ELLEN GOOD-WOMAN. As Dana said, Ellen Goodman spoke at the Women, Action & the Media conference here last night in Cambridge, MA from her 40 years of experience with the MSM op-ed pages. As one of the first women to grace the "thinking pages," Goodman's perspective was one that I found invaluable (although she had trouble articulating herself on complex issues like disablity and race). She points out that a lot of young women entering the media today know there was sexism that prevented women from speaking out in the media, but "they forget it was legal" to discriminate. The women, she said, were "researchers" at big publications like Newsweek, and the men were the reporters and writers. Sitll, women make up a vast minority of the talking heads. Goodman brings the perspective that women have come a long way in the media but still have a long way to go.

-- Kay Steiger

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: SPRING BREAK. Now that it Democrats have secured victory in including a withdrawal date in the Iraq funding supplemental, Terence Samuel notes that the coming congressional recess is going to be a battle of the talking points.

So Washington is once again primed for a showdown. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says that on April 15, if the money approved in the supplemental funding bill is not available, the troops will begin seeing effects. Democrats don't believe him, and they plan to spend a lot of time during the recess discussing how our troops are well-cared for. They'll point out, it is Republicans standing in the way of support for the troops: Some Democrats are willing to force the confrontation by slow-walking revisions of the bill after the veto.

Read the whole thing here.

--The Editors

PLANET GORE. I know that to be considered a respectable independent thinker, and not a partisan hack, I'm supposed to take conservatives seriously. And I try, really I do. But then sometimes they go and do something so ridiculous that makes it just too hard for me.

Case in point: National Review has started a special blog called "Planet Gore" (how clever!) devoted entirely to stopping any reasonable movement to prevent climate change. Sample post title: "The Admirable Crichton." Yes, they are seriously touting the novelist Michael Crichton as a global warming expert. This struck me as hilarious until I remembered that President Bush does too.

--Ben Adler

KEROACK'S PRIVATE PRACTICE. Looks like "Dr." Eric Keroack resigned his post as head of the federal Office of Population Affairs because the Massachusetts Office of Medicaid is investigating his private medical practice.

MassHealth officials aren't releasing the details on the investigation. The AP reports that his private practice is based in Marblehead, MA. And indeed, that's the address on his state registration: 14 Willow Rd., Marblehead, MA. But when I called the phone number listed with that address, I got what was clearly a home answering machine, not a doctor's office. And a simple reverse-phone lookup shows it is indeed a residential address -- not a private medical practice.

So where is Keroack's private practice that is under investigation, if not in Marblehead? The address listed for his practice by the hospital he's affiliated with, North Shore Medical Center, is 103 Broadway, Revere, MA. This is the address of one of the outposts of his crisis-pregnancy center chain, A Woman's Concern.

The AP report implied that, because Keroack's practice is supposedly located in Marblehead, where there is no branch of A Woman's Concern, that the Medicaid investigation into Keroack's "private practice" is not an investigation into his crisis-pregnancy center. Seems to me that could be wrong, and it's possible the investigation -- and Keroack's subsequent resignation -- are related to his affiliation with the crisis-pregnancy center.

Related: Legal Momentum sent a pregnant woman into A Woman's Concern and documented her experience.

Update: Planned Parenthood reports that Evelyn Kappeler, the current Acting Deputy Director for Population Affairs, will be replacing Keroack.

--Ann Friedman

THE HORROR. It is quite remarkable how obsessed Chris Matthews remains with Bill Clinton's sex life. (Why the adultery of Hillary Clinton's husband is a major campaign issue while we can be free to swoon over Republican adulterers, some of whom actively humiliate their exes, remains unclear. Although one prominent law professor does claim that Hillary's campaign events are being used as fronts for Bill to meet women -- I'm sure Matthews will be discussing that soon.) Needless to say, this is just one dimension to his exceptionally creepy misogyny. Bob Somerby finds Matthews engaging in the following sober analysis, in language that occasionally bears resemblances to English:

You know, somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, I think there might be a giant, green, ugly, horny monster. A gigantic, gigantic monster of anti-Hillary, and anti-woman Hillary, anti-liberal woman Hillary, some real ferocious beast out there that says no matter what happens between now and Election Day, they're not going to let her win. Men, some women, are just not going to let this woman, this woman win the presidency. I don't know whether that monster's out there. All men I meet are afraid to talk like that. You only hear criticism of Hillary from smart, college-educated women. They're the ones that always have a problem with her now.

--Scott Lemieux

IN DEFENSE OF IWO. Some Friday movie blogging: In a piece in the March print issue of the Prospect, Charles Taylor did a fine job debunking the myth of Clint Eastwood. As Scott has noted, while Eastwood is a talented filmmaker, his catalogue is uneven, and the worst work nearly unwatchable. Mystic River, Unforgiven, and The Outlaw Josey Wales are genuinely fine films, but critics have too often unaccountably responded positively to such weak entries as Million Dollar Baby and Flags of Our Fathers. Unfortunately, in the process of criticizing Eastwood, Taylor gets his latest work, Letters from Iwo Jima, badly wrong.

Taylor and Salon's Stephanie Zacharek have both argued that Eastwood presents a picture of the Imperial Japanese Army that takes insufficient account of its brutality.

Certainly, in World War II, the Japanese Army operated with barbarity against both civilian and military foes. The IJA committed many atrocities in its eight year war against China, including most notably the Rape of Nanking. After capturing the Chinese capital, the IJA ran wild, raping and beheading civilians without any apparent purpose other than terror. In Manila in 1945, a retreating and isolated Japanese army turned its frustration on the local population, massacring thousands before American forces could retake the city.

The Imperial Japanese Army's treatment of prisoners was also brutal. After defeating a combined Filipino-American force at Bataan, the IJA marched 75,000 American and Filipino troops nine days in horrific conditions, killing thousands. Similarly, 16,000 surrendered Allied troops died in slave-labor conditions during the construction of the Burma-Thailand Railway. The issue of Japanese use of "comfort women," or forced sex slaves, has again come to the fore as a consequence of the unfortunate comments of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Indeed, the depredations of the Imperial Japanese Army had effects beyond the murder of its victims. As Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper detail in Forgotten Armies, the brutality of the Japanese Army in China, Burma, Malaya, and elsewhere helped undercut support from anti-colonial groups that might otherwise have been sympathetic with, or at least neutral toward, Japan's pan-Asian propaganda.

Taylor and Zacharek contend that because Eastwood doesn't depict the Japanese Army massacring civilians or killing very many American prisoners, Letters from Iwo Jima amounts to a whitewash. Of course, there were few civilians on Iwo Jima for the Japanese Army to massacre, and because of the tactical situation it had very few opportunities to brutalize and kill American prisoners. This left Eastwood with several options. He could refrain from making a movie depicting the Japanese view of the Battle of Iwo Jima. He could demonstrate Japanese brutality through flashbacks, an effective if clumsy device. Finally, Eastwood could, instead of giving us obvious examples of Japanese brutality, show us an Army that would, given the opportunity, commit atrocities. Eastwood chose the last, and did his job with uncharacteristic subtlety. He told the story so well, in fact, that some critics seem to have missed it entirely.

Taylor saw a stylized, honorable Japanese Army that bore no relationship to the real Japanese Army. I saw an army capable of committing the atrocities of Manila and Nanking. Eastwood ably demonstrated the character of the Imperial Japanese Army -- both how it understood itself and how that understanding could break down into an orgy of unrestrained, irrational violence. Early in the film, as the Americans take control of Mount Suribachi, a group of Japanese soldiers is ordered to abandon their position and retreat to a more defensible point. Infused with "warrior ethos," several in this group decide to commit suicide (using hand grenades) instead of obeying orders and retreating. The rest of the group, less enthusiastic about detonating themselves, nevertheless do so because of both overwhelming social pressure and the very real threat of battlefield execution. This scene is key to Eastwood's understanding of the Imperial Japanese Army, but neither Taylor nor Zacharek mention it. Along with a few others, this scene demonstrates that Eastwood understands the internal problems that helped lead the IJA to commit atrocities.

Armies do not, by and large, commit atrocities because they're full of horrible people. Instead, they engage in horrific behavior because of institutional and situational factors. Military units that display extreme ideological commitment easily dehumanize the enemy, leaving just a few short steps to atrocity. Even then, committing atrocity doesn't often appeal to a lot of soldiers. Social cohesion and pressure to conform, especially in a culture that puts a particularly high value on conformity, can lead soldiers to temporarily forget their own values in favor of group togetherness. Terror also pushes soldiers to commit atrocities, both in response to threats from their own comrades and as a reaction to fear of the enemy. Finally, while some armies commit atrocities in response to direct orders from superiors, many don't. Military units that respond poorly and erratically to central orders tend to take matters into their own hands, including relations with civilians and prisoners of war. The political imperative to treat conquered civilians and captured prisoners humanely requires tight discipline at the unit level, as the urge for vengeance and rampage can easily take over a group of soldiers.

Eastwood gives us an army designed for atrocity. He depicts the Japanese Army as enthusiastic to the point of irrationality, deeply invested in social cohesion and group conformity, terrified both of itself and of the overwhelming American power, yet with extremely poor chain of command discipline. This is an army that would, given the opportunity, do terrible things. That it lacked the opportunity on Iwo doesn't change the fundamental nature of the organization. Eastwood reminds us that the men of such an army, in spite of all the evil that they could do, still clutch pictures of their loved ones when they die. Moreover, he shows us the limits of what professional soldiers can do within such an organization. While Taylor saw the depictions of General Kuribayashi and Baron Nishi as a mixture of archetypes borrowed from war and samurai movies, I saw a couple of officers trying to win a battle, hindered not just by the Americans but also by the limits of their own organization. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the characteristics that make an army likely to commit atrocities also make it ineffective on the battlefield. The Japanese Army performed unevenly during World War II, combining occasional brilliance with consistent problems of discipline, supply, and organization. The suicidal tendencies that Kuribayashi has to deal with make it harder to defend Iwo, not easier.

Eastwood doesn't literally show us the Rape of Nanking. Instead, he does something far more important; he shows us the army capable of committing the Rape of Nanking, and the Bataan Death March, the Burma-Thailand Railroad, and the atrocities in Manila. Both Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima attempt to understand the battlefront in terms of the home front. In the former, Eastwood is at his clumsiest and most obvious. In the latter, he's at his most subtle. Letters from Iwo Jima should be understood as part of a family of films, along with Breaker Morant, Battle of Algiers, and The Grand Illusion, that conceptualize the practice of war as distinct from but embedded within a larger social universe. It's among Eastwood's best work, and critical over-appreciation of Eastwood's other films shouldn't obscure its quality.

--Robert Farley

BIGGEST. TAX INCREASE. EVER. As everybody's pointing out, the Republicans' characterization of letting some of the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010 as the Democrats enacting "the biggest tax increase in American history" is, of course, a lie, both on the semantic point of what constitutes a hike and on the more concrete point that the Republicans drafted and signed those expirations into law in the first place. But here comes John Boehner with an awesome Wall Street Journal op-ed today decrying the Democrats' "back to the future" budget resolution featuring "the largest tax hike in American history." This is "back to the future," of course, because it's an echo of Bill Clinton's dreaded tax hike of 1993, which Boehner, like every right-winger, continues to invoke as if most people associate the 1990s with tax-stifled economic misery. (He also, of course, gets in a requisite pot-and-kettle dig at the Iraq supplemental bill's pork.) Boehner ends hilariously by conceding that, while "we Republicans could have done a much better job while we were in the majority" on matters of fiscal discipline, there remain "very real differences on Capitol Hill when it comes to fiscal responsibility. Democrats think we can spend our way out of every problem; Republicans will continue to work to help fiscal sanity triumph over fiscal recklessness."

Meanwhile, Sawicky reminds us that the more compelling critique to be made about the Dems' budget, both this year and no doubt for several years to come, is that it's all too married to notions of "fiscal sanity" and hamstrung by a reluctance to raise either spending or revenues [Max corrects] significantly.

--Sam Rosenfeld

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: LET'S TALK ABOUT SEX. We're finally starting to be able to! Ann writes about the gathering momentum -- at the state and federal level -- to combat abstinence-only sex education. Take a look.

--The Editors

MARGINAL McCAIN. What's most interesting to me about the story (or really the additional evidence supporting an old story) that John McCain almost switched parties in 2001 is not so much that he considered it, but why he quickly abandoned the idea: He balked when Sen. James Jeffords left the Republican Party to caucus with the Democrats, switching control of the Senate.

It wasn't that McCain had second thoughts on whether he'd be comfortable in the Democratic Party, or that they didn't treat him with respect, or even that the Republicans offered him massive benefits. Rather, it was the fact that, after Jeffords switched, his would not be the switch that gave Democrats control. In other words, if he weren't the marginal member, he wasn't interested in switching. If he couldn't hold the kind of power that Lieberman is claiming now -- the ability to use the threat of switching or switching back -- the whole idea was of no interest.

By contrast, I suspect that Jeffords switched entirely for reasons of his own, and if McCain had switched first, Jeffords would have switched anyway. (So the question to Tom Daschle should be, if you thought McCain was serious, why not ask Jeffords to hold off, and lock in McCain first and then get a margin of two?)

This has really been the McCain M.O. He's neither a maverick, nor a classic flip-flopper who goes where the wind blows, rather, his consistent pattern has been to maneuveri to put himself in the position where his consent can be the make-or-break factor. As I put it in a column a year ago, "bipartisanship has been a scarce resource, and McCain effectively cornered the market." And since I wrote that, he's done it several more times, notably on the torture bill. It's an astonishing way to exercise power. And he's been joined in the game by Lieberman.

But it's a high-wire act, especially when also running for president, and I think Iraq has knocked McCain off his game.

-- Mark Schmitt

MCCAIN'S AMBITION: I think it's interesting that the story Dana tells about John McCain's near-party switch gets so little attention (the general story of how McCain might have switched, that is, not the specific confirmation offered in today's Hill piece). It seems like a pretty big deal that the Republican front-runner almost switched parties, and yet I don't see the cable news and slick weeklies chewing it over much as the presidential race gears up.

What I think the anecdote reveals about McCain, though, is pretty serious. If you look at his legislative record, as Jon Chait has pointed out, he veered sharply leftward in 2001-2002, and then just as sharply veered back. Clearly McCain is willing to make some pretty big compromises in his pursuit of power.

--Ben Adler

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE WISCONSIN WAY. Roger Bybee looks at the exciting push for progressive universal health care this year in Wisconsin.

--The Editors

FIRING FITZGERALD Under questioning by Senator Dick Durbin, Kyle Sampson just acknowledged that he brought up the possibility of adding Patrick Fitzgerald to the list of United States Attorneys to be fired with Harriet Miers and someone else. I missed the exact timing of the event (though it was while the CIA leak investigation was ongoing) and who the other person was. Sampson claimed that his interlocutors said absolutely nothing in response, but looked at him funny -- which is frankly quite believable, it is such a breathtakingly stupid idea. Obviously, if the White House wanted to get rid of Patrick Fitzgerald, they'd have to do something like get rid of all the U.S. attorneys in one fell swoop, so that Fitzgerald was not targeted.

--Jeff Lomonaco

MEMO TO LEGISLATORS: FOLLOW UP QUESTIONS! I've been reading the transcripts of the Libby trial, and one of the things that really makes an impression is how skilled the distinguished lawyers on both sides are at asking follow-up questions, perhaps especially when a witness seeks to dodge a question with an answer about not recalling something.

Legislators involved in hearings such as the hearing with Kyle Sampson this morning would do well to take a page from the lawyers and press the witness when he gives a fishy "I do not recall" kind of answer. Obviously, there are time constraints involved: lawyers in a trial (or before the grand jury) really do have all day and more, whereas the senators have very little time to question a witness. But the basic technique is easy and not time-consuming. If, on an important matter, the witness says, "I do not recall X," the followup question is, "Are you testifying that you specifically remember that X did not happen, or is your testimony that X might have happen and you just can't recall it now?" Or: "Can you rule it out that X happened? or are you telling us that you don't recall whether X happened but it very well might have happened?"

For instance, Dianne Feinstein questioned Sampson about the fact that Sampson talked about "the real problem we have right now" with U.S. attorney Carol Lam in San Diego the day after her office alerted DoJ that they would be executing search warrants in an investigation of Dusto Foggo and Brent Wilkes. (For more on the story, see here.)

Feinstein asked Sampson today, "And are you aware that on May 10 Carol Lam sent a notice to the Department of Justice saying she would be seeking a search warrant -- of the CIA investigation into Dusto Foggo and Brent Wilkes?" And Sampson carefully responded, "I don't remember ever seeing such a notice." The obvious follow-up: "Are you saying you specifically remember that you never saw such a notice? Or are you saying it is possible you saw it and now you just don't remember?"

This Q&A raises another technique legislators rarely seem to pursue, which is surprising given that politicians are themselves probably the most practiced abusers of casuistry in our society today. Sampson says he doesn't remember ever seeing such a notice. "Well," Sampson should be asked, "did you ever learn of the substance of the notice? That is, did you ever learn, in any way or form, of the fact that Lam intended to have search warrants executed in the investigation involving Foggo and Wilkes?"

Some witnesses are so slippery that they will always be able to dodge follow-up questions like that. But some aren't. And even the most slippery ones often look pretty bad when they are forced to become unusually evasive.

--Jeff Lomonaco

GORE-EDWARDS? Presidential tickets cannot be re-compiled like a band’s discography, but as I've mentioned before, if the Democrats wanted to create a “greatest hits” ticket from the last two cycles that would mean pairing the better of the two presidential nominees, Al Gore, with the better of the two running mates, John Edwards.

Yesterday, in my weekly column for the Baltimore Sun, I wrote about Gore’s confrontation with Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe last week on Capitol Hill. What I didn’t know as I was filing was that Gallup would be releasing a poll the very same day showing that of the four Democrats they included in the survey, the net approval scores (approve minus disapprove) among the Democrats surveyed for Gore (+73) and Edwards (+60) would not only be on the rise, but are now higher than for either Hillary Clinton (+52) or Barack Obama (+51). Gallup writes: “In recent weeks, Clinton's favorability ratings among Democrats have declined somewhat, from 80% or better to the current 74%. Meanwhile, Gore's image has improved from 72% in early February to 84% today. Edwards' popularity also received a small boost following the announcement of his wife's recurrence of cancer. Views of Obama have held steady in recent weeks.”

Approval ratings are a soft indicator, and they can be quite fluid. Edwards has been in the news because of his wife’s cancer, perhaps creating some sympathy (the poll went into the field the day after the couple’s Chapel Hill presser); and Gore is still riding on the fumes of his post-Oscar celebrity. Still, one wonders: On mostly making the race so far about each other, have Hillary and Obama peaked too early?

--Tom Schaller

COMPARISON. There was some question in comments yesterday regarding the appropriateness of the Iranian arrest of 15 British sailors and marines in the Gulf. Recall the Hainan Island Incident, from 2001? An EP-3 Aries II spyplane had been flying near Chinese airspace when it was shadowed by several PLAN J-8 fighters. One of the fighters clipped the wing of the EP-3, damaging the American aircraft and destroying the Chinese. The American crew of 24 landed without authorization on Hainan Island, in Chinese territory. The Chinese kept the Americans until the United States issued an apology, ten days later. American diplomats were given access to the crew the day after the crash, and while the crew members were interrogated none were forced to give televised confessions.

Compared to the current situation of British sailors in Iran, the violation of Chinese airspace (through the landing, if not through the initial spying) was clear, as was the mission of espionage that the aircraft was engaged in. Moreover, the incident involved the death of a Chinese citizen and the destruction of several million dollars worth of Chinese state property. Nevertheless, Chinese behavior was considerably more subdued than Iranian has been thus far, in spite of some pretty serious questions about the Iranian account of the capture.

Now, Iran has suggested that it will end the standoff if Britain apologizes. Given that the British don't, apparently, believe that they were in the wrong, I'm not sure that we're going to see that. The Iranians have also threatened to put the captured sailors and marines on trial, which the Chinese never did with the detained airmen. Thus, this still strikes me as a case either of Iranian overreaction or of Iranian brinksmanship, and one that's hardly sensible given the delicate diplomatic situation that in which Iran currently finds itself.

--Robert Farley

BUT IF WE MAKE ACCESS TO THE BALLOT EASIER, DEMOCRATIC UNICORNS WILL STEAL OUR ELECTIONS! Today Michael Waldman and Justin Levitt have a really terrific piece about the GOP's voter fraud fraud. The scam is advanced by the common method of "generalizing from apocryphal anecdotes":

Allegations of voter fraud -- someone sneaking into the polls to cast an illicit vote -- have been pushed in recent years by partisans seeking to justify proof-of-citizenship and other restrictive ID requirements as a condition of voting. Scare stories abound on the Internet and on editorial pages, and they quickly become accepted wisdom.

But the notion of widespread voter fraud, as these prosecutors found out, is itself a fraud. Firing a prosecutor for failing to find wide voter fraud is like firing a park ranger for failing to find Sasquatch. Where fraud exists, of course, it should be prosecuted and punished. (And politicians have been stuffing ballot boxes and buying votes since senators wore togas; Lyndon Johnson won a 1948 Senate race after his partisans famously "found" a box of votes well after the election.) Yet evidence of actual fraud by individual voters is painfully skimpy.

Before and after every close election, politicians and pundits proclaim: The dead are voting, foreigners are voting, people are voting twice. On closer examination, though, most such allegations don't pan out. Consider a list of supposedly dead voters in Upstate New York that was much touted last October. Where reporters looked into names on the list, it turned out that the voters were, to quote Monty Python, "not dead yet."

Or consider Washington state, where McKay closely watched the photo-finish gubernatorial election of 2004. A challenge to ostensibly noncitizen voters was lodged in April 2005 on the questionable basis of "foreign-sounding names." After an election there last year in which more than 2 million votes were cast, following much controversy, only one ballot ended up under suspicion for double-voting. That makes sense. A person casting two votes risks jail time and a fine for minimal gain. Proven voter fraud, statistically, happens about as often as death by lightning strike.

Yet the stories have taken on the character of urban myth.

And not only does the tiny problem of voter fraud detract attention from the really serious problems with voting in this country -- such as unreliable voting machines that vary across districts, insufficiently staffed voting centers, etc. -- these urban legends are used to actually oppose efforts to make it easier to vote, as it is in most liberal democracies (which don't seem to have problems running fair elections).

--Scott Lemieux

FLIP-FLOPPER. In 2001, John McCain talked to John Edwards, Tom Daschle, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, and other Democrats about leaving the Republican Party, The Hill reports this morning, but abandoned the idea when Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords left the GOP and declared himself an Independent. The story is confirmed by former Rep. Tom Downey (D-NY), Daschle, and “a source close to Edwards.” To some swing voters, this news will likely help to harden the ridiculous myth of “maverick” McCain. But this is a great weapon for McCain’s GOP rivals. What grassroots conservative wants to vote for an almost-Democrat?

--Dana Goldstein

BAD FRAMING. Congressional GOP leaders met with some bloggers yesterday to lay out their planned strategy to fight the Democrats' budget resolution this year. The plan, predictably, is to call the Dems' proposal* to let most of the Bush tax cuts expire in 2011 "the biggest tax increase in American history."

Though this was obviously before a sympathetic crowd, I think House minority leader John Boehner could stand to tighten his game a bit before entering the real fight: "Either they can cut entitlements, which they're not going to, or they can raise taxes," he told the bloggers. "And they are going to raise taxes." Hmm. You don't have to have Schmittian levels of confidence in a new era of politically viable tax-raising to think that explicitly casting the budget fight this way -- as a zero-sum fight between funding for popular entitlements and high-end tax cuts -- is a bit unwise. Certainly Republicans, when they were in the majority, knew that rendering such conflicts explicit was a no-no. That's why, each year that they passed budget reconciliation bills, they'd deliberately break them into two separate measures -- one that was only tax cuts, the other only spending -- and vote on them at different times during the year, to obscure as much as possible the actual spending consequences of endless tax cutting. Boehner seems to have forgotten that -- in addition to forgetting that you never want to explicitly refer to entitlements when you're discussing cuts in spending, and instead pretend that cutting things like "waste" and those dreaded appropriations earmarks would more than cover the cost of permanent gigantic tax cuts for the rich.

UPDATE: *See Gregory's comment for a useful correction.

--Sam Rosenfeld

IS THERE MORE TO THE CUMMINS* FIRING? I am not a U.S. attorney firing-ologist, but when reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece in this week’s New Yorker about Democrats and Wal-Mart, I paused at this line about a case involving the Bentonville, Arkansas-based corporate giant:

Most recently, Wal-Mart announced that it had fired a technician from its Threat Research and Analysis division (which combats industrial espionage) for eavesdropping on telephone calls made by the Times’ Wal-Mart beat reporter, Michael Barbaro. Wal-Mart claims that the technician acted alone; the U.S. Attorney in Arkansas is investigating.

Politically, having Griffin there could still be useful for Democrats as Mark Pryor, a top GOP Senate target for 2008, faces re-election next year. But maybe there’s something deeper going on here?

*(Name misspelling fixed.)

--Tom Schaller

THE POST-VETO FIGHT. I think it's safe to say that Democrats exceeded the expectations of everyone -- including themselves -- in their ability to pass supplemental bills in both chambers calling for withdrawal from Iraq. The strategic and substantive debates now turn to responding to the president's inevitable veto of a bill coming out of conference. One option would simply be to hold the caucus together to keep passing the same bill endlessly. Another option, actually one that Matt tossed out to me in conversation in the office yesterday, is described in the aformentioned Washington Post article today:

Conservative Democrats also discussed alternatives for providing troop funding, if the standoff proves to be prolonged. For instance, Reps. Dennis Cardoza (Calif.) and Mike Ross (Ark.) suggested that the war funding be parceled out in three-month increments to force Bush to keep coming back for more.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WHISTLING PAST THE GRAVEYARD. Harold marvels at Republicans' apparent inability to change their ways on any number of fronts in the face of massive public discontent. Exhibit A: "The truly astonishing thing about the latest scandals besetting the Bush administration is that they stem from actions the administration took after the November elections, when Democratic control of Congress was a fait accompli." But that's only Exhibit A. Read the whole thing.

--The Editors

PITCHING YOUR BRAND TO THE GODLY. At first I thought the invitation to this was spam, but no, there really is such a thing: The 2nd Annual Faith Based Marketing Summit is taking place in Dallas come mid-April, combining the two great American traditions of Godly people and sales. Featured speaker last year: Greg Stielstra, author of Pyromarketing: The Four Step Strategy to Ignite Customer Evangelists and Keep Them for Life.

Critical questions the upcoming conference says it will help answer include:

Other than the church on Sunday morning, where do people of faith gather?

Is Christian media the only place to reach faith based consumers with my marketing message?

How can entertainment be used to reach the faith audience in a language they understand and resonate with 159 million consumers falling into the “faith” category?

How do I distinguish between them to achieve success with my one-to-one marketing strategies?

Do Christians consume differently from the rest of the world?

How much does faith play into the products and services Christians buy?

How commercialized can a ministry become and still remain true to its objectives?

Why should Christians be a niche marketing strategy?

How do I get the very loyal market of faith based consumers to truly embrace my brand?

And finally, the question many a communications professional has asked herself:

Am I trying to haul water to the desert or water to the sea with my communications strategies?

The speakers roster looks fairly impressive, with a heavy skew toward the entertainment industry, and a keynote by Jeff Yordy, Vice President, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment -- the manager of the FoxFaith division, which "has shipped over 25 million units of faith-based product in the last two years."

Boy am I hoping someone from the Democratic Party goes to this.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

PORK!! A page 1 story in The Washington Post today passes on the president's harsh criticisms of Congress's Iraq supplemental bills, devoting many paragraphs to Bush's indignant recitation of several porky domestic spending provisions in the packages. Could it have hurt the authors to at least briefly mention that every emergency Iraq supplemental devised and passed by Republican Congresses in the last several years -- and happily signed by the president -- has included such provisions?

The supplemental bill passed in 2005 included "pork efforts such as redirecting existing funds to study preservation of Rio Grande River silvery minnows, providing debt service on a firefighting training academy in Elko, Nev., and allowing oil and gas exploration along Mississippi's Gulf Islands National Seashore." The one passed a year later included funds for "the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Arrowhead Center at New Mexico State University, and the Rhode Island School of Design" (see more here).

As I've indicated before, I'm a bit more cavalier than most about the use of pork to grease the legislative wheels. I think it's obvious that the much more procedurally troublesome aspect of the way this war has been funded is the administration's very insistence on the accounting shenanigan of emergency supplementals, which have no justification other than to serve as a means of blurring the cost of (and complicating debate over) the war. But regardless of what one thinks of Republicans' criticisms of the pork included in the new bill, newspapers ought to be including the very recent history of such measures in their accounts for context.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BIG AG. If you’re looking for some stereotypical Washington absurdity, I recommend spending time with the House Agricultural Committee, which will be taking up reauthorization of the mammoth Farm Bill this year. In the space of two hours of discussion on proposals, I heard at least five jokes about how flat Kansas is. I also saw a man in a sunflower tie -- I assume that he was from the Sunflower Commission -- and a man with horseshoe cufflinks and a pink horse tie to match. Dressing the part and all that. Their politics are, alas, no better than their fashion sense: these are men who unanimously object to lowering the maximum income eligibility for subsidy payments to $200,000 (in their words, a “drastically” dangerous cut from the existing $2.5 million cap).

The meeting started off with a pleasant acknowledgment of how little had changed since Democrats assumed control of the committee in January. And then one by one, the lobbyists made their arguments for increases in subsidy payments, as opposed to the USDA’s proposed cuts. (The committee is disproportionately made up of congressmen -- of both parties -- from subsidy-heavy districts.) But if anything underscored the deferential treatment accorded to Big Ag, it was the request that the panel describe any arguments that might be made against the lobbyists' suggestions, should they exist.

Any one of the representatives on the committee could have made those opposing points themselves, had they chosen to read the reform-minded literature that sat, untouched, on an info table outside.

--Alina Hoffman

SOMETHING I HAD FORGOTTEN. Joe Biden is still running for president.

--Sam Rosenfeld

REGENT UNIVERSITY AND THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION. Monica Goodling, a top aide to Alberto Gonzales, graduated from Regent University School of Law in 1999 and started working for the DOJ around 2002, under the godly leadership of John Ashcroft. Her rise to the present position looks meteoric. How exactly Goodling acquired the necessary experience in such a few years remains a mystery to me. Several hours of Googling gave very little but hearsay.

Perhaps it is the greatness of her alma mater that explains her rapid promotions. Regent University was founded by the Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson with the mission of producing Christian leaders who will change the world. The very word "regent" has a special meaning in this context: the alumni of the university are expected to serve as regents until the real ruler, Christ, returns.

A good way to begin changing the world is to start with the U.S. government. Digby notes that Regent University boasts 150 alumni in the Bush administration. That is an astonishing figure for a university which has been operating for a mere quarter of a century.

What is it that makes the Regent graduates so desirable for appointments in high places? Christopher Hayes wrote about Pat Robertson's joint in 2005, and may have the answer to my innocent questioning:

At a school designed explicitly to produce influential professionals, worldview plays an especially crucial role; it is the bridge from inner spiritual beliefs to public action in the professional sphere. It's for this reason that Regent's professors are required to integrate "biblical principles" into every subject area, and it's the reason that law students take a class their first year in the Christian foundations of law. Regent Law School Dean Jeffrey Brauch calls the result a "JD-plus." Students take the standard canon of legal education -- torts, property, constitutional law -- but supplement discussions of what the law is with discussions of what the Bible and Christian tradition say the law should be, reading Leviticus, the Gospel of Matthew, and Thomas Aquinas alongside their case law. The same model extends throughout Regent's nine schools, which offer courses like "Redemptive Cinema" and "Church-based Counseling Programs," while infusing standard professional training with insights and injunctions from the Judeo-Christian (read: Christian) tradition.

-- J. Goodrich

“MAKE HISTORY WITH HILLARY.” That’s the tagline for NOW’s new campaign to elect Hillary Clinton the next president of the United States. The august feminist organization joined Emily’s List today in making an unusually early formal endorsement of HRC. It demonstrates the limit, I think, of single-issue politics. In her statement, NOW PAC Chair Kim Gandy says:

At this time in our history, this country needs strong, experienced and principled leadership to restore faith in our government and repair its credibility at home and abroad, and to end the destructive policies that have eroded our civil liberties and increased injustice and inequality in our society.

But no word on how Hillary will do that, only assertions that “the time is NOW for a woman president.” No matter how attractive that message is -- and it’s damn time, I agree -- without a wider debate on HRC’s merits as a progressive with a policy agenda beyond reproductive justice and women’s equality, most committed movement lefties will be hesitant to support her because of her record on Iraq and perceived capitulation to the center. We’ve seen that here in TAP’s Hillary debate, of course. But it seems like as the primary rolls forward, framing Clinton’s candidacy as a feminist watershed will be a major tactic, not something to be downplayed.

--Dana Goldstein

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: GETTING WARMER. Brian Beutler offers a major overview and analysis of the complex political terrain facing the Democratic congressional leadership as they seek to devise legislation on global warming. Be sure to take a look.

--The Editors

NO DEUS EX MACHINA IN THIS TRAGEDY. In connection with Sam's post, check out a piece in today's WaPo by Thomas Ricks on a new report on Iraq from Barry McCaffrey. Even more worth a read is McCaffrey's report itself -- there's a link to the pdf here.

There's much of value in the brief report, but he touches on a point related to the one from Brownstein that Sam discusses: "The democratic [sicj] control of Congress and its vocal opposition can actually provide a helpful framework within which our brilliant new Ambassador Ryan Crocker can maneuver the Maliki administration to understand their diminishing options." That is, the Bush administration can in effect tell Maliki, "We're holding off the opposition and the American public for now, but it won't last, especially if you don't do what we say and show real results. We might have to pull up the Green Zone." Such leverage may be helpful for accomplishing some of the objectives, like a modified form of de-Baathification and an oil-sharing law, that are supposed to be the mechanisms of national reconciliation. Whether they will be or not, even if achieved, is another question.

But as McCaffrey himself goes on to point out, at most the U.S. has a thirty-six month time horizon -- and in this regard, I suspect McCaffrey is hinting at something else he likes about the new Democratic control of Congress: the Democrats may have a secret ally in the military, which, as McCaffrey is quite explicit to say, simply cannot sustain the deployment for much longer and has been driven into "a position of strategic peril" by the Bush administration. (McCaffrey is a little less explicit on that last point, but it's clear.) In fact, everything I have read and heard suggests that many in the military have a timeline not unlike that of the Democrats in the House.

Furthermore, one of the many fearsome dilemmas McCaffrey points to is the fact that while the U.S. has three years tops, the insurgency will continue in some form for a decade. And McCaffrey's suggested "primary war winning strategy" to address this dilemma is not encouraging -- he simply brings down the utterly unexplained and unelaborated deus ex machina of Crocker and Petraeus "getting the top 100 Shia and Sunni leaders to walk back from the edge of all-out civil war." OK …

On another note, Ricks' piece in the Post ends by pointing to a recent, less gloomy assessment from Dave Kilcullen. Kilcullen is that rarest of beings -- a smart and frank member of Bush's government, as shown by his comments in pieces by James Fallows and George Packer last year, when he was Hank Crumpton's chief strategist in the State Department's counterterrorism office. Now he is in Baghdad as Petraeus' chief advisor on COIN operations. And amazingly enough, he is occasionally blogging at smallwarsjournal.

To be sure, Kilcullen has an investment in a positive assessment of the new strategy; but he also has an investment in evidence and how to assess it to make the strategy work as well as possible, and he has an established record of frank speaking even in a pretty senior position in the government under Bush. If you're interested in following how things in Iraq look to those involved in the new strategy, his posts are an extraordinary resource -- and infinitely more valuable than the assessments of reverse wolf-criers like Joe Lieberman or polemical propagandists like Kristol and Kagan.

--Jeff Lomonaco

THIS IS LIKE AN ONION ARTICLE ...accidentally published by CNN.

--Ann Friedman

THE OLD GIRLS' CLUB. Why is it a good idea to hold networking events for women only?

Because historically male institutions -- like law firms, Wall Street, opinion journalism (ahem) -- have had male-centric bonding and networking events in place for decades. Because most of my potential female mentors immediately head home to their children at the end of the workday, and opportunities to grab a drink with them or interact outside the office don't materialize very often. Because women are more likely to make connections and pull each other up the ladder if they have a chance to interact in an all-female environment. Because it's fun.

It's a common complaint among young women professionals I know that the women above them on the ladder aren't very willing to lend a hand up. Women-only events, where women get a chance to talk to one another in a slightly more casual setting, are one way to ease these tensions.

Books like Tales from the Boom-Boom Room have documented the prevailing male networking culture with descriptions of female traders excluded from golf outings and poker nights, or forced to forge business bonds at strip clubs. Now women-only events have some dudes feeling left out, poor things.

Some male executives think ambitious women would be wiser to learn to play golf -- still a primary way men in business socialize and lay the groundwork for deal making. And some women are ambivalent about women-only events that may cause them to be viewed as "frivolous."

Yeah, there's nothing frivolous about golf.

--Ann Friedman

AFGHANISTAN, A SUCCESS STORY -- NOT. Once upon a time, electricity flowed through the buildings of Kabul, the Afghan capital, 24 hours a day. Today, it's more like every other day for a three-hour stint. So says Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, who today convened a media briefing at the National Press Club on the status of Afghan women, five years after the U.S. pushed the Taliban from power. It was Smeal, you'll recall, who relentlessly pushed the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban -- which the U.S. was poised to recognize as the legitimate government of Afghanistan -- effectively ending the pipeline dreams of the U.S. oil company UNOCAL, who counted among its paid consultants one Hamid Karzai, now the beleaguered president of Afghanistan. (Another UNOCAL hired hand was Zalmay Khalizad, now the beleaguered U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and soon to be the beleaguered U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.)

Today Smeal brought before the media an assemblage of eminences that included Mavis Nicholson Leno (long an advocate for Afghan women) and Dr.Sima Samar, who heads the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Afghanistan's first official human rights body. Afghanistan's brain drain, it could be said, is killing the women of that country. In the 1970s, when Samar went to medical school in Kabul, not only did she enjoy electric power 24 hours a day; she also was not alone as a female physician. Before the Taliban came to power, 40 percent of Afghanistan's doctors were women, as were 70 percent of its schoolteachers. When the Taliban banned women from working outside the home, nearly all the educated women left the country. Gone now is what little medical care was available to Afghan women before the Taliban. Deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth have hit record highs.

After removing the Taliban from power and facilitating a national election, the U.S. has done little for Afghanistan. Reconstruction monies line the pockets of U.S. corporations, and do virtually nothing to improve conditions for Afghanistan's people. Why should we care? Well, as a nation, the U.S. had a bit to do with creating the vaccuum that sucked the Taliban into power. Essentially, the U.S. armed various Afghan warlords after the 1979 Soviet invasion of the country. As Smeal said today, "We used them as a proxy in our fight against the Soviet Union." And then we left the warlords to turn their U.S.-bought Stinger missiles on each other -- and anyone who got in the way.

In the most recent appropriation, Smeal explained, more funding -- $3 billion, she said -- is allocated to the building of new U.S. embassies in Afghanistan and Iraq than is earmarked for Afghan reconstruction. The state of things in Afghanistan is terrible not just for Afghan women (whose average life span is 44 years), Smeal asserted, "It's terrible for the United States and it's terrible for the world. Our credibility is on the line."

Indeed, if democracy fails in Afghanistan, theocracy may well be vindicated in the eyes of many Afghans, and the hands of other religious hardliners in the region (think Pakistan) will be strengthened. To force greater accountability for funds allocated to Afghan reconstruction and other initiatives, Smeal is calling for Congress to separate its appropriations for Afghanistan and Iraq. Not only would this make the money easier to keep track of; it also erodes the lump'm-all-together rhetoric of the so-called "War on Terror".

--Adele M. Stan

YOU WIN SOME, YOU WIN MORE. Another Democratic victory in the Senate:

President Bush on Wednesday withdrew the ambassadorial nomination of businessman Sam Fox after Democrats denounced Fox for giving money to a controversial conservative group that undermined Sen. John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign.

"Sam Fox had every opportunity to disavow the politics of personal destruction and to embrace the truth," Kerry said Wednesday. "He chose not to. The White House made the right decision to withdraw the nomination. I hope this signals a new day in political discourse."

The White House announced the withdrawal in a press release distributed less than an hour before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gathered to vote on his nomination to be ambassador to Belgium.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CHILDLESSNESS. I'm grateful to Brother Paul for the loophole in his wording that appears to exempt yours truly from presumed incapability of understanding the profound grief of burying one's own child: "At the risk of being exclusionary to the young and childless here on Tapped, if you don’t have kids, you wouldn’t understand." Thank goodness the old and childless are spared such judgment.

As for the rest of Paul's post, I daresay that the Edwards marriage may well be the thing that best recommends the one-term senator for the job. He definitely seems like a good guy and his wife, Elizabeth, is even more impressive. On the matter of religion, I like that Edwards doesn't make a big show of his. While I find it admirable of Paul (and Harold) to state, in public, their disbelief, I remain wary of any full exposition of religious beliefs or lack thereof by politicians. Alas, the conditions that led Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to play coy on the exact nature of their own beliefs still prevail, I think.

--Adele M. Stan

FIFTEEN. I also find the British claims as to the location of their sailors and marines a bit more compelling than the Iranian; the Iranians changed their story about the location after the British pointed out that the first Iranian claimed location was, in fact, in Iraqi waters after all. But whether the sailors were in either Iranian or Iraqi waters is a bit beside the point. The border between Iran and Iraq in this area is confusing and oft-disputed, and arresting the British sailors in disputed waters is not an appropriate reaction even to what may have been a small incursion. Especially since Iran is not contesting the basic British account (that the sailors and marines were investigating an Indian merchant ship), the arrest and detention would be a major overreaction if it happened anywhere else in the world.

It seems obvious to me that the arrests are intended to be seen as a political response to US detention of Iranians in Iraq, and perhaps as a means of embarrassing the Blair government. The method of capture (several Iranian boats acting in concert) would seem to support this. The byzantine nature of the Iranian state leaves in question who, precisely, intends to send what political message. The entire situation is worrying, though, because this is hardly the time for Tehran to act recklessly against the major U.S. ally. The drumbeat of war against Iran has slowed in the last few months, and since I don't want war I would prefer that Tehran refrain from presenting convenient casus belli. Unfortunately, Iran also has a Dick Cheney, a Don Rumsfeld, and a Bill Kristol -- men who believe that the "enemy" understands only force, and who habitually underestimate the costs of such an approach.

--Robert Farley

PEACE FOR PEANUTS. Last night, Jon Stewart (whether intentionally or not) very nicely made the case for congressional pork in a segment on the war appropriations fight.

Dana and (in more expansive terms) Brad Plumer have already made this case recently but, with all due respect to both of them, they weren't as funny.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHO NEEDS WHO FOR WHAT? Ron Brownstein's column today is entitled "Bush and Democrats: Enemies who need each other." I assumed he meant in part that Dems are relying on Bush's utter intransigence on Iraq to keep their own caucus united -- a point made yesterday by E.J. Dionne (to whom MoveOn's Tom Matzzie remarked, ""Bush is our worst enemy, and our best ally"). But Brownstein says something else instead:

Bush has the authority to engineer a change of direction in the war. But he lacks the credibility with the public to reestablish consent for his course.

Congressional Democrats, even after their seismic Senate victory Tuesday, ultimately lack the leverage to mandate a new course in Iraq. But they offer Bush his only possibility of rebuilding a public consensus over America's role in the war.

Because neither side can set a sustainable course on its own, their choice is either to continue colliding in polarized confrontations like Tuesday's Senate vote narrowly approving a time limit for withdrawal, or to seek agreement on a strategy for Iraq that a broader coalition in Congress and the country might support.

Brownstein envisions a possible agreement as follows: "A negotiated legislative agreement that links a trial for Bush's troop surge (which is showing some promise) with a concrete agreement from the administration to begin withdrawing forces if the strategy doesn't produce substantial, tangible progress in a reasonable period might serve the political interests of both parties." Leaving aside whether or not the surge has actually been showing promise, for the president to agree concretely to binding congressional Democratic demands for withdrawal if the surge doesn't work in a set period of time would amount to a radical departure for the president and a clear substantive victory for the Democratic opposition. And it's pretty clear that it's absolutely not going to happen. Thus, all that is left to do is "continue colliding in polarized confrontations" for the next two years, forcing Bush to go on record with unpopular vetos and hoping to steadily erode support for continuing the war among Republicans in Congress. As Brownstein says, that's a strategy that may hold political dangers for Democrats, but it holds much greater political danger for Republicans, and at any rate it isn't as if the president has given the Democrats much choice in pursuing it.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE OPINIONATERS. They were everywhere -- the Washington celebrities, I mean. Tucker Carlson was on stage during a panel discussion on “America in the World” at The Week’s Opinion Awards dinner on Tuesday night at the Four Seasons. So were Tom Friedman and Jim Lehrer. Teresa Heinz Kerry asked a question from a table in the back of the room. So did audience members Tina Brown, Margaret Carlson, Chris Matthews, and George Stephanopoulos. An icon of old-school journalism -- Ben Bradlee -- gave the “Welcome Remarks,” making a rambling, but utterly charming, speech about the value of newspapers (you can take them into the bathroom). Meanwhile, a representative of the New School, Opinion Award-winner Joshua Fruhlinger of Wonkette, was refreshingly un-self-important, asking traditional-media executives in the audience to read blogs and, if possible, to hire bloggers (who are, as he puts it, totally ready to “sell out”). The other award winners were Michael Kinsley, Akron Beacon Journal cartoonist Chip Bok and blogger Michael J. Totten. Aside from moderator Sir Harold Evans’s rant about a poll tax in Georgia that simply confused the audience (“which Georgia?” people kept asking), the event was lively, informative and -- given that it was a Washington-Heavy-Hitter event -- surprisingly fun.

--Tara McKelvey

CHARACTER. Anyone wondering what John Edwards thinks about religion -- his own, and the country’s -- would do well to read this long interview he did with Beliefnet. As a non-believer myself (and yes, more of us should be willing to say so publicly -- kudos to Harold for doing so recently), I found a good deal there to make me comfortable with Edwards. Despite his professions of a powerful faith, he declines to say that America is a Christian nation, and comes out against organized prayer in schools and posting the Ten Commandments in public buildings, two distressingly popular items on the Christian right agenda.

Amongst all the recent discussion of how much voters should consider candidates’ personal lives, there is something else to note. In the interview, Edwards says that after their son Wade was killed in a car accident in 1996, “my faith came roaring back and has stayed with me since that time.” I have no idea if I’m representative, but as a parent, I can tell you that the fact that the Edwardses endured what is without question the most awful thing a human being can experience -- the death of a child -- and came through it with their marriage intact, and without losing their minds, fills me with an admiration that is difficult to describe. At the risk of being exclusionary to the young and childless here on Tapped, if you don’t have kids, you wouldn’t understand. Does it say something about what kind of president Edwards would be? I think so. It's not as if my vote is decided, but the fact is that the presidency is a unique office, one in which personal weaknesses and strengths are far more important than they are in, say, a legislator.

A member of Congress can have all sorts of personal foibles -- he can be cruel, or stupid, or eccentric -- but if he isn’t corrupt, ultimately the only thing that makes much of a difference in our lives is how he votes. But a president is different. American voters don’t vote for president by a checklist of issues, and they shouldn’t. Think about our current president. What is it about him that has led to the awe-inspiring magnitude of the damage he has caused? It isn’t because he had the wrong positions on issues -- you could have taken another Republican with the same basic policy goals and put him in office, and the destruction wouldn’t have been nearly as great. No, it is Bush’s character that led us here: his lack of curiosity, his delusions of destiny, his simplistic thinking, his Manichean worldview and intolerance for the possibility that he might be wrong (or for anyone who would raise that possibility). And what made FDR or Lincoln great? It wasn’t a series of position papers, it was their character that enabled them to respond to crises in admirable ways.

So while Edwards is right that no one should vote for him simply out of sympathy for his family’s struggle, there’s nothing wrong with watching how he deals with that struggle and making some reasonable conclusions about what it says about the kind of person he is. It may be an imperfect means to assess how he would deal with the unique challenges a president faces, but at least it’s something.

--Paul Waldman

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WHAT WAVE? Marc Mauer says the evidence for a recent and serious rise in crime across the nation is murkier than you think.

--The Editors

ALT-O-RAMA. Garance weighs in on the Althouse explosion. Eric Alterman offers some backstory of his own.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WITHDRAWAL LANGUAGE SURVIVES. Take a look. John McCain's comment:

But presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the bill “should be named the State Certain for Surrender Act,” adding that “a second-year cadet at West Point will tell you if you announce to the enemy that you’re leaving, it’s a recipe for defeat.”

McCain called the provision “one of the most shameful things I’ve ever seen.”

--Sam Rosenfeld

EUMERICA? The Pew Research Center survey I wrote about yesterday has provoked some interesting discussion on the blogs. John Quiggin suggests that we might see "Eumerica" in the making: a situation where the Democrats and independents in the U.S. acquire social and political values similar to those currently dominant in Europe, whereas the hard-core Republican base will drift ever further away from all this (toward what? Talibamerica?)

I doubt that this will happen unless the hard-core base is seen as an ever-dwindling one, given that the proportion of the Pew survey respondents which chose the most socially conservative answers was quite a lot lower than the 25% of the population that is supposed to be Bush's base. In any case, a very small hard-core base of Talibamericans wouldn't have much political power on their own. But something else Quiggin notes is quite interesting:

On the other hand, Republican support is contracting to a base of about 25 per cent of the population whose views are getting more extreme, not merely because moderate conservatives are peeling off to become Independents, but also because of the party's success in constructing a parallel universe of news sources, thinktanks, blogs, pseudo-scientists and so on, which has led to the core becoming more tightly committed to an extremist ideology.

I'd argue that the right-wing media and research universes have served the ultra-conservative cause very well indeed. They helped to bring it first into the mainstream dialogue and then to power during the last two decades. What is worrisome from a wider angle is the current situation where like tends to flock with like and debate across the political aisle becomes increasingly difficult, not only because of heightened emotions but because of disagreements about the facts themselves. Those who get their news from Fox are not going to see the same facts as those who listen to the BBC or read progressive blogs, for example.

--J. Goodrich

BUDGET RESOLVE. This morning I went to a sparsely attended press conference hosted by the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs where several representatives patted themselves on the back for passing the continuing budget resolution which adds an additional $6.6 billion in health care and discretionary funding for veterans. In light of the Walter Reed scandal, Democrats in the Veterans' Committee are pushing for more funding. Budget chair John Spratt emphasized funding for post-traumatic stress disorder, calling for the hiring of more psychiatrists to deal with the "growing beneficiary population" -- Iraq and Afghanistan vets who will be dealing with postwar trauma -- as well as funding for prosthetics research.

As I've said before, the silver lining in the Walter Reed scandal (though, to reiterate, that's an Army rather than a VA hospital) is that opposition to VA funding becomes even more politically disastrous than normal. By promoting an increase over previous Congress' budgets for veterans, Democrats are drawing votes from those that may have gone for the Republicans a few years ago.

-- Kay Steiger

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FOOLISH EMBRACE. Blake Hounshell makes the case against continuing to prop up Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharaff.

--The Editors

AND TONY, TOO. Geez, bad times all around. White House spokesman Tony Snow has had, like Elizabeth Edwards, a recurrence of his cancer:

White House press secretary Tony Snow, who has become the face of the Bush presidency over the last year, has cancer again.

Snow's deputy, Dana M. Perino, broke into tears at an off-camera briefing this morning as she announced that the cancer has spread to his liver. Doctors discovered it when they operated on Snow on Monday to remove a small growth that had developed in his lower abdomen....

Just last week, when Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of Democratic presidential contender John Edwards, announced that her own cancer had returned, Snow offered effusive praise for the dignity and optimism she exhibited.

"As somebody who has been through this, Elizabeth Edwards is setting a powerful example for a lot of people, and a good and positive one," Snow said from the podium. "She's being aggressive. She's living an active life. And a positive attitude, prayers, and people you love are always a very good addition to any kind of medicine you have. So for Elizabeth Edwards, good going. Our prayers are with you."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

PARENTAL CONSENT FOR PRENATAL CARE. The North Dakota legislature recently failed to pass legislation that would have guaranteed pregnant teens the right to seek prenatal care without notifying their parents. Current state law requires parental consent to treat pregnant women under 18.

Conservatives are wailing that explicitly stating there is no parental notification requirement would "drive a wedge between the daughter and the parents." But isn't it obvious that, if a young woman has chosen to carry her pregnancy to term without telling her parents, she most likely has a compelling reason for keeping them in the dark? And if a teenage girl faces very little support at home for keeping her pregnancy -- which, presumably, is the reason she would keep this info from her parents -- then you would think anti-abortion activists would be in favor of this legislation. After all, they love to publicize cases where parents have coerced their daughters into abortions. You would think that this legislation would prevent that from happening.

The disconnect in requiring parental notification for abortion but not for prenatal care has been pointed out by legal groups opposing laws that meddle with teens' reproductive rights. A Guttmacher Policy Review article from 2000 found no states that require parental consent or notification for teens to receive prenatal care, whereas more than 20 required it for abortion.

Other sources say 27 states and DC "specifically allow pregnant minors to the obtain prenatal care and delivery services without parental consent or notification." And last year Colorado decided to grant teens confidentiality rights when it comes to prenatal care. Too bad North Dakota won't be joining their ranks.

--Ann Friedman

FRIENDLY FIRE COVERUP? The interview with Pat Tillman's mother on NPR this morning is worth a listen. Her anger at the Army officials is palpable, and she even calls the lies they told her about her son's death "a form of abuse."

--Kay Steiger

ANOTHER YEAR OF THE WOMAN? Senators Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer and representatives Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler will reintroduce the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress today, and will announce hearings on women’s equality in the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Conservative online media is already up in arms, lamenting the funding the ERA would likely provide, for the first time, to poor women on Medicaid who need to access abortion. Yes, the ERA would help progressives fight for women’s bodily rights. But it is also a crucial legal protection -- one first introduced in Congress in 1923 -- necessary to end workplace discrimination against women, fight wage inequality, and stop obviously sexist corporate practices, such as insurance companies covering the cost of Viagra, but not birth control pills. I remember Maloney speaking at a young women’s leadership event last summer and lamenting the Democratic Party’s move away from strong support for the ERA. Hopefully these new hearings, held under a Congress with its first female speaker, will be a step toward reversing that trend. The amendment simply reads:

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

It’s time to put the Phyllis Schlafly era behind us. What’s so offensive in 2007 about equal rights for women?

--Dana Goldstein

THE WITHDRAWAL VOTE. Purgegate has been sucking up the oxygen recently among political junkies, but it's worth emphasizing that the saga of the congressional war supplemental bill has really taken a dramatic turn in the last two days toward a confrontation with George W. Bush himself over a Senate-House conference bill that does in fact include language calling for withdrawal from Iraq. When attention was focused on the House fight, the implicit assumption was that such a bill would never pass in the Senate anyway, so it was merely of symbolic importance whether Nancy Pelosi could hold her caucus together, present a united front, etc. But in fact, it's looking increasingly likely that, even if the Senate itself doesn't pass a bill including the withdrawal language, it will pass a conference bill that does.

Mitch McConnell indicated yesterday that, indeed, he was not going to fight tooth and nail to get that language out, and it would be up to the president to veto such a bill. As for the vote on the Senate bill (possibly happening today), even that one could be a nail-biter in terms of keeping the withdrawal language in:

Once the GOP motion [to strike the withdrawal language] comes to a vote, which Reid has indicated he would not seek to stop, McConnell is in line to keep Nelson and Pryor in his camp if Republicans do not strike the benchmarks. That could trigger a replay of the Iraq vote earlier this month, when Sen. Gordon Smith (Ore.) was the only Republican to vote with Democrats and the majority fell short, 48-50.

“I’m not announcing a count, but I think the vote [on March 15] was certainly helpful, and generally members like to be as consistent as possible,” McConnell said yesterday.

Yet Reid could still win over Pryor and Nelson, who have not explicitly revealed their votes. The supplemental reflects changes requested by Pryor, focusing on a classified campaign plan for Iraq that includes non-public deadlines for withdrawal. Those changes would fall out if the GOP’s motion to strike succeeds.

E.J. Dionne argued today that merely the fact that the House passed its bill last week is itself a really big deal. But for the House and Senate to successfully manage to produce a war supplemental bill that calls for ending the war -- to be clearly on record with that position, and to force the president to veto it -- would, of course, be much bigger.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE WRONG HETERODOXIES. This, from Ross Douthat, is a very smart analysis of the current trends on the Republican side of the aisle:

the party needs someone who's solidly right-wing on issues like immigration or gun control or campaign-finance reform - issues that matter more to the base than to swing voters - and who can use this credibility to be more ideologically innovative on, say, taxes or health care or even foreign policy. Instead, it has a collection of candidates who are heterodox on immigration and gun control and campaign finance reform, and who are therefore rushing to embrace the party line on taxes and the Iraq War in an effort to gain cover for their deviations elsewhere. It needs someone whose pro-life convictions are a given, and who is therefore free to distance himself from the Jerry Falwells in the party without forfeiting the support of most social conservatives. Instead, it has candidates with dubious pro-life convictions who are rushing to embrace the Falwells of the world to cover over their weaknesses on that front. And so on.

The major contenders, in other words, have a worst-of-both-worlds problem. Their ideological untrustworthiness will give them fits in the primary season without winning them many swing voters come the general election. (John McCain, should he get the nomination, isn't going to pick up blue-collar voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania because he broke with his party to champion campaign-finance restrictions. Rudy Giuliani isn't going to win over any of the Montanans who went for Jon Tester or the Virginians who went for Jim Webb because he split the national GOP on gun control or welfare reform.) And because they're considered ideologically untrustworthy, they're vulnerable to a dark horse challenge not from the kind of creative reform conservative that the party desperately needs, but from a candidate whose principle qualification is a solid record of party-line votes, and not much else. Someone like, say, Fred Thompson.

--Ezra Klein

FACT-CHECKER. Following up on Garance, it should be said that Richard Cohen truly has a wonderful, unblemished record when it comes to discerning a "tendency to manipulate facts [that] may bear watching" in presidential candidates. (And, because I find it impossible not to link to it whenever I mention Cohen, he also wrote this.) It appears he'll be offering the same sage analysis this cycle as well.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE END OF THE FIRST CYCLE? The shift in tone in coverage of Barack Obama that Ezra notes around his health care plan can also be found in today's Richard Cohen column, which rather absurdly takes Obama to task for having a confused memory of events that happened when he was nine. Beyond the fact that memory is a funny thing and that unless you hire an army of fact-checkers your memoir will always be a biased, partial, not completely accurate telling of events -- and that this problem has been intrinsic to the nature of the memoir since Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his Confessions in 1782 and launched the literary genre -- there is the question of the shift in media tone. Cohen writes: "This tendency to manipulate facts may bear watching in Obama. (After all, we hardly know him.)"

Obama has been coasting and basking in the glow of unusually fullsome "get to know you" press coverage. Cohen's column and Ron Brownstein's excellent analysis over the weekend signal that that media moment is now coming to an end, and giving way to the second stage of campaign reporting, which involves a great deal more skepticism and questioning. I didn't expect this stage of the campaign to arrive until summer, but everything else has been happening ahead of schedule -- so why not the bloom off the rose moment, too? The Hillary 1984 ad flap couldn't have helped, either. The Obama campaign denied any involvement or association with the video's producers, but was proved wrong. That kind of thing markedly enhances across-the-board press skepticism -- once burned and all that.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BE CAREFUL, EVERYONE, OR SHE"LL TAUNT YOU A SECOND TIME! I don't think there's much more to say about Ann Althouse's bizarre tirade against our colleague. However, just as I'm sure Ann (Friedman) was surprised to learn a few months ago that her other blog is "sexed up with pictures of women in bras," Garance may be amused to hear the account of the diavlog that Althouse is giving in her comments: "You know, sometimes human beings show emotion. It's not such a big deal. I was being taunted, I said I intended to stand my ground, and then I did." Taunted? If anyone can cite an example of Garance doing any such thing from the transcript, I'll buy you a TAP subscription myself. Not only is this a ludicrous fiction, it's quite remarkable how restrained Garance was during the unprovoked meltdown.

--Scott Lemieux

WHERE'S THE BEEF? It's good to see Obama getting a bit of mainstream media pushback for his campaign's lack of substance and specifics. Issues matter! And so do approaches to issues. At the SEIU/CAP health care forum last weekend, Obama explained away his lack of a health care policy by suggesting that "every four years somebody trots out a white paper," the real question was whether they could muster the consensus and political will to pass and implement a plan.

Okay, true. So, uh, can he? Obama has never passed a major piece of legislation in the United State Senate, after all. He's not explained why insurers and pharmaceutical companies and for-profit hospitals and conservatives and big retailers and all the rest will flip on their historic opposition to universal health reform. If you're not going to put out your plan and prefer to instead explain your political strategy, I'm down with that. But then you have to actually explain your political strategy. So far, Obama has proven himself a unifying and consensus-building figure in that a lot of liberals like him. He's not proven himself a unifying and consensus figure able to pass major articles of legislation or defuse traditional opponents to his ideas. So, fine, he can eschew the white paper for now. But he needs to give those of us worried about health care reform something to go on.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: PEACE NOW. Matt takes on those who deny a linkage between the Israel-Palestine conflict and other American predicaments in the Middle East. " An entire cottage industry exists to generate commentary arguing otherwise, but the fact is that settling that conflict remains the single most important thing that can be done to improve America's position in the region."

--The Editors

THROWING STONES AT GLASS ALTHOUSES. I've never seen Garance rendered speechless before, but if you click on this link and scroll to 5:00, you'll see Ann Althouse do just that. That'll teach you to reference well-known online arguments, Garance!

--Ezra Klein

IT'S NOT ABOUT OVEREATING AT BUFFETS, EITHER. I was actually just complimenting The American Spectator's blog a few moments ago, so I'm saddened to see David Hogberg going for the easy partisan jab in such a misleading way. The Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation is holding a hearing on crimes aboard cruise ships, which spurred Hogberg to write a post titled "Did Somebody Cheat At Shuffleboard?" In it, he snarks, "Guess what weighty problem Congress is investigating now? Terrorism? Health Care? Illegal Immigration?...Oh please. Those are trifles. What really matters are crimes aboard cruise ships."

First of all, the Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation isn't exactly where you do health care legislation. I thought conservatives were against bureaucratic creep! Moreover, the actual cruise ship issue is worth a bit of attention. If Hogberg had read the summary document on the House page he links to, he'd have learned that cruise industry executives have voluntarily disclosed 178 sexual assaults and 24 vanished passengers aboard cruise ships between 2003 and 2005. This is particularly problematic because, for various legal reasons, almost all these cruise ships are registered in other countries, rendering them outside domestic jurisdiction. Depending on what type of crime is committed, who it's committed against, and where the boat is, however, the US can claim jurisdiction on boats that operate within our waters. This hearing is about when, how, and whether to do that. Shuffleboard crimes they ain't.

--Ezra Klein

DER SOLDAT. AlterNet reports that the German magazine Der Spiegel recently published a profile of several U.S. soldiers who struggle with their role in the war. One soldier went AWOL because of his objections:

From inside, the Army struck "John" as brutal, controlling, "like a slavery contract." Iraq, his first war zone, did nothing to quiet his doubts. The communications specialist was sent to a base near Baghdad to repair a phone and Internet hookup that allowed communication between US facilities. John found himself holding a faulty fiberoptic cable labeled "Abu Ghraib." "I really felt like part of something bad at that point," he says. "I didn't directly have blood on my hands, but I was part of it."

One soldier was finally granted conscientious objector status and currently works as a schoolteacher in Nevada, but the process was long and difficult. As Tara McKelvey reported in our April print issue, a few litigators have had success in fighting "stop-loss policies" by suing the Army. But it's clear that when a soldier has ethical objections serving in a war, or is ordered to serve beyond his or her commitment, he or she has very few options.

--Kay Steiger

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Two Prospect pieces are now available online concerning Islam, Europe, and the limits of tolerance. From our new print issue, Stephen Holmes offers a review essay about cultural and political clashes in the Netherlands over the country's Muslim immigrant populations; Holmes discusses books by Ian Buruma and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The article is available free to non-subscribers. Also, in a new piece for TAP Online, Ari Paul profiles Geert Wilders, rising star of the Dutch anti-Muslim right.

--The Editors

LET IT RAIN. Let's hope it doesn't rain when the North Koreans and Iranians attack us with their ballistic missiles:

Torrential rains wiped out a quarter of the U.S.' intercontinental ballistic missile interceptors in Ft. Greely, Alaska last summer -- right when North Korea was preparing to carry out an advanced missile launch, according to documents obtained by the Project On Government Oversight.

"The flooding occurred during a three-week period between the end of June and early July 2006," POGO notes, in a statement. "The flooding damaged 25% of the U.S. interceptor missiles’ launch capability. These silos house the interceptor missiles that would be used to attempt to intercept a missile aimed at the United States. No interceptors were in the flooded silos."

What exactly are we getting, for the $9 billion a year we're paying for missile defense? And why can't it take a little rain?

--Robert Farley

A PRETTY GREAT MOVIE? What's odd about Reihan Salam's review of the Gandhi DVD is that he doesn't conclude that it's a pretty great movie; he says that the first 45 minutes are very good, that the rest isn't very good, and then tries to explain why 2/3rds of the movie is unwatchable. It's a pretty interesting article, but he never supports the assertion that Sam quotes. As an aside, the film glides over a lot of the violence associated with India's participation in World War II, including most notably the development of the Japanese-supported Indian National Army.

Myself, I prefer Michael Collins, which is pretty much just Gandhi without the pesky non-violence.

--Robert Farley

AN END TO THE REPUBLICAN CONSERVATIVE ERA. That was Bruce Bartlett's reaction on hearing about the new Pew Research Center survey on the political views of Americans. Bartlett is a conservative analyst but also the author of an anti-Bush book. And what caused his strong statement? This:

Increased public support for the social safety net, signs of growing public concern about income inequality, and a diminished appetite for assertive national security policies have improved the political landscape for the Democrats as the 2008 presidential campaign gets underway.

At the same time, many of the key trends that nurtured the Republican resurgence in the mid-1990s have moderated, according to Pew's longitudinal measures of the public's basic political, social and economic values. The proportion of Americans who support traditional social values has edged downward since 1994, while the proportion of Americans expressing strong personal religious commitment also has declined modestly.

Even more striking than the changes in some core political and social values is the dramatic shift in party identification that has occurred during the past five years. In 2002, the country was equally divided along partisan lines: 43% identified with the Republican Party or leaned to the GOP, while an identical proportion said they were Democrats. Today, half of the public (50%) either identifies as a Democrat or says they lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 35% who align with the GOP.

Setting that problem aside, the survey findings are good news to the Democrats, for the time being. For the time being, because the shift in attitudes it portrays has two separate causes: the long-term, slow change in general social attitudes, and the disastrous consequences of the most recent Republican administration. It is the latter which most likely created the increased support for a social safety net and the decreased tolerance for war-waging, not some fundamental shift in the underlying attitudes of the respondents. If I'm right about this, the attitudes could shift back once a Democratic administration is elected and has finished the needed spring cleaning. Which means that I'm not quite as optimistic as Bartlett about this signaling the end of an era for the conservatives. Heh.

-- J. Goodrich

PRISON REFORM AND THE PLRA. I strongly recommend reading this post about the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which makes it more difficult for prisoners to sue and reduces the scope of potential litigation in ways that enable appalling prison conditions to continue. This is particularly problematic because (due to prisoners' evident lack of political clout) prison reform has always been a litigation-driven exercise, as Feeley and Rubin have explained in great detail. Limiting prisoners' right to sue in this manner is effectively the equivalent of sanctioning substantial amounts of abuse; hopefully Congress will amend some of the bad effects of PLRA. The SAVE coalition has a list or recommendations with other useful resources here.

--Scott Lemieux

NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Reihan Salam has a very nice piece up at Slate on the now-25-year-old Richard Attenborough epic Gandhi. I like the lede:

Imagine it's 1982 and you're rooting for Tootsie to win the Academy Award for best picture. You have no hope. Why? Because the competition, Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, embodies the hopes and dreams of hundreds of millions of impoverished Indians. You think I'm making this up? During the ceremony, Attenborough actually accepted that particular statuette on behalf of "Mahatma Gandhi himself" and, more cloying still, "his plea to all of us to live in peace." What message was the academy supposed to send the world? "Congratulations on that freedom struggle, India, but what can we say? Dustin Hoffman looks great in a dress!" So, while I'm sure the film richly deserved (cough) its eight Oscars, the producers did have an ace up their sleeve: the pity vote.

But now that Columbia Pictures has released a special 25th–anniversary-edition DVD -- and now that India is no longer the sick man of Asia -- the time has come for a cold-eyed assessment of the 191-minute monster. To be honest, when I first set out to write this essay, I figured, "I'll keep it real and drop bombs on Gandhi." But watching the film again, I was struck by how much of it I remembered vividly. It's difficult to overstate Gandhi's impact on my life and on the world. Even now, veterans of the anti-apartheid movement praise the movie as an inspiration, and high-minded do-gooders have dubbed an Arabic version for screening across the West Bank. While Gandhi isn't about to bring peace to the Middle East, it's actually a pretty great movie.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE FEW, THE PROUD. Michael Crowley digs up this awesome anecdote about Hillary Clinton (and yes, I'll get to Ezra's item, just in a different post) in the process of looking at her foreign policy views:

in her late twenties, Hillary Rodham Clinton briefly attempted to enlist in the U.S. Marines.

That last fact -- reported in 1994 but largely forgotten since -- underlines the degree to which, unlike many of her peers, Clinton has never allowed Vietnam to define her vision of foreign policy. It's true that the war helped pull her from her roots as a Goldwater Girl and a president of Wellesley College's Young Republicans and drive her into the Democratic Party. During her junior year at Wellesley, she even knocked on doors for Eugene McCarthy's antiwar campaign. But Vietnam apparently didn't imbue Hillary with a loathing for the military. In 1975, just months after the last U.S. troops returned home, Hillary was living in Arkansas with Bill, who had mounted a failed bid for Congress the previous year. The young couple, who would marry later that year, were both teaching law at the University of Arkansas, when Hillary, for reasons never made entirely clear, decided to enlist in the Marines. When she walked into a recruiting office in Little Rock and inquired about joining, the recruiter on duty was unenthusiastic about the 27-year-old law professor in thick, goggle glasses. "You're too old, you can't see, and you're a woman," Clinton recalled him saying. "Maybe the dogs"--Marine slang for the Army--"would take you." Deflated, Clinton said she decided to "look for another way to serve my country."

From there, the trail seems to go cold.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

ROBUST. According to the BBC:

The British government was advised against publicly criticising a report estimating that 655,000 Iraqis had died due to the war, the BBC has learnt. Iraqi Health Ministry figures put the toll at less than 10% of the total in the survey, published in the Lancet. But the Ministry of Defence's chief scientific adviser said the survey's methods were "close to best practice" and the study design was "robust". Another expert agreed the method was "tried and tested".

The reply from another official is: "We do not accept the figures quoted in the Lancet survey as accurate. "

In the same e-mail the official later writes: "However, the survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones."

Asked how the government can accept the Lancet's methodology but reject its findings, the government has issued a written statement in which it said: "The methodology has been used in other conflict situations, notably the Democratic republic of Congo.

"However, the Lancet figures are much higher than statistics from other sources, which only goes to show how estimates can vary enormously according to the method of collection."

--Robert Farley

HILLARY AND FOREIGN POLICY. Michael Crowley's article tracking the roots, evolution, and actual shape of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy views is a very fine piece of work. Particularly interesting is the emphasis placed on Kosovo as a formative experience for Clinton. She was, after all, in the White House during that war, and its stunning success and eventual popularity doubtlessly convinced her that the US military could be quite powerful and precise when properly guided. I believe that she's come to the decision that Bush isn't able to properly guide it. I don't believe she thinks the same about herself. Which is fine! One thing I really appreciate about Clinton is that she's been very honest in her foreign policy views. She won't apologize for her vote on Iraq because she doesn't believe it was a mistake, she won't back down from her previous opinions because she still holds them, she won't pretend to have learned different lessons in the past four years than she actually has. This is how campaigns should be run, and her apparent sincerity on the big issues speaks well of her. I still disagree with her conclusions, but at least they're out there for debate.

Almost more interesting than Crowley's article, however, is the compilation of source documents offered along with it. TNR's been offering a few of these amplifying web features lately, wherein a piece is buttressed by a web article linking to the primary documentation used, and they're a very smart, very helpful, very informative accompaniment.

And on a slightly different note, the article mentions Sandy Berger's attempt to smuggle national security documents out of the archives a few years ago. Did we ever satisfactorily find out what was going on there?

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: TORTURER'S TOLL. Tara McKelvey profiles ex-army interrogator Tony Lagouranis, who shares his experiences of having engaging in coercive interrogations in Iraq as well as his thoughts on the torture-happy TV show 24.

--The Editors

THE WAGES OF BUNGLING. Sen. Joe Biden took to The Miami Herald on Sunday to catalog the disastrous consequences of administration bungling in the Middle East.

In the Palestinian Territories, the administration overruled Prime Minister Sharon and many Palestinians and insisted that the January 2006 legislative elections go forward, despite having failed to empower Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The result was a Hamas victory....

The administration subcontracted to Saudi Arabia the power to broker a deal for a national unity government between Abbas' Fatah party and Hamas, without insisting on red lines any deal could not cross.

Hamas now has what it most craves -- legitimacy in the eyes of the Arab world, which could serve as a bridge to wider international legitimacy. It gives up nothing in return. The Mecca agreement does not require Hamas to meet the demands of the Quartet (the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations): recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept past agreements. Mecca has undercut the administration's most ambitious involvement in the peace process and its belated effort to bolster Abbas.

Even without Mecca, the administration's renewed interest in Israeli-Palestinian peace is driven by flawed logic: the desire to gain greater cooperation from moderate Arab countries -- Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States -- in containing Iran's expanding influence.

Those countries have a powerful self-interest in diminishing Iran's influence that requires no inducements. They should be taking risks to support Israeli-Palestinian peace so as to ease regional tensions and isolate Iran. If the Saudis and others mean what they say about wanting a two-state solution, now is the time to begin the process of normalizing relations with Israel.

Meanwhile, authoritative reports say that the administration is telling Israel not to talk to Syria. Syria's overtures may not be sincere, but Israel should be permitted to call its bluff.

A Syrian-Israeli peace process could have significant strategic benefits.

"Every time the United States says it doesn't want Hamas, they boost Hamas," said Mustafa Barghouti, a former presidential candidate who is heading the Independent Palestine candidate list. "Let us do our elections entirely on our own. These interventions run counter to our efforts, and they hurt the Palestinian people. This effort was completely counterproductive."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WASHINGTON POST NEEDS A HISTORY LESSON. The Washington Post story on New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg's potential presidential ambitions contains a bizarrely inaccurate assertion: "His money -- and a post-Sept. 11 desire for a steady hand -- helped elect Bloomberg mayor in 2001." I have never seen a shred of evidence, nor does the article's author, Michael Shear, offer any, that a "desire for a steady hand" explains Bloomberg's surprising victory in 2001.

Prior to Sept. 11, Bloomberg was running well behind either likely Democratic mayoral nominee (Fernando Ferrer and Mark Green) in polls. It was only the fact that he was outspending them 10 to 1 (he ultimately spent $70 million on his mayoral bid) that put him remotely within striking distance. Then Sept. 11 blessed Bloomberg in two different ways, though not the one Shear alleges. First, it was supposed to be the day of the Democratic primary. The primary had to be rescheduled for several weeks later, thus dragging out the bloody fight between Ferrer and Green and giving the ultimate nominee, Green, less time to focus on the general election.

Secondly, it transmogrified Rudy Giuliani from a divisive figure with low approval ratings into "America's mayor" with 90 percent approval. Therefore Giuliani's endorsement of Bloomberg was a watershed moment that put him over the top. I suppose one could interpret this as a desire for a "steady hand" in the sense of a "steady transition to Giuliani's chosen successor," but to simply assert it as fact in a news article is inappropriate. As a New Yorker I find this constant 9/11 revisionism to benefit the presidential ambitions of not just one but now two Republicans incredibly aggravating.

--Ben Adler

THE NEW UNILATERALISM. Robin Wright has the piece I've been waiting for explaining the genesis and impact of the new U.S.-led, voluntary, private-sector international sanctions on Iran, which are reportedly starting to have some real bite:

More than 40 major international banks and financial institutions have either cut off or cut back business with the Iranian government or private sector as a result of a quiet campaign launched by the Treasury and State departments last September, according to Treasury and State officials.

The financial squeeze has seriously crimped Tehran's ability to finance petroleum industry projects and to pay for imports. It has also limited Iran's use of the international financial system to help fund allies and extremist militias in the Middle East, say U.S. officials and economists who track Iran.

The U.S. campaign, developed by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, emerged in part over U.S. frustration with the small incremental steps the U.N. Security Council was willing to take to contain the Islamic republic's nuclear program and support for extremism, U.S. officials say....

The campaign differs from formal international sanctions -- and has proved able to win wider backing -- because it targets Iran's behavior rather than seeking to change its government. "This is not an exercise of power," Levey said in the interview. "People go along with you if it's conduct-based rather than a political gesture."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TALKING CLINTON. I think Garance's controversial post on Hillary is a valuable contribution to this debate, and I'm really glad she wrote it. I don't find it particularly useful to argue whether I'm a sexist or not, so I'll leave that aside and let readers make their own judgments (Brian makes a good point here, though). I will say that Garance's read of the polling data is somewhat problematic, as not only is Hillary in first place among males aged 18-49, but the candidate I've been more favorable towards, Edwards, is in fourth. Some demographic solidarity!

But what I think Garance's post makes helpfully explicit is the importance Hillary's supporters place on gender discrimination being the primary argument against her candidacy. It is much easier, after all, to argue that men shouldn't be sexist than it is to argue that Hillary Clinton should be president. But what about the affirmative argument? Why should Hillary Clinton be the progressive choice for president in 2008? That's what I'm not hearing. She's not saying elect me, because I will heal this nation's politics, as Obama is, or because she will fight for a sharply progressive vision of economic justice, as Edwards is. She has not pegged her candidacy to poverty or opposition to the Iraq War. No, it's "I'm in it, and I'm in it to win it."

And Garance's posts have been similarly thin on actual support for her candidacy. Indeed, after volunteering to pen the "pro" side of the Hillary debate, she talked about why women should be able to run for president. I agree! But that's different than agreeing that Hillary Clinton would make for a better president than her competitors, or even a good president at all. I disagree with her foreign policy instincts, think her uniquely incapable of overcoming her history and passing comprehensive health care reform, am uncomfortable with dynastic politics, dislike her willingness to engage in cultural panders (against video games, flag burning, etc), and believe her an incrementalist at a time when progressives can get away with more. Garance has been unresponsive to these arguments, preferring to frame this debate as a question of gender. That's certainly safer ground for Hillary supporters, but it's not a particularly strong argument for why progressives should work to elevate Hillary Rodham Clinton to the presidency of the United States. And so much as Garance and others would like to keep the argument on safer grounds, that's what's actually at issue, and what Hillary's supporters seem singularly unwilling to discuss.

It's rather remarkable, actually, how the onus is supposed to be on those who aren't supporting Hillary to defend their choice. I thought candidates had to convince us to support them! Hillary Clinton was, for eight years, the first lady of the United States. During this period, her major policy initiative -- ClintonCare -- was a colossal failure. In 2000, she ran for the Senate in one of the most heavily Democratic states in the union. She ran 5% behind Al Gore, but won. In the Senate, she distinguished herself as a hard-working incrementalist. She was wrong on the Iraq War. But her name recognition is huge, she raised a ton of money -- including becoming a top recipient of industry dollars -- and leads in the polls. Can someone -- anyone -- explain to me why this person is entitled to the presidency, and why supporting other candidates is such an unlikely position as to require explanations of discrimination?

--Ezra Klein

THE BRIGHT SIDE! Bob Novak's latest column channels congressional Republicans' thoughts about Al Gonzales, the U.S. attorneys scandal, and their sense of disconnect with the Bush White House. It includes a hilarious line that nicely captures the sorry state in which the GOP finds itself:

The saving grace that some Republicans find in the dispute over U.S. attorneys is that, at least temporarily, it draws attention away from debate over an unpopular war.

--Sam Rosenfeld

GSA. Be sure to read The Washington Post's front-page story about another politicization-of-executive-agencies scandal, this one involving a deputy of Karl Rove's as well as the head of the General Services Administration (GSA), Lurita Doan.

Witnesses have told congressional investigators that the chief of the General Services Administration and a deputy in Karl Rove's political affairs office at the White House joined in a videoconference earlier this year with top GSA political appointees, who discussed ways to help Republican candidates.

After Jennings and Doan spoke during the videoconference, one regional GSA administrator offered the suggestion that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) could be excluded from the opening of an environmentally efficient federal courthouse in San Francisco, which Pelosi represents, according to Waxman's letter. GSA manages the nation's federal courthouses.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: YOU'RE FIRED. Robert Kuttner makes the case for impeaching Al Gonzales:

Why impeachment? In our system of checks and balances, the Senate confirms members of the Cabinet, but impeachment for cause is the only way to remove them. The White House, by refusing to cooperate, has now left Congress no other recourse.

Instead of responding to lawful subpoenas, President Bush has invited congressional leaders to meet informally with Karl Rove and other officials involved in the prosecutor firings, with no sworn testimony and no transcript. Rove narrowly escaped a perjury indictment in the Cheney/Libby/Wilson affair. You might think these people had something to hide.

After the administration refused to cooperate, Republican Senator Arlen Specter inadvertently gave the best rationale for impeachment. Referring to the White House invocation of executive privilege, Specter warned, "If there is to be a confrontation, it's going to take two years or more to get it resolved in court."

Exactly so. By contrast, an impeachment inquiry could be completed in a matter of months. The White House, knowing the stakes, would find it much harder to stonewall. And Gonzales might well be asked to resign rather than exposing the administration to more possible evidence of illegality.

--The Editors

ANTI-AIPAC JEWS?: I like Dana's post analogizing the fact that AIPAC doesn't represent the views of American Jews on Iran to how Bill Donahue's Catholic League is far to the right of most American Catholics on social issues. However, I take mild issue with the idea also expressed by Ezra that AIPAC, or its views on Israel, are "aligned with conservatives." As has been mentioned ad nauseum in the media recently, major liberal Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama have spoken before AIPAC and been warmly received. Strong support for Israel is a position that crosses party lines in this country.

I think that Dana's and Ezra's and Ari Berman's view that AIPAC is totally out of step with the majority of American Jews on Israel proper, not just Iran, reflects a generational divide. Our parents generation of Jews, who are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats as well, came of age at a time when strong support for Israel--a social democracy in the Middle East and the homeland for refugees from the Holocaust--was viewed as entirely consistent with staunchly liberal politics. To a younger generation of liberal secular Jews, who came of age during the era of occupation, anti-Israel activism on campus, and settlements being built by religious extremists seeking to restore biblical Israel and being egged on by creepy Christianists, taking a more nuanced view has become the norm.

So my cohort seems to view AIPAC's line as out of step with most Jews because it is out of step with the cadre of highly informed and mostly secular young liberal Jews that they talk to about politics. But if you talk to Jews over the age of 50, or younger Jews who were raised to be pro-choice, pro-welfare and pro-Israel but don't follow politics for a living, you will find much less of a gap.

--Ben Adler

A FINAL WORD ON HILLARY. For this round of the debate, at least. Let me begin with an anecdote. A bunch of us Tappers went for drinks the other day, and Hillary Clinton came up. It was a mixed crowd, but, reflecting the magazine's writing employees, mainly men. As the conversation turned to '08, a young woman spoke up softly. "I like Hillary," she said. Very quickly, several men raised their voices against her, expounding, at great length, on everything that was wrong with Hillary, and why she couldn't win, and why no one should support her. The young woman said nothing in reply, and, in fact, said nothing more for the remainder of the evening. But I'm not sure that her mind was changed.

Today, the Gallup Poll reported that "Clinton's highest level of support is among 18- to 49-year-old women; her lowest, among 18- to 49-year-old men." And so, with all due respect to Sam and Matt and Scott and Ezra and Mark, their views on this site must be understood as unavoidably a reflection of their demographics, as well as their judgment, as are the differing views of Dana and J. Goodrich and, well, me. I've been most surprised by Ezra's assertion that Hillary is so uniquely unsuited to the presidency that she -- and she alone of the major candidates! -- should never have even thrown her hat in the ring. And I tend to agree with Mark that Mark Penn has been responsible for some of the most egregious Democrats attacks on liberals (such as through Joe Lieberman), though I temper this with the knowledge that Clinton's style is to have a strategist for every constituency, so that if you find the idea of mom-fluentials absurd, Ann Lewis and Ellen Malcolm are there to provide a different and more appealing view of how to approach women voters.

As I argued in my piece, "The most important division Clinton begets is between men and women," and I think you can see that political divide emerging even here on this site. Unfortunately for Clinton, most opinion media -- including the progressive variety -- consists of upwards of 75 percent (and somtimes even upwards of 90 percent) male voices. That means that the demographic bias of men against Hillary is offered a far greater public airing than the demographic bias of women for her, and that the few women who are around will be more likely to be like the young woman at happy hour, and prefer to sit in silent disagreement rather than feel themselves pounced upon by all the loudest voices at the table, or in the midst of an eight on one intra-office fight.

It also means that progressive media are going to be unusually out of sync with the progressive base this cycle. But the facts are the facts: 43 percent of Democratic women under 49 back Hillary, according to Gallup, and "The bad news...comes among male Democrats aged 18 to 49, which is the only one of...four age and gender groups in which Clinton is statistically tied with Obama." The figure is even starker when you look at the youngest group in the Gallup survey: just 24 percent of 18-29 year-old men back Clinton (the Ezra/Sam/Matt demographic), compared with 40 percent of women in the same age bracket, and 44 percent in the 30-49 group (my own, and Goodrich's).

Now, writers at The Prospect don't do endorsements, at least not on Prospect turf, and, as I said in my piece, "There is a strong progressive case to be made for [Obama] as well." And so this debate will doubtless be continued, as events unfold and warrant it.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ACCORDING TO JIM. In his column this week, Terrence Samuel tells us about a speech Jim Webb gave last night that demonstrated, once again, a more expansive progressivism on his part than the c.w. has held.

The bigger surprises came in what he had to say about matters beyond the war. The senator bragged about walking a picket line during his campaign. Most strikingly, he lamented the country's high incarceration rates, singling out the fact that a black man who does not graduate from high school faces a 60 percent chance of ending up in jail.

"This is not something that fits into political campaigns, but I have long been concerned about the staggering prison incarceration rates in the United States, which are the highest in the world," he declared.

As a reminder, Webb is the junior senator from Virginia.

"We want to keep bad people off our streets. We want to break the backs of gangs, and we want to cut down on violent behavior," he said, "But there is something else going on when we are locking up such a high percentage of our people, marking them at an early age and in many cases eliminating their chances for a productive life as citizens."

He says the high incarceration is a "trajectory" issue. "It will take years of energy to sort it out, but I am committed to working on a solution that is both responsive to our need for law and order, and fairer to those who become entangled in this system."

Needless to say, not a lot of people are talking about the mind-boggling number of black men in jail and what to do about it -- and certainly not a lot of people in the United States Senate.

Webb said that he has sometimes been dismissed as a one-issue candidate: "Well, I probably do spend a little bit too much time on economic fairness," he said with a smirk, "but I don't simply dwell on that issue."

He came armed with a litany of statistics, and if you closed your eyes, you would have thought it was Huey Long talking:

--The Editors

WHAT IS STAGE IV BREAST CANCER? For those looking to understand Elizabeth Edwards' diagnosis, David Brown, who was trained as a physician before becoming one of the nation's top medical reporters, provides this clinical and sobering summary:

Both Edwards and her husband were upbeat and said they would continue campaigning. She said she is "completely symptom-free." He likened her cancer to diabetes -- an incurable but treatable disease.

Data suggest, however, that her long-term prognosis is considerably graver than for people with diabetes and other chronic diseases.

A study published last year in the European Journal of Surgical Oncology reviewed the experience of 2,500 women treated at a large hospital in Sydney between 1989 and 2002. Of that group, 18 percent had a recurrence of their breast cancer, and the average time to recurrence was 2.3 years, slightly shorter than Edwards's. The most common site of relapse was bone, as was hers.

Among women with recurrences outside the originally affected breast or its nearby lymph nodes, only 13 percent survived five years or more. Women whose tumor reappeared in bone had a median survival of 2.4 years, longer than those in whom the tumor came back in either the lungs or liver....

A statement by Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, said survival statistics for women whose cancer was widely spread at the time of original diagnosis "has no meaning in Ms. Edwards' case and should not be interpreted as a suggestion of her survival chances."

However, it is unlikely her prognosis would be better than those women, among whom 24 percent were alive five years after original diagnosis, and 13 percent were alive after 10 years.

Also, from a purely medical perspective, anything that helps a woman with breast cancer stave off depression and feel socially connected and valuable and alive is beneficial for her survival, since depression and social isolation have been pretty well documented to hasten disease progression. Given their temperaments, it appears that staying in the race is clearly the best way forward for Edwardses during this difficult time. To give up their dreams now would be a concession to the disease, instead of an effort to fight against it, and to live with it, as long as Elizabeth can. Andrew Sullivan, who knows what it means to live with an incurable but treatable condition, writes, "One key to surviving serious illness is to live positively and candidly while you treat it." Many women with breast cancer have stayed active, productive, engaged members of their professions until the bitter end, and there's not reason Edwards can't, too. The much missed Molly Ivins, for example, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999 and had two recurrences of the disease before passing away this January. It doesn't make any more sense to suggest that Elizabeth give up her work as her husband's political adviser -- or that he give up what are clearly their joint ambitions for his future -- than it would be to say that Ivins should have stopped writing and fighting four years ago, when she had her first recurrence. Ivins raised hell and made a difference even after being terribly weakened by her second recurrence, and there's no reason Edwards can't do so, too.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

PRO-CHOICE CATHOLICS, ANTI-AIPAC JEWS. Our own Ann Friedman has written an In These Times tribute to Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for a Free Choice. Kissling, who was once a nun for six months, is a national progressive leader on abortion rights, access to contraception, LGBT rights, and stem cell research. She’s also a favorite target of extreme right-wing Catholics like Bill Donahue, whose Catholic League instigated the Edwards blogger ruckus last month. When Kissling stepped down, Donahue tarred her as anti-Catholic, saying, “I hope she takes her tapestries of Tibetan Buddhist deities with her when she exits her office, as well as any New Age paraphernalia she may have acquired over the years.” But as Ann reports, “For 25 years, Kissling has pointed out that criticizing church doctrine and agitating for reform is not anti-Catholic.”

Indeed, polls show that Catholics are more accepting of premarital sex, homosexuality, and birth control than Protestants, and about two-thirds accept abortion in at least some circumstances.

I realize I’m taking a risk with this analogy, but to me, the vitriol that the Bill Donahues of the Catholic community reserve for the Frances Kisslings -- social justice thinkers who are in line with their own constituents’ beliefs -- parallels quite neatly what sometimes happens to Jewish Americans who are critical of AIPAC and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. As Ezra pointed out last week, 87 percent of American Jews vote Democratic, so it’s no surprise many of us are uncomfortable with AIPAC’s alignment with conservatives, particularly those of the conservative Christian variety who support Zionism because they believe all Jews need to relocate to the Promised Land before Jesus makes another showing. And far from being hawkish on Iran (as AIPAC is), more than half of American Jews oppose military strikes there. If you’re interested in alternative media voices that express the progressive views held by millions of American Catholics and Jews, I highly recommend Conscience and Tikkun.

--Dana Goldstein

A DIFFERENT VIETNAM SYNDROME. The war supplemental bill passed today in the House, 218-212. Last month, historian Julian Zelizer wrote a piece for the Prospect detailing the actions that Democratic congresses took in the '60s and '70s to influence the course of (and eventually end) the Vietnam War. One question that Zelizer's piece may have prompted among some readers was: Sure, but didn't the Democrats pay a lasting and devastating political price for their opposition to even that unpopular and disastrous war? That, I think, is a widespread assumption, and one that provides the context for some Democrats' continued fears about taking substantial action to end the Iraq war. I'm glad to see that someone has now decided to challenge that historical narrative, and impressed to see that the someone who has done it is none other than Peter "Fighting Faith" Beinart. As he says straightforwardly in this Time piece, "Despite today's conventional wisdom, Democrats didn't suffer in the 1970s for opposing Vietnam. And they're even less likely to pay a political price for trying to end the war in Iraq." It's worth a read.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUDGMENT. Matt is right about this. In addition to the fact that it's contrary to progressive interests to have Penn advising people, there's the additional issue of what it says about Clinton's priorities that she would hire him in the first place. Clinton wants her head pollster to be somebody whose specialty is giving catchy names to wholly arbitrary groups of affluent people as a justification for throwing progressive policy initiatives under the bus. This says something important about her judgment, and what it says is obviously not good.

--Scott Lemieux

SCHRODINGER'S REPORTING. Ana Marie Cox, who's been doing really fine blogging (and Michael Kinsley-baiting!) over at Swampland, does my heart good by suggesting to her colleagues that how the Edwards' announcement gets covered is a function of how they cover it:

I've been thinking really hard about Jay's points from his piece yesterday. His argument initially struck me as interesting -- even a good point -- because it was so different than almost any other piece I'd read after the announcement; it was largely an examination of the baldly political consequences rather than a reaction to the press conference itself.

As a piece of punditry, his point may yet stand: Over time, voters may react negatively to image of a man pursuing the presidency as his wife struggles with an incurable disease. But whether or not that is the image they see is another question, and that creation of that image largely depends on how we in the media frame the Edwards' decision. Specifically, such an image will emerge if we depict that choice as Jay did: as a man -- John Edwards -- torn between "his duties as husband and father to three children, including a 6 and 8 year old" and "his duty to his country and the cause of winning the White House."

--Ezra Klein

CONFLICT OF SOMETHING. Howard Kurtz today tells the complicated tale of the departure of the Los Angeles Times editorial page editor over vague conflict-of-interest accusations that led other editors to spike the already completed Sunday Currents section. The guest editor of that section, Brian Grazer, was apparently represented by a public relations firm that employs Martinez's girlfriend, Kelly Mullens, and that made Times editors uncomfortable. All I can say is that if that standard of disinterestedness with regard to writers and editors were applied here in Washington, where only Adam Bellow's book has channeled the governing ethos, every single opinion magazine in town would immediately have to spike itself.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

A VERY BELATED NOTE ON THE HILLARY DEBATE. The media treatment of Hillary Clinton's campaign has not been free of misogyny or sexism. But one particular sexist card has not been played much, as far as I can tell, and that is the argument that if she won the presidency it would really be her husband who would be running the country again.

Now, on my optimistic days I think this omission is a sign of a fairer society, a society in which women are simply assumed to have agency. But on my not-so-optimistic days I suspect that we don't hear these hints because of Bill Clinton's high approval ratings.

-- J. Goodrich

OH, ARLEN. At Slate, Emily Bazelon has a good piece mainly about the other DoJ scandals we haven't heard much about over these years of oversightless Republican rule. Before she gets to that, though, she describes Arlen Specter's shameful arguments on behalf of capitulating to the Bush administration's ridiculous "not under oath, behind closed doors" conditions for talking with Miers and Rove about Purgegate. (Video of a just a bit of Specter's pleading can be seen here.)

Arlen Specter, R-Pa., urged Democrats to "rethink" the subpoenas they have planned for Rove and Miers. Specter had to do a little dance that demonstrates the difficulty he and other Republican senators find themselves in. On the one hand, he wants Congress -- in particular judiciary committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. -- to make a deal with White House counsel Fred Fielding, who yesterday said Rove and Miers could testify, but only in private, not under oath, and without a transcript. On the other hand, Specter said that it would be "preferable to have the matter transcribed" and that his "own preference" is for a public hearing. He also said, "It's obviously indispensable to find the facts about whether the Department of Justice acted properly or improperly" in firing the eight U.S. attorneys who were forced to resign last year.

Specter's best argument was the long delay he says will ensue if the Democrats reject Fielding's offer. If the clash over whether the Bush administration can assert executive privilege to defy congressional subpoenas goes to court -- where the president said yesterday he'd be happy to take it -- Rove and Miers won't be testifying about anything to anyone for quite a while. "We'll be looking at 2009, after the end of this president's term," Specter foretold, reminding his colleagues of the Clinton-era fight over executive privilege that began in 1995 and ended in a 1997 court ruling. Waiting two years would be bad because the way the Department of Justice dealt with the ousted prosecutors has been "a very very serious problem," causing "a morale problem" and raising questions about how the U.S. attorneys who have continued in office "are going to function," which is "of the utmost importance." Specter seems truly conflicted: He appears to agree with Democrats that the Justice Department and administration behaved outrageously, but in the end he'll bow to the White House and vote against the subpoenas. [emphasis added]

--Sam Rosenfeld

ONE LIFE. I also agree with Ezra about this. There is, of course, no "correct" choice for dealing with a such a tragedy, and had Edwards dropped out of the race to take care of his wife it would be entirely beyond criticism. But the same, I think, is true of the choice they did make. As I've said elsewhere, I certainly would not want my hypothetical spouse to give up her lifelong ambition because I got sick. Good luck to them both.

--Scott Lemieux

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: PENN, INC. Prompted by the Prospect's debate over Hillary Clinton (a debate that is now available to non-subscribers, by the way), Mark Schmitt says that he's got no beef with the senator -- his problem is with her pollster and advisor, the very influential (and multiply employed) Mark Penn:

I will admit to being a little obsessed with Penn, partly because I think his focus on these dubious sub-segments of affluent swing voters has hugely limited the possibilities for inspiring, ambitious, purposeful politics in the last decade. (And its corollary assumption that all lower-income voters are unmovable -- either locked to one party or to non-voting -- was proven wrong by Karl Rove in 2004 and Rahm Emanuel in 2006.) ...

But I digress. The bottom line is I kind of keep track of Penn. And like every good Washingtonian with a few million dollars in mortgages, he seems to hold at least three jobs at once: He's Senator Clinton's pollster and political advisor. He runs his own corporate polling firm, Penn, Schoen and Berland. And, finally, he is the "Worldwide President and CEO" of Burson-Marsteller, the fifth largest public relations firm in the world. That's a big title, and it seems like it would be a big job. Prowl around the Burson-Marsteller web site, and you'll see that it's a company that does lots of things.

--The Editors

THE EDWARDS ANNOUNCEMENT, AND THE POLITICO. Elizabeth has bone cancer, but the Edwards's appear determined to seek treatment while continuing the campaign, so the political effect of this is relatively minor, aside from Elizabeth's remarkable performance before the cameras this morning. They've not run a sappy conference, and so I won't dip into what is, at this point, a personal health issue for them, other than to say that I've known Elizabeth for a number of years now, she's always been overwhelmingly kind and impressive, I'm not surprised that she'd prefer to continue participating in a national campaign rather than recede to receive treatment, and I'm glad to know someone of her great intelligence and humanity will remain in public life.

The real loser here, though, is The Politico. CNN must have mentioned The Politico 65 times in the long minutes before the press conference, as the new magazine reported this morning that they'd confirmed Edwards' was suspending campaigning. I was surprised by that report, as I hadn't been able to confirm the same, but The Politico has been getting early confirmation on a host of recent stories, and they seem to have the magic touch. Now, though, I'm beginning to wonder. The story they confirmed was obviously untrue, even though the rumors were overwhelmingly in that direction. I'd be interested to know, now, what happened. The magazine has been early to get confirmation on a number of big stories lately, and a cynical observer may wonder if they haven't been calling the very likely "confirmed" in order to raise their profile. It'll be interesting to see if they address this on their web site.

Update: Ben Smith does address it. Good for them! This is the sort of transparency that's good to see from the new media venture.

--Ezra Klein

IN THE AIR. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions heard testimony yesterday on the “long-term health impacts from 9/11.” Despite initial reports, including some intentionally false ones by the EPA that the air in lower Manhattan was not hazardous following the attack, the numerous cases of "World Trade Center Cough” and other sometimes serious ailments have proved otherwise.

It is now widely accepted that rescue workers and other individuals present at ground zero in the months after the attack have experienced -- and continue to experience -- health problems due toxic exposure and stress. Aid and construction workers were exposed to numerous airborne toxins such as pulverized metals, fuel from the two jetliners, and building materials -- which included known and suspected carcinogens such as dioxin, asbestos and benzene.

While New York City has created programs to care for injured workers, those programs need more funding -- so do affiliate programs that treat affected workers in other cities. Moreover, the ultimate affects of exposure are unknown and people may need access to regular monitoring for the rest of their lives.

Mayor Bloomberg was at the hearing to ask Congress to reopen the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, which closed at the end of 2003, to help those whose illnesses have been slower to emerge. But this is no guarantee of coverage -- initial allotments from the fund varied greatly -- and sorting through the potential gaps in workers' existing coverage is complicated. Senator Cornyn suggested that many of the workers already have health insurance, but city workers are insured according to their union, and union plans differ. Furthermore, it is the long-term ailments that are still emerging that are the most problematic. Treatment for chronic conditions, potential cases of cancer and mental health issues, such as the many cases of PTSD, are often not fully covered under health insurance plans, if they are covered at all, and they might make it difficult for patients to qualify for health insurance in the future.

While there seemed a concerted effort not to politicize this issue, it seems obvious how tied up this matter is with our existing health care crisis. The rhetoric at the hearing emphasized the need for the American government to stand up and take care of the heroes who selflessly came to the aid of those in need, and no one disagrees. But this call for the government to take responsibility and ensure adequate care for 9/11 heroes is more of an example of everyday irresponsibility and ought to demonstrate the current system’s failure to guarantee sufficient care without the impetus of a national emergency.

--Alina Hoffman

THE POWER OF THE NON-CANDIDATE. I went to see Al Gore testify on the Hill yesterday. The line of people waiting in the hallway of the Senate’s Dirksen Building to see Gore was long; many of those waiting were under 30.

Is Gore positioning himself to make a run for president? The conventional wisdom is no, and for a variety of reasons: he’s enjoying more attention and garnering more praise as a non-candidate; he is making proposals (like the substitution of carbon taxes for payroll tax cuts) that undermine a potential bid; and, the most superficial of them all -- that he hasn’t shed 20 or 30 pounds. It’s hard to know what to make of all of this, other than to say that circumstances will probably be more critical than Gore’s mindset. If that’s true, maybe he shouldn’t run. A person shouldn’t run for passive reasons, like the collapse of the Democratic field or the dissatisfaction of primary voters with that field.

One of the many ironies of Gore’s career is that he now has a compelling issue and reason to run, one that he tried to insert into earlier campaigns, with far less success, than now. Gore has said that he believes people are listening to him more now precisely because he’s not asking for votes. In an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross originally aired last May, Gore said: “I think that in a political campaign, particularly in a campaign for president, the way candidates are perceived is shaped by the constant attacks by the opposing side, shaped by the healthy skepticism viewers and listeners bring to anything that somebody asking for votes is saying, and shaped also by the necessity of the campaigns, which don’t allow you to speak about only one issue but require you to speak necessarily speak about the full range of concern of that American voters have the right to hear your views on and when you move one to the other that’s a different kind of presentation.”

It’s a sad but accurate indictment of both politicians and cynical voters that a non-candidate is taken more seriously about a matter of such national and global import. In that regard -- and only in that regard -- it was perhaps a good thing for the planet that Gore lost in 2000.

--Tom Schaller

WHO SAYS CHENEY IS HEARTLESS? Via Tom Maguire, the New York Post's Page Six hears

THAT Vice President Dick Cheney spoke to Hudson Institute members Monday at the Union League Club. Asked about a possible pardon for Scooter Libby, he smiled and said, "You can imagine how I feel about that." Libby himself was seated in the front row.

--Jeff Lomonaco

CLINTON NON. To hop into the debate, I pretty much fully endorse the arguments of Matt, Sam, and Ezra. In particular, I would like to highlight the apercus that " nobody is entitled to a presidential nomination on account of unfair treatment at the hands of scoundrels, and liberals should avoid the danger of judging Clinton's political maneuvers and struggles from her perspective rather than from the perspective of what's best for liberalism," and "Clinton's new dissembling, on an issue where the record is so clear, fits a pattern: Not only is she not much of a liberal, she actually seems determined to insult liberals' intelligence." I'm also not persuaded by the vote-counting data adduced by Garance. You can't compare raw vote totals without considering the fact that Clinton represents one of the most liberal states in the country and Edwards represented one of the most conservative. In context, it seems to me that Edwards' voting record is at least as progressive, and certainly his platform is considerably more so. I agree that perceptions of her as an arch-liberal are largely driven by sexism, but this isn't really a good reason to support her in the primary unless she actually is as progressive as the other major candidates, and (the fine record of leadership on women's issues discussed by Garance and Dana notwithstanding) I don't think she is.

Speaking of women's issues, in fairness to Clinton I actually think there's one issue where Garance sells Clinton a bit short:

This moderation has put Clinton in a position to help resolve tensions around some truly divisive national issues, such as abortion, on which a female leader has more freedom to stake out new ground and also faces more expectations to act. Since 2005, Clinton has helped reframe the abortion debate so as to co-opt the most effective turn in contemporary anti-abortion rhetoric. As documented by Sarah Blustain and Reva Siegel in these pages [see "Mommy Dearest," October 2006], the anti-abortion movement's newest stratagem has been to argue that abortion hurts women, and to flood legislators with letters from grieving post-abortion women. Clinton has worked to defend choice even in that environment by unifying left and right around the shared goal of reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies.

--Scott Lemieux

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE GOD OF DOUBLE STANDARDS. Harold reflects on the Reverand Albert Mohler's acknowledgment that a biological basis for sexual orientation may exist:

But once you recognize homosexuality as a genetic reality, it does create a theological dilemma for the Mohlers among us, for it means that God is making people who, in the midst of what may otherwise be morally exemplary lives, have a special and inherent predisposition to sin. Mohler's response is that since Adam's fall, sin is the condition of all humankind. That sidesteps, however, the conundrum that a gay person may follow the same God-given instincts as a straight person -- let's assume fidelity and the desire for church sanctification in both cases -- and end up damned while the straight person ends up saved. Indeed, it means that a gay person's duty is to suppress his God-given instincts while a straight person's duty is to fulfill his.

Mohler's deity, in short, is the God of Double Standards: a God who enforces the norms and fears of a world before science, a God profoundly ignorant of or resistant to the arc of American history, which is the struggle to expand the scope of the word "men" in our founding declaration that "all men are created equal." This is a God who in earlier times was invoked to defend segregation and, before that, slavery.

--The Editors

MORE ON EDWARDS. I'm with Garance, of course. If a candidate leaves the race, it should be in a blaze of rebellious glory, after a total humiliation, or in absolute ignominy. It should not be because his wonderful and beloved wife is gravely ill. I am, happily, hearing more contradictory things now, as the campaign is apparently telling folks not to assume the worst. There's not much reason for them to do that if they are announcing a definite end. But, for now, we really just don't know. Hoping for the best is all we've got, and I, for one, am hoping.

--Ezra Klein

AWFUL. I am hearing the same rumors. If so, it's very sad. I only like candidates to drop out because they are crushed to a bloody pulp, as is the normal pattern, and not for any heart-rending non-political reasons. Still hoping it's not true -- especially because Edwards has, with the Fox News pushback, finally seemed to find a way of making a real impact in the public sphere, despite not holding elected office. News at noon, tomorrow.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

EDWARDS TO DROP OUT? His campaign has released a very cryptic press release promising a news conference tomorrow, with Elizabeth, in North Carolina. I'm hearing rumblings that he may drop out. Edwards also had to miss an event earlier this week due to a doctor's appointment for Elizabeth, so that could be involved as well. Stay tuned...

--Ezra Klein

CLINTON'S LIBERALISM. More tomorrow, but for now, let me just say this in reply to Ezra's query: Given the words "she would remain resolutely in the public eye, ready and waiting were the ground to shift and 2012 to look more inviting," I think an interpretation that he didn't think Hillary Clinton should run now was reasonable. Ezra, if you'd like to clarify that as having actually meant that you don't think she should run, ever, I'll accept that, but I think it only proves my point as to why you'd find my piece -- or any pro-Hillary piece -- irritating. In any event, I think I argued fairly clearly in my piece that Clinton is not as liberal as she has sometimes been perceived to be, because all female candidates are thought to be more liberal than they are. To that I'll add that all the impartial assessments of the situation that I've seen show that Clinton has a less liberal voting record than Barack Obama, but that John Edwards's vote ranking from his years in the Senate puts him firmly in the moderate camp, and probably to the right of her. The American Conservative Union and Americans for Democratic Action both ranked Edwards as more conservative than Clinton, and, according to Media Matters:

Edwards's average liberal rating for the five years he has served in the Senate (1999-2003) is 75.7 percent -- 20 points lower than his 2003 rating, which Republicans are touting. According to National Journal, in 2002, Edwards received a 63 percent rating; in 2001, he received a 68.2 percent rating; in 2000, he received an 80.8 percent rating; and in 1999, he received a 72.2 percent rating.

Furthermore, according to a January 31, 2003, National Journal profile (NationalJournal.com subscription required) of "The Presidential Wanna-bes," "Among the other presidential contenders, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina has been in the moderate-to-conservative range of Senate Democrats during his four years in the chamber." And in 2002, Edwards made National Journal's list of "Senate Centrists"

Edwards has changed his positions and approach since losing election 2004, and today has put forward expansive populist programs to go with his long-standing populist rhetoric. But when he was in the Senate, he was a moderate whose primary legislative accomplishment was putting together the Patients Bill of Rights with John McCain, who was then still a media golden boy.

So, no, I agree Clinton is not the most liberal candidate running -- Dennis Kucinich is -- or even the most liberal of the top three (that appears to be Obama). I'm with Matt in being cynical about any Democrat's ability to achieve major domestic policy reforms during the 2009-2012 term, so, with all due respect, don't particularly think the question of who can best put together a universal health insurance reform package ought to primary. But I respect your commitment to the issue, and desire to judge candidates based on it.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MORE TAP DEBATE! I'll happily assume that Garance will actually respond to some of the issues I've raised in her promised next post, but in the meantime, I'll correct what I'm sure is her good-faith misrepresentation of my position on Hillary.

Garance says I've "spent much of the last year suggesting that it's not her time to run yet and that she should wait her turn, while the real heroes of progressive politics (cough, John Edwards, cough) step up to the plate." I don't think it's "not her time to run yet," I just don't think she should run. I think that Hillary is uniquely incapable of sparking progressive change in this country, and she should be clear-eyed enough to understand that. Her past failures on health care render her singularly unable to achieve comprehensive reform, her reputation as a liberal forces a more ostentatious centrism than anyone else would have to project, and she's overwhelmingly polarizing at a time when the country could use a drawdown in partisan hostilities. And that doesn't even get into my ideological disagreements with her. As I argued in the op-ed Garance links to, I think Hillary would be an excellent majority leader, as she's shown a real aptitude for mastering the clubby atmosphere of the Senate, is a talented incrementalist, and commands enough media attention to be a powerfully effective messenger. I don't think she should run for president.

So let me ask Garance this, because I believe it's the nub of our disagreement: Do you think Hillary is more or less liberal than the other frontrunners, and do you think the narratives from her past in any way constrain her ability to, say, reform the country's health care system?

--Ezra Klein

HILLARY DEBATE CLUB. I was out at the RAND forum on Iran all day, so am just catching up on Ezra's take on my piece on Hillary Clinton. I may have more to say later, but for now I'll heartily endorse Dana's comment that a vision of progressivism that does not include Clinton's decades long record of leadership on issues of importance to women and children is a very narrow one indeed, and add that anyone who doesn't think that Hillary's gender is going to be an issue that progressives have to play defense on is, as Rick Perlstein makes clear in this piece, wearing blinders. In any event, I'm not all that surprised my piece made Ezra "chafe," since he's spent much of the last year suggesting that it's not her time to run yet and that she should wait her turn, while the real heroes of progressive politics (cough, John Edwards, cough) step up to the plate:

• Ezra: "Hillary Clinton should back off from the presidential race and vie for the Senate leadership."

• Ezra: "forces are aligning to offer her a dignified way to demur from an ugly and ill-fated presidential effort, while still emerging a national leader....Many of her potential competitors score far better on likeability indices....Worse yet, the blogs -- the weathervane of the emergent left -- can't stand Clinton ... her path to the Senate leadership is a far safer road, ensuring that Clinton's trailblazing migration from first lady to senator remained unmarred by a catastrophic defeat in a presidential campaign. She would be the first woman to occupy the august body's leadership position, and she would remain resolutely in the public eye, ready and waiting were the ground to shift and 2012 to look more inviting."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: PLEADING THEIR CASE. In the final story in our "Mother Load" special report, Jeanine Plant explains the trend of suing unaccommodating employers for "Family Responsibilities Discrimination" -- and wonders if these lawsuits will be effective in changing workplace culture.

--The Editors

ONE WOMAN'S LEADERSHIP. I’ll take the bait and jump into the debate about Hillary Clinton. First, I’ll disagree with Ezra: Despite what Kos might say, it’s unclear at this juncture to what extent Clinton’s female-ness and Obama’s blackness will define them in the campaign. This fight is going to get much, much dirtier than it is one year and eight months before the election. And to some extent, supporting the first female or first black presidential prospect as such is a good thing. Remember learning as a child that every American can grow up to be president? Well a Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama presidency would add some proof to that warmed-over pudding. Progressives shouldn’t underestimate the power of symbolism. God knows, conservatives don’t.

All that said, I am far -- very far -- from casting my lot in with Clinton, and for many of the reasons Sam and Matt outline in their print piece: she’s been wrong and wrong again on the war, she’s washed up on health care, she’s not particularly economically progressive, and so on and so forth. But I have to take serious issue with the guys’ repeated claims that Clinton has no “long record of leadership on key progressive issues” and “has not stood out on any major progressive causes during her time in the Senate…and has declined to use her name and platform to make any significant issue a signature.”

Beyond her failed attempt at health care reform, Clinton’s signature issues are women’s issues. It is difficult to debate her leadership on this front. Whatever you think of her statement in 2005 that abortion can be a “tragic choice” and the pro-choice movement should focus on prevention, her attempt to reframe this bitter debate was nothing if not the move of a leader who knew she’d be alienating some long-time supporters, but thought it was the right thing to do in order to ensure access to abortion.

In addition, Clinton has aggressively opposed proposed cuts to the Office of Women’s Health and the appointment of right wing hack Eric Keroack to run federal family planning programs. Last year, she was key in securing over-the-counter access to Plan B, going so far as to block Senate confirmation of Andrew von Eschenbach as commissioner of the FDA until Plan B was approved. In 2005, Clinton introduced legislation requiring hospitals to offer emergency contraception to rape victims. She vocally opposed a California ballot initiative last November that would have required parental notification when minor girls sought abortions, and last July voted against a Senate bill that would make it a crime to take girls across state lines to obtain abortions. And Clinton’s support for women goes beyond reproductive justice. She recently introduced the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would be a great first step toward fighting wage inequality between women and men.

Of course, Garance is right that "women's issues" aren’t motivating factors for women voters, so all this could mean little to Clinton’s electoral prospects (I’m less sold on the idea that women will vote for her for vaguer identity-politics reasons). But suffice to say, even if I don’t want Clinton making decisions on when to go to war, I don’t look askance at her leadership on a whole host of other issues that affect my life daily.

--Dana Goldstein

CURING CANCER. Ezra has a post at his other place on the NIH budget. After several years of rapid rise in budget allocations, the NIH is now faced with the lean years. The puny promised increases in research funds amount to a drop in the budget in real terms. This creates problems for young researchers who can't get funding for new research and for the universities and other research institutions which would like to keep the young researchers employed with something better than the writing of multiple grant applications in the vain hope of finding enough money somewhere.

As some of Ezra's commenters pointed out, it is not feasible to expect the NIH budget to just surge year after year, and perhaps this is the time to put a halt to the considerable increases of the past. But the whole process looks a little like a car coming from 100 miles per hour to a full stop in ten seconds, not a soft landing for the researchers.

The NIH is an important funding source for medical research which doesn't offer money-making opportunities through patents, the kind which is often viewed as basic medical research. The kind which we hope will find a cure for cancer one day. Most economists, even conservative ones, acknowledge that funding basic medical research is something the government should be involved in, because the markets will underprovide it.

Something to keep in mind when looking at how much money the NIH will get next year.

-- J. Goodrich

CITING WIKIPEDIA. Today in TNR Eric Rauchway writes about Wikipedia's place in academia. Which prompted Steven Aftergood to comment in today's FAS Secrecy News email on the growing use of Wikipedia as a reference in U.S. government intelligence products, namely those produced by the Open Source Center.

A March 19 profile of Indian Congress Party Leader Rahul Gandhi prepared by the Open Source Center (OSC) of the Office of Director of National Intelligence is explicitly derived from "various internet sources including wikipedia.org." A March 21 OSC profile of Rajnath Singh, president of India's Bharatiya Janata Party, is likewise "sourced from wikipedia.org."

An OSC report last year on the leader of the terrorist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Velupillai Prabhakaran, noted that he and his wife "have two children, a girl and a boy. According to wikipedia.com, the boy is named Charles Anthony and the girl, Duwaraha."

The OSC was created in November 2005 to aggregate the world's public information to compile reports for government intelligence services. So it makes sense that they'd reference Wikipedia, which is itself an aggregator of public information. But for the most part, I'd agree with Aftergood that it's pretty alarming for the government to be uncritically citing Wikipedia as a reliable source.

--Ann Friedman

GOREWATCH LIVES! Been a bit since we did this, but both Dave Roberts and Brian Beutler have been liveblogging today's congressional testimony from Al Gore. Meanwhile, I'm confused. First, Joe Klein tells me that based on Gore's global warming proposals, he may be running for president. Then, Grist's David Roberts tells me that, based on on Gore's global warming proposals, he's not running for president.

So uh -- what gives, guys?

Generally speaking, I'm with Roberts. I don't think this shows much political calculation on Gore's part, and I think, for many reasons, Gore isn't running for president. Moreover, if you actually pay attention, he's become so focused on global warming, that it's almost impossible to imagine him widening out enough for a presidential campaign. Take his plan to replace payroll taxes with carbon taxes, which is pretty unwise. Payroll taxes actually, you know, pay for things. But work is fairly inelastic -- people need paychecks -- so taxing it provides a stable funding base. Gore is advocating carbon taxation explicitly because it will reduce carbon consumption. That, of course, will reduce the tax revenues. Then we raise the taxes per unit of carbon, thus reducing use, thus forcing us to raise rates, etc. Of course, Congress won't actually raise rates that much, so this is really just going to begin depriving the government of revenues. It's true that we should reduce carbon emissions, but we can do it without defunding Medicare.

Plus, on the outside like this, Gore's endorsement is becoming more and more valuable. If he enters the race, other candidates will attack the severity and downsides of his global warming proposals. If he stays out, they'll adopt those very same ideas, hoping for his eventual support.

--Ezra Klein

WAL-MART AND SEIU. I'm a bit skeptical of SEIU's alliance with Wal-Mart in this interview I did with Andy Stern, so it's probably worth making the opposite argument as well. Stern's attempt to enlist Wal-Mart as an ally rather than an enemy in the fight for universal health care is, I think, precisely the right tactic. The left is at real crosspurposes on the Wal-Mart issue, wherein unions want to force Wal-Mart to offer their employees better benefits in the short-term so as to make unionizing easier, while the broader left wants to end worker reliance on company's like Wal-Mart for health care. In other words, we come not to strengthen the corporate welfare state, but to bury it. So large-scale organizing to get this or that corporation to offer better benefits is, at best, beside the point, and at worst, counterproductive. Better would be a systematic approach to force Wal-Mart and others to substantively support some sort of universal health care reform.

This, in theory, is what Stern and SEIU have done. My skepticism comes in how low of a bar they've set for "support." Wal-Mart hasn't committed to any specific reform plan, so there's no assurance that the system they're envisioning is actually a good one. Additionally, they haven't put any concrete amount of money, political muscle, or other resources behind pushing for reform, and they've said publicly that they'll continue supporting politicians who oppose universal reform. So the danger becomes that Wal-Mart blunts the union drive against their shoddy benefits by pointing to this SEIU partnership when it's really nothing more than an abstract endorsement of the concept of universal health care. That would be the worst of both worlds. Stern's a smart guy, and cognizant of these dangers, but for now, he's basically saying, "trust me."

--Ezra Klein

CARROTS AND STICKS. Yesterday, Dana told us about some of the carrots Nancy Pelosi is using to garner sufficient Dem votes for the House Iraq war supplemental bill. Today in The Hill we hear about the sticks:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is holding the implied threat of lost committee seats over the heads of Democratic Caucus members who may vote against her $124 billion Iraq war supplemental bill…

She has been hardest on members of the Appropriations Committee and her fellow Californians who oppose the measure. The Speaker pointedly reminded Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), a leading opponent of the bill, that she had appointed her to the Appropriations Committee, three Democratic lawmakers said.

The message was simple, the lawmakers said: Pelosi could also remove Lee from the panel.

During a meeting last week with appropriators, Pelosi reminded them that serving on the panel was a privilege, admonishing lawmakers from safe districts who feel they have the luxury to vote how they want without consequences — as opposed to Democrats elected in swing districts who do not, a Democratic appropriator said.

“Do I have 218 people that I know are definite ‘yeses’ right this minute? The answer to that is no. … Do I think we will have 218 votes on this bill when we call it up for a vote? The answer to that is yes,” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters yesterday. “[Do] I think we will need to delay it? I hope the answer to that is no and believe it is no.”

--Sam Rosenfeld

COULD 2001 HAVE BEEN THE NEW 1937? Matt replies here to my post from yesterday about the 2000 election. There seem to be two separate arguments he's making here. On the less important issue of whether Gore squandered an opportunity because he failed to "propose a particularly ambitious domestic agenda during the 2000 campaign," I suppose that all things being equal I would have preferred that he do so. But as I said yesterday, I don't think that it's terribly consequential in terms of what he could have accomplished, and given the states in play he had sound strategic reasons for not doing so.

The more important question is "would [it] have been feasible for a progressive president to secure a similarly-scaled, though differently directed, package of reforms." I am certain that it would not have been. The fact that, from a rational policy perspective, 2001 would be a good time for an ambitious progressive agenda is neither here nor there in terms of the political viability of such a program. The key variable in the two periods of major progressive reform -- FDR's second term and under LBJ -- was massive Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. (And even with that, it's amazing how many concessions FDR had to make; for example, most New Deal programs allowed local administrators to largely exclude African-Americans in order to appease Southern members of Congress.) Gore would not have had even a bare majority in the House, and even had Jeffords still switched the nominal Democratic majority in the Senate certainly would have been nowhere near the progressive super-majority necessary to pass major reform legislation.

Bush's tax cuts are a bad analogy because they were an issue where his (already much more homogeneous) coalition is maximally coherent and where unprincipled "moderate" Democrats were especially likely to be peeled off. Something similarly ambitious in the other direction would have been much more likely to meet the fate of Bush's attempts to privatize Social Security, which never got off the canvas despite GOP control of both Houses. In other words, the best Gore could have done was exactly what he proposed -- maintaining the government's fiscal solvency and trying to pass some small reform initiatives that could be built on in a more favorable institutional context. The Bush administration, on the other hand, will make it harder for Democrats to get a reform agenda passed in the future, which is precisely what made the Naderite "heighten-the-contradictions" logic that put Bush in the White House so stupid.

--Scott Lemieux

TAP DEBATE! I was struck by Markos's comment that, "it is amazing, however, to witness a presidential race where being the white male candidate appears to be a disadvantage." True dat. Moreover, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are, by and large, being evaluated on their own terms. Clinton is not "the woman" candidate, and Obama is not "the African-American" candidate. Clinton is the pragmatic frontrunner with establishment support and big bags bulging with money, while Obama is the electrifying newcomer. Indeed, I sort of think that this has proven a problem for supporters of Hillary, who are invested in the opposition to her being a function of her gender or name rather than her politics. I chafed against Garance's pro-Hillary article in the latest Prospect for precisely that reason (though Garance is not, as far as I know, an actual Hillary supporter) -- it seemed to want to make the conversation about her chromosomes rather than her conservatism. After all, I find it hard to believe that Democrats are abandoning a white woman for a black man on grounds of political expediency. The knock on Hillary in Democratic circles, at least at this point, is admirably substantive. She's a pragmatic centrist at a moment that calls for a visionary progressive.

Garance, to her credit, acknowledges the ideological tension, but tries to resolve it in a very peculiar way. "This is where ignoring the elephant in the room -- Clinton's unique position as a female candidate -- really starts to matter for liberals," she writes. "Women are more anti-war than men. The very same population that most supports Clinton is the one that has most consistently and most ferociously favored withdrawing troops from Iraq and opposed intervening in Iran. And this same group has signaled its belief that the liberal values expressed by electing the first female president in our nation's history trump the value of having that person apologize for her vote."

I find that a very...strange appeal. First, it's by no means clear that women are overwhelmingly supportive of Hillary. A recent Zogby poll showed her capturing 34% of women vs. 30% of men. That's a significantly smaller percentage than I would've expected. And in another poll, Zogby found that 42% of women say they'll "never" support Hillary. Only 30% say the same about either Obama or Edwards. So it's not clear to me that Hillary has the potential to vastly outrun the other Democrats among women. Indeed, there's evidence to suggest the exactly the opposite.

Moreover, I'm really confused as to why female support should obviate ideological disagreements. Even if 34% of female Democratic voters really are rock-solid for Hillary, that doesn't mean her vote on the Iraq War was right, or that we can trust her instincts going forward. Indeed, if we wanted to follow the preferences of the population, the more telling metric would be who self-described progressives support, and according to Zogby, they break for Obama. An interesting addendum to that is Rasmussen's finding that only 43% of voters think Obama is liberal, while 53% think Hillary is. So the more progressive candidate, with more progressive supporters, is also seen as more moderate by the populace at large. That seems like a big deal to me.

There's more to say on this, but I hope the other Tappers -- Garance included! -- will respond. For now, those of you without a subscription should buy one so you can read the full debate in the magazine. Matt and Sam make, I think, a very compelling case that Hillary simply isn't a progressive leader, and that that reality is too often obscured by the irrelevant fact that she's got many very conservative enemies.

--Ezra Klein

DOUBLE WHAMMY. Think Progress reported late yesterday that the Justice Department replaced one of the fired U.S. attorneys, Bud Cummins of Arkansas, with former Rove aide Tim Griffin -- passing over Cummins's deputy, Jane Duke, because Duke was on maternity leave at the time.

A typical tale of a qualified woman being passed over for a job so it could be awarded to a member of the boys' club. Add pregnancy discrimination to the list of Bush administration transgressions in Purgegate.

--Ann Friedman

GOOD CALL! I think Dick Durbin has the right idea in his suggestion for a possible replacement for Alberto Gonzales:

The White House yesterday denied reports that a search for a new attorney general had begun, and Bush called Gonzales in an expression of confidence. Yet Democrats did not shy away from discussing the qualifications a replacement nominee would need to win their votes.

“If it comes to that, we’ll take our responsibility very seriously,” Durbin said, giving Bush kudos for his selection of Robert Gates to lead the Pentagon. As for suggested replacements, he added, “I’d start with the U.S. attorney for the northern district of Illinois” — Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Scooter Libby case who earned a lackluster rating in Sampson’s Justice memo.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: DANCING WITH THE DEVIL? SEIU raised some eyebrows last month when it announced its membership in a coaltion with Wal-Mart to advocate for universal health care. Ezra talks to the union's president, Andy Stern, about the strategic thinking behind the campaign and what he has to say to the criticisms.

--The Editors

BLOOMBERG'S CANDIDACY: Following up on Garance's post from yesterday regarding New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg's staunch support of gun control and the unpopularity it has earned him south of the Mason-Dixon line, there's an important caveat worth raising. Though Bloomberg is a Republican, all the speculation on his potential presidential campaign has him running as an independent, possibly on the Unity '08 ticket (as Garance suggests in her post title and the link she includes). So while the analogy to Rudy Giuliani (two Republican New York mayors with liberal records on gun control and social issues) holds up on policy it doesn't on politics. Bloomberg doesn't need to win Republican primaries to run. If he runs, it will be as a self-financed late entrant, like Ross Perot.

What Garance's post demonstrates, however, is how damaging Bloomberg would be to the Democratic nominee. Someone with his personal and political profile will have no appeal in red states. His sole effect will be to put blue states in play and potentially throw the election to the Republican.

--Ben Adler

MEANWHILE, IN SODOM. Joe Klein made an interesting observation a few days ago while writing about the concern for the poor both Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee express:

Then again, the Republicans are fielding a motley crew right now: if you count Newt Gingrich, who'll probably join the fray in the fall, the four leading candidates have had nine marriages among them: Giuliani three, Gingrich three, McCain two and Romney one. The Republican faithful are left with a devil of a choice: moderate candidates who live like liberals, or religious conservatives who talk like liberals.

Presumably it is Brownback and Huckabee who speak like liberals and the rest of the lot who live like liberals.

Which brings me back to the liberal Sodom, Massachusetts. The very name of this state can be used as a secret swearword in presidential speeches these days, because it stands for all things liberal and corrupt and Hollywood-tainted. Thus, if we look for the oft-divorcing liberals we must find them in Massachusetts, right? Not quite:

The 2003 figures are instructive. In that year the Massachusetts divorce rate was 5.7 divorces per 1,000 married people. Comparable figures for Kentucky, Mississippi and Arkansas were 10.8, 11.1 and 12.7 respectively.

If I were a politician I'd take the opportunity to proudly proclaim that liberalism is the glue that keeps marriages whole. Sadly, it isn't quite that simple, as the states I mentioned also have very different education and income levels and different ages at first marriage -- all factors which are known to affect the likelihood of divorce. But it is important to note that religiousness doesn't appear to be a marriage glue, either. Born-again Christians, for example, divorce at about the same rate as atheists.

--J.Goodrich

BLAME WHERE IT BELONGS. I think I'm a little more sympathetic to the overall premise of Matt's argument than Ezra, although to me it's not so much about the war (arguably the greatest period of progressive policy-making in American history, after all, happened during the escalation of the Vietnam war) as a straightforward story about how American political institutions make major progressive reform very difficult under all but the most fortuitous circumstances.

I must admit, however, intense annoyance about Matt's claim that Al Gore is to blame for "squander[ing] the opportunity" presented in 2000. First of all, we don't know what kind of reform Gore might have been able to attain, especially a Gore elected to a second term (FDR didn't exactly run as a fire-breathing progressive in 1932.) Given that the election was "lost" in relatively conservative swing states, there were good strategic reasons for not running further left, but this doesn't tell us exactly what his policy agenda would have been. But, also, I don't like going along with implications that the 2000 election was entirely about Gore's weaknesses as a candidate. Gore didn't design the definitively irrational system the Constitution uses to select presidents. He didn't insist on Ralph Nader's vanity campaign. He didn't encourage the Florida state legislature to create its election statutes by having the attorney general's infant son scrawl something in crayon. He didn't appoint 5 partisan hacks to the Supreme Court. He didn't force outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times to conduct an endless smear campaign against him, or generally cover this highly consequential election like an elementary school student council race. (And lest you think that the appalling media coverage is just sour grapes about an inherently awful candidate, I would note, for example, that a majority of people who actually watched the first Bush/Gore debate thought the latter had won -- but people who got their information through press coverage of the debate didn't.)

I don't recall Gore underestimating the importance of the 2000 campaign, but I do recall lots of alleged liberals -- represented for me by Frank Rich -- who claimed that the election didn't really matter and that Bush and Gore were indistinguishable (which also relied on assumptions that Bush was a harmless moderate, something that was plausible as long as you ignored his record as a governor, his supporters, and his platform.) I don't claim that Gore was a great candidate. But when it comes to squandered opportunities, I'm a lot more upset at the media and the idiot "Gush-Bore" crowd than I am about someone who ran a serious campaign and would have been a good president.

--Scott Lemieux

A LIBERAL CASE FOR PORK? In September, TNR’s Brad Plumer argued “the liberal case for pork.” Call it vote buying if you will, but today, The Washington Post reports that House Democrats are tempting Iraq fence-sitters by adding $21 billion in domestic appropriations to the $124 billion war bill that sets an August 2008 deadline for pulling American troops out of Iraq. Waiting another year-and-a-half to remove our troops from harm’s way is less than ideal for many progressives, but Pelosi is waging a bare-knuckled fight just to get a veto-proof majority to support this bill. It puts Louisiana Republicans in the awkward position, for example, of either supporting redeployment or voting against tens of billion dollars in funding for Hurricane Katrina relief and flood prevention. The Post reports:

For Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.), there is $25 million for spinach growers hurt by last year's E. coli scare. For three conservative Democrats in Georgia, there is $75 million for peanut storage. For lawmakers from the bone-dry West, there is $500 million for wildfire suppression. An additional $120 million is earmarked for shrimp and Atlantic menhaden fishermen.

I like the way Pelosi is playing this one.

--Dana Goldstein

EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE 1984 AD. Adam Conner explains it all at MyDD.com, and also links to this interview Micah Sifry did with the ad's creator. Here's ParkRidge47 explaining why s/he made the spot:

The idea was simple and so was the execution. Make a bold statement about the Democratic primary race by culture jacking a famous commercial and replacing as few images as possible. For some people it doesn't register, but for people familiar with the ad and the race it has obviously struck a chord.

A friend suggested the idea after reading a New York Times article about the Clinton's campaign bullying of donors and political operatives after the Geffen dustup.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

AND PROGRESSIVISM MARCHES ON AND ON, HURRAH, HURRAH! I'm a little unconvinced by Matt's pessimism here, though I think it's much more of a wait-and-see situation than anything you can actually argue out. I'm skeptical that we're going to see any major progressive reforms in the very near future, but I think we're going to see quite a bit of momentum gathering behind such reforms in the very, very near future, so who knows. Troubles abroad, however, only make organizing at home more likely. If a Democratic president has to spend much of his time doing the unpleasant, uninspiring work of extricating our armies, he's more, not less, likely to try and craft inspirational proposals at home. Indeed, I'd be surprised if the arguments weren't explicitly linked, along the lines of, "it's time to stop building firehouses in Baghdad and start building them in Baltimore!"

Also, Matt says that, "Besides the New Deal, the other major era of progressive change in recent American history was the booming postwar years, the same period during which the vast welfare states of Western Europe were created." I'm not sure what he means by this. As Chris Howard explains in The Welfare State Nobody Knows, progressive policy achievements have actually been much more steadily achieved than most folks realize. You have the New Deal, of course. But in the 40s and 50s, you have the GI Bill, subsidized school lunches, disability insurance, Perkins loans, and the mortgage and health care deductions (both middle class tax entitlements). The 60s are the Great Society, with Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, Head Start, and so on. The 70s see the introduction of Supplemental Security Income, Section 8 housing, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. The 80s hugely reduced the tax burden on the poor through the 86 reforms. The 90s give us SCHIP, the Americans With Disabilities Act, a huge expansion of the EITC, and the creation of the Family and Medical Leave Act. And even under Bush, the 2000-2006 has seen No Child Left Behind (remember: it was, in many ways, a Ted Kennedy and George Miller priority) and Medicare Part D. It's simply not the case that progressive policy making has stalled except for two short periods during the previous century.

--Ezra Klein

GI JANE. An article in the NYT magazine this weekend examined women vets and why they experience a slightly higher rate -- 24 percent compared with 19 percent of men -- of post-traumatic stress disorder than their male counterparts. The reason behind this is sexual assault and harassment, something the article calls a "double whammy" when combined with the stress of serving during wartime. The reality, as the article points out, is that the military and VA have done very little to deal with this problem. Even when women go through treatment for PTSD, they're often placed in groups of all men, some of whom are dealing with sexually assaulting someone. This often destroys the trust that these women are supposed to experience in a group therapy setting. The end of the article points out that there is one VA-run group in California especially for women suffering from PTSD -- often as the result of sexual assault. The military needs more groups like these.

Today, Women's eNews reports that VA hospitals are taking small steps to accommodate their female patients, like providing women's underwear and tampons, for instance. The article reported that women currently make up about 15 percent of the military force -- with recruitment rates on track to double those numbers in the next 13 years.

The simple reality is that the military went from being virtually an all-male institution to one with an increasing number of women. Battling the sexism that comes with the male-dominated military poses a serious challenge. Since the structure of the military is so top-down, it would be nice to see commanders taking on a zero-tolerance attitude about discrimination, harassment, and assault. The minor progress deserves to be rewarded, but the military has a long way to go to accommodate GI Jane.

--Kay Steiger

EVENTS. TAP co-founder and co-editor Robert Kuttner will take part in a panel tomorrow night in New York on the future of newspapers. The discussion will focus on Kuttner's current Columbia Journalism Review cover story, and he'll be joined by Steve Rattner, Jill Abramson, Amanda Bennett, and Jim Brady.

How Newspapers Can Survive (and Thrive) In the 21st Century
When: Tomorrow, Wednesday, March 21st, at 7 p.m.
Where: the Lecture Hall at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism

And TAPPED contributor Tom Schaller will be debating The Nation's Bob Moser tonight in Winston-Salem, NC.

Southern Surrender: Smart Strategy for Democrats?
When: Tonight, Tuesday, March 20, at 7 p.m.
Where: Wake Forest University, Room 1312 of the Worrell Professional Center

Both events are free and open to the public.

--The Editors

THE POLITICS OF SHAME. I've been just a bit skeptical of suggestions that Gonzales is done; in any normal administration, yes, such a furor would probably result in a resignation, but as we've seen time and again, this is not a normal administration. It doesn't play by the same rules. Most specifically, it doesn't seem to respond to shame. Shame depends, more or less, on a broad agreement about right and wrong, and on the idea that transgressing norms of appropriate behavior should have some consequence, even if the consequence doesn't, strictly speaking, come in the form of a legal penalty. President Bush has repeatedly demonstrated that he simply doesn't have a conventional understanding of right and wrong; thus, it's really, really hard to shame him or his administration into doing something.

Now, his call of support to Gonzales may just be a "vote of confidence" of the sort received by coaches who are about to be fired. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if he stands by the AG.

--Robert Farley

ASK THE REPUBLICANS. So now John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton have all been asked, with varying results, whether they agree with Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace’s assertion that homosexuality is “immoral.” Much ink has been spilled on their answers. But I haven’t seen that the leading Republican candidates for president have been asked the question, and I’d be interested to hear the results.

Mitt Romney would probably give a full-throated “You betcha!” -- fervor of the converted, you know. McCain, I’m guessing, would hem and haw in a pathetic and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to signal to the conservatives that he’s on their team without sounding intolerant. But what about Rudy? The guy who dresses up in drag, has plenty of gay friends, and used to march in the annual gay pride parade in New York? He’s obviously not going to say homosexuality is immoral. But if he dodges, it ought to be just as big news as it was for Hillary.

This is hardly the only uncomfortable question the Republican candidates are likely to face. I’m waiting for the day when someone stands up at one of his town meetings and asks John McCain if he is born again. For McCain -- an Episcopalian -- the answer is “no,” but in a Republican primary, that’s the wrong answer.

But back to the immorality question, the interesting dynamic here is that Democrats generally believe, correctly or not, that their candidates are all perfectly fine with homosexuality, but are too politically cautious to say so (with the exception of Edwards, who gave the right answer the first time he was asked). Republicans, on the other hand, probably aren’t quite sure what their candidates actually believe. So why doesn’t somebody ask them?

UPDATE: Ah, see the first comment for some answers.

--Paul Waldman

MCCAIN'S WOES. It's one thing to say conservatives are supporting Giuliani out of ignorance, but his lead among moderates looks like real trouble for McCain. The calculus for a McCain candidacy was always that he could stack his natural dominance among moderates and independents atop a renewed conservative constituency after spending a few years appealing to the base. In reality, not only has McCain's conservative support failed to manifest, but his lead among moderates has disintegrated. And they're not likely to leave Giuliani when the press exposes him as...more of a moderate. And conservatives aren't likely to run to McCain. If they become disillusioned, they'll go to a dark horse, or a new entrant, like Fred Thompson. So I really don't know where McCain goes from here.

--Ezra Klein

RUSSIA LOWERS THE BOOM. This is very good news; Russia is taking a hard line on Iranian uranium enrichment. Combine this with evident increasing popular and elite disenchantment with Ahmadinejad, and I'm almost starting to get optimistic that Iran can be convinced not to develop a nuclear capability. A really, really good move right now would be a signal from the United States that we're willing to engage in some talks; such would alleviate Iran's fears and almost certainly strengthen moderate elements in the country. Of course, we know how likely that is to happen...

--Robert Farley

JUST POSTED ONLINE: IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE. Matt throws cold water on progressives' hopes and dreams.

--The Editors

FOG OF THE WAR ON UNIONS. Neo-liberals, neo-cons, con-cons, and con men would have us all believe that unions exist to protect the incompetent and reward them with undeservedly exhorbitant levels of compensation. Even if unions did functionally fulfill such a purpose -- which, in the case of most unionized workers, they do not -- I can nonetheless assure you that opposition to labor unions from the likes of this administration has little to do with such arguments. Brothers Scott and Matthew have weighed in on this topic, but I think it's important enough to warrant a regular flogging. This is not really about compensation or competence; it's about transparency. Knock the unions out of the public sector, and government becomes nearly opaque, all the better for the looting of public coffers by contractors, and promoting all manner of cronyism and nepotism, not to mention retributionism (which is, I admit, a made-up word for whose use my unionized grade-school teachers would have sternly rebuked me). Without union protection, government whistleblowers don't stand a chance, regardless of any paper assurances. I have no reason to believe that's not equally true at the local level in the public schools as it is in the federal government, where I got my labor education.

For four years, I worked for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the union that just won bargaining rights for the airport screeners of the Transporation Security Administration (TSA), in a bill that the president has threatened to veto. After hearing directly from screeners about the many abuses to which many were subjected -- extreme levels of mandatory overtime, delayed paychecks, bait-and-switch hiring deals, lack of training, lack of such basic equipment as protective gloves (the types and degrees of abuses varied from airport to airport) -- it became clear to me that the Bush administration barred the screeners from representation simply so it could run the TSA -- with your money -- any damn way it pleased, thank you very much. And if that meant a $600 millon cost overrun on its contract with NCS Pearson (now Pearson Government Solutions) -- an overrun that allowed TSA recruiters a working holiday at a luxury resort in Telluride, so be it. But TSA is the agency charged with keeping you and me safe from airborne terrorists, and they have the power to keep you from flying or seeing to it that you are detained by the authorities. Imagine what unchecked power in the hands of an airport's federal security director could mean.

When I learned of the firings of the eight U.S attorneys for which Alberto Gonzales so famously twitches today, I suddenly recalled one of the Bush administration's earliest union-bashing exercises, when the president revoked the union rights of thousands of Justice Department employees who were represented by AFGE and several other unions. And it wasn't just the fact that they yanked those rights; it was the manner in which it was done -- on the very day the U.S. attorneys were to present their case to the Federal Labor Relations Authority. Brian Friel of National Journal did an excellent piece for GovExec.com about the administration's attempt to purge the unions:

At the hearing, lawyers at the U.S. Attorney's Office in South Florida had planned to argue that they should be allowed to unionize despite the Justice Department's objections. The lawyers didn't get to make their case because the order, citing national security, banned unions at all U.S. attorneys offices, as well as at the Justice Department's Criminal Division, the U.S. National Central Bureau of Interpol, the National Drug Intelligence Center and the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. Several hundred U.S. attorneys office and criminal division employees...found themselves without union representation - and with no recourse, since presidential orders barring unions cannot be appealed.

This is all of a piece with that little Patriot Act provision that allows the president to exempt his appointment of replacement attorneys from Senate confirmation. It's damn near perfect.

--Adele M. Stan

HILLARY'S JUST NOT A MAC. Wondering about the HRC-Mac ad mashup, Mike writes, "How sure are we that this 1984-Hillary ad was made by an Obama "supporter"? Because when I saw it, my immediate reaction was that it was made by a winger. It's conservatives who have this Orwellian view of HRC -- they think she wants the state to control everything, she wants to take away your babies so they can be raised in state orphanages where the party line will be piped through the sound system, and so forth."

I see where he's coming from, but no. To understand the ad, you have to understand...the ad. The Stalinist imagery isn't the point. The conformity is. The mute, dark colors, the stifling dress, the joyless shuffe through the workday, the stultifying exhortations on the loudspeaker. The idea of the ad was that the Mac detonates all that. Computers don't have to be an element of a dreary, dystopic work realm. They can be exciting, fun, personal, ecstatic. They can support color and icons and design and idiosyncracy. They can help us transcend the deadening effects of wage slavery, rather than acting as a tool of the managerial oppressors. This spirit, stemming from the very first Mac ad, is laced through the computer's history. Apple has never made much headway in the corporate market. They've relied, instead, on designers, artists, students, writers, and others outside the office park. When Steve Jobs came back to lead the company's ongoing resurgence, he made the electric blue iMac, began building his laptops in sliver-brushed titanium, and even, for a period, offered five different colors of computer.

That's the backdrop for this ad. Or, more precisely, what the original ad was the backdrop for. And here, Hillary Clinton is the PC. She is the colorless, corporatized candidate, mouthing uninspiring platitudes, boring us with politics-as-usual. If a conservative had wanted to tag her on authoritarian grounds, the quotes chosen wouldn't have been banalities, they would have been gaffes and overreaches, ominous statements and nanny state declarations. Instead, they just placed her in the decades-old Mac-PC culture clash. They could have easily -- conceptually, I mean, not technically -- put her in this ad as the John Hodgeman character. And, frankly, the ad would actually work much better with her and Obama, rather than Hodgeman and the indie dude.

--Ezra Klein

HOT OFF THE PRESSES: THE APRIL PRINT ISSUE. The latest print issue of the Prospect has just come out; be sure to take a look. Our cover story by Robert Kuttner, "Friendly Takeover," concerns the influence and outlook of banker and Democratic power broker Robert Rubin.

Formerly co-chairman of America's top investment bank, Goldman Sachs, Rubin now chairs the executive committee of the country's leading commercial bank, Citigroup. In between, he served as head of Bill Clinton's National Economic Council, then as treasury secretary, and he continues to be the party's preeminent economic guru. Other men have stood at the pinnacle of Wall Street. No one else has simultaneously been at the pinnacle of the Democratic Party…

Rubin's rise is not just personal but structural. It reflects, and reinforces, the increasing influence of finance on the American economy and polity, through both deregulated financial markets and campaign money.

Rubin's extraordinary power reflects the synergy and networking of his multiple roles -- as fund-raiser, gatekeeper, banker, certifier of fiscal soundness, and as the man reputedly responsible for the boom of the 1990s. Rubinomics, of which more shortly, is credited with balancing the budget, broadening prosperity, and redeeming the Democrats as fiscal stewards.

Rubin enjoys unparalleled reach into the overlapping worlds of corporate and Wall Street boardrooms, nonprofits, party organs, and senior Democratic politicians. The leading center-left Democratic-oriented think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP), has Sperling as a senior fellow in economics. Despite bolder initiatives on health insurance and other issues, and some staffers to Sperling's left, CAP's core view of budget balance, regulation, and trade, are close to Rubin's. The Hamilton Project, founded by Rubin and based at the Brookings Institution, promotes free capital movements, fiscal balance, and small gestures toward greater equality. In April, Rubin will serve as honorary co-chair of the 25th anniversary gala of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the most respected liberal think tank on fiscal issues. Rubin also serves as vice chair of the Council on Foreign Relations.

It was Rubin who promoted his protégé Larry Summers for president of Harvard, certified Summers' supposed new maturity, and resisted Summers' ouster. Rubin is one of only seven members of the Harvard Corporation, yet characteristically, when the Summers presidency exploded, little mud splattered on Rubin. And although he no longer raises large sums for political candidates himself, Rubin remains very close to others in the Wall Street Democratic money machine, and to its party conduits, particularly Senator Chuck Schumer, who heads the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and Representative Rahm Emanuel, Schumer's House counterpart in the 2006 campaign.

When the Democrats took back the House in 2006, incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi advised the new Democratic caucus that its first two briefings would include one on defense, with three experts of differing views. On the economy, Robert Rubin would be appearing, solo.

Also featured in this issue:

• An argument by Barry Lynn about how the modern structure and functioning of the global economy have eluded the understanding of mainstream economists;
  
• A debate among three Prospect writers over the merits of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential candidate. Garance Franke-Ruta makes the Case For; Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias co-write the Case Against;
  
• A major essay by Paul Starr on why liberalism works, and has over centuries;
  
• A critique of tax credits as "freakopolitics" by Mark Schmitt; and
  
• Stephen Holmes's review essay on Islam in Europe.

The rest of the issue, however, can only be read by subscribers. Are you, Tapped reader, not a subscriber? You should be. It's damned cheap -- and, well, TAP rocks.

--The Editors

INFORMED SPECULATION. Since Mike Tomasky raised the question of the origins of the Hillary 1984 internet ad, which ends with the url for the Obama campaign, BarackObama.com, I thought I'd ask around in pro-Obama technologist circles and see what people had to say. Adam Conner, a blogger with RunObama.com, pointed the finger to Hollywood. "I can't imagine any campaign ever being brave enough to officially authorize it or any political media firm with the skills to create it," he said, when contacted by instant messenger via Facebook. His best guess: that it came from "someone with previous high-tech editing skills, maybe hollywood?... they would've had to get a high quality copy of the original ad too i would imagine." The original ad, of course, is this 1984 Superbowl ad for Apple, which heralded the release of the MacIntosh computer on Jan. 24, 1984. That ad was directed by Ridley Scott (who, conspiracy mavens will note, more recently did the CGI-intensive Gladiator for Dreamworks SKG, which was co-founded by Obama donor David Geffen).

Another technology expert, however, pointed out that the ad into which Hillary's face has been inserted is not the original 1984 ad, but this 2004 remake, in which the runner who throws the sledge-hammer is wearing an iPod. That makes the question of getting access to a high-resolution clip of the 1984 ad moot, since the 2004 ad has been in digital circulation since then. The new modifications made to the ad could have been done by a whiz running Final Cut Pro on an Apple.

The Obama campaign, for its part, has denied having anything to do with the video.

One thing that makes me think this was not a G.O.P. hit is the viral flow pattern. I first saw the ad on MyDD, right before it jumped to Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo, on March 5. Those are pro-Democratic sites, and that's the same day other Democratic political technologists started getting the ad e-mailed to them. I asked Josh via instant messenger where he got the link from, and he says a friend of his who knew the ad's creators sent it to him and that "the person assured me the creators were not tied to a campaign or a political org" and that "i took it as a given that they were dems [given who was doing the iming] and that they liked obama and that that was the point of their creating the video." And there you have it. The most likely explanation is the most obvious one: The ad is the product of Democrats who are frustrated with the Clinton campaign, and like Obama.

UPDATE: The original poster of the video on YoutTube appears to be someone calling him or herself ParkRidge47, aged 59. Park Ridge is both a town in New Jersey and -- this can't just be a coincidence, right? -- the suburb of Chicago where Hillary Clinton, also aged 59, was raised.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK ABOUT DESTROYING THE UNIO... I MEAN, THE CHILDREN? Kevin Drum has an excellent rejoinder to Megan McArdle's offer to support any and all liberal remedies, including "double spending per student" (with, presumably, commensurate tax increases I'm sure McArdle and her conservertarian friends will enthusiastically support!) if liberals will agree to bust teacher's unions. As Kevin says, particularly given the logical problems (where, exactly, is this pool of brilliant teachers willing to teach in badly-performing public schools for non-union wages and with no employment protections going to come from?) and lack of empirical evidence that unionization has a significant effect on educational outcomes, it once again gives away the neoliberal show. Even given conflicts between their purported fiscal principles and their a priori desire to crush unions, they'll pick the latter.

Moreover, there's also the problem of how disconnected this is from actual politics. As Matt says, "were Megan's deal wherein liberals get to get literally everything we want on education policy as long as she gets to bust the unions actually on the table, I'd take it. The reason liberals don't take that deal is it isn't actually on the table." And it's even worse than that, of course; once unions were busted, the political power of the kind of progressives who could get the kind of tax and funding increases to poor schools that McArdle is talking about would essentially vanish. Which is why, of course, it makes sense for conservatives to use school reform as a stalking horse for busting unions -- once you achieve the latter, the chances of enacting other progressive legislation becomes virtually nil. Politicians don't create public policy in a vacuum; they do things because there are countervailing pressures. Unions are still the most important source of external pressure progressives have.

--Scott Lemieux

BUSH: REAGAN REDUX. In today's New York Times, Paul Krugman writes:

As the Bush administration sinks deeper into its multiple quagmires, the personality cult the G.O.P. once built around President Bush has given way to nostalgia for the good old days. The current cover of Time magazine shows a weeping Ronald Reagan, and declares that Republicans “need to reclaim the Reagan legacy.”

But Republicans shouldn’t cry for Ronald Reagan; the truth is, he never left them. There’s no need to reclaim the Reagan legacy: Mr. Bush is what Mr. Reagan would have been given the opportunity.

In 1993 Jonathan Cohn -- the author, by the way, of a terrific new book on our dysfunctional health care system -- published an article in The American Prospect describing the dire state of the federal government. Changing just a few words in that article makes it read as if it were written in 2007.

--Sam Rosenfeld

ON WILL. Over the weekend, The New York Times published a story comparing the Vietnam experiences of John McCain and Chuck Hagel, purporting to analyze the connections between those experiences and their positions on Iraq today. The story did a reasonably good job making the connection with regard to Hagel:

Mr. Hagel has described seeing a sniper take off the top of the head of a young captain crouching near him in a cemetery. A mine sheared off a fellow soldier at the hips. The execution of the war was baffling. “I saw strange things, as all our guys did,” Mr. Hagel said. “We would take a village, inflict casualties, hold it for a day or two. Then orders come down to get out. You wondered: What was the point?”

A number of bloggers have commented on the Green Lantern Theory of Iraq, which essentially says that all that is necessary to win is Will. This seems to be McCain’s theory. We just have to be strong and resolute, never give up, and things will work out in the end.

Something like this theory is probably what saved John McCain’s life and allowed him to endure unspeakable torture as a prisoner of war. His Vietnam was not complicated. He didn’t really have to worry about whether a particular operation was a good idea or accomplished its goals, or whether hearts and minds were being won, or whether the way the war was being carried out would be likely to succeed in the end. What he had to do was endure his suffering. If he was strong and resolute, he could survive. Each day no doubt required a Herculean application of will. And in the end, it worked: he did survive, and to all appearances, did so with a damaged body but a spirit largely intact, unlike many people who have endured similar circumstances.

The things that got McCain through that awful five and a half years -- will, strength, perseverance, a refusal to give in -- are the things he now says will bring “victory” in Iraq. Now to be fair, he’s hardly the only one saying these things, and most of those echoing that argument never had to endure anything worse than a bad hangover during Vietnam. But is it any wonder that McCain believes what he does?

--Paul Waldman

DISUNITY '08. Looks like Rudolph Giuliani is not the only Republican New York City mayor with presidential aspirations to, ah, have some issues with gun owners. The Associated Press reports:

MIDLOTHIAN, Va. (AP) -- Amid the Confederate flags, anti-Yankee bumper stickers and Civil War relics on display at Bob Moates Sport Shop, a counterattack against the North is under way.

''Ask about the Bloomberg Gun GiveAway'' reads a sign taped to the gun shop's register, beckoning customers to enter the drawing named for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose federal lawsuits against gun dealers in five states have drawn the wrath of Virginia's gun enthusiasts.

Bloomberg says the dealers holding the contest are sick. The dealers call Bloomberg names that aren't fit to print.

''The truth is, if Bloomberg hadn't picked on Virginia, we wouldn't have gotten involved. But he made the mistake of stepping into Virginia with this,'' said Philip Van Cleave, president of the pro-gun Virginia Citizens Defense League and mastermind of the giveaway, which has boosted business for the two participating store owners....

The contest has only further agitated Bloomberg, who has made gun control a top priority in his second term.

''These are sick people,'' Bloomberg said in January at the Mayors Against Illegal Guns summit in Washington. ''And if they think that this is funny, I don't think that the parents or the spouses or the children of those that get killed with illegal guns would find that very entertaining.''

Dave Hancock, who has worked at Bob Moates Sport Shop for 25 years, said of the mayor: ''I think he's an idiot.''

--Garance Franke-Ruta

I'VE GOT A THEORY. I'm traveling and haven't been doing my normal quotient of blog reading, so maybe others have said this. But: How sure are we that this 1984-Hillary ad was made by an Obama "supporter"? Because when I saw it, my immediate reaction was that it was made by a winger. It's conservatives who have this Orwellian view of HRC -- they think she wants the state to control everything, she wants to take away your babies so they can be raised in state orphanages where the party line will be piped through the sound system, and so forth.

Think of the mental connections the person who did this ad needed to make. He or she needed to be sitting around thinking that a Clinton presidency would take us to Orwell's Oceania. It really strikes me as a conservative's dot-connecting. Plus it follows that, at least in my anecdotal experience, most wingers think Hillary is the Dems' most formidable candidate, so one of their number doing a pro-Obama thing makes sense on that level, too.

--Michael Tomasky

CHOICES, CHOICES. The conservatives suffer from what used to be called a multiple personality disorder (remember The Three Faces of Eve?) when defending the traditional division of labor between men and women. They can't figure out if women staying at home is something our genes force us to do or if it is something the god of the fundamentalists forces us to do or if it is just a thing women choose to do (la donna è mobile).

The Independent Women's Forum (a gals' subsidiary to the extreme right) mostly argues that women choose to focus on their children and therefore choose to have lower earnings and less retirement income one day. Here "choice" is used very much in the way I would use it in deciding whether to have chocolate or vanilla ice cream on my cone on a nice spring day. These women have no societal norms, no disapproving in-laws, no uncooperative bosses, and certainly no regrets. The wider society doesn't matter in these choices at all. Not even the children's father matters, as you can see from the usual graphics accompanying stories about family-work balance: A woman holding a baby and perhaps a telephone.

That's one of Eve's many faces in the conservatives' multiple personality disorder. Then there is the fundamentalist wing which argues that God has intended women to stay at home to be helpmates to the men who are the real family leaders. No choice here, at all, just the unavoidable divine judgment -- even though the Bible never says that women should stay at home. But consistency must be a hobgoblin of only small fundamentalist minds.

The third face of Eve on the right is the Evolutionary Psychology one. The capital letters are to distinguish this popularized version of various prejudices from real evolutionary psychology. The capital letter version believes that women were once primitive cave-wives, cooking the mammoth the valiant hubby caught with his bare teeth, and so it will be, forevermore. In this view of the past women never did any hunting or gathering or small-game hunting or anything much outside the cave.

The problem with all these multiple personalities the conservatives offer as an explanation for traditional sex roles is that if one is shot down another one takes its place. But the most common of them is still the choice-based argument, and the conservatives have managed to sell it as the general explanation to the mainstream media. E.J. Graff has written an excellent article on the so-called opt-out phenomenon among professional women and on its treatment as "choice" along the vanilla-chocolate dimension of ice-cream flavors. She points out the ahistorical aspect of all this writing and its reappearance decade after decade, with the same framing focusing on nothing but the one woman in isolation from the wider society or even her own partner.

--J. Goodrich

CALMING THE WATERS. A rapprochement appears to be in the works between Barack Obama and Al Sharpton, with the former smoothing the latter's ruffled feathers with a short phone call, reports the New York Daily News. Relatedly, the Daily News has also decided to give Obama the rather awesome short-hand headline name of "Bam," as in "Al & Bam phone chat axes feud." I foresee a string of "Biff! Bam! Pow!" online ads, with maybe an occasional "Zowie!" thrown in for good measure. Some guys have all the luck.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE GOODRIDGE BACKLASH? In response to my point that Mickey Kaus's nominal support for gay marriage was empty because he never finds any means of achieving it acceptable (the only meaningful difference between people who are flat-out reactionaries and people who support social change unless it might cause social conflict or affect entrenched interests is that the former are at least honest), a commenter at my other site asks: "There wasn't a massive backlash after the San Francisco and Massachusetts decisions? This didn't mobilize the Republican vote in Ohio and other battleground states, thus costing Democrats the 2004 election?" Although the question is apparently meant to be rhetorical, the short answer is in fact "no."

I'm presenting the long answer in an updated version of a paper I'm presenting at the MWPSA conference next month, and Dan Pinello does a good job of summarizing the arguments in his new book too. To summarize some of the many problems with the countermobilization thesis:

• The state backlash was window dressing. The strongest argument for the Kaus backlash thesis are the 13 state initiatives passed in 2004 which passed following Goodridge and Gavin Newsom's actions. However, the actual cost of these initiatives for the cause of gay rights was trivial. In none of these states did gays and lesbians lose state legal privileges (although in a couple states there was a loss of some private benefits); and as Pinello notes, in 9 of the 13 states the new amendments just mirrored statutory bans on gay marriage that already existed. And since state constitutional amendments are generally no harder to change than a statute, the political cost is nominal. A federal constitutional amendment -- which is almost impossible to change -- would be a different issue, but of course the FMA was pure cynical exploit-the-bigotry-of-the-rubes politics with no chance of actually passing. Gay marriage isn't any less popular now than it was in 2004. In other words, there's no evidence that Goodridge actually made the practical task of achieving gay marriage harder. So, clearly, the decision was a net benefit: they gained in Massachusetts (where pro-gay rights legislators have fared better than opponents of the court's decision, belying claims of a backlash), without actually losing ground anywhere else. As a general matter, I also don't believe there's any significant empirical basis for claims that judicial opinions create uniquely large backlashes.
• The election myth. As Pinello notes, the evidence that gay rights was a decisive factor in the 2004 election is scant-to-nonexistent; once you go beyond eyeballing exit polls and actually do empirical studies of voting behavior, the alleged effects disappears. Moreover, at this point the various strands in the antiliberal obsessions of Kaus and his fellow travelers start to collapse on one another. Kerry in 2004 did historically well given that he was facing a wartime incumbent in a decent economy. Obviously, few people (and Kaus least of all) would claim that this was because Kerry was an incredibly strong candidate. But if a massive anti-gay backlash hurt the Democrats badly, where did the votes go?
• Predicting 9 of the last 2 backlashes. You may recall Kaus, and may other pundits predicting that the decision of courts in New Jersey to require civil unions would cause a major backlash against the Democrats in the 2006 election. You may also recall that this didn't happen even at the level of simple correlation, which will be promptly forgotten the next time the courts issue a similar holding.

--Scott Lemieux

THE BRAVEST THING in a time of lies and cant is still to tell the truth. Read George Bush's statement on the 4th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and then read George Packer in The New Yorker on how "part of our legacy will be thousands of Iraqis who, because they joined the American effort, can no longer live in their own country." Commentators sometimes think it is brave to say something controversial and false, because it represents going out on a limb, or because it may even help counter the propaganda of others. But it is always braver to say something that is true, and that reveals the world as it really is.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

INVESTIGATE, OR GOVERN? If you remember back to the days immediately before and after the Democratic victory in November, the sensible, thoughtful , responsible position was to stroke one's chin and insist that Democrats had a choice: "They can investigate, or they can govern." Of course this was a false choice all along. To do two things at once is why they have committees. Al Gore may not have invented the internet, but senators practically invented multitasking. And you can't govern effectively if you don't understand what your government has been doing for the last six years, so investigations have purposes other than accountability.

Still, even some liberals were right to have trepidations about an over-emphasis on the subpoena power. Investigations can backfire: Whistleblower witnesses can sometimes seem like unappealing cranks, even when they're right. Hostile witnesses can turn themselves into improbable martyrs, like Ollie North. And, let's face it, the occasional lapses into pompousness of some of our great senators and congressman can easily cause a hearing to seem more a showcase for their own self-regard than a serious effort to discover something relevant and true. And an administration desperate and determined to keep the sunlight out can exploit all three factors.

Further, having themselves turned impeachment into an unabashedly political move, the Republicans were prepared to denounce any investigations as simply pretexts for a planned impeachment of the president, to shift the question quickly to the question of whether a charged-up Democratic majority was going to seek to overturn the previous election. The talking points that conflated investigation and impeachment, in order to discredit the former, were in use since at least last May.

So now we have the first test of investigating, rather than governing. How's it working out? Well, the Democrats didn't even have to go digging into the past. All they did was look under the first rock they saw, the first slightly curious thing that happened after the election. And within days, everything came pouring out: A systematic plan to replace well-performing U.S. Attorneys who were not doing the political bidding of the Republican Party with those who would. A panel of outraged witnesses who were the most respectable, responsible bunch of Republican-yet-independent legal professionals you could ever imagine. E-mails that showed -- almost -- the exact chain of politicization of justice through the White House counsel's office, the Office of Political Affairs, through the Attorney General's office. The precise objection raised to Alberto Gonzales' nomination to be attorney general -- that he did not understand the difference between representing the U.S. and representing the interests of George W. Bush -- has been proven beyond doubt, and he will soon be spending more time with his family.

And when the facts speak for themselves, the senators don't become the story.

So score one for investigate. Not every story is going to reveal as much as this one, but many of them will.

-- Mark Schmitt

J-10. Ken Silverstein had a good post on the over-hyping of the J-10 a couple of weeks ago. The J-10 is China's newest fighter aircraft, and while it has some impressive specifications, Ken notes that

the J-10 -- which, according to China, entered service last December -- was in development for decades; and the plane is reported to have serious problems with its engine and other major systems; finally, the electronics systems on the J-10 are downright primitive compared to those of American warplanes.

However, I'm still of two minds about the F-22. I appreciate that it's not especially useful in the current world environment, and that defense dollars could go to much better targets. However, advanced fighter development around the world hasn't stopped; the Russians, Chinese, Indians, and Europeans are all working on the next generation of fighter aircraft. It's true that the U.S. is substantially ahead of its competitors, but there is, after all, some advantage to having a lead. So, I wouldn't quite agree that the F-22 is a boondoggle; it's a misplaced priority, but some attention needs to be paid to advancing fighter aircraft technology...

--Robert Farley

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE SUBPRIME SCANDAL. Robert Kuttner discusses the latest bitter fruit of financial deregulation.

In the past decade, as regulators discarded rules, shady mortgage banking companies, financed by the bluest-chip outfits on Wall Street, calculated that they could make a lot of money offering bait-and-switch mortgages to poor credit risks. Default and foreclosure rates would be greater, but higher profits would more than compensate for the risks. So the subprime mortgage industry, enabled by the big banks, invented amazing gimmicks. These included not just variable-rate mortgages, but mortgages that were initially interest-only, mortgages with introductory teaser rates, mortgages with no down payment. No income verification required! No credit check! Subprime operators targeted people with horrific credit histories and families desperate for housing who could not afford the debt they were taking on. Last year, 60 percent of subprime loans required no meaningful documentation.

Then came the morning-after: As higher payments kicked in, people couldn't meet them. Defaults skyrocketed, to an estimated 13 percent of all such loans. At least 25 subprime lenders have gone out of business. The big dogs on Wall Street, who had invested in the subprime operators, took a big hit, too.

It's not clear where this will end. Many low-income families will lose their homes. Innocent investors will suffer the spillover effects on the stock market, and general mortgage rates may have to go up to compensate for these losses of reckless speculation.

--The Editors

SWIFT BOATER GETS SUNK. Word is that Democrats might sink Swift Boat Veterans For Truth donor Sam Fox's nomination to be ambassador to Belgium. The nomination, of course, has to come before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where John Kerry has been having some fun with his tormentor. Fox gave $50,000 to the Swifters, but is lately trying to claim that he had no idea the money would be used to launch an anti-Kerry smear campaign, which either shows he's an idiot and thus unsuited to be an ambassador or a liar and...thus unsuited to be an ambassador. Generally speaking, when I give someone $50,000, I tend to find out what it's for. Senate Democrats, happily, aren't eager to forgive and forget, and one top aide told The Washington Post that "Democrats may sink [the nomination] to show support for Kerry and teach a moral lesson about the personal destruction wrought by of independent 527 groups such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth." That would appear wise. If rich funders understand there will be actual consequences for filling the coffers of vicious smear artists, maybe they'll be less likely write those $50,000 checks in the future.

--Ezra Klein

IMMIGRATION AND WAGES. The anti-immigration movement makes a lot of hay out of Harvard economist George Borjas's estimate that immigration depresses wages for low-skill workers by 8%. I've always been surprised by how slight that number actually is, and how the the wage concerns of that specific demographic (high school drop-outs) seem relatively ignored by conservatives when they can't be turned against Hispanics, but whatever. Now, though, Bryan Caplan looks at the rest of the Borjas data, and muddles the picture even further:

	Short Run	Long Run
All native workers	-3.4%	0.0%
High school dropouts	-8.2%	-4.8%
High school graduates	-2.2%	+1.2%
Some college	-2.7%	+0.7%
College graduates	-3.9%	-0.5%

So even in a study trumpeted by Mark Krikorian's virulently anti-immigrant "Center for Immigration Studies," the long-term wage impact is...zero. And most of the gains accrue to the middle class. And a long-term impact of zero, of course, obscures the massive gains both to immigrants, their families, and, through remittances, their home countries. Given numbers like that, it almost makes you wonder if the intense focus on shutting down the border is really about wage standards at all...

--Ezra Klein

EXBURBAN DREAMS DEFERRED. Over the past few years, stories of far-flung suburbs decimated by foreclosures have become newspaper staples. With resort-like names such as “Pocono Mountains” (in Pennsylvania, a 5-hour commute from New York City) and “Villages of Avalon” (in Riverside County, Calif., over an hour from downtown L.A.), it turns out that for many young families, these communities really are little more than a fantasy. The American romance with house-owning has long eclipsed concerns about the negative impact exurban lifestyles have on our larger society: more gas guzzling, loss of green space, and ethnic homogeneity, just to name a few. But over the past decade -- in part due to federal policies that boast of increasing minority home-ownership rates, but in practice enrich developers and banks -- mortgage foreclosures and homeowner vacancies have reached record highs. The story is always the same: clever marketing campaigns prey on families in blighted neighborhoods, promising them the American dream and then some. Once the potential buyers are reeled in, developers and lenders offer short-term perks like reduced or even free rent and make outsize promises about the property’s potential value. And when these working class families agree to buy, they are often overcharged, even as they rely on subprime loans, since low credit scores mean they can’t qualify for conventional mortgages.

This L.A. Times article about foreclosures in Perris, Calif. is more of a human interest story than a hard examination of the economic forces at work here, but the story reveals what’s so pernicious about this trend. When financially insecure families purchase a home through an adjustable-rate mortgage, they become more likely to foreclose, not less, as the value of their property increases. When the housing market booms, interest rates go up, shifting the value of the home from the borrower to the lender as monthly mortgage payments increase. Since incomes aren’t growing as quickly as other sectors of the economy, people aren’t able to keep up with their bills. The result is a crippling cycle of debt that prevents families from climbing back onto the real estate ladder.

In the past month, Senate Democrats have held hearings on the deceptive marketing and predatory policies of both mortgage lenders and credit card companies. But protections need to have teeth, meaning regulation of the lending industry, a major campaign financer. Keep your eye on which electeds have the courage to act. Hillary Clinton has proposed “foreclosure timeouts” and a shift of Federal Housing Administration loans from high-income to low-income areas. But the exurban nightmare is about more than just home ownership -- it’s a microcosm of the insecurity and inequality so many Americans are feeling across their lives.

--Dana Goldstein

THE INEVITABILITY OF ANACHRONISM. I wholly endorse Ezra's argument here, and also strongly recommend Sandy Levinson's book (although, as is often the case, his diagnosis is more convincing than his remedies.) Obviously, to defend an institutional feature as irrational and undemocratic as the electoral college (even though it produced a constitutional crisis in the third presidential election after the Constitution's ratification!) merely because the framers designed it is ridiculous. To add another point, the reviewer Ezra cites claims that the Constitution is a "workable document that only got us through a bit under 250 years." The rather obvious problem with this is that the first Constitution failed, as it proved unable to prevent the collapse of the nation into an exceptionally bloody civil war. This is not because the framers were stupid, but because even very smart people aren't clairvoyant. One would think that this would have permanently made a stance of uncritical reverence towards the document untenable, but apparently not.

One other point about constitutionalism: I don't agree with Matt that if we could re-write the 2nd Amendment today it would be significantly less ambiguous. Ambiguity is a crucial constitutional tool, precisely because 1) constitutions have to create political communities among people with fundamentally different views, and
2) the future is unforeseeable, making some play in the joints desirable. A more specific Commerce Clause, for example, would make the Constitution completely unworkable in the 20th century, and among the most obvious constitutional blunders are historically bound clauses that are destined to become almost immediately obsolete (such as the clause in the Seventh Amendment guaranteeing a jury in a civil trial in cases where "value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars.")

--Scott Lemieux

AH YES, A CORDIAL VOICE. I have to admit I no longer watch CNN -- they always seem to be covering something I've already read about online, or else have these skeezy talk shows on -- so I've pretty much missed the Glenn Beck era at the once venerable network. Imagine my surprise then to learn about the reasons he was brought on a year ago. According to Variety, Headline News president Ken Jautz described it thusly:

"Glenn's style is self-deprecating, cordial; he says he'd like to be able to disagree with guests and part as friends. It's conversational, not confrontational."

Ah yes. Calling a U.S. senator a "bitch" on the air. So very cordial.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MISOGYNY VS. HOMOPHOBIA. A (male) friend of mine in the political consulting biz mocked me for writing about the word "bitch" recently, and the way it is used as a slur to keep uppity women down. A lot of young men toss that word around without thinking these days -- as in, so-and-so is a "hot bitch," which is meant as a compliment -- but, as Janna notes, CNN's resident conservative jerk Glenn Beck is using it in the old-fashioned misogynist sense, and to virtually zero public outcry, except for the always observant team at Media Matters:

BECK: I don't want to sound like the old ball-and-chain guy, but Hillary Clinton cannot be elected president because -- am I wrong in feeling, am I the only one in America that feels this way? -- that there's something about her vocal range. There's something about her voice that just drives me -- it's not what she says, it's how she says it. She is like the stereotypical -- excuse the expression, but this is the way to -- she's the stereotypical bitch, you know what I mean? She's that stereotypical, nagging, [unintelligible], you know what I mean? And she doesn't have to be saying -- she could be saying happy things, but after four years, don't you think every man in America will go insane? Is it just me? I mean, I know this is horrible to say, but I mean it not -- I would say this if she were Condi Rice and she sounded like that. Condi Rice doesn't have that grate to her voice. You know what I need to do? I need to talk to a vocal expert, because there is a range in women's voices that experts say is just the chalk, I mean, the fingernails on the blackboard. And I don't know if she's using that range or what it is, but I've heard her in speeches where I can't take it. [...]

BECK: Am I alone? Dan [Andros, producer]? Have you noticed that about her?

ANDROS: Oh my gosh, she could be talking about how she's giving every American a million dollars, and I'm hearing, "Could you take out the garbage now, please?"

When Ann Coulter called heterosexual John Edwards a "faggot," the blogs erupted. But when someone calls the Democratic front-runner, who is female, a "bitch," we get total radio silence. This makes me think my nightmare Democratic scenario may yet come true. Hillary could win the nomination, but be so damaged from a steady stream of misogynist attacks like this -- which the male activists of her party will agree with too much to fight back against -- that she will go down in flames. Bob Somerby is the only prominent blogger who sees that what's happening to Hillary is exactly the same kind of smear-job that happened to Al Gore. But instead of defending her against these misogynistic attacks, just in case she does actually win the nomination, the hordes who defended Edwards' honor say nothing, or smirk private self-satisfied smiles of agreement.

Well, here's a political warning for you: Be careful how you play this one. Women notice this stuff, and if the party's base allows for these kinds of attacks on its sole female presidential candidate, a lot of women will take it as an expression of that party's values and stay home on election day. I mean, why vote for a party that won't stand up for you? And believe you me -- no party that can't stand up for the honor of a woman who has been publicly insulted is going to be judged capable of standing up to terrorists, no matter how masculine its nominee may be. More likely, women will look at Democratic men trying to take advantage of these kind of attacks as undeserving of support, and a Democratic Party unable to stand up to such attacks as a party of wimps.

Hence, the efficacy of this line of attack for conservatives like Beck. It hurts Hillary, but it hurts the men around her, too.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

PLAME'S TESTIMONY. Valerie Plame Wilson made an impressive appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee this morning. The Democrats were clearly trying to put to rest the notion that Plame was not under cover at the CIA when numerous administration officials leaked her identity to reporters in summer 2003. We learned both from Rep. Henry Waxman's relaying of information cleared by the CIA and from Wilson herself that she undertook secret work overseas in the period shortly before her outing. The likes of Republican operative Victoria Toensing, who is set to testify later today, and others have sought to cast doubt on Plame's status in order to question the very possibility of a crime in outing her.

There was one very important factual matter that Plame cleared up. Emphasizing that she was under oath, she explained that she neither authorized, recommended nor suggested her husband for his mission to Niger. She undermined several key claims that we have heard from the right both about her role -- and the role of the Office of the Vice President -- in her husband's mission. On February 12, 2002, one of Plame's subordinates at the Counterproliferation Division (CPD) of the CIA got a ca