admit that she was wrong to support the Iraq War is the influence of the foreign policy establishment: "This is a bunch whose views are well to the right of the Democratic primary electorate. And it is a bunch in whose good graces Hillary Clinton, a cautious and establishment politician at her core, is fervent to stay."

Well, he's certainly right about the first point, as he illustrates with figures like Ken Pollack and Richard Holbrooke. On the second, though, I'd offer a slightly different analysis. I'm not sure that Senator Clinton is so concerned with sucking up to those guys -- I think if she moves to the left to get elected they'll still gladly take jobs from her. I think she, being in some sense a member of that same cadre, simply subscribes to the same way of thinking that they do.

As Mike points out, the foreign policy elite include many former government officials. Just as the Clintons became more hawkish after eight years of actually serving (or being so close to it, in Hillary's case), isn't it possible the same thing happened to their advisors who now fill the ranks of Brookings et al? (A more cynical, but equally valid, explanation might be the effect of eight years of being influenced by the group think that emerges from career military officials and bureaucrats.) I, for one, though I disagreed with their support for the war from the beginning, never doubted the Clintons' sincerity.

Correction: This post originally stated that Mike neglected to mention that many foreign policy elites also served in government. I regret the error.

--Ben Adler

WHAT AMNESIA? Brendan O'Neill has a column in The Guardian's "Comment is Free" section about this magazine's history of commentary on the Iraq war.

For anyone who fell for wannabe president Hillary Clinton's claim last week that she did not vote for pre-emptive war in Iraq, and thus she is really more of a peacenick than a villainous hawk, American journalist Matthew Yglesias was on hand to provide a "history lesson"…

However, Hillary isn't the only one suffering from what we might call liberal amnesia, conveniently forgetting that she supported a war that has left Iraq a bloody and barbaric mess. Other liberals also gave the green light to the invasion and now seem to be suffering from a similar bump-on-the-head forgetfulness. Consider Yglesias's own magazine, American Prospect.

The thing about Hillary Clinton is that she's a single human being. It makes sense to ask a person to account for what they themselves believed or did in the past. The thing about a magazine's content is that it is written by many different human beings over different periods of time. The Prospect is a liberal political magazine, but that encompasses a range of opinions on subjects and we've aired plenty of different voices and views over the years on all sorts of things. The articles O'Neill cites are all freely accessible on our archives, as is all of our past content -- it's hard to say what "accounting" is owed here, just as it's hard to know what he means by "amnesia." Matt, for one, has always been upfront about being an initial supporter of the war who now thinks he was wrong, and the magazine has published plenty on the subject of reconceiving and/or clarifying liberal foreign policy doctrine in light of the Iraq debacle. (Ooh, here's an example!) That's precisely what critics of Hillary Clinton's new claims about her own 2003-era position are saying the senator is failing to do. (Also, for clarification's sake, TAP hasn't been a "liberal bi-weekly" since January 2003.)

The broader point is a simple one. O'Neill never actually says that he thinks most American liberals or American liberal intellectuals initially supported the war, and I won't ascribe that claim to him. But it's important to stress that such a notion really is wrong: I love as much as the next guy to bash liberal hawks and the "strategic class" and agree that they have disproportional influence in progressive circles, but the expressed majority line at TAP was always against the war, as was the line at every left-of-center publication except TNR, as it was with most liberal writers and pundits, as it was with the majority of the combined House and Senate Democratic caucuses, etc. As Richard wrote in the column O'Neill cites, "We now find ourselves about to go to war with Iraq, and most liberals have lined up against such an invasion." That was true!

--Sam Rosenfeld

DIVERSITY OF WHAT? I like Kay's linkage of geographical quotas and diversity quotas. To suggest that maybe women should have vaguely equal-esque representation in the House of Representatives is seen as crazy, totally unAmerican. But of course the four bearded men and a dog who live in Montana should get precisely the Senatorial clout of the tens of millions inhabiting California. Why the experience of being a Montanan is more unique and worthy of political protection than that of being a woman isn't immediately apparent, but never mind. The Founders made it this way and they had magic wisdom wigs.

--Ezra Klein

OPENING BID: $50,000. Walter Mondale's boyhood home in Elmore, Minn. is listed on eBay. So far, no bids.

-- Kay Steiger

ANTI-SEX LOGIC. As someone who endured many abstinence assemblies during my 13 years in Catholic school, I wasn't terribly shocked by yesterday's news that Montgomery County junior high kids are being forced to share chewing gum to demonstrate why sex is icky. Another well-known abstinence-only "game" is to have the kids suck on a lollipop, then try to put it back in the wrapper and see if any other kids would like to suck on it now. In my high school there was a more sanitary demonstration using pizza as the metaphor. The message: If you shared a slice of your pizza with everyone, you'd be left with an empty box. It always seemed confusing... didn't they want me to start out with and maintain an "empty box," so to speak, rather than end up there?

Meanwhile at the college level, the abstinence logic is equally confusing. In response to some campus groups who pass out condoms and Hershey's kisses on Valentine's Day, a few anti-contraception groups gave away free chocolate bars yesterday.

The wrappers said, "TRUE LOVE is worth more than contraception." And inside the wrapper was written, "It makes sense that condoms are handed out today with nothing more than a tiny chocolate kiss. This reflects how little love you can express while using one. Using contraception tells your lover, 'I don't want to share every part of myself with you.'"

Yeah. If you REALLY loved someone, you'd want to share your raging case of gonorrhea. Isn't that sweet?

--Ann Friedman

THE LIVEBLOGGING OF THE LIBBY TRIAL. The New York Times yesterday had a pretty nice piece on something of a phenomenon out of the Libby trial -- the coverage by firedoglake.

Initially, a different group of bloggers covering the trial - Media Bloggers Association - seemed to get all the attention. But there can really be no question that their coverage was completely overshadowed by the centerpiece of fdl's: the extraordinary liveblogging done by my friend Marcy Wheeler, supplemented by Swopa's during the week Marcy was away from the trial. (Full disclosure: I did one guest post over there on the trial.) What made the liveblogging extraordinary was not just that Marcy was able to keep up with the fast pace in the courtroom. It was that she both knows the case at such a granular level of detail and understands how those granular details fit into the larger context of what is at stake in the proceedings, so that she has been able to produce a very reliable non-transcript of the moment-by-moment proceedings, available for anyone interested. The Times notes that many mainstream journalists used fdl's liveblogging to check on the trial. I understand other VIPs with a hand in the case did as well. This is an instance where bloggers' ability to dig into a topic in a way that, for very practical reasons, is usually impossible for reporters at daily newspapers produced entirely good results.

I don't know if there's any larger lesson about the blogosphere in the media here. I doubt anything like this will happen again; it's just too much a unique confluence of circumstances. And I'm rather doubtful that the net effect of the trial for the fraught issue of relations between bloggers and the press will be positive, on account of the vitriol expressed toward several members of the press, particularly Tim Russert, by many of the bloggers following the case, not just on the right but on the left too. (In my view, some on the left bought way too much into the defense's rather misleading representations of Russert's positions and conduct.) But there can be no question that Marcy's liveblogging constitutes an event in the history of the blogosphere.

--Jeff Lomonaco

THE 30 PERCENT RULE. Women's E-News reported today that Chile is debating a quota law for women in congressional representation. The article noted that more than 50 countries around the world have laws requiring a certain percentage of women hold offices in congress or parliament. Opponents of the law in Chile say it will be tricky to implement because it may "threaten the political longevity of at least some male legislators."

Clara Bingham pointed out that despite the new female leadership in Congress, women still fall far below quotas set in third-world countries like Rwanda and first-world countries like Sweden. Even the new constitution implemented in Iraq required quotas for women. This opens it up to discussion, especially considering our geographically based system of representation, how the United States could push for gender equality in government.

-- Kay Steiger

HOW 'BOUT THAT. A Democratic majority successfully asserts its will:

A vote to criticize President Bush for his decision to send more troops to Iraq is expected to pass the House in a rare admonishment of a wartime commander-in-chief.

Democrats who wrote the nonbinding measure and back it with near unanimity were clear that it would set the stage for more decisive steps to constrain Bush's warmaking powers. They proposed ideas to put legislative strings on future funding in Iraq and prevent any pre-emptive invasion of Iran....

The anxiously awaited vote was expected by Friday afternoon.

This is why that stupid plane story became such a big deal -- how better to start the process of tarnishing the only Democratic leader in a real position to oppose the president and oversee changes in American laws?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Three new pieces up this afternoon: Jason Motlagh reports on the debilitating corruption in Afghanistan's government; Addie ruminates on race, culture, and our abandonment of New Orleans; and Daniel Levy lays out how to respond to the Palestinian Mecca agreement.

--The Editors

LIBBY, PLAME, AND THE NIE. The defense rested in the Scooter Libby trial yesterday, after offering a very brief case and without, of course, calling either Libby himself or Vice President Cheney. Was this a sign of the defense's confidence? Or a sign it believed Libby's odds on appeal were better than at trial, and that therefore it was better to avoid the political damage that may have been caused by Libby and Cheney's cross-examinations?

Byron York makes the argument from strength today, suggesting that the defense is hoping that the jury will take away a negative impression of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald after listening to eight hours of tapes of him questioning Libby before the grand jury back in March 2004. In the course of illustrating this claim, York makes an important error:

The grand-jury recording also revealed Fitzgerald exploring the possibility that a different leak -- that of information contained in the National Intelligence Estimate concerning reasons for war in Iraq -- might have been a criminal act. Libby testified that the portions of the NIE he leaked to Judith Miller had been specifically authorized by the president, through the vice president, and with the approval of the vice president's counsel. (The leak occurred a short time before the entire NIE was declassified.) Nevertheless, Fitzgerald, who appears to have been trying to expand his investigation beyond the original Valerie Plame Wilson leak, spent an inordinate length of time during both of Libby's grand-jury appearances asking him about the NIE.

It's true that Fitzgerald spent a lot of time questioning Libby about his leak of the October 2002 NIE on purported Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium in Africa. But York misunderstands what Fitzgerald was doing. He was interested in whether Libby's story, that the NIE leak was the purpose of his meeting with Judith Miller, might have been a partial truth designed to cover up the fact that that meeting -- initiated at the behest of Dick Cheney -- was really (or also) for the purpose of leaking Valerie Plame's identity, which is what Libby is alleged to have done. In other words, Fitzgerald was pursuing what I suggested yesterday was a theory of a narrow coordinated effort by Libby and Cheney to blow Plame's cover by leaking to Miller.

Libby testified that he leaked what he called the NIE's flat declarative statement that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake" for the first time during the July 8 conversation with Miller. But Fitzgerald had evidence that in fact Libby had previously leaked that very passage to David Sanger of the New York Times and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.

In other words, Libby's story that the purpose of the unusual Miller meeting was to leak portions of the NIE for the first time did not hold up to much scrutiny. And Fitzgerald apparently suspected it was a story covering for the real purpose of the meeting: to direct Miller to Wilson's wife, the CIA officer.

Cheney and President Bush, who were evidently questioned about the story of the NIE declassification, must have backed up Libby's version. And there's no way the pair of them would have participated in a cover story to protect Libby.

Though York misunderstands Fitzgerald's motivations in questioning Libby about the delcassification and leak of the NIE, he could still be right about the response of the jury. One of the most significant victories won by Libby's defense in the legal wrangling was evidently to get all or at least most reference to pre-July 8 leaks of the NIE kept away from the jury. So the trial jury may indeed have misunderstood the import of Fitzgerald's insistent questioning of it the same way that York has. Whether that would help Libby secure an acquittal, or a hung jury, I have no idea.

--Jeff Lomonaco

ON MINNESOTA POLITICS. Al Franken has been saying he's going to run for Senate for a while now. (As the aforementioned Minnesota native on staff, I especially love this colorful illustration of Minnesotans depicted as simpletons courtesy the New York Times.) The recent announcement just made it official. I'm going to venture out on a limb and say Franken actually has a shot. Remember, he's running against Norm Coleman, who got elected following Paul Wellstone's tragic death. And Norm Coleman actually used to be a Democrat back when he was elected mayor of St. Paul.

Really, it's going to come down to the DFL nomination, because although outstate Minnesota is fairly conservative, statewide elections are decided mostly by the residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul (overwhelmingly liberal). In fact, I remember Minneapolis' CityPages making the comment once that in Minneapolis, it's the Green Party on the left and the DFL on the right. The fact is, Minnesota suffers from Ralph Nader syndrome. The far-lefties want to give third parties a chance, but it usually screws over the Democrats, as we saw with Tim Pawlenty's re-election. I guess Minnesota needs to look seriously at implementing Instant Runoff Voting.

Don't forget, we're the state that made electing former professional wrestlers cool.

--Kay Steiger

FRANKEN. So Al Franken is running for Senate in Minnesota. His announcement video -- and has anyone else noticed the announcement video's sudden ubiquity? Who's giving the country's campaign managers webcams? -- is here, and it's quite good. Word on the street is he's listening to policy-wonk-to-the-stars (and occasional TAP contributor) Jacob Hacker, and you can see the Hackerian (is that a word? Can I make it one?) concern for the insecurity and economic woes of the middle class in Franken's message. On the other hand, I'm sort of surprised to see Franken going the substantive route, rather than using his comedic chops to puncture the pretensions of Washington and promise a new down-to-earthniess in the capitol. I don't know if he'll be able to make that transition, and would hope he turns his comedic identity into a sort of strength on the trail. Otherwise, he'll be trying to run from himself, and that never works. But then, I really don't know what works on polar bear voters. Luckily, we have a Minnesotan native on staff, and I hope she'll chime in shortly...

--Ezra Klein

RE: THE TABLE. In case I was unclear, I agree with the other Klein. If Iran, say, attacks America, then yes, all options are "on" the table. But I think the possible outcomes of us going to war with them are much worse than the outcomes of them developing nukes. So war shouldn't be on the table regarding their nuclear program. I don't think we, as a country, have the moral standing to militarily dictate who does and does not develop weapons, and the drawbacks to trying to do so would be immense.

Also, I think Atrios does a good job making explicit what I didn't. The very formulation of "all options on the table" is a threat. "We don't hear leaders saying, "we hope to come to a trade agreement with El Salvador, but until we do all options are on the table," because we're not trying to threaten them with war...If Bush is interested in war then the impact of a bunch of presidential candidates throwing out threats of war is to validate that view." In fact, this is a very simple question. "Would you go to war to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons?" I'm hearing a lot of folks say (but not convincingly argue) that diplomatically they need to retain that freedom. But this is not an abstract issue, and we voters have a right to know whether the announcement of Iranian nukes would trigger a military response or not. It's sort of an important policy choice, and it's a little odd that we're allowing them so much latitude on the question. I assume it's because we believe that the answer, deep down, is "no," but I'm not sure that that's always a safe assumption.

--Ezra Klein

QUEER EYE FOR THE SPORTS GUYS. As a straight guy, I can tell you how easy it is for straight guys to make fun of gay men who are demonstrably effeminate. (I’d be lying if I said I have never made gay jokes; in certain settings straight men often make gay remarks, often about and to each other.) So, for example, Carson Kressley from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy makes a convenient target because he fits the even more convenient stereotype: a thin, neat, self-described sissy who proudly knows his way around Sephora.

That’s probably why former NBA star Tim Hardaway freaked out upon learning that a 6’10”, 270-pounder like John Amaechi, with whom he used to share a locker room, is gay. Ditto for the news last year that former Minnesota Vikings lineman Esera Tuaolo is a homosexual -- with a hubby and two adopted kids now, to boot.

Kressley is a guy you could -- pardon the pun -- lick in a fight; Amaechi and Tuaolo, not so much. The bothersome part is not that they might be looking at your ass, but that they could kick your ass. Beneath all the “ruins team morale” stuff, that is what I suspect is most troubling -- a gay man who can compete in the most physically demanding, even punishing, of professional sports.

--Tom Schaller

OFF THE TABLE. Well, whaddya know -- one potential '08 candidate has already taken a military strike on Iran off the table. Republican Chuck Hagel said the following, according to a Think Progress summary of an April 2006 Reuters story:

“I do not expect any kind of military solution on the Iran issue,” Hagel told a news conference. … “I think to further comment on it would be complete speculation, but I would say that a military strike against Iran, a military option, is not a viable, feasible, responsible option,” he added. … “Iran is a complicated issue. I think that a responsible approach to these challenges is to work closely with our friends and allies, in this case Pakistan, with the United Nations, with the IAEA,” he said. “I believe a political settlement will be the answer. Not a military settlement. All these issues will require a political settlement,” Hagel said.

--Garance Franke-Ruta