Dr. George Tiller, an outspoken advocate for abortion rights and one of the few late-term abortion providers in the country, was shot dead in church this morning.

Cara Kulwicki writes at Feministe,

This is the first time an abortion provider has been murdered in over a decade. I have friends who work in abortion clinics. This is terrorism. And right now, I just don't have the words.

The loss of Dr. Tiller is deeply upsetting, and Cara rightly identifies this as a terrorist act. It is the culmination of an ongoing campaign of intimidation and harassment against someone who was providing completely legal health-care services. I've been paying attention to the more militant strains of the anti-choice movement, so this news shouldn't have shocked me as much as it did. But, like Cara, I have friends who work and volunteer in abortion clinics. When violence against abortion providers was hitting a fever pitch 10 years ago, I was not strongly pro-choice identified. I remember reading about the murder of an abortion provider, but it certainly did not affect me the way this news has. Whether it's rational or not, today I'm afraid for everyone who works in a reproductive health clinic. And not only those who provide abortion.

I am also worried about what Tiller's murder means for women in Kansas and elsewhere in the country who need the services that he provided. The simple fact is there are almost no doctors who provide late-term abortions, especially in rural parts of the country. I was in Nebraska several years ago to interview Dr. Leroy Carhart (whose challenges to abortion-restricting laws went all the way to the Supreme Court), and Carhart and Tiller were the only two late-term providers in their region. If one wanted to go on vacation or got sick, the other had to fill in. There was no one else. Perhaps it would be a fitting memorial to Dr. Tiller to contribute to Medical Students for Choice, and encourage more doctors with a deep commitment to reproductive rights to become abortion providers.

• Laura Rozen shares Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's reaction to the Obama administration's tough stand against expanding Israeli settlements, as well as Netanyahu's surprise that unlike past presidential administrations, Obama's isn't passively yielding to the Israeli position. I think moments like this serve as a good example that claims of the deep influence of the "Israel Lobby" on U.S. foreign policy are the result of a reputation for influence, rather than influence itself.
• It's undeniably good news that Finance Chairman Max Baucus is willing to fight "tooth and nail" for a public option in the health care reform bill and even better that Sen. Ben Nelson is now "open" to accepting a public option, given that this was previously a "dealbreaker" for him. Meanwhile Ezra notes how unions are standing in the way of substantive health care reform.
• I'm hard pressed to understand how the the ignorant rantings of 2008 presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, or convicted felon and right-wing thug G. Gordon Liddy's misogyny, or Fred Barnes' musings on the intelligence of Hispanics inform the public debate on Sonia Sotomayor. But one thing I am certain of, courtesy of Politico's dogged reporting, is that the White House definitely needs to address Tancredo's and Newt Gingrich's "racism" charges.
• Speaking of people whose opinions are irrelevant, Greg Sargent flags an interesting poll result in a recent Rasmussen survey that asks how important Dick Cheney's opinions are. Fifty-seven percent rate the former VP's opinions as "not very" or "not at all" important, although it would be interesting to know why people deem Cheney's thoughts as something between irrelevant and worthless. Is it just because he's out of office, or is it because the public recognizes the Cheney foreign policy the the failure it was? On the other hand, Pew finds that the public isn't all that into the "terror debate" in the first place.
• Remainders: Contrary to yesterday's obituary, Fox News is keeping the car-dealership conspiracy theory alive; Brian Beutler asks where the conservative Democrats stand on Sotomayor; Charlie Crist plays with fire down in Florida; and some libertarians are considering checking out of society altogether.

--Mori Dinauer

Chris Good, who somehow had the patience to transcribe part of this conservative "rap video," offers these lyrics:

"We need more women with intellectual integrity/I'm talkin, Megyn Kelly not Nancy Pelosi" ... "Superman that socialism, waterboard that terrorism"

I can only conclude that these two really don't know what "Superman" is a euphemism for, or they wouldn't have used it. If you don't know, use the Google. I'm not gonna tell you. TAPPED is a family blog.

-- A. Serwer

The deeply offended Stuart Taylor discovers that as a student, Sotomayor was very concerned about violence and intimidation of gay students on campus, as she wrote a letter to the school newspaper after the rooms of two gay students were ransacked. She also signed a letter criticizing the search process for a new assistant dean of student affairs who would deal primarily with issues involving students of color. The student committee tasked with evaluating the candidates was frustrated that it only saw applications from black and Latino candidates, and never saw any applications from Asian, Native American or other minority groups. She also urged the school to make good faith efforts to hire Latino faculty and offer courses on Latino culture and history. Scandalous.

Most disturbing however, is Taylor's revelation that Sotomayor was chair of a group called "Accion Puertorriquena," (Puerto Rican Action) which I assume was a SOC group devoted to the concerns of Puerto Rican students at Princeton. She was very critical of how Princeton treated its minority students in 1974, which is absurd, because America passed the Civil Rights Act only nine years earlier and Princeton had started admitting women five years earlier. Therefore, sexism and racism were then nonexistent at the university, where certain affiliated groups were despondent with the possibility of more women and minorities on campus.

In 1973, just a year before Sotomayor engaged in her racist crusade to destroy white men at Princeton, Cullom Davis, the founder of Concerned Alumni of Princeton, wrote mournfully in the group's magazine of the days when Princeton was "a body of men, relatively homogeneous in interests and backgrounds." This was apparently fairly typical fare for CAP, which was opposed to having more women and minorities admitted to Princeton. Incidentally, the group later boasted a current Supreme Court Justice among its members. If you have a subscription to The Nation, I urge you to read the rest of Eyal Press' report on the subject.

One can very clearly imagine Taylor's counterpart in 1967 bemoaning the racialist legal background of the newest justice to be appointed to the court.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, Mr. Taylor graduated from Princeton in 1970, just a year after the school started admitting women. 

-- A. Serwer

Debra Viadero of Education Week highlights a new study of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in North Carolina. When the district ended its 30-year old busing program -- reverting to racially segregated neighborhood schools -- high-performing teachers fled schools that became predominantly black and poor.

This research, by Cornell labor economist C. Kirabo Jackson, is significant because it links the problem of teacher quality to the problem of school segregation. If you are an education reformer who believes teacher quality is the single biggest factor affecting student achievement, here is compelling evidence that you should also actively support existing desegregation programs. According to Kirabo's study, the best teachers -- those with higher test scores on licensing exams and a track record of improving their students' academic performance -- showed a clear preference for racially and socioeconomically integrated schools over schools overwhelmed by the challenges of poverty.

Some would say the solution is as simple as paying teachers much more to teach in disadvantaged schools. And while that is one option, it ignores the other positive effects of integration, ranging from increased tolerance of diversity to allowing poor kids to share in the fruits of having actively involved, middle-class parents advocating for their schools. In short, the more we learn about the myriad factors affecting educational outcomes, the more it seems that there is a natural synthesis between free market edu-reformers, who are focused on improving teacher quality, and more traditional education liberals, who tend to worry more about student poverty and segregation.

--Dana Goldstein

Michael Goldfarb, who subscribes to the idea that by definition, a person of color who achieves academic excellence has been the recipient of "preferential treatment" and is therefore undeserving, discovers that Sonia Sotomayor was asked to teach a class on Puerto Rico while still an undergraduate and remarks:

I went to Princeton but somehow I never got to teach my own class, or grade my own work. One wonders how Sotomayor judged her work in that class, and whether the grade helped or hindered her efforts to graduate with honors.

It is, by definition, impossible for a woman of Puerto Rican descent to be smarter than Michael Goldfarb.

UPDATE: It's not even true! Maybe that's part of the reason why Goldfarb didn't get to teach his own class. But it's probably just because of preferential treatment offered to people like Sonia Sotomayor.

National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair John Cornyn has the tough job of trying to regain his party's majority in that chamber. It's a task that's not being made any easier by folks calling the first Hispanic Supreme Court nominee a racist, and so here he is pushing back on that. Primaries that push his candidates to the right and cost them money also don't help, so he's trying to convince the base they can't have a monlithic party of conservatives. Thus, "while we all might wish for a Party comprised only of people who agree with us 100 percent of the time, this is a pipedream.* Each Party is fundamentally a coalition of individuals rallying around core principles with some variations along the way."

Indeed. And for the GOP to start acting that way, Republicans who are actually accountable need to start acting as party leaders and broadcasting this message. "Big John" Cornyn is not a moderate. He's a conservative fella from Texas who, and I quote, "makes lesser states squirm." But the thing about actually being responsible for winning elections is that it forces you to confront the facts, and in Cornyn's case, the fact is that his party needs a broader coalition. It's the magic of democracy. But as long as folks who don't have to deal with the reality of electoral consequences -- Newt Gingrich, etc. -- are acting as Republican spokespeople and calling Sotomayor a racist, it's going to be hard for Cornyn to do much about to help the GOP's fortunes.

-- Tim Fernholz

*I always think it's funny when politicians describe something as a pipe dream. And as far as pipe dreams go, wishing for everyone to agree with you seems pretty tame.

In the year 2387, we will be able to travel faster than light. We will discover far-off planets and new civilizations. And black women will still be secretaries. Danielle Belton asks why the future is so white in sci-fi.

Meanwhile, Noy Thrupkaew considers Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, which explores the capitalism-as-prostitution metaphor.

And Terence Samuel says that Obama's honeymoon period is over now that he must fight for a Supreme Court nominee and fundraise for members of his party.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

Greg Sargent reports that Michael Steele has gently begun trying to wean the GOP off of attacking Sonia Sotomayor for reasons that have nothing to do with her work as a judge (my emphasis):

In what seemed like an effort to distance the party from claims that Sotomayor is “racist” and an “Affirmative Action” pick, Steele repeatedly said that Republicans should be hailing the historic nature of Obama’s pick.

“I’m excited that a Hispanic woman is in this position,” Steele said. He added that instead of “slammin’ and rammin’” on Sotomayor, Republicans should “acknowledge” the “historic aspect” of the pick and make a “cogent, articulate argument” against her for purely substantive reasons.

I imagine that, if Steele had made this argument like a normal person, someone somewhere might possibly have taken him seriously.

-- A. Serwer

Yesterday I linked to a piece in the Daily Telegraph that quoted retired General Anthony Taguba saying there were photos of sexual abuse of detainees that hadn't been released. In hindsight, I think there are a number of reasons to be skeptical of the report, not the least of which is the Telegraph's report a few weeks ago saying that the embargoed photos had been leaked--the story featured a picture that had been released years ago, and somehow none of the allegedly leaked photos have come to light since. So I'm not entirely convinced the story is accurate. I don't think people who think the photos are real should buy into it wholesale just because they think it would bolster the case for releasing them.

These pictures may exist, but even if they do, unlike Tara, I'm not so sure it would be appropriate to release them. Terrible things were presented as "legal" in the torture memos, but rape wasn't one of them. There's a difference between a torture program initiated at the highest levels of government and the alleged sexual abuse of a detainee by individual troops. In one case, by not releasing the photos, the government is hiding its own wrongdoing--in the other, the victim's expectation of privacy is a larger priority, because the abuse is the result of individual bad actors. Just as we wouldn't splash screenshots of a videotape that was evidence in a civilian rape case all over the front page of newspapers out of respect for the victim, and I'm not sure the choice should be any different here.

-- A. Serwer

Via Twitter, TPM News Editor Justin Elliott points out this "creepily gendered" Times headline: "Sotomayor’s Sharp Tongue Raises Issue of Temperament."

Indeed, I can't remember the last time I heard a man referred to as "sharp tongued," which strikes me as a synonym for catty, pushy, nasty, and a whole bunch of other terms usually reserved for aggressive women. The Times article, by Jo Becker and Adam Liptak, goes on to call Sotomayor "testy" and "combative," though also "formidably intelligent" and "gregarious." But the piece buries what should have been very close to the top, a comment by Judge Guido Calabresi, former dean of Yale Law School. He said:

Some lawyers just don’t like to be questioned by a woman. It was sexist, plain and simple.

Right. If you're laboring under the assumption that the current Supreme Court is made up of a bunch of passive nice guys who make lawyers feel warm and fuzzy inside, read Jeff Toobin's profile of Chief Justice John Roberts.

In any case, by acknowledging that critiques of Sotomayor's "temperament" must be understood within the context of her place in a male-dominated profession, the Times reporters clearly one-up Jeff Rosen's now-infamous "Case Against Sotomayor." But while it's perfectly legitimate to debate Sotomayor's potential shortcomings, I'm still not thrilled with the way this "temperament" story is being framed. As Ann Friedman and I discussed in our first episode of "Ask a Feminist," there is a well-developed body of sociological research demonstrating that within workplaces, male aggressive behaivor is accepted by both men and women as a "leadership" quality, while similar aggressive behavior by a woman gets her labeled as a difficult bitch. In some surveys, even women have reported that they prefer male bosses.

All I ask is that coverage of Sotomayor's "personality" be put in this context.

--Dana Goldstein

Update: Josh Marshall made a similar point (very) early this morning.

Charles Krauthammer is the latest conservative to distort Sonia Sotomayor's comments in order to smear her as a racist:

On the Ricci case. And on her statements about the inherent differences between groups, and the superior wisdom she believes her Latina physiology, culture and background grant her over a white male judge. They perfectly reflect the Democrats' enthrallment with identity politics, which assigns free citizens to ethnic and racial groups possessing a hierarchy of wisdom and entitled to a hierarchy of claims upon society.

Sotomayor shares President Obama's vision of empathy as lying at the heart of judicial decision-making -- sympathetic concern for litigants' background and current circumstances, and for how any judicial decision would affect their lives.

Of course, just prior to criticizing Sotomayor for believing that empathy lies "at the heart of judicial decision-making" he recounts the story of Frank Ricci and how Sotomayor cruelly refused to ignore the law in order to grant the verdict conservatives wanted. Krauthammer argues that conservatives stand for the principle of "blind justice," (you could say "color-blind justice," since to do otherwise would be enshrining what Krauthammer calls a "racial spoils system") as well as standing "against justice as empathy." Krauthammer, like the color-blind Stuart Taylor, is a supporter of racial profiling and someone who believes torture is justified.

We have here the rudiments of applied conservative legal principles. The letter of the law is inviolable -- except when the government does it in the name of "national security." The law should be impartial and without empathy -- except when it comes to those individuals conservatives find sympathetic. And the law should be color-blind, unless you're going to suspect someone of being a criminal or a terrorist because of the color of their skin.

-- A. Serwer

Brad Plumer's got a post in defense of Energy Secretary Steven Chu's proposal that we paint our roofs white. Sez Brad:

To give an easy example, just refitting the 30 billion or so square feet of commercial roof space in the United States would be the equivalent of taking roughly 75 million cars off the road for a year. And, as a bonus, buildings with white roofs tend to stay 30 percent cooler than their black-topped counterparts during the summer, which curtails energy use. Obviously this wouldn't stop global warming, but on the list of pain-free measures that would make a fair bit of inroads on the problem, this has to rank very high up there.

People were mocking Chu for his prosaic-but-effective idea, which recalls the fracas around Obama's campaign suggestion that Americans check their tire pressure to make sure their cars were running as efficiently as possible. The RNC and Rush Limbaugh had a field day with that suggestion, even though it was true that it would be a helpful move. I have a hard time figuring out why these kinds of ideas are considered laughable -- anything to score a political point, I suppose. You'd think people who oppose big-government plans like cap-and-trade would want to encourage relatively simple measures to solve the problems of global warming and our unsustainable energy regime. Oh, but they don't believe that global warming and sustainability are actually problems. Sigh.

-- Tim Fernholz

The Commerce Department has released the adjusted GDP numbers from January to March: The economy contracted at a 5.7 percent annualized rate. Since this is the second of three attempts to measure the growth rate during that period, you get a weird effect where it turns out the country did slightly better than we had previously thought we did in the past but slightly worse than we had estimated a new projection about the past might reveal (whew!) :

The Commerce Department's updated reading on gross domestic product, released Friday, showed the economy's contraction from January to March was slightly less deep than the 6.1 percent annualized decline first estimated last month. But the new reading was a tad worse than the 5.5 percent annualized drop economists were forecasting.

Economists are estimating the contraction will lessen to a little under 2 percent in the next quarter (right now), and that we'll start seeing some small growth in the third or fourth quarter. But while GDP is an important indicator, the critical measure in is always employment:

Many economists say the jobless rate will hit 10 percent by the end of this year. Some say it could rise as high as 10.7 percent in the second quarter of next year before making a slow descent.

This seems like a good time to suggest you visit the Center for Economic and Policy Research's third stimulus honor roll, a list of economists who believe a third stimulus package is necessary (Obama's was the second, Bush signed a small, tax-refund based stimulus plan in spring 2008). Whether or not the policy is sound, I have a hard time believing Congress would appropriate further money for a stimulus without the situation getting even worse than expected. But if in the next year the financial system stabilizes further and TARP funding starts getting returned or going unused, perhaps that could offset the costs of a small third stimulus.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Regardless of how movement conservatives are handling the Sotomayor nomination (heavens, she might "favor individuals over institutions, employees over corporations, the poor over the rich"), the Republicans who are actually in government don't seem too keen on making opposition to her their Last Stand (though they're more than happy to stall the appointment). That being said, they do seem to have short memories regarding treatment of past Republican judicial nominees.
• The cover story in the new Weekly Standard, "Reagan in Opposition," is subtitled "The lessons of 1977." Reading the piece, I think the main lesson is "Reagan was effing awesome." Seriously though, beyond the vast differences between the political and policy landscapes of 1977 and 2009 (the absence of the Cold War is highly conspicuous), much of the argument surrounding Reagan's success lies precisely in his ability to co-opt the opposition. He defended FDR. He was polite to his political opponents. He was an optimist who made conservatism widely appealing. To say Reagan was sui generis misses the point. The contemporary GOP has no figure that even remotely resembles St. Ronnie, whose personality was key to the revolution he ushered in.
• The usually reserved National Security Adviser, Jim Jones, has jumped into the "debate" between the Obama Administration and Dick Cheney over national security. Speaking at the Atlantic Council last night, Jones defended the administration, telling the assembled that "I think that the former vice president knows full well that perfection is an impossible standard" and that the United States can only do its best to "keep threats at bay and as far away from our shores as possible."
• I've long believed that most opponents of same-sex marriage are less interested in high principle than simply expressing their discomfort with the very idea of homosexuality. Today Jon Chait masterfully expands on this idea in a short piece that exposes the empty thinking behind gay marriage opposition: "The ubiquity of this hollow formulation tells us something about the state of anti-gay-marriage thought. It's a body of opinion held largely by people who either don't know why they oppose gay marriage or don't feel comfortable explicating their case."
• Remainders: The car-dealership punishment conspiracy theory dies a quick death; the president hauls in the cash down in Hollywood; is the new Ambassador to Japan a crony?; George Will can't even talk about baseball without getting it all wrong; new food regulations are in the works; and a shocking number of people "blame the Jews" for the financial crisis.

--Mori Dinauer

Doug Holtz-Eakin is apparently thinking of setting up a new right-wing think tank with the kind of strategic messaging capabilities that the Center for American Progress has provided liberals in the past few years. As a frequent think tank observer, I must weigh in! This idea seems counterproductive, since the right has already sunk a lot of resources into think tanks that are already pretty prominent, like Heritage or AEI. The real problem isn't just structure -- it would not be so hard to graft a smart messaging operation onto either institution -- but also content. What do I mean? Take a gander at the respective events pages of CAP, Heritage and AEI.

CAP's events are generally policy-focused and also forward-thinking: "Todd Stern on China and the Global Climate Challenge," a discussion with a White House official, "Web 2.0 and the Federal Government," "Building a National Strategy for Global Development." Heritage's events, on the other hand, are sort of kooky: "And These Storms: Lessons From Winston Churchill's Thoughts and Adventures," "Reagan's Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World From Nuclear Disaster," "A Conversation with Dr. Wang Dan: Student Leader, Tiananmen Square, 1989." AEI's events are much better (perhaps reflecting the center's new leadership): "Addressing Systemic Risk, with a Keynote Presentation by Alan Greenspan," "Election Demographics: What We Learned in 2008, What It Means for 2010 and 2012," "The Five (Not So) Easy Pieces of Health Reform."

So if I were Holtz-Eakin, I'd get in touch with with AEI and talk about getting serious about messaging, since they seem to be talking about relevant issues. And if I were conservative, I'd suggest Heritage wake up to what century it is.

-- Tim Fernholz

Photo courtesy Flickr user futureshape.

Rumors of a Rape Video -- or maybe a photograph of abuse, depending upon whom you talk to -- have existed for years: The image allegedly shows “a male translator raping a male detainee,” according to Duncan Gardham and Paul Cruickshank in a Daily Telepgraph piece headlined “Abu Ghraib abuse photos 'show rape.'” As Adam noted, President Obama says it is better not to release the photographs of detainee abuse, because doing so would make people angry and put U.S. troops in danger. The president sounds reasonable, and even many progressives believe that the pictures should be kept under wraps as a way of showing support for the troops and ensuring their safety. Keeping the photos private protects the victims, too. Not releasing the photographs is, in other words, a way to keep the peace. But what about justice?

The Abu Ghraib scandal exists solely because of the photographs: If no pictures had been taken (and then given to a military investigator and, eventually, to the media), there would have been only silence surrounding the horrific crimes that took place at the prison. Since the photos existed -- and appeared on 60 Minutes II and in the pages of The New Yorker and, eventually, on countless websites and television shows around the world -- military investigators were forced to examine what had happened at the prison and to write up a series of reports. The investigations focused a laser on the individuals pictured in the photographs, and some of these low-ranking soldiers were punished and put behind bars. The problem was that anything that took place beyond the frames of the photographs was seen as unimportant.

While reporting my book, Monstering, I heard about an interpreter who had worked at the prison and allegedly raped a 14-year-old boy, and that there was a video or a photograph of the crime that had been recorded by a female soldier. (It wasn’t Lynndie England -- I asked her about it.) Military investigators looked into the alleged crime against the boy – but half-heartedly -- and the investigation was eventually dropped. Since there was no photo or video that had been released to the public, it was not a priority.

So what happened to the alleged perpetrator? I spoke (briefly) with the interpreter who was accused of raping the boy as part of research for my book. After returning from Iraq, the interpreter had gotten a job at a LensCrafters in a shopping mall in suburban Maryland, and when I saw him, he was in good spirits, walking through the mall with a take-out pizza in a cardboard box. No word on the 14-year-old boy, who has been released from the prison. The military investigators who were looking into this alleged crime did not put much effort into finding him, at least based on the notes from the investigations that I saw. It was clear that this incident, however terrible, was not a priority for the investigators, apparently because no pictures of what had happened were released to the public. That is a travesty of justice: Government officials should black out the identities of the boy and of the other people who are depicted in the photographs so they are not humiliated once again by their abusers, and then release the images, and all of the horror that they depict, to the public. Maybe then there will be investigations -- serious ones this time -- and, if warranted, prosecutions.

–Tara McKelvey

Mark Krikorian has spent the last few days complaining about people who pronounce Sonia Sotomayor's name correctly, arguing that the correct pronunciation of proper nouns, calling such pronunciations "unnatural" because apparently ignorance is "natural." Needless to say this sort of throwaway comment goes a long way toward explaining why liberals and people of color perceive a knee-jerk hostility toward minorities, since the implicit assumption of such a statement is that despite being born an American citizen, there's something "un-American" about people with Spanish names.

Conor Friedersdorf explains in a thoughtful post why he disagrees with Krikorian:

So why do I find the comments quoted above so mistaken? For one thing, it doesn’t make any sense to talk about a women born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents as “a newcomer.” For another, it is common practice to defer to the pronunciations used by most anyone of European ancestry. Let’s imagine for the sake of argument, however, that Judge Sotomayor were an immigrant, and that Mark was asserting that even deferring to pronunciations used by European newcomers is wrongheaded. (There were, after all, a lot of European immigrants to changed their names as part of the assimilation process.) Nevertheless, I think the standard Mark sets for when newcomers ought to adapt is flawed.

There's a more basic problem here that has to do with simple respect. You try to say someone's name how they say their name, because that's their name. (You can waive that obligation, as Krikorian has with his own Armenian surname, but that's his choice.) To refuse to do so is just fundamentally disrespectful, especially as a form of ethnic protest against American citizens you regard as "newcomers" for the simple reason that they're not white. Conservatives regularly cloak white identity politics as "color blindness" and assert that they see people as "individuals," but by refusing to say Sonia Sotomayor's name correctly, Kirkorian is revealing that he sees her less as an individual person worth of basic respect than a cultural threat.

-- A. Serwer

As Tim noted below, Charlie Savage's piece in the Times this morning suggested more than it delivered on the alleged qualms in the reproductive rights community over Sonia Sotomayor's position on abortion. As he says, surely she should be questioned about her view of the law in this area, but I don't see -- yet -- evidence that the reproductive rights community is worried about her voting to overturn Roe.

I'd just add, though, that her two appellate decisions were not about other bodies of law, rather than about the constitutional right to privacy. Her decisions were purely procedural. In the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy's challenge to the global gag rule, she held that the group's First Amendment claim was controlled by a previous decision that had decided the identical issue. On the group's due process claim, she held that the group did not have standing to challenge the constitutionality of the rule. She did not, as E.J. Dionne wrote this morning, "up[hold] a ban on federal funds going to family planning groups that provided abortions overseas." Instead, she decided that the party challenging the ban did not have the legal standing to do so.

In the other case, anti-abortion protesters sued the town of West Hartford, alleging the police used excessive force against them. Sotomayor reversed the trial court's grant of summary judgment in favor of the town, holding (as is the legal standard) the facts of the case were sufficiently in dispute to require sending the case to a jury. As much as this has been portrayed as Sotomayor ruling "in favor" of the clinic protesters, it's hardly a reflection of her views regarding their conduct or activities.

One case that hasn't received any attention is the Second Circuit's blocking of a New York trial court's order holding a hospital in contempt of court for its refusal to turn over the medical records of women who obtained late-term abortions. The records were sought by the Bush administration as part of its defense of the constitutionality of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2004, and was seen as an intimidation tactic against women seeking the procedure. The Bush administration claimed it needed the records to support its claim that the procedure is never medically necessary, and the hospital objected based on its patients' privacy rights.

According to news reports, Sotomayor also questioned the necessity of the records, saying, "I just don't understand what the records will prove in this case.'' The Bush administration then withdrew its request for the records before the court issued a final decision.

--Sarah Posner

One thing learned from Denver earlier this week, where Vice President Joe Biden announced the beginning of the Green Jobs Era, is that there is still no strict definition of what a green job is. Regardless, there will be many of them. As Biden told the audience at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature on May 26:

Look, green jobs are good jobs. They pay ... 10 to 20% more, depending on the definition of a green job. And, with the Recovery Act, we're doing everything we can to make these jobs the foundation upon which our efforts to create 3.5 to 4 million jobs occurs. And that's a hard case to sell.

Sure is hard when you haven't quite narrowed down what it is you're selling. As read from the Middle Class Task Force Green Jobs report issued May 26: "We defined green jobs broadly as jobs that help to improve the environment in some way."

Well, mountaintop coal miners believe they're helping the environment in some way, but they shouldn't be considered in this. Biden called yesterday for the White House Council of Environmental Quality to report back to him in 90 days with suggestions on how green opportunities should be determined. Green economy opportunities should be expanded so that they benefit both middle-class and low-income families. But to do that, there has to be a clearer idea of what qualifies as a green job so that the right people benefit.

White House green jobs adviser Van Jones -- whom Biden referred to as his "evangelist" -- was on deck in Denver, but he's eluded questions about how the federal government will define an environmentally safe workforce also. An interesting collaboration between the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Labor seems to be on course, though, in providing an exact green jobs program. The new collaboration, as yet unnamed, is using some of the $500 million in green jobs funds from ARRA to create grants and loans for greening public housing projects.

Funding for rebuilding public housing that employs low-income residents in the process would go along way in, for example, New Orleans where housing projects could use re-fortifying and people there could use jobs. One proposed funding stream from the collaborative is the Pathway Out of Poverty grant program that would help those who've long suffered before the recession to gain sustainable green employment. HUD and DOL are asking workforce investment boards and public housing agencies to begin strategizing immediately for funding that could become available as soon as next month.

Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has actual experience in legislating and implementing green jobs programs. Ditto for Shaun Donovan particularly as pertains to greening public housing. It makes sense that these two should be the evangelists to define America's green jobs future.

-- Brentin Mock

The inimitable Charlie Savage takes a look at concerns on the left that Sonia Sotomayor might not be relied on to protect a woman's legal right to choose an abortion if another challenge to Roe makes it to the Supreme Court. But it's not clear that we can draw any conclusions about her views from the few cases she has heard relating to abortion rights.

The decisions she was involved in seem to rely on other bodies of law rather than the privacy doctrine that is the legal foundation of a woman's right to choose. One decision that allowed the Bush administration to deny funding to pro-choice groups seems to turn more on the limits of policy-making rather than on the legality of abortion (and also seems to permit an administration to also spend funds on pro-choice groups if it so chooses). Another seems to turn more on the right of people to protest and the limits of police force. The final cases, on immigrants claiming political asylum to avoid forced abortions in China, shouldn't be construed as anti-choice at all; if anything, they reinforce the idea that a woman should be able to make her own decisions about reproduction without interference from the state.

Admittedly, the above analysis is merely proof that she doesn't have much of a record on the issues critical to reproductive rights -- uncertainty isn't a conclusion, either. While pro-choice groups are smart to be badgering senators to ask Sotomayor about her views on Roe v. Wade and related cases, I can't begin to imagine she'll say anything more direct than that she respects precedent -- which might be good enough.

-- Tim Fernholz

How do you solve a problem like Korea? Frankly, Matthew Yglesias is stumped. But he does have some ideas as to how North Korea's bellicosity could be managed.

Meanwhile, Brentin Mock asks if Lisa Jackson, the new head of the EPA, can fight for both business and environmental justice.

And Robert Reich calls John McCain's approach to health benefits the failed candidate's best idea.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

Former Bush spin-meister Mark McKinnon, on the GOP:

The Republican party right now is clawing its way to the bottom. They’ve got 23 percent of the American electorate supporting them. They’re seen as a sort of bitter, partisan party right now: anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic. I just think that this sends a lot of the wrong signals to independents and soft Republican voters out there who are leaving the party in droves. … I say it as a proud Republican, and as a progressive and moderate Republican, but I would just hope that there’s room for us still. There are a lot of voices in the party that seem to be crowding and shouting us out and shouting us down all the time.

Via: The Texas Monthly.

--Dana Goldstein

Our own Bob Reich recently chatted with Brown University's Glenn Loury about the politics of the financial crisis, the dying gasps of the GOP, and the vulnerabilities of cap and trade. In this clip, the two talk about why Democrats are allowing Wall Street to push them around.

Watch the whole thing here.

--The Editors

As California has spent the last six months or so struggling with imminent financial collapse, I've considered how the state's structural governing challenges, mostly embodied in Proposition 13, led to its problems, but was looking for a better analysis. Luckily, the Prospect's own Harold Meyerson deploys his WaPo real estate and California expertise in a nice column on the subject.

Amid the inflation of the late 1970s, however, the California model began to crumple. As incomes and property values rose, Sacramento's tax revenue soared -- but the parsimonious Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, neither spent those funds nor rebated them. With the state sitting on a $5 billion surplus, frustrated Californians grumped to the polls and passed Proposition 13, which rolled back and then froze property taxes -- effectively destroying the funding base of local governments and school districts, which thereafter depended largely on Sacramento for their revenue. Ranked fifth among the states in per-pupil spending during the 1950s and '60s, California sank to Mississippi-like levels -- the mid-40s -- by the 1990s.

...But the problem with Proposition 13 wasn't merely that it reduced revenue. It also made it very difficult to increase revenue. Raising taxes now requires a two-thirds vote of the legislature, though in 47 other states a simple majority suffices. California has become overwhelmingly Democratic in the past two decades, but Republicans have managed to retain footholds -- representing just over one-third of the districts -- in both houses of the legislature.

... Because California is so much larger than any other state, and its unemployment rate among the nation's highest, the collapse of its capacity to spend will counteract some of the effect of the federal stimulus and retard the nation's recovery -- much as its aerospace slump retarded the recovery of the mid-1990s. The Obama administration ignores California's plight at its own -- and the nation's -- peril. The nation's banks are stuck with so much bad paper from California mortgages gone awry that a huge contraction in state spending would make their assets even more toxic. In the short term, the only way to avoid a further downturn may be a federal loan to the state.

Now that's an unpleasant proposition. Meyerson also notes that former E-Bay Executive and John McCain surrogate Meg Whitman is running for governor on a platform of cutting business taxes in the state that faces a $21 billion deficit and extremely low tax burdens on the wealthy, which is just disappointing. But, there's one upside to the potential of giving a federal loan to the state: It could be contingent on Californians repealing Proposition 13 and coming up with some kind of sane way to manage their finances in the future. If there's anything we've learned about giving loans to institutions that are too big to fail, it's that they should come with requirements for sustainability.* And no bonuses for executives.

-- Tim Fernholz

*The other thing we've learned, of course, is that nothing should be too big to fail, but unfortunately I'm not sure there's a way to shrink the California sector.

Matthew Vadum of the American Spectator calls me a "useful idiot" for not believing that ACORN caused the mortgage crisis, radicalized the president of the United States, and conspired to steal the election from John McCain and Sarah Palin. These were the "allegations" I was referring to when I wrote this piece last fall, in which I had the gall to speak to both the people filing charges against ACORN and the folks who work inside the organization. As I noted quite clearly at the time, "ACORN is in many ways a troubled organization," going on to list their various problems--but conservative bloggers like Vadum aren't content to confine their criticisms to ACORN's actual issues with taxes, embezzlement, and voter registration fraud. These problems aren't as sexy or sensational as a secret plot to subvert American democracy. So folks like Vadum simply make things up in order to prove ACORN is part of some vast conspiracy to do evil--Vadum himself previously mused on one occasion whether ACORN should be labeled a "terrorist" organization.

At any rate, Vadum argues that ACORN's "allies" such as myself are "scheming to distract from corruption allegations." That hardly seems accurate, given the reporting and blogging I've done on allegations against ACORN. It's true that unlike Vadum, I've actually made efforts to determine whether certain allegations against ACORN were based in fact, such as when the entire right wing blogosphere decided that ACORN was "infiltrating" tea party protests based on a post in a web forum from a bot selling pepper spray (the post has since been removed). The problem may be that Vadum can't tell the difference between an allegation and conviction, much the same way that he can't tell the difference between voter fraud and registration fraud. Not having concluded that ACORN is guilty of the charges filed simply because charges have been filed makes me an "ally."

That post may explain Vadum's hostility toward me personally. Following the nomination of David Hamilton to the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Vadum described ACORN in part as a "radical direct-action group" that "resurrects the dead and gets them to the polls every election." At the time, I challenged Vadum to name a single instance of ACORN having registered someone through a dead person's name who then successfully cast a ballot. At the time, he kept quiet, because he didn't have any evidence whatsoever to support his assertion. That may have been a wise decision.

-- A. Serwer

Retired Major General Anthony Taguba, the author of a report on prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib, told The Telegraph that the photos of detainee abuse that the Obama administration recently went back on releasing contain "torture, abuse, rape and every indecency." Taguba added that he agreed with President Obama's decision not to release the photos, because the consequence "would be to imperil our troops."

In a televised speech on national security last week, the president defended his reversal on the decision to release the photos, saying that "releasing these photos would inflame anti-American opinion and allow our enemies to paint U.S. troops with a broad, damning, and inaccurate brush, thereby endangering them in theaters of war."

-- A. Serwer

• The candid bigotry coming from all corners of the right wing in the mere day since Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court is just astonishing. Tom Tancredo and Newt Gingrich both believe Sotomayor is "racist," although one wonders why anyone would care what these two former lawmakers think about anything. Meanwhile, you've got the Judiciary Committee's ranking member fretting about the "threat" to the Court's "heritage" and Michael Goldfarb's racist musings on the high court's first affirmative action hire. [Ed. note: Previously, quotation marks were mistakenly placed around the phrase "affirmative action hire."] Fortunately, one conservative blogger sees an "opportunity for Republicans to reestablish their identity" and veteran movement conservatives are cuing the training montage music as the nomination reunites the movement. Helpfully, Brian Beutler reviews the figures who have the most to gain from the Sotomayor brouhaha.
• Former McCain campaign adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin wants to build a "Center for American Progress for the right" because the GOP needs more diversity of ideas. Well, no argument here. But the CAP comparison is inaccurate, considering that conservatives already have plenty of think tanks. Kevin Drum takes this a step further, clarifying that what Holtz-Eakin really meant was that the right needs a "conservative DLC."
• Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) has a short and amateurish video out for the Republican Study Committee that argues Barack Obama is dividing the country because he won't stand with "a group of investment firms and hedge funds" who received federal bailout funds. Price then solemnly tells us that he finds it disturbing that the president would side with taxpayers instead of incompetent rich people. It's always helpful when the GOP explicitly tells us who they're looking out for.
• I'm glad Harry Reid has recognized the folly of adopting the right wing's "terrorists as supervillians" storyline, conceding that some Guantanamo detainees will need to be incarcerated in stateside supermax prisons. Max Baucus, meanwhile, has decided that it's far more accurate to portray terrorists as the brains-hungry zombies among us.
• I realize that replacing a moderate member of the Supreme Court with another moderate is a very big deal, requiring the political world's undivided attention, but it would be nice if a few spare cycles could be devoted to North Korea's increased bellicosity. Fortunately we have noted conservative intellectual Jonah Goldberg to  tell us that Barack Obama would probably be unwilling to retaliate in the event of Pyongyang nuking Seoul or Los Angeles.
• Remainders: Joe Sestak throws his hat in the ring; Nate Silver doesn't see a gay marriage divide between Hispanics and whites; free market paradises get a promotional video; and The New York Times is wasting money on mustachioed columnists.

--Mori Dinauer

Another day, another study [PDF] showing that union intimidation is non-existent under majority sign-up, also known as card check. The study is a collaboration between researchers at the University of Illinois, Rutgers (New Jersey), Cornell (New York) and the University of Oregon, who compared their respective states' union organizing laws. All four states rely on majority sign-up, which would become the national standard if the Employee Free Choice Act is passed in its current form:

In brief, from 2003-2009 in the states studied, a total of 34,148 public sector workers employed in state, county, municipal and educational institutions voluntarily joined a union. Most importantly, contrary to business claims, in 1,073 cases of union certification and in at least 1,359 majority-authorization campaigns, there was not a single confirmed incident of union misconduct.

I'm sure that folks on the employer side will characterize this study as an example pro-union bias. But will they attack the study itself -- do they have any reason to believe that the facts are wrong here? When the last study came out on the topic, focusing specifically on Illinois state practices and finding no evidence of intimidation, there was a lot of criticism of the study's author and very little of the research. In any case, it doesn't seem like majority sign-up will become a national law, since the current EFCA compromises under discussion in the senate generally include an accelerated election and a mail-in ballot instead of card check, which was consistently attacked by conservatives. These studies, at least, makes clear that the attacks on card check have very little to do with concerns about workers being intimidated and everything to do with concerns about workers being able to exercise their right to organize.

As long as I've got you here, thinking about unions, here's a chart that shows how long it takes unions who secure bargaining rights to get their first contract, from EPI:

That's why first-contract arbitration is an important part of the Employee Free Choice Act, too: it ensures that employers bargain in good faith instead of using contract negotiations as a second chance to stop the union. That way, both labor and management can secure some kind of fair agreement and return to the important business of, well, work.

-- Tim Fernholz

Rush Limbaugh explains how the Republican Party "needs a civil rights movement."

If ever a civil rights movement was needed in America, it is for the Republican Party. If ever we needed to start marching for freedom and Constitutional rights, it's for the Republican Party. The Republican Party is today's oppressed minority. It knows how to behave as one. It shuts up. It doesn't cross bridges, it doesn't run into the Bull Connors of the Democrat Party. It is afraid of the firehouses and the dogs, it's compliant. The Republican Party today has become totally complacent. They are an oppressed minority, they know their position, they know their place. They go to the back of the bus, they don't use the right restroom and the right drinking fountain, and they shut up. I don't think this way, I don't think of myself as an oppressed minority. Or as a member of an oppressed minority. And I hope I never do think of myself as one.

Aside from the insanity of this argument, I'm amused by the notion that segregation was a figurative "mentality" possessed by black folks prior to 1965, rather than you know, a system of laws. Also, despite the fact that Republicans of today are the most oppressed minority ever, the only way Limbaugh can think of to describe their plight is through metaphorical comparisons to an earlier, more privileged group of people who were facing actual dogs and firehoses. In any case, what Limbaugh sees as oppression is known to normal people as "losing an election," something most people are able to cope with without ridiculous historical analogies. This one is right up there with comparing the estate tax to the Holocaust.

For an explanation of "peak wingnut" look here.

-- A. Serwer

It's been one hundred days since the stimulus bill was signed, and the Administration is commemorating the event with announcements about the bill's beneficial effects; they're highlighting 100 specific projects. On the other hand, I see via Andrew Sullivan that Daniel Indiviglio makes a bunch of silly arguments about the legislation.

He starts off making the case that consumer confidence numbers are a result of the stimulus package -- which somehow invalidates them -- but there's no real connection to be found between the stimulus and consumer confidence at this particular point in time. The main tax breaks in that package with immediate effect on consumers have been in effect since April as lessened paycheck deductions. Most of the major infrastructure funding is still going out the door and wouldn't account for broad changes in consumer confidence. Similarly, federal funding for unemployment benefits and other forms of aid to states is still being distributed, and most folks who are on unemployment, though no doubt happy to see their benefits extended, are not typically confident consumers. In fact, in the fact of rising unemployment, the raise in consumer confidence probably has more to with psychological factors rather than economic "green shoots." Oh, and incidentally, economists believe that Bush's spring 2008i stimulus package -- the one Indiviglio cheerfully disdains -- was likely responsible for most of the GDP growth in the 3d quarter of 2008.

My favorite observation of Indiviglio's is that we will have to pay for all this spending eventually. Obviously! Even before the recession, we would have needed to increase taxes to pay for the deficits of the Bush administration. Will the relatively small upper-income bracket tax hikes scheduled for 2011 have a huge negative affect on growth? I doubt it. They certainly didn't hinder growth in the nineties. Will major tax reform that could come in the latter half of the president's first term at the earliest have a huge negative effect on growth? I doubt that as well. But will the stimulus help ease our way through this recession, keeping people at work and minimizing productivity loss? Absolutely. The real question is whether we spent enough to do so.

Indiviglio portrays himself as the only realist who understands that the economy won't be zooming to new heights anytime soon -- perhaps he's getting his news from CNBC? His favorite economic indicator seems to be the DOW -- but most serious observers (and the folks in the administration) realize that growth is going to be slow to come in the next few years; policymakers from Tim Geithner to Ben Bernanke have made clear they understand the dangers of correcting policy too quickly at the end of a recession. A useful analysis demands an understanding of the trade-offs between counter-cyclical spending now and debt later. Since Indiviglio apparently doesn't believe in fiscal modifiers or the stimulus itself, and seems to imply that the government's intervention were in fact counter-productive, I'm curious what his alternative economic strategy would be.

-- Tim Fernholz

David Kurtz catches this article in The Hill that cites Curt Levey suggesting that Sonia Sotomayor's love of Puerto Rican food may be part of what conservatives will allege is racial bias.

Sotomayor also claimed: “For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir — rice, beans and pork — that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events.”

This has prompted some Republicans to muse privately about whether Sotomayor is suggesting that distinctive Puerto Rican cuisine such as patitas de cerdo con garbanzo — pigs’ tongue and ears — would somehow, in some small way influence her verdicts from the bench.

Curt Levey, the executive director of the Committee for Justice, a conservative-leaning advocacy group, said he wasn’t certain whether Sotomayor had claimed her palate would color her view of legal facts but he said that President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee clearly touts her subjective approach to the law.

“It’s pretty disturbing,” said Levey. “It’s one thing to say that occasionally a judge will despite his or her best efforts to be impartial ... allow occasional biases to cloud impartiality.

I'm leaning towards Kurtz' conclusion, this has to be a joke. Pigs' feet and chick peas = activist judge? The shark is not visible from this altitude. 

-- A. Serwer

Rather than giving up his transparently silly comparison of Harriet Miers and Sonia Sotomayor, Ramesh Ponnuru decides to dig a bigger hole. Although he concedes so much ground that I'm not sure why he's bothering. (I concede the point: if you leave aside the many crucial ways in which the analogy is howlingly inapposite, it holds up much better!) Jason Zengerle neatly demolishes Ponnuru's attempt to compare Sotomayor's credentials with those of George Bush (call me crazy, but it's not clear that getting gentleman's Cs as a legacy admission to a non-meritocratic Yale is the precise equivalent of making law review at the country's best law school). Yglesias, meanwhile, notes that Sotomayor's credentials are rather more similar to those of Samuel Alito than to Miers. Ponnuru concludes by saying that Senate Republicans should feel free to disagree with even a highly credentialed nominee if they disagree on the merits, which is perfectly fair (if a rather different standard than most of his colleagues applied to Alito), but does less than nothing to justify the Miers analogy.

But to make a similar point to the one Adam makes in his terrific article, it's also worth addressing Ponnuru's assertion that Sotomayor is like Miers because "both nominees were picked because they were women, because they were members of politically valued groups (evangelicals in Miers's case, Hispanics in Sotomayor's), and because they were considered politically reliable by the people who picked them." If we take out the (unsubstantiated, implausible, and indeed offensive) assertion that Obama doesn't respect Sotomayor's intellect, why bring up Miers rather than much more relevant analogies? This description certainly applies to Saint Reagan's picks of not only O'Connor but Scalia, who was tapped over Bork in part because he was Italian-American. It also applies much more to Clarence Thomas -- who was obviously picked because even a Republican president didn't want a lily-white court, and replacing Thurgood Marshall with a white reactionary would hurt he GOP among moderates -- than to David Souter (whose pick appealed to no obvious Republican constituency).

Does Ponnuru think it's fair to analogize Scalia and Thomas to Miers? Does Ponnuru think that Souter was a better pick than Thomas? Or, preferably, can we just stop pretending to be shocked that politics plays a role in Supreme Court nominations no matter what party controls the White House?

--Scott Lemieux

On Hardball yesterday, Pat Buchanan argued that Sonia Sotomayor "says her sex -- her gender, excuse me -- and her ethnicity are going to influence her decision. She will decide differently from a white male." Likewise Stuart Taylor has asked "do we want a new justice who comes close to stereotyping white males as (on average) inferior beings? And who seems to speak with more passion about her ethnicity and gender than about the ideal of impartiality?"

I've already responded to some of Taylor's assertions, so I won't do that here. I merely want to point out this passage from Samuel Alito's confirmation, highlighted by Glenn Greenwald:

Because when a case comes before me involving, let's say, someone who is an immigrant -- and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases -- I can't help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn't that long ago when they were in that position.

[...]

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.

This is Samuel Alito, arguing that his experience of being the son of Italian immigrants, his knowledge of discrimination, gives him empathy that offers insight into such cases. How is this qualitatively different from Sotomayor saying that her knowledge of such things might maker her a better judge? It isn't--in fact, Alito is arguing the same thing, that his life experience gives him insight into the way laws affect people in real life, the exact quality Obama said he was looking for in a nominee. Like Sotomayor, Alito was merely commenting on the way life experience shapes one's vision of the law.

The conservative freakout over Sotomayor's remarks, as opposed to the way Alito's were marketed as a selling point for him as a judge, makes a remarkably salient case for why we still need affirmative action. Two judges made similar points--one was an Italian American man, the other was a Latino woman, both accomplished on the bench--but what was sold as a strength for Alito makes Sotomayor a racist. Taylor and Buchanan, while attacking Sotomayor, have inadvertently made the case for a policy they'd like to see eliminated, by proving that all things being equal, a minority woman is held to a different standard than the white man of similar background and experience.

-- A. Serwer

James Kwak had a smart post yesterday explaining why financial "innovation" isn't really innovation at all and rounding up the the usual suspects' views on the same topic. The gist is that most kinds of innovation produce benefits for consumers as well as innovators, while financial innovations -- like the mortgage-backed securities first developed by Lewis Ranieri over here -- tend to disproportionately benefit innovators over consumers:

Microsoft and Intel together probably created a handful of billionaires and a few thousand multi-millionaires out of their employees; but for at least the last ten years, no one going there has gotten anything more than a decent salary and a good resume credential. As computers get smaller, cheaper, and faster, the benefits flow overwhelmingly to their customers – to us. And those are near-monopolies. The general pattern in the technology industry is that a few entrepreneurs make a lot of money, and the vast majority of people make a decent salary; even the highly-educated, highly-trained, hard-working software developers, most of whom could have been “financial” engineers, are making less than a banker one year out of business school.

That’s the way innovation is supposed to work. You invent something great, you make a lot of money, then your competitors copy you, prices go down, and the long-term benefits go to the customers. And you and your competitors all get more efficient, meaning that you can do the same amount of stuff at a lower cost than before. If you want to make another killing, you have to invent something new, or at least invent a better way of doing something you already do.

By contrast, the historical pattern of the financial sector – rising revenues, rising profits, and rising average individual compensation – is what you get if there is increasing demand for your services and, instead of competing to lower costs and prices, you limit supply. Sure, prices fell on some financial products, but financial institutions encouraged substitution away from them into new, more expensive products, with the net effect of increasing profitability (and compensation).

Understanding this phenomenon is important because it's key to understanding how large a financial sector we need. It should be smaller, but finding the right balance between large enough to perform capital movement functions and small enough not to become a bubble-encouraging, economy-endangering waste of productivity.

-- Tim Fernholz

Over the weekend, Ruth Marcus made what I think is a pretty important point that I hadn't really considered. Responding to Jack Goldsmith's article in The New Republic asserting that Obama's national security policies are identical to Bush's, Marcus writes:

This is true only if you define "the Bush program" as what the courts and, to a shamefully lesser extent, Congress, had forced Bush to do by the end of his administration. Even similar-looking positions contain important differences whose significance Goldsmith minimizes. Obama suspended and then revived the military tribunals that Bush put in place -- but with improvements on excluding information obtained by coercion, limiting the use of hearsay and expanding access to lawyers.

Obama's military commissions policy also got a fairly low-key but significant endorsement from one of the most fervent critics of the original military commissions, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, the prosecutor who resigned from the Mohamed Jawad case because he didn't believe the military commissions under Bush were capable of dispensing justice.

[T]he Bush-Cheney administration left President Obama with a limited number of alternatives, all of them bad, and he has made rational decisions, devoid of hysteria or false emotion. The worst aspects of the commissions appear to be on their way to correction. It is impossible to criticize or condemn the president for acting decisively and quickly to restore America's role -- always an aspiration, imperfectly realized -- as an exemplar of transparency and fairness. As someone who has risked his life on the battlefield in Iraq, I can only express support for the commander in chief as he undertakes these enormously complex -- and costly -- decisions.

Vandeveld was a prosecutor in the military commissions--and he was also one of their harshest critics. His perspective on this should be taken seriously. At the same time, I have yet to hear a compelling argument for why or how Bush's mistakes have "forced" Obama to use military commissions, just that his decision to do so was prudent.

-- A. Serwer

Antonin Scalia is not a robot. Really! Even conservative Supreme Court justices experience empathy, says Adam Serwer. Just for the religious, the unborn, and powerful corporate interests, natch.

Meanwhile, Sarah Posner analyzes the religious right's takes on Sonia Sotomayor and Proposition 8.

And nobody rouses the Republican rabble quite like Newt Gingrich. Paul Waldman considers the political role of the inescapable and irascible GOP spokesman.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

Short answer: No. But with the United Kingdom being warned by Standard and Poors that the quality of their debt may be downgraded -- meaning their growing debt may increase the worry of default and the risk of lending to the country -- some folks are using the opportunity to get anxious about increasing U.S. debt. The basis of this argument, and most similar ones, is looking only at the 2019 deficit and debt projections, as though there will be no policy changes between then and now.

But those projections are extremely uncertain (see this graph) and don't take into account any of the various events that could occur in the next decade, including the potential for both tax reform and tax increases. As the financial system recovers, we can expect that some of the major deficit-increasing expenditures on financial bailouts to return to the Treasury. And, as the president has made clear, as this current crisis passes he expects to take further steps to move closer to a balanced budget. Looking at this graph of deficits and surpluses, it's important to realize that the deficit is dropping in response to policy decisions, and the president and congress will have a chance to move more towards a balanced budget each year.

The most important thing to remember is that debt has a purpose. It's purpose is to help pull us out of our current recession. The debt we have now is not the frivolous debt of George W. Bush's tax cuts, largesse lavished on the wealthy at the expense of our fiscal health. The current spending is entirely designed to help the country weather this storm. And even then, as Jon Chait notes, Obama's budget still projects a lower average deficit over the next decade than if Bush administration policies had been continued. Given that, and the fact that our economic security is bolstered by the extraordinary stability of our political and, yes, military institutions, we need not worry that debt will be the undoing of our economy. The real scary challenges, in my view, are figuring out how to reform the financial sector, how to solve our energy problems and, perhaps most difficult in a political sense because it is something that is out of politicians' hands, figuring out what sector will drive economic growth in the coming decades.

See Also: Noam Scheiber also tells you to relax.

-- Tim Fernholz

The attacks on Sonia Sotomayor for being a "racialist" are laughable, but no more so than when they come from Stuart Taylor. Taylor, like others has taken this statement from Sotomayor completely out of context: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Taylor writes:

Imagine the reaction if someone had unearthed in 2005 a speech in which then-Judge Samuel Alito had asserted, for example: "I would hope that a white male with the richness of his traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn't lived that life" -- and had proceeded to speak of "inherent physiological or cultural differences."

First of all, Sotomayor did not speak of "physiological" differences, she was talking about life experience, and the idea that someone with the experience of being discriminated against might offer insight that those who haven't had that experience wouldn't have. Taylor's objection is based on two social assumptions that need to be utterly destroyed, the first being the idea that social perspective of white, Christian, heterosexual males are somehow "objective" and uncolored by life experience, and the second being the idea that acknowledging cultural specificity among non-whites is the same thing as assertions of white supremacy by whites. The fact is that many Latinos have faced a specific experience of systemic and social discrimination not shared by non-Latinos, and this experience colors their perspective just as not having it does. If there's anything problematic about Sotomayor's statement, it's that it is as nonspecific about "whiteness" as Taylor's is.

What people like Taylor find so offensive about Sotomayor's statement is that it properly exposes the perspective of white, Christian heterosexual men as specific to their experience, rather than the omniscient eye of G-d they're used to presenting it as. Does anyone seriously believe Dred Scott or Plessy v. Fergueson would have been upheld by any court that had the remotest idea of what it was like to be black or a slave? Or similarly that the court would have held in Minor v. Happersett that being a citizen didn't mean you had a right to vote if you were a woman? Do we really believe that judges in these cases were "simply upholding the law" in the absence of the cultural and social prejudices of their times?

The hypothetical example Taylor cites above is also not remotely equivalent, had Alito said referred to his small town values, religious background, or being the son of Italian immigrants, conservatives would have applauded him. In fact, that's exactly what happened--Sotomayor's story is bigger news because she would be the first Latino on the court, but conservatives played up Alito's modest small town and Italian roots, to the point where Senator Orrin Hatch suggested in 2005 (via Nexis) that Democrats could lose the Italian American vote by opposing him. "I think Democrats have to be very careful here because many Democrats think they own the Italian-American vote all up and down the East Coast," Hatch said. "Well, they don't, but they think they do. But if they become offensive against somebody with the qualifications of Sam Alito, Judge Alito, then I think it's going to be held against them." The key here is the imbuing of culturally nonspecific "whiteness" with inherently positive traits, because "whiteness" is a fiction contrived to assert racial superiority. White people are as ethnic and culturally specific as non-white people, and there is a qualitative difference between asserting a specific cultural heritage and experience and lauding the inherent values granted by skin color. 

Moreover, Taylor, who believes the greatest injustice in Western history was Sotomayor's failure to ignore established precedent in the Ricci case and act as an empathetic, activist judge on behalf of a plaintiff he finds sympathetic, has been a fervent supporter of racial profiling. Sotomayor's statement about life experience affecting the way judges rule is a plainly innocuous statement, and contains none of the malice Taylor attributes to it. But I'd be interested to understand how Taylor explain how the law should be color-blind in situations when he feels whites might be disadvantaged, but not when it comes to assuming people are criminals or terrorists based on the color of their skin. That sounds pretty "racialist" to me.

UPDATE: Commenters point out that Sotomayor did use the phrase "inherent physiological or cultural differences" in her speech. I should have been clear in the original post, but it appears to me that Sotomayor was using "physiological" to refer to gender, rather than race. I don't agree with this, but it also seems worth pointing out that she also said "While recognizing the potential effect of individual experiences on perception, Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law."

UPDATE II: On second thought, this is a much stronger quote:

I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations.

Last week, an interview at a Brazilian defense website revealed that China and Brazil had come to an agreement regarding the training of Chinese naval personnel on board the Sao Paulo, Brazil's only aircraft carrier. Brazil is one of the only four countries in the world to possess an aircraft carrier capable of launching and recovering conventional aircraft; the others are France, Russia, and the United States. The United States has little interest in training Chinese pilots and crew, France is prohibited from doing so under EU law, and Russia is currently engulfed in an intellectual property-related spat over Chinese fighter aircraft.

China currently has no operational aircraft carriers, but is widely believed to be planning a fleet. This left Brazil as China's only option for a preview of big deck carrier operations. These operations are quite complicated, and take a long time to master. Cooperation with Brazil, both in terms of generating familiarity with the carrier and in terms of accessing the expertise of Brazilian military officers, could provide China a shortcut through years of expensive and dangerous training.

It's evident what the Chinese get out of this deal, but what brings the Brazilians on board? Mr. Trend has some thoughts:

The agreement is mutually beneficial for both China and Brazil; China gets training, and Brazil strengthens its reputation and power as a global force. The agreement on the carrier training was apparently part of the private meetings between China and Brazil during Lula's trip to Beijing last week, itself a noteworthy event as China and Brazil strengthened their trade relations in what they hope is a mutually beneficial agreement that would reduce both countries' dependency on the U.S. economy (and also agreed to jointly send 3 satellites into space by 2013). China will send military leaders to Brazil to train, and Defense Minister Nelson Jobim will be going to China in September, presumably when the details of the arrangement will be worked out.

Although Brazil has little it is materially gaining directly from China in this agreement, I think it could be the biggest "winner" here. That a country as powerful as China is turning to Brazil (and only partly out of necessity) is a real coup in Brazil's efforts to demonstrate its equality with the other major world powers.

--Robert Farley

Both Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan have attacked Sonia Sotomayor as an "affirmative action hire." The suggestion here is that Sotomayor is somehow academically or intellectually undistinguished. But let's assume for a minute here that Sotomayor was accepted to Princeton partially on the basis of her race--she then proceeded to distinguish herself by graduating summa cum laude and earning the Pyne Prize, which is the highest undergraduate award Princeton can bestow. AA might get you into college, but there's no AA point system that helps minorities get to the top of their class. In other words, if Sotomayor benefited from affirmative action, then she's nothing other than an example of affirmative action working the way it's supposed to, precisely because whatever boost she had gaining access to these institutions, she then proceeded to distinguish herself as an exceptional student by any standard. (Dana makes a similar argument here.)

There's also a conservative catch-22 here -- conservatives argue that AA "stigmatizes" minorities by suggesting they haven't earned their accomplishments, but any time a person of color is in the running for a prominent position they proceed to stigmatize them as furiously as possible. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, I'm curious. I wonder, for Limbaugh and Buchanan how many Ivy League degrees does a person of color have to have before they're as good as a white person, and no longer reducible to an "affirmative action hire"? Clearly it's more than two, since Sotomayor and the president each have two and they've faced similar criticisms. Is it three? Four? How exactly do we score academic prizes and such? Do they count?

One of the clear effects of the Sotomayor nomination is that we're going to be talking -- a lot -- about affirmative action, for the first time in awhile. Of course, there is the rehearsed sense of outrage, from conservatives, that this Hispanic woman was nominated at all. So many qualified white men were available for the job! But is there any evidence that Judge Sotomayor's actual legal opinions on matters of race and gender vary from those of the white dude she would replace on the Court, David Souter? In short, no -- at least not yet.

The Court will soon release its decisions in two cases with gender and race implications: Safford Unified School District v. Redding, which considers the legality of a strip-search of a 13-year old girl, and Ricci v. DeStefano, which deals with the city of New Haven's decision to cancel the results of a firefighters' exam after no black applicant scored high enough to qualify for a promotion. Both of these cases Ricci comes to the Supreme Court from Judge Sotomayor's Second Circuit Court, where she sided with the liberal majority, upholding New Haven's right to cancel the firefighter test results. And in a case similar to Redding, Sotomayor questioned the legality of strip-searches. Unless Souter votes in one or both of these cases to overturn Sotomayor's decision, it seems to me there is little meat to Republican claims that Sotomayor will significantly move the Court to the left in terms of identity politics.

So what are Souter's likely opinions on these cases? When it comes to race, in 2003 he voted with the majority to uphold elements of the University of Michigan's affirmative action program in admissions. In 2007 Souter sided with the minority that wanted to allow municipalities to consider race in assigning students to public schools, in order to foster integration. And during the Ricci hearings, Souter was clearly sympathetic toward New Haven's position, not that of the disgruntled firefighters. From the bench, he said "the most reasonable reading" of the conflict between the test results and New Haven's civil rights obligations was to "[give] the city an opportunity, assuming good faith, to start again" and design a new test. In short, David Souter is a white man who doesn't pretend to live in a color-blind world. He has never shown the tendency of, say, swing vote Justice Anthony Kennedy, to pretend racial discrimination does not exist, or that it has no significant public policy ramifications.

In the Redding strip-search case, Souter's decision is less of a forgone conclusion, since he suggested during arguments that if the drug the school had been searching for had been stronger than ibuprofen, he might be sympathetic to the idea that a humiliating strip-search was necessary. "The ... reasonable analysis in the principal's mind is, 'Better embarrassment than violent sickness or death,'" Souter mused from the bench.

Yet as Adam has eloquently written, it is really the Ricci case, more than any other, that is animating Washington Republicans at the moment. Unless Souter surprises us and votes to overturn the Second Circuit's Ricci ruling, I simply don't see an anti-affirmative action campaign against Sotomayor gaining much traction.

--Dana Goldstein

this post has been updated

Put on your seat belts. Many Republicans have been itching for this fight. They figure if they can make Sonia Sotomayor appear "too liberal," "too activist," or "intemperate" -- and cause Obama to withdraw her nomination, or if they can defeat her outright -- they can slow the Obamomentum that's leading to universal health care, cap-and-trade, more spending on education, and higher taxes on the rich. This would also give them a crack at winning back a number of seats next November, which they know they can't win if their major issues are torture and taxes, and if their major spokesmen are Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh.

But if they choose to vilify Sotomayor, Republicans take a huge gamble. They could lose even more women and Hispanic voters in 2010 and beyond. And they could alienate even more Independents already turned off by the Republican "just-say-no" approach to almost everything.

Besides, it will be hard for Republicans to pigeonhole Sotomayor. Although as an appellate judge she has sided with defendants, inmates, convicted felons, and environmentalists, she has also taken decidedly conservative stances. In 2002, she ruled against an abortion rights group that claimed the so-called "Mexico City Policy," prohibiting U.S. funding for foreign groups performing or supporting abortion services, violated their First Amendment rights. She reasoned that the government is "free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position." In a 2004 case, she ruled in favor of anti-abortion protesters who claimed a city had improperly trained police officers who allegedly used excessive force on them. And she has ruled against a number of minority plaintiffs in discrimination cases.

And she has an impeccable upward-through-education-and-hard-work pedigree: She grew up in public housing in the Bronx, the daughter of a factory worker, and got a law degree from Yale.

Still, never underestimate the Republicans' capacity for taking big political risks that turn out badly. Remember Sarah Palin? Republicans may figure that they're so badly decimated already, so marginalized and irrelevant, there's little to lose and possibly much to gain by going negative on Sotomayor and unleashing their terror-TV and rant-radio attack dogs. It's also possible that without much remaining of any moderate view inside their own ranks, Republicans may simply lack the wisdom -- dare I call it judiciousness? -- to opt for a more sensible strategy.

--Robert Reich

• Sotomayor roundup: The early libertarian reaction paints her as a "radical" practitioner of "identity politics," a judicial activist who will take away your guns; the Judicial Confirmation Network and Family Research Council call her a "discriminatory activist" and a "legislator"; Kevin Drum thinks Obama is shrewdly goading the GOP into going into conniptions over the nomination; the GOP talking points leak; Sotomayor's views on executive power are an unknown; the SCOTUS Blog looks at the nominee's decision-making record; Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) loves him some conservative talking points; Sotomayor's confirmation vote back in 1998 suggests a filibuster attempt is unlikely to get off the ground; and her comments that the Appeals Court is "where policy is made" and her thoughts on the judicial decision-making of a "wise Latina woman" aren't all that controversial.
• Proposition 8 was upheld by the California Supreme Court today in a 6-1 decision, although the court also ruled that same-sex marriages performed prior to the constitutional amendment will not be invalidated.
• There are many contenders for the most worthless member of the Senate Democratic caucus, but our pal Ben Nelson (D-ConAgra) has really been on a roll lately. In addition to leaving open the possibility of joining a filibuster against Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee (made prior to today's announcement), Nelson has generally been indistinguishable from any number of the more conservative members of the Republican caucus.
• Russ Feingold sent a letter to President Obama late Friday describing his plans to hold hearings on the President's policy for detainees and retaining military commissions, which is undoubtedly the right step. After all, if you believe in checks and balances -- the president himself has repeatedly referred to "co-equal" branches of government -- then we ought to expect executive overreach to be constrained not by well-meaning presidents but by Congress and the courts, and that's the way it ought to be.
• Lest it be forgotten over the holiday, the RNC released a bizarre video (still on their web site!) that compares House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Bond girl Pussy Galore from 1964's Goldfinger. Given the incoherence of the spot, I'm going to guess that this was an ill-conceived attempt to project conservative misogyny on the public at large.
  
• Weekend Remainders: Homeland Security and National Security Council staff merge; David Petraeus supports closing Gitmo; either book sales or fear of prosecution are motivating Dick Cheney's publicity tour; NASA gets a new administrator; Tom Coburn might not be retiring from the Senate; the GOP revival runs through Gitmo; the birthers plan on blowing $45,000+ on billboards no one will understand; and Red State thinks Jesus would be down with waterboarding.

--Mori Dinauer

Sen. James Inhofe:

In the months ahead, it will be important for those of us in the U.S. Senate to weigh [Sonia Sotomayor's] qualifications and character as well as her ability to rule fairly without undue influence from her own personal race, gender, or political preferences.

Yes. Because the worldviews of John Roberts, Sam Alito, John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, and Antonin Scalia are not impacted at all by their white male identities. White men are raceless and genderless, haven't you heard?

--Dana Goldstein

The California Supreme Court has ruled to uphold Proposition 8, the ballot initiative than banned gay marriage in the state, while refusing to de-certify the 18,000 legal same-sex marriages that took place last year. At The Nation, Richard Kim urges activists to think twice before rushing toward an expensive battle to overturn Prop 8 at the ballot box in 2010. Why? Because California's domestic partnerships -- unlike DPs in other states -- already include all the rights and responsibilities of marriage. Kim writes:

I know people's emotions are very raw now; there are dozens of rallies planned around the country tonight. That's all fine and good. But the decision on whether or not to sink massive dollars and resources into an initiative to reverse Prop 8 in 2010 (remember, Prop 8 was the second most expensive election in the country in 2008; only the presidency cost more), should take this relative equality into account. There are dozens of states where same-sex couples have no partnership rights whatsoever; states where it is still legal to fire someone because they are gay; a federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act is still stalled in Congress. Aren't those better and more inclusive movement goals than an uphill initiative that would give same-sex couples the M-word in one state only?

--Dana Goldstein

TTR contains multitudes this week, looking at the latest on global economic consensus, the future of journalism, labor policy in Latin America and the dire consequences of our recession. We'll also take this opportinity to welcome our two newest interns, Asawin Suebsaeng and Chris Sopher.

• Consensus fail [PDF]. As of the last G20 meeting, real economic consensus between the major world powers has yet to be achieved. A new policy brief written by Michael Pettis for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace asserts that until the United States, China, and the European Union can agree on the root causes of the global crisis, discordance and economic downturn will worsen and subsist. National interests and domestic issues, including China’s constraining development model and the U.S.’s rapidly declining consumption, will adversely affect trade and slow recovery. Pettis’s recommendations include coordinated stimuli between the EU and U.S. and liberalizing Beijing’s domestic markets. -- AS
• Save the Journalists! Imagine a world with no newspapers -- no slightly soggy bundle on your porch, no professional news online. That dystopian future has many worried; preventing it is the topic of a recent Brookings Institution panel and policy brief, entitled “Saving the News Industry.” Falling circulation -- 62 to 49 million nationwide over the past 20 years, the report notes -- and plummeting ad revenues -- declines as high as 25 percent at some daily papers -- place the industry on shaky ground as it attempts to thrive in the digital age. The panel and paper make several important though not all novel recommendations [PDF], including digital “micropayment systems” (read: iTunes), better online content, new antitrust provisions and tax credits for news subscribers.-- CKS
• Can't buy me fair labor standards [PDF]. Since the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement began in 2005, the Washington Office on Latin America has been tracking the state of labor in the DR and Central America to see if anything came of $23 million intended tamp down preexisting labor violations. According to WOLA, there has been no improvement. In Guatemala alone, six union leaders have been assassinated; in the region as a whole, ten percent of children aged 5 to 14 still work illegally and pre-employment pregnancy tests still prevent women from working. The $23 million in funding was spent on projects laid out in a White Paper written by the trading countries' governments. WOLA insists that results would have been better if unions, human rights groups and the private sector had been involved in drafting the White Paper. To see why, and learn more about implementing the impending Colombia and Panama FTAs, read the report. -- CP
• "Red Alert!" In a new presentation, EPI's Larry Michel sounds the alarm on the dangers of the recession, reporting the disconcerting news that 1/3 of the workforce will be unemployed or underemployed at some point in 2010. Even worse, Michel projects that the child poverty rate will rise to 27 percent, with fully half -- 52.3 percent -- of African American children falling below the poverty line. -- TF
  

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
5/19/09
5/12/09

Jeffrey Rosen argues for Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation.

Conservatives are already citing my initial piece on Sotomayor as a basis for opposing her. This willfully misreads both my piece and the follow-up response. My concern was that she might not make the most effective liberal voice on the Court--not that she didn't have the potential to be a fine justice. Questions of temperament are often overlooked, but history suggests that they are the most relevant in predicting judicial success. (Justice Scalia may be a brilliant bomb-thrower, but has failed in his attempts to build coalitions and bipartisan majorities.) Now is the time to think more broadly about the role Justice Sotomayor is likely to play on the Supreme Court, and I look forward to doing that in the weeks ahead.

When not offering his endorsement of the power of the executive to crush the testicles of children in the name of national security, torture enthusiast John Yoo likes to parrot conservative talking points on legal issues. Here he is on Sonia Sotomayor:

Conservatives should defend the Supreme Court as a place where cases are decided by a faithful application of the Constitution, not personal politics, backgrounds, and feelings.

But Yoo, despite his abstract familiarity with waterboarding people and stuffing them in boxes, is unaware of our Internet traditions. Namely, the one where you point out to someone arguing a particular point that they were arguing the opposite point when the circumstances were reversed. Here's Yoo on the Newshour, talking about Sandra Day O'Connor in 2004:

JIM LEHRER: So that's what you think Justice O'Connor should be doing more of, in other words follow an ideology or follow a philosophy and be consistent with that and not switch back and forth, one time be with the conservatives and one time be with the liberals, is that what you're saying, John Yoo?

JOHN YOO: Yes, because if you're just switching back and forth all the time, if you're in the middle all the time, are you really being a judge - I mean, isn't that what we elect people to be legislators, is to cut compromises and to split the differences, not judges?

I don't really have any interest in getting into the incoherence of today's Ross Douthat column on the importance of stigmatizing single mothers and sexually irresponsible folks, but I don't think Douthat has any interest in getting into that, either, unless it serves his political purposes. Here's his standard:

[C]ontemporary America doesn’t seem willing to accept sexual stigma, period. We simply don’t have the stomach for permanently ostracizing the sexually irresponsible — be they a pregnant starlet, a thrice-divorced tycoon, or even a prostitute-hiring politician.

Now, give the man credit, he's certainly tried to ostracize David Vittter, before saying he'd vote for the prostitute-frequenting Louisiana senator over Barack Obama, given the chance. I also look forward to Douthat's attempts to ostracize Newt Gingrich, the twice-divorced, affair-having former speaker of the House. Here's Douthat on Gingrich last year:

It's true that Gingrich tends to be overrated (by conservatives, that is) as a font of new ideas, but I still would have liked to see him in the race -- not only because he'd be vastly entertaining in the debates, but because his standing within the movement positions him to give voice to certain truths without coming in for quite the ritual denunciations that Huckabee and McCain have summoned up.

Doesn't seem like any kind of ostracizing I'm familiar with. But since Gingrich has only been divorced twice, I guess it's cool. No doubt Douthat will plead, as he did in his post on Vitter, that "regretting the passing of a particular moral standard does not require one to always vote as if that standard were still in place." But it certainly seems to allow Douthat to shame people as if the standard were still in place. It's remarkably hands-free hypocrisy: When I stigmatize people, I'm just regretting the passing of moral standards. And when I support people who violate my moral standards, well, that standard is past. Right?

-- Tim Fernholz

I was just part of a conference call that the White House held with law bloggers. There are a couple of takeaway points that may be of interest to readers following the nomination. First, Obama cited three criteria in choosing Sotomayor: 1) her intellectual capacity (as demonstrated in her sterling academic record, her success as an assistant district attorney, and her distinguished service as a federal judge); 2) her approach to judging based on her opinions, which represent a high level of craftsmanship and attention to detail; and 3) her compelling personal story, rising from poverty in the Bronx to Princeton to being an editor at the Yale Law Journal. This combination of factors will, I think, make her confirmation inevitable.

The way in which the White House seemingly intends to deal with the controversial Ricci affirmative action case was also interesting. The argument was that the (unanimous) panel in this case was simply applying clear 2nd Circuit precedent, and critics of "judicial activism" can't have it both ways -- whatever "judicial activism" means, it means deferring to more electorally accountable officials on an ambiguous constitutional question on which neither precedent nor "original understanding" favor the preferred conservative position. I hope this reflects a willingness to push back on feeble conservative tautologies about "judicial activism." Whatever conservative jurisprudence can be said to consist of in the era of Alito and Thomas, it's got nothing to do with "judicial restraint."

--Scott Lemieux

As a young teenager, I had a really cheesy poster on my bedroom wall entitled "How to Be a Fabulous Feminist." One of the items on the list was "Visualize perfect birth control." At the age of 14, this confounded me. Weren't the pill and condoms supposed to work pretty much perfectly?

Of course, adults learn that no birth control method is without its flaws. One of the most common methods used by adult couples -- the birth control pill -- is also the one most fraught for many women. The pill can be expensive, and it has many noticeable side effects, ranging from dry eyes and weight gain to blood clots, headaches, and even anxiety and depression. Birth control pills are serious medication that fool a woman's body into thinking and acting as if it were pregnant. Going on or coming off the pill creates a massive change in hormonal body chemistry, affecting one's mood and sense of physical well-being.

Are there "more perfect" options out there -- perhaps non-hormonal options? Today on the main site, I report on a new paper, published in the journal Contraception, arguing that sex-educators and medical researchers give the withdrawal method another look. Yep, that's "pulling out," and although it provides no protection against STIs, one study found couples who use the method perfectly experience only a four percent failure rate in terms of unintended pregnancies, compared to a 2 percent failure rate for the male condom. Of "typical" withdrawal users (those who sometimes mess up), 18 percent will become pregnant over the course of a year, compared to 17 percent of "typical" condom users.

As I write, the implications of all this for sex-education are far from clear. Teenagers are a special demographic group with their own set of risk factors. But what should adults take away from these numbers? According to one study, 56 percent of women rely, at least occasionally, on withdrawal. There is a real desire out there for non-condom, non-hormonal birth control. Monogamous couples do want to prevent pregnancy, but many simply aren't sold on either of the two most popular methods. And withdrawal is not the only -- and probably not the best -- of the alternatives.

"The whole group of non-hormonal options does tend to be treated with a bias," sex-educator Heather Corinna told me. "You do have a lot of reporting from patients saying it’s hard for them to get support from their health care providers against hormonal methods, including diaphragms and cervical caps. Any approach like that from any health care provider is really inappropriate."

It's anecdotal, but it seems true to me. I, for example, am a migraine sufferer who has had trouble finding a birth control pill that doesn't give me more headaches, yet no doctor has ever encouraged me to consider an IUD, cervical cap, or diaphragm. What's to blame? Pharmaceutical companies are highly invested in marketing birth control pills to women and doctors, of course. But it's also a question of simple consumer education -- until women and men are encouraged in school, by their partners, and by the medical profession to visualize birth control that truly works for them, they may not realize there are decent options out there other than the pill. Have we found the "perfect" birth control? Not yet. But there's no reason to stop looking.

--Dana Goldstein

Weeks ago, Jeffrey Rosen wrote a scurrilous article for The New Republic in which he asserted, on the basis of anonymous gossip, that Sonia Sotomayor, summa cum laude of Princeton, recipient of the prestigious Pyne Prize, and editor of the Yale Law Journal, was "not that smart." Rosen was candid enough to admit that he hadn't "read enough of Sonia Sotomayor’s opinions to have a confident sense of them" and that he hadn't "talked to enough of Sonia Sotomayor’s detractors and supporters to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths." As I wrote at the time, the subtext of such arguments, which any person of color in the Ivy League has faced, is that people of color who accomplish anything resembling success are simply the undeserving recipients of preferential treatment. Note that this line of argument was raised against the president of the United States, and persisted among the right for some time. 

Isn't it a funny coincidence that all accomplished people of color are secretly dumb? (That isn't necessarily a partisan observation--whether or not Clarence Thomas was "qualified" to serve on the Supreme Court is different from the question of his intelligence. Liberals, then and since, often fail to make the distinction. As for the "Scalia clone" arguments, when was the last time Scalia quoted Frederick Douglass in a opinion?)

Conservatives latched on to Rosen's criticisms at the time, shearing the intended subtext from the respectful veneer adopted by Rosen. These arguments form the basis of their case against Sotomayor now. Ramesh Ponnuru, joining right-wing activist Curt Levey compares her to Harriet Miers, Bush's former White House Counsel who withdrew her nomination over conservative opposition. "This is someone who clearly was picked because she’s a woman and Hispanic, not because she was the best qualified," said Levey. She's a "quota pick" says Rod Dreher. I wonder how many of her opinions he's read. Wait--he doesn't have to, he read Rosen's piece in which Rosen admitted to having not really read her opinions.

Needless to say Miers has nothing even resembling the academic accomplishments of Sotomayor--in fact Miers was never even a judge. Sotomayor has been a judge since 1991, when she was nominated by President George H.W. Bush. She's been an appeals judge for over a decade, since 1998. Comparing their credentials is like comparing a biologist to a surgeon because they both work with organic life. At any rate, had Miers had the requisite conservative paper trail, conservatives would have supported her nomination anyway. They certainly didn't mind packing the Justice Department with lawyers who got their degrees from schools founded by televangelists.

Sotomayor's resume doesn't just look good compared to Harriet Miers. Sotomayor has more than 10 years on the appeals court--by contrast, the current chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, had two years as a judge on the D.C. Circuit before being nominated. As a white man, however, his credentials and intelligence are beyond reproach. I also think Brian Beutler is declaring Rosen's critique a "failure" prematurely: whether or not Rosen's article influenced the White House's decision making is separate from whether or not conservative arguments about her "intelligence" will ultimately derail her nomination, which given the kind of Democrats we have in Congress right now is entirely possible. 

A case against Sotomayor based on her "credentials" or "intelligence" is false on its face--this is a kind of Southern Strategy all over again. By stoking white resentment over the rise of allegedly unqualified minorities getting prominent positions, the GOP is hoping to derail her nomination. It probably won't work, but it's another sign of how little the GOP learned from last year's election.

Welcome, freshmen. Tim Fernholz profiles Democrat Tom Perriello and Republican Aaron Schock, two very different fresh faces on Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, Dana Goldstein considers the finding that the withdrawal method is as effective as condom usage. Should it be taught in sex-education classes?

And Bob Kuttner gives Obama a little bit of tough love.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

North Korea announced that it had tested a second nuclear device yesterday, a move which immediately earned the condemnation of the international community. Initial reports indicated that the explosion was in the 15-20 kiloton range (roughly the size of the Hiroshima bomb) but those reports appear to have been mistaken; the bomb was probably fewer than 10 kilotons, and perhaps less than four. This suggests either that the test was not completely successful, or that the North Koreans are trying to skip several levels of nuclear design by creating minaturized, low-yield nuclear devices that might fit on the end of a missile. I'd bet pretty heavily on the former possibility, as it took the United States and other nuclear powers a very long time to figure out the dynamics of small nuclear weapons.

Response options are limited. North Korea is already so isolated that additional sanctions (and additional condemnation) has only marginal effect. The success of any action against North Korea depends to great extent on the attitude of Russia and China. Beijing, which would be forced to bear many of the costs of a North Korean collapse (and which probably has much better information than we about the prospects for collapse) has been reluctant to put much pressure on the regime, although it has signaled its displeasure with Pyongyang's brinksmanship.

North Korea is believed to have enough plutonium for five to eight bombs. Assuming that this device was plutonium, that leaves another 3-6 potential weapons. Given that the first test failed and that this test may not have been a complete success, the actual military import of the weapons is so far minimal. North Korea's devices don't appear to work properly, likely can't be weaponized, and North Korea doesn't have delivery platforms (missiles) that can be relied upon. North Korea may have a backup uranium program, which is relevant because uranium devices are so simple that they don't need to be tested. Still, these failed tests have the very real cost for North Korea of substantially reducing its nuclear capability.

--Robert Farley

Republicans have promised a confirmation battle for President Obama's Supreme Court pick, Appeals Court Judge Sonya Sotomayor,

No doubt that factor crossed the mind of the president's political advisers, given that the share of Latino voters is one of the fastest growing in the United States. Steve Cobble and Jose Velazquez argue that they provided the decisive margin of victory for Obama in 2008, and keeping those voters energized and engaged is a key priority for the president going into 2010 and 2012, especially with the difficulty of pulling of comprehensive immigration reform, a top issue among Latino voters. Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting this is a pick made for that reason alone or even at all -- Sotomayor is obviously well qualified for the position, but everything the president does has political ramifications and it's important to understand them. In fact, the logic of the pick may preclude a difficult confirmation fight if Republicans decide this is not only a battle they can't win, but that if they do succeed in blocking Sotomayor they will further alienate a constituency that is already indifferent to the Republican brand.

There are few Republican politicians who can credibly claim to be competitive with Democrats among Latino voters -- John McCain post-election bitterness didn't help --if their party takes a vehement stance against Sotomayor, it will have repercussions in elections to come. One tea leaf to read will be the responses of the Republican Senate candidates in Florida, Marc Rubio and Jeb Bush Charlie Crist, who need to be competitive among Latinos in Florida even as they compete for conservative voters who would oppose the Democratic president's pick in their contested primary.

-- Tim Fernholz

Last week I spoke with Vanda Felbab-Brown of Brookings about gangsters, pirates, insurgents, and weak states. Here we talk a bit about the violence of the Mexican drug cartels:

Ms. Felbab-Brown also has a paper on the Mexican drug cartels from Brookings that's worth your valuable time.

--Robert Farley

A few random thoughts/links about Obama tapping Sonia Sotomayor as his first pick:

• It's a good, solid pick. Not a home run like Pam Karlan would have been, but I also don't think she'll be another Stephen Breyer; I see another Ruth Bader Ginsburg at worst. For me, she would have been #2 among the viable candidates after Diane Wood, and I don't think Wood is clearly more liberal; they're within a range in which appellate court records don't reveal enough information to make firm judgments.
• If the GOP wants to make a big stand on affirmative action in the context of the first Hispanic-American nominee -- and hence continue its demographic death spiral -- I say bring it on.
• Useful link of cases at the Times here. If you didn't see it at the time, this Tom Goldstein post is also excellent.
• At the very least, this pick will make Jeffrey Rosen and Stuart Taylor cry. Let's just hope that their respective predictive track records continue to be what they've been. Amusingly, Taylor recently moved Sotomayor below well-known no-hoper Jennifer Granholm on his Supreme Court short list. Well, at least that's not as bad as "Sam Alito, the moderate who will disappoint conservatives..."

--Scott Lemieux

Matt flags an important article on Iran by Fareed Zakaria:

Iranians aren't suicidal. In an interview last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the Iranian regime as "a messianic, apocalyptic cult." In fact, Iran has tended to behave in a shrewd, calculating manner, advancing its interests when possible, retreating when necessary. The Iranians allied with the United States and against the Taliban in 2001, assisting in the creation of the Karzai government. They worked against the United States in Iraq, where they feared the creation of a pro-U.S. puppet on their border. Earlier this year, during the Gaza war, Israel warned Hizbullah not to launch rockets against it, and there is much evidence that Iran played a role in reining in their proxies. Iran's ruling elite is obsessed with gathering wealth and maintaining power. The argument made by those—including many Israelis [--] for coercive sanctions against Iran is that many in the regime have been squirreling away money into bank accounts in Dubai and Switzerland for their children and grandchildren. These are not actions associated with people who believe that the world is going to end soon.

Those are all good points in favor of engagement with Iran, as are the various Iranian outreach efforts chronicled by Flynt Leverett. Zakaria also points out that Iran's own rehtoric is focused on producing nuclear energy, not nuclear weapons. The only thing to add to Matt's observation that we need to be very skeptical about any absolute assertions about Iran's goals and capabilities is that there is not much reason to believe our intelligence in Iran is any better than our intelligence was in Iraq in 2003. Sometimes you hear that Iran could have a nuclear weapon in 2010; sometimes you hear it will take until 2015. That's a pretty big window.

It also strikes me as strange that there is so much more hysteria surrounding the Iranian search for nuclear whatever than the fact that North Korea actually has nuclear weapons, especially given this week's news from that country. Compared to North Korea's Stalinist regime, Iran is a political and social open book in terms of transparent governance and the willingness to act in their own apparent interests. North Korea also threatens nearby U.S. allies, but we rarely have people concluding that we'll need to go to war with them over the issue. It's an interesting dynamic.

-- Tim Fernholz

Photo of Tehran courtesy Flickr user youngrobv.

The New York Times is reporting that Sonia Sotomayor is President Obama's choice to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court. For a comprehensive review of Sotomayor's work, I would recommend going over to SCOTUSBlog, where her opinions are discussed here, here, here, here, and here. Sotomayor, who is of Puerto Rican descent and grew up in the Bronx, would be the first Latino justice on the Supreme Court. For SCOTUSBlog's  view on the likely lines of attack against Sotomayor, read here.

UPDATE: Uh, judging by some of the coverage of the Sotomayor announcement, there are a number of reporters who don't have a very well developed knowledge of geography. Puerto Rico is part of the United States, and Puerto Ricans are Americans by birth. I'm unsure of when Sotomayor's parents were born, but unless they moved to the Bronx before the Jones-Shafroth Act of 1919, then they were Americans, not "immigrants."

-- A. Serwer

Memorial Day Weekend has arrived. Yes, there are barbecues to attend. But, on a serious note, take a moment to remember why we've got Monday off: to remember those who gave their lives in service to our country. That said, we won't be blogging on Monday, since we know our readers have too much sense to be on the internet when they could be enjoying the holiday. Or at least we have too much sense to be on the internet when we could be enjoying the holiday.

While we're gone, here's an adorable hamster to keep you company, courtesy loyal reader MC:

-- Tim Fernholz

• I have a few questions about this new RNC spot that intersperses Lyndon Johnson's infamous "Daisy" ad with footage of Barack Obama talking about closing Gitmo. First, just how many undecided voters are going to recognize footage from a political ad that ran only once 45 years ago? Aren't non-political junkies going to be confused as to why there's a little girl in grainy black-and-white footage with bad overdubbing? And what's the implication here? Is securing potential terrorists in maximum security facilities on U.S. soil somehow comparable to nuclear annihilation?
  
• Speaking of supermax prisons, The Washington Post indulges our infantile political culture by patiently pointing out that yes, these prisons are, for all intents and purposes, escape-proof, and that they already hold international terrorists who have yet to "radicalize" the rest of the inmates. Somehow, I doubt this will prevent Democrats in Congress from pissing their pants every time Republicans shriek, "evil terrorists in the heartland!"
• Outside of the (debatable) political advantage for Democrats, it really is incomprehensible that Newt Gingrich is an ubiquitous presence on the enduring Beltway media institutions. Then again, Liz Cheney has been deemed an irreplaceable, impartial analyst of her deranged father's national security delusions, so what are you going to do? Personally I'd like to see more Mitt Romney and his serious argument that unlike Barack Obama and other human beings, Dick Cheney never sleeps and therefore is always, personally, keeping an eye on our borders to make sure America is safe from Cobra Commander.
• Remainders: Arlen Specter keeps the pressure on the CIA; Chuck Schumer shows a little patriotism towards our penitentiary system; the poor will be the first sucked into the California fiscal black hole; Laura Rozen details the less-prominent, though no less significant members of the Obama foreign policy team; The RNC outraises the DNC in April; and Can the IRS Save America?

--Mori Dinauer

When President Barack Obama spoke yesterday on the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, perhaps his most worrisome comment was the implication that prisoners believed to be dangerous but who couldn't be prosecuted -- that is, the government couldn't prove they were dangerous in a court of law -- would be detained indefinitely. While today's press briefing by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs didn't do much to elucidate the question, he did make this comment:

MR. GIBBS: How's it different than -- I don't think it's -- let me just say for the umpteenth time, I am not a constitutional lawyer. But if somebody is picked up on a battlefield you can detain that person for the length of the conflict. I think that's fairly well-established.

Gibbs comment suggests that these detainees who can't be prosecuted but the administration is afraid to release might only be held until the end of our conflict in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, it's not clear that we know the length of our conflict in Afghanistan, which is where, along with Pakistan, many of the detainees were captured. It's rather ironic to see the two most difficult moral and security challenges that administration faces now -- how to resolve conflict in Afghanistan-Pakistan and how to deal with the prisoners we captured there -- tied together. We don't know when either will end.

-- Tim Fernholz

Well, this has hardly been a good week for The New York Times. First, there was the Maureen Dowd plagiarism flap. Now, economics reporter Edmund Andrews' nightmarish personal story about predatory lending, which Tim wrote about earlier this week, is coming under criticism.

After his book Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown was excerpted by the Times magazine last week, Megan McArdle looked into Andrews' financial history and discovered that his situation is a little bit atypical: His wife, Patricia Barreiro has filed for bankruptcy twice, despite having a six-figure household income, a fact not disclosed in his work. Says Megan:

Andrews' desire to shield his wife is understandable--hell, laudable. No decent person wants to parade their spouse's financial trouble in front of the world. But this is material information that changes the tenor of his story. Serial bankruptcy is not a creation of the current credit crisis, and it doesn't just happen to anyone, particularly anyone with a six figure salary.

Earlier this morning I had an opportunity to speak with ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero about President Obama's proposed anti-terrorism policies, how they do or don't differ from the Bush administration, and how the ACLU plans to challenge the proposed military commissions and preventive detention policy in court.

What do you think of the the president’s assertion that there are people we have to detain, but can’t convict either in military commissions or federal courts?

I don’t believe that’s the case. I think the proliferation of laws enacted after September 11th give the government a remarkable array of law enforcement tools to use in prosecuting individuals. And if the government after eight years of work, with all of its vast resources [and] agencies working together, has not been able to render evidence that would reliably stand up in court to convict someone, then they did something wrong. And that means individuals who are not convicted must be released. The biggest mistake would be to tinker with the American legal system in an effort to hang on to 20 or 30 individuals that can’t be processed. Guilty people walk every day in American criminal courts because the system breaks down, or prosecutors fail to have the evidence, or law enforcement officials bend the rules in those prosecutions. That doesn’t make us less safe, it makes us stronger as a country when we adhere to legal principle, and a system of rules that are not changed for a preordained outcome.

What about people we’ve captured whom we don’t have hard evidence to convict, but who say they believe in what Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden are doing?

They should walk. Just because you say you’re supportive of al Qaeda, or you want to tear down America, doesn’t mean you’ve shown the criminal intent or the criminal ability to do so. Statements like “I support al Qaeda” or “I support bin Laden” are protected speech under the First Amendment. If we start locking people up because of what they say and not because of what they’ve done, then we’re in a very different democracy.

Read the rest here.

-- A. Serwer

It's both remarkable and predictable that Michael Steele has decided to attack Obama for being unqualified for his position, given the context in which Steele himself attained his. Via Thinkprogress, Steele had this to say about the president while subbing on Bill Bennett's radio show:

The problem that we have with this president is that we don’t know [Obama]. He was not vetted, folks. … He was not vetted, because the press fell in love with the black man running for the office. “Oh gee, wouldn’t it be neat to do that? Gee, wouldn’t it make all of our liberal guilt just go away? We can continue to ride around in our limousines and feel so lucky to live in an America with a black president.” Okay that’s wonderful, great scenario, nice backdrop. But what does he stand for? What does he believe? … So we don’t know. We just don’t know.

Of course, when Steele appeared at the State of the Black Union earlier in February of this year and spoke to a black audience, his tone was very different.

Who would think in 2009, you would have two black men at the pinnacle of political power in this country, irrespective of ideology, philosophy, that fact is a testament to struggle, perseverance and opportunity. And I salute our president, congratulations President Obama for making it happen, making it so real for so many who struggled for so long.

When Steele has a black audience, Obama's victory is "a testament to struggle, perseverance, and opportunity." When Steele has a white audience, he thinks Obama is a "magic negro" who just won because of liberal white guilt.

Steele ran his campaign for RNC Chair partially on the premise that he would be able to launch race-based attacks on the President while inoculating the GOP against charges of racism because he is black. I guess part of me hoped it was a hustle, and that he wouldn't actually go that route. I think it's pretty clear from the above who Steele was actually hustling.

-- A. Serwer

Spencer raises a good question: If Obama's national security policies are so much like the Bush administration's, why are Cheney, Krauthammer and the other conservatives-in-favor-of-the-security-state so furious at the new administration?

Jack Goldmsith, making the case -- a depressingly convincing one -- that Obama's policies are merely a more elegant presentation of the same Bush ideas, suggests that Cheney just doesn't understand. I don't really buy that. Cheney is a lot of things, but I don't think he's obtuse. Maybe Cheney's just mad because he thinks Obama will get accolades for policies that are really his. More than that, I do think that Obama has significantly changed the government's approach to these issues, by dint of those policies he has changed substantively and by not pretending in public that these are easy or simple choices. Goldsmith gets at the new president's central national security challenge here:

The Obama policies also reflect the fact that the Bush policies were woven into the fabric of the national security architecture in ways that were hard if not impossible to unravel. The new administration would not face the difficulties of closing GTMO if GTMO had not been used as a detention facility in the first place.

Indeed. Once the vase gets broken, it's hard to glue the pieces back together in a pleasing fashion. That's not to excuse the choices that Obama has made that don't square with the commitments to civil liberties he made during the campaign, but as Spencer says, there is still a lot more unwinding left to do. The end of torture, the limiting of rendition and the closing of Guantanamo are all still positive steps, and I'd predict that between the administration's internal review process and pressure from congress, the policy surrounding the State Secrets privilege will be improved as well. That still leaves questions about habeas issues and detainees, both those leaving Guantanamo and those in Bagram, that must be addressed for Obama to set himself apart from his predecessor.

-- Tim Fernholz

Obama's Gitmo speech highlighted a division between the president and his party. That might actually be a good thing, says Terence Samuel.

And a quick heads up: TAPPED will be going dark on Memorial Day. We will be enjoying the start of summer, and you should, too. If you do end up online, do check the homepage for Courtney Martin's holiday-appropriate column.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

CBO Director Doug Elmendorf testified [PDF] yesterday that he agrees with more pessimistic forecasts about the economy. That means that he expects weak growth to begin in the latter half of this year as the recession hits its trough, with unemployment numbers -- which will hit double digits in the next year -- starting to turn around six to 12 months after that. The gap between real and potential GDP, shown above, will likely exist until 2013, as businesses are still not investing and the housing market remains stagnant. Elmendorf's testimony does offer some "green shoots" -- there are signs that consumer confidence is turning around and that bank's ability to lend is increasing. However, the main talking point is "uncertainty" -- so much has happened to the economy so quickly in the last year that it is hard for forecasters to predict what will happen.

-- Tim Fernholz

At The American Scene, Conor Friedersdorf transcribes this absolutely appalling exchange between conservative talk radio host Mark Levin and a female caller, who was gently defending Obama's Guantanamo policy:

MARK LEVIN: Answer me this, are you a married woman? Yes or no?

CALLER: Yes.

MARK LEVIN: Well I don’t know why your husband doesn’t put a gun to his temple. Get the hell out of here.

Friedersdorf writes: "That isn’t merely beneath a gentleman. It is the kind of thing that a decent man doesn’t say to a woman, under any circumstances." Actually, this is outright misogyny -- hatred of women.

And this isn't Levin's first foray into crude sexism. When the military provided Nancy Pelosi with a jet for secure travel between California and Washington, D.C., Levin falsely claimed Pelosi demanded the plane because "she's the first woman speaker. She wants a really, really big one. ... And if she doesn't get it, well then that's sexual discrimination." In fact, Pelosi is second in the line of succession to the presidency. A military escort is routine for any Speaker of the House.

On a separate occasion, Levin said of Pelosi, "You could bounce a dime off her cheeks. The woman has had so many face-lifts." He has referred to Hillary Clinton as "Her Thighness" and to NOW as "the National Organization of Ugly Women."

And they wonder why women are trending left...

--Dana Goldstein

Being a black Jew just got a little less lonely:

Growing up in a black, Pentecostal family in Cleveland, Alysa Stanton never imagined the day when she would be preparing to be ordained as a Jewish rabbi.

But that day will come June 6 for the single mother who will be ordained by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, becoming the first African-American female rabbi in the world.

Ironically, I think that the fact that Stanton is a woman will be more trouble for her trying to find a congregation than the fact that she's black. Sadly, female rabbis are still somewhat controversial--there's that apocryphal saying from a rabbi that "a woman will be a rabbi when there's an orange on the seder plate." That prompted a number of Jewish families to actually start putting an orange on their seder plates. Something for President Obama to think about if he does another White House seder next year.

-- A. Serwer

The Republican Party, with support from at least one Democrat, continues its love of federalism with bill that would block DC's recognition of same sex marriages performed in other states:

“Nothing can be more important than the sanctity of our families,” Rep. Tom Price, chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, told reporters.

Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Dan Boren (D-Okla.) introduced the bill today, which aims to define marriage in D.C. as a “union of one man and one woman.”

“If the story becomes about us and not her, it’s a problem for us,” said a senior Republican lawmaker.

[Minority Leader John] Boehner has been working to cool off other Republicans who want Pelosi’s scalp. He fears that, if Republicans move to call for Pelosi’s ouster — as Gingrich did — before laying out a case for an investigation first, then they will have squandered a major opportunity to cut into Pelosi’s authority.

... “If anything, people have circled the wagons around her,” said Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson. “All you have to do is mention the names Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney as attacking the speaker of the House ... and people see this for what it is.”

Given that the CIA's notes about the briefings have several glaring errors and that statements from all parties involved have been, well, let's say delicately calibrated, it seems likely the Speaker is right in her recollection about not being briefed on waterboarding in 2002. But more than that, you have two highly discredited figures attacking her, purportedly for not vocally opposing a policy they support. Strange days.

Here's the important political lesson for the GOP: It's really crushing for a party to be led by figures who have no accountability. Boehner is worried because Cheney and Gingrich are making promises he can't deliver, just as Limbaugh et. al. are writing a platform he can't sell -- it's a recipe for disaster. But these outside leaders can do whatever they want; they don't have to answer to voters or other elected Republican officials. The media is weird that way -- somehow, these former officials who couldn't win an election outside of the reddest House district you can imagine have more say in their party's position than folks like Eric Cantor or Boehner, who, say what you will, have managed to win elections recently and convince their colleagues to support them in internal deliberations.

I'm trying to remember if the Democrats of 2000-2006 suffered under a similar phenomenon -- our former Vice President went into hiding for a while, and various constituentcy groups, including the netroots, made their voices heard, but all of the leadership jockeying was based around the 2004 and 2008 presidential primaries. It's a bummer for the GOP that their politicking in 2009 hasn't brought any potential 2012 candidates to the fore -- unless that Cheney-Gingrich ticket sounds promising to you.

-- Tim Fernholz
Photo courtesy Flickr user madaboutasia

• Whatever criticisms can be leveled at Barack Obama's national security speech today -- and there are plenty -- there's no question that he respected his audience's intelligence and dutifully explained why his administration was taking the steps it was taking. Unless you're William Kristol, or, say, one of the writers at The Corner who seem to believe that Obama was some amateur would-be leader with limited political experience talking vaguely and in a "pseudo-thoughtful" manner about subjects he knows nothing about. Dick Cheney, on the other hand, was a "grownup" and a "statesman" because he was able to reference 9/11 no less than 25 times while repeating the lie that there was an al-Qaeda/Iraq link and defending torture from "contrived indignation and phony moralizing."
• Beltway conventional wisdom watch: David Broder argues that Obama's reversal on several national security issues is the inevitable result of taking on the duties of commander-in-chief (and it's especially difficult for Democrats, Broder claims), while Howard Fineman believes the "grim realities" of being commander-in-chief have "forced" him to reverse himself on these issues. See also the unpersuasive "Obama got rolled by his generals" meme.
• It looks like Henry Waxman's speed reader bluff did the trick, with Republicans backing down from efforts to delay and amend the climate change bill to death, despite the noted danger of creating a "global warming Gestapo." Meanwhile, the House Education Committee is looking to stop subsidizing private student loans and the House GOP regretfully concedes that they have "no choice" but to convene a "bipartisan investigation" to investigate Nancy Pelosi.
• This massive Pew poll of political attitudes, identification and partisan trends over the past 22 years confirms what other polls have identified this year -- that the Republican coalition is shrinking, Democrats have gained modestly, and independents are filling the vacuum. On most of the specific issues polled, however, there's much more synergy between self-described Democrats and independents, than there is with with independents and Republicans.
• Remainders: Please make the "Biden is a gaffe machine" storyline go away; the RNC demonstrates the perils of quoting out of context; in a party full of broken records, Newt Gingrich is a corroded 78 that plays on one rusty, old, gramophone; and Cato engages in some amateur-hour political analysis.

--Mori Dinauer

One major challenge effectively regulating financial institutions is the federal preemption of state laws. For example, if there are federal rules about what kind of loans a bank can make and an individual state wants to make tougher regulations to prevent stuff like predatory lending, well, too bad, no dice, the federal rules preempt the state statutes, rendering them inoperable. I touched on some of these issues in my article yesterday about Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who had to be pretty creative in order to find a legal basis to hold predatory lenders accountable, partially because of federal preemption rules.

Preemption doctrine often serves business interests at the expense of taxpayers -- it's much easier for them to lobby for lax regulations at the federal level rather than in all fifty states -- and also should offend lovers of local democracy -- why should the feds limit your ability to make rules? Sometimes, of course, federal preemption is useful, but in many cases you want to federal rules to be a floor and not a ceiling. That way, there's a clear national standard and states can choose to go further if they want, but they can't offer less protection to consumers than any other state.

Some exciting news in this direction, however, is that yesterday President Obama issued an executive memorandum [PDF] requiring the heads of departments and agencies to not overreach their authority for preemption while making new regulations (in some cases during the Bush administration, preemption was used with only vague statutory backing) and to initiate a review of the last ten years of regulations to determine if preemption was misused and correct any overreaches they find. The memo notes that...

Executive departments and agencies should be mindful that in our Federal system, the citizens of the several States have distinctive circumstances and values, and that in many instances it is appropriate for them to apply to themselves rules and principles that reflect these circumstances and values. As Justice Brandeis explained more than 70 years ago, "[i]t is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."

True that.

-- Tim Fernholz

Photo courtesty Flickr user Steve Rhodes.

Via David Axe and the United States Naval Institute blog, Fairplay Shipping News reports that a retired Soviet admiral has claimed that many of the chief Somali pirates were trained in Soviet naval schools.

Sergey Bliznyuk told the Ukrainian newspaper Gazeta Po-Kievskiy that he had personally come across some men he now believes are behind many hijackings. “There are many former military men among the Somalis who have perfected the tactics of sea combat,” he said. “The majority of these 40-50-year-olds were trained in the former Soviet Union. “I myself taught at one point at a school in Baku [Azerbaijan], where we had 70-80 Somalis a year studying.” Bliznyuk told the newspaper that Soviet officers had trained naval personnel from the government of President Siad Barre, who ruled Somalia in 1969-91 after a military coup. Further, Bliznyuk told the newspaper: “The USSR taught not only Somali natives but also those of Yemen, Ethiopia and others. Who would have assumed then that they would turn against us?”

Yesterday a new study [PDF] was released that offers up yet more evidence of why reforming union organizing law is a good idea. During organizing campaigns from 1999 to 2003 (the latest available data), here is what management did:

63% interrogate workers in one-on-one meetings with their supervisors about support for the union
54% threaten workers in such meetings
57% threaten to close the worksite
47% threaten to cut wages and benefits
34% fire workers

Even when workers succeed at forming a union, 52 percent are still without a contract a year after they win the election, and 37 percent remain without a contract two years after the election. ... Although the use of management consultants, captive audience meetings, and supervisor one-on-ones has remained fairly constant, there has been an increase in more coercive and retaliatory tactics (“sticks”) such as plant closing threats and actual plant closings, discharges, harassment and other discipline, surveillance, and alteration of benefits and conditions. At the same time, employers are less likely to off er “carrots,” as we see a gradual decrease in tactics such as granting of unscheduled raises, positive personnel changes, promises of improvement, bribes and special favors, social events, and employee involvement programs.

The New York Times let the business side criticize the study without actually providing any evidence that the study was inaccurate. People at the Chamber of Commerce are also suggesting that this is an attempt to "demonize" business. But that's not the case, either. The point of this study isn't that businesses are evil, it's that laws are being broken by some people and we need more robust protections for people exercising their right to organize.

Speaking of those robust protections, Employee Free Choice Act floor leader Senator Tom Harkin is now threatening to force a vote on the original bill if reluctant legislators won't even come to the table for compromise discussions.

This would put wobbly Democrats who are trying to play it both ways -- folks like Arlen Specter, Blanche Lincoln, Tom Carper or Jim Webb -- in a tight spot. Ideally, they'd placate unions with talk of a difficult political atmosphere while pleasing business by taking no action. If Harkin forces them to choose, they'll have to tick off somebody. This may be the stick needed to force a compromise, since business isn't interested in any bill at all. But these plans will all likely to wait until Al Franken is seated, hopefully in June, to ensure that every Democratic vote -- and particularly a progressive like Franken -- can be mustered.

-- Tim Fernholz

Adam mentions this in his informed analysis, but I want to draw extra attention to the portion of the speech that left me hanging: The discussion of detainees who are considered both impossible to prosecute and too dangerous to release.

This is the toughest issue we will face. We are going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who have received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, commanded Taliban troops in battle, expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.

As I said, I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture – like other prisoners of war – must be prevented from attacking us again. However, we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. That is why my Administration has begun to reshape these standards to ensure they are in line with the rule of law. We must have clear, defensible and lawful standards for those who fall in this category. We must have fair procedures so that we don’t make mistakes. We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified.

We definitely need new standards. But the impression I get from the speech is that if we can't find ways to prosecute these dangerous people -- and "can't prosecute" means is that we can't legally prove they are actually dangerous -- they'll remain in jail indefinitely with no recourse. It is, as Adam writes, a dangerous precedent. But in all honesty I can't imagine that Obama, or any other president, would make a different choice.

-- Tim Fernholz

I don't know if you noticed, but our president can give a helluva speech. His time as a constitutional lawyer has endowed him with the kind of rhetorical reverence for the rule of law that I find incredibly touching. Whenever our nation has been at its worst, the promises of our founding documents have led us through. I know I'm not the only American who feels this way, and this president, more than any other in my lifetime, knows how to evoke that kind of pride.

The most important part of the president's speech wasn't the policy--he said little that was new. He condemned the use of torture in no uncertain terms, and rejected the idea that such methods are necessary to protect national security. He recommitted to reforming the "State Secrets" doctrine, which his administration has used in much the same manner has his predecessor despite promises to the contrary. He reiterated his commitment to trying as many suspected terrorists as possible within independent Article III courts, said that the military commissions would be revamped to be consistent with our legal obligations and be limited to trying those who had broken the laws of war, and he referred to the "third category", those who the government believes are dangerous but cannot be tried. Herein lies the most dangerous path for us as a country--whether or not you believe these men are guilty, the fact is that detention without due process is a fundamental violation of the same laws that Obama called "the source of our strength through the ages." I am skeptical that this power, once invoked, can ever be restrained. As for the photographs--Obama seemed to reassure human rights groups that they would ultimately be released yesterday--the idea that a government can shield scrutiny of its own wrongdoing based on national security reasons is a dangerous precedent to set.

The most important part of the president's speech was the framing of our national conversation around this issue. On Guantanamo, he reiterated that the prison has "set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world." This is important, but it's secondary to another point the president made, that the creation of Guantanamo was not an issue of security but of shielding suspected terrorists from our judicial system. He spoke of the argument that has raged over the past few weeks, perhaps referring specifically to Dick Cheney when he referred to arguments that "are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country." He reframed his positions on national security, much as he does with all political issues, as standing between two "two opposite and absolutist ends," those who would never "put national security over transparency" and those who believe the Nixonian dictum that "that the President should have blanket authority to do whatever he wants."

I don't buy this framing. The fact is that there is no middle ground when it comes to due process. With his soaring and sincere rhetoric, the president has done an incredible job of selling his kinder, gentler War on Terror, and ultimately, the American people will likely have his back, if only because they trust him. In a sense, Barack Obama may be far more dangerous than George W. Bush when it comes to violating our civil liberties; where the American people feared the excesses of Bush, they trust wholly in the sincerity of Barack Obama. At least for now.

-- A. Serwer

Remember when the high price of oil was still a big story? Well, it still should be. There's good reason to believe that it was a major cause of the financial collapse and that it could hurt the economy again. Ryan Avent offers some potential solutions to the gas price problem.

And Jake Blumgart wonders why America's unemployed aren't organizing.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

In March, we published a special report on the aftermath of Katrina, which considered topics ranging from regional policy fixes to environmental justice problems. Demos is hosting a conference based on the report today, and our own Brentin Mock is speaking. Be sure to tune in here for the livecast:

--The Editors

In a political climate in which anti-Semitism is often used as an excuse for bellicosity toward Iran and the larger Muslim world -- as well as an excuse for stalemating on peace between Israel and the Palestinians -- it's very important to realize that the terrorist suspects arrested in New York yesterday were one Haitian and three native-born Americans, none of whom were working in concert with any global network of extremists. Zack Roth does a nice job explaining:

There's no doubt the men expressed violent sentiments towards Jews and others, and a desire to commit large-scale terror acts. According to the complaint, at one point during the planning, Cromitie said: "I hate those motherfuckers, those fucking Jewish bastards ... I would like to get [destroy] a synagogue." In that same conversation, he also said, referring to the Twin Towers: "The best target was hit already." ...

But it's not clear whether these men would have carried out any terror plot without encouragement and material support from an FBI informant. The New York Times reports that "a federal law enforcement official described the plot as "aspirational" -- meaning that the suspects wanted to do something but had no weapons or explosives."

Indeed, the complaint paints a picture of a plot in which the FBI informant played a central role from the start. The informant met Cromitie, the apparent ringleader of the plot, last June at a Newburgh mosque. Cromitie told the informant that his parents had lived in Afghanistan, that he was upset about the US killing Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that he would like to do "something to America." Soon after, the informant falsely told Cromitie that he (the informant) was a member of the Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed. Cromitie said he too would like to join, in order to "do Jihad."

From there, the plot began to slowly take shape, with the informant playing a central role throughout. The informant helped to procure fake homemade bombs, and accompanied the men in obtaining a surface-to-air guided missile system and three IEDs. The informant also accompanied the men in buying handguns for use in the plot.

--Dana Goldstein

During his speech, the president made an important point to keep in mind as the "debate" over what to do with Gitmo detainees unfolds: Holding suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay was never about "safety". As the president said, "part of the rationale for establishing Guantanamo in the first place was the misplaced notion that a prison there would be beyond the law."

The point wasn't that U.S. prison facilities were incapable of holding dangerous people -- we know they are capable because we've held them there before, and we continue to do so. The original point of Gitmo was to put terrorist suspects in a location beyond the reach of U.S. law, so they couldn't take advantage of constitutional protections. We know this because after the Boumediene decision, the Bush administration began to transfer detainees out of Gitmo to Bagram. Why? Had Gitmo suddenly become less secure? No -- the Supreme Court had just ruled that holding terrorists offshore didn't mean the Bush administration could simply ignore the law. They were specifically talking about Gitmo however, and it wasn't until recently that a judge ruled, on the basis of Boumediene, that detainees at Bagram who were captured in third countries and transferred there had the same rights.

The opposition to closing Gitmo is about, it's not about safety or security. It's about politics.

-- A. Serwer

Philip Weiss writes that this Gideon Levy column in Haaretz reminds him that "the things I love about my Jewish culture--intellectual honesty and sensitivity--are alive in Israel, in the likes of writers like him. Why hasn't any American writer--why haven't I for that matter--said what was obvious about the Obama-Netanyahu meeting? Netanyahu looked like a thuggish oaf next to our brilliant president."

Levy writes that just as Richard Nixon saved Israel from the aggression of the Arab states in 1973, Obama -- if he remains staunchly committed to the two-state solution -- has the potential to "save Israel from itself" during a time of rightward drift in the country's politics:

In a single move he shrank the fearmongering of Benjamin Netanyahu and his mouthpieces on Iran to its proper size. In a single move he put the centrifuges of occupation, the real existential threat to Israel, at the top of the agenda. He fended off Netanyahu's attempts to divert attention from substantial issues, and blocked all efforts to waste more precious time on Iran and impose ridiculous preconditions on the Palestinians. He also blocked all efforts to distract us with committees, promises for negotiations, formulas, declarations and empty words. These are Israel's best tricks and games; anything to evade responsibility for the main issue - the end of the occupation. ...

How pathetic and heartrending was the sight of the Israeli prime minister, sitting tense and sweaty, next to the new American president, confident, stylish, and impressive, without all the jokes and back-patting of Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush. The latter was in fact the least friendly president to Israel - one who allowed it to carry out all its violent madness.

Beautifully said, important words -- straight from an Israeli Jew. For more commentary on how Netanyahu's domestic policy weaknesses strengthen Obama's hand, read the latest from TAP's incomparable Israel correspondent, Gershom Gorenberg.

--Dana Goldstein

The news that a team of law enforcement officials arrested four men in New York on terrorism charges is, of course, reassuring. But it's also an important reminder that we have an effective way of dealing with terrorists: old-fashioned investigatory police work. Admittedly, we have yet to learn if any of the broader surveillance powers the government has were used in this investigation, but the impression you get from reading the article is that a human intelligence source was cultivated successfully by counter-terrorism agents who then provided actionable intelligence to them. Nobody even got water boarded!

Coming on the day of, man, it hurts to type this, "dueling" national security speeches from President Obama and former Vice President Cheney, it's a reminder that we have one method of approaching the problem of terrorism that works to provide a more secure America and one that drags the country into immoral and self-defeating behaviors. Realizing that the problem of terror does not imply World War III (or IV, depending on your zaniness level) shouldn't be so hard.

I'm not sure what the statistics are on this (maybe Adam or Attackerman knows?) but it will be interesting when we eventually learn how many of the Guantanamo prisoners can't be properly tried due to controversies surrounding their capture versus those that can't be properly tried due to illegal methods used after they were captured. I imagine our problems would be a lot smaller if we hadn't been mistreating people in search of connections that weren't there. Makes John Kerry look increasingly prescient.

To be sure, there is room for military force appropriately deployed to prevent terrorists from using failed states as launching points for international attacks -- I'm thinking Afghanistan here. But it's also clear from our current entanglement there that we haven't yet figured out the overall strategy for approaching these kinds of operations and limiting them to the possible -- it's an ongoing debate.

Meanwhile, Hilzoy beats me to the punchline:

I assume that if it's too dangerous to move people at Guantanamo to the United States, it must be much too dangerous to allow these jihadists to run loose in our prisons. After all, they might provide financing for other jihadists from their supermax cells, or radicalize other prisoners, or use special Terrorist Mind Control Techniques to create a whole army of brainwashed convicts under their complete control.

-- Tim Fernholz

America now has a full-blown industrial policy. But it's an odd one -- a combination of lemon socialism and taxpayer-financed regulation.

Consider GM and Chrysler. To what purpose are our taxpayer dollars being put as we bail them out? Apparently only to help them survive, even as pale shadows of their former selves. Steve Rattner, the administration's auto expert, explained last month that the government was "making an investment decision. We're not running these auto companies. We are helping them restructure and reposition themselves for the future." Which raises the question: Why bother at all, if a huge portion of their employees and those of their dealers and suppliers are losing their jobs?

This week the administration announced new fuel economy targets. But auto buyers aren't particularly interested in fuel efficiency now that gas prices are low. So how are GM and Chrysler to pay the costs of achieving the new targets? Tucked into the latest version of climate legislation unveiled this week by the House Energy and Commerce Committee is a provision that doubles to $50 billion loans to help auto makers comply.

Industrial policy ought to fill in where the market fails -- providing basic research to help spur new technologies and industries, reducing the negative side effects of the market (such as carbon pollution), and easing the adjustment of workers and communities out of older industries that are shrinking toward new ones. Ideally, these three parts of industrial policy would be synchronized so the new technologies and industries address negative side-effects while also creating opportunities for communities and workers to gain new employment.

Much of the industrial Midwest desperately needs new technologies and industries to take the place of the shrinking U.S. auto industry, and workers who have been (or are about to be) laid off need help transitioning to those new jobs. Could chunks of the old auto industry be adapted to produce high-speed rail or, more generally, highly efficient people-moving systems of the future or, even more generally, green technologies that support such systems? Could some of the billions now slated to fund new non-carbon based energy sources be targeted to this?

I don't know the answers but I worry no one is asking these questions. Bailing out the auto companies while forcing them to lay off tens of thousands of their workers, imposing higher fuel-economy targets on them, and lending them billions more to meet those new targets seems oddly unrelated to the large structural transformation the economy must go through. We need a broader and more imaginative approach to industrial policy -- one that integrates all the different ways government influences industry, and achieves overarching public goals.

--Robert Reich

So Rove, sensing a new meme in the air the way a puppy smells a side of bacon, decides that after spending weeks talking about how dangerous Obama is and how he's made the country less safe that he's going to tell everyone what a great job he's doing on national security. Rove worked in the Bush administration, but he's either so ignorant about policy that he didn't realize Obama was doing the same thing as Bush these past few weeks and needed someone else to explain it to him, or he's just making everything up as he goes along. In the second paragraph of his op-ed this morning, Rove gets it wrong (emphasis mine):

For example, President Obama kept George W. Bush's military tribunals for terror detainees after calling them an "enormous failure" and a "legal black hole." His campaign claimed last summer that "court systems . . . are capable of convicting terrorists." Upon entering office, he found out they aren't.

Here's a brief list of terrorists convicted in federal court just under the Bush administration, you know, the one Rove worked for:

• Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted 2006
• Masoud Khan, convicted 2004
  
• Richard Reid, convicted 2003
  
• Iyman Faris AKA Mohammad Rauf, convicted 2003
  
• Jose Padilla, convicted 2007
  
• Five of the "Fort Dix Six", convicted 2008

Since Obama has taken office, Ali Saleh al-Marri was tried and pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism, and five of the Liberty City plotters were convicted (they plan to appeal). The alleged perpetrators of the suspected terrorist plot foiled in New York yesterday will be tried in federal court. It's one thing to argue, as Obama has, that some detainees can't be tried in federal court because they wouldn't have enough admissible evidence to convict them, it's another entirely to claim that the courts literally "can't" try terrorists. That is an absurd claim on its face. The problem isn't the nature of federal court, the problem is the state of the government's case against the detained.

-- A. Serwer

• The terrorist-as-supervillian meme has gotten pretty ridiculous at this point, and certainly wasn't helped by FBI Director Robert Mueller's remarks that potential terrorists could "radicalize" other inmates, even in maximum security facilities. Fortunately, Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin have made it clear that they aren't as cowardly, supporting the opening of their states to Guantanamo transfers, if it ever happens.
• According to this story from The Hill, Democrats are rallying around Nancy Pelosi as the GOP tries to make her the villain in the controversy over CIA interrogation techniques. Perhaps even more significant is Arlen Specter's admission that "The CIA has a very bad record when it comes to -- I was about to say 'candid'; that's too mild -- to honesty." Looks like Specter is starting to earn that 'D' after his name after all.
• This ABC News report makes a pretty convincing case that Federal Appeals Court Judge Diane Wood is definitely in the final brackets for Obama's first Supreme Court appointment, although other candidates have confirmed they've been through the vetting process as well.
• It seems that Michael Steele, if he must be embarrassed, prefers to be responsible for his own embarrassment. Yesterday the RNC Chair managed to block a resolution that would have renamed the Democratic party to the "Democrat Socialist Party," instead merely condemning "the Democrats' march to socialism." baby steps, baby. Baby steps. See also, "Are conservatives more clever than they appear?"
• Remainders: Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) challenges George Will's self-delusional narcissism; a Rumsfeld aide stands up for his boss; where there's a Senate seat up for grabs, there's a Kennedy ready to make a play for it; a CFR senior fellow reminds us the Cold War ended nearly twenty years ago; and the birther bill gets a co-sponsor.

--Mori Dinauer

Kevin Drum sums up the failure of the gimmicky initiatives that were intended to forestall California's intended budget disaster:

There are legal, judicial, federal, and contractual limits to how much spending can be cut, and there are political limits (i.e., the Republican rump in the legislature) to how much taxes can be raised. The sums just don't add up.

Californians are living in a dream world. Prop 13 slashed property taxes and nobody wants to amend it, even for commercial property. Arnold Schwarzenegger got elected in the middle of a budget crisis by promising to cut taxes. When that proved to be an unsurprising disaster, the voters approved billions in borrowing, making the budget situation even worse. It's easy to blame Sacramento for this mess (and I do!), but the public has been complicit every step of the way.

I think this is largely right, and it's true that the voters can't be let off the hook for using a bad system irresponsibly. But the key is still that the California initiative system is, in fact, a very bad system -- the result of restrictions on tax increases without limits on spending increases is pretty much what the rules would be expected to be produce. I would also reverse the way in which Kevin describes the dilemma in the first paragraph. The primary limits on draconian spending increases, it seems to me, is political: Californians, for good reason, don't want a Mississippi level of social services. The biggest limits on tax increases, conversely, are constitutional and institutional. It's true that the Republican rump makes necessary tax increases impossible -- but it's able to obstruct tax increases because of idiotic counter-majoritarian rules that permit them to do so. (Although, of course, Kevin is right that the voters are responsible for said idiotic constitutional rules.)

It also should be emphasized that Gray Davis -- who at least tried to deal intelligently with these revenue shortfalls deserves a lot of retrospective credit (just as he does on energy deregulation), and his recall in favor of Schwarzenegger's ice-cream-castles-in-the-air proposals was a predictable disaster.

UPDATE: Similar thoughts from Yglesias here.  

--Scott Lemieux

Congress' denial of funding to close Gitmo is being portrayed as a serious blow to the Obama administration's plans to close the facility. Ken Gude of CAP, whom I spoke to earlier regarding Congress' complicity in continuing Bush counterterrorism policies, also had some thoughts on the recent conflict over closing Gitmo. He said that Congress' decision wasn't necessarily a serious blow to the administration's plan, and that the fact that the administration hadn't set up a definite plan for what to do with the the detainees was a genuine problem.

“The administration was, I think caught unprepared for how big of an issue this was going to be in Congress, how fast it was moving there, and how it outpaced their policy development," Gude says. “It was always the administration’s intention to present a complete policy. So the hurdle set up by Congress is one that will be fairly easy to clear.”

-- A. Serwer

William Galton's post yesterday at TNR, arguing that the latest Gallup and Pew figures on abortion should counsel the president to "think twice before nominating someone with a long record of support for positions far outside the current cultural mainstream" for the Supreme Court is just plain wrong. Wrong about the polls, wrong about what the polling means, wrong about what Democrats' strategy should be on abortion.

First, as I laid out in today's FundamentaList, and as several people far better versed in parsing polls than I am have shown, the recent Pew and Gallup polls that Galston latched onto are not reliable indicators of public opinion.

The most notable problem with the Gallup poll, which asked whether respondents considered themselves "pro-choice" or "pro-life," was that it was based on a sample that was divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans, when data (including Gallup's) shows Democratic voter registration is outstripping Republican voter registration by at least ten percentage points. That a slim majority of respondents identified as "pro-life" doesn't mean a majority of Americans identify as "pro-life."

Yet in these polls, Galston finds justification for a Democratic retreat on its reproductive rights position, because that's what the public would most want. Given that there's no evidence that this is the public's preference in the first place -- indeed there's ample evidence that most Americans want abortion to remain legal, with a few restrictions -- why treat hearty advocacy for the position as a dread disease? Support for reproductive rights shouldn't be feared and swept under the carpet so as to avoid "polarization." There's a legal and moral case for it. Making that case doesn't make you divisive or out of touch. Wear it proud.

--Sarah Posner

The Credit Card Reform bill has just passed the House, and it will soon go to President Obama to sign. Ron Lieber has a nice, clear explanation about what the bill actually does, and goes as far as to bunk the credit card industry's threats to cut back on reward programs.

“If you strip away the reward component of a credit card, it’s essentially a commodity,” said Rick Ferguson, editorial director at the loyalty marketing company LoyaltyOne. “The reward is what gives it its personality. It works from a branding perspective as well as a mechanism to influence customer behavior and consolidate spending on a particular card.”

That last part is crucial. People who spend a ton generate fees galore from merchants, and that money helps the card company stay in business. So you may soon see card companies giving away more goodies or lowering annual fees for people who hit certain spending thresholds each year. American Express already does this on a number of cards.

A while ago, in response to conservative fearmongering over holding Guantanamo inmates on American soil, Atrios pointed out that terrorists aren't "actual supervillains with special powers." The fact is that Congress has a Constitutionally mandated responsibility to consider the possibility that terrorists are supervillains with actual powers. Today, Glenn Greenwald makes a completely incorrect assertion:

Take note, Chris Cillizza and friends: while it's true that "not a single prisoner has escaped from Gitmo since it was created," it's also true that no Muslim Terrorists have escaped from American prisons and our SuperMax prison "has had no escapes or serious attempts to escape." Actually, the only person to even make an escape attempt from a SuperMax is Green Arrow, who hasn't succeeded despite the help of Joker and Lex Luthor.

Greenwald clearly doesn't remember the Magneto incident of 2003, in which the mutant supervillain escaped from his glass prison facility after Mystique increased the iron content in his guard's blood, which Magneto extracted using his ferrokinetic powers and then used to destroy his cell. Obviously, we need to discover if Gitmo inmates do have mutant abilities, which will undoubtedly require more waterboarding, and this has to be done before the administration gets a dime to close Guantanamo. In fact, I'm pretty sure Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the subject in 2002. 

-- A. Serwer

So I've been fairly critical of the Obama administration's failure to live up to its campaign promises in restoring the rule of law to the fight against terrorism. One way in which they differ from the Bush administration however, is that the authority they've asserted for detaining terrorism suspects indefinitely doesn't come from the "inherent" authority of the executive but from congressional authorization.

This means that theoretically, Congress could compel the administration to conform to the rule of law by repealing the Military Commissions Act. "I don’t believe Congress can say you have to try them in civilian court rather than court martial," says the Center for American Progress' Ken Gude. "But they would be able to say that he has to use the existing institutions.” Basically, Congress couldn't tell the administration which institution to use, but it would have to be one already established, such as federal court or military courts-martial (from a civil liberties point of view, the two are not significantly different).

The introduction of legislation to regulate the use of the State Secrets doctrine is an example of Congress' attempts to reject the president's authority on certain matters. Unfortunately, Congress seems far more concerned with binding the administration to Bush-era policies, and perhaps I haven't been fair to the administration in the sense that Congress is at least as complicit in preserving them as the administration has. They have the option to force the president's hand on a number of these issues--instead, they're more focused on keeping Guantanamo Bay open. On the other hand, they didn't spend 2008 making all of those flowery promises about the rule of law.

-- A. Serwer

In response to my column about new evidence showing that school integration matters, Joshua Curtis writes:

This is the first time that I’ve ever read anything that reflects my personal educational experiences. My parents are white ex-hippie lawyers who sent me to “bad” elementary and middle schools that had a high percentage of low income and minority students. However, I doubt this had a negative effect on my long-term academic success. Last year I graduated from Oberlin College and received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant grant. In a couple weeks I’m going to start training [for] Teach For America.

I think many parents, even liberal ones, believe that their children will be hurt if they attend a school with a significant number of low income students. But as your article says, this is not the case. Making more parents aware of this is important to gain political support, at both the local and national level, for creating racially and economically diverse schools.

I was also wondering what research supports this. I’d love to read it.

Great question, Josh, and congratulations on your new job. It sounds like my schooling experience was quite similar to yours. Here is some research that might interest you:

• Both Sides Now - Columbia University sociologist Amy Stuart Wells and her research team interviewed black, white, and Latino graduates of desegregated high schools. They found that as adults, these people were more tolerant of difference, placed a high value on diversity, and hoped to provide the same type of education experience for their own children
• Michigan State education expert Mary Kennedy found that nationwide, poor children who attend racially and economically segregated schools perform at a much lower level than similar poor children who attend integrated schools
• Sociologist Jomills Braddock found that black and Latino young adults were much more likely to be hired for a job if they attended suburban high schools instead of segregated, urban ones
• For some great narrative education journalism and a review of much of this research, check out The Children in Room E4, by Susan Eaton

--Dana Goldstein

Michael Steele threatens to quit his post if RNC members don't cease trying to undermine his authority. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that he'd be "shocked" if Steele didn't play the race card.

Isn't he already? The RNC wanted the social benefits of electing a black chairman, but unsatisfied with his performance several months into the job, they're trying to make him little more than a figurehead. The optics of the first black head of the RNC quitting his job because he wasn't trusted enough to have the same authority as his predecessors is obvious enough without Steele having to remind anyone. The best "race card" is the one no one can accuse you of playing.

-- A. Serwer

The lenders who inflated the housing bubble have arguably caused more damage than the executives behind the Enron or WorldCom scandals. So why is no one being punished? Tim Fernholz examines the efforts of attorneys general to hold predatory lenders accountable for the current economic crisis.

Meanwhile, Sarah Posner considers Obama's Notre Dame appearance and what the controversy says about his relationship with religious constituencies.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

Steve Benen points to this absurd piece from Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei setting up a "duel" between Dick Cheney and Barack Obama on national security tomorrow:

President Barack Obama will attempt to regain control of a boiling debate over anti-terrorism policy with a major speech on Thursday -- an address that comes on the same day that former Vice President Dick Cheney will be weighing in with his own speech on the same theme.

The dueling speeches amount to the most direct engagement so far between Obama and his conservative critics in the volatile argument over what tactics are justified in detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants.

Let's be clear: as Jack Goldsmith pointed out yesterday, the Obama administration's policies differ little in substance from the Bush administration. Cheney's position amounts almost entirely to a defense of torture, the only issue on which the Obama administration has made a substantive breach from his predecessor. This is political journalism as sportscasting. Goldsmith wrote yesterday:

If this analysis is right, then the former vice president is wrong to say that the new president is dismantling the Bush approach to terrorism. President Obama has not changed much of substance from the late Bush practices, and the changes he has made, including changes in presentation, are designed to fortify the bulk of the Bush program for the long-run. Viewed this way, President Obama is in the process of strengthening the presidency to fight terrorism.

The "duel" being hyped by Vandehei and Allen amounts to an argument over whether torture is justified and whether or not to shove the same counterterrorism policies of the last eight years down our throats with a scowl or a smile. In Goldsmith's view, Obama's approach is better because it's more likely to elicit popular consent.

High stakes, huh?

-- A. Serwer

If true, this is hilarious. Reportedly, Venezuela and Russia were close to a deal on purchasing several ultra-quiet KILO diesel submarines. Last November's visit to Venezuela by the Russian nuclear battlecruiser Peter the Great was intended to enhance the status of both nations and to help seal the submarine deal. Unfortunately, a dispute broke out:

[Dave Sherlaw of Seawaves] pointed out that the KILOs (the subs) destined for Vietnam were originally to be purchased by Venezuela but that deal collapsed after a fistfight on board the Russian cruiser “Peter the Great” when it and other warships were visiting Venezuela.

Venezuela’s leader Chavez was in the process of visiting the Russian flotilla but his bodyguards were prevented from boarding. A fistfight then broke out between the Russian sailors and the bodyguards. The nose of one Russian was broken.

That ended the sub purchase.

Evidence against: Sailors get in fights all the time, although admittedly not with the bodyguard of the president in the presence of the president. To the extent that the fight mattered, it may simply have given Chavez and excuse to cancel a deal that he was already reconsidering.

As noted, the Russian naval visit to Venezuela was intended to enhance the prestige of both countries. The Russians could demonstrate a capability to operate on distant shores (the battlecruiser is currently operating off Somalia), and the Venezuelans could demonstrate the friendship of a powerful state. Since the planning of the expedition, however, world oil prices have crashed, along with the rest of the global economy. Whether or not this incident in particular had a role in quashing tighter cooperation between Venezuela and Russia, the specter of a Moscow-Caracas-Havana axis, such that it could have been, will not haunt the United States for some time.

Via Galrahn.

--Robert Farley

Speaking at an education reform convention in Los Angeles hosted by the New Schools Venture Fund, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced yesterday that he has hired that group's COO, Joanne Weiss, as the administrator of the $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund -- the segment of the stimulus package aimed at "scaling up" successful school reform efforts happening at the state level. To the delight of the pro-charter school, pro-merit pay crowd, Duncan has indicated that a special focus of the fund will be on developing merit pay models for teachers, as well as on teacher recruitment for high-need areas. Other priorities for the money include more rigorous academic standards for students, interventions for low-performing schools, and more effective educational data systems.

Weiss' appointment is significant because of her clear identification with one side in the "education wars" roiling the Democratic coalition. The New Schools Venture Fund is an organization that moves money from private sector philanthropists into public school education reform efforts. The group is a key ally of D.C. schools superintendent Michelle Rhee, whose proposal to use private funding to launch an ambitious teacher merit pay system has come under fire from teachers' unions and local community groups. In a bad economy, some education experts question whether this funding model is reliable or sustainable -- and whether "edu-preneurs" will have the patience necessary to commit to long-term projects in the frustrating world of urban public education.

Regardless of these broader politics at play, Weiss' direct experience in funding school reform efforts certainly augurs well for the Race to the Top Fund. As Eduwonk Andrew Rotherham has written, with the $4.35 billion representing a drop in the bucket of the massive economic stimulus package, there are concerns about how this money will be allocated and spent. According to my sources in Colorado, which is considered a leading contender for the funds, the DOE is planning on rewarding Race to the Top grants to projects in just 8 to 12 states. Applications for the fund are due at the end of summer, and the money won't be distributed until next year.

--Dana Goldstein

On Monday, D.C.'s Ward 5 Democrats voted down the same marriage equality resolution adopted in Wards 8, 4, and 2. Ward 8 Democrats' support for the measure may have obscured what was going to be more of a fight from the beginning; on Saturday I remember marriage equality activists remarking that "Ward 5 was going to be tough." The turnout was also much greater than in Ward 8. In ward 5, the resolution was voted down 87-51, compared to 21-11 in support in Ward 8.

UPDATE: Yesterday the Ward 6 Democrats at the Southeast Branch Public Library in Eastern Market endorsed the marriage equality resolution by a large magin, 73-3. The demographics of this group however, were significantly different than in Wards 5 and 8. It was a much whiter, more bohemian crowd.

-- A. Serwer

• Michael Steele’s big pep talk to the RNC today is like something from a different dimension. “The era of apologizing for Republican mistakes of the past is now officially over,” he said. Really? When was that “era?” “We are at a crucial juncture for our party, and more importantly for our country. Simply put, America needs us now more than ever before,” Steele claimed. Nope. Steele then went on to describe “an end to the era of Republicans looking backward” before framing the Republican comeback in terms of a president who left office twenty years ago and has been dead for five.
• What the GOP really needs, as Jacob Heilbrunn suggests, is its own secret speech denouncing the likes of Dick Cheney. Agreed. Of course, this is a party that can’t even stand up to radio talk show host, so good luck.
• Kudos to the good people of Hardin, Montana, who recognize that incarceration is is something America does very well. They've requested to have 100 Guantanamo detainees sent to an empty prison there. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are threatening to cut off funding for closing Gitmo because they don’t believe the administration has provided enough adequate security for the transportation of these supervillians.
• Jeffrey Toobin on Chief Justice John Roberts: “The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.” I guess protecting the powerless from the powerful just isn’t in style any more.
• A special shout-out to Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, for retaining George Will, whose ability to substitute his irrational hatred of my home city for actual understanding of transportation policy surely ranks him as one of America’s finest columnists.
• Remainders: Harry Reid looks vulnerable, but has no real competition as of yet; Lanny Davis argues we should accept Dick Cheney’s challenge to indict him for authorizing torture; Politico experiments with bold new WTF? journalism; and a Democratic Senator from Oklahoma?

—Mori Dinauer

An extra brief TTR this week, because I'd rather be outside. Plus, we're in between spring and summer interns. On that note, much thanks to our Spring 2009 crew: Josh Linden, Jake Blumgart, and Malcolm Kenton. On to the thinking...

• "Health Care reform can cut deficits." This report from the Center for American Progress makes the definitive argument that cost-saving measures can be an important part of health-care reform. Here's how to save hundreds of billions of dollars.
• "City on a what now?" The good folks at the Center for Economic and Policy Research observe that the U.S. is now ranked fourth-from-last in the OECD's unemployment measures, suggesting that perhaps we should reconsider the benefits of the U.S.' "flexible" employment model.
• "Back to the U.S.S.R.? [PDF]" One oft-unpleasant comparison made to the current conflict in Afghanistan is the Soviet occupation of the country in the 1980s, which ended up being a significant defeat for the U.S.S.R. and hastened its demise as a polity. Now, Bruce Reidel, who headed up the Obama administration's Af-Pak policy review, has written a piece for the CTC Sentinel, published by West Point, that compares the Russian experiece and our own. Very interesting reading for anyone keeping tabs on Afghanistan, via the always informative Abu M.

-- Tim Fernholz

Previous Round-Ups:
5/12/09
5/5/09

Via Matt, I see that Ross Douthat is going after Dan Brown's books for being anti-Catholic, both on a superficial level and then more broadly in Brown's sort of glossy modern religiousity. Far be it from me to defend Brown, an awful writer and ridiculous theologian (if that's what he considers himself) who apparently thought that Foucault's Pendulum would be a much better book if someone just dumbed it down a little. But Matt doesn't even go as far as he can in his observation that the Catholic Church is well-suited to conspiracy theories. He forgets that the Catholic Church very recently participated in a wide-spread, systematic effort to cover up numerous instances of priests sexually abusing children, so one shouldn't be surprised that people don't find other such theories, however implausible, worthy of fictional consideration. (Lest I'm accused of being anti-Catholic for bringing up that point, let me note that I'm a regular Mass-attender myself.)

More broadly, Douthat's column is a broadside against religion-lite folks who prefer their faith to be one of simple goodwill and broad-minded tolerance rather than one that engages with the myriad complexities, contradictions, and downright unpleasantness that are a part of any authentic faith tradition. I'm not inclined to judge those folks, or even the dread atheists, and this blog post isn't really the place to debate Catholic soteriology with Douthat, so I'll leave his ideas about exclusive truth alone.

But in that context, this sentence made me raise my eyebrows a little: "The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — jealous, demanding, apocalyptic — may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is." Indeed, the Jesus of the canonical gospels is a pretty wild dude, even a radical, and is extremely difficult to reconcile with almost any present day sensibility. Given that Douthat seems to be suggesting that we should choose this Jesus over Dan Brown's (as if there were no other valid interpretations), it surprises me that, in my admittedly non-extensive reading of Douthat's work, I have never seen him grapple with the implications of Christ's extremely non-contemporary sensibilities, particularly the political ones. Can anyone point me to Douthat's efforts to do what he is, apparently, advocating?

-- Tim Fernholz

Two more bits of information have come to light casting doubt on the CIA's version of events in 2002, when they claim Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the use of torture. The first is that, via Spencer Ackerman, Rep. David Obey sent a letter to CIA director Leon Panetta claiming that the CIA erroneously listed an appropriations staffer as present during the meeting when he wasn't. The second is that the term "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," which appears in the document describing the briefing, Zachary Roth reports, didn't come to use until several years after the briefing itself.

It's been said before, but it's worth remarking that the only public official who seems to be paying a price for the Bush administration's torture policy is Pelosi, which doesn't make any sense. The original rationale for bringing Pelosi into this, from the right's perspective, was proving that what was done wasn't a crime, because otherwise "they wouldn't have briefed Pelosi." Now it seems that we didn't torture, torture isn't illegal, and Nancy Pelosi should step down for not having stopped the Bush administration's illegal torture program. Of course, the only way to really know her degree of responsibility is to look closer at what happened, something the GOP wants to avoid.

Late last week, everyone was buzzing about Edmund Andrews' Times Magazine piece, in which he documented his family's descent into a sub-prime mortgage and crippling debt -- all despite the fact that Andrews earns a generous $120,000 annually as a New York Times staff writer. Megan McArdle spent the weekend reading the book from which the piece was excerpted, and confirms what I suspected: that Andrews' troubles can be traced back, rather clearly, to his habit of marrying women who have opted out of the work force.

The precipitating cause of Andrews' financial problems were a divorce and a rather hasty second marriage, to a woman named Patty. Andrews and Patty dated bi-coastally for one year before Patty and her 10-year old daughter moved from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The couple merged their households and bought a half-million-dollar suburban home immediately, despite the fact that Andrews was paying his first wife $4,000 each month in alimony and child support. That left him with just $2,777 in take-home pay -- and with a new wife who hadn't held a full-time job since the early 1980s.

Unsurprisingly, at first, Patty was unable to secure a middle-income job. When she finally did, she was fired less than a year later. Patty's ex, meanwhile, was in arrears on his $700/month in child support. That meant Andrews was attempting to support two women and four children, essentially maintaining two totally separate households.

Megan's interpretation is that Andrews "couldn't afford to get married. At all." In fact, what Andrews couldn't afford was to marry women unprepared to participate in the work force. (And if he was going to do so, he really should have rented instead of bought real estate.) I'm not suggesting that people in love shouldn't get married. Rather, life is precarious, both emotionally and financially. An effective way for women to inure themselves and their children against this precariousness, at least somewhat, is to work -- regardless of their marital status.

--Dana Goldstein

At Religion Dispatches, the indefatigable chronicler of conservative movements Chip Berlet has written the essential assessment of what is wrong with the "common ground" with religious conservatives that some Democratic activists claim will end the culture wars.

If you've been following this rumble here and in The FundamentaList, you know the basic outlines: Some Democratic consultants and progressive think tanks decided that the old battles over abortion and gay rights were stale and that everyone was tired of arguing. Why not agree on some "common ground" with religious conservatives and make all that go away?

I've obviously been skeptical of that approach -- both as a matter of political expediency and of justice. And Berlet is, too. With his new piece, Berlet has taken the discussion to new heights of understanding, by describing the players in detail but without rancor, and by making a moral and fact-based argument why the common ground approach won't help win elections and will actually set the progressive movement back. As a self-identified progressive and member of the religious left, Berlet pleads with Beltway activists to focus on advancing a progressive agenda, rather than adopting what he calls a "Christian right frame." He writes:

This is more than just a squabble over who among the religious gets to claim the name progressive, its a struggle over whether or not the Obama administration will follow the path blazed by community organizers seeking social, economic, and gender justice. This will not happen unless there is sufficient pressure on them to do so. ... We think the term “progressive” has real meaning, and scoff at attempts by Inside the Beltway players to transform it into a re-branded code for backsliding Democrats. ... There is nothing wrong with reaching out to Christian evangelicals and people from other faith traditions, I have been doing it for 30 years. But as an active member of the Christian Left who spent over a decade as a community and labor organizer, I see a problem. As progressives we should be reaching out to people of faith, including evangelicals, but we need clearer criteria for those with whom we seek to work.

Read the whole thing.

--Sarah Posner

A Gallup poll finds that since 2007, Republicans have lost voters in nearly all categories except for frequent churchgoers. 

So far in 2009, aggregated Gallup Poll data show the divide on leaned party identification is 53% Democratic and 39% Republican -- a marked change from 2001, when the parties were evenly matched, according to an average of all of that year's Gallup Polls. That represents a loss of five points for the Republicans and a gain of eight points for the Democrats.

-- A. Serwer

This weekend, gay-rights activists across the globe observed the International Day Against Homophobia. In Moscow, however, what should have been a peaceful march was quashed by riot police. Michelle Goldberg considers the reaction and wonders if homophobia is the new anti-Semitism.

Meanwhile, Paul Waldman looks at the state of health-care reform and determines that Republicans are doing their best to repeat history.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

Since I'm on semi-vacation in New Hampshire, I've more-or-less missed the ever-shrinking Blogger Commentary Time Window (BCTW) on Utah Governor Jon Huntsman's nomination as the United States Ambassador to China.

Anyway, I did want to draw attention to this commentary by Christian Brose, which does a good job of laying out what Huntsman's probable assumptions are about his political future and that of his party. But readers, remember: No one has any idea how the politics of 2012 will shake out, and any political calculation based on current assumptions is just a mistake. Looking at Brose's conventional wisdom handicapping of the 2012 GOP, I don't see much to disagree with, but now we have to get into Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns territory. Remember when everyone thought George Allen was a front-runner for the 2008 GOP nomination? Hillary Clinton for the Democrats? The permanent Republican majority of 2004? The never-ending Democratic majority in Congress for most of the latter half of the prior century? You get my point. Whatever Huntsman's calculus is, I hope it isn't entirely predicated on the political climate three years from now.

On that note, I also wouldn't assume that a politician's every motivation has to do with becoming president someday, or even moving up to whatever the next notch on the ladder is (although it's not an unsafe assumption, either). North Carolina's Roy Barnes isn't running for Richard Burr's Senate seat despite a good chance he could take it, and New Hampshire's John Lynch won't run for a Senate seat that is practically a given for him. It's certainly possible that Huntsman, who has long experience in Asia and an obvious fascination with Chinese language and culture, might just covet the most important diplomatic post in the region.

-- Tim Fernholz

Christopher Hitchens has a new piece up complaining that Wanda Sykes' routine didn't poke enough fun at the president--a criticism that I'm sympathetic to--but then he comes up with this:

There used to be a mildly racist comedian in England named Les Dawson who thought it amusing to ask what West Indians said to themselves while using the black-and-white strips of the pedestrian crossing. ("Now you see me, now you don't; now you see me, now you don't.") In order for this to be funny in the least—and I frankly despaired of it ever achieving that critical mass so essential to the life and definition of a comedian—it would have to be just as funny if a "white" person was traversing the road in the same way.

Not laughing yet? Me neither. Well, then, why is it so "edgy" for Wanda Sykes to say that Obama gets lots of praise now, but that if he messes up, it'll be, "What's up with the half-white guy?" This can be remotely hilarious only if said by somebody nonwhite, but almost every paleface in the audience seemed to feel it their duty to rock back and forth with complicit mirth.

I thought this joke was hilarious, I thought it was hilarious partially because I am mixed, and I'm going to ruin the joke by explaining it. 

Black people are constantly being judged as a whole by the successes or failures of individuals--when one of us becomes famous or infamous, white folks who have little experience with black folks in real life come to conclusions based on what they see or hear. As a result, we're incredibly self-conscious about how we're perceived in the public eye--so much so that a black person that achieves a measure of success, no matter how light skinded or how much you deny your heritage--you can be Anatole Broyard, Jean Toomer, or Tiger Woods, we'll still claim you as reflective of what we, as a people, are capable of. At the same time, we feel pressure to disassociate from those who meet harmful the kind of harmful stereotypes that remain pervasive.

The joke is funny because it reveals the irony of a miserable social dynamic--despite what he's already achieved, the success or failure of Obama's presidency will ultimately reflect on the black community as a whole, not just on the United States. At the same time, we spent several months of the past year debating whether Obama was actually black--when we all really know the answer. Like so much good black humor, it squeezes a laugh from something that should bring us to tears. It's also not so complicated that it should be beyond a white audience with some cursory knowledge of black history. 

Hitchens, for some reason, hears "white" and thinks the joke is on him. He's so used to being perceived as brilliant--and so sensitive to the idea that he, as a white man, is being slighted--that he doesn't even consider that he just didn't get the joke. The example from the racist comedian makes this plain--the simple punchline of that joke is "black people are ugly and different." Hitchens' column doesn't just betray a lack of sophistication in not getting Sykes' joke--it betrays a lack of intellectual curiosity. He didn't even think there was something there not to get, and so he didn't bother to ask anyone.

-- A. Serwer

Welcome to our second installment of "Ask a Feminist," in which our own Dana Goldstein and Ann Friedman address a topic in the news related to gender and feminism. Today's episode features a question from Matt Yglesias: "Is it sexist to say the financial crisis was caused by men?"

Please email questions for future episodes to isitsexist at gmail.com -- or leave them in comments!

Links discussed in this video:

• Michael Lewis on the Icelandic financial crisis and gender
• Joe Hagan on "The Crash of Zoe Cruz"
• Michael Janofsky on the women of the credit crisis
• Study shows women better investors than men

--The Editors

So the "Coalition for a Democratic Workplace" (Orwellian!) is pissy because The Washington Post has offered support for the compromise Employee Free Choice legislation being negotiated in the Senate, which eliminates majority sign-up in favor of an accelerated election with a mail-in ballot and moves first-contract arbitration to the "baseball" model. Of course, now that business interests have succeeded in taking the original majority sign-up procedure off the table, they're still opposing the legislation -- now calling it "postcard check" -- because they don't really care about workers' rights, they just don't like unions. It all becomes clear in this paragraph, which comes after the outright lie that the new legislation would give organizers "unfettered" access to employees at their workplaces:

Unions already enjoy significant access to employees outside of the workplace: They can visit employees' homes and approach workers in parking lots and other public places. Giving professional organizers unprecedented workplace access would disrupt productivity and infringe on worker privacy.

Remember when business was in a tizzy because those malicious union organizers might come to your house and intimidate you into signing up for card-check? (Never mind there's no evidence intimidation is happening.) Now it's apparently the employers' preferred outcome. One also wonders if they think the unfettered access management has to employees is any kind of infringment on worker privacy.

The author here suggests that federal election standards might be a good way to look at NLRB. Well, that's a framing of the debate we can agree on! To understand just how unfair the current union organizing process is, federal election standards make a nice standard. Here's a somewhat oversimplified animation on the subject, and here's a much more rigorous study of the differences. And, for the hat trick, here's a chart:

If the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace wants to start the argument with those standards, by all means, let's have it.

-- Tim Fernholz

I think Glenn Greenwald is correct that Obama has successfully managed to embrace Bush policies while being labeled a "centrist." By appearing to tether him between two "extremes," the administration has won the approval of what has been dubbed the "respectable intellectual center." The problem is that "the respectable intellectual center" makes no policy distinctions: Its opinions are governed entirely by where positions appear to land on an ideological scale. So despite the fact that Obama's military commissions will be virtually indistinguishable from Bush's, (as former Bush OLC lawyer Jack Goldsmith writes, "Suspects tried in Obama military commissions gain relatively little from the Bush baseline") the White House has managed to spin them as some sort of "compromise." Marc Ambinder reported on Friday: 

This point has been overlooked in the first round of coverage about President Obama's decision to use military commission tribunals for some of the Gitmo detainees: according to an administration official, most of the remaining 241 detainees will be afford Article III trials -- that is, fully-fledged, regular trials, unless they're released without trial. Some of them might be shunted to a newly-created national security court, if the administration and Congress team up to create one. The remaining detainees -- presumably dangerous folks who the administration wants to detain but who haven't had the right type of evidence accumulated against them -- will be tried by the military. The AP says about 20 military commissions will be held.

Well the Bush administration only charged about 12 or 13 detainees, so only out of context does 20 sound like a compromise. The Bush administration also tried several high-profile terrorists in federal court, including Zacharias Moussaoui and Richard Reid. Should they be remembered as champions of civil liberties? Andrew Sullivan, responding to Ambinder, commented on what he referred to as the "Obama straddle":

I'm much more sympathetic to Obama's compromise than Glenn. Once you remove torture, and allow for real legal defenses, and avoid hearsay, the worst of the Bush-Cheney system is eliminated. And it remains my belief that the conflict with al Qaeda is much more like war than criminal enforcement. Finding a way to provide some of the nimbleness and expedition of war-powers without the inhumane dimension of the Cheney era is not easy. But it strikes me that the president is making a thoughtful effort to get the balance right.

Sullivan, after writing for years about the lawlessness of the Bush administration, accepts the Obama military commissions largely because of a change in style. Let me repeat: There's very little substantive difference here between what Bush did and what Obama is doing. They are changes, Goldsmith writes, in "packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric." 

The "reasonable" position is fast becoming the idea that it's OK for us to deny the right to due process for the "really dangerous" detainees. It's hard to see how this is a "compromise" of any kind -- it's like being sort of pregnant. Either there's due process or there isn't. The military commissions will deny due process to people who may have been implicated through torture or hearsay. Some of them may be genuinely dangerous, but that's not a reason to deny them due process. Doing so is only a "compromise" if you buy the administration's framing that Republicans want to boil terrorists in oil and liberals want to sign them up for ultimate frisbee. Because the instinct of the "respectable intellectual center" is to find whatever position seems to lie between two "extremes" and stick to it, Obama's almost wholesale embrace of Bush counterterrorism policies can be sold as a "compromise." But if you believed the last administration was "extreme" in its assertion of executive power, than this one is too. 

-- A. Serwer

Our editor Mark Schmitt recently discussed torture and the law with Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute on Bloggingheads. In this clip, the two consider the role of empathy in legal judgments. Watch the whole thing here.

--The Editors

Get ready. Every time the government threatens to regulate any kind of industry in the financial sector, whether the big banks, mortgage lenders, or, in today's case, credit card companies, you can expect a claim along these lines:

The industry says that the proposals will force banks to issue fewer credit cards at greater cost to the current cardholders.

You want to regulate us? Well, credit will 'dry up.' The article reports that the credit card industry will be unable to profit from hidden fees and near-usurious interest rates when the government bans them in new regulations currently under debate in the Senate (and other new regulations that will be implemented by the Fed in 2010). Now, this is factually true, but akin to a thief complaining that it's going to be so much harder to make money now that he can't just steal things anymore. White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee gets how credit card lenders are eliding responsibility of their actions:

“The card industry is giving the argument that if you didn’t want to be carjacked, why weren’t you locking your doors or taking a different road?” Mr. Goolsbee said.

So how much will the credit cards change under the new regime? Unclear, although it is possible interest rates will rise slightly and perhaps more or higher annual fees will be charged for people who have good credit. But even if they can't retroactively raise your interest rate on past balance or charge hidden fees for any number of ridiculous reasons (credit card companies once attempted to charge a fee for paying your balance on time), they will still be competing for customers, and it's hard to see how someone with a solid credit score won't benefit from that situation. Meanwhile, people without solid credit scores won't be victimized, and maybe some people (like college students, for instance) won't be able to get credit cards they don't need and shouldn't have. This is still going to be a very lucrative industry, and I'm not sympathetic to the idea that they need to maintain their pre-crash profit margins. Oh, you say, but they're facing $82 billion worth of defaults? Maybe they shouldn't have designed their business model around harshly penalizing failing customers instead of creating viable lines of credit.

-- Tim Fernholz

Photo courtesy Flickr user JudeanPeoplesFront.

• As if the Waxman-Markey climate change bill working its way through Congress weren't contentious enough, President Obama has chosen to complicate things by introducing national emissions and mileage standards at a White House event scheduled for tomorrow. The rule change would effectively replicate California's tough standards at the national level and be fully implemented by 2016.
• President Obama tapped Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman to be U.S. ambassador to China late Friday, and while a lot of the chatter seems to be around Obama cleverly neutralizing an extremely hypothetical 2012 opponent, it turns out that Huntsman is, you know, very well qualified for the job. Meanwhile, it seems former president Bill Clinton will be named UN special envoy to Haiti.
• I think the GOP's new found obsession with bringing down Nancy Pelosi -- even if it makes a truth commission more likely -- is very telling of their tendency to prize tactics over strategy (or confuse the two). Pelosi hasn't changed her position on investigating torture, after all, and continues to insist the investigation will determine who's right about her claim that the CIA lied to Congress.
• Robert Draper's devastating look at the tenure of Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary is certainly in the must-read category. But as important as it is to show what a disaster Rumsfeld was, by making him the focus there's the risk of invoking the incompetence dodge.
• Weekend Remainders: Sen. Robert Byrd is hospitalized; the NRA just seems to bring out the crazy by osmosis; Obama goes to bat for Kirsten Gillibrand; Sen. Jim Webb disappoints; Dana Perino is the latest Bush flack to find a home at Fox News; Bill O'Reilly is apparently a very stupid man; and a potential NASA administrator chats with his potential new boss.

--Mori Dinauer

Ezra Klein's "first day at school," as he referred to it via Tweet, at The Washington Post included a keen observation about President Barack Obama's Notre Dame speech. Among the hullabaloo over abortion, Klein pulled out Obama's newer nuanced framing of climate change, placed in both a religious and broader global context for the college crowd. Drawing on a study from the British medical journal The Lancet, Klein wrote:

The developed countries that benefit most from fossil fuels will suffer least. The countries with the maximum incentive to prevent climate change have no power to do it. At Notre Dame, Obama exhorted the graduates to recognize that "that our fates are tied up, as Dr. King said, in a 'single garment of destiny.'" But we are not bound equally.

Exactly. Not only are we not equally bound, but our world will not just be one "hot, flat and crowded" planet, contrary to Thomas Friedman's sloganeering. Some areas will be much hotter than others, and much more crowded. These areas will mostly exist in the poorer, more vulnerable terrains of Africa, Asia, and South America. Oxfam International noted this point last month in their "Right to Survive" report, as did the World Bank in their working paper "Sea Level Rise and Storm Surges: A Comparative Analysis of Impacts in Developing Countries." Today, the U.N. released a report emphasizing the same disproportionate destructive impacts on countries least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. Among the key findings in the U.N.'s "Risk and poverty in a changing climate":

The policy and institutional frameworks for climate change adaptation and poverty reduction are only weakly connected to those for disaster risk reduction, at both the national and international levels. Countries have difficulty addressing underlying risk drivers such as poor urban and local governance, vulnerable rural livelihoods and ecosystem decline in a way that leads to a reduction in the risk of damages and economic loss.

A failure to address the underlying risk drivers will result in dramatic increases in disaster risk and associated poverty outcomes. In contrast, if addressing these drivers is given priority, risk can be reduced, human development protected and adaptation to climate change facilitated. Rather than a cost, this should be seen as an investment in building a more secure, stable, sustainable and equitable future. Given the urgency posed by climate change, decisive action needs to be taken now.

Boris Johnson, called on the C40 -- the world's 40 leading cities -- responsible for about 80 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions -- to make the steepest emissions-reductions goals. Four cities in that group are in Africa while three are in China, even though China is responsible for most of the world's carbon emissions. From 1850 through 2000 it was the U.S. and Europe who were the leading emitters -- responsible for 30 percent each of cumulative emissions in that time period. The U.S. still remains the emissions-per-capita leader.

The consequence is that impoverished areas of Africa, Asia, and South America -- mostly areas along the coasts -- will lead the world in health and mortality risks. As the U.N. report notes, the increase in cyclones, fueled by climate change, has led to a 200 times greater level of mortality figures in low-income countries than in developed ones. Poor countries are actually less likely to get hit by cyclones, but when they do, look out: They face an 81 percent higher risk of mortality. Single garment of destiny in this respect? Maybe for some. For others? More like multiple robes of dark fates.

-- Brentin Mock

With respect to Sonia Sotomayor's comments about the subtle relationship between diversity and judging -- judges should strive to be impartial, but obviously cannot step entirely out of their backgrounds and experiences -- Kerry Howley makes two accurate points: 1) they are entirely innocuous, and 2) Sotomayor's comments will be inevitably misrepresented by Senate Republicans if she is nominated by Obama. I would only add that Sotomayor's statements are more obviously true when dealing with appellate judging, when a judge is almost always choosing among multiple plausible interpretations as opposed to trying to determine what "the law" is. A decision handed down today provides a good example of this.

In 1976, The Supreme Court held in GE v. Gilbert (quite absurdly) that pregnancy discrimination by employers "was not a gender-based discrimination at all." Congress responded by overriding the Court's interpretation by passing the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, amending Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to outlaw pregnancy discrimination by employers. Today, the Court held 7-2 that the PDA should not be applied retroactively -- AT&T is permitted to pay lower pension benefits to female employees if they took maternity leave prior to the enactment of the PDA. Souter's opinion presents a plausible way of interpreting the statute, but as Justice Ginsburg notes in her dissent, one more consistent with the Court's current gender discrimination jurisprudence is available:

Today’s case presents a question of time. As the Court comprehends the PDA, even after the effective date of the Act, lower pension benefits perpetually can be paid to women whose pregnancy leaves predated the PDA. As to those women, the Court reasons, the disadvantageous treatment remains as Gilbert declared it to be: “facially nondiscriminatory,” and without “any gender-based discriminatory effect.”

There is another way to read the PDA, one better attuned to Congress’ “unambiguou[s] … disapproval of both the holding and the reasoning” in Gilbert. On this reading, the Act calls for an immediate end to any pretense that classification on the basis of pregnancy can be “facially nondiscriminatory.” While the PDA does not reach back to redress discrimination women encountered before Congress overruled Gilbert, the Act instructs employers forthwith to cease and desist: From and after the PDA’s effective date, classifications treating pregnancy disadvantageously must be recognized, “for all employment-related purposes,” including pension payments, as discriminatory both on their face and in their impact. So comprehended, the PDA requires AT&T to pay Noreen Hulteen and others similarly situated pension benefits untainted by pregnancy-based discrimination.

Do you think it's a coincidence that the only woman on the Court was one of the two dissenters in this case, while two more liberal members (albeit including one Gilbert dissenter) joined the majority? It's unlikely. Does that mean that Ginsburg was somehow subverting the law to her gender? Of course not -- her opinion is a perfectly plausible reading of the statute and is more consistent with its purpose than the majority's reasoning. It would benefit the court to have have a gender balance closer to that which pertains in the nation (not to mention the nation's law schools).

--Scott Lemieux

"Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it."

                                                                        -- Antonin Scalia, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 2004.

-- A. Serwer

I was at the Washington Highlands Public Library in Ward 8 this weekend, where the Ward 8 Democrats voted 21 to 11 to support a resolution calling for same-sex marriage in the District. Ward 8 is represented by Marion Barry, the former civil-rights activist and mayor of D.C. who recently warned of "civil war" in the District over gay marriage. Ward 8 is, as of 10 years ago, 93 percent black. Because of the nationwide perception in the wake of Prop. 8 that black people are more opposed to marriage equality than whites, Ward 8 was seen as a kind of litmus test for the District.

Despite his fiery rhetoric over the issue, Barry wasn't present; the president of the Ward 8 Democrats, Sandy Allen, said it was for health reasons. (She had to explain this twice, the second time because the audience kept heckling Barry in absentia for not being there.) There were about a hundred people there -- but only a handful were from Ward 8, and many non-residents were pro-marriage-equality activists, a fact that caused some visible resentment among some people in the audience.

The panel featured two pastors: one, the Rev. Dennis Wiley, who supported gay marriage and has performed same-sex marriages in his church, and one, the Rev. Patrick J. Walker, who was opposed. The panel also featured Ward 8 committeeman Philip Pannell, who is openly gay and was hired by Barry in the 1980s. At one moment, Panell recounted, telling Barry that since he had "jumped the broom four times, maybe he could give me a chance to do it once." The audience cracked up. Barry, with his four marriages, would be an unlikely defender of the "sanctity" of marriage if only the ranks of such people weren't filled with names like David Vitter and Newt Gingrich. The language of the resolution, which urged the D.C. City Council to adopt marriage equality with "all deliberate speed," was a subtle nod to the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

There is some considerable euphoria over the result of the Ward 8 vote, which I would caution people against embracing. The panel was noticeably lopsided. A 76-year old former school administrator named Calvin Lockridge stood up and demanded to speak on the grounds that the panel was unbalanced in favor of marriage equality (because Barry hadn't shown). Lockridge's speech led to the introduction of a second resolution to table the first until Ward 8 residents could be better "informed" on the issue. Curiously, more people voted in that resolution, which failed because it tied 19-19. Most of those who voted to table seemed supportive of a citywide referendum on the issue. Going forward, this will be the goal of those who oppose gay marriage.

I would say that it's very early to draw too many conclusions from the results in Ward 8. The marriage equality resolution passed in large part because the people who really cared about the issue showed up, and those people were in favor. Thirty-two people can hardly be seen as an accurate representation of views in Ward 8, which has a population of 70,000 people. Polling suggests that in a citywide referendum, supporters of marriage equality would be facing an uphill battle, which is precisely why opponents support a referendum and gay-rights advocates oppose one. At the same time, I think polling on the subject has largely overstated the intensity of black opposition to marriage equality in D.C: My theory is that if gay marriage was legalized, no one would care. But if it were put to a vote, the result would be very close. That's because while black people tend to be more opposed to gay marriage, it's not an identity-defining issue in the same way it is for white folks in the religious right. The memory of institutionalized oppression creates doubt where in others there might be religious certainty.

I think black voters, particularly in D.C., are malleable on this issue. (We did, after all, have domestic partnership laws "before it was cool"). The line that got the most applause during the entire meeting was the Rev. Wiley's declaration that "we would be in serious trouble if, as slaves, our freedom was put to a referendum." But that's just what might happen, and if gay-rights activists drop the ball in reaching out to the black community like they did in California, they'll lose.

"Don't make the perfect the enemy of the better" is a favorite slogan in Washington because compromise is necessary to get anything done. But the way things are going with health care, a better admonition would be: "Don't give away the store."

Many experts have long agreed that a so-called single-payer plan is the ideal, because competition among private insurers who pay health-care bills inevitably causes them to spend big bucks trying to find and market policies to healthy and younger people at relatively low risk of health problems while avoiding sicker and older people