DEMOCRATS AND SECURITY. Two more brief notes related to the Democratic security plan. First, the Iraq material is, of course, some pretty thin gruel. The Dems' position on Iraq involves calling for 2006 to be a "significant year of transition," even though the party won't have a chance to actually affect policy until (possibly) 2007 -- this confusion is sort of inherent to an "agenda statement" that's really a campaign document. Beyond that, their failure to specify any actual mechanisms by which the United States can induce "Iraqis [to] make the political compromises necessary to unite their country" is understandable, given that such mechanisms don't exist, but substantively it points to some rather starker conclusions about the right way forward. Various Democrats disagree in good faith about this issue so the banality on display here is probably unavoidable, but on the merits it’s problematic.

Secondly (and this is only tangentially related to the Real Security plan), one tendency liberals ought to avoid is conflating "support the troops" policies like boosting veterans' benefits, health care, and mental health services -- all important and valuable positions in their own right -- with a national security posture that actually addresses public suspicions about Democratic weakness on defense and foreign policy. These positions on social services and benefits are really just straight-up, bread-and-butter liberal domestic policies, only aimed at a military constituency. I think Americans recognize that, and that's why highlighting Democratic support for such measures isn't a particularly effective rejoinder against right-wing "soft on defense" attacks. I should caution that I don't actually mean this as a criticism in any way of the Democrats' Real Security plan, which covers a lot of ground beyond social service support for troops and vets, and engages major national security issue areas (terrorism, homeland security, Iraq, etc.). But it is a tendency I've noticed among plenty of liberals and Democratic politicians before.

The real sources of Democratic political weakness on defense issues go deep, and aren't all reducible to messaging -- they have to do with things like nationalism and war-making. Without, say, Democrats actually becoming a more affirmatively pro-war party (something I wouldn't want to see happen), I tend to think that, to at least some degree, this political vulnerability is intrinsic and insoluble, though Matt has certainly written extensively on ways it could be mitigated significantly.

--Sam Rosenfeld

SO MANY PLANS, SO LITTLE TIME. For those of you confused by the various plans out there (at last count, there are no fewer than eight, and at least four are seriously being considered), this side-by-side comparison (PDF) from the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute is the best summary you'll find. Remember, too, that guest-worker programs don't just come in terribly bad and pretty bad flavors; the McCain-Kennedy plan offers so many routes to citizenship that their guest-worker program isn't too bad at all, though I'd prefer the path to citizenship be activated instantly after hire.

--Ezra Klein

POST-PATRIOTIC PROGRESSIVES AND THE PUNDITS WHO LOVE THEM. I found this post of Michael Lind's, supposedly lampooning post-patriotic progressives who believe nation-states outmoded and all men to be brothers, notably absurd. Lind's a sharp mind and a good writer, so it's strange to see him swing and miss so widely. The question in the immigration debate is not one of globalization but one of tradeoffs: Should we help tens of millions of desperate immigrants pull themselves and their families from third-world levels of poverty at a cost of -- and this is the high estimate -- eight percent wage depression for native high school dropouts? Cruelty, thy name is McCain-Kennedy!

It is, of course, straight pretense to pretend the issue is a simple tradeoff between the advancement of citizens and the betterment of immigrants. If you somehow did staunch the flow of immigrants and deport the undocumented, you would destroy a hefty chunk of the remittances that currently help keep Mexico stable, in addition to worsening their labor glut and unemployment rates. Come an economic downturn, Mexico is more likely to crash, and if our second-largest trading partner takes a nosedive, you better believe America's readying to belly-flop, which is never a good thing for our low-skilled workers.

As for the enforcement crowd, Lind paints them as brave defenders of the national interest, beset on all sides by googly-eyed one-worlders wrapped in hemp and waxing rhapsodic over the brotherhood of all beings. How cold-eyed and realistic of him! But before you swoon, remember: enforcement has been massively increased over the past few decades and has proved an embarrassing failure, leading to nothing but perverse consequences and broken families. I'm all for policing the border and rationalizing the inflow -- not least because it'd lead to fewer immigrants perishing in the desert heat -- but we've been doing that and it hasn't worked. At a certain point, results should supersede biases, and a hard-edged insistence on enforcement and punishment just places you shoulder-to-shoulder with the xenophobes and racists advocating the criminalization of aid workers. I happen to prefer the company of those sympathetic to poor immigrants desperate to do backbreaking labor in search of a better life. That doesn't make me a post-patriotic progressive, it makes me a post-nativistic one.

--Ezra Klein

THE MUTE MAN WITH THE PLAN. One of my pet irritations is the long-standing, oft-repeated meme that Democrats lack ideas, or principles, or an agenda. Most often, the target is national security, which Democrats are supposedly rudderless on. At least they are if you listen to the media, which loves nothing more than to rewrite that same old story, peppered with quotes from the same unnamed analysts and consultants, lamenting the party's irresponsibility and incoherency on the nation's most existential threats. Which was why the release of the Democrat's "Real Security" plan was such an interesting test case. Here was a 127-page document supporting a two page statement of direction: redeployment away from Iraq, renewed focus on chasing bin Laden, increased urgency on energy independence, doubling of our special forces, new GI Bill, etc. You can quibble with it, but it was an actionable agenda on national security.

And then...nothing.

The New York Times ignored it, as did the LA Times, CNN and the other major networks. It's a case of the media ensuring their own storyline: If they uphold that Democrats lack a national security strategy and refuse to report that Democrats issue one, they've made their own narrative manifest. In politics, if you hold a press release and no one attends, it doesn't make a sound. Remember that next time Lou Dobbs sadly intones that "Democrats haven't come up with a single message, a straightforward proposal or plan." They've got the plan, but a fat lot of good a plan does if the press refuses to tell anybody about it.

UPDATE: Be sure to read Ben Adler's somewhat different take on this on Midterm Madness.

--Ezra Klein

THE SORT OF FOLKS YOU BRING HOME TO MOM. Got to love the American right. When a hostage gets kidnapped and killed in Iraq, they blast the left for insufficient outrage. When a hostage gets kidnapped and not killed, they speculate "something stinks," predict that she'll going to become a suicide bomber, and wonder if she's not already carrying "Habib's baby." Classy stuff.

--Ezra Klein

ARCANE INTERNATIONAL LAW BLEG.
Here’s a question that perhaps some of our readers with legal knowledge or relevant experience can weigh in on: citing security concerns, the prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone has asked to use the premises of the International Criminal Court in The Hague to try Charles Taylor. Should the deal go through, the special court would essentially rent the space from the ICC, but Taylor would remain under the special court’s jurisdiction.

My question is this: Under the American Sevicemembers’ Protection Act of 2002, all official US government cooperation with the ICC is expressly forbidden, absent a presidential waiver. It’s quite likely, however, that that American intelligence, and even US government officials, will be involved in Taylor’s prosecution. So does a change of venue to ICC premises require a presidential waiver? And if the waiver is not granted, does US law preclude American involvement in the Taylor prosecution should the trial take place on ICC premises?

I warned you that this was arcane. But my curious mind wants to know.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

LE SIGH. As Brad DeLong notes, Richard Cohen's admission that he didn't realize that Bush had lied until sometime last week is a bit absurd. If you don't think Bush is a liar, you simply haven't been paying attention. And if you haven't been paying attention, maybe you shouldn't be a Washington Post political columnist.

--Ezra Klein

THE VISION THING. Too many people too soon forgot about John Boehner's laugh-out-loud hilarious campaign manifesto released back during his House leadership race, in which the Ohio rep. included epigraphs from Winston Churchill and Walt Disney and implored his fellow Republicans to reclaim their souls through a renewed commitment to spewing vacuous platitudes. For a liberal, one of the funniest things in the memo (PDF) was Boehner's enthusiastic call for a big caucus-wide powwow to figure out what Republicans stand for and what their core principles are. Given the number of endless (and endlessly futile) "what do we stand for?" conference meetings and bull sessions that Democrats have masochistically forced themselves to endure since the 2004 election, one read Boehner's cheerful game plan and wanted to shout "No! Stop! You have no idea what you're getting into!" I had assumed that once Boehner actually took the helm in the House he'd soon forget about his silly mission-statement ideas, but to my great delight this Hill story mentions in passing that, apparently, Boehner's moving full speed ahead.

--Sam Rosenfeld

IN DEFENSE OF BLUE STATE ELITISM. I'm going to go a step further than my genteel colleague Sam and defend The Prospect's Red State Dossier on substantive grounds as well. Coming mere moments after an election that largely turned on a defense of "traditional marriage" and contempt for blue state values, it actually was the role of magazines like The Prospect, which don't need to worry about political expediency, to mount an assault on the rightwing's explicit claim of moral superiority. That such a dry recounting of data can be termed elitist, or anything save honest, is precisely the point.

That's what confuses me about Rob Anderson's article. If blue states, with their liberal policies, are actually seeing lower rates of social ills than red states, that says something important about the set of policy prescriptions best equipped to actualize so-called "family values." As our piece elegantly explained, the highest proportion of teenage births for a blue state was in Delaware, which nonetheless ranked behind 17 red states on the metric. New England turned out to be the least sexually promiscuous, while the defenders of morality in the crimson Mountain States admitted to having the most partners. Red states, too, had more divorces than blue states, while Massachusetts, under fire for threatening traditional marriage by allowing gays into the fold, had the lowest separation rate in the country.

These are outcomes in direct contradiction to much of the right's political rhetoric, and if progressives plan to mount a case for their viability on such issues, pointing out the reality is a good place to start. Conversely, running from their own record because they fear the "elitist" label would be both pathetic and counterproductive. Which isn't to say the left hasn't been doing exactly that for quite some time. If any Democratic candidate referred to Southern values, or Western states, with the knowing sneer that Republicans use when spitting out the word "Massachusetts," the outcry would be swift and vicious. Instead, Democrats kowtow to the importance and unquestionable virtue of America's amorphous "heartland" while their erstwhile allies write articles slamming any defense of blue state morality. But if the political environment has truly become so toxic to empiricism that a simple recounting of social science statistics is perceived as anything but honest, that strikes me as precisely the sort of trend magazines like The American Prospect, and for that matter, The New Republic, should be fighting against.

--Ezra Klein

HILLARY RAISES BIG BUCKS IN TEXAS BUSH COUNTRY. Senator Clinton did a great deal of fundraising around the country in March, and her private fundraising schedule -- which was passed along by a source -- shows that she raked in big bucks in that most impenetrable of red-state strongholds: Texas.

The schedule lists a dozen events in four states, in the space of just two months, March and April. This is very significant, because all the activity shows just how determined Hillary's advisers are to stockpile an enormous campaign warchest at a time when she is facing only token opposition for reelection in 2006 -- something which of course will only fuel speculation that her fundraising right now is also about scaring off potential Dem challengers in 2008.

On March 21, the schedule shows, Hillary quietly slipped off to Texas for an unpublicized swing through that state, where the junior senator from the ultimate blue state raked in as much as $4,200-per-person in some of the most red-hued of venues. For instance, one event was a breakfast at, of all places, the Dallas Petroleum Club, a mahogany-festooned enclave whose president was once Ray Hunt, a top Bush fundraiser and oilman. She also had a fundraising event at a barbeque in San Antonio and an event crowded with high-tech entrepreneurs in Austin (the state capitol where Bush presided as Texas governor).

Here's something interesting. A source familiar with the Austin event tells me that at least one attendee was surprised by the fact that many who showed up were Republican women, lots of them first-time donors. I mention this not to argue that Hillary has crossover appeal, but to show how aggressively her fundraisers are working to tap diverse constituencies around the country. Her schedule also shows events in Washington, DC, Rhode Island, and Missouri -- an amount of national activity that, for someone who's so far ahead in polls and money for reelection, is striking.

--Greg Sargent

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, YOUR AMERICAN GOVERNMENT! It's rarely a surprise to hear that the Bush administration lies, but it's occasionally impressive to read a textured account of how brazen and conscious their deceptions are. And no one is better at offering such retellings than The National Journal's Murray Waas:

Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true, according to government records and interviews.

Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although "most agencies judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."

Three months after receiving that assessment, the president stated without qualification in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

Maybe I'm just a naive youngster, but the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch sure sound like "intelligence sources" to me. And no one should forget Colin Powell's humiliation at the hands of all this, which is even more abjectly embarrassing when you read:

In mid-September 2002, two weeks before Bush received the October 2002 President's Summary, Tenet informed him that both State and Energy had doubts about the aluminum tubes and that even some within the CIA weren't certain that the tubes were meant for nuclear weapons, according to government records and interviews with two former senior officials.

Official records and interviews with current and former officials also reveal that the president was told that even then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had doubts that the tubes might be used for nuclear weapons.

But if Powell was played, at least he was somewhat complicit in the fall. The American people, now embroiled in a costly and dangerous occupation of Iraq, were offered no such chance for accurate judgment.

--Ezra Klein

"RED AMERICA": BLUE AMERICA'S FAULT? Rob Anderson's effort to cast liberal elites as the real bad guys in the Ben Domenech scandal does indeed seem more than a bit strained. Anderson speculates that Jim Brady hired Domenech precisely because he was a crude, unqualified caricature of conservative punditry that Brady, fogged by blue state elitism, perceived to be conservatism's true face.

Perhaps that's the case, but I don't actually recall a lot of the qualified, thoughtful conservative journalists Anderson cites as obviously better choices for the "Red America" gig rising up in anger at The Washington Post's hiring decision and deeming it to be an obvious effort to discredit conservative opinion. To the extent we heard anything from fellow conservatives upon the news of Domenech's hiring, it was encouragement and support. And however crude Domenech's writing and commentary has been in the past, the fact was that he was an up-in-comer in mainstream conservative circles -- having, for example, recently edited the new book by certified "thoughtful, serious" conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru -- and a hand-wringing editor looking to appease a right-wing mau mau chorus might sincerely have thought he was a good choice.

I'd also like to state unequivocally (as Anderson himself acknowledges in a "to be sure" clause) that, whether "elitist" or not, both the famous Jesusland map and the Prospect's Dossier on red state social dysfunction provided outlets for liberals to let off some steam shortly after a devastating election loss -- a therapeutic service that was, I think, very necessary and probably healthy during a really dark period. Now, for a variety of reasons, including some serious substantive ones that Garance insightfully conveyed in her piece on values research, liberals should always avoid the temptation to sneer too much and too easily at conservative "heartland" culture. But what any of this actually has to do with the fact that a young right-wing comer and Washington Post hire turned out to be a crank and a plagiarist, I really can't say. Meanwhile, on the subject of elitism and regional resentments, I found Jon Chait's recent attack on Red State snobbery (also in The New Republic) a good deal more convincing.

--Sam Rosenfeld

PRIORITIES?

Via the excellent Coalition for Darfur blog, I see that the State Department is probing into a New York Times advertorial (PDF) paid for by the government of Sudan to see if it violated US sanctions. This is ludicrous. As far as I’m concerned, no newspaper has done more to raise public awareness about that God forsaken part of the world than the Times, and that money will likely help subsidize Nick Kristof’s travel budget.

I tend to think that the not-so-media savvy regime in Khartoum thought they could temper the Times’ editorial content by throwing a million dollars their way. But the Times had the last laugh: the very day the advertorial appeared, the Times ran an editorial denouncing Khartoum for spreading the genocide into Chad. Anytime the government of Sudan wants to pay the Times a million dollars, I am all for it.

The State Department has no business investigating the Times. This is the very same State Department, I remind you, which granted a former foreign service officer turned lobbyist a special waiver to let him take on the government of Sudan as a client. The lobbyist, Robert Cabelly, had a contract for some $500,000 to promote Sudan’s image on Capitol Hill. That is, until Frank Wolf, who is the chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds State, fired off a very angry letter to Secretary Rice and had Cabelly’s waiver revoked. Perhaps it’s time he write another one demanding that the State Department get its priorities right and do more to punish Sudan, not the newspaper that made Darfur a household name.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE DEMAND SIDE. As the immigration debate lurches forward, lots of folks have asked why there's so little focus on the demand side. Wouldn't it be easier to dry up the jobs than patrol the desert? My read is that you couldn't totally staunch the flow by patrolling employers, but you could sure put a dent in it, and today's comprehensive Los Angeles Times article tells you some of the reasons why:

• One fairly sure indicator of the existence of illegal aliens on a worksite is Social Security tax payments for large numbers of workers that do not match any known taxpayers. The only problem is the immigration authorities have no access to the Social Security Administration's records; they're not given the names of offending companies or of suspicious workers.

• The number of federal workers charged with finding illegals on the job has plummeted, from 240 in 1999 to 90 in 2003.

• Only one percent of the funds devoted to immigration enforcement is directed to workplace operations. Last year a mere 127 employers were convicted for hiring undocumented workers. Calling that a drop in the bucket vastly overstates its reach and effectiveness.

• Hiring undocumented workers became illegal in 1986. The enforcement method is the I-9 form, which states that workers are citizens, permanent residents, or authorized workers, with identification. Employers can use any of 29 different documents for ID, including report cards for those under 18. There is no way to sift genuine documents from forgeries, and with so many potential types of documents in play, catching fakes is near impossible. Employers, knowing this, often hire aliens with full knowledge of their status and total assurance, thanks to a half decent forgery provided by the immigrant, of their own plausible deniability.

• There's a fairly simple program called Basic Pilot that could fix much of this. BP forces employers to enter employee information into the database within three days of hiring. The info is then checked against SSA and DHS data, and if the numbers don't fly, the employee must be fired. The problem is, not all of BP's computers are linked, and it tends to encourage identity theft, with multiple folks using the same name and social security number. And, in any case, the authorities in charge of Basic Pilot won't share the data with immigration enforcers for fear that fewer employers will use it.

• Employer sanctions have plummeted: in 1999, 417 employers were fined for knowingly hiring an undocumented immigrant. In 2004, it was three.

Of course, Republicans, excited to demonize poor immigrants, aren't nearly so enthusiastic about taking on business. So even if some of this were fixed, nothing onerous, which is to say effective, would result. Illegal immigration is a potent political issue because the folks being screamed at are scared to even whisper back. Turning your fury on the corporate community -- even if it's more justified -- results in a far fairer fight, and that's the last thing a demagogue wants.

--Ezra Klein

FREE AT LAST. Reporter Jill Carroll, who was kidnapped in Baghdad on Jan. 7, was freed, apparently unharmed, by her captors today. The A.P. has the details. Her parents and friends are, needless to say, elated. "I don't know whether to cry or skip down my street," Jackie Spinner told ABC's Good Morning America, according to the A.P. And Carroll is going to have one heck of a story to write.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

IMMIGRATION JUJITSU. The estimable Mark Kleiman and the smelly Lizardbreath have both come up with a fairly elegant solution to illegal immigration: offer green cards to undocumented immigrants who turn their employers in. Long-term, you'd probably just see employers insisting on enough false identification to protect their plausible deniability, but the better documentation employers demand, the fewer illegal immigrants who'll be able to afford it, and so the fewer businesses will hire. So maybe it is a good idea. In any case, I've never really been convinced by the arguments against a national ID card, and maybe one of those, with a functional central registry, could actually make a program like this workable. I'd sure love to see the business community try and argue against it...

--Ezra Klein

DOWN WITH TIME-LIMITS! I find Mark Franek's argument in favor of abolishing the SAT's time limits fairly compelling. As he notes, more than 40,000 of the test's two million takers are getting dispensations for extra time due to learning disabilities, some real, some imagined. Back in high school, I knew a fair number of testers who exaggerated actual disabilities or invented fake ones in order to get a leg up on the all-important SAT. But it was obvious, even there, that the students from richer families were getting these extensions in greater numbers, if only because they found out about the feature through expensive test prep services. Moreover documenting a learning disability and appealing for the dispensation required time, money, effort, and official compliance, all resources available in greater quantities to families resting comfortably at the top of the income bracket.

Of course, just because the allocation is skewed doesn't mean that many students don't actually need the extra time. So why not simply give it to all students, letting them finish at their own pace? If the answer is that colleges, for some reason, value intelligence and competency under pressure, the principle's already been invalidated by the 40,000 students getting 150 or 200 percent more time than their competitors. Indeed, it's never been clear to me why the time limit is useful at all: I'm blisteringly quick at filling in Scantron bubbles, but that's not been a skill life has often required. A methodical mind, and the willingness to remain at an unpleasant task until it's competently completed seem far more applicable to both college and the real world, and testing for them would be fairer to boot.

--Ezra Klein

HERE’S A QUESTION: Do the border guards in Gamboru, Nigeria, get to collect the $2 million bounty on Charles Taylor?

--Mark Leon Goldberg

PROBLEMS AND SYMPTOMS. Brad Plumer makes the point on immigration driving down wages (by 7.4 percent) for high school dropouts that I've been ineloquently groping towards for the last few days, and does so pithily. Damn him.

Well, sure, that's true, but that's an argument for living wages, policies to promote full employment, and the expansion of basic rights to organize. Immigrants who can participate in and strengthen the labor movement in this country will help all workers, native or otherwise. Under the current regime, corporations can use immigration and "guest worker" policies to import a captive labor force, underpay them, and then drive down wages, which accounts for a good deal of the effect Krugman worries about.

And that's sort of the point. If you're concerned about wages, it would seem, given the reality of illegal immigration, that the answer is to render illegal workers legal, so they no longer have to hide from attention and can agitate for better wages and working conditions without fear of deportation. If you could carry out a two-pronged strategy of improving the labor laws, say, through card check, all the better. Eventually, if unions and other pressure organizations can force compensation and benefits upward, there'll be less of an incentive to hire workers who don't speak English, the market will begin favoring low-skilled but native born applicants in certain sectors, and the immigration flow will ebb as the available jobs wane (as has happened before).

The point, here as elsewhere, is that the relative value of illegal immigrants is a symptom of employer power that's abetted by their ability to hire second-class, criminalized workers. That, not the flow of immigrants, is what must be addressed. But, as usual, it's easier for the GOP to pick on and further persecute the lowly and voiceless than attack their corporate funders. Liberals, however, shouldn't take the bait.

--Ezra Klein

BOLTEN'S FUTURE PLANS? BUSH DOESN'T KNOW. According to today's New York Times, here's part of what President Bush had to say yesterday about the promotion of Josh Bolten to chief of staff:

Asked in an interview with CNN Español whether more changes were coming, Mr. Bush replied: "Josh has just begun to take a look at the White House structure. And I haven't had a chance to talk to him about the future yet."

So Bush put Bolten in charge without discussing with him any future ideas Bolten might have for White House changes that might put this disastrous presidency -- not to mention the rest of the nation -- back on the right track? Such ideas should have been among the most important criteria influencing Bush's decision to promote him in the first place.

Our CEO President in action.

--Greg Sargent

FAIR'S FAIR. It seems that the new GOP attack against the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill is a throw back to grade school: no cuttsies. That's what Jon Kyl is saying in his complaint that his grandparents waited in line a long time in order to make it here, and why should Latin Americans get special dispensation to speed through?

It's a weird argument, as if geographical proximity were somehow an illegitimate consideration when crafting immigration policy. But is it? I was born in California, so I'm a native. Were I born a few miles south, I'd have been Mexican. Because of that nearness, the Mexican economy is far more intertwined with the American economy than are the much bigger players in Europe or Asia. Canada is our largest trading partner while Mexico is our second largest, and were anything to happen to the fiscal health of either nation, the effect on the American economy would be swift and devastating. That's why, when Mexico looked near collapse in the mid-90's, Bill Clinton rapidly rushed through a massive bond to head off the catastrophe -- it wasn't an act of charity, but of self-preservation.

Now, you can argue back and forth on the impact of immigration on our economy, but it's an obvious massive boon to the Mexican economy. Remittances -- the money sent back by immigrants -- is the single largest source of direct foreign aid to Mexico, and it's unquestionably crucial to their continued stability and health. Add in that many immigrants come here, amass some savings, and return home to start businesses, and you've got a real problem if you cut that off. And if Mexico has a problem, we have a problem, which means their immigration has more impact on our direct financial prospects, and should thus, to protect the national interests, be treated differently than those attempting to head over from Belgrave.

There is, by the way, precedence for this. Kyl's grandparents were Dutch. The Dutch are part of the EU. And the EU offers generous immigration advantages to its members -- who're united by proximity -- over, say, Latin Americans. If he's so worried about fairness, I'd say loosening restrictions on adjacent countries would be quite fair indeed.

--Ezra Klein

READER BLOGS. One cool thing about all the comments in recent days is that a lot of readers have been linking to their own blogs, which has introduced me to a whole array of new residents of the long tail. So if you're a reader who's got a blog, this thread is for you. I'm curious to know who you are and what kind of things you write on your home turf. Put up your url and show us where you live.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

PARTY OF HUH? This is a small thing, but a week ago, National Review writer Ramesh Ponnuru criticized me on The Corner for trusting Amazon.com's description that his forthcoming book, The Party of Death, was about the Democratic Party. According to Amazon, "The Party of Death is the first book to expose the real agenda of the liberal Democrats, and to ask what life might be like in a post-Roe v. Wade America. National Review editor Ponnuru links the Democratic party to radical positions on such issues as abortion and euthanasia."

Ponnuru denied that that was his main focus, writing:

Franke-Ruta mentions my forthcoming book The Party of Death, which she describes as a "book on Democrats." The book does have quite a bit to say about the Democrats, and it's tough on them. But the book is about more than that, and the title isn't meant as a pejorative term for the Democrats. I explain, mostly in the introduction, what I mean and don't mean by the phrase. I'm not saying this to complain about Franke-Ruta. It was nice of her to mention the book, and her assumption was an easy one to make, partly because the Amazon page on the book is a bit misleading. (I've tried to get Amazon to change it a few times.)

Now an observant reader writes: "You might wish to note, in light of Ponnuru's post, that the longer subtitle on Amazon (The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life) also seems to be the one [that] appears on the cover mock-up on the Regnery web site. Has he "tried to get Regnery to change it a few times," too?"

Over to you, Ramesh: Is the publisher getting it wrong, too? Because if you scroll down to the bottom of the Regnery New & Noteworthy page, Ponnuru's book is pictured right below the mock-up for The Official Handbook of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy 2006, and though in very small print, the featured title sure looks to be: The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life.

Barnesandnoble.com, for what it's worth, also lists the book as The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life, and, in its "From the Publisher" book note includes this description: "Ponnuru details how the party of death took over the Democratic party." Now, I'm willing to believe the publisher sent that out wrong, too, but, if that's the case, Regnery's marketing department is really not doing Ponnuru any favors. So here's to hoping he at least got a good edit.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BUSH READS TAPPED?
Earlier today I modestly proposed that President Bush cancel his Wednesday meeting with Nigerian President Olesegun Obasanjo. It seems the White House is considering doing just that.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

JUST POSTED ON TAP: THE ANTI-JOE. No wonder Joe Lieberman seems testy these days -- the three-term senator faces his most serious primary challenge since taking office. Marie Cocco, in the latest issue of the Prospect, looks at the man who would be senator, Ned Lamont, and his potential path to victory.

For more on this and other races, visit Midterm Madness.

--The Editors

HYPING THE THREAT. Yesterday, David Albright and Corey Hinderstein of the Institute for Science and International Security reported (PDF) that US officials sought to hype the Iranian nuclear threat following a closed International Atomic Energy Agency briefing to Security Council members.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) privately briefed permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany in mid-March that Iran was almost ready to start putting uranium gas into a group of 164 centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment site. Iran is now on the verge of mastering a critical step in building and operating a gas centrifuge plant that would be able to produce significant quantities of enriched uranium for either peaceful or military purposes. However, Iran can be expected to face serious technical hurdles before it can produce significant quantities of enriched uranium.

Following the briefing, anonymous US officials quickly started to distort what the IAEA had said. These officials told journalists on a not for attribution basis that this action by Iran represented a significant acceleration of its enrichment program. US officials called several journalists to tell them that in the briefing IAEA officials were “shocked,” “astonished,” “blown-away” by Iran’s progress on gas centrifuges, leading the United States to revise its own timeline for Iran to get the bomb. In fact, IAEA officials have said they were not surprised by Iran’s actions. Although Iran’s pace is troubling and requires concerted diplomatic effort to reverse, it was also anticipated by other experts, including those at ISIS A senior IAEA official told the Associated Press that these US statements came “from people who are seeking a crisis, not a solution.”

Secretary Rice will travel to Berlin on Thursday to meet with her P5 foreign minister counterparts to talk about Iran. Part of her challenge there is to convince Russia that the US does not seek a military solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Meanwhile, Great Britain is constantly fending off accusations that it is once again enabling American belligerence, a la Iraq. In London today Jack Straw told reporters, "As to the possibility of this leading to another Iraq, it won’t. I have made clear often enough that I don’t regard military action as appropriate or indeed conceivable."

Frankly, when a report like this comes out, it’s not difficult to see how someone might get that impression.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

TIMES AND POST PART WAYS ON BUSH'S PRIVATE SESSIONS. Did anyone else notice something intriguing about The Washington Post's article today -- flagged below by Garance -- about President Bush's private off-the-record sessions with reporters?

The Post obviously viewed the president's campaign as newsworthy -- after all, they wrote a story about it. At the same time, though, The Post reporters who first knew about the sessions -- the ones that were invited -- were constrained from talking about them. So Post reporter Charles Babington went to outside sources to get a story that his newsroom colleagues already knew about. From The Post:

White House officials said they also hoped the meetings' mere existence would remain under wraps. That proved impossible when journalists from The Post who were not participants in the session, as well as those at other publications, learned of the meetings from sources outside the paper and began to report on them.

Does that strike others as a bit strange? The Post (or at least its employees) agreed to withhold information from readers that it clearly viewed as news, in exchange for whatever it would gain from these private sessions. Now, one might argue that the basic principle underlying arrangements such as this one are defensible. After all, reporters at least sometimes agree to withhold information from readers -- such as the identity of sources -- in order to have off-the-record conversations that ultimately result in more information going to readers than otherwise would have been possible.

Yet this isn't just any ordinary source, of course. It's the president of the United States. Isn't the prospect of withholding news from readers about the president too serious an omission to be justified by whatever supposed benefits the sessions bring? Also, unlike when an investigative reporter gets hard info from an anonymous source, these sessions aren't about transmitting hard info; they're about reporters gaining "insight into his thinking and concerns," as The Post put it. But will readers really benefit from this, given that these alleged insights are based on conversations the reporters can't disclose in the first place?

The Times, for its part, decided depriving readers of such info couldn't be defended. The paper wrote:

The New York Times, which was invited to attend a session today, has declined to participate.

Philip Taubman, the Washington bureau chief for The Times, said in a statement last night: "The Times has declined this opportunity after weighing the potential benefits to our readers against the prospect of withholding information from them about the discussion with Mr. Bush..."

I think I'm with The Times on this one. What do others think?

--Greg Sargent

MCCAIN DRAIN. E.J. Dionne hits the nail on the head today when he says that the positions that John McCain will need to take in order to win the Republican primary may very well lose him the support of the more moderate voters who've hailed him as a maverick, to his perhaps permanent electoral or reputational detriment:

it's a more dangerous strategy than it seems. McCain's central appeal, even to people who disagree with him, has always been his willingness to do the nonpolitical thing -- for example, to defend Kerry that day in 2004 simply because he thought the attacks on Kerry were wrong.

If McCain spends the next two years obviously positioning himself to win Republican primary votes, he will start to look like just another politician. Once lost, a maverick's image is hard to earn back.

Add to that one thing I haven't read a lot about, but which Democratic aides who work for likely '08 contenders increasingly bring up: McCain's age. He will turn 72 in '08, making him three years older than Ronald Reagan was in 1980, when he became the oldest man elected president.

The age issue is not just something raised by Democrats grasping at straws. Googling around I found Colorado-based Anthony Surace at the Christian conservative site The Templar Pundit sketching out an interesting view of McCain's chances with the hardcore conservative Republican base, in which he also pointed to general election risks, such as age and whether or not members of the press will turn against McCain out of a desire for divided government if Republicans retain Congress.

Surace, whose site helped promote the Blogs for Bush network, also had some views on the rest of the '08 Republican field that I hadn't heard elsewhere:

The Republicans need a candidate in 2008 who can restore principles of limited government and fiscal conservativism to the party. Unfortunately, I don’t see anyone currently “in the running” who can do that with any legitimacy.

George Allen is, like it or not, part of the Congress that has caused the problem facing the party. Mitt Romney, as much as I like him, does not look like he will be a great advocate of limited government. Tom Tancredo is a one-issue politician. Pence probably won’t run. McCain won’t make it through the primaries, Huckabee doesn’t stand for limited government, and the time for Gingrich has passed.

Where does that leave us? It leaves without a candidate who can restore the principles of the GOP, or at least without a candidate who is actively running for President right now.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sound of a dispirited base voter.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

STEPHEN SPRUIELL LAPS UP DEBORAH HOWELL'S LATEST SELF-CONTRADICTION. Incredibly, Stephen Spruiell is still trying -- and still failing -- to discredit the notion that Washingtonpost.com's hiring of Ben Domenech was a sop to the right. Now he says he emailed Deborah Howell and asked her to explain the discrepancy between two statements. First, her column of Dec. 11, in which she wrote that Jim Brady was considering "supplementing" Dan Froomkin's column with a "conservative blogger." And second, Brady's own statement two days later that "the desire to bring on a conservative blogger has never been related to Dan."

According to Spruiell, Howell has now contradicted her earlier version, emailing him the following:

Jim Brady said today that he will look for someone who has more journalistic qualifications next time. Froomkin and Morley are both liberals and he is looking for a conservative voice as well. I don't think it has anything to do with Froomkin, but more wanting a lot of voices. I only said that I thought Froomkin's column should have a different title.

Sorry, Stephen, this is nowhere near good enough. Howell's email is self-contradictory and full of holes. First of all, Howell says she doesn't "think" it had anything to do with Froomkin. That is completely inconclusive -- while her earlier statement to the contrary, by contrast, was completely definitive. Second, she says "Froomkin and Morley are both liberals and he is looking for a conservative voice as well." Ooookaaaay, so...there's no connection to Froomkin there? Or there kinda is, but there isn't? Confusing at best, I'd say. Third and most important, Howell
didn't do what Spruiell asked her to do -- that is, explain the contradiction between the two accounts.

Indeed, she papered over the contradiction with an outright falsehood that, amazingly, Spruiell didn't bother acknowledging. She wrote: "I only said that I thought Froomkin's column should have a different title." False. She did, in fact, say initially that Froomkin's column was prompting Brady to hire a conservative. Howell's email to Spruiell not only isn't a definitive denial, and not only doesn't do what Spruiell asked, but also contains a ridiculously blatant falsehood. Rather than address the discrepancy between the two accounts, she instead pretended it didn't exist at all. And Spruiell apparently didn't bother pressing the point. Wonder why.

For the moment, though, let's imagine that Howell's email is the good-faith denial Spruiell is pretending it is. There are now two possibilities. Either Howell misunderstood Brady the first time, as Spruiell suggests. Or Howell told the truth the first time, speaking candidly in an unguarded moment before anyone knew just how controversial her statement was. Brady then did damage control, denying the hire would have anything to do with Froomkin. Now Howell has contradicted her earlier account with a new one that's confusing and self-contradictory and doesn't address her earlier statement, but is more in line with Brady's. Is it possible that Spruiell is right? Anything's possible -- but her email simply doesn't offer any explanation for the contradiction, and hence, doesn't give us any reason to disbelieve her first statement. I still say my version is the far more likely explanation.

And with that, my sincerest apologies to TAPPED readers for spending far too much time on this ridiculous disagreement. I'll leave the final word to one of Spruiell's ideological fellow-travelers -- Rick Moran, who unlike Spruiell is not afraid to acknowledge the obvious, i.e., that this was in fact all about throwing a sop to wingers upset with Froomkin. Moran's take:

In fact, it was Dan Froomkin’s political blog White House Briefing that had conservatives calling for a blog to reflect the views of the right at the Post. The laughable bias of Mr. Froomkin contributed in no small way to the eventual decision by Executive Editor Jim Brady to hire Ben Domenech, founder of the blog RedState.org and, at the tender age of 24, a seasoned political operative having worked at the White House on Capitol Hill as a speech writer.

Here's hoping that if Spruiell still wants to argue about this, he'll henceforth direct his broadsides towards Rick Moran. 'Cause for our part, we're done.

--Greg Sargent

AS THE IMMIGRATION BILL TURNS. First, the good news. Arlen Specter's Judiciary Committee came through with a bill closely approximating the McCain-Kennedy proposal:

With Republicans deeply divided, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted on Monday to legalize the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants and ultimately to grant them citizenship, provided that they hold jobs, pass criminal background checks, learn English and pay fines and back taxes.

The panel also voted to create a vast temporary worker program that would allow roughly 400,000 foreigners to come to the United States to work each year and would put them on a path to citizenship as well.

The legislation, which the committee sent to the full Senate on a 12-to-6 vote, represents the most sweeping effort by Congress in decades to grant legal status to illegal immigrants.

And now, the bad news:

Any legislation that passes the Senate will have to be reconciled with the tough border security bill passed in December by the Republican-controlled House, which defied President Bush's call for a temporary worker plan.

And I refer to Brad Plumer to remind you how those reconciliation meetings go:

first President Bush would oppose it, then he would relentlessly accuse the minority party of raising taxes on all small businesses, most middle-class families, and a few cute puppies. After a few months of good hard Dem-whacking, the plan would die an ignoble death, only to be reintroduced into the Senate by Rick "Up For Re-election" Santorum, with only a few minor and wholly offensive tweaks. It would then get picked up, reluctantly lauded by bruised moderates, photographed in public places with its arms around President Bush, feted by liberal pundits desperately seeking a "compromise" and an "end to The Most Divisive Era Ever," and would finally squeak through the Senate. Then it's off to conference we go, where key House Republicans, along with select Democratic turncoats, would amend the bill beyond recognition, turn it into a disaster, and then quickly send the 12,000 page non-amendable "compromise" bill back to each house for a quick up-or-down vote.

This may all be moot, though. Specter's compromise could likely pass the Senate, but would do so without majority Republican support. By bringing it up on the accelerated timetable, he called Bill Frist's bluff. Now, rumblings from the Frist camp is that he simply won't bring it to the floor under the rationale that it lacks sufficient support from Republicans.

--Ezra Klein

AND POOF! HE’S GONE.
Last week, Liberia’s newly elected president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, boldly called for the extradition of regional war lord Charles Taylor to the war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone. Taylor had been under bungalow-arrest in Nigeria since the summer of 2003, when a hastily arranged exile averted a more violent ousting. At the time of his exile, however, Taylor was under indictment for his role in the Sierra Leone civil war. So to pacify the US and international community, Nigerian President Olusegan Obasanjo pledged to send Taylor to Sierra Leone at the request of Liberian authorities.

While visiting the US last week, Sirleaf called Obasanjo’s bluff. But rather than making good on his earlier pledge, Obesanjo hemmed and hawed about what to do, and concluded that he would defer a decision to the African Union. This proved enough of a delay for Taylor to plan his escape. Somehow, someway, under the noses of the Nigerians, Taylor vanished into the night.

The blame for Taylor’s escape quite squarely falls on the shoulders of Obesanjo, and he needs to be punished by the US and international community. Taylor on the lam is the only thing worse than Taylor in exile. It is also most unfortunate for the legacy of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which so far had been a rare model of success in war crimes prosecutions. Unlike the Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals, it is a genuine hybrid court that has found the right balance of local and international stewardship over the proceedings. The Court operates under a novel combination of international humanitarian law and Sierra Leonean law, and the judges and prosecutors there are a mix of internationals who cut their teeth at the Rwanda and Yugoslav war crimes tribunals and Sierra Leonean jurists.

The last thing this Court needs is for Charles Taylor to pull a Radovan Karadic and simply disappear into the countryside. Fortunately, Obasanjo is scheduled to meet with President Bush tomorrow. The White House ought to cancel this meeting in protest, and while they’re at it, make clear their disapproval of Obasanjo's desire to seek an illegal third term in office. Maybe the next time Taylor pops up somewhere, authorities won't be so willing to look the other way.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE P.R. CAMPAIGN THROWS IT TO THE BLOGS. President Bush's offensive to muddy the waters on the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is ongoing and seeking allies online, reports Scott Shane:

Under pressure from Congressional Republicans, the director of national intelligence has begun a yearlong process of posting on the Web 48,000 boxes of Arabic-language Iraqi documents captured by American troops.

Less than two weeks into the project, and with only 600 out of possibly a million documents and video and audio files posted, some conservative bloggers are already asserting that the material undermines the official view.

On his blog last week, Ray Robison, a former Army officer from Alabama, quoted a document reporting a supposed scheme to put anthrax into American leaflets dropped in Iraq and declared: "Saddam's W.M.D. and terrorist connections all proven in one document!!!"

Not so, American intelligence officials say....

Intelligence officials had serious concerns about turning loose an army of amateurs on a warehouse full of raw documents that include hearsay, disinformation and forgery....

But Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and who led the campaign to get the documents released, does not believe they have received adequate scrutiny. Mr. Hoekstra said he wanted to "unleash the power of the Net" to do translation and analysis that might take the government decades.

"People today ought to be able to have a closer look inside Saddam's regime," he said.

Mr. Hoekstra said intelligence officials had resisted posting the documents, which he overcame by appealing to President Bush and by proposing legislation to force the release.

The timing gives the documents a potent political charge. Public doubts about the war have driven Mr. Bush's approval rating to new lows. A renewed debate over Saddam Hussein's weapons and terrorist ties could raise the president's standing.

...Mr. Prados said the document release "can't be divorced from the political context."

"The administration is under fire for going to war when there was no threat — so the idea here must be to say there was a threat," he said.

That is already the assertion of a growing crowd of bloggers and translators, almost exclusively on the right.

Sounds like Bush is counting on the right having its own version of Susan Gardner and ePluribus Media. But instead of looking for the truth, they'll be looking to confirm the administration's misleading pre-war assessments and create a steady drumbeat of local news stories about the people behind the new "intelligence" finds.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

SO HARD TO FIND A QUALIFIED WOMAN. Over at The Corner, Peter Robinson posts some of the writings of the recently departed Lyn Nofziger. Nofziger first served as Ronald Reagan's press secretary and, later, political affairs advisor, and sounds like an enjoyable character from the obits. This passage of his really jumped out at me, though:

I keep thinking about the liberal effort to canonize Sandra Day O'Connor as one of the Supreme Court greats. What a joke. She was appointed by President Reagan at the urging of Barry Goldwater as a political sop to feminists. She was not a great legal mind and was not one of Reagan’s better appointments, mainly because she was ruled by her emotions rather than by logic or any particular knowledge of the Constitution. The best thing she has done is resign. For this she deserves our praise.

It's been a long time since I've seen such a clear statement of straight-up, old-school sexism. Harriet Miers was no O'Connor, but the fact that she faced similar criticisms while being considered for O'Connor's seat should give us all pause. It's almost impossible to find qualified women for top posts when national leaders consider hiring one an act of politics that must necessarily promote an overly emotional creature beyond her natural level. Gets hard to distinguish between their levels of qualification, too.

Also, apparently Nofziger had a blog. Who knew?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MORE OF THE P.R. CAMPAIGN. The president is also now sitting down for off-the-record talks with journalists in an attempt to humanize himself and repair relationships. Writes Charles Babington:

As he defends his Iraq policy with a public campaign of speeches and a recent news conference, President Bush also has been waging a private campaign that has included off-the-record sessions with White House reporters, sources said yesterday...

Off-the-record sessions with presidents are somewhat controversial in journalism circles. Critics say reporters should not subject themselves to being influenced or "spun" under ground rules that prevent the comments from being relayed to the public. But many news organizations say the sessions give reporters a rare opportunity to observe the president up close and to gain insight into his thinking and concerns.

I can't imagine that these sessions will have all that much effect at this point, unless, as with Bush's off-the-record national security chats with editors last fall, the conversations also involve requests not to publish or broadcast certain stories. Real openness in the form of regular press conferences, however, might actually garner the president a different kind of attention, as it would signal a substantive shift in his approach to both the media and public questions about the war.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BIG NEWS FROM BUSH. White House chief of staff Andrew Card has resigned after five and a half years on the job. His replacement, Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua Bolten, has a strong domestic policy background, as well as close ties to the president. Peter Baker reports:

Resisting Republican advice to pick a seasoned Washington veteran the way Reagan brought in former Senate majority leader Howard H. Baker Jr. when his own presidency was listing in his second term, Bush characteristically picked someone he knows well and trusts implicitly.

Bolten was policy director of the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign in 1999-2000, during the brief era of compassionate conservatism, and spent his first two years in the White House as assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for policy at the White House. I've heard good things about him from Democratic and Republican policy professionals in the past; his move to the OMB was once described to me as a symptom of the slow brain drain out of Bush's domestic policy apparatus that began mid-way through his first term, as the president's attentions shifted abroad.

UPDATE: That said, Bolten's not exactly fresh blood on the ideas front, having played a major role in last year's Social Security debacle.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

DON'T HATE THE PLAYAS, HATE THE PLAYED. And I guess I blame the press for the Minnesota Democrats Exposed site. There will always be hacks looking to work the refs, it's up to the refs to resist the pressure. Same deal with the Thune bloggers. On a basic level, this all seems par for the course, save with a weird belief that it's extra-sinister when bloggers are involved. The press uses all sorts of paid operatives in their everyday reporting. How many stories are fed by Ken Mehlman, or Karl Rove, or Scooter Libby?

I don't think protecting against tiny blogs by paid hacks is worth sacrificing the perspectives enabled and offered by the pseudonymous community. When you get a tip or fact, as a journalist, it's your responsibility to check it. If it's true, then I'm not entirely sure the relevance of the tipster's pay stubs. In the end, it's the press's role to verify and mediate. If they're just regurgitating what they find on blogs, pseudonymous or otherwise, they're not doing their jobs, and that's the problem.

--Ezra Klein

A QUESTION. I guess I'd just ask Ezra -- and readers writing under whatever names they have chosen -- what they think the appropriate solution is to the problem of something like a Minnesota Democrats Exposed site. If the FEC won't require disclosure, either because it can't or because it chooses not to, and journalists, as per Ezra, don't adopt a policy of treating such sites as pariahs, rather than sexy news stories, how should they be dealt with?

I'm assuming here, for the sake of argument, that local bloggers and political types can't track the source through simply sleuthing. Should people be forced to sue for defamation in order to get disclosure? What should they do?

I'm genuinely curious as to your ideas about how people are supposed to handle something like this, if you reject the first two approaches.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TO BE CLEAR. Garance's new policy of denying links or recognition to pseudonymous writers is not the policy of the staff. I disagree with her fairly strongly on this, and find it rather strange that she calls this a normative rule in journalism. Reporters are constantly referencing, quoting, and mentioning pseudonymous sources -- the only difference is, they call them "anonymous" sources, and they lack even an identifiable handle, much less a real name. Garance says that, unlike with pseudonymous writers, the reporters know the identity of their anonymous sources, but I fail to see how the knowing concealment of a hack is so superior.

Now, some of the concerns she brings up in her posts are troubling and they merit substantive discussion, but I don't support her solution and don't want it mistaken for magazine-wide policy. I think that the opening of the discourse to those who require pseudonymity has been one of the great benefits of the blogs, and anything that would force me to deny Digby's eloquent contributions or Riverbend's brave dispatches simply isn't a policy I could possibly get behind.

--Ezra Klein

KRUGMAN AND IMMIGRATION. Following up on my earlier immigration post, Paul Krugman has an ambivalent column on the subject in today's New York Times. Some of his points, though, strike me as weak:

while immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration — especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration.

Fair enough. But that belies the more galactic fact that now is a terrible time to be a high school drop out, and not just because of immigration. The fact is that being a high school drop out is much rarer than it was four decades ago, women are now in the workforce forcing you to compete in a larger labor pool, the minimum wage is at a 54-year low against the average wage, and so on and so forth. Immigration is merely one woe among many.

The answer to the slippage of the uneducated isn't nativism, or closed borders, but education. If you're a high school drop out, you should go back to school, or get your GED. And, if possible, we should try and make that easier on you. Now, that may not solve all the problems, but the issue here isn't immigrants, but education levels, and structural factors increasing competition, and cruel and disinterested public policy making, and the more global conundrum surrounding the disappearance of good, middle class, blue collar jobs (see my colleague Harold Meyerson's fantastic article for more on that).

Krugman also writes:

Finally, modern America is a welfare state, even if our social safety net has more holes in it than it should — and low-skill immigrants threaten to unravel that safety net.

The issue here is health care, as immigrants tend to pay in much more to Social Security than they take out. But again, the immigrant effect is rather limited. A recent article in the American Journal of Public Health (which I go into detail on here) found that immigrants, legal and illegal, make up 10 percent of the nation's population but only use 8 percent of our health care. Health costs for the children of immigrants are 84 percent less than for native kids, while the adults use about half what domestic born citizens do. And while immigrants are 200 percent more likely to be uninsured, they still account for only 18 percent of the costs among the uninsured. Bottom line: on the list of forces bankrupting our health care system, immigrant usage is pretty far down there.

And that seems to me to be the point. It's not that there are no costs, or downsides, or problems associated with immigration. But they're not worthy of half the attention or hype they're given by opportunistic politicians and xenophobes (a category, I hasten to add, that I don't think includes Krugman). Our immigration policy isn't perfect, and it does create losers. But the main reason for that is the disenfranchisement of the immigrants themselves, who're too afraid or invisible to seek union representation, workplace rights, better wages, or simple dignity. To this day, the best set of principles I've read for dealing with immigration is the Drum Major Institute's middle class framework, and I encourage Krugman, and anyone interested in this debate, to give them a read.

--Ezra Klein

IMMIGRATION BLUES. Oliver Willis's "no-cutting-in-line" stance on illegal immigration, while intuitively appealing, isn't realistic. The question isn't whether we should reward bad behavior -- though I've trouble defining bad behavior as a life-threatening trek across the desert in order to do backbreaking, essential labor for appallingly low wages -- but how we deal with a policy problem.

Illegal immigrants are here. Deportation would be impossible, both logistically and, assuming you could surmount those obstacles, economically. Enforcement is a sham. Since 1986, we've increased border funding by a tenfold. We have built walls stretching into the desert. We have fined employers. And the flow of immigrants hasn't stopped, or slowed; it's accelerated. Worse yet, there's been a set of perverse consequences: not only do more come, but more succeed. We used to stop around 40 percent; now we halt 10 percent. Where immigrants used to use the main roads, now they slip into the deep reaches of the desert. Coyotes (smuggling operations) have increased the sophistication of cross-border migration. And because the coyotes have grown more necessary, and because their fees have expanded as their utility has increased, those who arrive are more in debt than ever, leading them to stay longer and return home less frequently. Illegal immigrants are becoming permanent residents, and if you don't want the undocumented here temporarily, you really don't want them hanging out indefinitely.

So enforcement doesn't work. Deportation doesn't work. Fining businesses -- which we did try, to some degree, for awhile -- is totally unworkable. (In 1999 we fined 417, in 2004, it was three.) The question, then, isn't how we feel about illegal immigration, but how we handle it in order to ensure the most desirable policy outcomes. And while I'm not precisely sure what the answer is, I'm fairly certain what it's not: the failed, moralistic, xenophobic policies of the past.

For more on that past/present tension, keep an eye on the Senate, where the recent twists and turns have been operatic in their intensity. A few weeks ago, Arlen Specter was happily reconciling the McCain-Kennedy bill (liberal guest worker program with a path to citizenship) with the Kyl-Cornyn bill (less liberal, no citizenship). But a couple days ago, presidential hopeless Bill Frist decided to short-circuit the process and demand immediate legislation from Specter lest he force a vote on his own enforcement-only policy, a policy that Harry Reid has promised to filibuster. Frist's bill is a relative of the draconian legislation -- which includes the construction of a massive wall -- passed by James Sensenbrenner in the House, the same legislation that compelled the massive march last weekend in Los Angeles.

As someone at a panel I attended recently pointed out, a few decades ago, Ronald Reagan excited the country by demanding that xenophobes and tyrants tear a wall down. Now, contemporary Republicans are exciting the base by promising to put one up. The Party of Lincoln must be so proud.

--Ezra Klein

ACCOUNTABILITY, TRANSPARENCY, AND THE FEC. Today, the Federal Election Commission voted to approve rules extending McCain-Feingold regulations to the Internet. This is, as it should be, under the principle that the law ought to apply to all, and as ordered by a US District Court judge in 2004 (under the same principle). In general, the rules seem well-suited to preserving free speech, press freedom, and political organizing activity while also extending McCain-Feingold's regulation of campaign and candidate public communications to the Internet.

The rules don't go nearly far enough, however, in terms of requiring disclosure by bloggers being paid by candidates or political committees. But rather than advocating for the FEC to amend the new rules, I'd like to propose the creation of a normative response to non-disclosure that, over time, may have just as much impact on encouraging it as would an FEC rule.

First, let me lay out the problem. Unlike reformers' worries about soft money dumps into online candidate advertising, which remain theoretical, bloggers whose work for candidates or committees is undisclosed have already proved nettlesome. Indeed, undisclosed political consultants writing blogs to influence public opinion, often negatively, about a candidate and to attack the coverage of the traditional, independent media have been with us for at least two years.

Jan Frel, now a writer with Alternet, described the legendary Thune bloggers of South Dakota in a early 2005 piece for Personal Democracy Forum:

nine bloggers -- two of whom were paid $35,000 by Thune's campaign -- formed an alliance that constantly attacked the election coverage of South Dakota's principal newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. More specifically, their postings were not primarily aimed at dissuading the general public from trusting the Argus' coverage. Rather, the work of these bloggers was focused on getting into the heads of the three journalists at the Argus who were primarily responsible for covering the Daschle/Thune race: chief political reporter David Kranz, state editor Patrick Lalley, and executive editor Randell Beck.

Led by law student Jason van Beek and University of South Dakota history professor Jon Lauck, the Thune bloggers tormented and rattled the Argus staff for the duration of the 2004 election, clearly influencing the Argus' coverage. They also appear to have been a highly efficient vehicle for injecting classic no-fingerprints-attached opposition research on Daschle -- most of it tidbits that perhaps might never have made it into the old print media -- directly into the political bloodstream of South Dakota. What they did may turn out to be a "dark side of politics" model for campaign-blogger relations in 2005-06 -- made all the more telling by the fact that the Thune bloggers relied heavily on now-discredited Jeff Gannon/James Guckert of Talon News for many of their stories....

In December [2004], a report by CBS news writer David Paul Kuhn brought attention to reporting done earlier in the Argus, and later in the National Journal, that the Thune campaign paid Lauck $27,000 and Van Beek $8,000 in 2004. Neither Lauck nor van Beek had disclosed on their sites the amount of money that they earned, and they did not specify what they were being paid for. Lauck did say on his site that he was a consultant for the Thune campaign, a month after the Argus reported it in August [2004]. He told me that most of his direct work for Thune's campaign consisted of debate preparation. Lauck now believes that these kinds of ties and relationships should be disclosed and made obvious to blog readers.

Despite concerns such as those raised by the Thune bloggers, the FEC, according to a summary FAQ by some of the FEC commissioners, (via MyDD), specifically excepts paid political consultants from disclosure under the new rules, as long as the campaign discloses it. With media and other exemptions extended to all blogs and bloggers unless there is a question about ownership and control of the blog by a candidate, committee, or party, but no pro-active requirement to disclose on the part of paid political consultants, the FEC would seem to be setting up an environment that encourages the filing of FEC complaints and demands for review -- complaints that a requirement to disclose would pre-empt.

That said, I think there may be another solution. Already, complaints about non-disclosure can be found with ease in the blogosphere. For example, MyDD's Matt Stoller recently complained about one "Michael in Chicago," who had done work for Democratic primary candidate Christine Cegelis but failed to disclose this in his MyDD posts about her:

in a very contested and vicious primary, there was a lot of misinformation....Initially, I was relying partially on Michael's diaries and a few other IL contacts for my info on the race, and I was getting pushback on the district from DC people. When Michael had some disclosure issues...I decided I could no longer reliable talk about the district with any sense of what was actually going on.

Now, Michael seems like an ethical guy who made a mistake. For one thing, he admits he made a disclosure error, which I think is pretty stand-up of him, and he then changed his profile to reflect his contracting status. I wish we had had these discussions earlier. It's just that at the time I had no idea what was really going on, and I felt like everyone was trying to spin me instead of level with me.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, it was not until a local public relations company filed a defamation suit against him that Michael Brodkorb, the former communications and research director for the Minnesota GOP, attached his name to the site Minnesota Democrats Exposed, which he had been writing anonymously. Brodkorb also purchased and squatted on four internet domain names that Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidates for Senate and governor might have wanted for campaigns, such as www.mikehatchforgovernor.com. Brodkorb was employed by the Minnesota Republican Party at the time he started the anonymous site and for nearly a year thereafter, though he denies that his employers knew of its existence or paid for it.

Further, the disclosure problems in the blogosphere are so broad and diverse in nature that they would seem to require addressing on their own apart from the FEC rules, which, even if broadened slightly to include disclosure by paid campaign consultants, would have no impact on the larger problem. For example, DailyKos's "Adam B," who decided to use me as a straw man last week in his quest to generate online opposition to H.R. 4900, is, I learned over the weekend, Adam Bonin, the attorney representing leading liberal bloggers from DailyKos, Atrios, and MyDD, which have conducted a lobbying campaign against that bill.

Now, were a paper like the Washington Post to publish, without proper disclosure, an editorial by an attorney representing clients engaged in lobbying Congress on a bill that would preclude them from regulation, the howls of outrage for that journalistic ethical failure to disclose would be heard across the blogosphere. Indeed, the Post appended just such a disclosure to a letter-to-the-editor by Bonin that it ran last year. And yet blogs routinely fail to disclose information that is just as relevant, or even their writer's names.

This has led to the peculiar scenario where the Internet has fostered more openness and transparency on the part of old media than on the part of the new actors. Today, The New York Times editorial board offers readers greater transparency about who its writers and editors are than does Daily Kos, where designated site co-authors like georgia10 and SusanG use handles but not their names, and do not post easily locatable biographies, or MyDD, which provides very little information about its authors, one of whom is currently employed by a likely 2008 presidential candidate.

With power comes responsibility. A happy solution to the vexing problem of inadequate online disclosures was suggested to me by a blogger friend who also routinely publishes pieces in major newspapers. This is his personal policy, and I now adopt it as my own:

I will no longer link to any writer who does not disclose his identity and affiliations in an obvious place or manner, or reply to online commenters who decline to disclose their names.

In so doing, I will be extending the same standards this publication uses for publishing and replying to letters to the editor to the online comments, which have functionally replaced letters to the editor to a great extent, and the same standard this publication uses for all other sources to online ones. (This won't be site policy, just mine.) No publication considers a truly anonymous source -- one whose identity is unknown to both reporter and readers -- a usable one for any purpose other than further inquiry. And yet reporters, including myself, have routinely cited the writings of pseudonymous commentors, in grave violation of that standard.

Indeed, by extending the media exemption to all bloggers, including ones run by undisclosed political operatives, the FEC may have done both journalists and bloggers a favor. Now that bloggers will be considered media for purposes of campaign finance rules, I would hope they start acting like print media for the purposes of their disclosure standards, as well. Were more journalists and bloggers to adopt the policy of not linking to those who don't disclose or self-identify, over time, disclosure would become normative in the blogosphere in the same way that it is in print media. And everyone would happily chatter on.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CLARIFICATION. I erred last week when I described Redstate as a just a 527, called Redstate.org. Redstate.org, Inc. was founded as a 527 in 2004 and continued as one for its first two years, during which time I came to know the organization and its founders as leaders of that PAC. On January 2, 2006, however, they announced that Redstate Inc., a newly created for-profit "Republican community weblog", acquired the content of Redstate.org, and the url was changed to Redstate.com. Redstate.org, the 527 political action committee, continues to exist and remains on record with the FEC, according to FEC records and Redstate founder Michael Krempasky, the FEC's listed contact for the PAC. Participants in the Republican community that now owns its old content continue to discuss electoral strategy and financial support for candidates on the new dot-com media site; the proper descriptions for the organizations are Redstate (located at Redstate.com and, archivally, at Redstate.org) and Redstate.org (also located at Redstate.com). I regret the error.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TAP SAW IT FIRST. Last week’s New Yorker carried a review of Francis Fukuyama’s new book America at the Crossroads by Louis Menand, and yesterday’s New York Times Book Review ran a front-page review by Paul Berman. It’s nice to see that they’re catching up to our excellent Fuku profile from our October 2005 issue by Robert S. Boynton. With FF back in the headlines, it deserves a second look.

--The Editors