THE ABUSE OF PRESIDENTIAL POWER. Today I attended a Center for American Progress event where Fred Schwarz and Aziz Huq (and moderated by Mort Halperin) talked about their new book, Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror. They were inspired by the reports published by the Church Committee following the last great abuse of presidential power by Richard Nixon. They smartly note that presidential power grabs are hardly unprecedented, with some of the greatest offenders including Lincoln and FDR.

What the current administration did was all in secret -- something new to the violation of constitutional powers. Further, not only were the illegal activities secret, the reasons for violating the law were also classified, and the administration intends to keep them classified indefinitely. Today, they note, both the president and the vice president have certainly committed "impeachable offenses," but the path to preventing further abuse of power is somewhat complicated.

Huq proposes the executive branch re-institute checks upon itself, including the Office of Legal Council, making records gathered by the CIA's Inspector General public (to increase the work of people like Glenn Fein), and playing up the strength of whistle-blowers and leaks to the press. When I asked about the constitutional checks already in place, the courts and the House Government Oversight Committee, Huq noted they were important. "There is a "whole continent of information" we don't know about what happened with Syria, Niger, and the like, Huq said. He also noted that the courts are doing something of a poor job of placing firm checks on the executive branch, because although they don't respond to "election results per se," they respond to other intellectual "currents."

The bottom line is that Schwarz and Huq are calling for an increased level of transparency, because while abuse of presidential power is never a good thing, ultimately it is far more dangerous if it's done in secret.

--Kay Steiger

PAGING CHAIRMAN WAXMAN As Josh Marshall notes today, Condoleezza Rice was out propagating falsehood all over the airwaves yesterday to try to make her case for defying a subpoena
from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to testify on the White House's infamous claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa for its nuclear program. And it's no wonder. Rice has never really answered for her own role -- and if George Tenet's new book is to believed, it doesn't look good.

We've known since July 2003 that the CIA, and Tenet personally, intervened quite aggressively to get the uranium claim taken out of Bush's important October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati -- three months before he made the same claim in the SOTU. CIA sent the White House two memos explaining that the intelligence was bad and the claim should be removed from the Cincinnati speech. The memos were addressed to Stephen Hadley, speechwriter Michael Gerson, and either addressed or copied to Rice. Tenet also called Hadley, who was then Rice's deputy, to make sure Bush's didn't make the claim. When this information came out in July 2003, Hadley took responsibility, but claimed he didn't remember what had happened in October 2002. Rice -- who was conveniently traveling the day that Hadley, with Dan Bartlett, finally took responsibility for the 16 words -- mostly escaped scrutiny. She told Gwen Ifill on PBS on July 30, 2003:

What we learned later, and I did not know at the time, and certainly did not know until just before Steve Hadley went out to say what he said last week, was that the director had also sent over to the White House a set of clearance comments that explained why he wanted this out of the speech.

I can tell you, I either didn't see the memo, I don't remember seeing the memo, the fact is it was a set of clearance comments, it was three and a half months before the State of the Union.

Tenet's book has some claims in it that may prove to be inconvenient for Rice. First, he says Andy Card told him on July 22, 2003 that "Hadley, Rice, and the chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, had read the memos when they were received in October." (pp. 472-473)

Second -- and this is a dramatic piece of news from the book -- Tenet says that less than two weeks before the Cincinnati speech, in September 2002, CIA and the NSC had debated whether the President could include the uranium claim in a Rose Garden speech he was planning to make on September 26 after meeting congressional leaders (and just two days after the British released their white paper with the uranium claim). Tenet picks up the story with a draft speech sent over by the White House:

A footnote in the draft, typed in by the White House speechwriters, noted that the NSC and CIA were debating these three sentences. Apparently, we had earlier raised our concerns and were trying to persuade them to drop that segment of the speech. One of my assistants later marked the three sentences for deletion and penned in a note that read:

9-24-02 (8 PM)

Rice proposed simply removing the bracketed text. Jami concurred.

("Jami" is presumably then-senior CIA official Jami Miscik.) If this is accurate -- and it's worth noting that Bush did not end up including the claim in his September 26 remarks -- then it means not only that Rice herself was directly involved in the dispute over the uranium claim in fall 2002 and aware of CIA concerns about it, but also that she proposed taking it out in response to those concerns. If you add to that the claim that Rice herself learned about the CIA's deep and clear concerns about the intelligence underlying the uranium claim in the context of Bush's October 2002 Cincinnati speech, and Card's purported knowledge about it in July 2003, it means both that Rice lied publicly in July 2003 and that it is increasingly hard to believe that Rice was unaware of the CIA's concerns at the time of Bush's State of the Union in January 2003.

Fortunately, Henry Waxman, Chair of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has already invited Tenet to testify before the Committee on May 10; and in addition to the approval of a subpoena for Rice, there are ongoing negotiations, which may also include a subpoena for Andy Card's testimony on related matters. So this business can be clarified. It might help to add Jami Miscik to the list.

Two notes: Tenet's book is frequently vague, euphemistic, and downright misleading, so it is useful to know that there are other witnesses, as well as documents, that can confirm (or disprove) his assertions. But if the account of Bush's September 26 Rose Garden remarks is accurate, it is another instance where the infamous Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report from 2004 is radically incomplete and deeply misleading. (The relevant passages are on p. 51 of the report, and possibly p. 49.)

--Jeff Lomonaco

THE BAD POLLSTER.  I have a feeling that Mark Penn, Senator Clinton's pollster and apparently her de facto campaign manager, is going to start getting some close, and long overdue, scrutiny. The Washington Post picks up where The American Prospect left off, with a well-written article by Anne Kornblut, which really captures the point that Penn is more than an individual advisor; he represents a complete style of politics:

If Clinton seems cautious, it may be because Penn has made caution a science, repeatedly testing issues to determine which ones are safe and widely agreed upon (he was part of the team that encouraged Clinton's husband to run on the issue of school uniforms in 1996).

If Clinton sounds middle-of-the-road, it may be because Penn is a longtime pollster for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council whose clients have included Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.).

If Clinton resembles a Washington insider with close ties to the party's biggest donors, it may be because her lead strategist is a wealthy chief executive who heads a giant public relations firm, where he personally hones Microsoft's image in Washington.

And if some opponents see Clinton as arrogant, her campaign a coronation rather than a grass-roots movement, it may be because of the numbers wizard guiding her campaign and the PowerPoint presentations he likes to give on the inevitability of his candidate.

In one respect I think the article largely gives Penn a pass -- it presumes he's a good pollster: "undisputed brilliance," "clear opinions, with data to back them up," "likes to swim in as much hard information as possible." But we know that his trademark is not "hard information," but loose, malleable, and unverifiable voter categories that support his unchanging and narrow theory of politics: soccer moms, office-park dads, etc. The examples Kornblut uses show nothing to back up the undisputed brilliance. His argument for Clinton's electability apparently comes down to the claim that "she's already winning" in national polls and in key states. If national polls at this stage, putting people with universal name recognition against people without, had any relevance, the campaign he'd be working on this cycle would be President Lieberman's reelection. (Lieberman was in Clinton's position at this stage in the 2004 campaign.) His argument for the "inevitability" of Clinton's nomination "failed to anticipate" the rise of Obama; Ooops! But an argument based on inevitability requires a very high standard of proof, especially for an individual like Clinton who is not wholly loved within the Democratic Party. Any responsible strategist would have to anticipate that some kind of credible alternative would have emerged.

Kornblut acknowledges that, "Some critics say he is prone to skewing his interpretations to portray clients, and specifically the Clintons, in the best light," but goes on to say, "but Penn's work is reliable enough that his business has exploded over the decades," which serves as the transition into the section on his corporate work and Burson-Marsteller.

And this, I think, gets to one of the big issues with Penn's dual role. Sure there are conflicts of interest, but life is full of conflicts of interest. Sure, you can't do two jobs at once, but everyone in Washington has at least two jobs. What concerns me is that Penn uses the corporate work to give himself credibility for political work. We assume that he must be a good pollster because businesses pay for his services. And they must know what they're doing, right? His work is "reliable enough that his business has exploded..." Democrats and liberals can be particularly vulnerable to this. Because we're often more detached from business, we tend to have an exalted view of just how hard-nosed and market-wise corporations really are, and when the snake-oil salesmen come around, we're putty in their hands. But here's the news: big business can waste money too. Corporations and executives can be naive and gullible. They too can waste millions on silly polling that tells them what they want to hear. And I think in the case of Mark Penn, I think they do.

-- Mark Schmitt

IT'S ANNOYING ABORTION CONTRARIAN DAY! Will Saletan has many of the annoying tics of the blue-state male abortion "centrists" who dominate editorial discourse on the topic, such as viewing national elections as referenda on abortion, and originating policies that prominent pro-choicers have been advocating for decades. His latest entry into the field (via A Bird and A Bottle, which has excellent commentary) returns to one of his favorite tactics, trying to infer unassailable moral premises from scientific facts (or, in some cases, "facts") that don't in fact lead to any particular moral conclusion. Today, he defends state-coerced ultrasounds for irrational, capricious women who otherwise just don't know that abortion is a serious decision:

Pro-lifers are often caricatured as stupid creationists who just want to put women back in their place. Science and free inquiry are supposed to help them get over their "love affair with the fetus." But science hasn't cooperated. Ultrasound has exposed the life in the womb to those of us who didn't want to see what abortion kills. The fetus is squirming, and so are we.

Um, what do you mean "we," contrarian pundit? On the first point about putting women back in their place, don't take my word for it; take the Supreme Court's, and then ask why the ways in which abortion regulations are actually written and enforced are inconsistent with protecting fetal life but perfectly consistent with regulating female sexuality. As for the second point, "science" does nothing to resolve the moral and political debate here. Most women are, I think, aware that fetuses are alive. As for whether this fact means that fetal life should trump a woman's reproductive freedom, this is neither here nor there. After all, "pro-lifers" have access to the same ultrasound data and are certainly aware that fetuses are alive, and yet most of them aren't willing to act as if abortion is taking a human life. To top it off, Saletan argues that if we force women to obtain ultrasounds we can "trust" women to be rational, which seems to mean "agreeing with William Saletan:"

Now the Supreme Court has echoed that equivocation, ruling that one way to "inform" women of the evil of partial-birth abortion is to criminalize it. But the clash between ultrasound and the partial-birth ban is ultimately a choice between information and prohibition. To trust the ultrasound, you have to trust the woman.

Or, you know, we could "trust" the woman by allowing her to make reproductive choices based on the information she sees fit to use, some of whom might actually reach different conclusions than Sage Saletan. Anyway, my question: I assume in his next column, Saletan will argue that men should have to watch explicit videos of liver transplants before they're allowed to obtain one? After all, they're totally gross to watch, which must mean they're immoral! I would trust that men will do the right thing and not obtain them once given the appropriate guidance from the state.

--Scott Lemieux

HONESTY IN ADMISSIONS: Though I admire Alan Wolfe, I have to disagree with his most recent post on Open University. Wolfe argues that Marilee Jones, the admissions director at MIT who was recently exposed for having lied on her resume about having attained a college degree when she first applied for a job there, should not have had to resign. Wolfe argues, "We are as a country too much given to the absurd idea of zero tolerance." While I'm sympathetic to Wolfe's sentiment that a simple apology for youthful mistakes ought to often suffice in public life, I think the nature of Jones' lie, and her job, make her actions inexcusable.

Jones is, after all, in the business of assessing the applications of ambitious people that often contain unverified claims of extra-curricular activities and so forth. The temptation to lie on your college applications is considerable, and so for a college to allow its admissions director to do so would send the message that it is OK for applicants to do the same. Moreover, she did not lie about, say, an unrelated drug possession arrest. She lied about her academic credentials. At an academic institution that strikes me as a pretty severe violation.

Elite institutions like MIT set a tone among high school seniors that applying to college is a stressful competition among kids with stellar resumes. By letting Jones go I think MIT is sending the right message, that character matters more than your supposed credentials.

--Ben Adler

PERSONAL POLITICS. It's not a novel suggestion that we combat abortion restrictions by sharing real women's (and some men's) stories about why they made the choices they did. This is something the pro-choice movement has done since its inception, starting with speak-outs about back-alley abortions in the pre-Roe era. In the past few years alone, there have been several books, at least two documentary films ("Speak Out: I Had an Abortion" and "The Abortion Diaries"), and an entire monthly magazine devoted to sharing women's personal experiences. Ms. magazine recently published the names of thousands of women who declared, "We Had Abortions." And stories of the "it happened to me, it could happen to you" variety appear in the mainstream women's magazines fairly regularly. Planned Parenthood collects stories of women who have undergone abortions -- and tries to publicize them whenever things like Gonzales v. Carhart make the news. And lest you think that only women have spoken out, read this very moving post by a man who had to make a particularly difficult decision about a D&X abortion because his wife was incapacitated.

Point is, pro-choice advocates work very, very hard to connect personal stories with political actions. But these stories just can't seem to crack the mainstream media or "thought-leader" magazines. Broad, big-picture analyses of how abortion restrictions will affect future court cases and legislation and elections are vastly more common than first-person essays like this one that appeared in Newsweek last week. There are many women -- more than you may think -- who are willing to tell their stories. We just need journalists and pundits who are willing to seek out those stories and consider them when they discuss the abortion debate. The reason the Witteses and Rosens of the media are so appalling is that they NEVER stop to consider the individual women who are actually affected by abortion restrictions.

And other than just continuing to collect and document women's abortion experiences, the pro-choice movement needs to be better about using ownership language -- "YOUR right to choose" rather than "THE right to choose." Realistically, there are many people who are never going to accept that they may one day need to exercise this right. (Case in point: this fascinating collection of anecdotes from abortion providers about performing the procedure on women who are politically opposed to abortion.) But many voters -- women especially, I'd argue -- can and will be swayed by personal stories.

--Ann Friedman

MUST READ OF THE DAY. In the latest issue of The Washington Monthly (via Kevin Drum), Phillip Longman provides a brilliant critique of the health-coverage-centric worldview that the also talented Jonathan Cohn lays out in his new book, Sick. Though Longman barely reviews Cohn's book, he's written what is easily one of the most important health care reform essays I've ever come across, and actually made me want to read Cohn's book, as well as his own just-released volume, Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours -- and I've tended to avoid health care books in recent years. Just read the whole thing -- it's fantastic. Finally, someone is advocating for health care reforms that are about actually improving the health of Americans and their experience of medicine (for a typical horror story from the insured, read this Michael Lewis piece on trying to defend his infant son from the people sent to care for him), instead of just their ability to pay for care.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: SURVIVAL PLAN. Maggie Mahar discusses the proposals of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPac) to rein in the program's ballooning costs. As Mahar argues, the measures aren't merely necessary for Medicare's survival -- they will be crucial components of any national health-care reform plan.

--The Editors

THE EMERGING ANTI-OBAMA INDUSTRY. Over at my other blog, I noticed that Human Events magazine is flacking a massive "expose" on Barack Obama. In the past month, whenever I've written about Obama on my site, which has a Google AdSense account, a link to HumanEvents.com promising "Barack Obama Exposed Check out this FREE special report revealing the real Barack Obama!" appears at the top of the Google Ad strip.

This means that Human Events has bought the adword "Obama" or "Barack Obama," and is paying more for it than others currently purchasing the same adword (that's how a company winds up with a Google Ad higher on the ad strip, rather than ones further down the screen). This can get very expensive, very quickly, raising questions about who is paying for that anti-Obama message to be placed all over the internet -- people Google "Obama" quite frequently these days -- and whether the magazine is using it as a fundraising device.

If you click the link provided, it takes you to a splash page demanding your e-mail address before Human Events will send the "expose" on Obama. That's a classic e-mail harvesting gambit, and e-mails harvested this way can be added to others and sold to, for example, political outfits looking to eventually go after Obama, as well as other conservative groups. Targeted e-mail lists are quite lucrative properties.

The New York Daily News signed up for the report in March, and posted the 32-page "exposé", authored by such journalistic greats as Michelle Malkin, Bill O'Reilly, and Ben Shapiro, on its own site. It's not that interesting and does little to expose Obama, as opposed to the thinking of G.O.P. writers grappling with his candidacy. But the prevalence of the ad all over the internet this early in the cycle suggests that Obama may go on to experience Hillary Clinton-like levels of negative attention from the VRWC -- if people on the right find that they can fundraise or get new readers by going after him.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

LIBERALISM VERSUS POPULISM. In yesterday's New York Times, Michael Lind had a generous and thoughtful review of Freedom’s Power. He takes me to task, however, on one issue in particular: my treatment of the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century. He is entirely right that in discussing the formative influences on modern liberalism, I give the Populists little attention and regard the Progressives of the early twentieth century as more crucial.

Here is what I just wrote in an email in response to a reader who agrees with Lind’s review and thinks I should be more sympathetic to populism:

Many people use the term “populist” these days as a synonym for popular, egalitarian, and democratic. The liberalism I favor is all of those things. But as a distinctive movement in the U.S. and elsewhere, populism has other characteristics that are not so attractive -- a penchant for ill-will toward minorities and immigrants and a suspicious, resentful, and sometimes downright paranoid view of education, culture, and finance. It is entirely possible, for example, to favor progressive taxation and oppose special privileges for corporations without adopting a populist worldview. That is why, in my mind, populism is not part of the history of liberalism. It was one of the alternatives liberalism had to overcome. And in much of the world, it still is. You can see this especially clearly in Latin America and other developing regions where populist leaders throw red meat to the crowds and do very little to advance long-term economic growth and social improvement.

It was just about 100 years ago, after the defeat of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, that the original, agrarian Populist movement collapsed and gave way to the more broadly based Progressivism of the early 1900s that permanently altered American government and society. But Populism, despite its short and checkered history, survives in our political vocabulary, and there are a fair number of people who brighten up at the thought of a populist revival. I am, however, not among them.

From the outset, the populist impulse has been to play upon one public emotion above all: anger. That anger has typically been directed at a diffuse enemy at the top -- the monopolies, the interests, or elites of various kinds. The populist mind suspects conspiracies in high places, often in league with foreign influences, and appeals to a kind of insular Americanism that is suspicious of both immigrants and other countries. The grievances that populism taps are no doubt genuine. Its rhetoric and remedies are oversimplified and dangerous.

As of early September, Ralph Nader was doing better, pulling as much as 4 to 5 percent in the polls, which could be enough to tip the election. Nader's populism is the left-wing variety directed at corporate elites; it starts with legitimate criticism of corporate abuses but fails to provide a persuasive understanding of the economy as a whole. Nearly 30 years ago, as one of "Nader's raiders," I worked for Ralph on a study of Vietnam veterans and the Veterans Administration. Those were the days when Nader was a “consumer advocate” and swore that he had no ambitions for elected office, which was a good idea since he certainly didn't have the temper for it. The irony of Nader's presidential campaign is that if it succeeds, it may enable Bush (and his likely nominees to the Supreme Court) to dismantle the very agencies and policies that Nader himself helped to create in the early years of his public career. This would be success only if you count self-cancellation as an achievement.

The third candidate the media have dubbed "populist" is the surprise of the campaign: Al Gore. Gore earned the label by claiming at the Democratic convention to stand for "the people, not the powerful," and criticizing "big tobacco, big oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the HMOs." It was a critical turn for Gore, helping to reassure the base of the party about his Democratic bona fides. Nader reacted indignantly that Gore wasn't really a populist, and of course Gore isn't. He has no general antipathy to business, much less to the establishment.

So was his appeal at the Democratic convention fraudulent? Not at all. On a variety of issues, such as prescription drug benefits for the elderly, a patients' bill of rights, environmental protection, and the regulation of tobacco, Democrats face fierce, heavily financed opposition from business interests. Setting aside "big oil" (obviously singled out because of the makeup of the Republican ticket), Gore's list underlined a determination to prevail over business opposition on issues that are central to the campaign. In a survey question that quoted Gore's list of specific industries, a Business Week/Harris poll in late August found that Americans agree with the vice president by a margin of 74 percent to 22 percent, but they don't necessarily harbor any deep anger against corporations: 68 percent also agree that American business should be given "most of the credit" for the current prosperity.

The Democrats are not an anticorporate party, but they are more willing than the Republicans to take on business interests to pursue goals that have broad public support. It was important for Gore to make clear that he would do that, not only to consolidate support for November, but also to establish a basis for a mandate afterward if he wins.

As a general approach to politics, populism long ago fizzled. Prosperity today makes an appeal to public anger and suspicion particularly implausible as a winning strategy. But there is still room for a politics that pushes back against corporate influence and seeks to assert the primacy of a public interest. The recent scandal involving Firestone tires is a reminder of the kind of corporate malfeasance that genuinely arouses public support for strong regulation of business. You don't have to be a populist to want political leaders who know when to put business in its place.

--Paul Starr, cross-posted at Freedom's Power

FRIEDMAN VIEW-NIT. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand soldiers. Check out this graphical depiction of Tom Friedman’s many assurances over the past four years that we were entering (another) critical, six-month period.

--Tom Schaller

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. People sometimes like to argue that gender has no impact on how candidates approach women's issues, and that all the Democrats are equally good and knowledgeable on reproductive rights topics. I present to you Bill Richardson, as described by Mark Kleiman, at the California Democratic Party 2007 Convention over the weekend:

Richardson...just doesn't seem very smart, or very thoughtful. Having blundered last week by saying Whizzer White would be his model chief justice, a reporter asks him how he can reconcile that with his strong pro-choice position when White wrote the dissent in Roe v. Wade. Richardson says, "White was in the 60s. Wasn't Roe v. Wade in the 80s?"

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CZAR SEARCH. Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes up an appraisal of national security advisor Stephen Hadley that's also a report on Hadley's continuing, unsuccessful efforts to recruit somebody to be the Iraq war "czar." Yes, the White House is still pursuing this notion. Stolberg's piece -- just like David Sanger's Times article from Saturday about how the Bush administration is now acknowledging (on background) that, lo and behold, the supposedly temporary troop surge will likely not produce much in the way of progress this summer after all and that at any rate there won't be a comprehensive assessment done on its effects until September -- is the kind of offering that reminds me how tough it must be to be a straight-faced newspaper reporter covering the absurd farce that is the administration's Iraq policy this late in the game. How can one still cover this stuff straight, forbidden by standards and convention from conveying any sense of irony or absurdity? These poor reporters are forced to cover this new search as if real progress and change depend on who specifically ends up stepping up to assume the new Dude/Lady Who Will Fix Iraq post.

--Sam Rosenfeld

ABORTION CONTRARIANISM: STILL WRONG. It must be said that Ben Wittes's inevitable defense of Carhart II is somewhat less objectionable than his typical writing on the subject, though it achieves this only by virtue of its incoherence. He labels the rank sexism of Kennedy's opinion "absurd," and even concedes that the decision is "in some respects ... a big win for anti-abortion activists." (Of course, he's now on the record as claiming that Carhart II might have at least some negative impact on a woman's right to choose an abortion, while overturning Roe entirely would have a positive impact. I would try explain this, but I lack the ability to make heads or tails of the High Contrarian logic that is desirable if you want to write about abortion for most of the nation's premiere op-ed pages.) Still, his bottom-line argument that the Court's rejection of a facial claim against Congress' arbitrary regulation of abortion is likely to prove "constructive" requires evading virtually all of the problematic aspects of the opinion:

• It's nice that he calls out the Court for its sexist assumptions, but he then treats Kennedy's assumptions about the deficient decision-making capacities of women as essentially meaningless dicta, when in fact without them the entire case for upholding the statute collapses. Casey identified two state interests that may be advanced through abortion regulations (so long as they do not constitute an "undue burden" on a woman's right to obtain an abortion): the protection of fetal life and the protection of a woman's health. The PBA ban has no connection at all to the former -- the government conceded at oral argument that it would not prevent any abortion from occurring -- and even if one credulously defers to Congress' findings that 2+2=13 at best the procedure is neutral to women's health unless one assumes that women are unable to rationally make this choice for themselves. Kennedy's sexism isn't merely incidental -- it's the meat of his argument, and Wittes certainly doesn't deign to share with us what other connection with a legitimate state interest could make the burden imposed by the state "due." Worse, if one accepts the premise that preventing women from obtaining abortions is an acceptable means of saving them from themselves, it's not clear what abortion regulation Casey could possibly proscribe.

• Wittes' discussion of the theoretical possibility the Court holds out of a successful as-applied challenge also makes little sense. I've discussed the importance of this issue to abortion cases in detail here and here, but Wittes doesn't sufficiently grapple with a couple of important points. First of all, while it's true that denying facial challenges before seeing if a statute has unconstitutional applications makes sense in many areas of the law, it's inappropriate to apply it to abortion cases for an obvious reason: biology prevents the status quo in abortion cases from being frozen legally. Surely, as Ginsburg says in her dissent, Kennedy cannot mean that a doctor waits until she has a woman in her office ready to perform surgery before she can apply for an injunction, but as Wittes acknowledges Kennedy sheds no light at all on what it could mean. If what is needed is evidence that the procedure is necessary in certain cases, this case is as good as any; at least two Circuit courts have already determined that there is. Are doctors supposed to risk legal harassment and/or prosecution by performing the procedure when they determine it's necessary to build a factual case? If not, what abstract evidence is good enough? Wittes also, of course, essentially ignores the immense financial burden on pro-choice litigators of having to prove that individual applications of every abortion regulation are unconstitutional, and the burden that will exist (especially on poor women) in the meantime.

• Moreover, Wittes is asking us to believe that a Court majority whose most moderate member wrote an opinion rife with hostility towards not only abortion but women in general is likely to adjudicate future as-applied challenges in good faith rather than turning them into a Kafkaseque maze in which no challenge is ever quite specific enough. Let's just say that the next time that Wittes is involved in a high-stakes poker game, I hope he gives me a call.

• Finally, the piece ends with his trademark conclusion that the decision "could let some of the air out of the balloon" of the abortion debate. Even leaving aside the question of why a mild attenuation of conflict should be preferred to the just outcome, I remain unable to follow the logic here. Apparently anti-choice groups will be less likely to pursue, and anti-choice legislators less likely to pass, incremental restrictions on the ability of poor women to obtain abortions despite the fact that the Court has signaled that the Casey standard will be almost entirely toothless when evaluating anything short of a ban and that challenging such regulations will be a bewildering, enormously expensive exercise because...look, it's Halley's Comet!

--Scott Lemieux

JUST POSTED ONLINE: HEDGING DISASTER. Robert Kuttner lays out the trouble with hedge funds.

--The Editors

WHAT EDWARDS SHOULD HAVE SAID: I agree with Ezra that Edwards could have responded more aggressively to Giuliani's comments. But rather than personalizing it as Ezra suggests ("we're not going to take counsel on health care and poverty from someone who hasn't even seen fit to include them on his issues page?") I'd make a larger critique. If you go after Giuliani for not having policy specifics it's certainly stronger than some pabulum about "not dividing the country." But the campaign just started. When Giuliani does come out with specifics that critique is going to lose all its reasonance. Instead, Edwards--and all Democrats--should go after any Republican with a larger critique of their party's record. In other words, if I were an Edwards flack I would have said, "we're not going to take counsel on health care and poverty from someone whose party has presided over an increase in the number of Americans living in poverty and without health insurance."

--Ben Adler

BACK TO THE EIGHTIES? Jonathan Martin on the Politico blog quotes a survey which finds that Republicans don't think that George Bush at all resembles Ronald Reagan, the current idol among the conservatives pining for the good old eighties. What a relief! This means that all the Republican presidential contenders can now brush up on the mannerisms and sayings of the Gipper:

So all of the top contenders try to use Reagan for their own unique advantage. To neutralize those issues where he differs with the party base, Rudy cites Reagan's maxim of, "My 80-percent ally is not my 20-percent enemy." Fending off charges of a politically convenient conversion to the right on many of those same issues, Romney oft notes that, ya know, Reagan himself wasn't always a "Reagan conservative." And McCain, still viewed with suspicion by Republican regulars in part because of his willingness to make common cause with Democrats, reminds party stalwarts that even the unapologetic Reagan compromised and worked with liberal Speaker Tip O'Neill to get things done.

It will be interesting to see if this works among the Republican voters, given that the eighties was as long time ago and that there were two Republican presidents named Bush after the "glorious morning-rising-in-America" era.

--J. Goodrich

BORING PRESS RELEASES. C'mon, Edwards campaign:

EDWARDS STATEMENT ON TODAY'S RUDY GIULIANI COMMENTS IN NORTH CAROLINA

Chapel Hill, North Carolina - Senator John Edwards released the following statement about Rudy Giuliani's comments that Republicans are best suited to deal with issues like poverty, health care, and terrorism.

"Rudy Giuliani needs to put an end to his campaign to divide America and concentrate on offering solutions to the big challenges we face. Poverty, health care, the war in Iraq - these are critical issues that deserve serious proposals, not political attacks."

--Ezra Klein

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: HEALTH IN BLACK AND WHITE. This week, The New York Times ran a front-page story on a recent uptick in infant mortality in the South -- particularly among African Americans. The news offered a glimpse of the largely under-appreciated phenomenon of racial and socioeconomic disparities in health. Now, in a lengthy and illuminating interview, Madeline Drexler talks with one of the country's foremost experts on socioeconomic and racial health disparities, Harvard sociologist David Williams. Take a look.

--The Editors

ABORTION AND TEEN MOTHERHOOD. Scott's post below on parental notification laws brings up something that never seems to get said with regard to this issue. We all know that anti-abortion forces want to throw every roadblock and hurdle possible in front of a woman or girl seeking to have an abortion. When they talk about parental notification, they talk about the rights of parents. When progressives talk about why parental notification is bad, we tend to focus on the extreme cases -- a girl is being abused, she was raped by her father, etc. These cases are a good enough reason in and of themselves to oppose parental notification laws, but there's something else that’s said less often than it’s believed, if not by all pro-choice people, then certainly some: If a teenage girl is pregnant she ought to have an abortion.

It’s really as simple as that. Teenage pregnancy is bad, and teenage motherhood is bad, too. Having a child when you’re 16 or 15 or 14 may ruin your life, but even if it doesn’t, it’s going to make most of what comes after dramatically more difficult. Teenage mothers are more likely to drop out of high school, face economic deprivation, and have radically constrained life choices. So it seems that progressives oppose parental consent mostly because it makes those abortions less likely.

You won’t find any elected Democrats saying this, because then they’ll sound “pro-abortion” and not pro-choice. But if a 14-year-old girl gets pregnant and doesn’t want to tell her parents that she’s getting an abortion, I don’t really care if it’s because of some profound family dysfunction, or if it’s just because she’s embarrassed. I just want her to have the abortion so she can get on with her life.

Part of the problem with pro-choice rhetoric is that it sometimes almost sounds as though it accepts the notion that abortions are bad by definition -- the least bad option in many cases, but still bad. And it’s hard to convince people that you’re right if what you’re telling them is that you want women to have the right to make a bad choice. If you do accept that, then it’s a short hop to Justice Kennedy’s newfound position, which is that the government should be able to save women from making a bad choice they’ll regret, since they’re not adult enough to know that they should make the “right” choice.

And one more thing -- as long as we’re passing laws mandating that women who seek abortions have to be lectured about what sluts they are, or have to be shown a sonogram to make them feel guilty, why not pass laws mandating that any woman seeking an abortion has to be given a prescription for birth control pills, and maybe some free samples for the first few months to get her started? Any state legislators out there want to get moving on that?

--Paul Waldman

WWBYD? I'm on-board with Kevin's proposed deal, which dictates that "[d]ebate moderators agree to stop asking moronic questions and presidential candidates agree to actually answer the questions they do ask." Done and done. But I'm adding an addendum: "If a journalist can't think of a better answer, he can't criticize the one a candidate gives." Take Byron York's enormously hackish take on the proceedings. He's all atwitter because the Democrats gave vague answers to Brian Williams when he asked "If, God forbid, a thousand times, while we were gathered here tonight, we learned that two American cities had been hit simultaneously by terrorists, and we further learned beyond the shadow of a doubt it had been the work of al Qaeda, how would you change the U.S. military stance overseas as a result?”

Obama says we'd have to find out if we "have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network." Edwards says "the first thing I would do is be certain I knew who was responsible, and I would act swiftly and strongly to hold them responsible for that.” The problem, according to York, is that Obama's answer "did not involve using the military" and "Edwards offered nothing on how the United States might strike back. "

Well, then it's back to you Mr. York. Enlighten us as to the better answer. Because, as Brian Beutler points out, we're missing some key bits of information for planning military reprisals. Was the al Qaeda cell responsible based out of Cairo, Riyadh, London, or New Jersey? Assumedly, we're not going to flatten Trenton in response. So I'm genuinely curious: what's the correct answer here? Given that we don't know the circumstances of the attack, where it was conducted, whether the perpetrators are still alive, where they're based, or essentially anything besides "America attacked," what immediate changes in the US military posture overseas would York order?

--Ezra Klein

SUNSTEIN ON REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM AND GENDER EQUALITY. Law-blogger Bean points us to this op-ed by Cass Sunstein, who argued that Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent in Carhart II -- which rooted a woman's right to obtain an abortion on the basis that most attempts to interfere with this right violate a woman's equal citizenship -- may well become the Court's majority one day. In the long sweep of history, this is probably right, and certainly this provides a compelling doctrinal basis. (Reva Siegel, a pioneer in equal-protection theory, argues in the recent book What Roe Should Have Said that such an opinion would have been possible for the Court to advance based on the legal materials available in 1973.) A few random comments about Sunstein's argument:

• While I think gender equality is fundamental to a woman's right to choose an abortion, I don't agree with Sunstein's assertion that "[m]uch more than the right to privacy, the ban on sex discrimination is firmly entrenched in constitutional doctrines." [my emphasis] Whether or not one finds it a persuasive reading of the text, the "right to privacy" is perfectly well-entrenched in precedents that have no chance of being overturned reaching back to the 20s, and the doctrine provides a compelling basis for Roe (at the very least, there can be no serious question that choosing an abortion represents a fundamental right; the only question is whether there is a sufficiently compelling state interest to override it.) Moreover, I think that Sunstein creates a false dichotomy here. As the post-1980 jurisprudence of Blackmun, Stevens, and Ginsburg (and, in the case of the husband notification provision, even O'Connor) makes clear, recognition of a woman's equality rights can be, and is, an important part of applying "the right to privacy" (a somewhat misleading name applied to a line of cases that are really about a broader right to reproductive autonomy). As Carhart II makes strikingly clear, asserted state interests in regulating abortion almost always embody reactionary gender mores, so gender equality is always relevant no matter what doctrine is being applied.
• One striking thing about Sunstein's article is what a radical revision it is of the "minimalist" position on Roe he had previously advanced. One implication of the gender equality argument, as Sunstein seems to accept, is that abortion regulations (the 24-hour waiting period is a particularly obvious example) that might be colorable when applying a due process argument are plainly impermissible when applying a gender equality standard. Resting on equal protection also seems likely to have at least as broad an effect on other areas of the law. I certainly approve of all of this, but it's a strange position for someone who had previously argued that the Supreme Court's abortion jurisprudence should rest on the narrowest possible grounds and leave the largest possible space for subsequent legislative regulation to advocate without explanation for the switch.
• I do think that Sunstein deserves credit for acknowledging that "the sex equality argument will not be convincing to committed opponents of the abortion right." I like discussing the finer points of abortion doctrine considerably more than the next person, but it's important to recognize that in terms of the public acceptance of the decision, or subsequent results on the Supreme Court, the weak craftsmanship of Roe is irrelevant. (For one thing, as Carhart II makes depressingly clear, the gender equality argument won't persuade many opponents of abortion because they're against gender equality.) Whether Ginsburg's jurisprudence will secure 5 votes will depend on Presidential and Senate elections, not on it being a more attractive jufiscatory framework.

--Scott Lemieux

SCHOEN'S SONG. Whining about the inadequacy of Democratic consultants isn't exactly cutting edge commentary, but Doug Schoen's op-ed -- which I examine in great detail here -- is remarkable. All the more so because Schoen is no nameless strategist. He was a top Clinton guy, then -- tellingly -- a driving force behind Michael Bloomberg's Republican mayoral candidacy. His partner, Mark Penn, is arguably Hillary Clinton's closest advisor. And yet here he is, writing about how Democrats need to preemptively compromise on health care and embrace bipartisanship, misrepresenting the polls and the facts to make the Democratic position look weaker than it is and the Republicans more moderate than they are. And fine, I get it: Schoen is a consultant first and a pollster second. His role in life is to make his numbers fit his product, which is bipartisanship and incrementalism.

But who is the Republican Doug Schoen? Where's the Republican consultant writing op-eds saying "Look guys, according to the most recent New York Times poll, the public favors the Democrats on health care by 62% to 19%. 90% say the system needs either fundamental changes or wholesale restructuring. 81% say they're dissatisfied with the cost of health care. We've got to get out of the way on this one and get behind something popular." Instead, you've got Schoen, whose ostensible party enjoys a 43% advantage on the issue, advising that "[Americans] want to see healthcare needs and issues addressed in a spirit of partnership, not partisanship" and "[h]ealthcare should not become a partisan issue." Was it not a partisan issue in 1994, when Republicans choked out the Clinton plan and Dole voted against his own compromise bills? Or should it just not be a partisan issue now? And why is it that we've got the advisors of the party with a clear olead on this issue counseling compromise, while the party that's far behind in the polls sees no reason to reach out?

--Ezra Klein

TENET SPEAKS. Former CIA Chief George Tenet's regret-filled new book, At the Center of the Storm, has prompted Chairman Henry Waxman to invite him to testify before the Oversight Committee in two weeks. With all the blame he's been enduring from the Bush administration, he may actually testify, unlike other administration officials.

--Kay Steiger

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: LAW AND REVULSION. Cynthia Gorney, who has done a lot of reporting on the abortion wars and on "partial-birth" abortion in particular, explains that, in order to understand the ramifications of last week's ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart, you have to understand certain details about this specific abortion method. Once Justice Kennedy understood these details, the "ick factor" was enough to make him overturn the legal precedent upholding women's health and autonomy. And with "ick" as the standard, there's no telling what other abortion methods he'd outlaw...

--The Editors

GRAVEL. Thinking about Sam's post yesterday, why is Mike Gravel included in the debates? Dennis Kucinich, at least, is a sitting congressman, and a leading member of an important caucus in the House of Representatives. Mike Gravel was a Senator from Alaska. In the 70s.. And unlike the threat Sharpton posed -- or was assumed to pose -- in 2004, Gravel's exclusion will not lead aging white men to believe the Democratic Party is hostile towards their involvement. So why not take this guy out? He's running a single issue candidacy on a platform that may well be unconstitutional and he takes time that could be used for more serious candidates to disseminate their message. What merits his inclusion?

--Ezra Klein

MORE TERRORISM ON AMERICAN SOIL. A bomb was left at an abortion clinic in Austin. I'm guessing this will go down the same memory hole as the hundreds of packets of anthrax sent to abortion clinics after 9/11. After, as five reactionary lawyers on the Supreme Court have just informed us, you have to be crazy if you want to obtain an abortion anyway, so what's the big deal?

--Scott Lemieux

FAREWELL ANGELINA. Sure, sure, there was a debate on, but my cable news highlight last night was Bill O'Reilly's interview with Jon Voight. I like to keep up on my celebrity politics, but I must confess I hadn't known Voight was a big right-winger.

The difference in O'Reilly's body language and vocal tones in an interview like this is remarkable. The guy's a puppy dog. (He also got out a great closing line: "The downside of free speech -- and that's what it's all about.")

--Sam Rosenfeld

DEBATE IMPRESSIONS OPEN THREAD. Was watching a sneak peak of next week's Entourage. What'd I miss?

--Ezra Klein

STRAW DOGS. During the Dem debate, I think it was obvious, by the way all the other candidates repeatedly jumped at the chance to change whatever the subject was at hand and readdress remarks about terrorism and the use of force made by Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, that they considered those two candidates to be invaluable tools for "see, we're not like that" differentiation. Everyone could make the easy points about being against this war, not all wars always, reiterating the seriousness of the threat of transnational terrorism and the legitimacy of force in the face of real threats, etc. (Biden was the most explicit, in calling out the "happy talk" from Kucinich and Gravel, but everyone jumped to make the same points.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

STRANGE JUSTICE. I like Bill Richardson, and hope that he becomes a viable candidate in the primary. But his choice of "Whizzer White" as his ideal Supreme Court Justice in tonight's debate is...odd. Myself, I would prefer a justice who was on the right side of (just for starters) Roe, Miranda, and Bowers. (In fairness, he did write one of my favorite concurrences.) The fact that, when informed he was expected to choose a living justice, he chose Ruth Bader Ginsburg while singling out her demolition of the rank sexism of Carhart II makes it all the stranger.

--Scott Lemieux

PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT LAWS: A POPULAR BAD POLICY. Phoebe Maltz makes a good point about laws requiring that women under 18 get parental consent before obtaining an abortion. Why is it a good idea for state policy to increase the number of teenage mothers? This is particularly true of David Brooks, who thinks that pre-viability abortions should be legal. Why on earth would we want to make it harder for the group for whom unplanned children extract the greatest cost to terminate an unwanted pregnancy?

We can argue about whether parental involvement laws should be constitutional (I will concede that they have the strongest constitutional case of the common abortion regulations). But between the arbitrary application of bypass provisions, the fact that they're usually superfluous for young women in stable loving families and dangerous to young women with bad family relationships, and the fact that their primary concrete effect is increasing the number of teenage mothers, they're certainly appallingly bad public policy.

--Scott Lemieux

DEBATING THE DEBATE. Brian Beutler, currently residing in Argentina and thus, I think, ineligible to comment on American politics, breaks a host of international treaties and previews tonight's Democratic debate.

My prediction, for what it's worth: Clinton is a punching bag, loses badly, and suffers the only noticeable dip in the polls. Obama says little new, sees little change in his numbers. Richardson makes the biggest absolute gain though not big enough to make him a contender, and Edwards moves closer to second place in the national polls.

--Ezra Klein

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE AWFUL TRUTH. Following up Scott and Ezra, Terence Samuel writes about Harry Reid and why he makes the Broders in town so upset:

Indeed, let us ponder this "ineptitude" charge a bit further, as it's come up before in discussion of Reid by elite commentators. Reid led the Democrats back to control of the Senate against very long odds in November. This week, he passed an Iraq war spending bill with withdrawal timetables -- passage that depended on Russ Feingold and Ben Nelson voting the same way. That was a Wedding at Cana kind of moment. Would that more ineptitude came in this variety ...

he real question is whether the obvious discomfort of some Democrats currently high-stepping in hopes of getting past Reid's remark is particularly warranted. (In this context it may be useful to recall the popular furor that failed to materialize over Barack Obama's recent "wasted" lives comment, despite war supporters' best efforts.) It just might be that the American people already know what they believe on Iraq -- and are much closer to Reid's position than the White House's. As Reid put it after uttering the remark last week, "Now, I said this is how I feel." His saving grace may be that those sentiments put him squarely in the American mainstream.

In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, 66 percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track and headed in the wrong direction. And if there was any doubt about whether people had Iraq in mind with that answer, the exact same percentage -- a full two-thirds of Americans -- disapprove of the president's handling of the situation in Iraq, more than the 60 percent who disapprove of his performance generally. Meanwhile, 55 percent in the same poll say that the war is unwinnable.

--The Editors

CONSISTENCY. I don't know who tipped Atrios off to this David Broder column defending Richard Nixon in 1969, but it's a gem. It's also a reminder that no sentient pundit could maintain the consistent deference Broder shows towards the establishment -- not given how often the establishment has failed the country and humiliated its supporters over the last few decades. So this just backs up my suspicious that the so-called Dean of reporters retired to Aruba sometime in the mid-80s and a Broder-bot has been penning his pieces ever since.

--Ezra Klein

ONLY A FEW YEARS TOO LATE. Was just listening to Dana Perrino (I think) fend off questions from the White House press corps in advance of Bush vetoing the withdrawal bill. It's stunning how differently the press treats Bush's actions than they did a few years ago, how much less deference they offer his motives. In this case, the queries rapidly zeroed in on the distance between Bush's actions and the expressed preferences of the American people. With sizable majorities supporting timetables, how can he thwart the country's will?

Perrino's response was to fall back on the old vision of Bush a strong, determined leader unswayed by polls and political shifts. That worked once upon a time, mainly when what he was bravely doing was also largely popular. In this context, it sounded tinny and undemocratic. The press corps kept pushing and Perrino kept dancing away, underscoring Bush's strong rejection of the popular, till some reporter finally exploded (and I'm vaguely paraphrasing here, as I didn't have a pen), "It's not about popularity! It's about the path the people want him to take!" Perrino was, for a second, silent.

--Ezra Klein

THE EXODUS. Baghdad Burning author and Iraqi blogger Riverbend, who has chronicled the war for the past three-and-a-half years, has announced that she plans to join the refugee exodus from the still war-torn state:

On a personal note, we've finally decided to leave. I guess I've known we would be leaving for a while now. We discussed it as a family dozens of times. At first, someone would suggest it tentatively because, it was just a preposterous idea- leaving ones home and extended family- leaving ones country- and to what? To where?

Since last summer, we had been discussing it more and more. It was only a matter of time before what began as a suggestion- a last case scenario- soon took on solidity and developed into a plan. For the last couple of months, it has only been a matter of logistics....

So we've been busy. Busy trying to decide what part of our lives to leave behind. Which memories are dispensable? We, like many Iraqis, are not the classic refugees- the ones with only the clothes on their backs and no choice. We are choosing to leave because the other option is simply a continuation of what has been one long nightmare- stay and wait and try to survive....

We don't know if whatever we leave, including the house, will be available when and if we come back. There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country, simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends… And to what?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

META-OBAMA. This is the best column David Brooks has written in a very long time:

The question is, aside from rejecting the extremes, has Obama thought through a practical foreign policy doctrine of his own — a way to apply his Niebuhrian instincts?

That question is hard to answer because he loves to have conversations about conversations. You have to ask him every question twice, the first time to allow him to talk about how he would talk about the subject, and the second time so you can pin him down to the practical issues at hand.

If you ask him about the Middle East peace process, he will wax rhapsodic about the need to get energetically engaged. He’ll talk about the shared interests all have in democracy and prosperity. But then when you ask him concretely if the U.S. should sit down and talk with Hamas, he says no. “There’s no point in sitting down so long as Hamas says Israel doesn’t have the right to exist.”[...]

In other words, he has a tendency to go big and offer himself up as Bromide Obama, filled with grand but usually evasive eloquence about bringing people together and showing respect. Then, in a blink, he can go small and concrete, and sound more like a community organizer than George F. Kennan.

Meanwhile, Obama just gave a huge speech outlining his vision for American foreign policy. Brooks, to his credit, mentions this. Why the whole article is nevertheless framed around Obama's understanding of Niehbur's thought -- which, in this context, consists of banalities like "there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction." -- baffles me. Reinhold Niebuhr runs a close second to Harry Truman among Dead White Guys Who Are Constantly, Vaguely, and Uselessly Invoked By Those Seeking To Look Serious On National Security, and so his appearance here is hardly unexpected. Peter Beinart's The Good Fight was largely devoted to explicating Niebuhr's thought, and creating a contemporary theory that conformed to it. Anatol Lieven's Ethical Realism proceeded in much the same vein, though with fairly different conclusions. The determination of these folks who are actually alive in the age of al-Qaeda to couch their ideas in terms of a thinker who wasn't is rather odd.

--Ezra Klein

FORGET DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ. This morning CNN's Michael Ware did an interview on American Morning where he (wrongly) analyzed the situation in Iraq, saying troops need to stay put. Right-wing NewsBusters quoted him as saying:

“And you listen very carefully to what General Petraeus says, he says ‘This is what we would like to see, a representative government.’ When I was in Diyala province, I interviewed a two-star general on camera for CNN, and he admitted for the first time from anyone in the military that they’re now prepared to accept options other than democracy.

“Now this is what this war was sold to the American public on, yet they’re now saying democracy isn’t mandatory, it’s an option, and that they’re prepared to see a government that can protect itself, give services to its people, and it doesn’t have to be democratic. In fact, the general said, most of our allies in this region are not democratic. So that fundamentally addresses the root cause of why America says it went to war, and now the military is saying, well, we may not get there.”

It's official. The military wants to keep an authoritarian regime in place as long as it will stabilize Iraq and be a U.S. ally. Now the two reasons for going to war in Iraq, WMDs and democracy, are abandoned. Hm, I seem to recall an authoritarian regime that had stabilized Iraq before the war started...

-- Kay Steiger

SURREAL. This is a very odd debate that we're witnessing between Condi Rice and Vladimir Putin. Condi is correct to say that the ABM sites pose no meaningful threat to the Russian strategic nuclear force. She doesn't mention that the interceptors pose no meaningful threat to anyone else's strategic nuclear force, either, or that they lack a plausible strategic rationale even in the unlikely event that they'll function properly. For his part, Putin has repeatedly declared that Russian missiles are immune to interception by any missile defense system, which would seem to rather obviate the need to care about U.S. missile defense deployments. His threat to abandon the Conventional Forces Treaty is undermined just a bit by the fact that the current Russian Army would have to deeply strain itself in order to break any of the limitations imposed by that Treaty.

So what's really going on? The Russians probably don't actually believe that the Topol-M is immune to interception, and they may be somewhat concerned that the deployment of a very small system in a former Warsaw Pact country provides precedent for the deployment of a larger system somewhere more vital. The deployment of these systems, incidentally, carries a significant footprint, and means that the U.S. is committed (even more directly than before) to the military defense of countries near Russia. While Russia has no plans to invade Poland, it is deeply fond of bullying and intimidating its close neighbors, and anything that would limit such intimidation would be contrary to Russian security interests. I suspect that Putin is signaling to Russia's neighbors that they shouldn't expect any change in Russia's general foreign policy orientation just because U.S. deployments are expanding.

--Robert Farley

PARSING BIGOTRY. Having fallen behind on my oppo reading, I somehow missed this post by Ramesh Ponnuru at The Corner, who claims my TAPPED post on Bill Donohue's graceless response to the right's big Supreme Court victory last week on abortion to be fraught with rage:

"This Rageful Bigot" [Ramesh Ponnuru]

That's what Adele Stan calls William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Follow her links, though, and I think you'll find that the Donohue article Stan is criticizing is rather less rageful than Stan's own post. It's also not in the least bigoted.

First, I find it interesting that Ponnuru provides a link to my post, but not to the Donohue piece I discuss in that post. Perhaps he expects his readers to take him at his word.

But even more interesting is Ponnuru's lawyerly wording of his own post. While I call Donohue, the person, "a rageful bigot," (and one who should be disavowed by such supporters as Mary Ann Glendon, George Weigel and Dinesh D'Souza), Ponnuru counters only that Donohue's article is neither rageful nor bigoted. Rather artful, I'd say.

But where Ponnuru trips up is when he urges his readers to follow the links in my post. If you click on the word "worse," you'll get this transcript of a 2004 appearance by Donohue on MSNBC, wherein he describes Hollywood as "controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular." Having described "Hollywood" as such, Donohue went on to say, "Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common."

--Adele M. Stan

JOKER'S WILD. John McCain jokes -- again -- about war:

Republican presidential contender John McCain dismissed a demand by a prominent House Democrat that he apologize to U.S. troops in Iraq for making a joke about an explosive device, saying critics should "lighten up."

In an appearance Tuesday night on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," McCain joked that he had brought a gift for Stewart back from a recent trip to Iraq.

"What do you want to start with, the bomb Iran song or the walk through the market in Baghdad?" Stewart asked McCain, referring to two recent controversies involving statements by the Arizona senator.

"I think maybe shopping in Baghdad," McCain responded. "... I had something picked out for you, too — a little IED (improvised explosive device) to put on your desk."

On Wednesday, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., demanded in a speech on the House floor that McCain apologize to troops for joking about the explosive devices that are responsible for many of the casualties in Iraq.

"Imagine a presidential candidate making a joke about IEDs when our kids are getting blown up," Murtha said.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

RUDY v. AL? A new Quinnipiac poll of voters in large swing states -- Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania -- shows Rudy Giuliani ahead of Hillary Clinton in all three. Of course, it’s early, but Peter Brown of Quinnipiac writes of Hillary: “Her support is very deep, but narrow. Democrats view her favorably 8-1, but she turns off independents.” What’s interesting about this finding is that voices from the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, who incessantly emphasize the importance of independent voters in general elections, find that their favorite daughter candidate is the one most struggling with the very voters they deem pivotal.

Who does Brown, summarizing the results, Democrats ought to think about nominating? Al Gore -- the only candidate who beats Giuliani head-to-head in all three states. “Perhaps absence does make the heart grow fonder. Vice President Gore generally runs best against any of the Republican candidates," writes Brown. "Whatever the reason, should Gore get in, he could reshape the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.”

--Tom Schaller

HIGH LIEBERMANISM. Did Joe Lieberman just call the Democratic leadership pawns of al-Qaeda? In today's Washington Post he writes:

When politicians here declare that Iraq is "lost" in reaction to al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks and demand timetables for withdrawal, they are doing exactly what al-Qaeda hopes they will do, although I know that is not their intent.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

LOW BRODERISM. One could spend considerably more text than the column itself explaining the countless problems with David Broder's latest adventures in center-right false equivalence. First, you have the Dean's horror over Harry Reid's criticism of Alan Greenspan's political motives, just because the latter's positions on fiscal policy changed when it came time to justify Bush's upper class tax cuts, the horror! And then there's this:

Given the way the Constitution divides warmaking power between the president, as commander in chief, and Congress, as sole source of funds to support the armed services, it is essential that at some point Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi be able to negotiate with the White House to determine the course America will follow until a new president takes office.

To say that Reid has sent conflicting signals about his readiness for such discussions is an understatement. It has been impossible for his own members, let alone the White House, to sort out for more than 24 hours at a time what ground Reid is prepared to defend.

• Harry Reid is willing to modify legislation concerning the Iraq War to get a bill passed.
  

• George W. Bush is not willing to change his position an iota and has repeatedly said that he will veto any bill that has any kind of attempt to compel a withdrawal of troops from Iraq disaster. He has also rejected the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group.
  

• Broder's conclusion: the lack of consensus is solely a product of the fact that Harry Reid refuses to negotiate and refuses to accept the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group.

--Scott Lemieux

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: UNIONS GONE GLOBAL. Harold reports on the proposed merger between the United Steelworkers and two of Britain's largest unions, which would create the first truly multinational trade union (and the planet's largest union period). As Harold says, "The story here, however, isn't the number of members but the adaptation of labor to the globalization of capital."

--The Editors

NY ROCKS PART DEUX: Apropos of my other recent New York pride post, Gov. Eliot Spitzer is proposing a major liberalization of New York's outdated abortion laws. The New York Times reports:

Mr. Spitzer’s bill, the Reproductive Health and Privacy Protection Act, would update current law, which, for example, does not include a provision allowing for abortions late in pregnancies to protect a woman’s health. New York state laws on the books also treat abortion as a homicide, but with broad exceptions that allow the procedure in many cases.

--Ben Adler

A FOOLISH CONSISTENCY: Philip Klein of the American Spectator criticizes my post on the New York City aluminum bat ban thusly:

If liberals say that government can regulate "risky behavior" that imposes medical costs on taxpayers, using the same logic, proponents of sodomy laws could argue in favor of banning homosexual sex because it puts sexual partners at increased risk for getting AIDS. To be clear, I am adamantly opposed to sodomy laws, but my opposition is rooted in the same principle that prompts me to oppose banning smoking, trans-fats, and metal baseball bats. That principle is: liberty

Klein makes his criticism sound like a serious statement of consistent principle, but one would hope he's smart enough to realize the silliness of this comparison and is really just being facetious. First of all, a sodomy ban, unlike bans on smoking in bars and metal bats in high school baseball, is totally unenforceable because of the infinite number of locations where the act can take place. Secondarily, to enforce it would require invasions of people's personal homes, which none of the New York laws in question do, so the infraction on liberty is clearly an order of magnitude greater. I would not support a ban on smoking or consuming transfats in one's home for this reason.

It would be nice if conservatives like Klein debated a policy on its actual merits, instead of invoking this kind of fatuous slippery slope argumentation.

--Ben Adler

LOSING A WAR THAT'S WORTH WINNING. The evening news broke of David Halberstam's death, my mother, who had done some work with his then-wife, Polish actress Elzbieta Czyzewska, in 1967, wrote me with this recollection:

They gave a big party one night where I talked politics with H. and he said about Vietnam, “This war is worth winning, but it can’t be won.”

That’s a good epitaph for the U.S. in Iraq too.

It's also not a bad answer for those looking for a response to questions about what Harry Reid said.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: LESS MONEY, MO' PROBLEMS. After 10 attempts to get a Congressional hearing about pay equity, Rep. Rosa DeLauro finally succeeded this year. Kay Steiger reports on the debate over whether we need a Paycheck Fairness Act.

--The Editors

WIN, LOSE, OR DRAW. The Politico had a piece about various Democrats' wary responses to queries about Harry Reid's (decontextualized) "the war is lost" line. John Edwards said this:

"I think it depends entirely on what your definition of 'lost' means. That sounded familiar, didn't it?" former senator John Edwards, a Democratic presidential candidate, said to laughter on Ed Schultz's radio talk show Monday. "What I mean is, I don't think there is winning or losing in Iraq. There is certainly no military victory if it's used in that regard. The only way there can be security and peace on the ground in Iraq is for there to be a political solution."

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE FOURTH WORLD CONGRESS ON FAMILIES. This sounds like something the United Nations might have arranged, one of those long talk sessions where worthies meet. But it isn't quite that. It is a very socially conservative, right-wing meeting of like minds. On the agenda:

Next month's fourth World Congress of Families is to include sessions on "the mother in the home and the new economics," "the attack on marriage as the union of woman and man" and "beyond the contraceptive mentality."

Scheduled speakers include representatives of James Dobson's conservative Christian group Focus on the Family and the Discovery Institute, the principal organization behind the promotion of the "intelligent design" concept.

"We're seeking to be a rallying point for persons who defend what we call the natural family," said Allan C. Carlson, president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, which organized the conference, "that are concerned about family trends around the world that we think both hurt children and also hurt the prospects of nations to be successful, prosperous and happy places."

The members of the European Parliamentary Working Group on Separation of Religion and Politics say that several people scheduled to speak at the three-day conference have taken positions that clash with the European Charter of Fundamental Rights.

In a letter to Sauerbrey, they point to Roman Catholic Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, who suggested that condoms were of limited use against the spread of HIV - comments that were swiftly condemned by the World Health Organization - and Steven W. Mosher, whose Population Research Institute says that Muslims and other immigrants are contributing to the "demographic destruction" of Europe.

The opening address is to be given by Polish President Lech Kaczynski, who has called homosexuals "perverts" and who has been accused by Human Rights Watch of sanctioning "official homophobia."

--J. Goodrich

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: TIME TO PLAY FOR KEEPS. In his column this week, Mike discusses what Carhart II tells us about how Democrats should approach judicial confirmation hearings.

--The Editors

IF IT'S APRIL 25th… It must be Malaria Awareness Day! About one million deaths each year are attributed to malaria, making it the number one killer of children under five years old in Africa. And the estimated 500 million people who contract malaria each year, but survive, exact a heavy burden on already impoverished health care systems. The real tragedy here is that inexpensive countermeasures can make malaria utterly preventable. For example, most infections occur at night, when mosquitoes are feeding and people are sleeping. One solution? Make bed-nets a mainstay in at-risk communities. At my other blogging outfit, I like to plug Nothing But Nets, a grassroots anti-malaria campaign started by the Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly. For $10, Nothing But Nets buys an insecticide treated bed net and sends it to communities where infection rates are high.

Of course, there is only so much private philanthropy can do. And on the public policy front, the president -- and First Lady -- actually deserve some praise. In 2005, the White House launched the President's Malaria Initiative, which included a $1.2 billion pledge to increase funding to programs that combat malaria. This was certainly a step in the right direction, but as always, more needs to be done to fight off this killer in the night.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

"NO ONE SUFFERS MORE THAN THEIR PRESIDENT." This video, where Laura Bush explains that no one in America suffers as much from the war in Iraq as the president does, has the potential to become a destructively definitional moment for the administration. Yesterday, J. noticed James Pinkerton crowing over Bush's steady 35% support. He's a steadfast leader after all! That 35% may indeed have GOP Kool-Aid coursing through their veins, but these Marie Antoinette-esque admissions of detachment can shake even the hardiest partisan.

--Ezra Klein

DEMS AND DEFICITS. I'm deeply sympathetic to criticizing Nancy Pelosi from the economic left, and to worries that Democrats have boxed themselves into a rhetorical corner by carrying on about the largely illusory dangers of moderate deficits. But my sense is that there's a real lack of sympathy for the fact that Congressional Democrats have no power. In recent weeks, I've heard complaints on everything from their insufficient attempts to end the war to their unwillingness to craft a maximally enforceable prescription drug bill to concerns about their focus on the deficit. There's no suggestion that any of these priorities would attract a presidential signature, or that a veto could be overturned, but even so, folks seem intent of forcing Democrats to act as if they had an ally in the White House even as such an approach would reveal the most vulnerable parts of the progressive agenda at a moment when they can't possibly pass. It's odd.

As a general point, deficit reduction is a very useful tool for opposition parties. It's an economic critique that points directly towards constraint. So Newt Gingrich and Co. became obsessed with it when Clinton controlled the White House, even as the GOP's patron saint, Reagan, had blessed more red ink than just about any other president in history. When George W. Bush entered power, of course, deficit concerns were forgotten. And I see little reason Democrats will need to act any differently. Deficits may prove a useful rhetorical tool now, and later on, they can be deemphasized in favor of other priorities, just as the Republicans have been doing for decades. But for the moment, they're a necessary arrow in the quiver of the opposition party. And that is what Democrats, for all their recent successes, remain.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE DEMOCRACY OF EVIL. Sasha Abramsky reviews The Lucifer Effect, the long-awaited book by psychologist Philip Zimbardo, creator of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment.

Zimbardo has finally been prompted to write his first-person account of the SPE, as he calls it, by the specter of Abu Ghraib, and the shattering images of American military personnel engaging in torture there and in Guantanamo; and by his belief, and accompanying rage, that high-level U.S. political, intelligence, and military leaders have created a climate in which torture is legitimated ...

In the second section, the study's relevance for our understanding of Abu Ghraib is explained. Essentially, Zimbardo argues it's futile to blame a "few bad apples" when a situation has been created that puts a premium on certain forms of violence and cruelty. Don't blame the character of the torturers, he writes, blame the situation they're thrust into. Or, to use his own metaphor, it's not bad apples in a good barrel, rather it's good apples being corrupted by a bad barrel. If Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld declare the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the war on terror; if intelligence officials start waterboarding, beating, and even killing suspects; and if military officers such as Geoffrey Miller -- the man who made torture the norm in Guantanamo -- visit Iraq and urge a toughening-up of the treatment of detainees, nobody, Zimbardo eloquently argues, should be surprised at the acts that then unfolded on Tiers 1A and 1B of Abu Ghraib.

--The Editors

MURDERER GOES FREE. In one of my first posts at TAPPED, I discussed the case of Luis Posada Carriles, an anti-Castro terrorist connected with the CIA who, in 1976, murdered 73 Cubans by blowing up their airliner. The aircraft included such threats to freedom as the twenty-four members of the Cuban Youth Fencing team. Posada is wanted by Venezuela, which wishes to charge him in that attack and in others. The U.S. refuses to turn Posada over, purportedly because it fears he'll be tortured in custody. The far more likely reasons are Posada's extensive connections with the CIA and his popularity in the Cuban Exile movement.

In any case, Posada was freed last week, in preparation for a trial on immigration charges on May 11. Whether or not he'll show is an open question, as he clearly has friends with money and influence. Consider: It's not in serious question that Posada is a terrorist and a murderer. If we had a sniff that he were at all involved with a terrorist attack against the U.S., he would probably have been extradited to a third country for torture, or sent to one of our own torture facilities in Eastern Europe or Cuba. Because he murdered Cubans, and because the Exiles like him, we pretend that we care about torture and decide to set him free. Moral clarity, folks. Also see this, by the Venezuelan ambassador.

--Robert Farley

JUSTICIA REPRODUCTIVA. Yesterday Mexico City's elected officials overwhelmingly passed a bill that legalizes abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy within city limits. Although 90 percent of the population is Roman Catholic, the majority of city residents approve of the bill. Unsurprisingly, anti-choice groups plan to challenge the measure in Mexico's Supreme Court. Mexican federal law currently allows abortion in cases of rape, fetus mutation, and life of the mother. Given the bad news pro-choicers had from our own Supreme Court earlier this week, it's assuring to hear abortion laws are making progress in south of the border.

--Kay Steiger

POLITICAL BASEBALL. I had a mini-revelation last night while thinking about the way politics is reported and analyzed. It's just like the way professional baseball is reported!

Take this comment by James P. Pinkerton in his Newsday column:

So here's a question: If Bush is falling apart so dramatically that he is in danger of simply vanishing, how come he's hanging in there in the polls?

But don't take my word for it. According to pollingreport.com, a nonpartisan compendium of polls, Bush's average approval rating for April 2007 is 34.6. And what was his approval exactly a year ago, for all of April 2006? It was 35.6. Neither number is impressive, but what's clear is that Bush is hanging in there, approval-wise -- no "epic collapse."

So what gives? The answer would seem to be that Bush is not being evaluated in isolation: Instead, in the public mind, he is being compared and contrasted to the rest of Washington, D.C. - specifically, the Democrats who now control Congress.

But that's not baseball-speak. In baseball terms, Pinkerton is talking up a team that is performing poorly by comparing it to the other team. Without some propping up like that, the audience for such commentary would just go away. It's entertainment, and the game must be made to look interesting enough for someone to watch. And for the commentators to continue getting their fees. (It should be said that even on Pinkerton's own terms -- arguing that Bush isn't doing so bad because he's being viewed in comparison with his Democratic opponents -- his case is belied by the facts in multiple respects.)

Come to think of it, the baseball analogy applies to even deeper levels of politics. Suppose that there are two teams, the Republicans and the Democrats, and suppose that the game is played all over the government. Then it would make sense to party-politicize, say, the Department of Justice.

--J. Goodrich

EDWARDS ON DARFUR. John Edwards issued a pretty solid plan for addressing the Darfur crisis yesterday. If enacted, it would mark a significant departure from the current administration's go-easy approach. (Which, if you hadn't noticed, is failing miserably.)

The Edwards plan is to basically use the full weight of American diplomacy to press Khartoum into accepting UN peacekeepers. Nearly four years after Secretary of State Powell determined that the killings in Darfur amounted to genocide, this is still something that the Administration is reluctant to do. Edwards, however, would actually back up tough talk by imposing long-threatened American sanctions on companies owned or controlled by the Sudanese government and carving out a real role for NATO in Darfur, including enforcing a no-fly zone and providing crucial support to an eventual UN mission in Darfur.

My only quibble is that Edwards describes the UN deployment to Darfur as "two-phased," when in fact there are three. The first, a so called "light support package" to help the 7,000 African Union troops in Darfur, is already deployed. And two weeks ago, Khartoum agreed to phase two -- the "heavy support package" -- which seeks an additional 3,000 blue helmets plus heavy equipment like military helicopters to support the African Union. The real goal, however, is to use the diplomatic tools Edwards recommends to force Khartoum to accede to a robust UN force of 17,000 to 22,000 troops, which was authorized by the Security Council last August.

There is only so much security that an additional deployment of 3,000 blue-helmets can provide. Getting that larger deployment on the ground in Darfur should be the real focus of American diplomacy. The heavy support package is merely an intermediate step.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: OFFERING THE YOUNG A NEW DEAL. Our own Paul Starr calls for a renewed social investment in young people who feel many of the major forces affecting the economy today most acutely, from the cost of college to stagnant wages to health care coverage to work/family balance. Over at Freedom's Power, Starr discusses the thinking behind his proposal, some of which was first aired in a speech he gave fifteen years ago. Take a look at both the post and his new piece.

--The Editors

REAL CASH. To follow up on Kay's item, it's worth pointing out that the amount of money women lose to gender inequality is quite a bit higher on a per-person basis than the amounts politicians normally talk about when they promise even generous middle-class tax relief. A full-time year-round female employee whose salary, 10 years out, is only 69 percent of that of her male college-educated equivalent, as the AAUW study reported is the case, will be earning, say, $50,000 while her male college classmates will be earning nearly $73,000. That's a more than $22,000 loss to the woman on an annual basis. That's huge.

The gap is less, according to the study, when you control for hours, occupation, and parental status, but each of these things is so gender-influenced that ultimately controlling for them can wind up erasing the impact of gender rather than describing it. By the late 1960s, for example, only 3 percent of this nation's lawyers were female and anyone who measured pay who controlled for occupation would have failed to measure the impact of the gendered way women were tracked into certain occupations and not others. That's still true today. Even the legal profession was only 27 percent female by 2000, according to the American Bar Association, thanks to the residual impact of fixed gender roles.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BEHIND THE PAY GAP. I attended a hearing this morning held by the House's Education and Labor Committee that examined the Paycheck Fairness Act on this, Equal Pay Day. Though the PFA has been introduced by Rep. Rosa DeLauro 10 times, this is the first time the committee held a hearing.

A report released yesterday by the American Association of University Women found that women one year out of a 4-year college earn 80 percent of what their male counterparts earn. When the report looks at women 10 years after graduation, women are earning 69 cents to every dollar that men earn. The most significant finding of the study, though, is that controlling for all factors, including "educational and occupational choices, as well as demographic and personal characteristics," an "unexplained" 5 percent gap exists one year out of college which widens to a 12 percent gap 10 years after college. Furthermore, as Catherine Hill, research director at AAUW testified, attending a highly-selective institution does little to boost a woman's pay, and educated women experience a greater pay gap than women overall.

Some more conservative committee members denied the credibility of the study, but as Rep. Carol Shea-Porter put it, the pay gap is "easily noticed by those who live it."

--Kay Steiger

NO CONFIDENCE. A Senate staffer just told me that the chamber plans to hold a vote of no confidence on Alberto Gonzales ...

--Sam Rosenfeld

OBAMA ON IRAQ. I haven't read Obama's big foreign policy speech in full, but Other Klein, Kevin, and Matt have, and their reviews are largely -- if somewhat tentatively -- positive. I am impressed with this line, however, which I think is slightly more important than folks have given it credit for.

In 2002, I stated my opposition to the war in Iraq, not only because it was an unnecessary diversion from the struggle against the terrorists who attacked us on September 11th, but also because it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the threats that 9/11 brought to light. I believed then, and believe now, that it was based on old ideologies and outdated strategies – a determination to fight a 21st century struggle with a 20th century mindset.

--Ezra Klein

BAN THE BATS. In the new issue of City Journal, the neoconservative urban policy magazine associated with the Manhattan Institute, Paul Beston argues against a new law in New York City banning the use of metal bats in high school baseball. Dismissing it as "nannying," Beston links the law to other recent policies in New York City like the smoking ban and the trans-fat ban. He concludes "Banning bats my seem like small ball. But it perfectly expresses the council's and the mayor's underlying belief: too much liberty is hazardous to your health."

This clearly expresses a fundamental tenet of conservative/libertarian thinking: that engaging in risky behavior with serious social costs is an entitlement. People who are injured by metal bats, or fall ill from smoking or fatty food, cost the rest of us money. We pay their emergency room bill, their Medicare bills or their Social Security disablity insurance. Only someone willing to forgo those benefits should have the right to also opt out of public health laws like those passed by the New York City Council, or pre-existing ones requiring that motorcyclists wear helmets and drivers wear seat belts. But Beston, like all conservatives, makes no serious suggestion about offering such an option in our society (much less explaining how it would be practically possible.) Instead he merely sneers at the New York City government's efforts to lower the costs that he, like all other taxpayers, will ultimately bear (and that, should rising health costs force the government to raise taxes, Beston and City Journal would surely bray against as well).

--Ben Adler

SAVE SMALL MAGAZINES... LIKE THIS ONE. The U.S. Postal Service is considering a new rate plan that would burden smaller publishers (like The American Prospect, as well as other great publications like Mother Jones, The Washington Monthly, The Nation, etc.) with higher postage rates while unfairly locking in the best prices for the largest media companies. The rate increase -- which was proposed by Time Warner Inc. (the nation's largest publisher) -- would push many smaller magazines into bankruptcy, and make it almost impossible to launch a new publication. Here at TAP, our postal costs would increase by 21 percent -- tens of thousands of dollars per year. That's money we'd rather be spending on content.

Free Press, a national media reform organization, has a convenient form you can fill out to tell the Postal Board of Governors that it's unfair to burden smaller publications with higher rates. If you care about independent media like TAP, please take a few moments and express your opposition.

And, of course, you can always show your support for TAP by subscribing. The bigger our circulation, the less we're affected by this postal rate increase. (Plus, you get immediate access to all the goodies from our newly posted May issue. It's a win-win situation.)

--The Editors

COMPARISONS. I tend to hew to a strong pro-ruthlessness line when it comes to how the majority party ought to act in Congress, but be that as it may, it seems clear the Democrats still have a long way to go before they reach any Hammerian levels of strong-arming and exclusion. In today's Hill, an article surveying House GOP moderates' thoughts on the level of outreach and involvement they've experienced under Democratic rule compared to the years of their own party's control is striking: while most of those asked unsurprisingly grumble about a lack of Democratic inclusion, none of them say that they enjoyed more influence and involvement and had more of a say under their own party's control than they do now. Given the sheer importance of party affiliation in how Congress is organized and run, that says something about the level of marginalization moderates felt under the DeLay-era GOP leadership.

--Sam Rosenfeld

ABORTIONS AND BREAST CANCER. I almost feel silly writing this, but new data from a massive Harvard study shows there's no link between abortion and breast cancer. There was, of course, never any good reason to assume there was a link, but the anti-abortion movement seized on a few obviously unsound studies with typical ferocity, and even passed laws in certain states forcing doctors to tell women seeking an abortion that it may increase their risks of breast cancer. But this study, which tracked over 100,000 women, fairly definitively buries that canard, even though I doubt it will immediately impact the laws forcing doctors to recite it.

--Ezra Klein

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. Two pieces went up this morning: Addie Stan ruminates on Catholicism's decline in Europe, while Noy Thrupkaew reviews the Cannes prize-winner Red Road, a film about surveillance and voyeurism.

--The Editors

A POX ON THE HOUSE OF FALSE EQUIVALENCES. Karen Tumulty has an account of Carhart II that fits squarely within the extremely annoying pox-on-all-their-houses genre endemic to media coverage of the subject. First, she has to claim that both sides are being dishonest in the D&X debate. The anti-choice lobby is criticized because the distinction between methods at the same stage of gestation is completely arbitrary; in other words, their position is genuinely incoherent and unprincipled, and the issue is purely a ginned-up political tactic. Pro-choicers (although not any of their specific statements) meanwhile, are criticized 1) for making statements about the relative rarity of the procedure that are in fact accurate, and 2) for claiming that the procedure is used for medical reasons although "there are alternative ways to perform the abortion safely, though perhaps not as safely as when intact D&E is used." Uh, what? Since when does using a procedure that reduces medical risk not count as a medical decision? If a doctor chose to prescribe an anti-cholesterol medication with the same positive effects but less risk of producing heart attacks, this wouldn't count as a medical judgment? This is just a bizarre claim. And it's unclear why women should be burdened with a degree of greater health risks at all given that the two procedures in question are morally indistinguishable.

In addition to this blaming-both-sides-regardless-of-the-facts, which seems to be a contractual obligation for this kind of article, she also makes the strange claim that, despite further watering-down of Casey, "I don't expect the court decision this week to have many larger implications." She explains:

The fact is, where the two sides of the issue are at war over abortion and always will be, most Americans long ago decided what they think about it. They want abortion to be legal, but they don't want it to be easy. And their qualms about it grow as a pregnancy progresses. As with everything else about this debate, the absolutes will always give way to the individual.

This is just a non-sequitur. The fact that public opinion is relatively stable does not mean that the statutory obstacles put in front of (some classes) of women will remain stable. Public opinion didn't change much after Webster or Casey, but the number of regulations increased a great deal. Most of these regulations, moreover, have nothing to do with the stage of pregnancy at which an abortion is contained (and indeed these centrist regulations make later abortions more likely.) When legislation is used to close abortion clinics, for example, those clinics remain just as closed for first-trimester abortions. The fact that the Supreme Court has assumed that women are irrational is not only appalling in itself but makes virtually any obstacle short of a ban defensible.

And finally, one thing these regulatory regimes do not do is "give way" to the "individual." Their effect is the opposite: to permit reliable access to safe abortions for affluent urban women irrespective of the circumstances, and to make it more difficult for poor rural women to obtain abortions irrespective of the circumstances. The law is simply too crude an instrument to make these kinds of subtle moral distinctions. If you want individual circumstances taken into account, the solution is the "extreme" pro-choice position of leaving decisions about abortions between a woman and her doctor.

--Scott Lemieux

JUST RELEASED: THE MAY PRINT ISSUE. The new print issue of the Prospect has come out -- take a look. Mike Tomasky's cover story, "What Rudy Believes" (available for free to non-subscribers), draws from his years as a journalist covering New York politics to tease out the common threads of Rudy Giuliani's political career and personality. The threads ain't pretty.

Also available as a free preview to non-subscribers is Ezra Klein's feature piece, "The Health of Nations," which offers analyses of several real-world health care systems that work better and cost less than ours:

Medicine may be hard, but health insurance is simple. The rest of the world's industrialized nations have already figured it out, and done so without leaving 45 million of their countrymen uninsured and 16 million or so underinsured, and without letting costs spiral into the stratosphere and severely threaten their national economies.

Even better, these successes are not secret, and the mechanisms not unknown. Ask health researchers what should be done, and they will sigh and suggest something akin to what France or Germany does. Ask them what they think can be done, and their desperation to evade the opposition of the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry and conservatives and manufacturers and all the rest will leave them stammering out buzzwords and workarounds, regional purchasing alliances and health savings accounts. The subject's famed complexity is a function of the forces protecting the status quo, not the issue itself.

So let us, in these pages, shut out the political world for a moment, cease worrying about what Aetna, Pfizer, and Grover Norquist will say or do, and ask, simply: What should be done? To help answer that question, we will examine the best health- care systems in the world: those of Canada, France, Great Britain, Germany, and the U.S. Veterans Health Administration …

Elsewhere in the new issue:

• Simon Lazarus offers one of the first comprehensive assessments of John Roberts's tenure so far as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Guess what? Roberts may sound in interviews like a restrained consensus-builder, but he votes and leads the Court like an ideological, polarizing, and (yes) activist right-winger.
  

• Eyal Press reports on new social science research illustrating the importance of social cohesiveness and "collective efficacy" -- even on a block-by-block basis -- in buttressing the health and safety of neighborhoods.
  

• Mark Schmitt offers a theory of Barack Obama's theory of the contemporary political moment.
  

• Garance Franke-Ruta casts contemporary intra-left skirmishes over the Israel lobby in terms of "Shul Politics" -- arguing that "the new liberal critiques of AIPAC closely mirror recent efforts by the resurgent progressive movement, home to many Jews without kippahs, to force groups whose base is Democratic, but whose politics are deemed too conservative for the present era, to relitigate their hold on power."
  

• Paul Waldman looks at the last hold-outs of Bush cheerleading in the right-wing media, and how they discuss the president's disastrous war.
  

• Michael Kazin reviews two new works of history on the Gilded Age.
  

• In a Special Report package for the magazine this month, 20 writers, including David Callahan, Tamara Draut, Joan Fitzgerald, Jared Bernstein, and Marta Tienda offer articles on ending poverty in America.

--The Editors

AND THEY SAY BLOGGERS ARE NASTY. Michael Smerconish, the kinder-and-gentler-but-still-shocking replacement for Don Imus, had Camilla Paglia on his show to chat about the possible motives of the Virginia Tech assassin. Remember Camilla Paglia? I do, but don't ask me what would make her an expert on this particular topic. In any case, the conversation went like this:

SMERCONISH: You were quoted as saying, "Young women now seem to want to behave like men and have sex without commitment. The signals they are giving are very confusing, and rage and humiliation build up in boys who are spurned again and again."

It almost seems like, you know, this guy wasn't hooking up enough, and it allowed him to build up these frustrations that he might not otherwise have had.

PAGLIA: Well, I think this Cho was probably psychotic, and the signs of it were missed for a long time. But he seems to have been functional and to be able to get into college and so on. I'm of the pro-sex wing of feminism, whose patron saint is Madonna, all right, so I'm not coming from a conservative perspective here, but I do feel that this "hooking up" culture that's going on on campuses where girls just have sort of casual, random sex with guys and never see them again. I mean, I think that is kind of, over the long run, kind of degrading for women, OK? They're playing a male game, and I don't think they understand the psychological consequences.

SMERCONISH: Yeah, but none of them were hooking up with him. I mean, he wasn't partaking in any of that.

PAGLIA: No. Exactly. So you see all this going on around you. Not just in college, but in high school, it's going on. I mean, girls are servicing boys, and going either -- they're starting at age 10 and 11. And this is a kind of chaos that is going on right now in education. Also, our sex-permeated mass culture, popular culture makes it seem to a marginal and socially inept person like Cho as if everybody's getting it.

--J. Goodrich

SPITBALL, OR HIGH FASTBALL? Interesting; I've always thought of Bernie Shaw's death penalty question to Mike Dukakis as more of a high fastball than a spitball. Dukakis could (and did) strike out on the question, but he also could have hit it out of the park, all while staying true to his anti-death penalty principles. Everyone in the audience and at home understood that Shaw had stepped outside the bounds of polite discourse, but Dukakis failed to recognize this in time, and answered it as a straight policy question. He could have followed Shaw out of bounds and given an answer that acknowledged that the question was emotionally exploitative, while at the same time pointing out that making an important policy decision based on such an appeal is a very bad idea. Dukakis could have said something like this:

Sure, I'd like to take the guy apart myself. But that's why we don't let victims serve on juries, or as judges. And if we can't come up with a justification for a punishment beyond raw anger, then we need to seriously consider why we have it on our books

--Robert Farley

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE FAILURE OF PLAN COLOMBIA. In a lengthy dispatch from Colombia, Jens Erik Gould conveys the failure of the U.S.'s multi-billion-dollar coca-eradication campaign in that country. The piece begins:

If it weren't for the modern-day logos on some of the men's T-shirts, a snapshot of the Colombian village of La Balsa could be easily mistaken for a print taken a century ago. Rickety wooden homes that evoke images of an old Deep South backwater line the town's avenue -- which is no more than a grassy pathway. The seemingly-forgotten village has no electricity, no running water, no doctor, and no mayor. Its school doesn't go past the fifth grade. The village is situated just four miles from the Ecuadorian border in the hot and sticky coastal lowlands of the far-flung Nariño department. It is cut off from the nearest road by a motorboat ride across a river and a two-hour walk on a path that gets so muddy when it rains villagers are ashamed to make their horses traverse it. Much of rural Colombia is subject to this dearth of basic services and infrastructure. What villages like La Balsa do have, though, is an abundance of coca plants.

Seven years ago, the U.S. government launched a $4.7 billion anti-drug effort in Colombia, which provides more than 90 percent of cocaine that enters the United States. The program's pride and joy is an aggressive aerial spraying campaign to destroy coca, the raw ingredient in cocaine that ends up on American streets. Just three days before I arrived, U.S.-funded airplanes had dumped chemicals on La Balsa's crops, and, in some areas, even on the village structures themselves.

But Jorlin Giovanny, one of the some 300 peasants who live there, was already rescuing the seeds from his dead coca plants, methodically chopping centimeter-wide branches on a wooden block with a machete that left a metallic ring in the sultry air. The sun-tanned 27-year-old soaked the cut-up pieces in water and replanted them that very afternoon in tidy rows in the red dirt behind a half-finished house he was helping to build for his mother. "There's no other option," said a calm Giovanny, who was well-accustomed to this post-spraying ritual and expected the seeds to sprout again in a month's time. "What else are we going to do?" Virtually every family in town continues to grow coca, even though they say planes have sprayed their crops at least five times in the past five years.

--The Editors

NO MURROW. Over at the Politico, Roger Simon takes us on a little trip down memory lane back to 1988, when Bernard Shaw dealt a crushing blow to the Dukakis candidacy by asking the Massachusetts governor, with the opening question of his final debate with George H. W. Bush, "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for her killer?" Simon paints Shaw's question as evidence that Shaw succeeded in his self-proclaimed goal to be the Edward R. Murrow of his time. "Bernard Shaw was one tough customer," Simon tells us. "'As reporters, we were not doing our jobs if we don't ask the toughest question possible,' Shaw said." What a crock.

In case you're too young to remember, Dukakis was savaged in the press for the way he answered Shaw's question. With a heavy sigh (Bush had been pummeling him over his opposition to the death penalty), Dukakis explained all the reasons why he opposed the death penalty. He did not raise his fists to sky and scream, "Kitty!!! No!!!" Nor did he say, "Well, now that you put it that way, I guess I'll discard the principle I've held my entire time in public life. Fry the bastard!" Nor did he punch Shaw in the mouth, though he certainly would have been justified. Instead, he answered the question in a manner appropriate to someone who wanted to be president of the United States. Simon tells us what happened next:

In the press room, the murmurs over Shaw's question now turned to mutters over Dukakis' answer. "He's through." "That's all she wrote." "Get the hook!"

The reporters sensed it instantly. Even though the 90-minute debate was only seconds old, they felt it was already over for Dukakis. He had not been warm. He had not been likable. He had not shown emotion. He had merely shown principle.

Afterwards, his aides would try explain that he had been sick. He had seen two doctors before the debate. He had a fever, a virus. He wasn't himself.

But while he may have been sick, he was himself. That was the problem.

But Shaw wasn't trying to tease out the reasons Dukakis opposed the death penalty. His question was the worst kind of "gotcha," something with no policy content whatsoever. Its goal, and what it achieved so spectacularly, was to provide the "decisive moment" that would cast into sharp relief the character flaw that reporters had already decided was Dukakis' Achilles heel.

But according to Simon, here's how Shaw described it afterward: "I was just doing my job, asking that question … I thought of Murrow taking on McCarthy. That was the essence of what I wanted to be: Fearless, not afraid of the scorching bite of public criticism. I'm not afraid of being disliked. I'm not afraid of being criticized. In that debate, I did the right thing. I know I did. I know it."

Let's clarify something. Edward R. Murrow took on powerful people who were doing wrong. Bernard Shaw came up with a zinger question to put a candidate in an uncomfortable position, one tiny step above "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Shaw wasn't some kind of modern-day Murrow, he was a hack, the embodiment of everything that's wrong with how presidential campaigns are covered.

There's an unbroken line between Shaw, and Kit Seelye and Ceci Connolly making up lies Al Gore never told, and Jodi Wilgoren musing on John Kerry's windsurfing, and Maureen DowdJohn Edwards' haircut, and on and on and on into this campaign and the next and the next. It's not about substance, and it isn't even about "character." It's about finding what reporters think is the worst thing about a candidate, and picking and picking at it until their evident belief that it should disqualify him from the presidency becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's nothing to be proud of, and if Bernard Shaw thinks there's some parallel between his brand of questioning and what Edward R. Murrow did, he's truly deluded.

UPDATE: Over at my personal blog, I have an update to this post, explaining another example of reporters sabotaging the candidacy of a presidential front-runner they don’t happen to like. In this episode, David Broder and Lou Cannon admit to their crime.

--Paul Waldman

THE CW ON INFANT MORTALITY. It’s well known that the United States has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world (about 6 per 1,000 births). Progressive health care wonks have long suspected that sub par Medicaid coverage for pregnant women and cuts to programs like the State Children’s Health Insurance Program are culprits. Last month, the counter-CW folks over at Slate announced that actually, babies die because wealthy American spend a lot of money on fertility drugs, prenatal care, and other newfangled treatments that save otherwise unviable pregnancies and lead to increased rates of prematurity and infant mortality.

As Scott pointed out, yesterday a must-read article on infant mortality in the South appeared in The New York Times. On this issue, at least, it seems counter-intuition will only take us so far: American infant mortality is very much a byproduct of poverty, with all the usual disturbing implications for race and gender. In Mississippi, the poorest state in the country, the infant mortality rate rose from 9.7 to 11.4 per 1,000 births in 2005. Nationwide, white Americans have an infant mortality rate of 5.7, while African Americans have an exponentially higher rate of 14.0.

Poor black mothers are especially at risk for a variety of reasons, ranging from high rates of obesity (which can make ultrasound monitoring difficult and lead to diabetes, thus under-nourishing the fetus) to increased deaths from SIDS, accidents, and disease. Doctors are few and far between in rural counties, and local doctors report that many poor women have no prenatal care at all. In addition, the governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, has raised barriers for entrance into the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

All in all, not a rosy picture.

--Dana Goldstein

BIG MEDIA MATT. And a big -- what's the word? -- "woo!" to Matt Yglesias for turning MSM ("mainstream magazine"). Matt has been a powerful voice at The American Prospect over the past few years, and his contributions and presence will be dearly missed. More personally, Matt was my original inspiration for entering blogging, the first to ever link to a post of mine, the person who encouraged me to apply for The American Prospect's writing fellowship, my cubicle mate, and is a good friend. I'm lastingly grateful for all he's done for the magazine, sure, but also for all he's done for me.

In any case, us Prospecters will save you a chair at the Rooster and some cutlery to gesture with. Good luck, Ygz. And thanks.

--Ezra Klein

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ADMISSION IMPOSSIBLE? It's harder than ever to get into the top colleges, right? Not really, says Kevin Carey, who explains the statistical mistake -- the confusion between the number of college applicants and the number of college applications -- that launches a thousand scare pieces in newspapers every spring.

--The Editors

NY STATE OF MIND. My home city and state have made me proud these last few days. Two days ago, The New York Times reported that "nearly two-thirds of the members of the City Council are co-sponsoring a measure to shed a little light on the shadowy process by which co-op boards decide which apartment buyers to accept and which to reject." This is an important move to do away with a mechanism that currently allows illegal discrimination on the basis of age, race or other factors. Then, on Earth Day, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced an ambitious plan to reduce New York's pollution and contributions to greenhouse gas emissions (including a long overdue proposal for congestion pricing in Manhattan.) And finally, the Times reported today that "Gov. Eliot Spitzer will introduce a bill in the coming weeks to legalize same-sex marriage in New York." It is heartening to see cities and states take the lead on issues where Washington has remained so stubbornly retrograde.

But this is also a stark reminder of the importance of local elections and how much more effort progressives should be putting into them. Both Bloomberg's green initiatives and Spitzer's gay marriage proposal are likely to get caught in the quagmire that is Albany politics. In particular it is vexing to see that in New York, a state where Democrats hold a 5-3 advantage among registered voters, they still have not broken the Republican choke hold on the State Senate. For progressive change to happen from the ground up, activists and donors need to focus on state legislative races and the like -- both so that progressive policies can be passed at the state and local level, and so that Democrats can control the redistricting process. Until then, all the governor and mayor's good intentions may not make any real difference.

--Ben Adler

BREAUX SAVED BY THE ATTORNEY GENERAL. A political operative with insider connections to Louisiana politics tells me that John Breaux’s decision not to run for governor this year was motivated in part by the former senator’s rather comfortable retirement lifestyle, including a nice home in Maryland that Republicans said disqualified him as a non-resident ineligible to run. So Breaux took matters to the state’s attorney general, which gave a “non-definitive” ruling. At which point, Breaux balked. But the interesting twist here is that Breaux apparently wanted the AG’s office to either give a negative or no-opinion ruling precisely so he would have an excuse to get out.

Why? The strong rumor relayed to me is that Breaux, despite being one of the state’s most legendary and popular politicians, took one look at the $5 million so far raised by Republican candidate Bobby Jindal and, coupled with the post-Katrina devastation and out-of-state relocation of tens of thousands of New Orleans-area Democrats, feared he might embarrass himself by running and losing to Rep. Jindal. To get him off the hook, Breaux wanted anything but a green light from the Louisiana AG’s office -- because if he got the go-ahead and then dropped out everyone would know Breaux was too scared of losing.

--Tom Schaller

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: PRIVATIZING AND PROFITEERING. Robert Kuttner points out that the myriad problems with the private student loan industry illustrate why "it is often more efficient and less corrupting for government to do the public's business directly."

--The Editors

BORIS. Boris Yeltsin has shuffled off his mortal coil. In addition to providing some outstanding drunken buffoon stories, Yeltsin deserves mild credit for being the most liberal leader that Russia has had since, well, ever. He took real risks in an effort to liberalize both Russia's economy and political system, and while he might have done much more, I'm not sure what else we could have expected.

--Robert Farley

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A "PRO-LIFE" REPUBLICAN. The federal GOP's social and economic model Mississippi, as some of you know, is one of the more than 20 states with latent abortion bans that would come into effect if Roe v. Wade was overturned. (Although, of course, as Ben Wittes points out, going from abortion being legal in all 50 states to being banned in 15-25 states and more heavily regulated in many of the other states would actually be better for reproductive freedom because... I'm not going to lie to you, Marge. Well, goodbye!) And should the Court decline to overturn Roe explicitly, it has also been at the forefront of legislation instituting arbitrary regulations used to harass abortion clinics until they close.

Via Barbara O'Brien, however, after fetuses become children, the state's interest in them seems to wane somewhat. How did the "pro-life" Mississippi GOP respond to increases in infant mortality? I think you can guess:

In 2004, Gov. Haley Barbour came to office promising not to raise taxes and to cut Medicaid. Face-to-face meetings were required for annual re-enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP, the children’s health insurance program; locations and hours for enrollment changed, and documentation requirements became more stringent.

As a result, the number of non-elderly people, mainly children, covered by the Medicaid and CHIP programs declined by 54,000 in the 2005 and 2006 fiscal years. According to the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program in Jackson, some eligible pregnant women were deterred by the new procedures from enrolling.

One former Medicaid official, Maria Morris, who resigned last year as head of an office that informed the public about eligibility, said that under the Barbour administration, her program was severely curtailed.

“The philosophy was to reduce the rolls and our activities were contrary to that policy,” she said.

Mississippi’s Medicaid director, Dr. Robert L. Robinson, said in a written response that suggesting any correlation between the decline in Medicaid enrollment and infant mortality was “pure conjecture.”

Dr. Robinson said that the new procedures eliminated unqualified recipients. With 95 enrollment sites available, he said, no one should have had difficulty signing up.

As to Ms. Morris’s charge that information efforts had been curbed, Dr. Robinson said that because of the frequent turnover of Medicaid directors — he is the sixth since 2000 — “our unified outreach program was interrupted.” He said it has now resumed.

The state Health Department has cut back its system of clinics, in part because of budget shortfalls and a shortage of nurses. Some clinics that used to be open several days a week are now open once a week and some offer no prenatal care.

The department has also suffered management turmoil and reductions in field staff, problems so severe that the state Legislature recently voted to replace the director.

Oleta Fitzgerald, southern regional director for the Children’s Defense Fund, said: “When you see drops in the welfare rolls, when you see drops in Medicaid and children’s insurance, you see a recipe for disaster. Somebody’s not eating, somebody’s not going to the doctor and unborn children suffer.”

Providing further evidence for Barney Frank's dictum that for Republicans, life begins at conception and ends at birth.

--Scott Lemieux

LEDEENISM BACKFIRES IN IRAN. Laura Secor reports that Iranian regime-change advocate Michael Ledeen's writings are being used as a pretext to crack down on civil society reformers in Iran:

The reform era, Amir explained to me, may not have accomplished all Iranians had hoped it would in terms of structural political change. But it had opened a space that had not existed before. Khatami had made it possible for some 37,000 nongovernmental organizations to take root, addressing a panoply of social issues and human rights concerns at a granular level. In time, Amir insisted, even when the political space for reform had closed, this civil society could quietly grow, becoming a powerful force for change.

But there was a problem. The government had become convinced that the United States planned to finance and train these activists to overthrow the Islamic Republic, much as it had done in Serbia and elsewhere. In leaked intelligence reports Amir had seen, the regime had meticulously documented its case: "They quote the American Enterprise Institute and Michael Ledeen, as well as the statements of President Bush about civil society," he told me. On the basis of such evidence, the regime was pursuing an aggressive campaign against nongovernmental organizations as well as individual activists and journalists it named as part of a "spider's web" woven by the CIA.

Amir implored me to bring the message back to the U.S. government and think tanks to please stop expressing solidarity with Iranian dissidents.

No response yet from Ledeen.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

SORE WINNER. One would think that William Donohue, the mouth of the right-wing organization, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, would be humbly and joyously thanking his Creator for last week's merciless Supreme Court decision upholding the federal ban on the dilation & extraction method of abortion. Instead, the official bully of the Catholic right chooses to use the occasion, in this piece at Human Events Online, to rehash old, trumped-up charges against journalists who, when reporting on the nominations of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, noted that both men are conservative Roman Catholics. According to Donohue, who has made a career out of spewing resentment and worse, reporting on the biography of a Catholic Supreme Court nominee amounts to anti-Catholicism. (Note to my future biographers, I am a Roman Catholic and I don't mind if you say so.) In fact, Donohue confers upon the Prospect and yours truly a special prize:

When John Roberts was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, his Catholicism became an issue with pundits like NPR’s Nina Totenberg, ABC’s Barbara Walters, CNN’s Tony Harris, Slate’s Christopher Hitchens, the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne, Harper’s John MacArthur, former governor Mario Cuomo, et al. No one beat The American Prospect’s Adele Stan: She wrote that Bush was “playing the Catholic card” in nominating Roberts, and that “Rome must be smiling.”

(Note that the Rome must be smiling quote to which Donohue refers was a post on my personal blog, not part of a Prospect piece. My piece on the Roberts nomination for TAP Onlne can be found here.)

Donohue has long played a dishonest game -- supported by such upstanding types as Mary Ann Glendon,Kate O'Beirne, George Weigel, and Dinesh D'Souza, all of whom grace the Catholic League's Board of Advisors -- that conflates opposition to church teaching on women's rights with anti-Catholic bigotry. Yet, in his Human Events piece he asserts, "almost everyone associated with the pro-abortion movement has lied at one time or another." He neglects to note that one of his favorite co-religionists, Justice Alito, apparently bent the truth on his application for a job in the Justice Department when he claimed to have been a member of the anti-woman, anti-black Concerned Alumni of Princeton.

Calling those of us who opposed the additions of Roberts and Alito to the high court "anti-Catholic bullies," Donohue asks, "Must they be reminded that Senators Kennedy, Kerry, Leahy, Durbin and Dodd are also Catholic, and that they also support partial-birth abortion?" Not altogether true: Unfortunately, Leahy voted for the ban that the court upheld. And, yes, we know who our Catholic allies are, and sometimes call upon them, precisely because of their Catholicism, to stand firm in face of attacks from Donohue, whose organization hardly represents the beliefs of most U.S. Catholics.

Donohue's distemper in the face of his side's own victory begs the question: Why do such eminences as Glendon, Weigel and O'Beirne allow their names to be paired with that of this rageful bigot?

--Adele M. Stan

THE YOUTH VOTE: Zack Roth's piece in the new Washington Monthly on Tim Ryan, identifies a potentially important swing constituency in the '08 elections: young people. As Roth notes, "In last fall’s midterms, Democrats increased their share of the vote among eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds by 11 percentage points, while gaining only around 6 points with voters thirty and older, according to exit polls." So it is clear that young people have been up for grabs in recent years, and that performing well among them is key to the Democrats' success--especially because, as Roth points out, people who vote for the same party in several consecutive presidential elections before they turn 30 almost always stick with that party throughout their life. All of this is intensified by the fact that youth turnout has reached historic highs in the last two elections.

Right now, President Bush and Republicans poll particularly poorly among young people, as the recently released Harvard Institute of Politics poll results demonstrate (that poll was for 18-24 year olds.) But those numbers showing disapproval of President Bush's job performance and the country's direction are somewhat complicated by the fact that young people (ages 18-29) are actually the age demographic most likely to support the Iraq War.

So while it is clear that the Democrats must appeal to young people, it is not apparent how they should do so--attacking the Iraq War may not be the right answer. The Harvard poll gives some clues: young people support multilateralism and are concerned about genocide in Darfur. The first candidate to present a plan for an effective multilateral intervenetion, and to talk up a multilateral plan for Iraq withdrawal, may reap some major rewards. It should also be noted, though, that Rudy Giuliani leads all Republican contenders among young people. Given his prominence in 9/11, which happened when today's young voters were young adolescents, he might be the Republican candidate with the most appeal to them in the general election.

--Ben Adler

THE DOWD MANIFESTO. John Edwards, you're on notice: Maureen Dowd has proclaimed her intention to do everything in her power to destroy your candidacy.

No one should be surprised that Dowd would be all over the story of Edwards's $400 haircuts. After all, she is the least substantive of columnists, the most eager to grab on to some sartorial or personal grooming tidbit about a candidate and present it as not just a symbol of some larger deficiency of character, but as the very essence of the man or woman in question, the reason we should all sneer at the candidate in disgust.

And there's nothing Dowd loves more than calling politicians sissies. So this was how her Saturday column (available here to snooty elitist Times Select subscribers) began:

Whether or not the country is ready to elect a woman president or a black president, it's definitely not ready for a metrosexual in chief.

So Dowd will make it her personal mission to ensure that everyone within reach of her keyboard will be sure to know that John Edwards is just such a man, and therefore unworthy of the presidency. Let's take another taste of Dowd's delectable truffle of contempt:

Following his star turn primping his hair for two minutes on a YouTube video to the tune of "I Feel Pretty," Mr. Edwards this week had to pay back the $800 charged to his campaign for two shearings at Torrenueva Hair Designs in Beverly Hills. He seems intent of proving that he is a Breck Girl -- and a Material Boy.

"Breck Girl," huh? Where have we heard that before? Oh yes -- from the Republican National Committee! They're the ones who invented the slur, which they first shared with Adam Nagourney and Richard Stevenson of the Times, who put their juicy scoop into an article the paper ran in April 2003. No one much noticed, until six weeks later Dowd dropped it into her column, when she said, "the Breck Girl, as the Bushies call John Edwards, merely musters limp trash talk." ("Limp" -- get it? Ha ha!)

Since then, Dowd has called John Edwards "Breck Girl" in five separate columns.

The idea that the Democrat is weak, effeminate, and just plain girly is more than just the attack the Republicans will use against Edwards, it's the attack they have used against every Democratic presidential candidate since 1968. It is the essence of Republican presidential politics, the plea to white men that if they vote Democratic, people might think they're light in the loafers. And it works because of the enthusiastic cooperation of commentators like Maureen Dowd, queen of the Heathers, casting her lighting bolts of snide psycho-sexual humiliation down on anyone who fails to win her favor. Quite worthy of the Times op-ed page, the most valuable piece of real estate in the pundit universe, don't you think?

--Paul Waldman

APPEASING THE UNAPPEASABLE. I don't really agree with the take of my colleagues Garance and Ezra on Maureen Dowd's abjectly horrible column yesterday. The error they're making, I think, it to assume that these charges have some sort of objective merit to someone, or that there's some way of avoiding having junior high narratives being developed about you. Consider what similar advice given to Al Gore would look like (and there are many people who blamed Gore for running a horrible, horrible campaign and not adapting to the media.) He wouldn't be able to wear "earth tone" suits, or casual jackets, or Armani suits, or work clothes...actually, I'm not sure what he could wear. He couldn't discuss past political achievements because the media would distort them and make them look arrogant. He can't pass on things a newspaper told him about his friend's novel because it might not turn out to be fully true. He can't pay a feminist consultant. And on and on and on. And if he had done all of these things, Dowd, Rich, Connolly, et al. still would have just made stuff up out of whole cloth, as they in fact did. And it's the same thing with Kerry. If he engages in his actual hobbies, he's an upper class twit. If he does anything else, he's a phony. If he talks about NASCAR, Dowd will make him into a phony by lying about what he said. I assume the unwinnable choices and double standards facing Clinton are clear enough that going into detail would be belaboring the obvious.

In other words, I see no benefit to Edwards trying to appease this crowd. If he got a cheap- looking haircut, he would be attacked for that. If he tried to quietly get a mid-price haircut, he would be attacked as a flip-flopper who would really prefer to get expensive haircuts but is being a pandering phony. And then they will attack his suits, and his house, and his teeth, and his previous job, and his decision to betray his wife by staying in the race although she has cancer etc. etc. etc. Precisely because these narratives are 100% vacuous bull----, there's no way of avoiding them. If you want to read political significance into ordinary personality traits, a Dowd or a Givhan or anyone else who's won a Pulitzer for degrading our political discourse will find something. The best strategy is to ignore them, and if they must be engaged the goal should be to point out that they're clowns who have no business working on major newspapers. Maureen Dowd will be spending the next two years engaging in catty, sometimes dishonest gossip about Democratic candidates, and this will be true no matter what they do. Trying to change your behavior to accommodate this an inherently futile enterprise.

UPDATE: Since a couple of commenters seem to have misunderstood me, I should clarify that by "ignore" I mean that Democratic candidates should not attempt to change their campaigns in response to these silly narratives; as the Gore campaign demonstrates, this just makes things worse. If the response is to undermine the idiots who make these arguments, I repeat that I support this entirely. See also Matt on how these personality tautologies are part of a larger trap that inexorably tilts towards right-wing outcomes.

--Scott Lemieux

ON HOG FARMS AND MELAMINE. Now melamine has been found in pig urine at a California hog farm. The earlier melamine findings were all concentrated in pet foods, but this case brings out a connection to the human food chain.

The newest theory about how melamine (think of kitchen counters) ended up in wheat, rice and corn gluten is this:

Imported ingredients used in recalled pet food may have been intentionally spiked with an industrial chemical to boost their apparent protein content, federal officials said Thursday.

That's one theory being pursued by the Food and Drug Administration as it investigates how the chemical, melamine, contaminated at least two ingredients used to make more than 100 brands of dog and cat foods.

Hmm. See how well the "free markets" work when information is difficult to obtain?

Then there is the most recent recall of rice gluten. The U.S. importer, Wilbur-Ellis Co., told that it had sold the rice gluten to five manufacturers, but only three of their names have been made public so far. The reason? This:

FDA officials would not release the names of the other two manufacturers that Wilbur-Ellis supplied, citing its ongoing investigation.

Now let's see how this plays out among pet owners: "We don't know the names of those other two manufacturers. How can I know if what I'm feeding to Spot and Kitty is safe? But at least the manufacturers are protected while the FDA investigates. What a relief!"

--J. Goodrich

QUESTION. America: Do you really need caffeinated soap? Do you really need to wash with something that gives you a stimulant intake to two cups of coffee? I'm not saying you don't, just suggesting you may want to think about this first. Meanwhile, I'm totally patenting my idea for a fine caffeinated foam you spray on laptop keyboards so we absorb stimulants in direct proportion to how hard we're working.

--Ezra Klein

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WINNING THE PEACE. Reporting from Tel Aviv, Terence Samuel writes that it's clear there will be no true "mission accomplished" moment in Iraq. The Bush administration had best begin taking note that the conflicts in the Middle East will only be resolved through negotiations.

The volatile politics of the Middle East are a continuous refutation that military successes or defeats are ever as conclusive as we might expect. After 60 years of conflict, and still in the thrall of the debacle they call Second Lebanon War, Israelis are stumped about where to go next in their dealings with the Palestinians. The Arab League, after 60 years of conflict is talking about an "Arab initiative" for peace with Israel. No one is under any illusion that fighting here is at an end -- indeed, there is constant preparation for the next war -- but there is now a kind of weary understanding that the solution lies in some kind of negotiated deal. "Israel should give to peace the same money it now gives to security," said Israeli Housing Minister Meir Shetreet, an ambitious cabinet member trying to raise his profile by staking out what is he regards as a bold position. But even the most frustrated and cynical of voices here lament that there is no partner with whom to cut a deal.

President Bush should understand now that the war in Iraq will end in exactly the kind of military ambiguity that exists today.

Read the whole thing here.

--The Editors

PLOTTING FOR '08 ... CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS. The NYT had a column today about how the Republicans are already working to characterize as "disastrous" some of the early congressional votes made by the new Democrats. The GOP is using the politics of parliamentary procedure that the story calls "formally known as motions to recommit, usually obscure party-line proposals that Republicans are using to pummel Democrats in swing districts."

The lesson to take away from this (and the disastrous labeling of Kerry as a flip-flopper) is that the general public is confused by the technicalities of Congress, and clever campaign managers can spin almost anything to sound like the a candidate voted to pass horrible legislation. May the voters be willing to see through the hype and may the reporters make sure to fully and throughly examine congressional records in the other '08 elections.

--Kay Steiger

THE BANK. Phil DeVellis, most recently known as the creater of the (in)famous "Hillary 1984" video, has teamed up with the global activism group Avaaz and released a very funny mash-up of "The Office" and Paul Wolfowitz's troubles, called "The Bank":

Although, in the scheme of things, I can't say it's not disappointing that Wolfowitz won't be brought down for the disastrous, murderous, catastrophic war he helped unleash, but instead some run-of-the-mill nepotism.

--Ezra Klein

FIVE MEN DECIDING FOR 150,000,000 WOMEN. I'm struck by Sarah's point about the Right's "New Paternalism," and its interplay with Justice Kennedy's opinion. Kennedy argued that that it is “self-evident” that “a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she did not know.” As Sarah explains, "his twisted remedy, though, is not to ensure that a woman has adequate information; it’s to ensure that she has no option. Her moral judgment is completely eviscerated."

It is hard, in all of this, not to grow increasingly enraged at the makeup of the Court generally and the conservative bloc specifically. Kennedy could theorize all he wanted about female reactions to abortion: Within the group that voted to uphold the ban, there was not one woman. Five men made this decision for 150,000,000 women. Five men obviated the moral judgment of 150,000,000 women. And it is no surprise, surely, that the retirement of the conservative bloc's only female -- O'Connor -- finally permitted the deemphasis of maternal health in abortion cases, and that not one of the conservatives had the humility to retain O'Connor's insight after her exit.

--Ezra Klein

NO CHANCE. I'm frankly baffled by Ilya Somin's claim that there are plausibly five votes to strike down the PBA Act on Commerce Clause grounds. The most obvious problem with his argument is that it entirely ignores the Raich decision, under which the Commerce Clause issue presented by the Act is plainly insubstantial.

Obtaining an abortion is much more clearly a commercial transaction than growing medical marijuana for personal use, and given the dearth of abortion providers in the country abortion is certainly an interstate market. The idea that Scalia and Kennedy, both strongly personally anti-abortion, would switch votes given a more favorable set of facts is implausible in the extreme. It is true that the Court's personnel has changed, but the two Justices who left the Court were two of the three dissenters in Raich. At best, Roberts and Alito would be treading water, but both are demonstrably hostile to reproductive rights and lack Thomas's commitment to grand theory, so this strikes me as unlikely in any case.

The only other chance, then, would be if some of the Court's liberals would act as unprincipled hacks; I don't think there's any reason to assume that, as they've been entirely consistent on Commerce cases. (Certainly, Stevens's and Ginsburg's brief questions at oral argument -- which seemed to be much more about tweaking conservatives than about advancing a position -- aren't good evidence.) Similarly, the fact that Scalia joined Thomas's concurrence means nothing, since it didn't advance any position on the merits. Thomas, as far as I can tell, is the only likely vote to strike, and there's no chance at all that there would be five.

--Scott Lemieux

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: GUNS, DRUGS, AND THE MASSACRE IN VIRGINIA. Robert Reich ponders the respective powers of the National Rifle Association and Big Pharma.

--The Editors

NEW PATERNALISM. I finally reached my friend and coauthor Reva Siegel, who has long seen in her crystal ball up at Yale Law School what only appeared to the rest of the world in yesterday’s “partial birth” opinion from SCOTUS: that the anti-abortion movement reframed its arguments against abortion in ways that seem to protect women while in fact actually constraining them. This is a key new turn in the anti-abortion strategy: to argue that women are natural mothers who would not naturally choose abortion, and therefore need protection from the option. (This strategy is laid out brilliantly in Reva’s newly published lecture.)

Writes Justice Kennedy, indulging in some stereotypes straight out of the antis’ new playbook:

Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child. … While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they created and sustain. See Brief for Sandra Cano et al. as Amici Curiae in No. 05.380, pp. 22.24. Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.

While it was good of the justice to acknowledge “no reliable data,” he failed to acknowledge that the sources on which he does base these conclusions are equally unreliable. The brief for Sandra Cano, the "Doe" in the Roe companion case Doe v. Bolton, he cites is a collection of affidavits put together not by researchers looking at the effects of abortion but by the vehemently anti-abortion lawyers representing Cano. Her lawyers run the Texas-based Justice Foundation, which collected affidavits of women who regret their abortions in a project specifically aimed at attacking abortion in the courts. The project, called Operation Outcry, has affidavit forms on its site (also available through some crisis pregnancy centers) with the following introduction: “By providing a sworn statement, called an affidavit, you story can be used as evidence in legal cases.” (They also have an affidavit for men.) A representative sample answering an unbiased question this is not.

The problem is, these affidavits along with some very shoddy pseudo science, have made there way to some very significant places including several state legislatures -- most famously South Dakota -- considering abortion bans and several lower courts considering informed consent cases. Now Kennedy has bought their narrative hook, line, and sinker, writing that it is “self-evident” that “a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she did not know.” His twisted remedy, though, is not to ensure that a woman has adequate information; it’s to ensure that she has no option. Her moral judgment is completely eviscerated. “This is,” writes Jack Balkin, “the New Paternalism that is now central to the rhetoric of the pro-life movement. Either a woman is crazy when she undergoes an abortion, or she will become crazy later on.”

--Sarah Blustain

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: IRSHAD MANJI'S FLYING LEAP. Madeleine Elfenbein describes the controversy sparked by Muslim dissident Irshad Manji. Tonight, as part of its "America at the Crossroads" series, PBS airs Manji's documentary, "Faith Without Fear."

--The Editors

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE. Lynn Paltrow explains how the Supreme Court's ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart will affect every woman who becomes pregnant -- not just those who decide to have an abortion.

--The Editors

PERLS BEFORE SWINE. Author Rick Perlstein has signed on to do a new blog on the conservative movement, The Big Con, for the Campaign for America's Future, where he's now a senior fellow. Check it out.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE CLOVEN-HOOFED ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. Count on Fox News to ask the tough questions:

Was Cho Seung-Hui schizophrenic … psychotic … manic-depressive? Or were the shooting deaths of 32 people, including Cho himself, at Virginia Tech University part of the ongoing struggle between God and Satan … good against evil … lightness and darkness?

Could Cho have been possessed by the Devil? Could that explain the massacre at Virginia Tech?

Dr. Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University, shouts an unequivocal “Yes!”

“Based on what I’ve seen in the news," Roberts said in an interview, "there’s no doubt that this act was Satanic in origin."

Well that explains it. Meanwhile, there are some people out there even more despicable than the Derb. Neal Boortz, whose syndicated radio show is heard on hundreds of stations, said on Tuesday, “How the hell do 25 students allow themselves to be lined up against the wall in a classroom and picked off one by one? How does that happen, when they could have rushed the gunman, the shooter, and most of them would have survived?" You’ll notice here that Boortz is simply making things up to support his attack on the murdered victims at Virginia Tech. We know that no one was “lined up against the wall,” because there were survivors from every classroom who have told the media what happened. He simply burst into the room and started shooting. But sticking to, and stay with me here -- the facts -- would make it harder to vilify these young people whose families and friends are currently suffering the depths of a grief I have a feeling Neal Boortz has never known.

--Paul Waldman

AGAINST UNILATERAL DISARMAMENT. It may not come as a shock that I agree with Matt's conclusion that Roewas correctly decided on the merits. (For those who haven't seen it, I lay out a three-part case for Roe here, here, and here.) Matt makes another important point about the pro-choice anti-Roe crowd who base their claims not so much on doctrinal analysis as a general claim about whether courts rather than legislatures should decide "cultural issues":

The primary motive for this, I think, is that people find it odd that such a controversial issue as abortion rights should be decided primarily by the courts. They also feel, intuitively, that it's weird to leap so suddenly from one stance to another. I tend to agree that this is odd. The oddness, however, is right at the heart of the institution of judicial review as practiced in the United States. I'm of the opinion that this institution isn't a great idea and that many other countries have found more satisfactory institutional mechanisms for the relationship between courts and legislatures. There's no question, however, that strong judicial review is the system we actually have and reproductive freedom advocates have every reason to press our case vigorously through America's actual institutions rather than act in some make-believe universe where the United States has a generally majoritarian set of political institutions.

Like Matt, I am skeptical of judicial supremacy as a normative matter, and I certainly don't believe that it's necessary for liberal democracy. But Roe has to be evaluated within the set of institutions the United States actually has, not the one some analysts wish we had. (Moreover, it should be noted that given the Madisionian legislative framework abandoning judicial review would not create reliably more "majoritarian" outcomes.) Liberals shouldn't unilaterally disarm. And within this framework, Roe is a logical application of long-standing precedents that prevents bad legislation that is often arbitrary in form and in application, and it should be defended vigorously.

--Scott Lemieux

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: DIS-INEVITABILITY. Mike Tomasky does some speculating and number-crunching about the Democratic presidential primary:

Three strong candidates, all with dedicated backing and none informally anointed by the party brass or donor base, is something the Democratic Party hasn't seen in ages. One could say 1988, but even then, there weren't really three first-tier candidates (I don't think Al Gore was a first-tier candidate at that point in his career) who had the money to carry their campaigns into March. You can bet -- and this is the key thing -- that if the delegate count stays close into mid- to late February, all three campaigns will be raising plenty enough money to carry them into April. And it's possible, just possible, that after Montana and South Dakota vote on June 3, no one will have 2,600 delegates. Here, the role of the 800 or so "super-delegates," the elected officials and other potentates who can hold their commitments back until late, will loom large.

Maybe, just maybe, this means a brokered convention is possible this year. Read the whole column here.

--The Editors

EVENT: SOLDIERS AND THE MEDIA. TAP senior editor Tara McKelvey will take part in a Harvard University forum, "Soldiers and the Media" (part of a three-day series on human rights).

Saturday, April 21, 12 p.m.
Barker Center for the Humanities, 12 Quincy Street
Cambridge, Mass.
Free and open to the public

Renowned author Elaine Scarry (Body In Pain) will make opening remarks for the event at noon. Panelists include Deborah Scranton, director of The War Tapes, which was named best documentary feature at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival; award-winning journalist Nancy Updike, producer for This American Life; James Der Derian, Professor and Director of the Global Security Program at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University; Helen Benedict, novelist and Professor of Journalism at Columbia University; and McKelvey, who is author of the forthcoming book, Monstering: Inside America's Policy on Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War.

--The Editors

TIP-OFFS. In a story that would be utterly hilarious were the consequences less lethal, agricultural giant Wilbur-Ellis has submitted to a national recall of their rice protein concentrate, which has been tainted with Melamine and is poisoning the pet foods. From their press release:

Last Sunday, April 15, Wilbur-Ellis notified the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that a single bag in a recent shipment of rice protein concentrate from its Chinese supplier, Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Co. Ltd., had tested positive for melamine. Unlike the other white-colored bags in that shipment, the bag in question was pink and had the word ‘melamine’ stenciled upon it.

--Ezra Klein

WHOA. This is a fairly optimistic representation of my work by SEIU. They have, on their site, a link to both the interview I did with Stern and my afterthoughts on it. "American Prospect writing fellow and blogger Ezra Klein interviewed SEIU President Andy Stern last week about the union’s involvement in – and the consequences of – the Better Health Care Together partnership. Hours later, Klein posted this follow-up commentary endorsing SEIU’s strategy."

"Endorsing," huh? The post is here. Judge for yourself whether it's an endorsement.

Update: I should probably be more explicit. I think what Stern is doing could turn out to be truly brilliant, or genuinely catastrophic. It could bring Wal-Mart into the fight for universal health care, or take the pressure off them without getting anything in return. We'll have to wait and see. That said, "endorsement" is a strong term for a post that's half criticism, and it sort of wipes out my actual points -- hence my snap reaction. However, as some in the comments pointed out, the SEIU web site links to both the interview and the post, and so is being quite transparent, even as the descriptions cause me to bridle a bit.

--Ezra Klein

THE "STATES' RIGHTS" SCAM. As a follow-up to Garance below, it's worth noting that in a sane universe yesterday would put an end to the already-silly idea that most Republicans have a strong commitment to state autonomy, or that Republican opposition to the Supreme Court's abortion jurisprudence is about preserving state power rather than about a substantive opposition to abortion. (You may remember this nonsense recently in the New York Times from staunch feminist Ann Althouse, who claimed that Rudy Giuliani's intent to pack the courts with statist reactionaries who would allow the state to force women to carry pregnancies to term is about enhancing freedom (!) because it was really about states' rights. Rudy, needless to say, supported yesterday's opinion; how this fits into his alleged belief that abortion should constitutionally be left to the states is unclear.)

Congress not only passed a ban on a federal abortion procedure, but as Garance points out pre-empted state regulations not to put forward an alternative policy but just to stop states from making their own policy choices. Whatever the constitutional merits of these decisions, then, the idea that Republican opposition to Roe stems from a principled commitment to states' rights is farcical. Since giving more power to the states will more often than not lead to substantive outcomes conservatives find congenial -- less regulation of the economy, more regulation of individual moral choices -- it's a convenient selectively applied rhetorical trope. But as the laws upheld yesterday make abundantly clear, the number of people who will choose "federalism" when it actually conflicts with a strongly held substantive principle could fit in an economy Tokyo studio.

--Scott Lemieux

IN OTHER SUPREME COURT NEWS. Nathan Newman flags the Watters v. Wachovia decision to uphold a regulation exempting the mortgage subsidiaries of banks from regulation by state laws. Newman calls this "a gift to predatory lenders" and notes that the Bush's administration's decision to block the state laws, which the Court upheld, "directly fed the predatory lending mortgage bubble and helped encourage the abuses that may lead to 2.2 million subprime borrowers facing foreclosure on their home loans."

More importantly, as Justice John Paul Stevens noted in his dissent, "Never before have we endorsed administrative action whose sole purpose was to pre-empt state law rather than to implement a statutory command." The precedent being set here is very odd.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

RE: THE SUPREMES. I want to point out Yale law professor Jack Balkin's reading of yesterday's Court decision, which is fairly illuminative:

[T]he Court emphasizes Casey’s holding that states have legitimate interests in protecting potential life throughout the pregnancy. The Court uses this interest to justify the ban on intact D&E. But there is a strange lack of fit between the interest asserted and the means used to further it. Banning intact D&E does not save a single fetus’ life. Rather, it requires doctors to use standard (non-intact) forms of D&E or, as the Court at one point suggests, to inject the fetus with a chemical that kills it and then to remove the fetus intact. The actual interest the Court is asserting is not the interest in protecting potential life but rather an interest in not having the life of fetuses ended in ways that the legislature regards as particularly gruesome. That might be a legitimate interest (pace Lawrence v. Texas), but it is not the interest in potential life recognized in Casey.

--Ezra Klein

MATURITY. Remember last week, when David Brooks suggested that though John McCain was completely wrong on Iraq, his campaign would be revived as Americans understood how much more serious he was about Middle East politics than the other candidates? "In 10 months," wrote Brooks, "this election won’t be about the surge, it will be about the hydra-headed crisis roiling the Middle East. The candidate who is the most substantive, most mature and most consistent will begin to look more attractive and more necessary."

Anyway, here's the substantive and mature candidate himself, reworking the Beach Boys' song "Barbara Ann" to go, "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran..."

Good times.

--Ezra Klein

WHEN DID HE KNOW ORDER IT? Right out of the box at today's big hearing, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez cast himself as the fall guy for decisions made by "the White House," i.e., President George W. Bush and his Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. In the opening volley of questions served by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Partrick Leahy, Gonzo said that he would never have initiated the removal of of U.S. attorney for political reasons, "nor do I believe that anybody in the department would advocate for such a purpose." (Emphasis added.) The attorney general then admitted that he had "heard concerns" about U.S. attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico from Rove and "the president." Iglesias, you'll recall, refused to pursue a voter fraud case against Democrats prior to the 2006 congressional elections (he was not able to find damning evidence), which prompted a phone call from New Mexico's Republican Sen. Pete Domenici, who improperly attempted to pressure Iglesias to prosecute the targeted Democrats. Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) called Iglesias with a similar message.

It's time to renew demands that Rove be made to testify before the Judiciary Committee on his role in preparing this little enemies list.

--Adele M. Stan

FOUR THINGS TO REMEMBER WHEN READING GONZALES V. CRAHART. As an antidote to the inevitable chorus of fake moderates arguing that yesterday's abortion case is no big deal, four things to keep in mind as you ponder today's decision:

• Don't take assertions by the Court about whether they're overturning precedents or not at face value. What matters is the substance of the ruling, not how the Court characterizes past precedents. (The Court went out of its way to avoid saying that they were overturning Plessy in Brown, and then applied it as if it meant exactly that.) Moreover, the Roberts/Alito strategy of quietly gutting precedents -- epitomized in this case -- is much worse for those who oppose their legal goals than the Thomas/Scalia willingness to overturn precedents directly and honestly. The result of this type of case is a sharp restriction in the reproductive freedom of women without the political benefits of an outright reversal.
• Making it much harder to successfully strike an abortion statute on facial grounds, as the Court has just done, may seem like a mere technicality but is a big deal. I explain why here. Not only will this change in the standard applied by Casey make litigation to protect a woman's reproductive freedom much more expensive and difficult, but it will have the perverse effect of making the fact that abortion regulations almost invariably have much more impact on poor, rural women an argument in their favor.

• The next time someone claims that overturning Roe would "send the issue back to the states," make sure to point out that they don't have any idea what the hell they're talking about.
• And finally, let's also remember the underlying gender assumptions of those who support the power of the states and the federal government. Ann has already noted this powerful passage in Justice Ginsburg's brilliant dissent: "Revealing in this regard, the Court invokes an antiabortion shibboleth for which it concededly has no reliable evidence: Women who have abortions come to regret their choices, and consequently suffer from '[s]evere depression and loss of esteem.' Because of women's fragile emotional state and because of the bond of love the mother has for her child,' the Court worries, doctors may withhold information about the nature of the intact D&E procedure. The solution the Court approves, then, is not to require doctors to inform women, accurately and adequately, of the different procedures and their attendant risks. Instead, the Court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety. This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Constitution ideas that have long since been discredited." Given Alito's assumption that the state has the same interest in regulating married adult women is it has in regulating children, that he would vote to uphold this ban isn't exactly shocking.

--Scott Lemieux

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WHAT THE SENATORS SHOULD ASK. Mark Kleiman lays out the questions he'd like to hear today at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing featuring Alberto Gonzales.

--The Editors

THE FINE PRINT. Over at Feministing, Ann helpfully linked to Cynthia Gorney’s old Harper’s article on the politics of the SCOTUS-approved ban against dilation and extraction abortions. The article helps to clarify a few questions asked in comments here and elsewhere about yesterday's decision:

• Yesterday’s Gonzales v. Carhart ruling contains a provision protecting the life of the mother, but not her health. According to Doe v. Bolton, the little-known case decided on the same day as Roe, women’s "health" must be protected under any abortion ban after fetal viability. "Health" was defined as "all factors -- physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age -- relevant to the well-being of the patient." The Supreme Court eviscerated that precedent yesterday.
• Dilation and Extraction -- re-dubbed "partial-birth abortion" by anti-choicers -- does not equal "late term abortion." It is a procedure by which the fetus is removed intact from the womb instead of in pieces. Why would a doctor and patient choose this procedure? For many women ending a second- or third-trimester desired pregnancy because of a birth defect -- some of which may prohibit a baby from ever living outside of the womb -- holding their fetus is a way to grieve and bring closure to their pregnancies.
• Another benefit of Dilation and Extraction is that it decreases the likelihood of bleeding and pain inside the woman’s uterus and vagina. This is important to many women who plan on having children in the future.

--Dana Goldstein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: OUR ENEMY'S ENEMY. Al-Qaeda has increasingly been making some Sunni enemies in Iraq. Does that vindicate the "surge"? Hardly. As Marc Lynch discusses today, the most important recent development in Iraqi Sunni politics has been the spike in tensions between al-Qaeda and major insurgent factions. And this development actually bolsters the case for a U.S. withdrawal. Read the piece here.

--The Editors

RE: PBA BAN. It's basically TAPPED dogma -- as contributed by LeMew -- that the counter-mobilization theories about an abortion ban are BS. In other words, today's Supreme Court decision is not likely to produce an equal and instant counter-reaction among pro-choicers that'll lead to Republicans losing seats and state legislatures guaranteeing reproductive rights. I agree with that. And I think the problem is in part that the conservative position lends itself better to a strategy of incrementalism than does the liberal position. It's easier to offer a thousand tiny pieces of legislation slowly restricting choice than to create bills expanding on it. So my question, largely for Scott but for anyone, is whether there's any legislative strategy that makes sense here. Could Congress -- were they so inclined (and, of course, they aren't) -- go and insert a health-of-the-mother provision? In a perfect world, what would a progressive legislative strategy look like here?

--Ezra Klein

PARTIAL DEATH OF CHOICE. I agree with Dana, Scott and Ezra on the implications of the SCOTUS decision. It is also useful to look at the wider context of this decision: It is about a rare abortion procedure only used in cases where the woman has not otherwise planned to terminate the pregnancy, where the pregnancy is often a desired one and where something is very wrong with the health of either the pregnant woman or her fetus.

Now add the absence of any concern for the woman's health in this ban, short of a direct threat to her life, and what do we get? A situation in which arguing for the woman's general rights for reproductive choice looks morally deficient. After all, if women carrying a desired fetus can be asked to sacrifice their own health in this way, what arguments can the rest of us women use?

--J. Goodrich

"PARTIAL-BIRTH" ABORTION. Ugh, Dana, that's some nasty news. The Court's decision to uphold the "Partial-Birth" Abortion ban without forcing it to offer exceptions for maternal health is dangerous, both medically and legally. Legally because it opens the door to all sorts of small-bore regulations and restrictions that will, over time, convert abortions into a privilege mainly offered to the white and well-off. As Hadley Arkes predicted over at First Things, this decision will mean the effective, if not actual, end of Roe.

[I]f Roberts and Alito help simply to overturn that prior decision on partial-birth abortion, my own judgment the regime of Roe will have come to its end, even if Roe itself is not explicitly overruled. What the Court would be saying in effect is, “We are now in business to consider seriously, and to sustain, many plausible measures that impose real restrictions on abortion.”

That would invite a flood of measures enacted by the states. They might be restrictions on abortion after the point of viability, for instance, or even earlier, with the first evidence of a beating heart. Or requirements that abortionists use a method more likely to yield the child alive. Or provisions that ban abortions on a child likely to be afflicted with disabilities, such as Down syndrome.

Each restriction would command the support of about 70 or 80 percent of the country, including many people who describe themselves as pro-choice. And step by step, the public would get used to these cardinal notions: that the freedom to order abortions, like any other kind of freedom, may be subject to plausible restrictions; that it is legitimate for legislatures to enact those restrictions; and that it is, in fact, possible for ordinary folk, with ordinary language, to deliberate about the grounds on which abortions could be said to be justified or unjustified.

--Ezra Klein

ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. As Dana notes below, the Supreme Court has upheld the federal "Partial Birth" Abortion Ban Act, which as I have argued in detail, was 1) inevitable with Alito's appointment to the Court, and 2) very bad. It was, I suppose, also inevitable that it would come down while I'm on the road, and I therefore haven't finished reading the decision yet. In the meantime, I note that almost everything that needs to be said about the constitutionality of these laws was said by Justice Stevens in his concurrence in Stenberg v. Carhart, which the Court (despite its disingenuous claims to be following precedent) effectively overrules today:

Although much ink is spilled today describing the gruesome nature of late-term abortion procedures, that rhetoric does not provide me a reason to believe that the procedure Nebraska here claims it seeks to ban is more brutal, more gruesome, or less respectful of "potential life" than the equally gruesome procedure Nebraska claims it still allows. Justice Ginsburg and Judge Posner have, I believe, correctly diagnosed the underlying reason for the enactment of this legislation -- a reason that also explains much of the Court's rhetoric directed at an objective that extends well beyond the narrow issue that this case presents. The rhetoric is almost, but not quite, loud enough to obscure the quiet fact that during the past 27 years, the central holding of Roe v. Wade, has been endorsed by all but 4 of the 17 Justices who have addressed the issue. That holding -- that the word "liberty" in the Fourteenth Amendment includes a woman's right to make this difficult and extremely personal decision -- makes it impossible for me to understand how a State has any legitimate interest in requiring a doctor to follow any procedure other than the one that he or she reasonably believes will best protect the woman in her exercise of this constitutional liberty. But one need not even approach this view today to conclude that Nebraska's law must fall. For the notion that either of these two equally gruesome procedures performed at this late stage of gestation is more akin to infanticide than the other, or that the State furthers any legitimate interest by banning one but not the other, is simply irrational. See U. S. Const., Amdt. 14.

Upholding ludicrously arbitrary legislation that puts women's health at risk without furthering any legitimate state interest, while signaling that the "undue burden" standard will be interpreted to uphold virtually any abortion regulation short of a ban, sets an extremely dangerous precedent. I'll have more later.

--Scott Lemieux

CONFUSING AND CONTRADICTORY SNIPPETS. Waxman's Oversight Committee asked Secretary Rice to appear (after delaying her appearance to April 25) in order to investigate her "personal role" in the false reports on uranium in Niger. (Download the full documents here.) Waxman writes that the State department's responses thus far have been a "collection of snippets of public statements that [Rice] and other White House officials have made over the years" that are "confusing and contradictory."

The State department refused the request in a seven-page statement issued yesterday by Assistant Secretary Jeffrey Bergner, spottily detailing the events from the beginning of the war. It begins, "The President's speech did not actually refer to Niger, but to Africa." Their argument now seems to be that although the reports that Niger was selling uranium were false, other countries could have been the ones Bush meant when he referred to "Africa." It also says that Rice "does not have the information necessary to respond to this request" and furthermore, that the state department does not "maintain comprehensive records on this issue."

Talk about the incompetence dodge.

--Kay Steiger

CHANGE THE SUBJECT, ALREADY. The Supreme Court made the historical (and very scary) decision this morning to uphold the Bush Administration 2003 “partial-birth” abortion ban, which affects certain abortion procedures as early as the 12th week of pregnancy and contains no exception at all for women’s health. This limiting of abortion rights is clearly unconstitutional as defined by Roe and Casey.

I’ve been watching CNN all day and so far, it’s all Virginia Tech, all the time. Not even a mention of the Court’s decision.

--Dana Goldstein

CROSSED SIGNALS. The Bush administration had better gets its story straight on how harmful timetables are for Iraqi morale because, speaking as a credulous American citizen, I'm getting confused:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates yesterday affirmed a core element of war critics' strategy -- that the prospect of redeployment offers our best tool for motivating the Iraqi government. Speaking during a Middle East tour, Gates said the debate in Congress "has been helpful in demonstrating to the Iraqis that American patience is limited. The strong feelings expressed in the Congress about the timetable probably has had a positive impact...in terms of communicating to the Iraqis that this is not an open-ended commitment." Last year, Bush sent the exact opposite message to Americans. "Artificial timetable for withdrawal sends the wrong message to the Iraqis, they're seeing it's not worth it," Bush said. "Artificial timetable for withdrawal...sends the message to the enemy, we were right about America. That's what they said. Al Qaeda has said it's just a matter of time before America withdraws. They're weak, they're corrupt, they can't stand it, and they'll withdraw. And all that would do is confirm what the enemy thinks." Likewise, just last week, Vice President Cheney said setting a timeline "sends a message to our enemies that the calendar is their friend, that all they have to do is wait us out -- wait for the date certain, and then claim victory the day after."

--Ezra Klein

OOH, PRIVATIZATION! The Coast Guard has lost eight patrol boats. Eight expensive patrol boats. Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen announced this morning that the boats would be decommissioned because of hull cracks and other problems. The boats are part of the Deepwater program, which was intended to substantially modernize the entire Coast Guard fleet. As a series by Eric Lipton in The New York Times detailed a few months ago, the Deepwater program has been plagued by cost overruns, design problems, and serious issues with contractors. The initial arrangement, as David Axe details, gave significant latitude to a partnership between Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman in assigning secondary contracts. That arrangement has ended, and the Coast Guard has resumed its oversight role.

It would be tempting and all too easy to blame the problems of Deepwater on a misplaced mania for the privatization of critical government functions. Accordingly, I'll do just that. The principle-agent problems associated with essentially handing the henhouse to the fox should have been obvious from the beginning. "Iron Triangle" dynamics have made the situation worse, as retired Coast Guard officers slide easily into jobs with top contractors. Even minimal hopes for oversight get quashed, and tremendous waste predictably results.

Let's hope that the project can be righted. The Coast Guard plays an important and oft-overlooked role in U.S. defense, and its fleet is in need of an update.

--Robert Farley

IRAN IN AFGHANISTAN. Setting aside the question of whether reports of Iranian assistance to the Taliban can be taken seriously (it's possible that some private or government elements in Iran could see some advantage in cooperating with the Taliban, in spite of past hostility), the important thing to remember is that Iran was of great assistance to the United States in the initial Afghan campaign. Instead of attempting to build on that cooperation and actually, you know, fight al-Qaeda, the Bush administration preferred to adopt a stance of hostility. This stance has failed utterly to advance any United States foreign policy goal.

One doesn't need to sympathize with the Iranian state to believe that cooperation between Iran and the U.S. could be productive. Hostility is a defensible policy if it goes anywhere, but it really hasn't; Iran's nuclear program is more advanced now than it was five years ago, its government doesn't seem any closer to collapse, and it may (or may not) be aiding enemies of the United States in two different wars. At some point a policy choice should result in, well, results, and the only thing that U.S. policy has achieved is an excessively paranoid and angry Iran.

--Robert Farley

THE DEFICIT-REDUCTION DEBATE. To follow up briefly on Ezra's post, whereas Brad DeLong's friend refers to Bob Kuttner "trashing Democrats" rather than "arguing about the future of a party" or "thinking about policies" or "discussing issues," his piece on Robert Rubin does take on (among others) the substantive issue of balanced budgets, their role in the '90s boom, and their primacy as a progressive economic goal. (It's in the section starting with the line, "As we were going to press ... ") Kuttner refers to research done by Dean Baker, among others, as well as arguments made by Joseph Stiglitz offering skepticism about the role of deficit reduction in the '90s boom. This was a debate taken up somewhat in 2004 in DeLong and Jeff Faux's parallel assessments of Rubin for the Prospect, and it's a debate we'll likely be taking up again on TAP Online soon.

--Sam Rosenfeld

HMMMM. I see Keelin McDonell has decided that just mentioning the domestic violence angle raised by the police as an explanation for their actions in the Virginia Tech shootings is a great chance to haul out the hoary neoliberal anti-PC schtick I'm sure we all remember exhaustedly from the 1980s. Did I allege "good-ole'-boy misogyny" in this item? No. Did I try to make this "a lesson about un-PC attitudes"? Not unless you think trying to figure out ways that the horrific murder of 32 people could possibly have been prevented is a futile exercise in P.C. Did I decry "sexist" attitudes? No. I never used that word, and for good reason. Had the initial murders been related to "drugs or gambling rather than romance," I'd have made the same point about taking all murders seriously as threats to the community and not just small groups of individuals who know each other. Though I do suspect a drug murder, at least, might have been taken a bit more seriously, since drug addicts are thought to be especially unpredictable and bad, bad people.

But that's purely hypothetical. What's not hypothetical is that murders on college campuses are extremely rare. According to the FBI, there were fewer than five of them in 2005. And Ross Douthat is correct to note that there's no more reason to think intimate partner murders would lead to additional violence than would any other murder. But there's also no less reason to think so, and, since it's human nature to second guess tragedies -- the sad mental refrain "if only, if only" drums alike in every skull -- the point here is to try to see if there can be any lessons learned (cheesy as that phrase may be).

So far, the clearest lesson is that police and college administrators ought to treat every college murder with the same level of concern and speedy community notification, whether they think it was intimate partner violence or not, because every on-campus murder is an "extraordinary" occurrence. There are so few murders on college campuses that such a standard won't create any onerous burdens on colleges, and it's certainly going to be easier for everyone to make that change than to, say, alter the gun-laws in Virginia.

In any event, the more information we get the more it's looking as though the initial police conclusion -- that the the first two murders were an intimate partner incident or some kind of love triangle -- was incorrect. The first woman killed appears to have had no relationship to the shooter, and for all we know the killer never found his girlfriend, for whom witnesses say he was searching. It's possible nothing could have changed yesterday's outcome, and that even immediate notification of the student body of the first murders would have been too little to prevent further carnage, given the killer's grim determination. But right now it's hard for people to hear much over the thudding refrain, if only, if only.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

DE-DEIFYING RUBIN. Brad DeLong is not a fan of last month's cover story on Robert Rubin. "It is," he wrote, "the shoddiest thing I have seen The American Prospect publish," which I take as high praise indeed, as I thought it was pretty good! In any case, I'm not Bob Kuttner, and so can only offer up what I got from the article, but DeLong strikes me as too harsh.

Brad's primary problem lies with Bob's recounting of instances when Rubin, a banker by trade, pushed American economic policy in much the way you would expect a banker to have done so. Brad thinks this is a charge of corruption -- "Kuttner does want his readers to think that Rubin is a devious, self-interested plutocrat" -- which isn't quite how I read it. Kuttner's point, I think, was slightly different. It wasn't that Rubin's motivations are malign, but that his history is specific: Rubin's a Wall Street guy. A banker. And while he is a notably public-spirited and even progressive banker, he tends to come down much as a banker would, prioritizing a pro-trade, deficit- reduction agenda. Indeed, I don't think Kuttner is on unsafe ground when he writes, "the Rubin program offers nothing to fundamentally alter the economic risk and stagnation afflicting the broad working middle class." It was Rubin, after all, who convinced the nascent Clinton administration to do NAFTA before health reform -- which I judge a critical mistake. Reasonable people, of course, can disagree on whose priorities are correct, but it's hard to argue with the point that Rubin's priorities and points of focus come from a lifetime in markets, and he may be more concerned about health care had he emerged from a different profession.

None of this is a particularly hard knock on Rubin. Discussions about economic priorities should have lots of perspectives. The problem is, too often, only Rubin's is heard. As Kuttner recounts, "[w]hen 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." Rubin is treated as an economic demigod among the Democrats, and Kuttner is arguing that, well, maybe the banker's perspective could use some balance -- or at least some context. Rubin is, I fear, but a man, and one shaped by his own class and profession and education and contacts and experiences. I tend to think Rubin's actually done a rather good job balancing much of that out. But his reputation and power exceed even his considerable talents, and Kuttner's attempt to dramatize those drawbacks seems valuable to me.

--Ezra Klein

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CITIES FOR SALE. Ben Adler reviews Jason Hackworth's new book, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology and Development in American Urbanism:

While The Neoliberal City is informative on the subject of privatization and corporate involvement in gentrification, it leaves the reader a bit puzzled. Hackworth only describes, he does not proscribe. So while it is clear that he thinks the neoliberal city is deeply problematic, he presents no alternative. He states that "[t]he days of Keynesian urban policy seem to have expired -- or at least gone into hibernation -- and city governments have adapted to the new conditions." It seems he would agree that pushing massive urban public construction projects, such as those associated with New Deal and Great Society-era programs and a bygone industrial age, is no longer a realistic direction for urban America.

But then what is? The cities that look and feel vibrant today are the ones, like New York, San Francisco, Boston, Austin, and Portland, that have done precisely what the creative class naysayers oppose.

Read the whole thing here.

--The Editors

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT. As part of my day job at Campus Progress, I just heard a presentation from the Harvard Institute of Politics detailing the results of their most recent survey of 18 to 24-year olds. There was lots of encouraging news: Today’s young people are more likely than any other generation since the Vietnam era to vote and engage with politics, but are under-counted because exit polls tend to ignore campus polling places. On foreign policy, 75 percent of 18 to 24 year olds believe the United Nations, not the U.S., should take the lead in responding to international conflicts. And young people are positive about the cultural effects of globalization, but are more skeptical about its economic and environmental outcomes. Here are some other highlights from the survey:

• Young Democrats are more independent of their elders than young Republicans are. Like their older counterparts, 18-24 year old Republicans prefer Rudy Giuliani as the next president. But while older Democrats support Hillary Clinton (42% to Obama’s 24% and Edwards’ 17%), young Democrats prefer Obama (35% to Clinton’s 29% and Edwards’ 9%).

• Dovetailing nicely with Ronald Brownstein’s Obama-skeptic analysis of “beer track” and “wine track” Democratic candidates (the six-packers make more likely winners), Obama is more popular among the highly educated. Obama leads Clinton by only 3 points among 18-24 year olds not enrolled in a 4-year college, but by a whopping 17 points on campuses.
• And don’t discount gender. Obama leads Clinton by 20% among young Democratic men, but young Democratic women prefer Clinton by 6 points.

--Dana Goldstein

"EARNING" MONEY. Former HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson's statement to the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism -- "I'm in the private sector and for the first time in my life I'm earning money. You know that's sort of part of the Jewish tradition" -- is offensive for obvious reasons. But personally, I'm more offended by the the first part of the statement than the second, because it reflects a casual, unchallenged attitude that has poisoned Washington, and not exclusively Republican Washington.

"For the first time in my life I'm earning money..." Thompson's salary at HHS was $186,000. Even if this was his household's entire income -- which it isn't, his wife works -- it would put them well above the 95th percentile, and is sufficient to pay the mortgage on a perfectly nice house in a good neighborhood in Washington, with plenty left to invest. His salary as governor of Wisconsin was $122,000, plus housing in the 21,000 square foot governor's mansion.

And Thompson probably "earned" those salaries, in the sense that he probably put in a full day and made decisions. And now? Well, he's the "president," but not the CEO, of a company called Logistics Health, Inc. which is a government contractor -- we can guess what that job involves. He's a senior partner at the law firm Akin, Gump, where he "focuses on developing solutions for clients in the health care industry, as well as for companies doing business in the public sector," and he's got at least two other "jobs" as well, at none of which do his bosses seem to care that he's out running for president instead of clocking in at 9:00. So in what sense is he now "earning" money when he didn't before?

Two separate attitudes embodied in this statement drive me crazy. First, there's the casual contempt for government, in the attitude that money one makes in public service doesn't really count, you haven't "earned" it, whereas money from a private-sector employer -- even one that consists entirely of rent-seeking from government -- does. And second, there's the attitude that solid, upper-middle class salaries aren't "real money." That's a New York/L.A. attitude that seems to have infected Washington, and drives, I think, a lot of the corruption there, as people feel entitled to find a way to rake in at least a few million.

And finally, a second observation on Thompson's speech: The Religious Action Center is a wonderful organization, but if Thompson thought he would find any GOP primary voters there, then he really needs to learn a thing or two about Judaism!

--Mark Schmitt

THE POLICY IMPLICATIONS. The massacre in Blacksburg, Va., yesterday is already raising fresh talk of gun control, because mass shootings always do. But before people get sidetracked into that morass, they should take a close look at other the policy issue this tragedy has thrust into the national spotlight: domestic violence. Because the first victim was a woman, and possible had a romantic connection to the killer, the police did not see her murder as a threat to the community. Now the police are pretty plainly telling the public that they failed to warn the campus there was a killer on the loose because they failed to understand that men who kill their partners are also threats to society. And they are saying this by way of exculpating their actions. Reports The Washington Post:

Although the gunman in the dorm was at large, no warning was issued to the tens of thousands of students and staff at Virginia Tech until 9:26 a.m., more than two hours later.

"We concluded it was domestic in nature," Flinchum said. "We had reason to believe the shooter had left campus and may have left the state." He declined to elaborate. But several law enforcement sources said investigators thought the shooter might have intended to kill a girl and her boyfriend Monday in what one of them described as a "lover's dispute." It was unclear whether the girl killed at the dorm was the intended target, they said.

Murder is murder is murder. I realize that events unfolded rapidly, and that two hours is a very, very short time in the life of a police investigation, and that the police may just be casting around for a post-hoc defense against the castigation that is sure to come, but the idea that you don't warn people that a killer is on the loose just because you think he killed his girlfriend seems like 1950s thinking.

UPDATE: Note that the University of Texas Clock Tower massacre, until yesterday the deadliest school shooting in American history, also started with a domestic incident, with the killer stabbing his wife and mother the night before going on his rampage.

UPDATE II: Perhaps a better point of contrast would be the way Virginia Tech shut down the campus and cancelled all classes on the first day of school just last fall after an escaped prisoner killed a police officer near, but not on, the campus. Clearly, there was recent precedent for shutting down the campus.

UPDATE III: The latest news is that the first female victim in fact had no connection to the killer, and that the first two murders may not have been a domestic violence incident at all, but rather the beginning of the killing spree by the disturbed student, and that the domestic incident framework the police put on the initial killings was inaccurate and led them astray. Whatever the truth is revealed to be in the days ahead, one thing is clear: In those rare circumstances when students are murdered on a college campus and there is no suspect in custody, other students need to be informed immediately, regardless of what the circumstances of the intial murders are believed to be.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MONEY ACTS. Now that we know the individual contributors to each candidate, we can figure out who's got the coolest celebrities. For all her talk of values and cultural deterioration, for instance, Hillary Clinton certainly has the edgiest contributors, including Candice Bergen, Hugh Hefner, and Jerry Springer. She's managed to unite Sex and the City, Playboy, and transvestites who slept with your mother and are your uncle! Barack Obama seems to have drawn a bit more from the A-list, boasting contributions from Jennifer Aniston, Tom Hanks, and Ben Stiller. John Edwards, for his part, certainly has the coolest contributors, with both Larry David and Seth Green hooking him up. And Barry Manilow, oddly, is all over the place.

Whoops: Candice Bergen was Murphy Brown. Candice Bushnell wrote Sex and the City. My bad. On the bright side, Murphy Brown was a single mother, so my glib and superficial point remains!

--Ezra Klein

UNACCOUNTABLES. In the post below, J. writes: "Because Paul Bremer granted private contractors immunity from Iraqi laws in 2004 and because military laws don't apply to civilians it is unclear if any laws at all apply to the private mercenaries." For more on the legal no-man's-land in which contractors reside, see Tara McKelvey's feature story in the September 2006 print issue, "The Unaccountables."

--Sam Rosenfeld

MEANWHILE, IN IRAQ. Steve Fainaru's article in yesterday's Washington Post on the American private contractors and their hired guns in Iraq is well worth reading. What Fainaru describes is a subsociety where odd jungle versions of laws apply. Because Paul Bremer granted private contractors immunity from Iraqi laws in 2004 and because military laws don't apply to civilians it is unclear if any laws at all apply to the private mercenaries:

Current and former Triple Canopy employees said they policed themselves in Iraq under an informal system they frequently referred to as "big boy rules."

"We never knew if we fell under military law, American law, Iraqi law, or whatever," Sheppard said. "We were always told, from the very beginning, if for some reason something happened and the Iraqis were trying to prosecute us, they would put you in the back of a car and sneak you out of the country in the middle of the night."

Naucukidi said the American contractors had their own motto: "What happens here today, stays here today."

Washbourne sported a shaved head, a goatee and a mosaic of tattoos and piercings on his muscular, 6-foot-3-inch frame. He led one of two teams on Triple Canopy's "Milwaukee" project, a contract to protect executives of KBR Inc., a Halliburton subsidiary, on Iraq's dangerous roads. He earned $600 a day commanding a small unit of guards armed with M-4 rifles and 9mm pistols, the same caliber weapons used by U.S. troops.

The men referred to each other by their radio call signs. Washbourne was "JW," his initials. Sheppard, a former U.S. Army Ranger, was "Shrek," for his resemblance to the cartoon monster. Schmidt, a former Marine sniper, was "Happy," an ironic reference to his surly demeanor. Naucukidi was "Isi," an abbreviation of his first name.

Schmidt and Sheppard earned $500 a day. Naucukidi earned $70 a day for the same work.

--J. Goodrich

DWEEBS AND BAD BOYS. Reader Howard, commenting on my last post, called my attention to a wonderful piece by Sam Tanenhaus that ran in yesterday’s New York Times. In an essay in the Week in Review, Tanenhaus, now the editor of the New York Times Book Review, recounts his own seduction into Imusland, a phenomenon that occurred after Imus took an on-air shine to Tanenhaus’s biography of Whitaker Chambers, and began having Tanenhaus as a regular guest.

By now, I was tuning in regularly. It had become part of my routine: waking up each morning to WFAN and the frisson of hearing my name broadcast on the radio. Of course, I was hearing other things, too, and they were disturbing at times: slurs against black athletes, an “impersonation” of Clarence Thomas that didn’t sound like him at all (unlike the impersonations of white figures), but instead drew on the stalest of the “here come de judge” grotesqueries of a previous era; the almost continual soundtrack of leering sexual comments.

Today, in the harsh light of Mr. Imus’s disgrace, it is hard to explain why none of this bothered me very much. But the truth is I tuned it out. One reason, I think, is that my position seemed paradoxical. I was pleased to have been admitted into Mr. Imus’s club -- alongside famous columnists and TV pundits and celebrated authors.

"You know, most of us who are pundits are dweebs at some level. And [Imus] was the cool bad boy in the back of room," Brooks said. "And so, if you're mostly doing serious punditry, you'd like to think you can horse around with a guy like Imus."

--Adele M. Stan

SELECTIVE OUTRAGE. To follow up on Matt and Atrios, Radley Balko asks his readers if they've heard of James Giles. Giles, like the three men in the Duke rape case, was falsely accused of rape. Unlike the Duke men, however, he didn't have the money to hire top-flight legal counsel and didn't benefit from attracting opportunistic attention from powerful conservative statists with a strong commitment to opposing "political correctness." As a result, Giles "served 10 years in prison, as well as an additional 14 years on probation and as a registered sex offender" before being exonerated by DNA evidence. Despite having faced much more dire consequences, Giles' case has attracted a fraction of the attention.

The point is not that the Duke case was not an injustice, or that it didn't merit attention. Privileged white guys also deserve equal treatment under the law, and prosecutorial abuse is always bad. But despite the attempts of people like Walter Olson to draw grossly inappropriate analogies between these defendants and the Scottsboro boys, it's also worth noting that there are cases of prosecutorial abuse that, because they happen to people with fewer resources and less social status, have much worse consequences and yet somehow fail to interest many people screaming about the Duke case because there's no chance to rail against left-wing academics. It would be nice if the people upset about the Duke case will start contributing to the ACLU, supporting increased funding for public defender's offices, loosening recent restrictions on habeas suits, looking carefully at the drug war, etc. But I'm not holding my breath.

--Scott Lemieux

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: SHOW ME THE AIR TIME. Now that the '08 presidential hopefuls have annnounced their staggeringly high first-quarter fundraising totals, Marj Halperin suggests we should be looking at an approach that would really curb campaign spending: Free air time.

--The Editors

CUBA! Charlie Rangel and Jeff Flake had a good op-ed in Saturday's Washington Post about Cuba policy:

We should unite around a principle that Democrats and Republicans have long embraced, a principle that aided the West's success in the Cold War: American openness is a source of strength, not a concession to dictatorships.

It is time to permit free travel to Cuba, as provided in legislation we have introduced. Open travel would create a "free flow of ideas" that "would promote democratization," as dissident Oscar Espinosa Chepe wrote shortly after his release from prison in 2004. It would also bring humanitarian benefits to Cubans as family visits increase and travelers boost Cuba's small but vital entrepreneurial sector.

Electoral politics should not prevent us from reaching out to 11 million neighbors who have lived under communism for 48 long years.

The answer to the Cuba dilemma always comes down to Florida electoral votes. What's less often asked, however, is why the Cuban exile community settled around the embargo policy. The Taiwanese-American community, for example, seems happy to invest in China, and while I know less of the Vietnamese exile community in the United States, I haven't heard the argument that it posed much of an obstacle to the return of American investment to Vietnam. I do wonder whether the preferences of the Cuban exile community have more to do with the form that regime change takes, rather than regime change itself. Many of the exiles seem to continue to harbor fantasies about the return of property lost in the Revolution, and the sort of incremental regime change that economic and political openness towards Cuba would most likely facilitate is conversely least likely to result in compensation for lost property. A sudden counter-revolution, on the other hand, in which the exiles get to return as conquering heroes might produce better prospects for a return to 1959.

It's an insane fantasy, which would be fine if it weren't for the grip that the insanity has had on U.S. policy.

--Robert Farley

LITERAL WORDS. Yeah, I know that I should've given this horse his last lash a while back, but I simply cannot resist bringing to Tapped readers (in case you missed them) the words of New York Times columnist David Brooks on the Imus affair. Talking to NPR's David Folkenflick, Brooks answered this way a call for penance by historian and author Philip Nobile for having appeared with apparent glee as a guest on "Imus in the Morning":

"You know, when you're dealing with humor, you're not dealing with literal words. You're dealing with people who are putting on a costume."

Brooks also told Flick (as all the cool kids call the NPR media reporter) that while Imus certainly deserved pubic humiliation for his faux pas, "he didn't deserve to have his career ended." C'mon, now; unless he chooses otherwise, Imus's career is hardly ended; it's simply and deservedly diminished. It's not like he's an outed covert CIA agent or anything.

--Adele M. Stan

THE ABSTINENCE-ONLY FRAUD. You may have heard the shocking news that state-funded moralizing adults telling teenagers not to have sex do not, in fact, prevent teenagers from having sex. Interestingly, several states -- not all of them liberal and coastal -- have started to turn down the abjectly useless federal funding they're being offered:

In an emerging revolt against abstinence-only sex education, states are turning down millions of dollars in federal grants, unwilling to accept White House dictates that the money be used for classes focused almost exclusively on teaching chastity.

In Ohio, Gov. Ted Strickland said that regardless of the state's sluggish economic picture, he simply did not see the point in taking part in the controversial State Abstinence Education Grant program anymore.

Five other states -- Wisconsin, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Montana and New Jersey -- already have dropped the program or plan to do so by year's end. The program is managed by a unit of the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services.

And, really, what possible reason is there to take the money, when it can't be used for any useful purpose, and might take up time from students actually learning something of value? I also enjoyed this quote from an administration hack:

“This report confirms that these interventions are not like vaccines,” said Harry Wilson, associate commissioner of the Family and Youth Services Bureau at the federal Administration for Children and Families. “You can’t expect one dose in middle school, or a small dose, to be protective all throughout the youth’s high school career.”

The fact that all evidence demonstrates that these programs -- contrary to the repeated assertions of the administration -- are a complete waste of time and money just shows that we need to put more time and resources behind them! Ah, fiscal conservatism.

Also see TAP's take on the revolt against abstinence-only sex ed.

--Scott Lemieux

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THIRD TIME'S THE CHARM? "Three times in my political adulthood," Robert Kuttner writes, "we have seen the exhaustion of a conservative ideology and presidency .. And twice, the electorate ousted Republicans only to get centrist Democrats, who ran more competent administrations but did little to redress the structure of financial inequality in America." Kuttner wonders whether this time around will be different.

--The Editors

IT ALL COMES TOGETHER. In a strange combination of the posts below regarding Wolfowitz and conservative reproductive health policy, at a press conference yesterday, an NPR reporter asked Wolfowitz about his efforts to change the World Bank’s support for family planning efforts in developing countries.

Wolfowitz denied that he’s against family planning, but a GAO Government Accountability Project report indicates otherwise. [edited to correct from the original]

--Alina Hoffman

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CONSENTING ADULTS. TAP deputy editor Sarah Blustain explains that abortion "informed consent" laws (such as the one considered by the 8th Circuit Court on Wednesday) aren't really about making sure women have all the facts -- they're about codifying the notion that women are weak, ignorant, and unable to make decisions for themselves.

"Informed consent legislation and litigation is dangerous precisely because it misleads," says Yale Law School professor Reva Siegel. "Its anti-abortion premises and purposes are dressed up in the language of the pro-choice claim -- as restrictions designed to protect women's welfare and women's freedom." Should the law be upheld in the courts, it could both codify the personhood of the fetus and undermine the personhood of the mother in ways that would affect American legal and legislative efforts in untold ways.

Read the whole thing here. Sarah also did a revealing Q-and-A with anti-abortion lawyer Harold Cassidy, who is defending "informed consent" laws in courts around the country.

--The Editors

CONSERVATIVES DECRY POLITICIZATION OF THE FDA. Oh, this is rich: The Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America are suing the FDA over the agency's approval of Plan B emergency contraception for over-the-counter sale. Their complaint? The FDA's decision was politically motivated.

"It's very clearly caught up in political dynamics and I would go so far as to say there is electoral politics involved here," said [FRC's Charmaine] Yoest.

Indeed! I share Mrs. Yoest's assessment. In fact, women's rights advocates have been pursuing a lawsuit over the politicization of the Plan B decision since January 2005. They've subpoenaed White House officials, and depositions in the case have already revealed a lot about conservative politicians' meddling in the FDA approval process:

As far back as 2003, then-FDA commissioner Mark McClellan agreed to an unprecedented meeting with a White House domestic policy adviser to discuss the Plan B application. And Dr. Janet Woodcock (who also warned that Plan B would create teen sex cults) came right out and said Plan B shouldn't be sold over-the-counter to teens -- not because of the science but "to appease the administration's constituents."

Those constituents are folks like the FRC and CWA. You'd think they would be thrilled by political interference at the FDA. After all, medical research says emergency contraception is safe for women of all ages. Sadly for Yoest and her ilk, science isn't equally supportive of the claim that EC access leads to the formation of teen sex cults.

[The conservative groups'] lawsuit charges that the FDA had no authority to approve the same drug and labeling for simultaneous prescription-only and over-the-counter distribution and that the FDA cannot treat the drug differently based on the age of the buyer because "FDA lacks the authority to enforce Plan B's age limitations."

Here's another point on which I agree with the conservative groups. The FDA's decision to assign Plan B special "dual label" status -- over-the-counter for adults and behind-the-counter for teenagers -- was totally ridiculous. Thousands of pages of research said it was safe for women of all ages. And an independent advisory committee voted 27-1 to allow sale of Plan B over-the-counter with no age restriction. The conservative groups are correct that younger women can still access Plan B without a prescription (they're free to e-mail me; I'd happily purchase the drug for any woman under 18). Which makes it all the more apparent that labeling Plan B differently for sale to teens was not a practical or science-based decision, but a purely political one.

--Ann Friedman

SCAPEGOATS. Amidst an unexpected digression on anthropological studies of cross-cultural scapegoat sacrifice ceremonies -- I'm telling you, Swampland is a genuinely unpredictable and enjoyable blog -- Joe Klein says, "the atavistic intensity of our scapegoat sacrifices--Imus, perhaps Wolfowitz and Gonzalez to come--shouldn't be surprising."

No no no. Scapegoat: "One that is made to bear the blame of others." Imus is getting run out of town for something he personally said. Wolfowitz is on a death march because of patronage he personally allowed. Gonzales's days are (hopefully) numbered because of a politicization process he personally abetted. None of these people are being scapegoated. They're being roundly, rightly, criticized.

That said, I didn't know this: "The Jews civilized the process, making it metaphoric, turning the scapegoat, literally, into a goat--which wasn't nearly as much fun." Those Jews. So literal-minded.

--Ezra Klein

DIMENSIONS OF CORRUPTION. Obviously, Paul Wolfowitz's personal corruption is both bad in itself and undermines the anti-corruption principles he's purportedly trying to bring to the World Bank. As John Cassidy's recent profile informs us, however, there's another major example of his rather selective application of anti-corruption principles. First, there's his hiring of Bush administration cronies who weren't involved in the formal search process to crucial positions. And although he's cut off aid to several corrupt governments, his pet invasion project is for some reason exempt from such treatment:

In building up the World Bank's presence in Iraq, Wolfowitz is hoping that it is not too late to improve the situation there. "The bank's role, I am happy to talk about," he said. "Actually, in a certain sense, it tells you that there is a lot to be worked with if security can be established. This is a country whose biggest problem is how to manage tens of millions of dollars of annual revenues. I wish most of our clients had that problem." I asked him how he could simultaneously argue that the bank should stop lending to corrupt countries and become more involved in Iraq, which now trails only Haiti in some rankings of the most corrupt countries on earth. "It's a problem to work on," Wolfowitz said. "I get inaccurately characterized on this governance issue as saying the bank should disengage. To the contrary, the basic point of the anti-corruption strategy is that we have to find ways to engage in countries with problems. In Iraq, there are certainly a lot of people who want to improve the system, who actually look to the World Bank as an ally in doing so."

So giving aid to corrupt governments is bad... unless they tell you they really want to get better! Somehow I suspect that the huge personal stake Wolfowitz had in justifying the disastrous war he had such a large responsibility for is the more important factor here.

--Scott Lemieux

ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROVE. The Los Angeles Times provides some useful background for those trying to follow the White House e-mail story who need more narrative in their news than the excellent muckraking blogs can provide. This is how the scandal started:

The large e-mail inquiry originated from once-separate congressional probes into allegations of politicization of executive-branch functions by the Bush White House.

The House and Senate judiciary committees uncovered the use of the RNC e-mail addresses by White House staffers as it investigated the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

Waxman's staff found the RNC addresses while reading e-mails during the investigation of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Waxman has also investigated efforts by Rove's office to communicate Republican electoral priorities to political appointees at federal agencies.

Some of the e-mails were sent by the White House over special electronic communications links established by the RNC to handle political matters. Using government computers for such e-mails could violate federal laws governing presidential records and could threaten White House claims of executive privilege to shield internal documents from congressional scrutiny.

So this is the outcome of two probes into White House corruption, one involving convicted lobbyists, the other involving the firing of prosecutors who didn't toe the White House line. It may also be related to a third investigation, Patrick Fitzgerald's probe into the cover-up of the leaked identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Patrick Leahy is right that the missing Karl Rove e-mails can't have been fully deleted:

He said on the Senate floor Thursday that a teenager could find the lost White House e-mails. "They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that," Leahy told the Senate. "You can't erase e-mails -- not today. They've gone through too many servers."

Someone needs to call a forensic technologist and recover them.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

APPARENTLY SERIOUS... The Navy appears to be serious about challenging cost overrruns on the Littoral Combat Ship project:

The LCS program manager was canned; the admiral in charge of ship-building was reassigned; work on the ship was suspended.

Winter demanded that the second LCS contract be renegotiated. The old one was a "cost-plus" deal that paid out big bucks, no matter how the firm did its job. Winter wanted a firm price for his ship.

That was something Lockheed refused to accept. So Winter pulled the plug on the third LCS.

The LCS project is designed to supply the Navy with a large (50-80) number of smallish (2500 tons) super-fast (45 knots!) ships capable of fighting in the littoral (shallow, interior water). These vessels will constitute a large proportion of the future fleet, and unlike the Zumwalt destroyers, have a plausible mission set. The first two ships were built more or less competitively by Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, and the Navy has just brought the axe down on Lockheed's second ship. This is remarkably important for the future of the Navy; serious cost overruns in what could become a tight defense fiscal environment could significantly cut into force size. It remains to be seen if General Dynamics can deliver a good ship at a reasonable price.

Speaking of the Zumwalt, there appear to be serious questions about whether the enormously expensive and mission-challenged destroyer (which is really a cruiser, incidentally) will even float properly. According to Defense News, experts in and out of the Navy have expressed concerns about the radical hull design, suggesting that it could roll over in certain conditions. That would be bad, not least because the damn things cost an amazing amount of money. Incidentally, the success of this campaign to name the second Zumwalt class destroyer after Robert Heinlein would, I think, push the project from the absurd firmly into the surreal.

--Robert Farley

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: SWITCHING CHANNELS. Mike calls on liberal multi-millionaires to get with it and start a cable news channel.

--The Editors

REMEMBER THE VALUES VOTERS? Was it really only two years ago that Democrats were beating themselves up over "values voters," those working class Americans who voted against their own economic interests because they were so grossed out by gay people and in love with fetuses? Back then, many progressives believed we could never again rise to the majority without making serious compromises on the key civil rights issues of choice and LGBT equality. But this week, in an article about Republicans' lack of faith in their own presidential aspirants, The New York Times' Adam Nagourney and John M. Broder reported that it's now Republicans, not Democrats, who fear the grip divisive social issues have on their party's presidential prospects.

Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, said the party's presidential candidates were being whipsawed as they tried to appeal to conservative voters who have a history of strong views on issues like abortion and gay rights. "These tests are destroying the Republican Party," Mr. Simpson said.

--Dana Goldstein

IMUS IS GONE. RIGHT THING DONE. Last night, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone promised that CBS News honcho Les Moonves would "do the right thing" with regard to the future of Don Imus's program on the CBS radio network, but would not say exactly what that right thing is. Today we learned Imus has been fired from his radio show.

I do hope that this does not end the discussion on race and gender that was sparked by Imus's egregious taunt. And I have no intention of letting up on the cable news shows for their lack of women commentators -- especially African-American women -- even when the discussion focuses on the treatment of women.

It will be interesting to see with whom MSNBC fills its guest analyst roster tonight.

For a look at who's been commenting so far, check out this list.

--Adele M. Stan

GILMORE BOY. Yesterday, The Politico wrote about former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore who is billing himself as the "true conservative candidate" for president. As the Washington Times reports "polls show that few voters outside Virginia ever heard of him" in their Metro section. Things sure seem to be tough for the true conservative Republicans these days.

-- Kay Steiger

APPLES AND ORANGES. To add to Garance's earlier post about Markos's comments on the Kathy Sierra case: Markos is talking about oranges while the Sierra case and Web-misogyny are all about apples (a few rotten ones?). Markos writes:

Look, if you blog, and blog about controversial shit, you'll get idiotic emails. Most of the time, said "death threats" don't even exist -- evidenced by the fact that the crying bloggers and journalists always fail to produce said "death threats". I suspect many are like this gem I recently received...

Perhaps. But a recent study found that just having a female user name made chat participants from 6 to 25 times more likely to receive malicious messages from other users. Markos doesn't have a female user name, and he is unlikely to be attacked purely because of his gender. And the people (and bots) in that study were not bloggers or public figures, and they said no "controversial shit". Indeed, they were silent. This suggests that just being seen as a woman increases the odds of net harassment.

But suppose, just for the sake of the thought experiment, we agree with Markos that if you can't take the heat you should get out of the kitchen:

Email makes it easy for stupid people to send stupid emails to public figures. If they can't handle a little heat in their email inbox, then really, they should try another line of work. Because no "blogger code of conduct" will scare away psycho losers with access to email.

Markos may well be right that blogger codes of conduct wouldn't do much about the problem. But given the apples-and-oranges problem, women are now being asked to take a lot more heat than men -- both the kind of harassment Markos gets and the very specific kind of sexual harassment women on the Web get.

--J. Goodrich