JUST POSTED ON TAP: ANOTHER MISSILE CRISIS? Ted Sorensen and Adam Frankel discuss what the Bush administration could learn about Iran from JFK.

--The Editors

WHO WOULD JESUS WHACK? Occasionally you hear about all those broadly supportable progressive issues on which rapprochement with the Christian right will be had. This worldview presupposes that the evangelical movement's partisan identification is the result of the right convincing them that they hold more areas of policy agreement. Which may, in part, be true. Of course, there's also the Mafioso-style intimidation tactics that are deployed against heretics...

--Ezra Klein

THE END OF SUPPLY-SIDEISM. Chris Suellentrop notes that Republicans are beginning to abandon supply-side economics, one of the most overdue exoduses in economic history. Evidence comes from Bush's former chief economic adviser Greg Mankiw, who writes that "some supply-siders like to claim that the distortionary effect of taxes is so large that increasing tax rates reduces tax revenue. Like most economists, I don't find that conclusion credible for most tax hikes, and I doubt Mr. Paulson does either." Elsewhere, Ben Stein -- yeah, that one -- has a full-throated takedown of the economic illusion known as the Laffer Curve. "Supply side is fun," he writes, "in the same way it's fun to rationalize spending as if it were saving, and in the same way any theory is fun when it says that the easier, softer way is better than the hard way. But it doesn't work, or at least it hasn't worked yet. "

No, it hasn't. And what a comfort that it only took the economic Ph.D.'s in the Republican Party three decades to figure that out!

--Ezra Klein

TAPPED BOUND. Many TAPPED readers, I’m sure, will be happy to learn that Linda Hirshman will be guest-blogging with us for two weeks starting next Monday. Hirshman’s outstanding critique of “choice feminism,” which appeared in the Prospect’s December issue, helped spark a very heated debate about women, work, and the domestic glass ceiling. Hirshman has since extended her work for that piece into a book, Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, which will be released on June 8. So tune in next week for what will surely be an exciting discussion.

--Alec Oveis

SOME PAULSON SKEPTICISM. Reaction to Henry Paulson's appointment as Treasury Secretary has, thus far, been boringly positive. Fortunately, Max Sawicky rides to the rescue with a strident critique.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE ON IRAN. In addition to Garance and Laura Rozen's comments, it's worth heeding cautionary notes from both Kevin Drum and Ivo Daalder that Condoleezza Rice may be (whether in deliberate bad faith or not) putting too many demands for Iranian concessions on the table as preconditions for negotiation. That concern notwithstanding, as The Washington Post's piece on her announcement notes, Rice has certainly appeared to serve as a force in the administration for moving in the direction of engagement since she became secretary of state, and today's news seems to bolster that view.

The news serves as another pretext to plug this truly terrific article by Gareth Porter in the latest print issue of the Prospect which provides a thorough and insightful rundown of the complete history of the Bush administration's policy towards Iran. Repeatedly -- and most dramatically and explicitly in 2003 -- overtures from Tehran were extended to the administration, and the administration rejected them. It's exceedingly difficult to argue that subsequent events, and the current situation, have vindicated those policy decisions.

--Sam Rosenfeld

SOME PROGRESS, FINALLY. The United States, after much pushing, has finally acceded to engaging in direct talks with Iran, on the condition that it abandon its nuclear enrichment activities. This is the necessary next step in the diplomatic dance, but marks a dramatic departure from the Bush administration's approach toward Iran over the past six years. With the world looking to Iran for a counter-offer, Iran will now either have to chose the engagement with the United States it says it wants or else be perceived as the intransigent party in this conflict. Either way, the offer takes some of the pressure off the United States to resolve the impasse and puts it back where it rightly belongs, on Iran. Laura Rozen, who is a must-read on this as on so many other issues, has more from Chris Nelson over at War and Piece.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE GOOD NEWS. While I was on vacation yesterday, I don't think any of my colleagues noted the ongoing developments in the Haditha massacre story. This is one of those things that makes you appreciate the old-fashioned print news media which, for all its flaws, can bring things like this to light and leaves your humble blogger with relatively little to add.

I will say, however, that I think that if you look at the historical record of counterinsurgency warfare, you'll see that this is the kind of thing that pretty consistently winds up happening. As we've been seeing for a while, insurgent campaigns are a very ugly business. More recently, it's become clear that the counterinsurgency being waged by the Shiite new regime in Iraq is a very ugly business as well. And now we see that the United States military is no exception to the trend, just as it wasn't in Vietnam and in the Philippines. The first-order solution, obviously, is to try and get people to not perpetrate massacres and cover them up when they happen. But the larger lesson is almost certainly that there are actual limits to what can be accomplished in a manner consistent with the humanitarian standards that contemporary Americans espouse and that our government aspires to. The easiest way to stop these things from happening would be to avoid starting or continuing wars for frivolous reasons.

--Matthew Yglesias

IN DEFENSE OF INTERNSHIPS. I'm going to break with Garance here -- Anya Kamenetz's op-ed didn't make much sense to me. Her basic point is simple: Internships are a $124 million subsidy to corporate America. Well, maybe. But first you have to figure out how many internships are actually in "corporate America." The American Prospect, The Nation, the AFL-CIO, the Center for American Progress, the ACLU, People for the American Way, and all the other usual suspects have robust intern programs which allow them to train and try out kids they can't necessarily hire. Are they who we're thinking of when we say "corporate America"?

Indeed, corporate America doesn't really need the free labor. I'm sure they appreciate it, but they could hire their own grunts. Could the non-profits of the world? That's less clear. It was The Washington Monthly's internship that channeled me into writing rather than law school (I am eternally grateful). Kamenetz also blames internships for the decline of unions, wondering how "twentysomethings [are] ever going to win back health benefits and pension plans when they learn to be grateful to work for nothing?" Twentysomethings are perfectly aware that they need health care (as I wrote today over at Campus Progress), internships tend to come while they're covered by their parents' or schools' plans. This is strange logic in any case -- it's like bemoaning that service workers will never want higher wages once they've applied for poorly paying positions. Indeed, I'd guess the kids getting internships are far likelier to work in professions where they have both health coverage and pensions. Which brings us to another hole here -- the professions that most need to be organized and are proving most resilient against union efforts are in the service industry, and no one I know is doing a summer bagging internship at Wal-Mart.

Meanwhile, Kamenetz also says that "[l]ong hours on your feet waiting tables may not be particularly edifying, but they teach you that work is a routine of obligation, relieved by external reward, where you contribute value to a larger enterprise." Ugh. This appears to be the base of her criticism -- work isn't, or shouldn't be, fun. Internships are inherently frivolous and don't properly prepare participants for the lifetime of drudgery ahead. Kamenetz works at The Village Voice, her husband works, or at least worked, for Google. Save for The American Prospect, I can hardly think of two more enjoyable employers. It's all well and good for her to condemn her classmates for seeking out jobs they love, but those who won't end up in such enterprises will have plenty of time to experience the character-building benefits of waiting tables. For now, their attempts to gain some experience in fields that don't, or can't, hire summering young 'uns should be supported. Indeed, my response to the only point of hers I found compelling -- that internships favor rich kids -- is that we subsidize, or at least make tax deductible, such summers, not that we tear down the whole institution.

--Ezra Klein

THE NEW ANTI-UNION TRAINING GROUND: UNPAID INTERNSHIPS. Anya Kamenetz, author of Generation Debt: Why Now is a Terrible Time to be Young, today penned a brilliant op-ed for The New York Times arguing that, rather than focusing solely on the impact of illegal immigrants on wages and jobs, we ought to take a good, hard look at the potential wage and other distortions created by the rise of the unpaid internship as a major factor in American economic life, and to treat internships as the "$124 million yearly contribution to the welfare of corporate America" that they are. Moreover, she writes, unpaid internships inculcate in young people an ethos that is anti-union and anti-workers rights, while also undermining meritocracy:

internships promote overidentification with employers: I make sacrifices to work free, therefore I must love my work. A sociologist at the University of Washington, Gina Neff, who has studied the coping strategies of interns in communications industries, calls the phenomenon "performative passion." Perhaps this emotion helps explain why educated workers in this country are less and less likely to organize, even as full-time jobs with benefits go the way of the Pinto.

Although it's not being offered this year, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s Union Summer internship program, which provides a small stipend, has shaped thousands of college-educated career organizers. And yet interestingly, the percentage of young workers who hold an actual union card is less than 5 percent, compared with an overall national private-sector union rate of 12.5 percent. How are twentysomethings ever going to win back health benefits and pension plans when they learn to be grateful to work for nothing?

Lots to think about -- you can read the whole thing here. Why the existing unions don't focus on issues like this is a mystery to me, but I'd wager that if they did, they'd find a whole new generation of enthusiastic converts among those heavily indebted college students and recent graduates who want to work and to have careers, but who find themselves only offered unpaid posts, or else passed over for their now more-qualified wealthier peers, whose parents subsidized their unpaid posts.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

ZINSMEISTER'S RACE-CONSCIOUS NATION. Greg over at Horse's Mouth notes another peculiar article by new White House domestic policy chief Karl Zinsmeister, this 1996 American Enterprise essay on the always uncontroversial subject of race. While making appropriate hemming and hawing sounds and adding lots of caveats to his assertions, Zinsmeister still manages to come off sounding, well, like the kind of fellow an administration that's already alienated African-Americans might not chose to lead its domestic programs if it wanted to improve those relations. Zinsmeiter, in the below piece, is arguing with an essay by fellow conservative Glenn Loury, and argues, not once, not twice, but three times against the idea of color-blindness, because believing in color-blindness, he says, poses a danger to white people:

One place I cannot follow Glenn is in his call for a strict, thoroughgoing blindness to color. This is fruitless idealism. Yes, color-blindness is essential to public policy, where racial hierarchies combined with the coercive power of the state can have horribly divisive and even deadly consequences. Loury is right that this country desperately needs less race consciousness in its public life. Yet there is much more to the world than public policies, and to pretend that our race problems can be understood entirely as "problems of sin, not of skin" is, to me, to stick one’s head in the sand....

In my private and internal life I am, and must always remain, colorblind....But hard experience has taught me that colorblindness is an ineffective and even dangerous ruling principle. This is not something that I, or the vast majority of other Americans who share my view, learned from public policy conferences or books published by right-leaning theorists. It springs starkly from practical life....

Every year, more than a million-and-a-half whites are violently victimized by black offenders. Several million more annually suffer interracial property crimes. FBI figures indicate that blacks now commit hate crimes at a per capita rate four times that of whites—and we all know there are too many hate crimes carried out by whites. New York City statistics prepared for former mayor Ed Koch show that black offenders are five times likelier to kill whites than the reverse. Nationwide, according to Justice Department figures, the rate of black-on-white violent crime is now fifty times the incidence of white-on-black....

The brutal reality is that whether in the selection of juries or the choice of neighborhoods to live (or get lost) in, colorblindness has become a real risk today. So long as these frightening conditions—described by Michael Meyers on page 57 as a "state of war"—continue to exist, pretending race is irrelevant will be a luxury many Americans simply cannot afford. Jesse Jackson has told us it is a luxury he cannot afford, admitting he fears black faces on nighttime sidewalks (the same hard reality tens of millions of other Americans observe). This isn’t a matter of bigotry or animus, but of self-preservation. The penalty for the person who, ignoring race, turns down the wrong street today can literally be death. It is unfair and unrealistic to demand that people "ignore race" so long as race has direct connections to troubles and dangers of this magnitude....(emphases added)

President Bush abandoned his opposition to racial profiling after 9-11. Has he now also decided that the colorblind ideals that led to his opposition to affirmative action are no more than "fruitless idealism"? Does he now believe that "colorblindness is an ineffective and even dangerous ruling principle"? I'd rather like to hear Tony Snow's take on that one.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

GOREWATCH. So far as all the speculation that Gore has released his fundraisers and is definitively out goes, color me unimpressed. To be clear, I don't think Gore will run -- I'd put the odds at 60:40 against. But the decision has nothing to do with his funders. As Rich Lowry notes, Gore doesn't, in any case, have a serious network of longtime moneymen waiting for reactivation. Whatever cash-shoveling infrastructure he built in 2000 has long since atrophied, and much of it is probably solidly in Hillary's camp.

What makes divining his political intentions so frustrating is that Gore has, comparatively speaking, all the time in the world. It used to be that fundraising required a lot of rich buddies, a heap o' travel, and endless chicken dinners. Now, Gore could enter shortly before Iowa and, if the base was sufficiently dissatisfied, become financially competitive in a matter of hours. And he wouldn't have to lift a finger for infrastructure building until he sent out that press release. Moreover, Dean's loss and Kerry's triumph taught political watchers that the fundraising arms race isn't necessarily relevant -- Dean's money didn't slow his collapse, and Kerry's comparative disadvantage didn't impede his ascension. Pundits watching to see if Gore tries to compete with Hillary's monster fundraising operation will be disappointed. He has no reason to. The early primary states are cheap, and that's not even mentioning the rush of free media he'd get from entering the race. He'd be both Time and Newsweek's cover boy the following Monday. And if he won some primaries, as Kerry proved, the money would be there for him in the general.

Meanwhile, Gore is playing the reluctant savior card just right. The more desperate liberals are for him to swoop into the election, the less interest he needs to show in doing so. With no alternate bigfoots on the horizon (save maybe Obama), there's no other game in town for dissatisfied liberals. And the more he backs off, the more they'll beg him to step forward. To be clear, I'm not saying he'll run, but I would caution against anyone saying he won't. And giving up his nonexistent fundraising apparatus won't hurt him a bit.

SHAMELESS PLUG: I sketched out these scenarios in fuller detail in my piece on Gore from a few months back. There's also a section on what sort of campaign he'd try and run, so folks interested in the speculation should give it a read.

--Ezra Klein

THAT EXPLAINS IT. If you're ever confused about the GOP's puzzling determination to eliminate the broadly supportable estate tax, this report showing that George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their cabinet will personally gain between $90 and $340 million dollars from the tax's repeal clarifies things considerably. As for amassing the political will for the battle, a recent Center for Public Integrity report found that a handful of superrich families had spent $490 million lobbying against the tax. If they succeed, these same families will gain almost $72 billion. Now that's what I call a good investment.

--Ezra Klein

GORE WATCH: TAP BLOG EMPIRE GETS RESULTS. This post from Greg at The Horse's Mouth provoked Jonah Goldberg to say he'll issue an official correction to his Gore-bashing Los Angeles Times column. (See some follow-up from Greg here.) For those who can't get enough, Ezra and Jonah took advantage of the holiday weekend to get very pissy at each other and wade deep into the weeds of Gore's summer vacation schedule forty years ago.

Meanwhile, in another post Greg cites some compelling evidence that Gore won't end up running for President; but Rich Lowry offers a rather convincing alternative take here.

--Sam Rosenfeld

HOORAY FOR PRE-K. The vote on California's Proposition 82 -- the Rob Reiner-spearheaded initiative providing universal access to preschool for all Californians, paid for by an income tax hike on wealthy residents -- is coming up in a week. The odds are still in its favor for passage, though not overwhelmingly so. National Review pans the idea in an editorial today, calling it a "boondoggle" whose design is "blind, bloated, and indiscriminate." These obviously aren't terms I'd use to describe the idea but I think they actually (and perversely) get at some of the reasons why liberals should enthusiastically support universal preschool initiatives at the state and federal levels.

On substantive policy grounds, the social science data on the benefits of early childhood education (especially, though not exclusively, pertaining to underprivileged kids) has accumulated over several decades, and is overwhelming. This Arthur J. Reynolds op-ed in The Los Angeles Times gives a good rundown of some of the major research, which has included a few very intensive longitudinal surveys tracking the progress of individuals who had access to preschool programs. RAND released an exhaustive report touting the economic benefits of universal preschool and directly assessed Reiner's plan; elsewhere they've done assessments of efforts to ramp up preschool access in eight states. (Here in the Prospect in 2004, David Kirp reported on how such efforts, in unlikely places like Oklahoma and Georgia, developed politically.)

The opposition from National Review and other critics is usually couched in terms of the perceived wastefulness of making the program universal rather than targeted and means-tested. But the political rationale for universalism in social programs is something liberals understand all too well -- or certainly ought to. "Programs for the poor make for poor programs" is a cliché because it's true. There are, moreover, some more hard-nosed considerations, having to do with interest group politics, that ought to boost liberal enthusiasm for full-bore universal pre-k initiatives, and that also help to explain the inevitable intensity of conservative opposition: A federal universal preschool program devised correctly (something perhaps along the lines laid out (PDF) in 2002 by the Committee for Economic Development, which envisioned an array of federal stopgap supports for state-administered preschool programs at a cost of about $35 billion) could help produce a corps of unionized preschool staff and bring them into the progressive Democratic fold. This calculation is of course "cynical," if by cynical one means "building a durable politics out of substantively meritorious liberal social policy," so maybe I should apologize for bringing it up. It's also important to remember that a national preschool entitlement isn't some completely wacky new idea -- something rather close to it actually passed both the House and Senate back in the halcyon days of Richard Nixon; he vetoed this alleged bid to "Sovietize" the American family.

--Sam Rosenfeld

SPEAKER PELOSI. The New York Times assesses Nancy Pelosi today. Much ink (including a direct quote from Barney Frank) is devoted to how bad she is on television. This is true; she's bad on television. It's her deficiency as a "spokesperson for the party" that seems partly to explain the rather odd pincer dynamic that's emerged under her leadership, wherein various observers, activists, and members both to her left and to her right have expressed dissatisfaction with her. The hostility from the right -- from Steny Hoyer's allies, a.k.a. "Democrats interested in passing more bills that are friendly to corporate campaign contributors" -- is straightforward and makes sense. The criticism from those liberals who are at least aware that the actual alternative to Pelosi is Hoyer tends to center on her failures as a message person. But looking to congressional leaders for party image-making and P.R. is a mistake.

The actual job of managing a caucus in some kind of effective and strategic manner is immensely difficult in its own right. It's only the sheerest coincidence if it so happens that a person imbued with the proper skills, temperament, and ability as a caucus leader also happens to be slick and charming and photogenic. (Tom DeLay was not a good message person for the GOP. Neither is Dennis Hastert.) But the other thing about the job of congressional leader, besides that it's really hard, is that it's really important. Indeed, having someone there who's good at leading the House caucus is simply more important than having one who's good on Meet the Press. I think the record shows that, given the context of past leadership eras, Pelosi has been effective. Social Security privatization, for example, wasn't defeated though telegenic advocacy. It was defeated through the effective enforcement of caucus discipline. (As Pelosi put it at the recent Prospect breakfast, "[W]e have to build our unity so that everyone is behind what we’re putting out there. [inaudible] Can you imagine what it’s like to have 250 House and Senate Democrats not have their own Social Security proposals? I mean, this was a remarkable feat and Harry and I were pleased to get credit for that.")

The other banal-but-important thing to say about assessments of Pelosi -- which, to its credit, the Times piece mentions -- is that like all powerful women she's the subject of an enormous amount of straightforwardly misogynistic judgment. She's a pushy lady and she looks slightly garish and thus she inspires contempt and ridicule. Obviously neither all nor most criticism of her stems from that and there's plenty of legitimate grounds on which people base complaints about her, but it's impossible to be in and around political circles in D.C. and fail to recognize that uglier impulses are also a factor.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MAY ACTUALLY DO A HECKUVA JOB. With Treasury Secretary John Snow finally on his way out, Bush has named Goldman-Sachs CEO Henry Paulson to be Snow’s replacement. Paulson is -- believe it or not -- a serious, competent guy who comes, like Robert Rubin before him, from Wall Street. Better yet, he retains a reputation of his own, has long ties to the private sector, and has plenty of money in the bank. In other words, the administration needs him, he doesn't need them, and both sides know it. Paulson should enjoy an easy confirmation, and Chuck Schumer has already offered his support. Guess the Bush administration didn't feel like picking a fight...

Update: The Progress Report notices that Paulsen is also a serious conservationist who sits on the board of the pro-Kyoto The Nature Conservancy and has pushed Goldman-Sachs to demand "urgent" action from the government to curb emissions. One wonders what he thinks of Bush's belief that "Kyoto would have wrecked our economy. I couldn't in good faith have signed Kyoto."

--Ezra Klein

ORIGINAL ZIN. Newly appointed White House domestic policy chieftain Karl Zinsmeister admits to The Washington Post today that he altered his quotes in the online reprint of an article, without ever informing the reporter of the story that he contested the original quotes or readers that he'd altered them. Zinsmeister tells the Post he didn't take the matter up with the reporter at the time because he didn't want to get him in trouble.

This does not seem like a credible explanation. Zinsmeister's writings on the press have been so overwhelmingly negative that it's extremely difficult to believe his attempt to cast himself in the role of solicitous and protective elder worried about tarnishing the reputation of a young scribe. More likely, Zinsmeister simply has no respect for journalists or their work. That's certainly the impression you'd get from reading his comments on the reporters covering the war in Iraq. Here's what he had to say about the press in 2003:

Alas, many of the journalists observable in this war theater are bursting with knee-jerk suspicions and antagonisms for the warriors all around them. A significant number are whiny and appallingly soft. Most club together, passing far too much of their desert sojourn gossiping with fellow reporters, mocking military mores in snide jokes and wise-guy observations, chafing at the little disciplines required by the military’s life-and-death work, banding off as a group to watch DVDs on their computers in the evening, ganging separately in the mess hall during meals, rolling their eyes at each other when ideas like honor, sacrifice, or duty enter the conversation, and otherwise failing to take advantage of this unparalleled opportunity to enter deeply and perhaps sympathetically into the lives and minds of superlative fighting men....

Typical reporters know little about a fighting life. They show scant respect for the fighter’s virtues. Precious few could ever be referred to as fighting men themselves. The journalists embedded among U.S. forces that I’ve crossed paths with are fish out of water here, and show their discomfort clearly as they hide together in the press tents, fantasizing about expensive restaurants at home and plush hotels in Kuwait City, fondling keyboards and satellite phones with pale fingers, clinging to their world of offices and tattle and chatter where they feel less ineffective, less testosterone deficient, more influential....

A few nights ago, I listened as a writer for one big city newspaper dripped derision for the soldier’s life, squealed about the awfulness of President Bush abandoning U.N. babysitting of Saddam, and sniggered with a TV reporter at attempts to inspire “awe” through a bombing campaign. I almost wished there would be a very loud explosion very nearby just to shut up their rattling.

It seems unlikely that a person who holds those views about journalists would have been concerned about damaging a reporter's reputation by asking for a correction. More likely, Zinsmeister took the reporter at the Syracuse New Times for one of those "policy nerds" whose "ideological imbalances" were, he asserted in this 2004 piece, distorting press coverage of the war in Iraq, and consequently felt himself justified in making the post-hoc alterations that he did without alerting the reporter or his editor.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE (IN)CORRUPTIBILITY OF HARRY REID. On Harry Reid and the case of the comp boxing tickets, this is about as fully a non-story as you can imagine. The lay of the land went something like this: Reid was offering legislation to increase federal regulation of boxing. The Nevada Athletic Agency, concerned the new body would usurp their authority, gave him ringside seats to three matches, where officials from the NAA presumably pressured him on the bill. Reid watched, listened, and then voted for his legislation -- exactly what the NAA had been hoping to head off.

Efforts to make this into an issue are reminiscent of a similar campaign conducted when Jack Abramoff's fame was peaking. During that furor, various outlets tried to make hay out of a meeting between Reid's staff and an Abramoff-connected lobbyist over attempts to impose the minimum wage in the Marianas Islands. Abramoff was trying to stop the legislation, he deployed a lobbyist to see if he could enlist Reid's help, and Reid promptly voted against Abramoff and for the imposition of the minimum wage. Indeed, the two events follow the same pattern: interested parties try to influence Reid, he promptly votes against their interests.

In any case, Reid, I'd guess, is pretty well inoculated against charges that he's an easy mark for bribery. Back in the late '70s, when he served on Nevada's Gaming Commission, a ride manufacturer tried to bribe him into approving two carnival-like devices for use in casinos. Reid informed the FBI, donned a wire for the sting, but, when shown the money, lost his temper and started choking the briber until the agents rushed in and pulled him off. As Neil notes, if only we had video footage of that transaction. Even so, we do have the record, and it fits rather well with Reid's history. Folks try to bribe him, and he either merrily votes against their interests or physically assaults them. Would that all senators were so corrupt.

--Ezra Klein

REVOLT OF THE NEOCONS, CON'T. Danielle Pletka and Michael Rubin take Bush to task in the Los Angeles Times today for -- fancy that! -- not living up to his pro-democracy rhetoric:

LAST WEEK, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced resumption of full U.S. diplomatic relations with Libya, citing Tripoli's renunciation of terrorism and intelligence cooperation. This ends a quarter-century diplomatic freeze. It also marks an effective end to the Bush doctrine.

At his second inauguration, President Bush declared: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

Since that soaring pronouncement, the Bush administration has watched Egypt abrogate elections, ignored the collapse of the so-called Cedar Revolution in Lebanon and abandoned imprisoned Chinese dissidents; now Washington is mulling a peace treaty with Stalinist North Korea.

The rhetoric of democracy, it turns out, comes more easily than its implementation. Washington worries that Egypt will bow out of the fight against Al Qaeda if the U.S. presses for reform. It worries that China will bar investment if Bush presses for the release of political prisoners. Are these fears realistic? No. These countries still have interests that parallel ours. But that won't be clear unless the president forces the tyrants to make a choice: reform or face isolation...

Is it possible that the administration is questioning the wisdom of promoting democracy as a long-term solution to U.S. national security woes? "Realists" suggest that the president has finally woken up and smelled the coffee. They say democracy gave us an Islamist government in Iraq and Hamas in Palestine. It could give us the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Heaven knows what it would spawn in China or Libya. Better the devil you know.

But there is no sign the White House has done any strategic rethinking. The president continues to believe his own preaching, but his administration has become incapable of making the hard choices those beliefs require. Instead, it has been quick to embrace the showy, if transitory, political advantages...

--Garance Franke-Ruta

COINCIDENCE? The gunfire-in-Congress story is obviously still developing but thankfully so far it appears possible that no one (including one aide who was seen being taken out of the Rayburn office building to the hospital) was injured. Subcription-only Roll Call cites a witness reporting that "Capitol Police were told over their radios to look for 'a white male in a black shirt with a handgun.'" In unrelated news, Ezra never came to the office today for some reason.

--Sam Rosenfeld

NEEDED: MORE SPORTS UNION MILITANCY. If you just read Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker review of the new book The Wages of Wins, about the economic analysis of sports, you'll miss the important American Prospect-y angle. The book clearly indicates that professional sports unions ought to be more militant. It argues that, contrary to what team owners tell you, imposing salary caps has very little impact on competitive balance. It also argues that, contrary to what sportswriters tell you, labor stoppages have very little impact on fan enthusiasm for the league (whichever league we're talking about) once the stoppage is resolved.

The upshot is that unions are correct on the merits to demand more salary flexibility and have less to lose than they imagine from going on strike. Interestingly, the book also indicates that NHL, MLB, NBA, and NFL players are approximately twenty-five times more likely to go on strike than are typical union members despite actually being less militant than they ought to be.

--Matthew Yglesias

UNITED NATIONS OFFICIALLY DECLARES IRAN DRESS CODES STORY UNTRUE. OK, you read it right here first: The U.N. has done an investigation and declared the bogus dress codes story to be false.

Now can we finally throw the last shovel of dirt on top of this story?

--Greg Sargent

WHAT LEAVING MIGHT LOOK LIKE. Lefty stalwart In These Times, which has become increasingly provocative and readable under its dynamic new leadership, is generating controversy in anti-war circles with Chris Toensing's new piece, "Why Leaving Iraq Won't Be Easy." It's well worth reading, and the kind of clear-eyed assessment of the complex facts on the ground one might more readily expect to find in The New Republic, if TNR had a less complicated relationship to the Iraq War, than in a publication I long thought of as being not so far to the right of Z magazine. Wesley Clark has previously laid out similar concerns about the sorts of sectarian strife and bloodshed that would follow a U.S. withdrawal, and it's good to see people far to his left willing to take an unbiased look at what the consequences of leaving Iraq would likely be for Iraqis. Most importantly, Toensing points out that the elected, religious, and political leadership in Iraq is not yet asking for the U.S. to go, and that we may potentially face a "through-the-looking-glass scenario, with Washington bullying the Iraqi government into asking U.S. forces to leave."

Those closer to the Noam Chomsky/Cindy Sheehan/Howard Zinn axis on the anti-war left seem particularly disappointed that the piece doesn't hew to their well-worn rhetoric. Writes David Swanson at AfterDowningStreet.org:

As scores of Iraqis die every day, it does not matter if you call it civil war, sectarian strife, or democracy; it is—by design—an American killing field, a smokescreen for stealing oil, and for establishing permanent military bases to defend American business interests.

UPDATE: Some readers seem to be taking my mentioning of Sheehan, Chomsky, and Zinn as some kind of gratuitous swipe against the site AfterDowningStreet.org. I just want to be clear that the only reason I dragged their names into this is that there are huge pictures of them on the site, along with clickable links for PSAs they have recorded. Notes the site, "These Public Service Announcements are available for download and play on the radio. AfterDowningStreet.org would like to thank The People Speak radio, Pacifica radio, Ed Asner, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Tim Robbins, Cindy Sheehan, and Ann Wright." Otherwise, I'd never have mentioned them.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CAN'T TAKE THE POLITICS OUT OF WAR. The New Republic is the kind of magazine that can run a series of ridiculous articles on Darfur and then publish this week's brilliant and devastating critique of the very same articles by David Rieff. It's a subscriber only piece, so I'm looking for a good excerpt and I think I'll go with this one because it has the most general importance:

To his credit, Reeves has written that any outside military force would have to ensure that the rebel guerrillas do not take advantage of the foreign presence to improve their position on the ground. But that is what an international deployment will almost inevitably do, which is why Minnawi and others have been campaigning so hard for one. The deployment of foreign troops, whose mission will be to protect Darfuri civilians, will allow the guerrillas to establish "facts on the ground" that will strengthen their claims for secession. That is what makes the interventionists' claim that the intervention will be purely "humanitarian"--that it will protect civilians being murdered, raped, and displaced by the Janjaweed but do little or nothing else--so disingenuous. For it is virtually certain that this is not the way events will play out if U.S. or nato forces deploy. To the contrary, such a deployment can have only one of two outcomes. The first will be the severing of Darfur from the rest of Sudan and its transformation into some kind of international protectorate, à la Kosovo. But, at least in Kosovo, the protectorate was run by Europeans--by neighbors. In Darfur, by contrast, it will be governed by Americans (who are already at war across the Islamic world) and possibly by nato (i.e., Africa's former colonial masters). Now there's a recipe for stability.

If anything, the second possibility is even worse. Assuming the intervention encounters resistance from the Janjaweed and the government of Sudan (and perhaps Al Qaeda), the foreign intervenors will arrive at the conclusion that the only way to bring stability to Darfur is, well, regime change in Khartoum: In other words, the problems of Darfur are, in fact, the product of Al Bashir's dictatorship, and these problems can be meaningfully addressed only by substituting a more democratic government. Such an intervention may well end up being Iraq redux, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. But, then, it was disingenuous to pretend that the United States could democratize Iraq at the point of a gun.

In that case, it was probably the right thing to do nonetheless, but the point remains that you can't step into these conflicts without taking sides. The actual issues at stake in the Darfur conflict are very murky and it's extremely unclear to me why anyone would want the United States to become enmeshed in them or think that the US Army is well-suited, institutionally, to sorting the situation out.

--Matthew Yglesias

DID YOU KNOW...? General Motors chairman Rick Wagoner has an op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times making the case that GM matters, not just as a car company or employer, but as a protector of Americana and a canary in the globalizational coal mine. It's a strange piece of work, most of all because it highlights GM's problems without offering anything beyond vague promises that said problems are being addressed. It doesn't suggest anything Americans should do to protect this storied firm, nor does it lay the blame anywhere in particular. One wonders why Wagoner wrote it.

Midway through the op-ed, Wagoner writes that "the most frustrating challenge facing all of us at GM is changing the misperception that our cars and trucks don't measure up to some foreign makes. The fact is, every major automaker makes good vehicles today. On a model-by-model comparison, different companies will be slightly ahead in different segments, but overall, GM cars and trucks rank among the best in terms of quality and value for the dollar." Quite a rousing endorsement -- various car companies are good at various things, and many are better than we are at particular things, but taken in aggregate, we're "among" the best! (And how many companies are allowed to be in "among"? And how wide is the margin for "the best?")

The problem is that GM is among the best in dying model classes. No one doubts the American automaker's ability to spit out a thickly muscled sports car, or a brutishly powerful truck. But when the question turns to economy cars, family sedans, and hybrid technologies -- all the classes that'll be crucial as cheap oil vacates the premises -- GM is far behind its Japanese competitors.

Worse yet is their branding. I was at the Improv the other night and the comedian, a midwestern-looking Gen X'er, went on a rip about GM. "Did you know," he asked, "that the Japanese have no word for tow truck? [switching to a Japanese accent] 'You put key in, car start. Why tow truck?'" Big laugh. "Stupidly, I told that joke in Detroit," admitted the comic. "They hung me from a tree by a fan belt. Which then broke. Thanks for using GM parts, guys!"

When you're a laughline at the Improv, it doesn't matter if you're a storied participant in the American economy. You need to change, and radically so.

--Ezra Klein

STILL LOOKING. The embarrassing search for a new Treasury Secretary continues with today's news being that Donald Evans is apparently under consideration for the job. Evans was Commerce Secretary in the first term, a job that traditionally goes to a Presidential crony unqualified for a real job. Obviously, they put lots of unqualified cronies in important jobs, so being the crony so cronyish that you had to get the post actually designed for a crony is a real achievement. Putting him in charge of the Treasury Department would be ridiculous but, hey, you never know.

Also under consideration is the current Commerce Secretary, Carlos Gutierrez, who used to sell breakfast cereal and appears to have no relevant experience whatsoever.

--Matthew Yglesias

HELP HER HELP YOU. I think Matt sort of misses the point there. Hillary Clinton, realizing that America's youth are lazy, helped start this war in order to build character. After you've jogged around the sands of Mesopotamia with a rations pack on your belt and a rifle on your soldier, being a middle manager in the HR department doesn't seem so bad. Remember too that this occupation has forced lots of interpersonal interactions with hostile "clients" angered by our "practices." As the commercials say, these are skills for life, particularly in the coming, service-oriented economy. Clinton's just trying to prepare us.

--Ezra Klein

CLINTON VERSUS THE SLACKERS. Further efforts by New York's junior senator to alienate me as she decides that young people these days are just all too lazy. "They don't know what work is. They think work is a four-letter word." Who, exactly, does she think is fighting her regret-free war? The legendarily hard-working, nose-to-the-grindstone baby boom generation?

--Matthew Yglesias

THE DAY AFTER. More interesting than the state of Hillary Clinton's marriage is the state of her foreign policy thinking:

But on Tuesday, she was also forced to deal with Iraq when two women protesting the war interrupted her speech. The protesters, who yelled, "Stop the war," were dragged from the room, leaving Clinton to explain in a question-and-answer session that she did not regret voting for war but opposed the way the president has conducted the conflict.

She said the United States could begin thinking about "making other decisions" about Iraq once an Iraqi government is "fully formed."

So . . . she thinks Bush has handled the war badly but doesn't regret authorizing him to handle the war? On the forward-looking issue, this is going to get us nowhere. If you want the Iraqis to move more quickly on forming a government, promising to withdraw American military support if and only if they accomplish this isn't going to get the job done. At any rate, I have longstanding beef with Patrick Healy as a reporter dating back to when he covered Harvard for The Boston Globe, but I'd be more inclined to defend her against his insinuations if she were, you know, a better senator and presidential candidate.

--Matthew Yglesias

SO NOW IT'S SAFE. Within hours of Ken Lay's and Jeff Skilling's guilty verdicts coming down, the MSM had begun to form their inane analysis. No less a barometer of conventional wisdom than Newsweek's Howard Fineman wrote:

If you want a date to mark the beginning of the end of the Bush Era in American life, you may as well make it this one: May 25, 2006. The Enron jury in Houston didn’t just put the wood to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. The jurors took a chain saw to the moral claims of the Texas-based corporate culture that had helped fuel the rise to power of President George W. Bush.

--Ben Adler

THE BENEFITS OF SOFTWARE PIRACY. Via the Technology Liberation Front, a study was released claiming that software piracy "resulted in a loss of $34 billion worldwide in 2005, a $1.6 billion increase over 2004, according to a study commissioned by the Business Software Alliance." This is moronic. As is typically the case with these industry sponsored surveys the method seems to have been to add up the number of pirated units, look at the retail price of one unit, and multiply the two together.

Obviously, though, many of the people who have unlicensed copies of intellectual property wouldn't have acquired the property if they needed to pay full retail price. As noted here, the survey "says the highest piracy rates are found in Zimbabwe and Vietnam, where it reckons 90 percent of the software in use is illegitimate." Virtually nobody in those countries could actually afford retail software. Windows Home Edition costs 33 percent of Zimbabwe's per capita income.

What these surveys mostly reveal is actually the benefits of unlicensed copying. The actual market for intellectual property in very poor countries is tiny. The benefits of free intellectual property to consumers too poor to buy it is, by contrast, large. Consequently, the deadweight loss associated with rigorous enforcement of intellectual property rules in poor countries would be extremely high and, thanks to TRIPPs, is increasingly real. Fairly strict enforcement of limited term copyrights in rich countries makes perfect sense, but as you go down the economic ladder more and more laxity is appropriate. Small losses to software company profits are easily outweighed by giant gains to third world consumers.

--Matthew Yglesias

WALKING IT BACK. I want to retract my instapunditry of Tuesday morning about the New York Times article on Hillary Clinton's marriage. I momentarily forgot to put on my political journalist hat and reacted to it as a woman. As a woman, I find it impressive and admirable that she's been able to preserve her marriage and turn it into something that, by all accounts, works for her. She has a friend, advisor, and peer in Bill Clinton, and the article's unprecedentedly detailed accounting of their days showed that they somehow manage to find a way to spend a substantial amount of time together for a congressional couple, while still being mindful of not getting in each other's way. It may not be perfect, but whose marriage is, marriage being the union of two imperfect beings after all? She has a real marriage, and if you consider only her role in it -- which is the only thing that ought to matter at this point, since she is the political candidate, not her husband -- it's hard not to be impressed by her achievement in building something workable on top of a foundation we all watched cracking.

But that view is one that, I suspect, will be infrequently heard. The political media world will always look at her marriage from the perspective of him, forever placing her in the role of victim or deficient wife. The focal point of discussion will never be her happiness, but his, and whether or not she is living up to her responsibility to provide for it. And that is a disaster for her. The moment she once again becomes, in the public discussion, little more than the wife in his marriage, all her efforts to define herself on the public stage begin to crumble, too. Rather than being an actor, she is the subject of actions. Her capacity to make choices and decisions is negated, and her control over her life and fate and career rendered secondary to her capacity to control him. Instead of being the first female senator from New York, and the first serious female presidential candidate (requisite caveat here) in American history, the conversation becomes: Hillary Clinton, doormat or shrew?

That can't be good for her. Nor can the present media environment, which I expect will be even more brutal, if it is imaginable, than the one she faced in the 1990s. The blogs will hurt her more than they help, and not just by disagreeing with her on political matters. Even here, on this very blog, I see it happening. My colleague Ezra engaged in a kind of intellectual exercise on Tuesday that the MSM would never publish, and which is the kind of thing that can only add to her public humiliation. The moment people start discussing Sen. Clinton as a sexual being rather than an intellectual one, they take her down a notch. That's how it's always worked for women in public life.

Clinton's best defense against this kind of too explicit, too personal talk, whether couched in the elliptical terms of the MSM or in the in-you-face style of the blogs, resides in the fact that we still have gendered ideas about how it is appropriate to treat men and women in public. It is one thing to reveal the sexual misdeeds of a man -- that's part of public boundary maintaining. It's quite another thing to try to strip his wife in the public square. There is something so undignified, so socially shameful about the attempted public sexual humiliation of a woman that I have to believe there will be a negative backlash against it.

Or perhaps, again, I am just thinking like a woman.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE ECONOMICS OF SELF-INTEREST. I tend to agree with the consensus in the economics profession in general, and with Alex Tabarrok in particular, in the current immigration debate. But this is a bridge too far for me: "Economists are probably also more open to immigration than the typical member of the public because of their ethics -- while economists may be known for assuming self-interested behavior wherever they look, economists in their work tend not to distinguish between us and them." That's a mighty generous self-interpretation. A skeptic might think that this has less to do with "tend[ing] not to distinguish between us and them" than with the fact that economists reap benefits from high levels of Mexican immigration.

I'll believe that this is all about altruism when I see an open letter from economists demanding that we scrap the complicated H1B visa system and instead allow unrestricted immigration of foreign college professors without all these requirements about prevailing wages, work conditions, non-displacement, good-faith recruitment of natives, etc. Obviously, there are many foreign born professors in the United States, but there could be many more, wages for academics could be lower, and college tuitions could be significantly lower. If there's really no difference between "us" and "them" economists should be leading the charge to disassemble the system of employment protections they enjoy.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE ON PROTEST MUSIC. Fellow haters of Neil Young's thuddingly literal-minded and reductive new Bush-bashing album might appreciate this SNL sketch plugging Young's follow-up record, I Do Not Agree With Many of This Administration's Policies (Andy Samberg, as Conor Oberst, makes a guest appearance.) I should note that, contrary to the thrust of the spoof, lack of subtlety isn't really the core problem with Young's album as a piece of political art; of course totally unsubtle protest music can be terrific.

Meanwhile, given the continued flood of protest music-related media pieces that lump the Dixie Chicks in with Young, Oberst, Green Day, Pink, and others, it's sort of worth at least noting that the Chicks (who are great, I hasten to say!) have, I believe, never recorded a political protest song, either related to this administration or anything else, ever, in their entire careers, including for the new album that's just earned them the cover of Time under the headline "Radical Chicks." (Their new single's a self-referential riposte to country music fans pissed about Natalie Maines' "Texas" remark, not any kind of message to the prez.) That even people who've never in fact recorded any protest music can become "controversial protest singers" in the eyes of the media and the public is surely a troubling sign o' the times.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THOSE WHO IGNORE HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO NOT DISCREDIT IT. I'm going to go ahead and disagree with Matt's admonition to leave the last 30 years alone when arguing economics. I certainly agree that liberal policies shouldn't be sold on a platform of "your life sucks," but certain strains of recurrently ascendant conservative policy-making do need to be discredited, and there are few ways to do that without going to the tape. That's not to say, of course, that we're not better off than we were 30 years ago. We are. But our growth is being shared less and less equally, and our economy is ever more oriented towards facilitating remarkable success for the lucky few. Every time we elect a serious conservative, the deficit explodes and some hapless sap needs to painstakingly put it back together a couple years later. Large negative income shocks are far more frequent, upward mobility is significantly less common, and recoveries aren't producing anywhere near the growth in median household wages that we'd expect.

Of course, the President's policies have only a moderate impact on the economy. And America remains rich, powerful, innovative, educated, and vibrant. We've grown and we've improved. But conservative policies have begun reshaping our economy on the margins, narrowing growth and heightening inequality. It's one thing to say liberal economic policies will make folks better off. It's true, but that's a smaller appeal than one might really hope. After all, most Americans have health care, have pensions, have jobs. More important than hypothetical programs is our economic vision -- what sort of economy we want, and what principles will guide our reactions to market fluctuations. And to explain that, we need to contrast ourselves with the bulk of economic policy-making over the last 30 years. And that starts with understanding what's happened over the last 30 years. Which is why everyone should read Brad DeLong's post in full. It's by far the most worthwhile ten minutes you'll spend on a blog today.

--Ezra Klein

THE END OF LEGAL BRIBERY? I have to say, I'm a little concerned with this "end of legal bribery" business. The thing smart people say after some pol goes down in a corruption scandal is that the real scandal is what's legal -- the perfectly ordinary day-to-day business of favor granting, cash-for-access, blah, blah, blah. I've always understood that cliché to mean something like "the biggest problems need to be solved through the political process (i.e., elections) rather than the legal system." The FBI seems to have taken it in the opposite spirit to mean "we ought to start treating things formerly understood as legal as, in fact, illegal."

The upshot of that is going to be to concentrate an awful lot of practical political power in the hands of the FBI's public integrity division. So far, they're targeting people I don't like, so it all seems perfectly fine. But it makes me nervous about the long term. After all, a newspaper headline screaming "Congressman X Under Investigation on Bribery Charges" is extremely damaging, even if the guy eventually winds up being acquitted. I don't think I'm ready to mount a full-throated defense of legal bribery and honest graft at this point, but I do think this whole development deserves some more serious scrutiny. Fundamentally, the answer to bad politicians is for better politicians to run against them and voters to vote the bums out, not to have the FBI serve as a guardian of the legislative process.

See Mark Kleiman for more on this. Keep in mind that the FBI has not, historically, been America's finest institution.

--Matthew Yglesias

THESE WERE THE BEST OF TIMES. David Leonhart says Americans have never been better off than they are today. There's a certain amount of truth to this, but also a great deal of non-truth. I think Brad DeLong lays out the real shape of the situation pretty well.

I would also say that, to me, a lot less hinged on the question of whether or not the average American is better off today than he was 30 years ago than most people seem to think. Conventionally, your more lefty liberals offer a very gloomy account of recent decades while people further to the right have a more sunny view. But it sort of doesn't matter. Implementing, say, a universal health insurance scheme will either improve most people's lives or it won't. If it will improve people's lives we should do it, and if it won't we shouldn't. And so on and so forth down the line for your major progressive policy ideas. I'm a liberal because I mostly think the stuff liberals want to do will improve most peoples' lives. So what does it matter if I say "we're better off than we've ever been and we could be even better off if we adopted all these awesome policies" or "things have been terrible for the past thirty years but we could turn it all around if we adopted all these awesome policies"?

What's needed, politically, is to persuade people that electing progressive politicians will bring them policies that will improve their lives -- winning or losing some argument about how we should understand changes in living standards since the mid-1970s is neither here nor there. After all, nobody, even those most committed to a pessimistic view of the recent past, is actually proposing that we literally turn back the clock and make things just the way they were in 1971.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE GORE BACKLASH. Only a matter of time until it started in earnest, right? First up is Jonah Goldberg with an attempt to reactivate the Gore-as-exaggerator storyline. Turns out Arianna Huffington, swooning over her new crush at Cannes, reported Gore saying "'This is my second visit to Cannes. The first was when I was fifteen years old and came here for the summer to study the existentialists — Sartre, Camus... We were not allowed to speak anything but French!' Which may explain his pitch-perfect French accent." Goldberg grabs this and, under the title "There He Goes Again," compares it with reports that Gore was working on his family farm at age 15. More damning, Gore got C's in French at St. Albans, which spurs Goldberg to snort that "presumably somebody who can ribbit fluently about Camus, should be able to get a B — even at St. Alban's."

Sometimes it's tough to know where to start. Goldberg didn't seem to notice that the quotation marks ended before the line about Gore's fluency. That was Huffington's compliment, not Gore's boast. Goldberg implies the opposite -- all the better to smear with, I guess. As for which summer Gore spent in France, think about Goldberg's critique here: He's not arguing that Gore didn't take that trip, but that he's misremembering the year. This is the strike against Al Gore; that a trip he took almost 45 years ago might have happened at 14, or 16, rather than 15. Given our mind's learned tendency to drift towards multiples of five, this is pretty weak sauce. Goldberg, a bright guy, isn't actually making this critique – it's more of a meta-critique, trying to dredge up old doubts about Gore and his tendency to embellish.

Elsewhere, Gregg Easterbrook is nattering in embarrassingly churlish fashion over Gore's film. As Kevin Drum summarizes, Easterbrook thinks, in order, that An Inconvenient Truth is boring, annoying, contrived, unimaginative, alarmist, too detailed, conspiratorial, hypocritical, and morally careless. And yet, he's "glad" Gore made it. Well then! What's at stake here is Easterbrook's own reputation. Back when he remained a global warming skeptic, Gore was a believer. Easterbrook can't admit his mistake, so he can't admit Gore's accuracy.

It reminds me of Gore's class at Columbia. While writing my article on Gore's post-2000 activities, I tracked down some of the students in the course he created for their journalism course. The class was deeply critical of contemporary journalistic conventions -- particularly the false idol of "objectivity," namely as it translates into mindless stenography of unequal viewpoints. The students rebelled against Gore's critique, turning almost instantly hostile. Josh Bearman, who took the course, remembers that “He knew more than everyone in the room. So the class basically turned against him because he was smarter than they were, and they didn’t like that. We witnessed exactly what had happened on the campaign plane in the year prior.” And make no mistake -- we'll see it again. It's one thing for global warming to top the agenda. For Gore to put it there, however, implicitly indicts all those who mocked or sought to stymie his crusade in the past. His success is their failure, and they'll do their damndest to stop it.

--Ezra Klein

TWO QUICK SCANDAL FOLLOW-UPS. Regarding Mike's take on Charlie Rangel, Nancy Pelosi, and Bill Jefferson, tensions between Pelosi and the Congressional Black Caucus (including Rangel) have indeed exploded since her move yesterday to have Jefferson step down from his Ways and Means Committee post. As for ABC News's afternoon report about Dennis Hastert being targeted in the federal Abramoff corruption probe, a Justice Department spokesperson released a statement soon after saying "Speaker Hastert is not under investigation" by the department.

--Sam Rosenfeld

EUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM. Scott McLemee has written a terrific, thoughtful critique of the deeply annoying Euston Manifesto; it's well worth a read. Todd Gitlin's quoted comments in the piece strike me as particularly apt and refreshing.

No one has really managed to top this short-and-sweet riff from Daniel Davies, however.

UPDATE: This came via Maxspeak.

--Sam Rosenfeld

NOT CROSSING THE AISLE. Ed Kilgore and Matt game out some of the politics of immigration legislation, with Matt taking a slightly more hardline don't-pass-anything position. Kilgore, however, fully acknowledges that a bill coming out of a House-Senate conference would be substantively worse than no bill at all if it leans in the House's draconian direction. Some think that pull-out-the-stops pressure from the President might enable a decent final bill to emerge -- I have my doubts Bush's best efforts could actually do that, but at any rate such a campaign seems unlikely to happen.

The immigration bill debate seems somewhat relevant to this subscription-only Roll Call piece about new Democratic prohibitions on pre-election bipartisanship:

Senate Democratic leaders are pushing their rank-and-file Members to refrain from reaching across the aisle to work on legislation and other policy efforts with vulnerable Republican incumbents until after Election Day, warning that the GOP has often used such displays of bipartisanship to protect incumbents in tough races only to abandon those measures after November, Democratic sources said Tuesday.

Specifically, aides said party leaders were concerned that shows of election-year bipartisanship could help a number of Republicans facing difficult challenges, including Sens. Rick Santorum (Pa.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Lincoln Chafee (R.I.), Conrad Burns (Mont.), Jim Talent (Mo.), Mike DeWine (Ohio) and George Allen (Va.)…

During Caucus luncheons and staff-level meetings over the last several weeks, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and their top aides have repeatedly “reminded” Senators and staff that in order to win a majority in the Senate, “We have to beat [GOP] incumbents” and not help them by co-sponsoring legislation, jointly signing letters to other colleagues or the administration on key policy issues or agreeing to conduct joint events with vulnerable Republican incumbents, a Democratic leadership aide said.

According to the aide, Reid, Schumer and other leaders and strategists have argued that, “Every five-and-a-half years these guys pretend they’re moderate, and we fall for it every time. We’re not going to help them this time.”…

--Sam Rosenfeld

GORE WATCH. When I started this up, I had no idea it would be such a massive undertaking. But Gore's popping up all over the place. He hit John Tierney's column Monday, forming the inspiration for a fairly bizarre effort that lambasted Gore for getting global warming right before others did. "As therapeutic as this history may be for Gore," writes Tierney, "it has certain problems. Scientists recognized the greenhouse effect long ago, but the question was how much difference it would make. And until fairly recently, when evidence of global warming accumulated, many non-evil economists doubted that the risks justified the costs of the proposed remedies."

So Gore was right -- his sin was not waiting for others to catch up. Quite a resounding critique Tierney's got. Meanwhile, he blasts Gore for "avoid[ing] any call to action that would cause immediate discomfort, either to filmgoers or to voters in the 2008 primaries." Over at Grist, David Roberts slaps his forehead "duh," writing that "Gore might not have needed to spend so much time on basic climate science if boneheads like Tierney hadn't taken so long to board the clue train. It appears one can never convince Americans too much." Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd thinks Hillary Clinton's big speech on the environment was an attempt to steal Gore's thunder. "[Hillary] made it clear who's in power and who's in Cannes when she ostentatiously promised to take her motorcade back to Capitol Hill and introduce legislation for a strategic energy fund to jolt inert government and insatiable Big Oil into action."

Elsewhere in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani thinks Gore's book -- a companion to his film -- is great. "[A]s a user-friendly introduction to global warming and a succinct summary of many of the central arguments laid out in those other volumes, 'An Inconvenient Truth, '" Kakutani writes, "is lucid, harrowing and bluntly effective." The Exxon-Mobil funded National Center for Policy Analysis certainly thinks so. They're comparing Gore to Joseph Goebbels. He certainly didn't seem to be speaking German on the Today Show (which you can watch here), but that may just prove how tricky he is.

--Ezra Klein

UP IS DOWN, REDUX. People have been rightly concerned for a while now about seeing, in the current domestic discussion of Iran, a twilight-zone repetition of the dynamics of the prewar Iraq debate. Greg, looking at today's Washington Post piece confirming Iran's desire for direct talks with the United States and delineating a policy divide between intelligence experts and Bush administration officials, raises a particularly nauseating possibility: that we might soon see Iran hawks pointing to the Iraq debacle as a way to discredit the cautionary advice intelligence experts are now offering vis-à-vis Iran. "Look at how they screwed up the Iraq WMD intelligence, why would you trust them?" -- that kind of thing. The sheer audacity of such a move is precisely what makes me pretty sure it's going to be deployed by these folks; it's best to be prepared.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MORE! Nathan Newman is certainly right about importing nurses and doctors from other countries. Not only does it head off excellent jobs that could be filled by native workers, but it deprives other nations of trained individuals necessary for their development. That said, we do have a supply problem for doctors and, particularly, nurses. We need more. But the problem is in training choke points: We require remarkable amounts of credentialing, and we offer only a small number of places to get the necessary degrees. Last year, 150,000 qualified applicants were turned away from nursing schools -- this amidst a terrific shortage. Meanwhile, we have around 100 medical schools in the nation, and anyone who wants to attend one has to undergo an excruciating college pre-med curriculum in college en route to almost a decade of expensive, intensive training. Considering the number of these folks who just want to be pediatricians, a different track that made primary care a serious option for less scientifically minded students wouldn't be a half-bad plan.

The point, of course, is that we've got the space here to create hundreds of thousands of terrific new jobs. As the boomers retire, we're going to need an enormous amount of medical professionals. If we began training now, opening the gates so our medical profession was, if anything, too full, we'd both prepare for the coming onslaught and create a new class of skilled laborers. Indeed, creating an excess of medical suppliers would help the Republicans with their oft-stated dream of forcing the health care industry to compete for patients. It would force down doctor's compensation while allowing physicians to spend more time with patients. Couple it with an expansion of training centers and partial subsidization of training, and you've got yourself a policy. Of course, the rhetoric of free-marketeers only translates into proposals that shift risk to individuals and, occasionally, import more low-wage workers from other countries. Actually crossing the medical industry or creating good jobs for the poor doesn't serve any constituency the right currently depends on.

--Ezra Klein

THE NEXT 10 WORDS. Brendan Nyhan reports on John McCain's bold plan to end the violence in Iraq:

"One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit,'" said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.

Update: As some commentors note, this could be the solution to everything. The deficit? get Congress in a room, tell them to "stop the bullshit." Abortion? Get women in a room, tell them to "stop the bullshit." Maybe this can be McCain's version of Ross perot's famously versatile plan to lock all the smart folks in a small room and don't let 'em out till they've solved all our problems.

--Ezra Klein

INSERT SNOW PUN. Speaking of the unbearable lightness of John Snow's policy knowledge, check out gay liberal ninja Barney Frank disemboweling him during testimony last week. Snow's embarrassment was so complete that even the Wall Street Journal, no friend of Frank's, couldn't resist highlighting it. Ah, schadenfreude.

--Ezra Klein

IS IT JUST ME? Or does anyone else suspect that maybe half the reason Hastert et al. are so in heat over the Jefferson raid has nothing to do separation of powers and something to do with the fact that if they defend Jefferson and help him stay in the House, the corruption issue doesn’t cut so cleanly for Democrats?

I’m fairly certain that Pelosi and other leaders want him out. But they’re afraid to stand up to Charlie Rangel. As the senior/most influential African American House member, Charlie is the one who can cut Jefferson loose, and he should face public pressure to do so. If I still had my old New York magazine column, I know what I’d be writing this week.

--Michael Tomasky

POLICING THE CAPITOL. I know this is an out of season remark and all good liberals should be both distancing themselves from corrupt Rep. William Jefferson and mocking the GOP leadership for suddenly taking issue with the problem of executive branch overreach under circumstances that appear designed to make it easier for congressmen to take bribes, but Dennis Hastert and the other congressional leaders are right on the merits here.

There's a reason why security for Congress (and the Supreme Court) is provided neither by the Secret Service, nor by the FBI, nor by the DC Police Department, but rather by a special Capitol Police Department (or Supreme Court PD for the SCOTUS). This is also why the Constitution stipulates that members "shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place." There's a real separation of powers principle at stake here; the executive branch is not supposed to be charged with policing the behavior of the members of other branches of government. I'll shed no tears for Jefferson, but this is not unlike if the Bush administration were to use an illegal secret wiretap to catch an actual terrorist.

Now, of course, the flipside of this dynamic is that the legislative branch is supposed to police its own members. The House can vote to expel people for misconduct. The House has an ethics committee precisely because it's supposed to police its members. When push comes to shove in separation of powers cases, the executive always has the preponderance of power on its side. The only way to maintain the privileges of the Congress is for public opinion to support Congress. That's simply not going to happen in this instance because Hastert and the rest of the leadership have made it eminently clear that they're not going to keep corruption in check if left to their own devices. Virtually nobody respects Congress as an institution, or the congressional leadership as individuals at this point, and nobody should. So you get what we had here last week; I don't like it any more than Hastert does, but it wouldn't have happened if he'd been doing his job.

--Matthew Yglesias

IGNORANCE IS BLISS. Robert Zoellick was pretty ineffective as US Trade Representative, so I'm not sure we should shed too many tears over him not getting the Treasury Secretary job. The explanation for why he's not getting it, however, is moronic. The White House is looking for someone "who would command more respect on Wall Street, in international financial markets, on Capitol Hill and among the public" than does John Snow. Zoellick doesn't fit the bill because the White House wants a guy "who would be a better salesman" than Zoellick, who "is more widely admired for his policy knowledge."

They recognize that nobody respects Snow, but they can't seem to figure out why. But of course precisely the reason nobody respects Snow is that nobody admires his policy knowledge and nobody thinks he plays a real role in shaping the administration's policies. He's just a speech-giver, a talking head, like Tony Snow, so there's no reason for anyone to take his statements seriously. Finding a slicker salesman who likewise won't have the capacity to do the substantive aspects of the job and likewise won't be taken seriously in policy debates (if they've started having policy debates in the White House...) inside the administration won't accomplish anything.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST WONDERING. Okay, I’m not stupid enough to think that I just won a seven-figure sum in the Australian lottery (for starters, I didn’t enter it). But reading through the email I just got made me wonder: How does this scam work? According to Valentino von Kahn (Mrs.), the “coordinator” of the Australian Lottery who “signed” the email, I’m to contact a bank in the Netherlands and give them the following information: name, phone number, fax number, address, and amount won.

That seems like relatively harmless information that anyone in the world could get in five seconds at whitepages.com (except fax number, but so what?). So how can that information be used to separate me from my hard-earned dosh? And if it can be, can’t then anyone go to whitepages.com and scam me, or anyone? How does this work, people?

Jonah, what we need is a virtual fence!

--Michael Tomasky

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: NOT SO FAST. From our June print issue: Mike Tomasky assesses Peter Beinart's new book, The Good Fight, and finds that, when it comes to Iraq, there are accounts still to be settled.

--The Editors

WALL: ACTUALLY BAD, ACTUALLY EXPENSIVE. Jonah Goldberg thinks the arguments against walling off the southern border are all bad. Except, of course, for the symbolism argument which he concedes is good. The other main argument is that it's too expensive. He doesn't actually think that's a bad argument either, but he says of folks who make it "one gets the sense that even if it were cheaper, they wouldn't favor a wall."

Well, no. If you could build a decent wall of that length for a million bucks, I'd be all for it. One imagines that under those circumstances, walled borders would be common all around the world and there'd be no problem of symbolism either. The issue really is that if you look at the severity of the problem the wall is supposed to address (too many illegal immigrants), its likely efficacy in addressing that issue (pretty low), and its cost (quite high), this is actually a bad idea. If you had a workable, enforced system of employer sanctions for hiring people illegally, a wall would be unnecessary. If you don't have such a system, a wall is going to be largely pointless. I think the bad mojo symbolism of a walled border is entirely parasitic on the proposal's lack of substantive merits. Walls feel symbolically bad because we associate them with dictators keeping people shut in or with tense military standoffs. We associate them with those things because those are the circumstances in which they’re primarily found. They're primarily found in those circumstances because that's what they're useful for. As an immigration-control measure, super-long walls don't have what it takes.

On one level, though, I don't have a big problem with the idea of a giant, wasteful construction project since it would have WPA-esque benefits. On the other hand, I think one of the primary benefits of a better system of employer sanctions is that it might let us reduce border security, which would be good for commerce on both sides of the border without throwing the labor market into total chaos. The very loose border with Canada -- child's play to sneak across -- brings substantial benefits to both countries.

--Matthew Yglesias

FREELANCERS AND TEAM PLAYERS. Matt has some useful thoughts on the difference between a freelance crook, like Bill Jefferson personally enriching himself through abuse of his office, and the kind of systemic, institutional corruption practiced by the Republican congressional majority and typified by the major corruption scandals on that side of the aisle. (Rahm Emanuel was obviously spinning but also happened to be accurate in laying out the distinction here: "One is a party outlook and operation; the other is an individual's action.") I'd just add the prosaic point that in the early days of the Duke Cunningham revelations -- back when Josh Marshall seemed to be pushing the story on a lark and papers outside of San Diego weren't paying it much mind -- it certainly seemed like that was a much more eccentric and isolated story of wrongdoing, along the lines of Jefferson. That is, easy pickings for Democrats trying to make political hay out of a Republican "culture of corruption," but not actually connected to that culture in a serious way. By now, of course, the investigation into Brent Wilkes's corrupt circle of defense and intelligence contracting is widening sufficiently to threaten shutting down the entire House Appropriations Committee.

And indeed, we're witnessing a process -- one I have slightly mixed feelings about -- whereby an unprecedented wave of criminal investigations may be provoking actual institutional changes to the campaign finance system: finance reform via law enforcement. That of course wouldn't really be possible if the corruption at hand weren't of a systemic and institutional nature in the first place.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHO'S NEXT? Kevin Drum pointedly asks the right (and wry) question about The Times' data-driven reporting on power couples: "Who's next?"

I'd like to see some data on President and Laura Bush, for one, and how many weekends they spent together over the past year, despite living in the same house and same city. Maybe then we can move on to Sen. Chuck Schumer, who lives on Capitol Hill with a group of other congressmen, returning to see his wife and kids in New York on weekends. Or maybe a better point of comparison would be Sen. John McCain, since his website says, "He and his wife, Cindy, reside in Phoenix." How often does he get out there to see her, again? And how often does she visit him in Washington?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

IMPRESSIVE. There's a lot of blogosphere outrage, including here at TAPPED, about this morning's New York Times story on Hillary Clinton's marriage. I'm not so sure there should be. This story answers an essential question for Hillary-watchers, and knocks down one of the major raps against her as a candidate, the allegation that she is a coldly calculating person so ambitious she stayed in a sham marriage just so she could run for President one day. So, as much as she and her staff and her supporters may hate this story, I think they should be grateful for it. It has never previously been reported that she and Bill spend so much time together. Their carefully calculated public distance has created an impression that they prefer to keep each other at arms' length; this story knocks that down:

Since the start of 2005, the Clintons have been together about 14 days a month on average, according to aides who reviewed the couple's schedules. Sometimes it is a full day of relaxing at home in Chappaqua; sometimes it is meeting up late at night. At their busiest, they saw each other on a single day, Valentine's Day, in February 2005 — a month when each was traveling a great deal. Last August, they saw each other at some point on 24 out of 31 days. Out of the last 73 weekends, they spent 51 together.

Based on their very public, very separate lives, I would have imagined this number to be much lower.

That it's as high as it is is a testament to her own efforts, and to the power of the institution of marriage, to reconcile people to each other, even after great difficulty. I've long thought that one of the best things Sen. Clinton had going for her on the family values front was that she stayed married in a situation where every woman in America would have understood if she'd have wanted a divorce. She made a highly conservative personal choice in a situation in which doing the opposite would have been eminently forgivable. That's why I think that those who worry that her expected presidential candidacy will raise old concerns about family values are too worried by half. Her choices and behavior have always been very different from her husband's.

I can't imagine Sen. Clinton ever doing this, but, should she chose to, she could make a defense of marriage as a civic and social institution more powerful than any other Democrat, ever, having chosen to value a vow taken in youth above her own pain, above and beyond fidelity, and above the understandable sentiment of her community. In a world where there are so many forces that pull people apart, from their own weaknesses to their work to the lack of support of the society overall for maintaining vows in the face of grave challenges, having simply done that should tell voters everything they need to know about her values. I know nothing of the Clinton's marriage, but I have watched enough families over the years to know that those couples who run up to the brink of divorce and then chose to reject it enter a territory few people ever see, and that there is much goodness to be found on the other side of that decision. Couples do recover from the unrecoverable and they can reforge bonds of love that transcend not just past difficulties, but, in a really profound way, even embodiment itself. Yes, marriage is a contract for the conduct of mundane life, but it also has the potential to be a spiritual pact, and as marriage has lost more and more of its material grounding, its psychic and spiritual functions have loomed ever larger. That's not news story material -- who writes of such things outside the Style section, or novels? -- but it's part of the larger human story we ask our politicians to be part of, and in which, ultimately, all of us can't help but be interested.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MORE ANALYSIS THAN YOU EVER WANTED ON THIS TOPIC. In regards to the morning's big Clinton story, it really is all a matter of emphasis. As Matt notes, the actual article spends most of its time hinting that the Clinton's don't have much sex (I'll get back to this in a moment). The piece admits that, since the start of 2005, the Clintons have seen each other, on average, 14 days out of every month. Also since the start of 2005, Bill Clinton has quarterbacked a multibillion-dollar foundation and ran the government's response to the tsunami while Hillary has kicked her traveling into high gear to prepare for her presidential bid. And yet they still manage to see each other almost one out of every two days. That could be easily spun as a story of dedication and determination -- "Despite Heavy Schedules, Clintons Make Time For Marriage."

But let's talk about the sex. The average adult has sex about once a week, or 58 times a year, a number that's held steady since about 1988. The average, though, isn't adjusted for age. As you'd expect, 20 and 30 year olds have the most sex, with frequency dropping about 20 percent per decade through age 64 (when it begins plummeting). So Americans 18 to 39 have sex about 84 times a year, while those in their 40s get busy around 63 times annually. Extrapolating out, when you hit 50, your frequency will intersect your age, and you'll be making the beast with two backs (to use a Shakespeare-ism) about 50.4 times a year. Come 60, you're down to 40.32 encounters a year.

Now, Bill and Hillary are both 59. If they have average appetites (questionable, I know), we're looking at about 42 private moments a year. If they're together around 14 days a month, that's 168 opportunities, meaning they only have to sleep together one out of every four times they see each other to be perfectly normal. So even the article's insinuation is wrong -- there's no reason they can't be enjoying a perfectly healthy romantic life together. And if, as the saying goes, absence makes the heart grow fonder, they can easily be beating the average. TAPPED: taking on the big issues.

--Ezra Klein

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL GLASS HOUSE YOU HAVE! To follow up on Matt's post about Ramesh Ponnuru's complaints that we, among others, won't review a book that we haven't been sent review copies for, I just did a search on a book I quite like: The Medical Malpractice Myth, by Tom Baker. Baker is a law professor at the University of Connecticut and one of the nation's foremost authorities on insurance issues. His book calmly and methodically deconstructs the hysteria over malpractice, showing, quite convincingly, that the premiums are related to the boom/bust cycle of the insurance industry, that the lawsuits generally have merit, and that malpractice itself is exponentially more prevalent than malpractice lawsuits. It does not sell itself on the strength of Ann Coulter or Ward Churchill's blurb, and its title does not accuse one of America's two major parties of being pro-death. It is, in short, a more serious, thoughtful book by a more credentialed author, one who not only sent out review copies, but gave a presentation at the American Enterprise Institute, the nation's premier conservative think tank.

And yet not a single conservative outlet has considered his argument. This even though tort reform is a continual obsession of rightwing politicians, and indeed their primary response to rising health costs. This even though medical malpractice kills upwards of 100,000 Americans every year, rendering it deadlier than auto and workplace accidents combined. Of course, I'm not accusing The National Review of any conspiracy of silence, or unwillingness to subject their policy ideas to analysis. I'm just admiring their big, beautiful, glass house.

--Ezra Klein

A BLOG BY ANY OTHER NAME. I'm glad Judith Warner is back as a TimesSelect bonus feature, but what's the deal with the blurb they've given her?

Judith Warner: "Domestic Disturbances"
The author's blog on modern parenting returns and will now appear every Friday."

If it appears once a week on a regular schedule, that's a column, wouldn't you say? Worse, if you read it, you'll see that the most recent "post" was on May 18. Since that's my birthday, I happen to recall clearly that that was Thursday, not Friday. The previous column was on May 11. They come out Thursday night, not Friday. Obviously, in the print world a story that closes Thursday night goes in the Friday paper, but on the Web, Thursday is Thursday is Thursday and there's no getting around it.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHY NOT JUST ASK? Ace New York Times reporter Patrick Healy delivers a big scoop on the Clinton family marriage. Take this shocking revelation:

Since the start of 2005, the Clintons have been together about 14 days a month on average, according to aides who reviewed the couple's schedules. Sometimes it is a full day of relaxing at home in Chappaqua; sometimes it is meeting up late at night. At their busiest, they saw each other on a single day, Valentine's Day, in February 2005 -- a month when each was traveling a great deal. Last August, they saw each other at some point on 24 out of 31 days. Out of the last 73 weekends, they spent 51 together. The aides declined to provide the Clintons' private schedule.

Atrios wants to hit the hypocrisy button and wonders where the articles are pondering the sex lives of prominent Republicans. Frankly, I'd like to know why Healy can't just drop the silly insinuations and faux investigative methods. Both Clintons have official spokespersons, just ask them how often Bill and Hillary have sex. When they don't say, you can run a nice juicy headline like "Clintons Stonewalling on Sex Frequency Issue," or, to repeat a classic Monica-era format, "Clintons Dogged By Sex Frequency Questions," as if these things just come out of nowhere. If you're not going to ask straight-up, or even write clearly what you're talking about, then what's the point of all this?

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP: WHO’S YOUR DADDY PARTY. Francis Wilkinson’s cover article on the end of the GOP masculinity monopoly is now online. The rest of the June issue is also available, and subscribers who prefer to print out the magazine can download the PDF here.

--The Editors

THE HORSE'S MOUTH. Fans of Greg Sargent's contributions to Tapped, take note: As part of the Prospect's ever-expanding blog empire, we're now hosting Greg's own blog on media and politics, The Horse's Mouth. You'll want to make it a regular part of your daily TAP online intake. (Greg won't be a stranger to Tapped, however -- have no fear.) Meanwhile, those Tapped readers who haven't yet made Midterm Madness a daily destination as well really need to consider doing so. There's great stuff over there, and when it comes to the midterms, they know what they're talking about a hell of a lot more often than us Tappers do.

Just to recap: Tapped, Midterm Madness, The Horse's Mouth. All essential reads. Our blogs could be your life.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE RETURN OF EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICINE. It's easy to forget how much of American medicine is a guessing game, how your treatments are a composite result of your doctor's experiences, biases, treasured anecdotes, and personal reactions to his own training. Most folks think medicine operates off a rigidly defined set of standards: If you have symptom A, your doc orders tests B, C, and D. Not quite. According to a new study, doctors are ordering useless tests for asymptomatic patients at staggering rates. Of tests that aren't recommended for patients with a particular batch of complaints, we're spending between $12 million and $63 million. Worse yet, for tests with risks that outweigh the benefits for certain patients, doctors are ordering them against recommendations over 40 percent of the time, for a total cost reaching into the hundreds of millions. And that's not even getting into the ricochet tests and expenses that come from false positives found by unnecessary diagnostics.

The problem, basically, is that medicine often doesn't know it's doing. Technology is moving too fast, and we have too many treatments, for the profession to keep up. Add in that most doctors aren't spending their spare time reading journals, we're defunding medical research, we do very few comparative studies on new treatments, and one-third of journal studies are overturned anyway, and you've got a problem -- medicine becomes guesswork, and massively expensive guesswork at that.

A few examples: Remember when everyone used to get their tonsils out? Now we know that does kids little good. Back surgery? Apparently no more effective than drugs and physical therapy. Ulcers? They're bacteria, not stress. Angioplasties? We're hair trigger with these things, as we are with bypass surgeries, to the tune of hundreds of thousands unnecessary procedures a year. Prostate cancer? We don't actually know how to treat it, or at least how to choose between treatments for it. Masectomies? Turns out they're generally no more effective than the far less intrusive lumpectomies. Our culture, both medical and general, has a preference for the most aggressive treatments, but the data often doesn't bear that intuition out. This, by the way, is the world conservatives want patients navigating their own way through -- one that lacks enough digestible evidence for even the most highly trained, well-paid professionals to effectively traverse.

But we do need change, as we're wasting billions and billions on unnecessary, and even counterproductive, treatments. What can we do? A couple things: What's needed here is a long-time buzzword, "evidence-based medicine." We need proper data, filtered through standardizing committees, released in a comprehensible fashion. We need increased funding for NIH research, and more support for computer models that carry out virtual studies. We need laws regulating the nexus between Big Pharma, insurers, doctors, hospitals, and medical technology producers. We need a payment system that rewards outcomes rather than treatments. And we need a Congress that's not constantly distracted by BS issues like tort reform and insurance regulation. In 1994, Bill Clinton folded much of this into his health reform bill. But evidence-based medicine can be easily decoupled from insurance reform, and it should. Unfortunately, there are few points to be scored or donations to be had in such a technocratic, important exercise.

Update: Changed the line that said doctors didn't know they were doing. It was hastily written, and not what I meant to convey. The point isn't ignorance on their part, but a lack of digestible research, agreed-upon standards, and compensation practices that reward outcomes rather than treatments.

--Ezra Klein

SHOW ME THE BOOK! Lord am I tired of all this whining about how liberals aren't reviewing Ramesh Ponnuru's book, The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life. I think Kevin Drum already wrote the definitive take on this, but I'll reiterate. On the one hand, at every possible decision-point the marketing here seems to have been designed to get liberals not to take this seriously -- from the title to the choice of publisher to the inside flap material. On the other hand, the topic chosen is one that's famous for not being amenable to interesting debates and discussions. On top of that, unlike Ann Coulter's vile little rants, it's not really an interesting cultural phenomenon to learn that American conservatives think abortion is seriously wrong and also oppose "euthanasia, embryo destruction, even infanticide."

But if everyone will promise to stop whining and, say, send me a review copy of the book (this is helpful in getting people to review your book), I hereby promise to read it and write something about it.

Meanwhile, I'm a little confused by Ross Douthat's apparent view that if I do read it, he thinks my "caricature" of "pro-lifers as women-hating religious fanatics and nothing more" will be dispelled. Obviously, "fanatic" and "women-hating" are loaded terms and I'll leave them aside. But Ross and Ponnuru both actually are serious Catholics who actually do subscribe to a whole set of conservative views about sex and gender beyond questions about the legal status of abortion. Now if you found a secular humanist who thinks premarital sex and gay marriage are great, and women who don't work are traitors to the sisterhood but who also thought that criminalizing abortion was a good idea, that might be an interesting book.

--Matthew Yglesias

ISRAEL LOBBIES. Subscription-only CQ reports on the looming showdown between the House and the Bush administration over a draconian bill imposing across-the-board sanctions against the Palestinian Authority and limiting the president's waiver authority (which normally gives him some flexibility to override the directives). The administration has made clear that it opposes punitive sanctions of this scope, not merely on the grounds of executive prerogative (which is, of course, the par-for-the-course Bushian rationale for opposing congressional directives), but also because the extent of the restrictions the bill imposes -- related to both direct and indirect humanitarian aid and funding for any diplomatic contacts between American and Palestinian officials -- really does run counter to the substance of administration policy. Indeed, the bill appears to run counter to the policy of the Olmert government in Israel. Eric Alterman recently reported hearing an interesting tidbit from MJ Rosenberg of the Israel Lobby Forum (which opposes this bill): "Rosenberg says that House staffers have told him that the Democratic leadership in the House is telling Members that it is important that fewer Democrats than Republicans oppose the bill in order that Rahm Emanuel's fundraising efforts for the DCCC do not suffer." Among the 295 sponsors of the bill in the House, Republicans are so far beating out Dems 174-121, but we'll wait for the roll call vote later this afternoon to see if the DCCC's funding remains secure.

All this may inspire thoughts of a certain horrible evil no-good essay about the Israel lobby that we can't talk about because of course there's no Israel lobby. Snark aside, Rosenberg actually does discuss the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis in the context of this bill, pointing out that the Israel lobby is less monolithic than the authors portray it as despite the outsized influence of AIPAC. On the actual policy question at hand, I'm siding with the cooler heads currently carrying the day in such well-known hotbeds of craven terrorist-appeasement as the Bush administration and the Israeli government.

Meanwhile, this letter from Rep. Betty McCollum to AIPAC is not to be missed.

UPDATE: Link to the bill fixed.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE HISTORICAL MOMENT? I think I agree with about half of Ezra’s post below. Just as the Democrats were purged of their southern roots in 1994, so too might an overdue regional realignment visit the northeast in 2006. If, for example, voters in Connecticut remove Chris Shays, Rob Simmons, and Nancy Johnson from office, then November 2006 could be the moment that future historians cite as when the bluing of blue America caught up with the reddening of the red states. To be sure, there are more congressional districts in the south than in the northeast, so I tend to agree with Ezra that it is still a stretch to think that we’ll hear the words “Speaker Pelosi” in November. Still, if nutmeggers purge themselves of congressional Republicans, and if Rhode Islanders dump Lincoln Chafee, then an historical moment this will be: The New Englandization of the Democratic party will all be all but complete.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

AND I WOULD'VE SUCCEEDED, TOO, IF NOT FOR THOSE MEDDLING SITCOMS. Stanley Kurtz's hysterical post unveiling the "the entirely unsecret conspiracy against patriotism, tradition, and religion hiding in plain sight on our movie and television screens, in our universities, and on the pages of the mainstream press" is a peculiar piece of argument. Conservatives, he insists, need to watch out; their total defeat in the pop-culture arena means that "one big loss could easily turn conservatives back into a marginal cultural force for some time." For them, any hold on power is precarious, because "one cable news channel, talk radio, and the blogosphere do not an invincible army make. It only seems that way because we also have nominal control of the reigns of power."

But doesn't that minor "controlling the reigns of power" thing sort of discredit Kurtz's point? After all, Democrats controlled all reigns of power in the early '90s, and the presidency between 1992 and 2000, yet the culture didn't rise up to permanently marginalize conservatives. Indeed, folks watched Will and Grace, approved of Bill Clinton's job performance, and then split almost 50-50 in the 2000 election. Conservatives were fine. For all this cultural hegemony enjoyed by liberals, the right has basically owned the White House for the past forty years, controlled the House since 1994, etc., etc. Given that record, Kurtz's attempts to make conservatives once again the underdogs because of Big Love and The Da Vinci Code come off a bit hollow. The right, now in control, is desperate for a monolithic enemy to blame for their failures and shortcomings. All they've got left is pop culture. And so pop culture they shall use.

--Ezra Klein

NEW COUNTRY ON THE BLOCK. It looks like we'll soon be welcoming Montenegro into the family of sovereign states. But don't believe everything you read in the newspapers: "For supporters of Montenegrin independence, the results, however narrow, are the fruition of a decade-long struggle to enable Montenegro to reclaim its status from 1878 to 1918, when it was a republic and an internationally recognized state." Nope. Independent Montenegro was a principality and then a monarchy under the rule of Nicholas Petrovic until the country joined up with Serbia and the rest of the gang after World War I to form the Kingdom of Yugoslavia under the auspices of the Serbian royal family.

--Matthew Yglesias

CAN'T WIN FOR WINNING. LB is right -- the conventional wisdom is shifting against the Democrats. As today's Washington Post shows (and as Sam noted), the GOP is setting up victory as merely keeping Congress in 2006. Of course, with gerrymandered districts and the natural benefits of incumbency, losing Congress is a virtual impossibility. The punditocracy, egged on by the example of 1994 -- not to mention the predictions of Newt Gingrich, Bill Kristol and a variety of other eminences from that most golden of ages -- have begun salivating for the drama and intrigue of a Democratic Revolution, but the Republican resurgence of a dozen years ago was a historical inevitability, a realignment of conservative Southern seats from a party that enjoyed their tribal loyalty but not their ideological allegiance. Those districts had long been teetering Republican, they just needed a sufficient gust of wind to push them over. Democrats enjoy no similar regional historical trend. The likeliest outcomes are moderate gains, improvements that looked impossible mere months ago, but will now be seen as yet another lackluster performance by a party unable to take advantage of its good luck.

--Ezra Klein

WHAT DID DHS KNOW? Jeff Stein reports that some members of Congress are asking questions about whether the Department of Homeland Security may have had access, via its NSA liaison, to the NSA's illegal wiretap and phone record surveillance programs. This would be the same Department of Homeland Security, we recall, whose operatives were used to help Tom DeLay try to resolve a partisan dispute in the Texas legislature and that did such a heck of a job in New Orleans.

--Matthew Yglesias

METAETHICS: THE SAGA CONTINUES. I don't want to get too bogged down in this, but since Jonah Goldberg's written some posts in response to what I said Friday on relativism, here's a bit more. One thing, for the philosophers in the room, is that "relativism" per se is a vulgar term that just about everyone rejects. I'm more like a quasi-realist or a non-cognitivist or some other jargon term you may prefer.

The interesting point came, I think, in Jonah's second post wondering, "How are you going to convince others, to pick a nice progressive example, that gay marriage is a moral imperative or that torture is wrong without an appeal to conscience?" To me, this is just the point. Jonah's witnessed me engage in arguments with moral aspects in the past, and, indeed, we've debated various issues from time to time. There's no point in an actual moral conversation where adding "and my views are objectively correct!" adds anything to what's happening. Obviously, appeals to conscience are a part of argument. Equally obviously, conscience exists -- people feel guilty sometimes and have the capacity to empathize and people take advantage of these traits when arguing. I might say to someone, "Well, look, how would you feel if you were being told you couldn't marry your lover, that your relationship was going to be permanently relegated to second-class status, all because, hypothetically, recognizing the legitimacy of your love might lead to a decline in heterosexual marriage rates at some time in the future?"

That sort of thing is a classic of moral discourse, but obviously it doesn't "prove" anything. And that's generally how these things go. When you argue with people, you try to appeal to shared sentiments, point out alleged inconsistencies in the other guy's position, and so on and so forth. What underlies the possibility of discussion isn't objective moral truth but the fact that, say, Jonah and I have a vast stockpile of things we agree about and one tries to resolve controversies with appeals to stuff in that store of previous agreement.

He also says there's something "profoundly un-liberal" about my view. I think it's a little un-liberal and, indeed, I'm always a little surprised at conservative hostility to the notion. As I see it, this is all exactly why we sometimes must, as the conservatives say, stop negotiating with people and start trying to kill them instead. Sometimes you face someone whose disagreements with you are so profound that appeals to shared premises don't get you anywhere. Or you face someone who just doesn't care about doing the right thing. It's precisely because there's no way to decide who's objectively right in a dispute between, say, Adolf Hitler and liberal democracy, that we resolve the biggest moral controversies with force and threats of force rather than moral discourse and appeals to conscience. Debate and deliberation only work for the small stuff.

--Matthew Yglesias

EXPECTATIONS GAME. Some good times to be had reading through The Washington Post's write-up of the Bush administration's bold plan for revival through GOP victory in November -- with victory defined as "Nancy Pelosi not becoming Speaker of the House." (From the article: "If Republicans retain Congress in November, Bush advisers note, he could assert that for the third straight election, the party defied historical patterns and popular predictions." Of course, not only is it widely acknowledged that the odds still favor Republicans retaining Congress despite their massive unpopularity, but also, for Republicans to sustain losses this year without actually losing control of Congress would in fact be in keeping with historical patterns.) As far as bar-lowering goes, the new line being pushed by Ken Mehlman is especially amusing -- that the GOP can prosper by moving the election "from a referendum to a choice," or "from a period where the public looks at things and says thumbs-up or thumbs-down, to a time when they have a choice between one side or the other." Good to hear the RNC chairman talking up his parties accomplishments so effectively: Americans may hate the Republicans, but with some luck they just might hate the Democrats even more.

Of course, the last time I joined others in taking snarky potshots at the starkly negative characteristics of a Republican campaign strategy I ended up curled up in a fetal position at 3:00 in the morning watching the President get re-elected, so I should probably restrain myself.

--Sam Rosenfeld

GOREWATCH. It's getting a bit hard to keep up with Gore's press. He's got the cover of New York Magazine this morning, under the heading "The UnHillary?" The story is written by John Heilemann, who received significant access to the man himself, and came back with the stories to prove it. "Eleven years ago, I wrote a story about Gore in which I remarked that 'what any sensible person does in anticipation of a sustained piece of oratory by Al Gore' is 'order another cup of coffee—black.' So I can’t help but laugh when Gore arrives for the first of our conversations carrying a dainty white cup, walks silently over, waiterlike, and intones, 'I understand, sir, you take it black.'"

And Heilemann, for his part, takes his comments on Gore's plodding oratory back. He calls Gore's speech "a stump speech—or rather, half a stump speech. And a damn fine one at that. It’s certainly a more coherent and rousing condemnation of the Bush administration than I’ve heard from any other potential 2008 candidate." He gets all manner of consultants and politicos to talk up Gore's chances. He relays word of a thaw in the chilly, post-2000 relations of Gore and Bill Clinton, and gets one Clintonista to chuckle "that 'you can see Bill talking to Hillary one minute, then ducking into his study to take Gore's call and advise him on how to beat her. He’s Clinton, you know—he just can’t help himself.'"

So will he run? Far too early to tell. But Heilemann comes to the same conclusion I did -- that if he is interested in the race, he's doing everything right. "What Gore," he writes, "is being is smart. His rehabilitation has been propelled by his liberation—by the fact that, as Roy Neel puts it, 'he’s not forced into various boxes that you subject yourself to when you’re a traditional politician running for office.' But Gore’s liberation isn’t simply about the words that he can utter; it’s about how those words are heard. He is liberated from the filters that people put on their ears when they’re listening to scheming candidates."

Meanwhile, USA Today has the standard "Gore Comeback" narrative, and the San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting tidbit: Gore's canceled a speech at Berkeley to avoid crossing an AFSCME picket line. No use burning bridges you still may need to cross, I guess.

--Ezra Klein

ECHOES OF WHAT NOW? Via Matt Singer, this isn't comforting:

Iranian expatriates living in Canada yesterday confirmed reports that the Iranian parliament, called the Islamic Majlis, passed a law this week setting a dress code for all Iranians, requiring them to wear almost identical “standard Islamic garments.”

The law, which must still be approved by Iran’s “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenehi before being put into effect, also establishes special insignia to be worn by non-Muslims.

Iran’s roughly 25,000 Jews would have to sew a yellow strip of cloth on the front of their clothes, while Christians would wear red badges and Zoroastrians would be forced to wear blue cloth.

Update: This appears to be a hoax. My apologies.

--Ezra Klein

FRIDAY AFTERNOON METAETHICS HOUR. I don't want this to be misunderstood, but I'm a moral relativist. Or, rather, I reject moral realism, the view that "moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right. Moreover, they hold, at least some moral claims actually are true." This is a much-debated philosophical issue, but in punditland, it's just a term of abuse. Ergo, Fred Siegel writing in Blueprint about the least-significant challenge currently facing America -- college professors who are too left-wing for Siegel's taste:

If, as Michel Foucault told the Berkeley faculty in 1983, "There is no universal criterion which permits us to say, this category of power relations are bad and those are good," then there is no way to prefer a liberal society to fascism, communism, or Islamism.

Tragically, I don't have time for a full-throated defense of my meta-ethical views at the moment. But this kind of claim, oft-made, is clearly false. Is there a universal criterion by which I judge whether I like chocolate ice cream better than vanilla ice cream? Presumably not. Is there, therefore no way to prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla ice cream? Obiously, no; people are walking around with preferences about this as we speak, and it's fine. Similarly, letting the ontological chips fall where they may, the purported objective superiority of liberal societies to Islamism doesn't play an actual role in Siegel's preference for liberal societies.

Sometimes, you face a question that you think has an objective answer like "How much should we care about budget deficits?" What you're supposed to do in those circumstances is look at the evidence in an even-handed and objective way. The big issues of political commitment don't work like that at all. Siegel didn't go learn Arabic fluently, then read the Koran (it says you should only read it in Arabic), then study the works of Sayyid Qutb and other Islamist commentators, and then objectively weigh those arguments against the great names of liberal political thought in an open-minded and unprejudiced way before deciding, "Yes, those Islamists are all wrong!" That would be dumb, and nobody lives their life like that. Nevertheless, if you asked Siegel to explain his preference for liberal societies, I'm sure he could muster some reasons in much the way that I can. Islamists do a lot of stuff that seems cruel and repugnant -- sawing off peoples' heads, for example or stoning gay people to death. Is that "really" wrong? Do I need to check? Deduce it from first principles? If I can't come up with an airtight argument against head-sawing within the next fifteen minutes, does that throw everything into doubt? Again, that's silly; nobody thinks that.

--Matthew Yglesias

TOTALLY OFF-MESSAGE FRIDAY AFTERNOON POST. Some of my old New York friends and I have gotten into a discussion about the most popular television shows of all time. I made the case for The Flintstones. Hear me out.

Fred & Crew debuted in 1960 as a prime-time sitcom -- the first prime-time cartoon in TV history. It ran for six seasons on ABC, with 166 episodes produced. Since then, it has never been off the air. Ever. In fact, Rick discovered with some quick Googling that the Bedrock gang is on television in 80 different countries in 22 languages. Every single second of every single day, somewhere in the world, The Flintstones is airing.

Rick countered with I Love Lucy, and I confess that he may well have a point. Lucy debuted in October 1951 and, according to Rick’s research on the TV Land Web site, it has never been off the air since then.

But I wonder: Is Lucy on every second of every day? I kinda doubt it. So I think I’m on reasonably solid ground, although the nine years’ head start is obviously formidable.

So, what think you? I don’t know how these things are measured (or if they can be). If I had to guess the five most popular TV shows of all time, I’d stick to my guns and say: 1. The Flintstones; 2. I Love Lucy; 3. The Honeymooners; 4. The Andy Griffith Show; and 5. M*A*S*H. Discuss.

--Michael Tomasky

EASY THERE ECONOMY, EASY... Paul Krugman is in fine form today, letting his inner economist roar forth for a quick lecture on the state of the economy, and why the stock market's drop over the last few days is worrisome. "The rise in stock prices that began last fall," he writes, "was essentially based on the belief that the U.S. economy can defy gravity -- that both individuals and the nation as a whole can spend more than their income, not on a temporary basis, but more or less indefinitely." And then comes the bad news. The dollar's dropped a bit less than 10 percent against the euro and yen in the last month, the housing market is rapidly decelerating, and do we really need to talk gas prices? Consumers have been surprisingly resilient against their rise, but there's evidence that the tipping point is near. Back to Krugman: "We [have become] a nation in which people make a living by selling one another houses, and they pay for the houses with money borrowed from China. Now that game seems to be coming to an end. We're going to have to find other ways to make a living -- in particular, we're going to have to start selling goods and services, not just I.O.U.'s, to the rest of the world, and/or replace imports with domestic production." Think anyone else is in the market for a really big fence?

--Ezra Klein

THE APPLE FALLS FAR FROM THE TREE. Sounds like Labour's scion isn't too into, well, laboring. Euan Blair, progeny of Tony, has been stateside for the past couple of weeks, interning for Jane Harman. He lasted two weeks. According to subscription-only Roll Call, "Sources contend that it’s because the 22-year-old lad was a wee bit on the spoiled side. One source says Blair, who already had been accepted to graduate school at an Ivy League university this fall, seemed “bored” and uninterested in doing the work of other interns. A source who knew of Blair’s short tenure in Harman’s office said, 'He was a dilettante.'" Sounds charming. I can offer some reportorial substantiation in this case: A friend of mine happened upon him in an elevator recently, and hearing his accent, mentioned that he'd spent some time living in Oxford. "Oxford, aye?" Snorted Blair. "'ome of the gays, that is!"

He should try interning for Barney Frank.

--Ezra Klein

THE MCCAIN BACKLASH CONTINUES. First Richard Cohen, now Michael Kinsley? That's bad new for the straight talk express, which relies on precisely these folks for fuel. Indeed, my hunch is that the McCain phenomenon is beginning an almost perfect reversal: as fresh and counterintuitive as lauding his 2000 candidacy was, the cool kids are going to grow proportionately alienated by his 2008 steamroller. Too much pandering, too much politics. And, sadly for McCain, his main policy break with independents and the left is on the country's most salient issue, the war. As Kinsley wonders, "how many Americans and Iraqis should die so that we can enjoy entertaining presidential speeches?" That question is going to grow a lot louder, and even though there are, as Matt says, a couple leftie pundits looking to McCain to rescue their own hawkishness, when Kinsley, Krugman, and Cohen are all writing anti-McCain pieces in 2006, the next two years look like a loooong time for John.

--Ezra Klein

MCCAIN AND WAR. I loved this line from Michael Kinsley on John McCain: He "has a unique genius for telling the truth from his heart and making people believe that he is lying. And these people are his supporters! They admire him as a straight-talking truth–teller, and they forgive him for taking positions on big issues that they find repellent on the grounds that he doesn't really mean what he says." I do think, though, that Kinsley actually misses part of the dynamic here. He writes that lots of folks are eager to excuse McCain's misdeeds on the grounds that, "Oh, he has to say that to get the Republican nomination," where "'That' might refer to McCain's strong right-to-life stand on abortion, or his strong support for the war in Iraq, or his recent rapprochement with Jerry Falwell."

On abortion and Falwell, that's correct. But with regard to the war, I think it's wrong. Many Democrat-favoring journalists forgive McCain's views of foreign policy because they agree with McCain's views on foreign policy. McCainiacs have gotten a little cagey about this point since the constituency for their views has dwindled to about seventeen people, but if you look up the classic works of left-wing McCainism from the heady days of 2002, it was pretty clear. Here's Jon Chait making the case:

Yes, a couple Democrats--mostly old cranks like Robert Byrd and Hollings--have worried about an open-ended conflict; but others--such as Lieberman--have staked out terrain to Bush's right. The general mood among Democrats in Washington is to lay low on foreign affairs and to confront Bush in the domestic arena. Not only does this mean that McCain's hawkishness would pose little barrier to his nomination; it also presents him with an opportunity to determine what kind of Democratic foreign policy will emerge in the wake of the war on terror. And here McCain has a chance to shape the future of American politics--which, like all things historical, can be highly contingent. After all, if Franklin Roosevelt hadn't replaced Henry Wallace with Harry Truman as his vice president, the Democratic Party would not have built its policy of containment in the two decades after World War II. In the post-post Vietnam era now beginning, McCain could redefine the Democratic Party once again as the champion of Wilsonian interventionism.

McCain's uber-hawk views, in other words, are supposed to be a feature, not a bug. Similarly, Josh Green explained that "McCain's strength on national security could also be an advantage in Democratic primaries. Since September 11, even liberals have become more hawkish and desire a leader with command of the issue." And, of course, I certainly do desire a leader with command of the national security issue. Personally, I wouldn't define "command of the issue" as equivalent to "wants to invade lots of countries," but that's the view, and one that’s an integral element of the case for McCain, such as it is. The cultural conservatism is being glossed over, but the warmongering is embraced.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHY NOT SANCTIONS? Canadian immigrant Charles Krauthammer wants to build a wall across our southern border, rehashing the usual arguments and remarking, "Opponents pretend that these barriers can always be circumvented by, say, tunnels or clandestine entry by sea. Such arguments are transparently unserious. You're hardly going to get 500,000 illegals lining up outside a tunnel or on a pier. Such choke points are exactly how you would turn the current river of illegal immigrants into narrow streams -- which is all we need to turn the illegal immigration problem from out of control to eminently manageable."

This I genuinely don't understand. Obviously, anyone who says a giant wall would have no impact on illegal immigration is being silly. But it's seriously not all that difficult to circumvent a wall either. Unless we want to make it much harder for people to visit the United States, it's going to need to be fairly easy for people to legally enter the country. Once in the country, though, people may stick around by overstaying their visas. Currently, that's not as popular a mode of illegal immigration as is the border-crossing method, but if you keep the demand for immigrant labor the same and clamp down on the southern border, more people will take this route.

Beyond that, obviously, 500,000 people aren't all going to go through the same tunnel, but you can dig more than one. Depending on what kind of wall we're talking about, you may be able to cut the wire or climb over it. And, again, there's no need for a giant boat to transport thousands of people all at once -- small craft could land on random parts of the Gulf Coast or people can sneak in container ships. After all, we do have illegal immigrants from Asia right now. I've mentioned this before, but if you want to know the effect a border wall will have, you need to look up East Germany -- it's ugly: "Mines were buried and watchtowers set up. Dogs patrolled the area and automatic firing devices pointing towards the GDR territory could be triggered by movement. The border guards stationed along the route had orders to stop anyone attempting to escape by shooting them." Maybe I'm wrong, but I genuinely don't think the conservative editorialists of the world really, truly, deeply believe that the penalty for trying to come to the United States and make a living should be on-the-spot execution.

The true oddity of all this is that if you leave wall fetishism aside, there are much more pragmatic immigration enforcement methods available. What you need to do is first make it easy to verify people's immigration/citizenship status. Second, you need to impose extremely harsh financial penalties on people who employ illegal immigrants, such that it's easily worth their while to either pay someone else more money or else live without the help. Third, you give illegally employed people big prizes for turning themselves and their employer in (say, you get deported but you get to take the fine money back home with you) so employers become paranoid about hiring illegals. This would be more effective than a wall, cheaper than a wall, and wouldn't involve killing anybody. If conservatives were in the habit of actually thinking seriously about public policy, we'd have proposals along these lines coming down the pike. Instead we get, "The only thing that might work is a physical barrier."

--Matthew Yglesias

PELOSI GOES SOFT. I agree with Ezra’s take on the Conyers plan and what it says about Pelosi’s possible tenure as Speaker. Perhaps this wouldn’t be the approach taken for all committee investigations, but Pelosi does seem intent on reinstating bipartisan cooperation. This morning’s CongressDaily (subscription only) reports that Pelosi says she will continue to support a Minority Bill of Rights, even if Democrats take back the House in November. This includes “guaranteeing the minority at least one-third of committee resources, a revamped work schedule, a commitment to moving legislation through regular order, and allowing at least 24 hours before voting on conference reports.” It continues:

Pelosi said her time as minority leader has been spent "learning in the minority how you don't want to be treated, and that's how we would not want them to be treated."

In perhaps the biggest break from the current practices of GOP leaders, Pelosi said she would be willing to lose votes on the floor.

"Absolutely," she said. "It's not about a defeat, it's about a decision. I certainly would not say that we can't bring things to the floor because we'll lose ...

One has to consider whether she’s saying this just to offset the new GOP media campaign that’s now underway. But still, it’s amazing how the Democratic leadership will turn soft at the slightest whiff of power.

--Alec Oveis

YOU DON'T HATE WHAT YOU DO KNOW. Bryan Caplan offers data showing that the more immigration in your state, the likelier you are to be pro-immigrant. "The simplest interpretation of this result," he writes, "is that people who rarely see an immigrant can easily scapegoat them for everything wrong in the world. Personal experience doesn't get in the way of fantasy. But people who actually see immigrants have trouble escaping the fact that immigrants do hard, dirty jobs that few Americans want - at a realistic wage, anyway." Speaking of realistic wages, it's a point I've made before, but Matt has more on the likely effect of closed borders: not better paying jobs, but fewer jobs. And while he focuses on services that demand will simply dry up for, I'm more concerned about industries where we're barely out-competing global competitors, like agriculture. As The New York Times wrote, if the migrants weren't coming over the border to pick strawberries, it would be the strawberries coming over the border instead. That would, to be sure, be better for Mexico, but it wouldn't be that good for the United States.

Caplan's post reminds me of the odd situation where the GOP's militaristic fear-mongering is, at least according to the vote totals, least effective against those who actually live in a city that suffered an attack on 9-11. New York, D.C., even the targeted Los Angeles -- all went overwhelmingly for the Democrat, despite Bush's apparent advantage on terrorism issues. It's possible that those cities may have felt that Bush's failure to prevent 9-11 demonstrated an incompetence on such issues, and so didn't trust him for protection, or they may have simply decided that scattershot belligerence wasn't likely to leave them safer.

--Ezra Klein

DON'T MERELY MOCK THE MUSTACHE. It's lovely to see some bipartisan scorn heaped on Tom Friedman in the form of enthusiastic plugs for this hilarious round-up of "the next six months are key" pronouncements on Iraq made over the last 30 months. (As FAIR puts it in the subhead to the list, "Iraq's 'decisive' six months have lasted two and a half years.") But in the spirit of yesterday's post, it's worth pointing out to conservatives that the point here isn't merely to make fun of Tom Friedman the silly columnist. There's an actual substantive issue here. Rich Lowry notes ruefully that he "would have agreed with [Friedman] every time he said it," but that's not a problem merely because he agrees with Friedman. It can't actually be the case that the window of opportunity for success in Iraq can constantly and indefinitely move forward like that. Friedman's just more profligate than most in laying down explicit deadlines that he then inevitably breaks; the real issue is that the prospects for success in Iraq have been weak-to-nonexistent for a very long time, during which thousands of people have died and too many analysts (be they Freidman types or Bush champions like Lowry) and officials (be they folks in Congress or actual decision-makers in the administration) have avoided facing up to this and making any tough calls.

--Sam Rosenfeld

A PLUG. I’ve been meaning to plug Foreign Policy’s excellent new blog, Passport. It is a great aggregator of international news replete with thoughtful commentary from FP’s excellent staff. My only complaint is that I wish their Supreme Leader would contribute more posts. But seriously, it’s an excellent read. Bookmark it today.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

NEW RULE. To follow up on Matt's spat with David Frum, I think a rule needs to be adopted: If you don't care about income inequality normally, you're not allowed to make it your central argument against immigration. Frum is a guy who, throughout his career, has argued that income inequality has simply been a surge of salaries at the top. And he's been similarly unconcerned about mobility (which has decreased across the board, not just for Mexicans). The rich get richer, but the poor don't get poorer, so why worry? And to show how attentive he's been to the issue, searches on his blog for "inequality" or "mobility" turn up, literally, nothing. But when the subject turns to immigration, both become issues of paramount importance.

Last night, over drinks at the Rooster, we were talking about what separated intellectual dishonesty from simple dishonesty. And this is an excellent example. Frum's arguments on intergenerational wage convergence among Latinos aren't lies. So far as I can tell, and my read was admittedly quick, they're perfectly true. But Frum isn't a guy who cares about intergenerational wage convergence, or equality of incomes -- he's dishonest in his concern. He may worry about what low incomes or poor educational attainment are correlated with, but he's curiously unwilling to make that connection explicit. To be fair, though, Frum isn't the only, or even the worst, offender. That comes in the right's widespread adoption of George Borjas's work, which I say more on here.

--Ezra Klein

DUBLIN DISPATCH. This is the way politics should be. On a visit to Dublin this week, I happened to be in Grogan's public house at 11 a.m. The occasion -- as though one needs an occasion to be in Grogan's -- was a press event to celebrate a month-long tribute by the city to At Swim-Two-Birds, the Flann O'Brien masterpiece which is merely the greatest novel ever written by the hand of man, as part of Penguin International's "One City, One Book" series. There was a spirited public reading of "A Pint Of Plain Is Your Only Man," the epic poem by Jem Casey (the Poet Of the Pick), which is one of At Swim's many highlights. We were all joined in applause by Miceal O'Nuallain, who not only is the late author's brother, but also is most famous as "The Brother," one of the several inconvenient hecklers who enlivened the column written by his sibling in The Irish Times under the name of Myles na Gopaleen. Early on, Catherine Byrne, the incumbent Lord Mayor of Dublin, stopped by, as did her chain of office, which looks very much like a bauble Mr. T gave up on somewhere between Rocky III and "The A Team." As we may see over the next couple of years, American politicians only wear chains involuntarily.

--Charles P. Pierce

LESSONS UNLEARNED. To slightly dissent from Ezra's take on John Conyers's column on impeachment, I don't really think it's evidence of significant preemptive punch-pulling on oversight by the Democrats. This proposal for a select bipartisan panel is indeed possibly dubious, but I don't read it as being intended as the model for all committee investigations and hearings under a Democratic majority, just for the hot-potato impeachment question. Like Zach Roth, I think it's wise for Conyers and other Democratic leaders (including Nancy Pelosi) to get out in front of the impeachment question and draw a stark distinction between throwing the President out of office (not really part of the plan) and holding bad-ass subpoena-powered oversight hearings and investigations (definitely part of the plan). Judging by what Pelosi has said in recent weeks, it certainly looks like that's her strategy.

Meanwhile, the fact that there's even a serious question among some Democrats about the wisdom or desirability of holding aggressive oversight hearings at all if the party takes over is just depressing. The line offered by one Hill staffer in Roth's Washington Monthly story -- "When you do oversight, ultimately, the press is the judge of your credibility” -- captures perfectly one of the great crippling problems of modern Democratic political strategy. It's become something of a cliché, but it's obviously a lesson that some Democrats (though not many in the top leadership, fortunately) still haven't learned: The press is not your friend.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE CHICANO DIFFERENCE? David Frum tags me with glossing over some wage data in regard to the assimilation debate. He doesn't challenge the point about language use, so I'll take it that he's conceding this point to me. Frum observes that intergenerational Latino-Anglo wage convergence has slowed markedly since 1980 or so, which seems to be true. He attributes this to the difference between the older, Cuban-dominated Latino population and the newer, Mexican-dominated Latino population. That, however, just seems to beg for a further explanation of what about that difference makes a difference. Having some Cuban ancestry myself, I'd be open to a pure ethnic superiority argument on this score, but Frum attributes it to the fact that the Cuban immigrant pool is allegedly more urban than is the Mexican one, though I don't know of any data on the urbanness question.

Here's a different explanation. Inequality has increased remarkably over the past 25-30 years in America and social mobility has consequently declined. These trends have taken place across the board. Consequently, Mexican-American families that start out near the bottom of the economic totem pole are now assimilating (as witnessed by the language trends) into a new, contemporary America that doesn't feature very much intergenerational income mobility. If this bothers Frum -- and it does bother me -- then I'd exhort him to join me in supporting a robust inequality-curbing program featuring universal health care, rules aimed at making it easier to unionize, more attention to the absurd levels of executive compensation in America, higher taxes on investment income, asset-building programs targeted at the poor, etc., etc., etc.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that we've left assimilation behind as a topic here to a large extent. I think that when people worry that Mexican-Americans "don't assimilate," the worry is that they're not learning English. You walk into one of our country's newish Spanish-speaking enclaves and worry that the country's becoming Balkanized. When you learn that the Spanish-English transition is following the same pattern as the Polish-English, Italian-English, and Yiddish-English patterns (my great-grandparents spoke Spanish, my grandfather was fully bilingual, my dad overwhelmingly speaks English but knows some Spanish despite a lack of formal instruction, and I learned some Spanish and more English in school), then you stop worrying. Inequality is a different problem. I propose coping with that problem by adopting measures aimed at raising the living standards of working class Mexican-Americans, and African-Americans, and Euro-Americans, and Central American-Americans (surely not the right term), and so forth. Frum proposes to deal with inequality by . . . keeping the Mexicans in Mexico where they'll be even poorer.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE CONYERS PLAN. Obviously stung by Republican accusations that he's just achin' to impeach, Rep. John Conyers, potential chair of the Judiciary Committee in a Democratic House, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post laying out the Conyers Plan for his committee.

Impeachment, at least in the short-term, isn't on the agenda. Nor are partisan investigations. Instead, Conyers will create "a select committee made up equally of Democrats and Republicans and chosen by the House speaker and the minority leader" to find evidence of potentially impeachable offenses. If that emerged, the committee would then forward their recommendations to the Judiciary Committee and appropriate action could be taken. Conyers is taking such a leisurely route, he says, because the "House Republicans who took power in 1995 with immediate plans to undermine President Bill Clinton by any means necessary...did so in the most autocratic, partisan and destructive ways imaginable. If there is any lesson from those ‘revolutionaries,’ it is that partisan vendettas ultimately provoke a public backlash and are never viewed as legitimate."

Conyers plan seems like smart politics, but surprisingly unserious policy. By specifying that the Republicans will be chosen by the minority leader, Conyers killed his ability to name independent Republicans actually concerned with congressional oversight to the panel. I'm surprised he closed the door on himself like that. The impetus here is probably Nancy Pelosi, who's been growing more concerned by the Republican invocation of, ironically, the Republican overreach of the late-‘90s. She'd already removed impeachment from the table, and now she's got Conyers taking partisanship off as well.

--Ezra Klein

GORE WATCH. Looks like Al's well on his way to netting the all-important Arianna endorsement. She checked out his new film and left the theater rather impressed. "Whether Al Gore ends up running in 2008 or not," she writes, "he is modeling the way our public figures, and especially our would-be presidents, should be operating -- from the heart and true to themselves. Standing for something more important than just winning, and more powerful than the fear of losing." The movie's also engendering something of a backlash, at least among those with vested interests in the current energy production scheme: FOX is trotting out professional global warming denier Patrick Michaels to counter Gore's flick. Michaels was on his show, said Sean Hannity, to deliver "the real scientific truth." I'm sure he was (for more on Michaels, go here). And the CEI, a frontgroup for The American Petroleum Industry, is running pro-carbon dioxide ads. CO2, of course, is the compound which, in excess, creates global warming. But it's also a naturally occurring gas that each of us emit when we breathe out. And that's the point of the ads, which end with the rousing line: "Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life."

--Ezra Klein

THE RACE CARD. It's worth linking to some recent Media Matters items on Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson who, rather than adopting the Robert Samuelson bad statistics approach to immigration restrictionism, have left the racism pretty close to the surface of their thinking about the issue. And, one has to concede that O’Reilly and Gibson are correct -- unless you massively reduce immigration off its current trends, America's future is going to have a much smaller proportion of white Anglos, sort of like the present-day Texas or California. What's so terrible about this I couldn't quite say, but maybe the anti-immigration folks on the right would care to elaborate and we could have a serious discussion about what's really bothering them here.

--Matthew Yglesias

NUCLEAR BLUFFING. Dahlia Lithwick's ruminations on a possible revival of the nuclear option fight and the dangers this particular method of base-pandering could pose for the GOP are worth reading. Lithwick argues that the Bush administration wouldn't be able to appease its religious right base even if Senate Republicans pulled the nuclear trigger this fall, but that's probably thinking a step further than necessary. Republican electoral desperation aside, the political context for a new Senate push on the nuclear option doesn't seem close to being in place: weakness and disarray in the caucus, the record thus far of the Gang of 14 compromise (it's been highly favorable for the President and his nominees), and the real-if-still-slight possibility of a Democratic takeover in November all mitigate against a serious fight. If Republicans couldn't manage to go through with this a year ago, it's hard to fathom them accomplishing it now, particularly with Majority Leader Stumblebum still ostensibly in charge.

--Sam Rosenfeld

A MODEST PROPOSAL. The new issue of Blueprint, the bimonthly journal of the Democratic Leadership Council, which went up online today, features an article by Tony Blair entitled “Fighting for Values,” which is part of the magazine’s cover package on “Defeating Jihadism.” The piece is a resounding defense of civilization and globalization, a scathing attack on obscurantism and protectionism. Blair makes the case for the Iraqi invasion and occupation, of course, but, by past standards, somewhat briefly.

Since every day that Blair continues to serve as Prime Minister depresses the Labor Party’s polling by another couple of points, and twists the party into ideological knots defending a foreign policy that its members don’t believe in and that the British public rejects, here’s a suggestion that can make everybody happy: With the number of Labor MPs prepared to vote for Blair’s ouster clearly growing, the PM needs a graceful exit. Why doesn’t the DLC hire the guy -- give him an Al From Life Fellowship, say -- and take him out of the UK altogether? For that matter, why doesn’t some UK-based Third Way-ish foundation hire Joe Lieberman, and get him the hell out of Connecticut and the Senate? Call it the Great Transatlantic Insufferable Moralist With Blood On Their Hands Swap Meet. Our debt to the DLC would be incalculable.

--Harold Meyerson

EVIL BAD MEN. Thinking a bit more about the conservative conflation of border security and terrorism, I've become fairly convinced that we have a semantic problem. Liberals have often complained that the "War on Terror" is too broad a term -- it's like, as Jon Stewart put it, a war on ennui. What should have been a fight against al Qaeda, and maybe the Taliban, rapidly ballooned into a war against Iraq, an Axis of Evil, and a profoundly interventionist stance towards the Middle East. But, if I can be permitted a few moments of off-the-cuff psychologizin', there were simply two reactions to 9-11. One held that there was this group, al Qaeda, and they wanted to hurt us. The other was that the world contained evil bad men, and they wanted to hurt us. The War on Terror, basically, was an expression of the second perspective, though largely confined to evil bad men who were Arab (or Persian, or occasionally French). It wasn't a war against a discrete enemy, it was a search to discover and neutralize those who could potentially do us harm.

Under that rubric, concerns about Mexico make perfect sense. They're not worried about terrorism in the sense that Zawahiri will cross the border, but in the sense that lawless, aggressive brown men will rush forth, forming gangs, smuggling drugs, and generally causing havoc. In that way, Mexicans, along with terrorists, are to this decade what blacks were to the last -- a blank canvas on which to paint our fears of The Other. Terrorists, lawless immigrants -- it's all the same. When Rep. Patrick McHenry says "the simple truth is that is that if you break the law to come to this country, you will not respect it once you're here," he's not concerned about visa issues, but violent crime. They’re evil bad men who would do us harm, and who've proven it by subverting our desire for order and control at our own state lines. That the linkage doesn't make sense doesn't much matter, just as sucking up massive quantities of data won't make us safer. It's about feeling safer, believing we're in control. Port security isn't ostentatious enough for the psychic benefits, so we don't bother with it. Building a fence, tapping a phone line -- now that's satisfying. After all, there are evil bad men out there, and we have to do something about it.

--Ezra Klein

WHY DO POLITICAL ADS SUCK? I don't really know what to make of this Ned Lamont ad featuring Markos Moulitsas, but two things immediately jump out. One, you're not going to just forget that you ever saw it. Two, it's destined to attract some buzz, free media, attention, etc. These are things you would think people would want to accomplish with campaign ads but, pretty clearly, Democrats almost never even try. Instead you get this super-generic mind-numbing stuff. The GOP runs the occasional noteworthy ad like the "Wolves" spot from the '04 presidential campaign, but Democrats almost never do. It's fairly bizarre.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOW TO ARGUE LIKE A CONSERVATIVE. Just as they apparently think it's out of the question to point out that something said by a foreign baddie is, in fact, correct, conservatives also seem to think that the ex-CEO of Qwest's status as a corporate crook somehow deals a crippling blow to liberals' appreciation for his decision not to cooperate with the NSA surveillance program. But what does one thing have to do with the other? The issue at hand is the NSA program, not Joseph Nacchio's awesomeness. This love for personalizing policy disagreements and arguing in non sequiturs is a real problem.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHO OWNS FACTS? Major League Baseball has apparently decided that it not only owns the rights to broadcast baseball games but owns the statistics as well, so it can shut down unlicensed commercial fantasy baseball operations. Personally, I'd be thrilled if fantasy baseball gets wiped off the planet, but that's neither here nor there. If this is correct, then presumably MLB can shut down noncommercial fantasy games too. Or, for that matter, non-fantasy commercial uses of baseball statistics -- like, you know, when the sports section of your local newspaper runs the box score. Apparently, a couple of years ago MLB decided it was, in fact, illegal to transmit statistics in real-time.

The controlling principle in all of these iterations ought to be that you can't copyright facts, a core element of free speech. That anyone could find MLB's positions here even remotely plausible goes to show how far we've let copyright expand in other realms, to the point where the idea of a public domain of information free for all to use is starting to seem quaint.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHY DID VERIZON AND BELLSOUTH ISSUE DENIALS AFTER THE STORY BROKE? Here's another thing about the denials that doesn't quite add up. As we've seen, both Verizon and Bellsouth have more or less denied the USA Today story saying that the NSA has been secretly collecting their phone records. USA Today appears to be sticking to the story, though the paper's statement seems to carefully avoid a total commitment to it, instead saying that the paper's "confident" in its reporting.

But something doesn't quite make sense. Why are Verizon and Bellsouth only denying these allegations after the story broke? The USA Today reporters who did the initial story contacted the companies before publishing it. We know this because it contains statements from both companies, each of which declined to comment.

So why didn't the companies deny the story then? I can already hear your answer: "classification" issues. Classification issues do come into play -- though not how you'd expect. And they don't account for this initial failure to deny the story.

Take a close look at the post-story denials. Verizon said that since "the NSA program" is "highly-classified," the company "cannot and will not confirm or deny whether it has any relationship to it." But it also says the assertion that Verizon "entered into an arrangement to provide the NSA with data" is "false." Those seem to contradict each other, don't they?

Either Verizon has some sort of arrangement with the NSA or it doesn't. Did the company get approached by the NSA and decide not to participate, but wanted to keep what they'd learned secret? They seem to say they weren't approached. The statement says "Verizon was not asked by NSA to provide" the records from "any" of its businesses. So if Verizon doesn't have any relationship to the NSA or the program, there would have been nothing about itself that it would need to keep classified. They would have been perfectly free to deny the story before publication. They could have said, "Verizon has no relationship to such a program, should one exist." But they didn't. Why? More to the point, why isn't Verizon now perfectly free to fully deny its own non-relationship to the program, rather than refuse to confirm or deny any relationship, as it has done?

Verizon has done neither of these. From that I think we can infer that the company does have some sort of relationship to the program. What about Bellsouth?

The Bellsouth post-story denials are a bit more troubling for defenders of the NSA/phone records story. Its company spokesman said, "From the review we conducted, we cannot establish any link between BellSouth and the NSA." He also said, "We are not providing any information to the NSA, period." That's a flat statement that there's no relationship whatsoever. So again, there was nothing about itself to keep classified. So why didn't the company deny it initially?

One possibility: Buried in the USA Today story about Bellsouth's denial is this: "The night before the story was published, USA TODAY described the story in detail to Bellsouth, and the company did not challenge the newspaper's account." I have to say that "the night before" seems to be awfully short notice for a story of this magnitude. It's possible the company simply didn't have enough time to do the requisite internal check, though it's also quite possible that a few calls to the company's top execs would have sufficed, and there would have been enough time for that.

Bottom line: The Bellsouth denial remains somewhat troubling, but nonetheless inconclusive. Meanwhile, we can reasonably assume -- based on Verizon's own statements -- that Verizon has some sort of relationship with the NSA. Otherwise, as I said, they'd have nothing to keep secret.

--Greg Sargent

LOOKING FOR EVIL IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES. To follow up on Matt's point below, the GOP's scaremongering on terror has become downright comical. They're hysterical over the prospect that terrorists will board a plane, fly to Mexico, spend months planning and making the deadly cross-desert trek, arrive in the US dehydrated and exhausted, and then set about conducting a terrorist attack. Wander across the Canadian border? Unthinkable! Similarly, the press has deeply wounded national security because terrorists, who might've figured the US's massive intelligence apparatus had decided to take an extra long lunch break, are now aware that we're trying to tap their phone calls. Horrors! How will we fight them now!?

It all leads to a rather central point about the War on Terror. If we really believe those trying to attack us are such unbelievable morons, why are we worrying so much about them?

--Ezra Klein

LATINO ASSIMILATION FACTS. Along with the fake issue of immigration and national security is the fake concern that Hispanic immigrants don't assimilate. For example, Robert Samuelson earns his bones today as one of those white pundits, employed by white editors, writing for an audience of white people, who has the courage to speak uncomfortable "truths" about how non-white people are bad:

How fast can they assimilate? We cannot know, but we can consult history. It is sobering. In 1972 Hispanics were 5 percent of the U.S. population and their median household income was 74 percent of that of non-Hispanic white households. In 2004 Hispanics were 14 percent of the population, and their median household income was 70 percent of the level of non-Hispanic whites. These numbers suggest that rapid immigration of low-skilled workers and rapid assimilation are at odds.

That's some seriously messed up math. If you want to judge how rapidly people are assimilating, you need to first look at a group of people in some year -- 1972, say -- and then look at how those people and their descendants are doing in 2004. Samuelson is comparing the Hispanic population in 1972 to an entirely different population which, obviously, proves nothing. Via Tyler Cowen, here's some proper longitudinal data. We learn that "In a 2003 study by the RAND Corporation, economist James P. Smith finds that successive generations of Latino men have experienced significant improvements in wages and education relative to native Anglos." As Smith puts it, "Each new Latino generation not only has had higher incomes than their forefathers, but their economic status converged toward the white men with whom they competed."

It's also clear from polls that lots of people are upset that Hispanics in the United States "refuse to learn English," which would be a legitimate concern except that it's not true: "Spanish is the primary language among 72% of first-generation Latinos, but this figure falls to 7% among second-generation Latinos and zero among Latinos who are third generation and higher." The whole idea that this could possibly be a problem is just absurdly ignorant anyway. If you leave the United States, you'll be struck by the fact that huge numbers of people everywhere learn at least some English and would like to learn more. The reason, of course, is that knowing English is a very useful skill. It's even more useful if you actually live in the United States and, what's more, it's obviously much easier for an American-born child of immigrants to learn English than it is for someone growing up in Bangalore or wherever.

--Matthew Yglesias

IMMIGRATION AND NATIONAL SECURITY. Heather Hurlburt notes that the American people definitely see immigration as a national security issue and politicians need to deal with that reality. And so they do. But is immigration a national security issue? I don't really see why. No terrorists have ever been apprehended trying to cross the border from Mexico. Several have been caught trying to cross the border from Canada, but none of them were actually breaking any immigration laws -- people are free to come here from Canada as they please. They were breaking laws against driving around with bombs and plotting to blow stuff up.

Besides which, if you aren't Mexican, it's not at all difficult to get into this country in a totally legal way. The perpetrators of the 2005 London tube bombing were citizens of the United Kingdom. We could build a giant wall across Mexico and Canada and all they would need to do to get into the country is . . . buy a plane ticket, fly to America, stand in line, show their passport, walk unmolested through security, and there they are. There's nothing stopping a European who isn't looking for a job from coming to the states and wandering around to do some sightseeing or blow some stuff up. It would be perverse under the circumstances to actually try and sneak through the desert or even our comically unsecured northern border.

--Matthew Yglesias

GORE WATCH. Whether Al Gore is gearing up for another run or just jumping back into the public eye to promote his coming movie, his reentry into the media's consciousness has been brilliant. Many of you have already seen his Saturday Night Live clip, where President Gore addresses the successes (end of global warming) and failures (when glaciers attack!) of his tenure (if you missed it, John Amato has you covered). Over the past couple of months, he's made the cover of Wired, Vanity Fair, and most significantly, The American Prospect. Last week, Time included him in their 100 Most Influential List. His stock on Tradesports, as you can see in the graph here, is soaring. And yesterday, Gore updated his normal chuckling denial of electoral intentions -- "I'm a recovering politician" -- with a new ending clause: "But you always have to worry about a relapse.”

That you do. And there's nothing better for an addict than a caring, observant group of friends dedicated to tracking his progress. So this is the first edition of Gore Watch, a regular feature where I'll keep you up to date on Gore's movements, preparations, and ventures. With his movie rolling out over the next few months and his efforts to publicize it gearing up, there should be quite a bit to keep track of as Gore wanders backwards over the twelve steps.

--Ezra Klein

HOW TO ARGUE LIKE A HAWK. As you may recall, a little while back Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadenijad sent George W. Bush a somewhat rambling letter. One passage in the letter noted that if the billions of dollars spent on the Iraq War had instead been spent on fighting global poverty and improving worldwide public health, the United States would be liked instead of hated. This is, as best I can tell, entirely true. When I read that, I did a blog post noting the passage's existence, noting its accuracy, and saying that Iran's president was "making a lot of sense" in that particular passage. That blog post is now the subject of a denunciatory half-page front-of-the-book item in The Weekly Standard that doesn't even do me the service of using my name.

But more to the point, it doesn't even try to argue that I'm wrong. Apparently, since Ahmadinejad is a bad guy, it's categorically out of the question to point out that he's right about something, even when he is, in fact, right about the thing in question. Or, maybe, anything he says is automatically wrong, even if it would be true had he not said it. Or who knows what they mean. But one way or another, whatever you think of the messenger, the message raises an important point: Wouldn't it make more sense, both as an expression of American ideals and as a matter of American national security, to spend less money fighting wars and more money on popularity-building poverty-fighting initiatives?

--Matthew Yglesias

GATOR GONNA GETCHA. Now this is alarming. From 1948 to 2005, 17 people have been killed by alligators in Florida -- about 0.30 deaths per year. In 2006, so far three alligator-related fatalities have occurred -- a tenfold increase over the trend. If this keeps up, 30 people will die next year, 300 in 2008, and so forth until in the year 2013 the United States experiences a shocking 300 million deaths by alligator. At that point, we'll be begging for immigrants.

--Matthew Yglesias

PAGING DR. CLOONEY. If Robert DeNiro purchases the New York Observer, does this mean that it’s only a matter of time before George Clooney acquires the Prospect? We were on record calling Clooney "a great American" way before it became fashionable for right wingers to rag on him. Heck, Clooney and I were even quoted next to each other in a Mark Steyn screed against the U.N. A Clooney-Prospect merger would certainly be a match made in heaven.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE FILIBUSTER: GOOD FOR CONSERVATISM. The Hill has an article today about conservative trepidations over exercising the nuclear option and perhaps kickstarting the process of eliminating all filibusters outright. ('Winger activist Jim Boulet, Jr. has been articulating this warning to fellow conservatives for a while now.) I have my doubts that the nuclear option will be emerging as a seriously live issue again soon (though the Brent Kavanaugh showdown might provoke something), so I'm a bit dubious of the topical relevance of this piece, but it does nicely harken back to an old debate from last year about the filibuster. The correct side of that debate, you'll recall, is that the filibuster is bad for liberalism and should be eliminated.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in The Hill, as Atrios noted, we see ace moderate Arlen Specter cave to Republican demands on a weighty and high-profile issue for the nine bajillionth time.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHAT THE MARXISTS USED TO CALL “CONTRADICTIONS.” Over at the Corner, JPod is excited about this CNN poll showing that 79 percent of people who watched last night approved of the President’s speech.

Actually, that number doesn’t shock me. It tracks with lots of recent polling showing that Americans very broadly support a) tougher border enforcement and b) some kind of realistic amnesty deal for illegals already here, which is exactly what Bush called for. Heck, if they’d called me last night, and I wasn’t in a fighting mood, even I might have said I approved of the speech. The media chatter tends to be dominated by the poles -- reporters seek out the guy from the Minutemen, the woman from La Raza, etc.

What’s interesting here is that Bush, generally speaking, came out in favor of the Kennedy-McCain bill and against the tougher House version. The magazine that has been most critical of Kennedy-McCain? By an Arizona-Mexico border mile, it’s been National Review. The mag did a huge cover story blasting the legislation sometime last year, as I recall. And Editor Rich Lowry wrote a syndicated column headlined (at least in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) “McCain-Kennedy Amnesty Bill Disastrous.” So John is a little bit in the position here that we might be in, say, if President Hillary “She Can’t Be Stopped” (just kidding!) Clinton won a 79 percent approval rating for a speech tying a minimum-wage increase to support for CAFTA.

--Michael Tomasky

JUST TUCK IT AWAY. Have others pointed this out? My eagle-eyed and long-memoried pal Bill in Albany sends along this piece from the San Francisco Chronicle, February 9, 2005. Headline: “Bush Scraps 9,790 Border Patrol Agents.”

It seems that one act passed by Congress in late 2004 and agreed to by the administration called for 10,000 more agents. But Bush’s budget in early 2005 funded only 210 additional agents. Just a fact worth knowing these days.

--Michael Tomasky

THE BUMILLER TREATMENT. Greg makes plenty of good points about Elisabeth Bumiller's piece. Even leaving aside the fact that Bush is currently shifting from the rosy pro-immigration stance Bumiller wants to highlight here, I'd add that it's also pretty remarkable -- or, I should say, not remarkable at all -- that she can write an entire explanatory article on the origins and context of Bush's personal views on immigration and never once mention that Bush's outlook also happens to be the outlook of American business interests. It's not exactly unprecedented to see Bush hewing to a position on a public policy issue that is similar to the position taken by big business. (Of course on this particular issue the business position is one that happens to overlap in several respects with many liberals' views, with guest worker programs being a major point distinguishing the two camps.)

On a more positive note, though, it is nice to see Bumiller refer to Bush's attempts to speak Spanish as "fractured Spanglish" rather than "fluent Spanish" like we've been hearing from mainstream reporters for years. That, at least, is progress.

--Sam Rosenfeld

IF BUSH WELCOMES IMMIGRANTS, WHY PANDER TO THEIR ENEMIES? In today's Times, Elisabeth Bumiller offers a rather remarkable take on President Bush's immigration speech. She basically said that because his rhetoric was more accommodating than his actual policy proposals, it meant that his approach is "more subtle" than his proposed real-world solutions suggest. She tells us that "what was remarkable to people in Texas was how much he still believes in the power of immigration to invigorate the nation," and adds paragraph after paragraph about Bush's embrace of immigrants while in Texas. Why, he even likes to joke with Hispanic people! (Or maybe not, as Atrios notes.)

Look, Bush probably does think immigration is a positive force. But that only makes Bush's speech more cynical, not less. In the real world -- as opposed to the alternate universe of Bush's welcoming rhetoric -- his speech moves us away, not toward, a solution that fully acknowledges this. The largest policy proposals in his speech amounted, pure and simple, to appeasement for the enforcement-only crowd. By pandering to the enemies of the immigrants that Bush so likes to joke around with, he emboldens the most vocal and adamant foes of what is being referred to as a "compromise" or "middle-ground" in this debate. He shifts the point of possible compromise in their direction. Yes, Bush did voice support for a guest-worker program and disagreed with the most adamant immigration foes in other ways, and it's probably true that enemies of immigration would see this as a great betrayal. Be that as it may, it's hardly the proof of the more "welcoming" attitude rooted in his personal history that Bumiller sees it as. Her operating principle here seems to be that because Bush only gave the most rabid immigration foes some of what they want and not everything they want, that somehow amounts to a courageous stand against them born of his own principles.

But this speech was pure, unadulterated politics. Without getting into the debate that El Supremo Mike has stirred up about the Mexican border, Ezra was right to note that Bush has never shown interest in border patrol and has generally been pro-immigrant -- and suddenly, because the floor's dropping out from under his presidency, he turns around and demagogues it to the fear-mongers and xenophobes who despise the very immigrants that Bush is supposed to want to "welcome." The fact that Bush didn't betray his principles as comprehensively as he might have shouldn't turn this into an occasion, as Bumiller does, to celebrate his supposed adherence to them.

--Greg Sargent

FUN WITH SCIENCE. In answer to Mike's motion sensor query, the reason the border has been largely bereft of such Flashdance-era technology is that motion sensors aren't very smart. Separating a person from a squirrel, or a bird, or a tumbleweed is tricky. The number of false positives, which would force our already understaffed border guard to constantly dart out into the desert, would be staggering, and would probably lead to less effective enforcement than we have currently. To be sure, there are better systems out there, capable of separating man from marsupial, but they're expensive and we're cheap.

--Ezra Klein

INTIMIDATION: IT WORKS. Ezra described today's Richard Cohen joint as a break with recent precedent, but his previous column on Hillary Clinton was also good, solid liberal stuff. The two columns before that were the Stephen Colbert ones that got everyone upset. Cohen may not have enjoyed being attacked by the digital lynch mob, but in Garance's terms, the mob seem to have been successful in getting Cohen to start playing for Team Blue instead of antagonizing it.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOUSING SLOWS. For the third month in a row, housing starts -- which is to say, the number of new residences under construction -- dropped . Interestingly, analysts had expected a very slight slowdown this month, predicting a 0.5 percent decline. The real number? 7.4 percent. Meanwhile, builder's confidence dropped from 51 in April to 45 in May -- the lowest number since 1995 -- meaning most builders now see a negative housing market. That’s not terribly good news, but so long as the market cools at a relatively calm pace, we shouldn't see any particularly catastrophic impacts. But watch for those variable rate mortgages -- interest rates are rising, and if they start racing up while the market goes down, the economy is in serious trouble.

--Ezra Klein

WALLING THE BORDER. In response to Mike's query below, it's worth recalling that when Goldfinger was released in 1964, there were no restrictions whatsoever on crossing the border from Mexico to the United States. People from all over Latin America were free to just wander north as they pleased and wander back again, just as they were in 1864 or at any other time from the conclusion of the Mexican War to the Immigration Act of 1965 which first restricted movement across the southern border. Consequently, it took a long time for the fact that these new restrictions were imperfectly enforced to start bothering people, and it's genuinely no surprise that we haven't managed to make our southern frontier look like the GDR border system yet.

The President's speech contained this rhetoric about how "the United States must secure its borders" which is "a basic responsibility of a sovereign nation," but in truth throughout the vast majority of our history we didn't even try and it all seemed to be fine. Indeed, around the world, genuinely "secure" borders are pretty rare and tend to reflect international military tensions rather than efforts at immigration control.

This is mainly because erecting physical blockades across borders is an unduly expensive method of restricting migration -- it's much, much, much easier to create an effective identity system combined with harsh, harsh penalties for employers who violate the rules. Most people wouldn't try to come here if it were extremely hard to get a job, and if small numbers snuck in for eccentric reasons nobody would care. The main historical use of physical boundaries is to restrict out-migration, as in Cold War-era Eastern Europe when the idea was to prevent people from leaving the Communist countries and defecting to the West. But the GOP doesn't want to take on big business, so instead you get this yearning for beefed up border security rather than draconian employer sanctions that would be cheaper to implement and more effective.

That said, I sort of think liberals might want to get behind a giant wall-building endeavor. That would be more-or-less the biggest public works project in American history, no? With the Davis-Bacon rules in effect, that's a lot of good jobs for working people.

--Matthew Yglesias

CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE. In a sharp break from his recent wankery, Richard Cohen has an excellent column on John McCain today. It's interesting, though, that Cohen thinks Jerry Falwell can codify McCain a true conservative. If that's the case, and Falwell has become a gatekeeper for the ideology rather than just the Christianist voting bloc that rests in uneasy alliance with conservatism, then the word truly has lost all meaning.

--Ezra Klein

DO THEY HAVE FAX MACHINES? So, according to the speech last night, we’re just now installing motion sensors and infrared cameras on the Mexican border? Can this be true?

Watching Goldfinger a little while ago, I actually wondered about this. You’ll recall the early scene in which Bond, joined by a revenge-seeking Tilly Masterson, whose sister Jill was killed by Goldfinger in Miami (she’s the one who was covered in gold paint), tries to infiltrate Mr. G’s compound in the Alps. It’s nighttime, and Bond, on a hill at the edge of the compound’s property line, dons some night-vision goggles and sees a complex web of thin red lines -- motion sensors, designed to prevent intruders from attaining ingress. I forget how he finally does get in; I think he kills someone and drives the Aston Martin in (after Tilly gets the Oddjob treatment).

Anyway, that movie was made forty-two years ago. And while the Bond films were sometimes ahead of reality, they weren’t ahead by much, and certain government agencies were known to study the films for the purpose of picking up on the latest gadgetry. It just seems kinda obvious to me. Is there some civil liberties angle I’m not thinking of? Motion sensors don’t hurt (as far as I know, they work on essentially the same principle as the motion sensors that turn light switches on and off, of the sort recently installed here at 2000 L St. in a major, lifestyle-changing upgrade). I suppose someone out there may have an informed take on this. Maybe they’re just not effective.

I do think the border problem is a real one, unlike some folks around these parts. Yes, of course, the only long-term solution is higher-paying work in Mexico and points south. And no, I don’t think people trying to sneak into the country are bad people. But we do have to do something in the meantime.

--Michael Tomasky

RUMBLINGS FROM INSIDE THE BUBBLE. In his speech on immigration tonight, President Bush will be calling, once again, for "a tamper-proof card" to "help us enforce the law – and leave employers with no excuse for violating it." Whoever wrote this speech obviously hasn't been reading The New York Times lately, or he'd have known that the reason we don't have a tamper-proof card already is because of the self-dealing ways of a certain Kentucky Republican known to his local paper as "The Prince of Pork":

The Department of Homeland Security has invested tens of millions of dollars and countless hours of labor over the last four years on a seemingly simple task: creating a tamperproof identification card for airport, rail and maritime workers.

Yet nearly two years past a planned deadline, production of the card, known as the Transportation Worker Identification Credential, has yet to begin.

Instead, the road to delivering this critical antiterrorism tool has taken detours to locations, companies and groups often linked to Representative Harold Rogers, a Kentucky Republican who is the powerful chairman of the House subcommittee that controls the Homeland Security budget.

It is a route that has benefited Mr. Rogers, creating jobs in his home district and profits for companies that are donors to his political causes. The congressman has also taken 11 trips — including six to Hawaii — on the tab of an organization that until this week was to profit from a no-bid contract Mr. Rogers helped arrange. Work has even been set aside for a tiny start-up company in Kentucky that employs John Rogers, the congressman's son.

"Something stinks in Corbin," said Jay M. Meier, senior securities analyst at MJSK Equity Research in Minneapolis, which follows the identification card industry, referring to the Kentucky community of 8,000 that has perhaps benefited the most from Mr. Rogers's interventions. "And it is the sickest example of what is wrong with our homeland security agenda that I can find."

Way to highlight the administration's lack of oversight and profligate congressional G.O.P. spending -- not to mention yet another burgeoning Republican corruption scandal.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

ROCK BOTTOM. Word on the street is that Larry Brown will be leaving as coach of the New York Knicks soon in order to be replaced by catastrophic general manager Isiah Thomas. Superficially, I think this move will lead to Thomas' vindication -- Brown's squad played so poorly this season that they're almost certain to do better next year as a matter of regression toward the mean. Not well, but better.

Similarly, my fear is that since Bush's poll numbers are so very low right now that he's almost destined for a small rebound into the mid thirties or so. Since mathematical illiteracy is more-or-less required to get a job writing about politics, this bounce will be attributed to Bush's new border plan and to the latest NSA revelations painting Democrats as weak. Then there's going to be pressure on congressional leaders to panic and give up the fight on these topics. Be that as it may, the point is that given the absence of some massive economic calamity, Bush's approval rating right now is sort of shockingly low and almost certain to go up somewhat. Whenever that happens, people need to stay calm.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE GREATEST AGE SINCE THE GILDED ONE. I've been debating whether to dig into John McIntyre's defense of tax cuts. It's sort of standard stuff, but the first graf is such a perfectly concise statement of the GOP's economic narrative that it deserves some real examination.

The Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby is on a crusade to discredit pro-growth or supply-side economic policies. Today's column titled "The Return of Voodoo Economics" makes one wonder about what he doesn't like about 4% growth, under 5% unemployment, housing and the stock market higher, wealth being created and tax revenues at all time highs. I guess he pines for the pre-Voodoo Economics days of the 1970's when the highest marginal tax rate was 70% and the country had anemic growth, high unemployment and a Dow languishing below 1,000.

On stagflation, there's an economic consensus here. It was caused by the oil spike of the early 70's. Suddenly, goods and services cost much more, but wages had not grown commensurately. Hence, prices went up, but without any increase in demand, and thus no increase in production. Marginal tax rates had next to nothing to do with it.

As for the current economy, that's a more interesting question. There is growth, to be sure, but it's been curiously hollow. Wage growth, despite doing notably well in April, has been anemic throughout the expansion. In 2003 and 2004, median wages actually went up less than they did during the recession of 1990-91. Nevertheless, overall growth has been robust. It's just all going to the rich. Since the 1970's, the aftertax income of the top 5 percent has grown by 200 percent, while those in the middle saw a 15 percent increase, and those on the bottom a mere 9 percent. The Dow Jones may be doing well, but two-thirds of stocks are held by the top 5 percent. Productivity increases, too, no longer much help the average American. Between 1947 and 1973, wages grew commensurately with productivity. Ever since, wages have increased at about a third the rate of productivity. If we'd kept up the 1947-73 pace, the average household would now make around $60,000.

The bottom line is that inequality hasn't been this severe since the 1920's. As for alternative paths, the Clinton era, with higher marginal tax rates and less government spending, saw faster growth with fairer distribution. And that, at base, is the question. Do you believe growth should accumulate to the rich, or be shared across society? Jumping up and down about the 1970's is silliness, it's like blaming 9/11 on Rudy Giuliani. After all, the economy kicked ass under FDR and Lyndon Johnson, so theirs should hardly be a discredited economic vision. The question isn't about growth, or employment, or anything else (all those metrics do better under Democrats, by the way). This is about the distribution of growth, and about the level of acceptable inequality. I myself am not a big Gilded Age fan, but reasonable people disagree.

--Ezra Klein

DAYS OF OLD. So of course everyone hates this Adam Nagourney Week in Review article quoting "leading Dems" who say the party would be better off not taking over either chamber of Congress in November. Actually, two arguments get made in the piece. The argument based on political gaming -- that it'll be better to let the GOP ride out their failures on their own for another two years -- has a real logic to it (Ezra agrees with it, and he's no wanker!), though it bespeaks a rather dubious approach to doing politics. The second argument has to do with the dangers that Democrats could face by conducting a lot of "political," mean-spirited congressional hearings rather than come together with Republicans to get things done. This argument is of course supremely lame.

There's a meta-point to be made about Nagourney's sources in the article though -- they help bolster the argument that, to use the uncouth but expressive language of Atrios, the true age of wanker domination (or at least wanker eminence) in the Democratic Party and the center-left political scene is in the past. Nagourney's quotes come from founding K-Street Democrat Tony Coehlo, late-1990s DNC chair Joe Andrew, and prototypical 1980s-90s "pain caucus" Dem Bob Kerrey. These genuinely are voices of the Democrats' recent past. Their outlook and approach don't predominate among the ranks of current Democratic officials. Overwhelmingly the explanation for the shift is Bush- and GOP-driven partisan polarization (along with the final eclipsing of an actual conservative faction inside the Democratic Party), though it's certainly the case that blogs and other actors in the nascent, new-school vast left-wing conspiracy have played a role as well. This is partly what leads me to want to defend the actions of party leaders like Nancy Pelosi and rebut blanket condemnations of the party made by netroots types -- not that there isn't plenty to complain about, but that there's genuinely less to complain about, in terms of the party remaining roughly loyal to progressive principles and learning to act like an effective opposition, than in any time in the recent past. Of course, what's still left to do is take power.

--Sam Rosenfeld

OH DEAR. Via FishbowlDC comes this extremely disturbing news that patterns of calls from and to reporters have received special attention. Reprinted (almost) in full:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.

Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials.

People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.

Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.

The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded.

Um, how much money can you put on a pre-paid cellphone, again?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE POLITICAL IMPORTANCE OF PLACING THE NSA SCANDAL IN A WIDER CONTEXT. We need to look at the latest NSA scandal not in isolation, but as part of a much larger pattern of presidential lawlessness -- a view Matt has rightly insisted upon -- and now we have some proof that this way of seeing it is politically more potent, too. Take a look at the USA Today poll that Atrios flagged. One of its key findings:

About two-thirds are concerned that the program may signal other, not-yet-disclosed efforts to gather information on the general public...

By nearly 2-to-1, 62%-34%, they support immediate congressional hearings to investigate it.

These two numbers are clearly connected, and that's really important. In isolation the thought of phone companies sharing call records may not be particularly terrifying. But folks are prepared to see this one program as part of a widening cesspool of presidential abuse, and when they do, they not only start to get worried, but they want to know more, too. Plus, unlike that instant Washington Post poll which I railed about earlier, the USA Today poll also asked a key question about the program's legality. The eye-opening answer is that a total of 54 percent think it definitely or probably violates the law. The moral: Stress the program's possible illegality and put it in a larger context, and public opinion seriously shifts -- which means more pressure on the press and Congress to act.

--Greg Sargent

NEGROPONTE LIED, PEOPLE SPIED. Dan Eggen at The Washington Post notes that as recently as a year ago Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte was assuring people that the NSA was "absolutely not" monitoring domestic calls which, of course, it was. What's more, he actually said this in congressional testimony which used to be considered more serious than run of the mill lying. I don't see any particular reason to trust a group of people who've repeatedly shown themselves to be untrustworthy to conduct a potentially abusable program, in secret, without abusing it.

UPDATE: Sorry -- don't blog while angry. Negroponte lied to reporters, not in congressional testimony (although there was the 2001, "to this day, I do not believe there were death squads operating in Honduras" incident). It was Attorney-General Al Gonzalez's congressional testimony that the article discusses and he was evasive.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE DEMAGOGUE SHUFFLE. Bush's new plan to deploy the National Guard to the border is a bit pathetic. Here's a guy who has never showed an ounce of interest in border enforcement, who's been laudably pro-immigrant throughout his administration, and who loves to declare that he doesn't follow the polls. So, now that his numbers are bottoming out, what does he do? Send American guardsmen to lock-down the border, stopping a crisis that doesn't actually exist. Forget, for a moment, that our National Guard is wildly overstretched, and probably has better things to do than stand watch for Mexicans (ports, anybody?). We're about to send thousands of troops to intercept peaceable human beings who are net pluses to our economy and desperately needed by many of our industries.

If we need immigration reform, fine. And if we want to increase enforcement, so be it. But the idea that this is such an urgent problem that the legislative process must be circumvented for immediate troop deployment is just laughable. And the idea that deploying troops will do anything but subliminally scare Americans into thinking Mexicans pose some real physical threat, rather than an imagined economic danger, is similarly naive. The GOP, long searching for an enemy, believes it has found one. It's readying to ratchet up the country's latent fears and xenophobic tendencies in order to get a slight boost in the polls. For a long time, demonizing Mexicans was the one thing Bush wouldn't do -- not in office, not when he was governor of Texas. But look at the polls. Bush is drowning in, and tonight, when this plan is officially announced, his final shreds of dignity and decency will take their last gasp.

--Ezra Klein

THE "IT'S CLASSIFIED!" SHUFFLE. I'm continually amazed by how bad -- how unctuous, transparent, and phony -- Bill Frist sounds in interviews. Appearing on CNN's "Late Edition" yesterday, he parried a question from Wolf Blitzer about the NSA data mining operation by first going on at length with detailed positive commentary about the program and then immediately hiding behind the "it's classified" defense when tough questions came up. This is a classic Bush administration move, of course, but Frist handled it with his characteristic klutziness:

[BLITZER]:Are you comfortable with this program?

FRIST: Absolutely. Absolutely. I am one of the people who are briefed...

BLITZER: You've known about this for years.

FRIST: I've known about the program. I am absolutely convinced that you, your family, our families are safer because of this particular program.

I absolutely know that it is legal. The program itself is anonymous, in the sense that identifiers, in terms of protecting your privacy, are stripped off. And, as you know, the program is voluntary, the participants in that program.

And it comes to the reality -- it faces the reality that we're in the 21st century. And the only way to connect the dots, whether around the world or in this country, to prevent another 9/11, whether it's in the Pentagon or in New York or back in Nashville, Tennessee, is to connect those dots. And the only way to connect those dots is to use 21st-century technology that protects your privacy, and that's exactly what this does.

BLITZER: Can you tell the American people right now that over these past almost five years since the phone records have been collected -- I'm not talking about the warrantless surveillance, the warrantless wiretaps -- the phone records, that has resulted in thwarting one terrorist attack in the United States?

FRIST: You know, I am not going to comment on the program until the appropriate time. There has not been even a confirmation of the USA Today program itself.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHEN IN DOUBT, LIE. In Laura Bush’s interview yesterday with Fox News, in which she blamed the media for her husband's abysmal poll numbers, the first lady said this:

And I think right now what we're seeing with these poll numbers is a lot of fun in the press with taking a poll every other week and putting it on the news, on the front page of the newspaper. When his polls were really high, they weren't on the front page. (Emphasis added.)

Really? Here's a list of headlines from The New York Times and The Washington Post about polls taken when President Bush wasn't on such hard times. Every one of these was on the front page:

1) January 29, 2002, the Post: Bush and GOP Enjoy Record Popularity; Poll Finds Broad Support Despite Doubts on Economy

2) March 11, 2002, the Post: Poll: Strong Backing for Bush, War; Few Americans See Easy End to Conflict

3) July 17, 2002, the Post: Poll Shows Bush's Ratings Weathering Business Scandals

4) Dec. 17, 2003, the Times: Bush's Approval Ratings Climb In Days After Hussein's Capture

5) Dec. 23, 2003, the Post: Bush Gets Year-End Boost in Approval; Poll Shows Dean Surging Among Democratic Rivals

6) March 22, 2003, the Times: Support for Bush Surges at Home, but Split Remains

7) April 20, 2004, the Post: Poll Shows New Gains For Bush; Lead Over Kerry Widens On Issues of Security

8) Sept. 10, 2004, the Post: Bush Support Strong After Convention; Kerry Favorability Rating Plunges in New Survey

9) Sept. 28, 2004, the Times: Poll Shows Bush With Solid Lead; Despite Worries, Voters Cite Lack of Clarity From Kerry

Not bad, eh? This is despite the fact that I only checked two papers and didn’t even look all that hard. At this point, for the Bushies, lying is as easy as breathing.

--Greg Sargent

WITH GREAT HUBRIS COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY. Cliff May makes a common conservative joke about the Bush administration getting blamed for problems that have no apparent connection to anything it's done, in this particular instance riots in Sao Paulo. The thing of it is that this mindset -- holding the United States partly responsible for everything that goes bad wherever one happens to live -- is a straightforward consequence of precisely the sort of foreign policy May favors and the Bush administration has implemented. The prevailing orthodoxy has it that the United States should be engaged everywhere, unrestrained by international organizations, and deeply concerned with the internal policies of other countries.

There are two ways you could try and justify that combination of hegemony and asymmetrical sovereignty. One would be purely in terms of the American interest: "The world should work like that because it's good for us." But if you phrase it that way, then the 95 percent of the world or so that doesn't live in the United States is going to view American foreign policy as a threat to them. Alternatively, you can phrase it in terms of American benevolence: "The world should work like that because it's good for all of us." This, though, really does involve taking the blame for things that go wrong. Nobody blames the leaders of Iceland or Belgium or South Korea or Brazil for things that happen on other continents, because the leaders of those countries don't purport to be solving all the world's problems or building up a massive security apparatus to serve the common good.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE UNCONCERNED AMERICAN. Most Supreme and Enlightened Overlord Mike wonders if the NSA program's weirdly high poll numbers point to a populace "still very, very scared of another terrorist attack," and willing to do, or sacrifice, just about anything to stop it. I'd go in the opposite direction: This seems to me a populace not terribly worried about the government peeking at their phone logs, and willing to sacrifice whatever abstract privacy rights such a program violates in order to possibly prevent an attack.

It's perfectly plausible that Americans have X level of anxiety over another attack, where X is a low number, but only Y amount of concern over the government knowing they don't call their grandparents enough, where Y is a lower number. And since terrorist attacks are both rare and really bad, you can have a country both relatively unconcerned about their reoccurrence and willing to give up quite a bit to prevent their success. Nevertheless, were Americans accepting high gas prices, or more taxes, or curfews in order to prevent an attack, that would prove their fear. As it is, opening their call logs to the NSA isn't actually an inconvenience in any way, and only chilling in an abstract, look-where-it's-leading sort of way. But make no mistake, it is chilling. And my guess is Americans really just haven't thought this one through. Yet.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP: HOW TO AVOID A BLOG WAR. Garance offers some advice to the MSM.

Also, those of you who missed the launch party for David Sirota’s new book "Hostile Takeover" may be interested in watching the event here. The American Prospect co-hosted the event with the AFL-CIO, and among the speakers was the Prospect’s Harold Meyerson.

--The Editors

PUNCH HARDER, DON'T RUN. Obviously, the public's initial response to the latest from the NSA hasn't been the outrage I would have hoped for, but nonetheless I think Democrats desperately need to ignore this implicit advice from Mark Blumenthal:

MP makes no predictions, but Bush can only stand to gain if the public's attention shifts from his handling of gas prices, the economy, immigration and Iraq to his administration's efforts to "investigate terrorism." The Post-ABC poll found that 51% approve (and 47% disapprove) of "the way Bush is handling Protecting Americans' privacy rights as the government investigates terrorism." That is "hardly a robust rating," as the ABC release puts it, "but one that's far better than his overall job approval, in the low 30s in recent polls."

On the contrary. If Bush had low ratings overall but high ratings on some random peculiar subject -- agriculture issues or something -- then avoiding the topic would be the way to go. But Republican handling of terrorism is destined to play a large role in the next couple of elections, and there's no way for the Democrats to avoid it. The only question is when and how that debate's going to be had. If Democrats try and duck it, they'll eventually find themselves stuck playing defense against some GOP attacks. But since the fight is inevitable, you may as well engage as soon as possible. The public isn't troubled by the administration's handling of privacy . . . yet.

But given that the public doesn't think the administration is trustworthy, competent, or on their side, how hard can it really be to convince people that all of these concerns are applicable to invasions of privacy as well? Clearly, that's not the public's thinking at this point. But the name of the game is to talk about this and try to change some minds. Given Bush's generally dismal ratings it shouldn't be all that difficult.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE WASHINGTON POST'S POLL IS FLAWED. Let me get the fun part out of the way first. Here's an answer to Matt's question about the identity of Specialist (whose criticism, which has on occasion targeted yours truly, is indeed valuable and well-argued sometimes). "Specialist" is the code name for a secret team of a dozen White House interns targeting liberal blogs who have been chained to their desks in the basement of the West Wing and who suffer regular whippings at the hands of Tony Snow.

Seriously, there's also a very good answer to Mike's question: Why the heck did 63 percent of respondents to the Washington Post's poll initially find the controversial NSA program acceptable? Here's a possibility: The poll is seriously flawed.

Take a look at the poll itself. The key question comes after four other questions, each of which frames this purely as civil liberties vs. terrorism, with no mention of legality. And the question itself is framed that way, too. It reads:

It's been reported that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. It then analyzes calling patterns in an effort to identify possible terrorism suspects, without listening to or recording the conversations. Would you consider this an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?

There are a few key words missing from this question. "Court order" are two of them. "Possibly illegal" are two more. The question of the program's legality -- which is anything but clear -- just doesn't come up. The result is that folks are simply asked to decide between safety and "privacy." Putting aside whether this is even a valid dichotomy to begin with, there's no indication whatsoever that the program may have no meaningful legal oversight at all and that it may be operating in utter legal darkness.

My bet is that the results would have been quite different if the question also contained this: "Some experts think this program may be illegal, because it seems to have been done without an order from the court which is meant to help ensure that such gathering of private information about American citizens is done with legal oversight. Would you consider..." etc.

As Ezra also notes, many people probably haven't thought this one through. They aren't helped in that regard when such crucial context is omitted. And it isn't the first time pollsters have failed to include it, either. The question of legality has also been missing from other mainstream polls taken after earlier NSA revelations. This glaring omission skews the results, and for professional pollsters, it's really indefensible.

--Greg Sargent

IS THE NSA PROGRAM ILLEGAL? COULD IT BE CRIMINAL, TOO? Is the NSA's newly-revealed program to collect the phone records of millions of Americans illegal? Experts are expressing different opinions this morning. But Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, thinks it's clearly illegal -- and she says it may even be criminal, too.

I just got off the phone with her. And I'm going to try -- and probably fail -- to accurately boil down what she said into something real, real simple.

Her view is that there's only one legal way for NSA to get such records -- with an order from the court created by the FISA. Others are arguing there may be other ways -- by subpoena or by a so-called "National Security Letter" from the FBI. But she makes a strong case that this just isn't so.

The key question is, Does the NSA have subpoena power? If it does, it might not need a court order. If it doesn't, however, it seems clear that it would need a court order. Got that?

Martin says it's absolutely clear that the NSA doesn't have subpoena power. Why? Because it hasn't been given that power by Congress. And it can't use law-enforcement subpoenas because it's not a law enforcement agency -- it's an intelligence agency.

Because it's an intel agency, she argues, the NSA only derives its authority from FISA. And FISA appears to require that the NSA persuade the FISA court that it needs the info. In other words, a court order is mandatory. But a court order appears not to have been obtained. So by Kate Martin's interpretation, it's very likely illegal.

Some are arguing that if the access to the records was granted by a "national security letter" from the FBI, that might be valid. But that apparently doesn't fly, either. Martin says the FBI can only use such a letter to authorize itself access to info of this type. It can't simply type out such a letter, hand it to the NSA, and say, "Here, go get the info with this."

So in her view this program is very likely illegal. Now, is it criminal?

That depends on how the info was gathered. This could have happened in two ways. Either the phone companies turned over the info in bulk, after the calls were made, or the companies and the NSA made an arrangement by which a so-called "pen register" trap and trace device transmitted the info about who was calling whom to NSA in real time -- that is, as the calls were being made.

Martin argues -- and she makes her case more extensively here -- that no one can use such devices without obtaining a court order under either the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or under criminal wiretap law. Violating either of those isn't merely illegal -- it's a crime as set forth in the Stored Communication Act. So if the info was being transmitted in real time without a court order, she argues, those doing so committed a crime. Another thorny issue, if this were the case, would be figuring out who exactly committed the crime.

Now, we don't know whether the info was turned over in real time. Glenn Greenwald, who offers his own invaluable analysis here, doesn't seem to think so. But as best as I can determine, we don't know for sure. And it certainly seems like a fruitful line of inquiry.

Bottom line: Your government participated in an arrangement that was likely illegal, and could conceivably have been criminal. And there's still a heck of a lot more we still don't know about what's actually happening here. Still, one thing appears pretty certain at this moment: We're on some pretty frightening territory now, aren't we?

--Greg Sargent

WHEN PSYCHOTICS ATTACK. Giving a speech at a Library of Congress lecture yesterday, former senator Alan Simpson was "shocked to read that House Republicans wouldn't pass a mental-health bill because it had Democratic sponsors. 'You've got to have rocks for brains to do that,' the Wyoming Republican complained. 'We never had that kind of thing. We just didn't do that to each other.'" It's not the rocks for brains that bother me so much as the extra headstones. America views treatment for mental illness as a luxury commodity, obtainable for the rich, unnecessary for the poor. Maybe that's why 300,000 jail inmates take medications for "severe" mental illnesses like schizophrenia, or why the largest mental facility in the nation is not a hospital but the Los Angeles County jail, or why folks with serious mental disorders are 5.5 times likelier to kill a police officer than anyone else.

This week, out in Virginia, a police detective named Vicky Armel was gunned down by a mentally ill teenager. Unlike straight physical illnesses, the psychologically sick aren't merely in danger, but often pose a danger. It's long past time we guaranteed parity of treatment to those with such afflictions, but a couple Democratic sponsors on a bill were apparently enough to scuttle a step in that direction. Our rock-brained Congress has some headstones on their conscience.

--Ezra Klein

WHAT’S THIS ABOUT? Like any lib, I was somewhat surprised by that Washington Post poll this morning finding that 63 percent of Americans approve of the NSA surveillance program (and when people were asked how they’d feel if their own calls were being monitored, approval went up by 3 percent!).

Seems to me there are three possible explanations for these numbers. First, Americans don’t care that much about civil liberties. Second, on this matter unlike virtually every other matter under the sun, Americans believe Bush and trust him at his word. OK, explanation one is sort of true, but there’ve been notable times in our recent history when clear majorities were outraged by domestic snooping. Explanation two seems highly unlikely.

And so, explanation three: A lot of Americans are still very, very scared of another terrorist attack. And they think, Hey, whatever it takes. This is a good thing for us to be reminded of, I guess. I almost never think about the possibility of another terrorist attack, and it doesn’t seem to me that anybody I know does either. And I and most of the people I’m talking about live in a city that was attacked. But I can’t recall any friend of mine -- both cultural elitists and my “normal American” friends back in West Virginny -- saying “Jeezus, I’m terrified they’re gonna hit us again, any day.” But I guess a lot of people do think that’s the case.

Is anxiety about another attack part of the daily routine of any TAPPED readers or any of your heartland cousins and so on? Am I part of the Barone-ian “soft America”? In any case, if a significant number of Americans believes that the next attack is more or less imminent, well, there are some obvious political lessons there.

--Michael Tomasky

WHO IS SPECIALIST? I have to say that I'm growing concerned about the rapid pace with which frequent TAPPED commenter and detractor Specialist manages to put up comments on this blog. What person could have the requisite stamina? Is it possible that the NSA is running some kind of massive blog-trolling program with hundreds of operatives -- or automated computer routines -- unleashed upon the progressive blogosphere to contest our arguments? The American people want to know.

--Matthew Yglesias

PRIVACY FOR ME BUT NOT FOR THEE. Many props to the Washington Post who led off their front-page, top-'o'-the-paper story on the NSA scandal with this bolded quote:

The privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all of our activities. We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans. Our efforts are focused on links to al-Qaeda and their known affiliates.

It's also worth noting that this administration has jealously protected its own right to keep its links, consultations, and conversations secret. That case with Cheney and the energy records wasn't about a transcript, it was about merely obtaining a list of who attended the secret energy meetings. Such revelations were considered so intrusive that the Bush administration appealed those requests all the way to the Supreme Court. Think about that when the GOP spin inevitably shifts to argue that such basic data collection carries no threat to privacy. As the kids say, IOIYAR.

--Ezra Klein

POISONED FRUIT. Perhaps this is obvious, but the thing about the big NSA phone records dragnet is that this gives us the previously missing explanation as to why the administration thought it was so important to illegally wiretap people without warrants. That used to be a bit mysterious -- if the idea was to spy on people with al-Qaeda connections, getting a warrant should have been easy. The problem is that the evidentiary basis for believing the people in question had al-Qaeda connections now turns out to have been illegally obtained evidence from the broader NSA program. And then the problem reiterates itself -- if the listening-in stage of the program reveals anything interesting, you can't use that in a court either. You can't use it to get further warrants, you can't use it as the basis of a prosecution, basically you can't use it at all. So if you want to act, you're going to need to do one of these detention-without-trials deals or maybe a "rendition" or a military tribunal or what have you. And then, once the guy's in custody, if he tells you anything you can't use that either. So the whole process starts again and soon enough there's an entire parallel justice system operating entirely in secret without any oversight or real rules.

And that's the optimistic scenario in which all of the relevant people are maximally honest, honorable, and competent. Leaving aside the reality that nobody with a single shred of honesty or basic human dignity would be working for George W. Bush at this point, that's simply not a realistic picture of any large-scale enterprise. Things are bound to go wrong -- badly wrong -- when you have all these people operating outside the law without any checks or scrutiny.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE ON DEAN, AGAIN. Following up on Ezra's contention yesterday that he's not an anti-Deanie meanie, I'd also add that my own thinking on the 50-state strategy is far less negative, as should be clear from this April item, than Kevin Drum suggested:

I've spent some time in recent weeks interviewing people who work for state Democratic Parties in some of the reddest precincts in the nation, and all I can say is that based on how little support they have on the ground from interest groups, progressive activists, or the national Democrats (though they have more now than they used to, thanks to Howard Dean), it's somewhere between a miracle and a testament to the constancy of the American people that Democrats continue to win national office in some of these places. Even though the present political environment would seem to be the most favorable Democrats have faced in a long time, the president's weakness must be measured against the Democrat's even greater on-the-ground weakness in rather electorally critical parts of the nation.

The real question is how best to make up for this gap while also taking advantage of the historic political environment. No matter what happens in '06, that election is going to act as some kind of steam valve and I really doubt that, with a highly contentious presidential race also on the ballot, the '08 environment could be any more favorable to congressional change than the one in which there's a sitting president with a 29 percent approval rating and two and a half years left in office. Donors will be distracted by the presidential race in '08, and, if all goes well, the 50-state project will have matured enough to be bearing fruit. The real question now is whether or not, for the next few months at any rate, there's more that can be done by the DNC to directly support candidates, as well as infrastructure, while that project is still in its infancy.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING. Last week I argued that the burgeoning prostitution and bribery scandal involving contractor Brent Wilkes could be used to tie the abuse of women to abuse of detainees in the public mind and create an overall picture of the attitude of the administration toward human dignity. Now Laura Rozen is suggesting those two things have even more in common than a disrespect for human rights:

… the source on Archer Logistics later pointed me to something else potentially far more explosive: that Wilkes was in discussions to get a huge contract -- a few hundred million dollars -- from the CIA to set up an off the books plane network for the Agency, that was only scuttled pretty deep into the Cunningham revelations.

"I Imagine that since their whole flying operation has been outed, it makes it tough to operate clandestine flights," the source explained. "I bet it would cost a bundle to set up a whole new operation that no one knew about ... How do they operate a secret fleet of aircraft now that everyone knows about the planes we have? If I were high up in the CIA, this would be a big priority for me, and I would need a solution outside the normal range of solutions."

Why was Wilkes coming around the Agency this past year? My guess, it wasn't a purely social visit.

People who have no respect for the bodily integrity and inviolability of others will lack that respect wherever they go, at home and abroad. It's a values question.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

DEBATING VOTE BY MAIL. The Prospect put out a special report this month on Oregon's system of all-mail voting, which is serving as a model for efforts to spread mail voting in other states across the country. We then invited six experts and advocates, including former Oregon secretary of state Phil Keisling and avowed mail-voting opponent Curtis Gans of American University, to debate the issues raised in the report. The ensuing exchange was both lively and, given the subject matter, remarkably heated. For folks interested in electoral reform, it's not to be missed, and people should use this comments thread to weigh in with their own thoughts; participants in the exchange are interested in seeing them.

--The Editors

THE COLBERT QUESTION: MADAM LEADER SPEAKS. TNR is to be commended for reviving the epic Stephen Colbert funniness debate for another week. But as James Wood puts it, "[i]t is time -- it is always time -- for some literary criticism." Wood's take is insufficiently pro-Colbert by my standards but insightful nonetheless. (See this post at Matt's place for a choice excerpt.) The Colbert debate living on for another day gives me the excuse to finally mention Nancy Pelosi's comment at a breakfast meeting with journalists that the Prospect held on Friday. As it was adjourning I approached the congresswoman and said that we had all been dancing around the real issue of the day: What was her position on Colbert's speech? Pelosi ducked the question, while still making it clear which side she's really on: "Well, I wasn't at the dinner and didn't see the performance. But I watch his show every night and love him." (Recall that Pelosi's second-in-command, K-Street Democrat Steny Hoyer, had already publicly taken the wankerific line on the subject.)

Meanwhile, following from Ezra and Garance's posts, it's worth mentioning that Pelosi's response to a question about Howard Dean and the DNC was unmistakably hostile (in a passive-aggressive way) and in keeping with the criticisms voiced by other congressional leaders recently.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAPPED: BOUNDARY ISSUES. Tara McKelvey talks to Anthony Lewis about illegal wiretapping, executive power, John Yoo, and other pressing topics.

--The Editors

MORE ON DEAN. Kevin Drum accuses me of coming down on the Rahm Emmanuel side in the great Dean-Emmanuel showdown. That's not quite true. I was just pointing out that, if Democrats lose in a couple crucial seats for lack of money, the ground has been laid for Dean to take the blame. In fact, my position, laid out when Noam Scheiber (who's got more current thoughts on this subject here) wrote this story in April, is the same as Drum's: This is the wrong story. The question isn't whether Dean's 50-state strategy will leech resources in the short-term, but how it will work in the long-term. Some enterprising political reporter should travel out to some of the red state Democratic Parties that Dean's given funding, evaluate their organization and plans, and try to assess whether this is good money thrown away on useless symbolism, or a wise attempt at transformation. If only I, say, worked at a political magazine, and could suggest such a piece to relevant editors...

It's also worth noting that this is basically moot. Dean is doing exactly what he was elected to do. The DNC Chair is voted in by delegates from state parties. Said delegates cast ballots for Dean because he promised to fund them rather than the national party. He's done precisely that. And since it's those chairs, rather than a President or putative party leader, who Dean answers to, it's hard to fault his single-mindedness. On the other hand, most DNC chairs promise something similar, and then spurn their constituencies to head off anger from the national leadership. Dean's stuck to his guns. Maybe he should get some loving press coverage for his "authenticity."

--Ezra Klein

DURBIN DOES HEALTH. I just got back from hearing Dick Durbin talk health care at The Center for American Progress (which has really stepped up the quality of its free sandwiches). His speech was something of a eulogy for Bill Frist's "health care week," which saw the GOP try to score a few "doing something" points on health care by debating, and then defeating, a variety of misguided bills, from tort reform to Mike Enzi's attempt to destroy all state-based insurance regulations. As for Durbin, he's allied with Blanche Lincoln to craft legislation creating a Small Business Health Benefits Program modeled after the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. It's a solid bit of wonkery, nothing transformative, but a definite step forward for small businesses who would be able to enter into a mega-association and choose from a menu of plans that would be negotiated by the government's Office of Personnel Management. Tax credits would be provided so low-income workers could buy in.

Durbin also wants a Senate resolution stating universal coverage as a goal for the next ten years. I don't know how useful that is from a policy perspective -- it's not, after all, binding -- but it seems like sound politics. Speaking of politics, Durbin had a great line on the motto of the Ownership Society: "Don't worry, we're all in this alone." Cute, not to mention true. He also called the current White House occupants a "regime -- I mean, administration," but that was as far as the partisanship went. Which was partially the problem: Nothing he said was particularly exciting, or visionary, or even progressive. Durbin is renowned as something of a hack-and-slash fighter, but all he really offered a was technocratic proposal to allow small businesses better bargaining power. If he's that hard up for ideas, maybe he should've wandered down the hall, where the Center for American Progress's health team keeps their policy proposal. That, at least, is a plan for universal coverage, and a stark contrast with the right's fetish for individualism

--Ezra Klein

NO MORE 269-269. To follow up on Matt’s post, The Hotline (subscription only) notes that the expansion of the House to 437 seats would also mean that the Electoral College would grow by one, bringing its total to 539 (the Electoral College now counts D.C. as having one representative and two senators, for some reason). This would put an end to the dreaded 269-269 scenario, whereby the House would decide who the next President would be. All in all, this plan sounds like a good idea.

--Alec Oveis

BETTER AND BETTER. I'm glad that the U.S. House of Representatives looks like it will consent to giving me and my fellow Districters some representation in their fine halls, but I'm in some ways even more excited about the details of the plan. The general idea, long floated, has been to give DC a member and also add a member to the Utah delegation, thus preserving the partisan balance. But there was concern about opening up Utah for redistricting mischief. So the plan calls for the addition of an at-large member just on top of Utah's existing three congressional districts.

Why is this good? Well, because for all the energy expounded bemoaning gerrymandering, nobody's ever willing to take on the real culprit -- the very idea of a congressional district. You could solve this entire problem by treating whole states as multiple-member constituencies with the representatives elected with one of several forms of proportional representations. Bigger states might need to be chopped up into two or three (or in the case of California, maybe four) districts, but even so, the potential for line-drawing hijinks under my system would be small. This plan isn't unconstitutional, it just cuts against a long-entrenched American habit. The new Utah-DC deal undercuts that habit, and just might pave the way for broader reform of the system.

--Matthew Yglesias

AUTHENTICITY IS STUPID. It's worth adding a more general point to Greg's post on today's awesome David Broder-Joe Klein twofer: Authenticity is a pointless thing to care about in politics. Obsessing over the personal motivations and supposed core beings of individual political actors is, in fact, close to the opposite of what politics is actually all about. Institutional arrangements and historical contingencies largely determine political (and thus policy) outcomes, and outcomes are what matter.

Besides, the track record for consistency and "authenticity" of some of our great political leaders -- both on the level of this goofy kind of gut-check personality assessment and on the level of actual policy positions -- is awfully dubious. Franklin D. Roosevelt was dismissed as an unremarkable lightweight when he first ran for President (Walter Lippmann famously described him as "a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President"), largely because he was a fairly unremarkable lightweight in his early political career. And of course he ran his 1932 campaign railing against the deficit-spending Hoover administration and calling for "sound currency" and "immediate and drastic reductions of all public expenditures." Authenticity just doesn't have anything to do with anything.

--Sam Rosenfeld

NON-DENIAL DENIALS. "Bush Denies Massive Spying on U.S. Citizens" -- good headline. So maybe everyone in a tizzy about this morning's USA Today blockbuster is all worked up over nothing? Maybe the liberal media got it wrong again? But no. Bush didn't actually deny massive spying on U.S. citizens. He said the government isn't "mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans," but as the article goes on to note, he "did not directly address the collection of phone records."

Since the phone records is what's at issue here, he didn't deny anything. To be generous, I guess he was denying that collecting, storing, and analyzing all this information amounts to "mining or trolling" through people's "personal lives." This cavalier view of privacy comes, of course, from an administration that's been second to none in terms of desiring to keep its own dealings secret. One way or another, massive spying does, in fact, seem to be what's going on and the White House isn't really denying it. And, of course, each step of the way down surveillance road, it's consistently turned out that the administration had secretly rolled back privacy protections much more than it previously admitted. Realistically, whatever they turn out to be doing or not doing, they clearly don't think there's any legal, practical, or moral constraint on what they're allowed to do if they feel like it.

--Matthew Yglesias

TODAY IN CORRUPTION. The New York Times' big piece on the FBI's myriad public corruption investigations makes the interesting observation that 9-11 actually helped to shift the bureau's focus more toward public integrity, as it was an area for which the FBI had almost exclusive authority and provided the agency an opportunity to maximize impact at a time when personnel all across federal law enforcement bureaucracies was being shifted to counterterrorism.

Meanwhile, the big news on the FBI anti-corruption front today is confirmation that the bureau is investigating California's Jerry Lewis, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, for action he's taken on behalf of a longtime lobbyist crony and Brent Wilkes associate. (The mad-dog goo goo group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington had requested just such an FBI investigation four months ago.) Lewis occupies one of the most powerful positions in Congress; this could be a very, very big deal.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE CONSERVATIVE NANNY STATE. There’s a new book from Dean Baker available as a free PDF download or in paperback if you're so inclined. It's fantastic: "In his new book, economist Dean Baker debunks the myth that conservatives favor the market over government intervention. In fact, conservatives rely on a range of “nanny state” policies that ensure the rich get richer while leaving most Americans worse off."

As everyone now knows, the New Right built this big infrastructure and now liberals want to do the same. But one of the big things that infrastructure did was take formerly marginal "wacky" ideas and push them onto the mainstream agenda as things people needed to seriously debate. The new liberal institutions have done very little of that -- almost none at all. Baker's book, however, is absolutely chock full of such ideas. It would be a wonderful thing to start getting attention to some of the issues he raises. At the end of the day, the current Democratic agenda of raising the minimum wage and re-establishing pay-as-you-go budget rules is a bit unambitious.

--Matthew Yglesias

DAVID BRODER: REPUBLICANS PRESUMED INNOCENT; DEMS PRESUMED GUILTY. You really couldn't ask for a more perfect illustration of the punditry's double-standard when it comes to "authenticity" than today's Washington Post column by David Broder. After approvingly quoting the view in Joe Klein's new book that Al Gore and John Kerry were "trimming their public positions to suit what they -- and their consultants -- thought were the prevailing winds," Broder adds: "The voters can sniff hypocrisy and spot what is synthetic about a candidate." Which of course leads Broder -- surprise, surprise -- to a discussion of the patron saint of authenticity himself, John McCain:

The presumption of authenticity -- the assumption that what he says, he actually believes -- is John McCain's greatest strength going into the 2008 presidential race. That presumption will be tested this weekend when McCain speaks at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, and I will be surprised if he fails the exam. (Emphasis added.)

This is truly something. If voters "sniffed" any "hypocrisy" about the last two Dem candidates, it was largely because pundits like Broder, and much of the press, told them to. The press relentlessly portrayed both Dems as willing to say and do whatever it took to get elected. Every move Al Gore made, no matter how obscure, was said to have political and questionable motives. Then once the press had made that Gore's narrative, the pundits proceeded to argue that Gore himself was the author of this storyline -- exactly what Klein has now done once again. If there's one thing pundits love doing, it's describing voter perceptions as if they themselves have played no role in determining how those perceptions were formed -- when of course they played a critical role.

Contrast Broder's treatment of Dems with his point about the "presumption of authenticity" granted to McCain. Who's doing the presuming here? Answer: Why, Broder is, of course. McCain has already demonstrated a willingness to pander to Falwell and others on the right, but that goes unmentioned by Broder. Instead, he's already predicting -- presuming -- that McCain will demonstrate unflappable authenticity at Falwell's university. The emerging McCain narrative, as crafted by pundits like Broder and David Ignatius, is this: When McCain panders, it doesn't count, and we'll all pretend it didn't happen, because the real McCain would rather not be doing it. This is more than just dimwitted punditry; it will have consequences. It will help McCain to be all things to all people without voters "sniffing" his "hypocrisy." If there's one thing Dems should be prepared to deal with by now, it's that when it comes to the pundits' view of a politician's authenticity, Republicans are presumed innocent, and Dems are presumed guilty.

--Greg Sargent

THEY'RE IN THE MONEY... I apologize if my favorite part of the article on Rahm Emmanuel and Howard Dean's recent clashes is the writer's description of Emmanuel, who's "a recreational ballet dancer with the vocabulary of a longshoreman," but c'mon -- that's good stuff. The actual piece is interesting too, chronicling a recent blow-up between the two party poo-bahs that ended with Emmanuel stomping (possibly on his toes?) out of Dean's office, furious over the DNC's rate of spending and concentration on building a national infrastructure.

This was the concern driving Noam Scheiber's recent article on Dean (which I now wonder if Emmanuel didn't help pitch or source), that his determination to create a 50-state structure would deprive the party of crucial resources in an almost historically fertile election year. The issue, to be clear, is not the amount of money raised, which has satisfied even Chuck Schumer. Instead, it's Dean's decision to spend so much of it on field organizers and state parties, which has ensured there will be less for the closing hours of the 2006, and 2008, elections. The DNC, which has raised $74 million, has just $10 million cash on hand. The RNC, with a take of $142 million, has more than $40 million laying around. That'll be $32 million Republicans can spend and Democrats can't. As Garance correctly notes, if that money ends up making the difference, you might see a lot of the blame heaped on Howard.

--Ezra Klein

FUN WITH SURVEILLANCE. Turns out the NSA, with the collaboration of every phone company except Qwest, is monitoring all of our calls -- not to listen in to what's being said, but simply to gather data about the calls and draw inferences from that. It's important to link this up to the broader chain. One thing the Bush administration says it can do with this meta-data is to start tapping your calls and listening in, without getting a warrant from anyone. Having listened in on your calls, the administration asserts that if it doesn't like what it hears, it has the authority to detain you indefinitely without trial or charges, torture you until you confess or implicate others, extradite you to a Third World country to be tortured, ship you to a secret prison facility in Eastern Europe, or all of the above. If, having kidnapped and tortured you, the administration determines you were innocent after all, you'll be dumped without papers somewhere in Albania left to fend for yourself.

Once you start in with this business, it's a widening cycle of lawlessness with almost endless possibilities for abuse. Tellingly, the reason Qwest wound up not cooperating with the NSA on this is that the NSA couldn't be bothered to get a court order. Shame on the other phone companies for simply giving in to a request without legal backing.

--Matthew Yglesias

DEAN'S BURN RATE DEJA VU. The Washington Post reports this morning that Rahm Emanuel, head of the DCCC, stormed out of a meeting with DNC head Howard Dean over worries that Dean was spending too much money in too many states in a way that was not geared to winning this fall's congressional elections.

Emanuel's fury, Democratic officials said, was over his concern that Dean's DNC is spending its money too freely and too early in the election cycle -- a "burn rate" that some strategists fear will leave the party unable to help candidates compete on equal terms with Republicans this fall.

That reminded me of this October 2003 controversy over Dean's spending, “Deans Burn Rate Raises Questions.” Basically, the concern in 2003 was that Dean was spending too much money on organizers in too many states (13), and far too early in the cycle, rather than husbanding his resources for use in a targeted fashion come crunch time. That is the exact same concern Emanuel is raising now about Dean's management of the DNC. And, if history is any guide, Emanuel's concerns are ones that ought to be heeded. Most assessments of the failure of Dean's candidacy in 2004, such as this one from Business Week, pointed to Dean's burn rate as one of the reasons his campaign flamed out:

the Dean juggernaut fell victim to its own hubris and gaffes: an unhealthy "burn rate" that depleted its venture capital, a belief that pouring money into advertising would create unstoppable momentum, and an unproven product -- the candidate himself -- that didn't live up to the hype.

Howard Fineman is predicting an onslaught of accusatory nastiness as part of the national Republican campaign strategy this fall. Emanuel is concerned that the Democrats, now so well-poised to make inroads in the House, will find themselves under-funded at that crucial moment. Anyone serious about making the most of Bush's bad poll numbers and the growing dissatisfaction with Congress ought to share his concerns -- especially if they support Dean's 50-state project.

Should Democrats fail to regain power, it’s likely they won’t get as favorable an electoral environment again any time soon, regardless of what's built out on the ground. Stories like the one in the Post suggest that if Dems do fall shy of expectations come fall, it will be Dean's head that will be first to roll. At that point, the long-term rebuilding project could be scuppered, and the only thing the DNC will have to show for the past two years will be blown opportunities and blown cash.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WATERS WARS. Let me recommend Jon Margolis's fascinating piece on TAP Online about Canada's strange, and potentially untenable, refusal to export their fresh water. As Margolis writes, "Canada has 20 percent of all the world’s fresh water, to slake the thirsts and irrigate the crops of only 0.5 percent of the world’s population. [And] with the United Nations estimating that almost two-thirds of everybody, or almost 5.5 billion people, will face chronic water shortages by 2050," such protectiveness of their reserves will eventually appear cruel. Margolis focuses mostly on Canada's unwillingness to sell water to the profligate United States, but I'd be interested to know their position on dampening drought and quenching Third World thirst. And if you're interested in reading more on the issue, Brad Plumer has further context and commentary.

--Ezra Klein

TRUTHINESS IN THE STYLE SECTION. Inspired by Friends With Money, The New York Times decided to inflict a little ignorance on the American people, informing their readers that economic barriers to friendship are growing in salience because "other barriers have been broken down." After all, people make friends in college where "Students from country-club families and those on scholarships are thrown together as roommates, on athletic teams and in classes." This is best put in the "deeply misleading" file. Tuition is so high at private colleges that most of the people on financial aid (e.g., my freshman roommate) are from richer-than-average families. Similarly, while it's true as the article states that a higher-than-ever share of people from more modest backgrounds go to college nowadays, rich kids and poor kids go to different colleges. The actual level of economic diversity on elite campuses is low and declining.

If economic differences among friends really are increasing in salience, or at least in salience to New York Times readers, that's probably because inequality in the top of the income distribution has been exploding. The difference in earning power between the 8