ON OBJECTIVITY. Wow, a bunch of young journalists who don't believe in objectivity. I dunno, I'm going to have to side with Mike here. I rather like the idea of objectivity in reporting, by which I mean approaching the world with questions and letting the answers you get shape the story you write, rather than seeking only those facts that you can fit into a pre-conceived narrative. Now, I'm all for news outlets where people allow ideology -- or even just perspective -- to shape the questions they choose to ask, as we do at this magazine, but there's still something to be said for being reality-based in the pursuit of answers, I hope. Even ideological reporters can be objective in their assessment of facts.

I sometimes feel like the growth in media criticism as a field has led a lot of people to form higher-than-ever expectations of journalism. Journalism is not the Holy Bible, a set of fixed texts meant to be parsed and prodded and discussed ad infinitum. It's not in the business of creating permanent works designed for endless rounds of commentary (reports are not essays). It's the first rough draft of history, and, depending on the outlet, there should be real emphasis placed on the word "rough." Journalism is almost never "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God." It is, frequently, "What I could find out by deadline about this new thing that happened that my editor would let into the paper." (With the "what I could find out" part obeying, in good journalism, certain rules of comprehensiveness in terms of the intensity of the search.) Journalism is an attempt to impose narrative on the world, sure, but because the world is in constant flux, every written story is only part of a larger story. It's aspects of reality put into print. It's snapshots. To be sure, sometimes you can use a wide-angle lens -- but you can never fit the whole world in a single frame. There is almost never a last word. That's for historians. Journalists are students of the ever-unfolding present. Pundits try, often with little more success than fortune-tellers, to predict the future. And the distinction between reporters and media personalities -- that all too frequently gets elided these days. But count me in the same camp as Mike: There is value in the reality-based search and in the quest to simply uncover aspects of the world.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: DIVIDED WE STAND. The Democrats' problem is at once simple and, perhaps, impossible to solve, according to Terence Samuel. Theirs is the party that says we're all in this together. But who still believes that?

--The Editors

IDEOLOGY IN AMERICA. Thinking about Matt's post on ideological outlets, this is the sort of thing that's long been attractive to me. I really do think we need less "objective" news and more slanted, but transparent, coverage. The bias you know is better than the bias you don't. But one thing that worries me: A bunch of partisan outlets would be a problem. There's nothing honest or constant about their opinions, and so the whole advantage of knowing their beliefs evaporates when the beliefs become inconvenient and change.

In the United States, we have a sharply constrained spectrum of political thought -- only two parties of any relevance, and a public distaste for ideology. All of which is to say, I wonder if we have the culture or the institutions that would make ideological reportage a viable alternative. The UK, France, Germany, and others all have more serious ideological traditions than we do. And while, in the '50s and '60s we had the sort of philosophy-first groups that could've created a perspective-based reporting agency, today there are very few outlets that could sustain a non-party driven take on the news. On the other hand, these problems could evaporate, or could be a symptom of the objective media's disapproval of ideology, or could be solved by a popular new newspaper widening the allowable spectrum of opinion, etc., etc. So maybe such a paradigm would prosper after all. Any mega-rich commie simps want to put up some seed money?

--Ezra Klein

OY. Here we go again. Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and this:

Five U.S. Army soldiers are being investigated for allegedly raping a young woman, then killing her and three members of her family in Iraq, a U.S. military official said Friday.

The soldiers also allegedly burned the body of the woman they are accused of assaulting in the March incident, the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case....

a U.S. official close to the investigation said at least one of the soldiers, all assigned to the 502nd Infantry Regiment, has admitted his role and been arrested. Two soldiers from the same regiment were slain this month when they were kidnapped at a checkpoint near Youssifiyah.

The official told the AP the accused soldiers were from the same platoon as the two slain soldiers. The military has said one and possibly both of the slain soldiers were tortured and beheaded.

The official said the mutilation of the slain soldiers stirred feelings of guilt and led at least one of them to reveal the rape-slaying on June 22....

Senior officers were aware of the family's death but believed it was due to sectarian violence, common in the religiously mixed town, he said.

The killings appeared to have been a ''crime of opportunity,'' the official said. The soldiers had not been attacked by insurgents but had noticed the woman on previous patrols.

Every incident like this is more powerful than the millions of dollars spent by the State Department on public diplomacy. It also makes you wonder how much stuff like this goes on in Iraq that no one ever hears about it because no one confesses. There is a broad historical literature about how occupations are inherently corrupting over time, to both the occupier and the occupied, and while rapes by U.S. military personnel do occasionally occur in other nations where U.S. troops are stationed, the extensive and appalling cover-up here would not have been possible without the kind of massive power differential between U.S. troops and the local population that occupation creates.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TIME OUT OF MIND. So, just to take a clear stand against the rising tide of overt Young
Fogeyhood around these parts, I wear baseball caps, okay? My current one comes from Three Chimneys Farm in Kentucky. I wear them for comfort and for style, and because several centuries of Hibernian breeding left me with skin that is well-nigh translucent. I also wear them so that, when I read something like this, I have something handy I can throw across the room besides the obvious cursewords.

Who dealt this mess? I mean, a group of important someones at Time freaking Magazine need an essay on the lessons to be learned from TR's politics, and they all decide to hire a goon who should be kept away from elections for the same reasons we keep Charlie Manson away from the cutlery. And not only that, but a goon who spent a flat year hanging one of Time's own reporters out to dry. Karl Rove is not a historian. Karl Rove is not a political theorist. Karl Rove is not any combination of the two. He's a vandal and a thug who would tear the Time-Life Building down for a parking lot if he thought it would mean five points on the next Gallup Poll.

"There can be great joy in politics," reads the piece.

Great joy in politics.

Karl Rove.

Holy mother of God.

--Charles P. Pierce

CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE. As The Weekly Standard reports, homelessness really is plummeting across the country. Some of it is due to the inevitable effects of a sustained economic expansion and the restoration of balance (and cash) to previously-strapped state and local governments. But some is due to Bush administration policy.

Their "Housing First" program has sought to restore the low-cost residences that cities effectively zoned out of existence over the past few decades. To be sure, these aren't palatial accommodations, but some roof is better than none, and it offers a base upon which to begin treating other problems. This approach comes from a radical reevaluation of how to deal with social problems -- treating not the easy cases in the middle, but the hard cases on the fringe, and doing so without the array of preconditions and punishments that so often boot these subjects out of treatment. It's a remarkably nonjudgmental approach, and effective, too. Keep folks on the street and they end up in the hospital, costing literally hundreds of thousands a year. Housing, by contrast, may not solve everything, but it renders life less dangerous, and thus intervention less expensive. It's a legitimate policy achievement for the Bush administration and they deserve credit for it.

For more on the theory behind "Housing First," check out Malcolm Gladwell's article on the application of power laws to social problems. As he writes, these policies are a bit offensive to the American ideal. "From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn’t seem fair. Thousands of people in the Denver area no doubt live day to day, work two or three jobs, and are eminently deserving of a helping hand—and no one offers them the key to a new apartment. Yet that’s just what the guy screaming obscenities and swigging Dr. Tich gets...Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. We give them to widows and disabled veterans and poor mothers with small children. Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It’s simply about efficiency." The Bush administration, happily, resolved the conflict on the side of pragmatism, and the approach is paying dividends. Would that they do the same more often...

--Ezra Klein

AGAINST OBJECTIVITY. I guess I appreciate what the Supreme Leader is getting at in his column when he says that "any civil society needs institutions in every realm of life -- in business, the law, the arts, what have you -- that take as their presumptive raison d’etre not ideology but its opposite, impartiality." On the other hand, does it really follow from that that we need The New York Times? After all, England, France, and -- as far as I know -- pretty much all European countries seem to get on just fine without a broadsheet that aspires to American-style neutrality. Obviously, if the Times were to just vanish tomorrow, that would be bad, but if it were to transform itself into a feisty Guardian-style paper and prompt the creation of a counterpart rightwing national broadsheet, I think that would be good. After all, ideology need not be the enemy of quality. No liberal is going to approve of The Economist's politics, but it's still a way better magazine than Time or Newseek.

Be that as it may, I also think it's useful to distinguish between two ideas Mike sort of runs together -- non-partisan and non-ideological. Partisan journalism as practiced by, say, Fred Barnes or (frequently) Fox News is pretty deplorable. Ideological journalism, on the other hand, tends to be interesting and informative even when you disagree with it. Oftentimes, ideology and partisanship overlap, but not always. Reason is rigidly ideological but not at all partisan since it espouses an ideology no political party that ever hopes to win elections would touch with a ten-foot pole.

On a loosely related note, Mike observes that sometimes he laughs when he hears "that so-and-so reporter is a tool of the Bush administration when I know that so-and-so’s personal views aren’t that far away from mine. But such criticism means, from so-and-so’s perspective, that he or she is doing his or her job." That strikes me as an oft-crippling problem for neutral reporters who tend to respond to complaints about their work with the observation that since conservatives don't like them and liberals don't like them, they must be awesome truth-tellers. Well, maybe. Alternatively, maybe they're doing lots of bad work and pissing everyone off. Or maybe they're rigidly adhering to an elite consensus that is no less ideological than what the left or right are pushing. Or maybe they get complaints from both sides but one side is right and the other is wrong.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. The Supreme Court handed down a number of important decisions this week. Tracie Powell assesses the ambiguous implications of the Court's Texas redistricting decision for interpreting and enforcing the Voting Rights Act, while Deborah Pearlstein explains why the extraordinary Hamdan decision will affect far more than the U.S.'s policy for trying Guantanamo detainees.

--The Editors

VIEWER'S GUIDE: JUNE 29 -- INFINITY. I link to this only to point out that The Food Channel is likely to be the only place in the cable universe where this gentleman is not discussed for the foreseeable future. You can almost hear Sean Hannity's blood boiling, O'Reilly's in full loofah, and Rush probably isn't going to need his little helpers for a while. On a brighter note, Ward Churchill is probably off the hook.

--Charles P. Pierce

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: KELLER MUST STAY. Prospect supreme leader Mike Tomasky boldly flip-flops on the "fire Bill Keller?" question, in light of the current right-wing jihad against The New York Times sparked by the bank-records story. Liberals understand the need for institutions in society that at least strive to be impartial and non-ideological. The modern right believes no such thing, and that's why the Times, and its beleaguered editor, need defending.

--The Editors

$1 BEEELION DOLLARS. I don't find myself agreeing with Republican representative Dan Lungren very often, but this strikes me as a great idea. He's sponsored legislation offering a $1 billion prize to the first American automaker able to create, market, and sell 60,000 cars that get 100 mpg. He explains, "[c]ompetition for a prestigious prize is far more likely to get results than government programs aimed at anticipating and funding 'winners.' Although occasionally effective, federal subsidies are paid before an industry proves it can achieve what it set out to do, and all too often such subsidies are given to the politically influential, not the meritorious. But prize money is paid out only when the goal is achieved."

Quite right. I'd quibble with leaving this to American automakers -- if the intent is to popularize the car rather than subsidize politically influential corporations, other companies should get to play. Maybe the prize can be limited to the first company that develops, builds, and sells the automobiles in America (the Japanese makers, after all, are opening tons of domestic production plants). Nevertheless, it's a good concept, and the sort of outside-the-box thinking that could generate some interesting, unexpected results.

Update As Kevin Drum notes, the prize money is a bit on the low side for this sort of endeavor.

--Ezra Klein

SIEGELISM. Matt says he agrees. But it's easy to agree that all these young kids and their insouciant fashion statements make you mad. Matt's 25 now, and I'm sure in three years, I'll agree, too -- there appears to be a schedule for these sorts of opinions. For that reason, the question isn't whether he agrees with Siegel's banal crankiness, but his proposed remedy. "When I see someone wearing a baseball cap in a movie theater," Siegel writes, "I want them to bring back the guillotine." Siegelism in action -- take a mundane point (I don't like bloggers or baseball caps) and go for the wild overreach (they're fascists or we should execute cap wearers). When agreeing with Siegel, the question isn't the underlying opinion, but the overlay of nuttiness.

--Ezra Klein

STICKING UP FOR LEE SIEGEL. A lot of bloggers I respect are slagging on anti-blogofascist Lee Siegel's tirade against baseball caps, but let me say that flaws in Siegel's other writing notwithstanding, I totally agree with him about this.

--Matthew Yglesias

FOOL'S GOLD. Folks may remember the newly declassified discoveries of WMDs being touted by Rick Santorum, Curt Weldon, and others. The haul amounts to about 500 munitions which include sarin and mustard gas components and they are very, very scary. At least if you're a common household insect. That, at least, is the opinion of folks who actually know what they're talking about. Salon's Michael Scherer went by the congressional hearings meant to ascertain the potency of these armaments. The testimony, if it weren’t disproving the lies that led us into war, would've been funny. David Kay, the nation's top weapons inspector, explained that:

As far back as September 2004, the CIA had disclosed the discovery of the old chemical munitions from Iraq's war with Iran. The CIA also explained that these weapons were not the ones the Bush administration had used to justify the invasion of Iraq. What's more, Kay said, the decades-old sarin nerve gas was probably no more dangerous than household pesticides -- and far more likely to degrade at room temperature. "In terms of toxicity, sir," Kay told Weldon at one point, "I suspect in your house, and I know in my house, I have things that are more toxic than sarin produced from 1984 to 1988."

--Ezra Klein

WHEN IN DOUBT: FIND AN EXILE. Ah, excellent. Farid Ghadry, part of the Syrian exile group Reform Party of Syria, says that the recent operation where Israeli jets buzzed Bashar Asad's house "is very encouraging to the Syrian opposition." Let me go on record as sharing Justin Logan's skepticism. Appearing to be working in collaboration with the Israeli Defense Forces has not, historically, been a great method of gaining popular support in Arab countries.

The good news is that a couple of weeks ago Ghadry "met with Vice President Cheney on June 17 at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual retreat" in Colorado, so it's not like there's any precedent for this sort of thing going awry. I mean, Cheney + exiles + AEI = victory, right? Right.

--Matthew Yglesias

JONAH GOLDBERG RESPONDS. But not very convincingly. Here's the nut of it:

I think Ezra is desperate to misconstrue my point so that he can wag his finger and whine about mean and dishonest conservatives. My point was simple. The American economy depends on fossil fuels and the world depends on the Amerrican [sic] economy.

Jonah appears to cede the point that precisely none of his examples are related to the consumption of fossil fuels, and thus his markers of American economic leadership would survive a drastic increase in CAFE standards. Even so, this doesn't much help him. He'd now have to prove that the health of the American economy relies on our refusal to, say, deploy a serious carbon tax, or vastly raise CAFE standards, or embark on a serious conservation effort. He doesn't prove any of those things because he can't. As economists believe a serious anti-emissions effort would cost us about two tenths of a percentile of GDP growth over the next couple of decades, his point remains a dishonest attempt to conflate our economic success with our use of fossil fuels. In fact, it's not even clear how that's supposed to work -- is China, with their massive coal reserves, an underdeveloped nation because they lacked sufficient fossil fuels? Venezuela with their oil?

Indeed, Jonah undercuts his own argument when he wonders if I'd be willing to switch our high-tech sector from coal-generated electricity to nuclear. I sure would, and by admitting that there are non fossil-fuel related ways to power our economy, he demolishes the point of his original post -- that our economic leadership relies on fossil fuels. Many thanks, Jonah.

--Ezra Klein

THE CASE AGAINST READER MAIL. In response to the proposition that people should sometimes "make some decisions which are different from the ones dictated by narrow self-interest in a social context deeply shaped by the enduring legacy of sexism," reader J.R. remarks that my views are "simply fascism with a velvet glove." But I wrote them in a blog post, making it "hard fascism with a Microsoft face" in a velvet glove, which is really bad. Seriously, to coin a phrase, everyone needs to stop being such wankers about this. People make judgments about the prudential or ethical merits of others' life choices all the time -- that's not "fascism," it's functioning in human society.

--Matthew Yglesias

BODY POLITICS. The July/August print issue of the Prospect has a three-article package on abortion politics that is now available online, and worth a look. Helena Silverstein and Wayne Fishman assess the Supreme Court's swing voter on abortion, Anthony Kennedy, while Allison Stevens reports on a crucial shortcoming in the choice movement's strategy. Finally, Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns, and Money fame does us all the service of delivering -- at long last -- a comprehensive riposte to the scores of contrarian arguments proffered by "pro-choicers" about how women and Democrats might be better off if Roe was overturned. Lemieux makes the definitive counter-counter-intuitive anti-anti-Roe case here, and it's well worth a read.

--Sam Rosenfeld

EMERGENT MEME WATCH. Joe Scarborough is a real problem for my channel-flipping habit. Every time I happen across his program, I pause, figuring I've found Friends, only to realize that someone gave Chandler a rightwing talkshow. It's no mere resemblance -- the two look precisely identical. It's such a shame, I never figured Chandler the Republican type.

Anyway, that's all digression. Yesterday, Chandler/Scarborough hosted a global warming segment with John Stossel, who was arguing that worries over global warming are not, in fact, about the logistical issues that will make Bangladesh unlivable, but about a deep-seated hatred of capitalism. Yes, if you're worried about global warming, you're a commie.

But Stossel is something of a laughingstock anyway, so I didn't take the segment very seriously. Jonah Goldberg, though, has changed my mind, offering up nearly the same argument over at The Corner. Jonah's formulation is less accusatory (you're not necessarily a Communist) and more affirmative: Our massive overproduction of greenhouse gases is simply because the "American economy sustains the planet, pulls millions out of poverty, keeps the sea channels open, develops most of the medical breakthroughs, provides most of the funding for international institutions (including the finger-waggers at the UN's environmental divisions), offers the best higher education to the world's leaders, and generally provides a blanket of security for much of the planet." The trick here is to set global warming advocates in opposition to, say, cancer researchers, whom we all know work in a field deeply dependent on fossil fuel combustion. It is, of course, crap. Our disinterest in renewables, absurdly low CAFE standards, weak public transport system, and overuse of automobiles explains our greenhouse production -- our higher education infrastructure does not.

I take on Jonah's argument a bit more fully at my other place, but the logical refutation is scarcely the point. The science of the issue is largely settled. More importantly, the American people are largely convinced: 60 percent think the issue requires action, while only 9 percent believe concern is unwarranted. So here comes the right's next tactic: Redefine global warming as the inevitable result of a strong, innovative, and growing economy, and smear efforts to curb emissions as too punitive to contemplate. This effort is no more honest than their last, and I'll leave it to the eminent economist Paul Krugman to refute:

There's some dispute among economists over how forcefully we should act to curb greenhouse gases, but there's broad consensus that even a very strong program to reduce emissions would have only modest effects on economic growth. At worst, G.D.P. growth might be, say, one-tenth or two-tenths of a percentage point lower over the next 20 years. And while some industries would lose jobs, others would gain.

--Ezra Klein

NEVER SACRIFICE? I don't really want to spend all day on this, but Jonah Goldberg's posted and endorsed an email on Linda Hirshman that makes the bizarre claims that her arguments are "fantastically illiberal" because "Hardly anyone in our deeply liberal society argues that we should sacrifice our desires to a greater good — the churches do, ever so timidly, but that's about it."

Come on, now. For one thing, we're not living in a libertarian utopia. We're all subject to any number of legal regulations on the pursuit of our desires enacted in the name of some greater good. So many that I don't think I should need to enumerate them. Besides regulatory efforts, we're all beset by any number of efforts to use moral suasion to get people to check their desires in pursuit of larger social goals. I cursed at a Wizards playoff game and earned a dirty look from a father sitting in front of me with his young daughter. People ask me to contribute to charity. Religious groups tell teenagers not to have sex. People try to shame other people out of wearing fur. Cheating on your spouse is generally held in low regard. I don't think anyone -- even at Hit and Run -- thinks "it's what I wanted to do" constitutes an absolute defense against moral criticism.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE DAILY SHOW REVISITED. I awoke this morning to a gleeful Lee Siegel post trumpeting a new study that shows, just as Siegel predicted, that exposure to The Daily Show turns viewers off of politics. "Jon Stewart's show," Siegel wrote, "is destroying democracy as we know it."

Only it isn't. Siegel got his information from a woefully incomplete Washington Post column on the subject, whose author either didn't read the paper he purported to explain or didn't understand it. The actual findings were that Stewart's show increases cynicism towards politics, but included no data showing that heightened cynicism decreases participation (indeed, I'd expect it wouldn't). Determined to get to the bottom of this, I employed a variant of the secret reporter tactic of PUTDP (Picking Up The Damn Phone) and sent John Morris, one of the study's authors, an e-mail. Here was his reply:

Bloggers and the mainstream media have overstated our findings greatly. Our study does not argue that Jon Stewart is "poisoning" democracy. We simply link exposure to the program with increases in cynicism, and demonstrate that, from an attitudinal perspective, the effects of his show on public opinion are not necessarily benign. We then speculate in the conclusion section on the possible behavioral consequences (particularly voting) and urge future research to look in that direction.

Citizens who understand politics are more likely to participate than those who do not. Moreover, the increased cynicism associated with decreased external efficacy may contribute to an actively critical orientation toward politics. This may translate into better citizenship, because a little skepticism toward the political system could be considered healthy for democracy. However, decreased external efficacy may dampen participation among an already cynical audience (young adults) by contributing to a sense of alienation from the political process. And it has been demonstrated that lowered trust can perpetuate a more dysfunctional political system.

--Ezra Klein

THAT WAS THEN. So I woke up in the middle of the night and flicked on TCM. And there was The Shoes of the Fisherman, the 1968 Michael Anderson-lensed (as they say in Variety) adaptation of the famous Morris West novel about the ascension of the first Eastern European Pope.

I was transfixed. I remember both novel and film being much discussed in my house when I was a kid, although I don’t really remember anyone’s opinions. I think I recall my late, beloved Aunt Vicky, who was the devout Catholic among our extended clan, speaking of it approvingly. Which is interesting for the following reasons.

TSOTF struck me as having, very clearly, a liberal message -- a subtle piece of propaganda that was pro-Catholic (reverent attitude toward the ceremonies of the Church) but that must have been, at the time, egging its audience to embrace Vatican II and change in general. Pope Kiril I, played with a certain appealingly leaden steadiness by Anthony Quinn, announces at his investiture (forgive me if that’s the wrong word) that what he’s decided to do as Pope is…sell off all church property and holdings to feed the world’s poor! On the side, there’s a character named Father Telemond who is obviously modeled on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, every liberal Catholic’s favorite theologian back then. Telemond is censured for his heterodox writings, but Kiril is secretly compassionate toward him, and he is portrayed sympathetically by Oskar Werner.

In Googling around today, I notice that conservative Catholics try to take some credit for West -- because the liberal literary elite sneered at him (undoubtedly true and possibly deserved), and because, in the character of Kiril, he “predicted” the arrival of John Paul II (there is a certain Cold War subplot as well). But it looks to me like West was on our side. In an NPR interview in 1996 (I got it through Nexis so I don’t have a link), he told Liane Hansen that he considered the then-current state of Catholic affairs “a dangerous time for the Church.”

While TSOTF is definitely not what you’d call a great film, it is indeed a great period piece, and it’s actually good in that Technicolor, over-baked, and “exploratory” way of many 1960s mainstream films that tried to grapple with “issues” in a middle-brow manner, provided the grappling did not get too in the way of the period cinematic stylings (The Comedians, which starred Dick and Liz and was based on Graham Greene, comes to mind).

Anybody know about West? Anyway, this is highly recommended when you’re in the right kitschy mood. Sadly, it’s impossible to imagine a Catholic message movie today in which the Pope decrees anything like what Pope Quinn decreed.

--Michael Tomasky

JUST SAY NO. This is what Peggy Noonan wrote today on a website sponsored by one of America's most influential publications: "Bush The Younger would breastfeed the military if he could."

This is one of those moments in which I love to imagine how the editing process at a place like OpinionJournal works: "Jesus, Bill, I told you to hide the damn mushrooms."

Feed your head, Peg-o-my-heart. One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small.

Ask Rush if you don't believe me.

--Charles P. Pierce

SCOTUS STANDS UP. I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised by the Supreme Court's ruling in the Hamdan case. Ordinarily, the Court is very deferential to executive assertions of national security authority and then turns around and changes its mind years after the fact. Note also that conservative "strict constructionists" continue to believe that the Bill of Rights secretly doesn't apply . . . when the President says it doesn't.

Meanwhile, it's always worth recalling the administration's underlying legal theory about Gitmo. This holds that U.S. law doesn't apply there because it's in Cuba. But Cuba doesn't actually get to have sovereign control over the area either, because if it did we'd have to leave as per their request. So, basically, it's a legal null zone where you can just do whatever. This is the kind of thing you expect a seven year-old to come up with when forced to explain why he should be allowed to have dessert even though he hasn't finished his peas yet.

--Matthew Yglesias

LONG HOURS, HIGH PAY? Greg Mankiw points out a new study showing that, in 2002, the top income quintile was twice as likely to work long hours as the bottom quintile. "That is," he writes, "wages and hours worked went from being negatively correlated to being positively correlated. This may be an important piece of the puzzle of rising income inequality." Possibly so. Of course, the bottom quintile are low-wage workers in jobs that rarely pay benefits and often keep employees in a sort of part-time twilight so they don't qualify for health care -- that may be a piece of the puzzle as well.

Also interesting, however, is recent research by Tom Hertz of American University who found that "[h]ouseholds whose adult members all worked more than 40 hours per week for two years in a row were more upwardly mobile in 1990-91 and 1997-98 than households who worked fewer hours. Yet this was not true in 2003-04, suggesting that people who work long hours on a consistent basis no longer appear to be able to generate much upward mobility for their families." So while the upper quintiles may work longer, it's not clear that more hours positively associate with income increases from workers further down the ladder. Laboring longer to get ahead may only work for those who are already there. Indeed, the really relevant data here may need to be broken down by profession. High-paying professions may force longer hours while lower-paying occupations don't reward -- or often even allow -- such work at all.

--Ezra Klein

DICK MORRIS IS RIGHT!! He has this column in The Hill saying that Lieberman should forego the Democratic primary entirely and just run as an Independent, and that if he did so, he would win “overwhelmingly.”

Alas, I’m afraid that I suspect this is entirely correct. Consider: First, voter enrollment in Connecticut looks like this (PDF; scroll down to page 12 of 14 for totals). You have roughly 700,000 Democrats, 450,000 Republicans, and 930,000 “unaffiliateds” (i.e., independents). Second, think about turnout in a dead-of-August Democratic primary (it’s August 8). Let’s be generous and assume a primary turnout of 25 percent. That’s 175,000 voters. Let’s say Lamont beats Lieberman 55 to 45. That’s 96,250 votes.

That’s not a huge base on which to build for a general election that will probably include 1 million voters (the total state enrollment is 2 million; assume general election turnout of 50 percent or so). Assume also a fairly weak Republican, as seems to be the case -- a bloke named Alan Schlesinger, the “two-term mayor of the city of Derby,” according to his Web site.

Assume that, running as an Independent, Lieberman would get the lion’s share of unaffiliateds, and probably not an insignificant number of Republicans. He would be very tough to beat. Lamont, in a general, would have to fight for the unaffiliateds in a big way. (And you know what that means -- he starts taking positions that disappoint certain people!!)

Morris thinks Lieberman would lose a primary battle and should forget about competing in it and just run in the general. About that, the numbers show Dick is probably right. He is wrong, of course, about Lieberman as a solon -- “ethical, sincere, thoughtful,” and all that rot. About who Lieberman has become, Mark Schmitt, as usual, is right.

--Michael Tomasky

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE FROG IS US. Ok, so apparently a frog won't actually stay in a bowl of water that's slowly brought to a boil. But it's still a damned good metaphor! Jim Sleeper takes a look at the mainstream media bowl and sees too many frogs drifting listlessly in the rising heat.

--The Editors

ACTUAL CONSERVATIVE MAGAZINES: ALSO BAD. This Jonah Goldberg post on Linda Hirshman is really pretty revealing. And I'd like to say, for the record, that contra Jonah, I think her arguments should be taken seriously because they deserve to be taken seriously and not as part of some marketing ploy. At any rate, Jonah writes:

[Hirschman] says that unless women work, they aren't fully human beings. We're supposed to take this seriously? I thought feminists were supposed to be champions of personal choice, self-empowerment, constructing their own inner-narratives, defining "me" on my terms, not seeking standards in the "male paradigms" of the partiarchal eurocentric capitalistic system yada yada yada yada, blah, blah, blah.

This is the whole point! Hirshman is arguing that feminists shouldn't be champions of personal choice. She's arguing that, instead, feminists should be champions of equality and that getting from the status quo to an egalitarian world will require people -- men and women alike -- to make some decisions which are different from the ones dictated by narrow self-interest in a social context deeply shaped by the enduring legacy of sexism. Jonah may not find that compelling, but when someone offers a critique of the current popular understanding of feminism, it doesn't make very much sense to turn around and accuse Hirshman’s argument of failing to conform to the current popular understanding of feminist goals.

--Matthew Yglesias

MAGAZINE BLOG FEUD: NOW WITH POLICY SUBSTANCE. I'm afraid the Lawrence Kaplan post on Kerry and Iraq that Ezra mentioned below is actually way, way, way worse than Ezra's post would lead you to believe. The thing of it is that the article Kaplan links to is a clear-cut piece of evidence against his basic view of the Iraq War and a strong piece of evidence in favor of the Spencer Ackerman line that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is a "prerequisite for success." Read the lede:

Eleven Sunni insurgent groups have offered an immediate halt to all attacks — including those on American troops — if the United States agrees to withdraw foreign forces from Iraq in two years, insurgent and government officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The upshot of this article is, of course, that the United States should agree to a timeline for the withdrawal of forces. The Kaplan Perpetual War plan is, in other words, totally wrong, as is the series of posts he's written recently mocking Democrats for refusing to "admit" that they're defeatists. But all he can see in this crucial news development is an excuse to . . . spend more time mocking John Kerry.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHEN THE LEFT HAND DOESN'T KNOW WHAT THE FAR RIGHT HAND IS DOING. A couple days ago, TAPPED contributor Ben Adler noticed the contrast of a Marty Peretz post proclaiming his paper's strong, if occasionally heterodox, liberalism sitting atop a Lawrence Kaplan post sighing over "how deeply unserious" Democrats are about Iraq. As Adler noted, this is what liberals bristle against in TNR: not their willingness to "grapple" with conservative ideas, but their penchant for publishing ideological conservatives and other travelers -- Kaplan is some species of neo-conny quasi-liberal who voted for Bush and blasted liberals for, literally, hating America -- who evince a robust contempt of the left. Today, Kaplan struck back at Ben with a contemptuous* post asserting his dislike for Bill Frist. Fair enough. Unfortunately, it sits atop another Kaplan post explaining that Kerry -- and those who support his withdrawal resolution -- are even less moderate on Iraq than, yes, the Iraqi insurgency. Oops.

* Check the shot at "something called Campus Progress" by something called The New Republic. I adore that insult construction; it's so deliciously egotistic, assuming that the very fact of the author's unfamiliarity with the publication is, in and of itself, a commentary on its worth.

--Ezra Klein

REPUBLICANS FAIL TO VALUE REPUBLICAN VALUES. This is kind of funny, until you realize that it’s more convenient, politically speaking, for the GOP to have their values agenda keep failing, so that they can keep running on it and against Democrats who allegedly oppose it:

House Republicans failed Wednesday to advance a bill protecting the words ''under God'' in the Pledge of Allegiance. Only a day earlier, the GOP had placed the measure on its ''American Values Agenda'' in hopes of bolster the party's prospects in the fall election.

But Republicans could not muster a simple majority on the issue in a committee where they outnumber Democrats by six....

Ten of the committee's 23 Republicans did not show up for the vote.

The committee will try again tomorrow.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

Israel turned up the pressure on Palestinian militants to release a captive soldier Wednesday, sending its warplanes to bomb a Hamas training camp after knocking out electricity and water supplies for most of the 1.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip.

if necessary, Israel must be prepared singlehandedly to raise the price of attacking us to prohibitive levels....

Israeli military action will mean that Hamas has delivered the opposite of the improved situation for Palestinians that it promised in the elections that brought it to power.

Who will turn the power in Gaza back on (the electricity plant, which provided 42 percent of Gaza's power, may take a year to rebuild)? Who will rebuild the bombed bridges? Since Hamas was elected, the international community has shown no desire to maintain infrastructure-building projects in Gaza, let alone undertake new ones. Recall also that the idea of cutting power to all of Gaza preceded not only the kidnap of Shalit, but also the election of Hamas. Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch condemned the idea last December, when it was revealed that Israeli military personnel were considering it a retaliatory move for earlier rocket attacks launched from Gaza. "Cutting the electricity supply of an already impoverished population would have disastrous humanitarian consequences. A power cut would create severe hardships by interrupting government services, forcing businesses and factories to close, causing food and medicine to spoil, and disrupting the work of hospitals," she said. And that was before the economic blockade had weakened Gaza, and before the recent fighting between Hamas and Fatah gunmen brought Gaza to the brink of civil war.

Will the "extreme action" work? Judith Kipper, the director of the Middle East Forum at the Council on Foreign Relations, earlier in June said that she believed that the desperation in Gaza and the West Bank was already producing an effect opposite to what was intended: "there is more and more radicalization. Forget Hamas. All the Palestinian people in general are not blaming Hamas; they are blaming the United States and Israel. It has the unwanted result of radicalizing even those who were not radicalized before because that is what desperation creates." That would be consistent with the response to Israeli economic pressure in 2001-2002, according to the World Bank's report (PDF), which "was anger at Israel as the perceived agent of economic distress—not rejection of the violence that Israel was acting to prevent, or of its main proponents at that time."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WAL-MART RECONSIDERED. This week, Slate hosted an interesting debate between progressive economist Jason Furman and labor-liberal champion Barbara Ehrenreich. The topic was Wal-Mart, namely, Furman's contention that Wal-Mart is, in fact, a progressive success story, having driven down prices more than they've depressed wages. Attentive readers will know I've a certain amount of sympathy for Furman's argument, which I believe brought a level of empirical rigor and complexity to a debate that had grown contradictory and problematic for liberals. I’m most taken with his willingness to leave the corporate welfare state for dead and champion the usage and expansion of programs like Medicaid.

But enough history. While Furman's take was daring and important when it first emerged, he's ridden it to a level of dogmatism that appears unwise. To read these debating points, he seems to allow no chance that Wal-Mart could do more than it currently does to help their workers, and comes off almost incredulous that critics could question H. Lee Scott's strategy for the company. Scott, after all, certainly knows business better than his critics. And so he does. His business acumen, to be sure, could eat mine for lunch and still require a soup course. But the progressive critique isn't that Scott could do better to help his shareholders or expand his profits, but that his incentives are all off, that there's more to being a good business than simply being a successful one. It's not that Wal-Mart is bad or good, but that they could do more, and instead do less.

In his final response, Furman argues that standards must be raised by the government and that the focus on Wal-Mart is misguided. But the delineation is not near so clear -- who can forget this photo of Wal-Mart's VP looming behind Maryland's governor as he vetoed an anti-Wal-Mart law? It's the Wal-Marts of the world, after all, who're funding the right, stalling the progressive agenda, fighting universal health care, battling progressive taxation, and all the rest. In my talks with union members and others, it's become clear that they understand this, that they're, in essence, trying to turn Wal-Mart into state's evidence, organizing in part to force them to help with certain progressive reforms. And there's evidence that it's working, as when Scott came out for a minimum wage increase to deflect negative attention. But fighting Wal-Mart, forcing them to do better, is part of creating the heightened pressure for government expansiveness that Furman wants. After all, Wal-Mart's low wages and sparse benefits currently offer them a competitive advantage over their more generous competitors. Until those disparities are equalized, Wal-Mart will battle any legislative attempts to flatten the playing field.

--Ezra Klein

MORE MALARIA. What do you know, Josh Kurlantzick turns out to have one of those "not online" Washington Monthly articles you can actually read just fine online and it's all about malaria.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: BURN, BABY, BURN. Last night, the Senate narrowly defeated a constitutional amendment banning flag desecration. Free beers all around at the Flag Burners Club! Kirsten Powers reflects on the lunacy and stubborn durablity of the GOP's favorite non-issue issue.

--The Editors

WHEN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY KILLS. As DAS noted in comments below if you wanted to really do something difficult and dramatic to help Africa (mosquito nets being quick and easy) what you'd want to do is revisit the pharmaceutical patent issue. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, TRIPS, is the devil's own policy initiative and its entrenchment into the WTO multilateral process is one of the least-heralded, most pernicious things done policywise in my lifetime. But don't take my word for it. Listen to hard-core free trader Jagdish Baghwati.

--Matthew Yglesias

IDEALISM IN ACTION. This is arguably a blogofascist position, but one thing I think would be a good idea would be for the United States government to find ways of helping suffering Africans that don't entail starting wars and killing people. For example, you've got all these people dying of malaria even though "there are medicines that cure for 55 cents a dose, mosquito nets that shield a child for $1 a year and indoor insecticide spraying that costs about $10 annually for a household."

Since this is an issue that does involve Africa and doesn't involve sex, a lot of the meager political leadership that's existed in the United States has come from your religious right types like Sam Brownback, and good for them.

--Matthew Yglesias

WMD WATCH. Pete Hoekstra and Rick Santorum have solved the mystery of the missing WMDs. And believe me kids, it's a doozy:

On Wednesday, at our request, the director of national intelligence declassified six "key points" from a National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) report on the recovery of chemical munitions in Iraq. The summary was only a small snapshot of the entire report, but even so, it brings new information to the American people. "Since 2003," the summary states, "Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent," which remains "hazardous and potentially lethal." So there are WMDs in Iraq, and they could kill Americans there or all over the world.

By the way -- here's a quick test to see if the WMD talk you're hearing is worth a lick of spit. If the controversy is over declassifying an administration report, as it is in this case, write it off. If the Bushies actually could find some serious weapons stockpiles in Iraq, Karl Rove would personally knock on your door to tell you so. To believe that they're just keeping such politically beneficial information just defies reason.

--Ezra Klein

GUTSY. Note that on the flag-burning amendment, Robert Byrd voted against.

Even though he’s from red West Virginia. Even though Jay Rockefeller voted yea. Even though he’s involved in a potentially tough reelection campaign against a simian blowhard from my hometown named John Raese who will demagogue this to death. Even though virtually every other Democrat facing an election this year -- especially those from red states, and even one from a blue state (Bob Menendez) -- voted yeah. (The roll call is here.) Even though Byrd could have been the 67th and thus decisive vote in favor.

“Old Glory lives because the Constitution lives,” Byrd said. “We love that flag, but we love the guarantees of the Constitution more.” He’s willingly created a potentially difficult situation for himself because of an actual belief! Bravo.

--Michael Tomasky

THE TROUBLE WITH CHOICE. The response to Linda Hirshman's infamous article (now expanded into a book) was , and continues to be, predictably heated, but also a bit disappointing. (And I'm not just disappointed because the best blog ever is counted among the many "mommy blogs" that have taken understandable umbrage at Hirshman's argument.) Some of the critiques have been straightforwardly wankerific while plenty of others have been sound and compelling. But too few responses have fully and directly engaged one of Hirshman's central points, which is her attack on the left's misguided investment in what is actually a libertarian view about (and veneration of) individual "choice." This, to me, is an extremely important argument, which is why I was so happy to read this really phenomenal review of Hirshman's book today by Meghan O'Rourke. She makes the basic point early on:

But—though I almost hate to say it—buried beneath Hirshman's overblown rhetoric is a useful idea, now set out in a short book titled Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World: namely, that our obsession with choice prevents us from asking tough questions about how to achieve further equality. "Deafened by choice, here's the moral analysis these women never heard," she says: Until there is more equity in the cultural norms for child-rearing and household tasks, each time a woman decides to "opt out" she is making a political decision that reinforces an already ingrained social inequality. Women who believe otherwise suffer from a mixture of false consciousness and impractical idealism. It's when Hirshman is at her most radical—when she sets aside the language of personal fulfillment in favor of injunctions about the collective good—that she is at her most valuable…

--Sam Rosenfeld

KOOKY? YES. I just got off the phone with Lieberman's press secretary, and I can confirm that yes, she is a bit "kooky." I had called to find out simply what polling company the senator was using, and she nearly jumped down my throat: "Are you working on a story? Is this for a process story?!" She then ranted about how the campaign was focused on the issues of Connecticut voters, all the while growing more agitated. She terrorized me for a few minutes, asking why I had called, until I told her that I was only a lowly intern who knew nothing and oh, would she please let me go… Needless to say, she didn't answer my question.

--Ben Weyl

ON SIMPLICITY. Scott Winship at the new Daily Strategist blog purports to disagree with me and Jon Chait as to whether it's possible to quickly summarize liberal thinking on economic policy. The trouble is that his summary is, well, not all that quick:

How about this for a “single overarching theory”: equal opportunity and security. We don’t value progressive taxation except to the extent that it helps us create more opportunity for the disadvantaged. Reducing the deficit is important to the extent that it increases economic growth (promoting opportunity in this generation) or reduces the share of future budgets that go toward interest payments on the debt (promoting opportunity in future generations). Health coverage – including Medicare and Medicaid – reduces insecurity. Education and technology investment promote opportunity. Environmental protection is vital for the opportunity and security of future Americans.

I think that's fine. But when you think about it, it just isn't nearly as quick a summary as "the government should spend less." Nor -- to recapitulate the point about asymmetry -- is it the reverse of conservative theory in a straightforward sense. Rather, it's different. And a little bit complicated. Libertarians would say public policy should maximize negative liberty -- to hell with security. But it's simply not the case that liberals think public policy should maximize security and say to hell with negative liberty. We do think that generous public sector health care is good in part because it promotes security, but we don't think security -- or even security and opportunity -- should be promoted at all costs. This isn't a complaint about liberalism; I think it's a strength to be somewhat tentative about exactly how much additional security we think public policy needs to provide.

--Matthew Yglesias

KEEPING THE BOOT ON THE NECK. This Hill piece about the heat Democrats are bringing down on vulnerable House GOP incumbent Mike Fitzpatrick on the subject of Social Security privatization makes for highly encouraging reading. For a while there has been a real worry that Democrats' fierce and devastating victory in the Social Security fight last year was turning out to have been a catastrophic success -- too much of a victory, too soon, for it to be a live issue to campaign on in the fall of 2006. Democrats seemed to have been satisfied with their substantive defeat of actual legislation and weirdly inclined to move on to other issues once that fight had been won. Obviously, though, there's a paper trail of statements and an endless stream of damning associations Democrats can deploy to corner vulnerable Republicans on Social Security this election while drawing stark distinctions between the parties.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BOOK CLUBS. This is rather funny. Excited that the Chamber of Commerce's educational wing has selected Cato scholar Arnold Kling's healthcare treatise for their "Top 10 Reading Selections," Michael Cannon enthuses that "The foundation’s board is a bipartisan group of influential figures from the business, political, and policy spheres...[which] evidently agreed with Marginal Revolution publisher Tyler Cowen that Crisis of Abundance 'is one of the most important books written on health care.'”

Well that's true. But that bipartisan bit is a smidge suspicious. Here are the 10 titles on the list:
1. Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy by Moises Naim
2. Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East by Clyde Prestowitz
3. The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy by Peter Huber and Mark Mills
4. In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State by Charles Murray
5. Our Brave New World by Charles Gave, Anatole Kaletsky, and Louis-Vincent Gave
6. The Sarbanes-Oxley Debacle: What We’ve Learned; How to Fix It by Henry N. Butler
7. An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths by Glenn Reynolds
8. The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor
9. Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care by Arnold Kling
10. Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You To Believe About Our Schools – And Why It Isn’t So by Jay P. Greene

So by my count, we've got a book arguing against energy conservations, another calling for the demolition of the welfare state, a third deriding corporate regulations, a fourth by a leading conservative blogger, a fifth dismissing progressive health reforms, and a sixth attacking public education. Some bipartisan book club -- I literally couldn't make those selections more comprehensively conservative if I tried. It does remind me, though, of an anecdote from Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm, which explained how conservatives would enlist and educate students by sending them persuasive books on conservatism. I don't have my copy handy and have forgotten which titles were on the lineup, but I remember being impressed with the choices and wondering how I'd have turned out if Rand, rather than Chomsky, had served as my introduction to politics.

As a strategy, that plan always seemed sound to me -- get 'em before they can think critically, that's what I always say! Unfortunately, I'm not sure how I'd get them, which books I'd pick. So here's your question of the day: which five books do you want young liberals, or all liberals, to be reading?

--Ezra Klein

WAIT A SEC. All due respect to Charlie Pierce, but I've never mentioned Jerome's astrology stuff, have no idea what this is about, and would appreciate it if someone could link me to a synopsis. I think he means Garance and Matt.

By the way, TAPPED astrology fun fact: Did you know that Sam Rosenfeld, Matt Yglesias, and I are all Tauruses?

--Ezra Klein

ASTROLOGY, A POLITICAL LIABILITY? All due respect to Garance and Ezra, but the proof that this whole Kos-TNR rockfight has been conducted exclusively with the moon in the House Of Groucho is probably the latest iteration in which poor Jerome Armstrong, who should just go to the track the next time he wants to make easy money, is belabored with the fact that he has an interest in astrology. I disagree with the notion that this necessarily is a political problem, and anyone who asserts that it is must somehow answer the argument that a similar interest didn't seem to derail the political careers of these fine folks.

--Charles P. Pierce

DAVID BROOKS: MAKING THINGS UP. David Brooks, joining the "kosola" fake scandal brigade over the weekend wrote:

When Sherrod Brown, the Democratic Senate candidate in Ohio, hired Armstrong last year to help with his campaign, this was also a sign of respect. The Kingpin [i.e., Kos] had instructed his Kossack cultists to support Brown's Democratic primary rival, Paul Hackett. But the Kingpin switched sides and backed Brown over his former anointee.

As has been the case lamentably often during this escapade, the person making the allegations here isn't being totally clear on what he's alleging. The "suspicious" pattern of activity, however, is pretty clear. First Kos is backing Paul Hackett. Then Sherrod Brown hires Jerome Armstrong. Then Kos decides to back Brown instead. Suspicious. Only, as Robert Wright points out, this gets the order of events totally wrong. Look at Jim Geraghty's timeline and you'll see that Brown hired Armstrong in April 2005. Then, on October 4, 2005, there's talk of Brown getting in the race (Hackett was already in) and Kos says he's inclined to support Hackett. Then, two days later, Kos changes his mind and decides to back Brown. That's very different and not at all suspicious.

Meanwhile, I should let everyone know that I've been looking into it and I have a shocking revelation that, I think, may shake the magazineosphere to its very core. It turns out that decisions about which articles run in magazines -- and even about which people get hired – aren’t made solely on the basis of abstract merit. No! Rather, it seems to be the case that personal relationships with editors and various forms of networking play a role. Shocking stuff, I know, but it's the truth.

--Matthew Yglesias

SUBURBIA DEFENDED. Yesterday, TAPPED contributor Ben Adler ended a post on the minutemen with a bizarrely digressive shot at suburbanites. "That kind of selfish mentality -- our public schools are only for rich, healthy students -- is lamentably common in suburbia." Is it truly? Ben has not, to my knowledge, ever lived in a suburban community, so his anecdotal evidence cannot claim a wide sample. More to the point, Ben is a close friend of mine, and I well know the raging contempt the proud Brooklynite holds for the landscaped tracts that I grew up in. We've all got our quirks, I guess. But his assumption of suburban selfishness is not a rare strain in progressive thought, and so it deserves to be questioned a bit.

The simplest test would be to compare the percentage of total education funds devoted to special ed in urban and suburban districts. My hunch, having lived in Orange County as well as D.C. and L.A., is that the conservative crazies in Fountain Valley's fallout shelters are nevertheless more generous to those with special needs. But my opinion is not a relevant data point and, since I rarely wonk out over education, I'm not entirely sure how to track down the relevant numbers. Those with more expertise are invited to help out.

What we can do is dive into some opinion data to see if the selfishness Ben ascribes to suburbanites actually finds genuine expression in their ranks. Here I'll rely on Ruy Teixeira's report, "The Next Frontier: A New Study of Exurbia." As Teixeira convincingly argues, Democrats can't sacrifice the suburbs for the cities. Cities haven't grown at a faster rate than suburban areas since the 1940s, and in 2000, suburban residents had reached a full 50 percent of the nation, while urban dwellers were under a third. So on a purely calculating level, assuming churlish self-interest against 50 percent of the country may not prove the wisest course.

Happily, it's also wrong. Tim Kaine's 2005 victory largely came from increased performance in the Virginia suburbs and exurbs. Indeed, all over the country, mature and emerging suburbs (most political scientists break suburbs into five distinct classes) are trending Democratic, and doing so with such uniformity that the current has even reached my archconservative neighbors in Orange County (remember when Loretta Sanchez ousted Bob Dornan?). For a longer rundown of this trend, see this Virginia tech report on The New Metro Politics (PDF). It's simply no longer true that these rings are conservative entrenchments.

Political outcomes aside, the suburbs aren't as ideologically conservative as is often assumed. There is, to be sure, a skepticism around taxes. But polling data doesn't reveal anything particularly out of line with average attitudes. Recent polls in the Minnesota suburbs showed that "they overwhelmingly agreed that paying taxes was worth doing 'to make sure we have public schools, clean streets, public safety and a clean environment' rather than that those taxes were wasted due to government inefficiency and handouts. And they expressed particular support for the use of tax money for the public schools (the top choice), controlling health care costs and transportation infrastructure." Indeed, "emerging suburbanites strongly agreed that recent declines in the quality of life in Minnesota were 'because we don’t invest resources in our schools, the health care system or transportation infrastructure the way we used to' and strongly disagreed that life in Minnesota had improved because 'we don’t spend so much government money on programs that don’t work.'"

They don't sound so selfish to me. Indeed, they seem rather ready to pump up education spending, much of which goes to special programs (my own suburban high school had both a massive and well-run special ed division, and a sizeable deaf population, complete with publicly provided translators for classes sports). I'd be happy to see data otherwise, but in lieu of that, Ben's post seems unfair.

--Ezra Klein

NONE DARE CALL IT BULLSHIT. I never, ever, ever watch prime time cable news because it makes me want to kill extremely large numbers of people. Tragically, I walked through the door yesterday and my roommate already had Hardball on. There were two people debating the issue of . . . whether or not The New York Times should be brought up on charges of treason. Seriously. Treason. For publishing an article in a newspaper. Treason. And there was Chris Matthews happily presiding over the whole thing as if this was a serious conversation that people should be having. This all taking place on a network that, allegedly, does journalism.

UPDATE: Video available as well.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE LIMITS OF CHARITY. Warren Buffett's plan to give most of his money to the already giant foundation Bill Gates started is, of course, going to make the foundation super-large. Word on the street is that it will allow the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to approximately double its current $1.4 billion in annual grant-making, which is mostly focused on the important and under-served cause of fighting third world disease. Still, one thing that I think contemplating the prospect of this super-foundation does is simply demonstrate the limits of direct charitable work as opposed to spending money on policy work aimed at systemic change. If the foundation really does double its grant-making, that would come to about $1.7 billion per year on global health issues.

By contrast, were the United States government to live up to the commitment it's already made to the United Nations Millenium Development Goals that would involve spending about $77 billion on third world development issues in the first year with disbursements growing proportionately to American GDP. That, obviously, is a lot more than $1.7 billion. At the same time, it's a lot less than the $450 billion or so that we spend on the military. Which is to say that one really, really, really great way to improve global public health would be to do something like get Congress to shift about 10-15 percent of the Pentagon budget over to international development assistance. That would generate a pool of funds that totally dwarfs anything the Gates Foundation can spend. What's more, it would almost certainly inspire Europe and Japan to raise their levels of development assistance, since as everyone knows European governments like to be more generous than the USA in order to better sneer at us.

But how could you possibly convince Congress to shift 10-15 percent of the DOD budget to development assistance? Well, it'd be very difficult. Among other things, there's a wealthy and powerful defense contractor lobby and, tragically, no "help poor children not die in Chad" lobby. On the other hand, if you gave me, say, $1.7 billion dollars per year to spend on influencing the American political system, it'd be relatively easy to generate large-scale political change. Indeed, $1.7 billion annually is probably way more than you'd need to launch a successful domestic campaign to get the United States to meet the millennium targets -- the 2004 presidential campaign cost about a billion in aggregate for both sides.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE BLOGOSPHERE'S BEEF WITH TNR. I think Marty Peretz's Friday evening post on The Plank, in which he defended TNR from its left-wing blog attackers and excoriated their grammar, actually made a lot of fair points. TNR does effectively criticize the Bush administration and congressional Republicans on any number of issues, mostly domestic. And, I might add, they often do so more effectively than some of their more left-leaning counterparts precisely because their tone is less rigidly partisan and they are willing to grapple more seriously with conservative counter-arguments. [Full disclosure: I used to work there.]

But here's the irony: Immediately below Marty's post is a prime example, courtesy of Lawrence Kaplan, of precisely what the bloggers find so maddening. And no, sorry Marty, it isn't because "TNR is a heterodox institution, a concept Kos surely cannot fathom." It's because TNR is an institution that gives space to the conservative -- not moderate -- rantings of liberal-haters and Democrat-haters like Kaplan. Here's what Kaplan said:

After listening to the Senate Minority Leader speechify about "Mr. Bush's war," anyone who didn't realize how deeply unserious the Democrats are about Iraq surely came away convinced.

This isn't simply a "heterodox" opinion for a supposedly liberal publication. Other liberal magazines allow a wide range of opinions, but those opinions all fall somewhere broadly within the liberal spectrum. TNR, on the other hand, indulges Bush crony Greg Mankiw with a non-sensical cover story in favor of social security privatization, and indulges neo-con Lawrence Kaplan (and Peretz) in contemptuous anti-left diatribes.

The analogy is perfect, in fact, in explaining why Kos et al hate TNR's favorite senator, Joe Lieberman, and don't have the same venom for Max Baucus and Ben Nelson. It's not because Lieberman is more conservative. The blogosphere is pragmatic, non-ideological, and very tolerant of moderates (see their recent embrace of Mark Warner). What they do not tolerate is the public flagellation of their party's left-wing that gives aid and comfort to the enemy.

Clarification: This post originally contained a quote from Kaplan's post which suggested that he was praising the Senate Republicans, when he was not. I apologize for the error.

--Ben Adler

BETTER IN '06 THAN '08. The fight between TNR and Daily Kos made the hop to the mainstream media over the weekend, and both news outlets had their single most blogged-about days this year, according to Technorati. Having gone "berserk" mid-week with his declaration of war against TNR, according to this Newsweek profile, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga appears to have thought the better of it and decided to try and capture some of the controversy-driven traffic by highlighting a welcome to the first-time readers. Most other responses on the site are now tending toward satire or works with lighter touches, while TNR, for its part, renounced one of the e-mails it had published, citing sources who misled its reporter. So perhaps both sides are stepping back from the brink.

Conservative blog Reihl World View has the best round-up of all the facts at issue, which, even controlling for the writer's obvious agenda, are rather devastating, and by and large news to me. All I can say is: Far better for this kind of stuff to break mid-'06, when nothing electoral is at stake and no one is really paying that much attention, than during election season '08, when, instead of just generating round-ups at three-month-old conservablogs, like Reihl's, and a David Brooks column, the story could have mushroomed into 527-funded television attack ads that could have been devastating to a Mark Warner candidacy (imagine the impact of using Armstrong's analysis of the causes of 9-11 to tarnish Warner on national security, for example). Markos has been complaining for some time that he believes Hillary Rodham Clinton's people have been doing research on him. All I can say after the revelations of the past week is: I certainly hope so.

If Warner didn't know, when he hired Armstrong, that this kind of stuff was in his background -- the SEC settlement, the political astrology -- it's a sign his PAC failed to do its own due diligence. There are plenty of successful people in politics with complicated pasts, but they make damn sure to tell their candidates about their backgrounds so that no one is caught flat-footed should anything ever become an issue. It's imperative that Democratic candidates know whether or not there's any risk their candidacies will be damaged in any way by something in the past history of a staffer.

Meanwhile, the reaction on the blogs to the TNR items was disproportionate, self-interested, and ultimately damaging to a potential '08 candidate who many believe provides the best alternative to Clinton for taking back the White House. Had Markos not declared war on TNR, I am convinced the items published on TNRs' low-readership blog The Plank would never had made the jump to the MSM where the broader story has now had a negative impact on Daily Kos' credibility and on Jerome, who's reputation will not, I'm afraid, ever fully recover (the flaky astrology stuff being worse than the SEC settlement from a pure politics perspective). Warner's nascent campaign, meanwhile, has seen a staffer become the main story, which is never good, and which is even worse at a time when most of the public doesn't know anything else about the former Virginia governor.

Just as the Democratic National Committee has been conducting test runs of its 50-state field operation over the past few months, the past week ought to be considered a test run for '08, and for the proposition that blogs can, in fact, successfully help candidates without creating what Clinton White House staffers used to call "distracter issues." Let's just say the test did not go well. The '07-'08 media environment is going to be different for the netroots than the '03-'04 one because of the absence of Joe Trippi or a Trippi-like figure. It is impossible to understate how much of the media narrative about blogs, the netroots and democracy was spoon-fed to reporters by Trippi during the last cycle. Trippi never met a reporter he didn't like, and he would spend hours -- hours! -- repeating the same narrative about the importance of grassroots democracy, the power of technology, and the Internet, even when he had to do it from beneath a ratty blanket on the couch in his office because he was as sick as a dog. Trippi was a Washington player in a way that the new blog gurus are not. And their power to influence media narratives over time will reflect that difference. Where Trippi would share his campaign's story and bottles of wine with ABC News political director Mark Halperin and other media big-wigs at posh trattorias, the new gang has preferred to wage a proxy war on ABC's The Note. That may look like a more authentic approach and expression of deserved scorn, but on its own I'm not sure its going to be all that effective at helping any particular candidate. Perhaps those who are not in the press don't know this, but much of the story of the rise of the blogs was placed as part of an inside game, and not based on reporters suddenly discovering and being sympathetic to a group of newly mobilized outsiders based on their merits.

UPDATED: A number of readers have written in to correct my understanding of the Daily Kos recommended diary system, which is site-reader and not Kos-driven. I appreciate the clarification and regret the confusion. As for the rest of the comments, all I can say is that anyone who doesn't think Trippi played a major role in the rise of the political blogosphere needs to go back and read this piece from three years ago. And anyone who thinks small and objectively unimportant things like someone's belief in astrology don't wind up mattering in campaigns has not been paying close attention to the central fact of American political life, which is that anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a campaign. Example: What's going on in Virginia. Fighting Dem Jim Webb is fighting back against Republican George Allen's latest attack on him by calling him "George Felix Allen Jr." The race for a Senate seat is being fought on the grounds of Allen's middle name. And I agree with Ezra here -- Webb's fighting that battle very well. Or look at 2004: the Dean scream made perfect sense inside the room where Howard Dean was giving his concession speech in Iowa, as I was the first person to report in 2004 (scroll down), but that didn't stop it from becoming a campaign-killing media moment that even his phenomenal New Hampshire organizing could not overcome. Or think of the stupid flap over Naomi Wolf advising Al Gore in 2000 -- opponents do turn staffers and consultants into controversies if they can make it part of a larger narrative. I have great respect for bloggers and media critics who are trying to change that system, but politicians still have to figure out how to work within it, flawed as it is. Being hard-headed about its brutal reality is in no way incompatible with working to change it for the better.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MINUTEMEN EXPLAINED. The New York Times has inadvertently explained the recent resurgence in xenophobia. The explanations that I gleaned from their big story on immigration today are: 1) there are too many retirees with nothing better to do, and 2) there are too many suburbanites not used to diversity and allergic to the common good. Both these qualities were perfectly captured in the story's leading man on the street, Patrick Nicolosi of Elmont, New York.

When reading profiles of the Minutemen and such, I am constantly struck by the high proportion of retirees among them. In this piece Nicolosi, 49, who retired prematurely from his delivery truck driving job, tsk-tsks as he sees two immigrant children board a local school bus. Lacking gainful employment to occupy his time, he has the energy to get worked up over this, and some of his neighbors think him a busybody because of that. Furthermore, since he lives in the suburbs, where schools are heavily financed by property taxes, the cost-burden equation of immigration is shifted. In cities, it doesn't create the same student-to-funding imbalance in local public schools when immigrants crowd small dwellings or illegally rent parts of houses. The revenue sources for students come from income taxes -- which many immigrants pay with fake social security numbers -- as well as property taxes. In the suburbs, however, more students per dwelling means fewer dollars per student.

Even so, Mr. Nicolosi betrays an all-too-common unhealthy suburban American attitude when he vents:

"Two children are in school, and one is handicapped — that's $10,000 for elementary school, $100,000 a year for special education," he said. "Why am I paying taxes to support that house?"

That kind of selfish mentality -- our public schools are only for rich, healthy students -- is lamentably common in suburbia. Both that, and the local property tax funding structure that expresses and reinforces it, need to be changed.

--Ben Adler

WDJD? WHAT DID JEROME DO? It's worth being clear, too, on what exactly the charges against Jerome Armstrong are. The SEC believes that he took stock at below-market prices and then sought to hype the stock in order to increase its prices without disclosure. That last bit is the problem. He can push whatever stocks he wants (well, not after the investigation, but before); the wrongdoing came in his lack of transparency. Raging Bull readers who scanned his posts had no way of knowing he was possibly a paid flack rather than an honest broker.

Fast forward to the present, where Armstrong is a consultant to Mark Warner. Indeed, he's a decidedly public employee of Warner, certainly one of the best known and most widely publicized consultants of the 2008 campaign thus far. Where the stock malfeasance turned on Armstrong's hidden relationship, allegations of wrongdoing here are all based on his public relationship. Given that the job of a consultant is to hype and help his candidate, Jerome's efforts are both obvious and even laudable. He is, it seems, a very good consultant. Like a childhood hacker becoming a brilliant computer programmer, what Jerome once did wrong, he's now doing right. He's hyping his candidate to the nation's political influencers, and he appears to be succeeding. Call foul on that, and you better be willing to call foul on the entire political system, where Carville and Shrum and Rove do precisely the same thing, but with far less transparency in who they're talking to and targeting.

--Ezra Klein

P4P PASSES. In politics, the battle lines over health care are drawn atop access. The quality of our care is granted, the only question is how more folk can reap the benefits. In academia, however, the question is as often care. Our surgeons may be on the cutting edge (thanks folks, I'll be here all week), but stepping back a bit from the frontier, the vast majority of care is either inefficiently delivered or simply forgotten. Studies show that we receive only about 55 percent of the recommended treatments for most serious complaints -- and we're not talking CAT scans here, but easy lifesavers, like aspirin and beta blockers after a heart attack. America offers the world's best care for the most exotic and complicated problems, but if you're unlucky enough to suffer something more mundane, you're better off in a host of other hamlets.

The policy response here is something called pay For Performance medicine, or P4P. At base, the incentives in our system are to offer treatments, particularly intensive ones. It's called fee-for-service, and it offers no incentives for quality care or low intensity (aspirin) treatments. P4P, by contrast, pays based on outcomes, on percentage of suggested care delivered (for a fuller explanation, see this review I wrote). It pays based on how good, not how expensive, the treatment is. And one of its first major tests just ended. Utilizing more than 200 hospitals and 38 states, Medicare instituted P4P systems, paying based on treatment quality and comprehensivity and offering bonuses for outcome improvement. The results? Not only did care get better, but it got cheaper. "2004 hospital costs for pneumonia patients were $10,298 for patients who received a low number of the care measures and $8,412 for those who received a high amount. Hospital costs for heart bypass surgery patients also varied widely, with those receiving a low number of measures costing $41,539 while those who had the highest amount cost $30,061."

The mechanism here is that better care means fewer days in the hospital, fewer relapses, less catastrophic measures deployed. Those things are expensive and, contrary to popular opinion, much lifesaving care is cheap -- at least if you deploy it early. It's worth noting here that it took the influence of Medicare, a single-payer government system, to finally force a wide test of P4P theories. Private insurers are too fractured, and lack the proper incentives, to trigger a reevaluation of hospital care procedures. But Medicare, using their weight and public mission, forced a study that may pave the way towards more efficient, cost-effective, and worthwhile care.

Ooh, scary government, huh?

--Ezra Klein

KOS/ARMSTRONG/ZENGERLE FOLLOWUP. All right, a brief comment on this. The folks out there in the 'sphere alleging that Jason Zengerle deliberately fabricated the now-infamous Gilliard email ought to knock it off. There's no basis for saying that, it would be a ridiculous thing to do, and it's irresponsible to be running around making those kind of charges.

To step back a bit, insofar as all that's being alleged by Markos' detractors, here is something along the lines of "Markos' affections for candidates seems idiosyncratic and not driven by a consistent ideological worldview" that I heartily agree with and I think is a problem. TAPPED, like Max Sawicky, has generally taken the position that, contrary to the C.W., the trouble with the netroots is insufficient dogmatism and strident leftwingery. This is why I now and again have occasion to disagree with something he writes, at which point I genuinely express said disagreement in a blog post. On the other hand, it's hardly as if he's the only person on the planet who doesn't always support the candidate I think should be supported. And to say that someone's judgment is sometimes -- or even often -- bad is very different from the sort of allegations of corruption that I think are implied in terms like "Kosola."

--Matthew Yglesias

THE REAL ISSUES. Jason Zengerle concedes that, as rumored in the blogofascistsphere over the weekend, the email he attributed to Steve Gilliard was inauthentic. He then pleads that we not "use this minor error to distract people from much larger issues," namely:

Armstrong's troubles with the SEC; Armstrong's relationship with Moulitsas and Moulitsas's pattern of supporting politicians who hire Armstrong as a consultant; Moulitsas's attempts to silence liberal bloggers from commenting on these matters; the seeming acquiescence of so many of these liberal bloggers (including Greenwald) to Moulitsas's demands; and now, strangely, stuff like this.

I have to say that I don't understand this at all. Frankly, I think Markos' views on Mark Warner are wrongheaded and I've said so in the past. That said, I have yet to see Zengerle or anyone else adduce a shred of evidence that Markos took money from the Warner campaign, that Markos took money from Jerome Armstrong, or that Markos threatened or otherwise "silenced" liberal bloggers.

Rather, what appears to be the case is that Markos and Jerome, coauthors of a book on American politics, tend to have similar views about American politics. Zengerle's theory about the Liberal Advertising Network being used as a tool of intimidation was totally ridiculous and he never had a shred of evidence to back it up. Markos asked that people not respond to the story, and people respected his request. Quel horreur! Meanwhile, Jerome . . . what, exactly? Has wacky views on astrology? Appears to have committed unrelated financial misdeeds in the past?

Where's the beef in these charges? The evidence? Anything? Or is the idea that Markos should just operate under a presumption of guilt?

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE BLOGOFASCISTAS. What is the nature of the blogofascist threat, and can liberals summon the will and the courage to face it down? Matt makes the case for putting anti-blogofascism at the center of a new liberalism for the age.

--The Editors

BUSH AND ROOSEVELT, EMPIRE AND HISTORY. Karl Rove, it seems, thinks Bush's foreign policy is modeled on Teddy Roosevelt's. Ross Douthat sees irony:

It's funny, because so far the military conflict that the Iraq War most resembles isn't Vietnam or World War II, but the TR-boosted Spanish-American War - a quick and painless military victory over a second-rate power, driven by a mix of idealism, jingoism, and power politics, that segued into a long and grueling counter-insurgency campaign.

This is quite right, which is why everyone should read John Judis's book.

Speaking of which, I have some serious doubts about the Supreme Leader's thinking below. The upshot of all this analogizing is that, just as we were in Cuba and Puerto Rico, I think the current administration is really quite deeply committed to an enduring military presence in Iraq and to exercising considerable influence over the Iraqi government. If that can be accomplished in a manner consistent with drawing down 75 percent of our troops then, obviously, Bush will do that. Saying he wants to stay in Iraq forever isn't equivalent to saying he wants 120,000 troops to stay there forever (that would be a lot). But if it isn't possible to draw down to that level, then we won't draw down. It's important to understand that it's already the case that the main thing our troops are doing is "force-protection" -- it's hard to station a small deployment in a hostile area. Odds are the deployment will keep the insurgency burning. This will make it unsafe to move to a small force. Bush won't want to move to a total withdrawal. And so we'll continue to have a big deployment.

Remember that two years ago most liberals thought there would be a major drawdown before the 2004 elections. It didn't happen. Throughout 2005 there was also lots of talk about how Bush would be withdrawing in time for the 2005 election. It didn’t happen then, and it's not going to happen in 2006. I hope -- I pray, really -- that Bush decides to withdraw troops before the 2008 election (or sooner!) but I'm not going to count on it happening. What's more, anytime Bush wants to improve his standing in the polls by doing something crazy like implementing better policies, my plan is to applaud him.

--Matthew Yglesias

OCCAM’S RAZOR EXPLANATION. I think, Ezra, it’s all simpler than that.

They invaded Iraq. They didn’t expect a problem. They got a problem. Now they want out. But they want out provided two conditions are met in the process: 1. They can do it in such a way to make the Democrats look weak; 2. They can time it so as to maximize electoral benefit from announcement of withdrawal.

Ezra and Matt are making the mistake of discussing substantive factors. You’ve surely learned by now that there is no substance with these people. There is only politics. We will start to get out of Iraq, bit by bit, this September and October. By the end of 2007, a plan will be announced to ensure we’re substantially out (i.e., a 75 percent draw down or some such) by October 2008. You can set your watch by it.

Yardsticks of civic stability will be manipulated, just as intelligence was manipulated three and four years ago, to “prove” that Iraq is becoming a stable society at whatever moment the administration wants to trot out those statistics. The substance, and the consequences, will be something for the next administration to deal with.

Please, quit being so un-cynical!

--Michael Tomasky

BFF. To follow-up on Matt's point that the Bush administration not only missed, but actively subverted our opportunity to withdraw from Iraq, it's really worth stating the implications of this clearly. For years, the sector of the left concerned with the appearance or existence of imperalist tendencies was mocked and pilloried -- remember Zell Miller foaming over hearing our troops called "occupiers" rather than "liberators"? But they were right.

The Bush administration is actively working against the wishes of the elected Iraqi government and the expressed preferences of the American public to pursue an indefinite occupation of Iraq. This is a perpetual deployment on behalf of no stated goals, no wish-list of accomplishments, and no obvious purpose. I can't say whether we want the military bases, the oil, the regional foothold, or anything else; but invading a country, overthrowing their government, and then remaining against the wishes of the elected successors is the very definition of an occupying power, and in any international context, the neocons would be quick to define it as a hostile occupying power. Folks sometimes wonder why we don't have an exit strategy. The answer, now obvious, is because we don't want one.

--Ezra Klein

EVANGELICALS FOR MITT? After noticing an incoming link yesterday from Evangelicals For Mitt, I headed over to the advocacy site to take a look for myself. Unfortunately, the place is barred and shuttered, password protected and closed to the masses. Yet it has been built -- Feedster picked up plenty of text behind the wall, including active links. In my experience, few personal web pages are locked until they're ready, but most all official political organizations keep their door tightly shut until the last possible moment. So I'd guess -- though on the basis of rather flimsy evidence -- that this is a professional site, either sponsored by the campaign or operatives near to it. The "WhoIs" information on the domain name backs up my suspicions; the information is hidden, a Utah-based hosting company being the closest thing you get to a name.

Given all the talk that Mitt Romney will find his Mormonism a huge barrier in collecting evangelical votes, it's perhaps not surprising that the outreach is starting this early. My hunch has long been that Romney's religion will manifest itself less as a particular (and particularly controversial) organized faith and more as a set of social beliefs the Christian Right can thrill to. That, after all, is what's happened with evangelicals' former blood enemies the Catholics, and now plenty of scions of the Christian Right take Catholic communion on weekends. Similarly, so much as folks warn that Mormonism is viewed as a cult -- I think Romney is too far from a cult leader, and possibly too attractive an option against actual social liberals like Giuliani -- to resist. That said, Amy Sullivan, who certainly knows more than I about religious matters, examined the issue in-depth and reached the opposite conclusion, so maybe you shouldn't be listening to me. The Romney team certainly isn't. They, or folks close to them, are obviously concerned, and thus the campaign to create an astroturf groundswell of Evangelics for Romney seems to be getting underway early.

Updated against a few too many glib turns of phrase.

--Ezra Klein

A DESERT WIND AND A PERVERSE DESIRE TO WIN. For a while over the weekend, it looked like the Bush administration stumbled into a golden ticket out of Iraq -- a draft national reconciliation plan written by Iraq's prime minister that, among other things, called on the United States to develop a timetable for withdrawal. Rather than embrace this opportunity, however, the administration worked to water down the reconciliation proposals, including the requests for the United States to withdraw.

That little saga tells you what you need to know about the vague noise about troop draw-downs emanating from the White House and the Pentagon. As I said last week, the administration doesn't have a real plan to leave Iraq because it doesn't want to leave Iraq. Duncan Black (pseudonyms are a sign of blogofascism) reminds us that we've been here before. Rather than whining that -- shockingly! -- the other political party is being mean to them in an effort to win elections, Democrats need to keep their eyes on the ball and pressure the administration to actually take steps toward withdrawal.

A good first step, of course, would be to take the Iraqis up on it when they're asking us to go rather than pressuring them to tell us to stay.

--Matthew Yglesias

ASSYMETRICAL WARFARE. I wanted to highlight something Ezra passed along from the breakfast with Grover Norquist: "The left, he argued, shouldn't seek to simply mimeograph the right's structure -- CAP for Heritage, Media Matters for Media Research Council, etc. 'You don't have to have the same weapons in politics because both aren't structured the same.'" When you think about it, this seems both obvious, important, and unduly neglected. And it goes beyond institutions -- the progressive and conservative coalitions in America simply aren't mirror images of one another, and so while there are obviously lessons to be learned from looking at the right's rise, you can't simply imitate things that worked for conservatives and hope they work for liberals.

In his Los Angeles Times column yesterday, Jon Chait dealt with an important example: "Conservatives venerate the free market and see smaller government as an end in itself. Liberals do not venerate government in the same way, and we do not see larger government as an end in and of itself." Thus, while conservative thinking on economics can be summed up with a quick-and-easy slogan ("small government"), liberals not only don't have an equivalently brief formulation, but we can't find one unless we decide to become Communists ("collective ownership of the means of production") -- the actual idea is just harder to summarize without becoming extremely vague.

Indeed, I've become sufficiently enthusiastic about this Norquistian pearl of wisdom that I'm tempted to uncork an obscenely long post on the subject, but I'll demur and perhaps write it up in a more organized manner later.

--Matthew Yglesias

IN DEFENSE OF HRC. Hillary Rodham Clinton, lately keeping us safe from burning flags and Grand Theft Auto, gets one right in a big way with this speech. In a general way, defending privacy is the most important issue in domestic politics, both in and of itself, and as a way to attack the Human Growth Hormones that John Yoo execrably injected into the Executive Branch by dressing Alexander Hamilton up as one of the Plantagenets. People like privacy.

Respecting someone's privacy is a virtue; otherwise, nobody ever would have invented Venetian blinds. Most people could care less whether the Sixth Amendment applies to some poor sod swept up by the Northern Alliance and packed off to Botany ... er... Guantanamo Bay. But they believe their personal privacy is something the government is supposed to protect. I think you might even be able to chip off some of the libertarian right with this one. My one quibble, and it's largely a personal one, is that there doesn't seem to be any mention of genetic privacy here, an issue on which the senator's hubby was laudably ahead of the curve.

-- Charles P. Pierce

BAUER, MEET CHERTOFF. Thanks to the redoubtable, and ludicrously well-married, Mr. TBogg for finding this bit of comedy gold.

If you missed Bruce Springsteen's little gavotte with Soledad O'Brien this morning on CNN, you missed his making the point to Sunshine that no network on which Ann Coulter ever has appeared can credibly ask musicians about being qualified to speak out on politics. Seriously, do you think Coulter -- or for that matter, Ken Mehlman -- knows more than Springsteen does about any pressing issue of the day? Mehlman's an automaton, and Coulter's from the Planet Of The UltraVixens. Yes, Soledad, better we leave the serious stuff to you guys and to those deep thinkers at places like the Heritage Foundation who, I'm sure, are going to look positively darling in their Savile Row suits and Jack Bauer t-shirts. Send the bill for the Chee-Tos to the Olin Foundation.

--Charles P. Pierce

A METAKOS MOMENT. Though part of me thinks Matt treated the outbreak of open war between TNR and Daily Kos with the appropriate level of seriousness (for now) below, there's still some actual points to be made, rather than scored, about what's been happening over the past few days as this flamewar writ large has escalated. Two analytic points made by other bloggers over the past few months come to mind. Chris Bowers of MyDD had a great insight into how poorly some online dynamics, such as the flamewar, translate into real life, which he talked about at the Yearly Kos conference in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, on a panel called "MetaKos." After the opening remarks, an audience member asked him if he thought that blogs served as models for offline communities. Bowers' reply:

I would say no. [audience laughter] That would be a very dark and disturbing place....where someone jumps into a room and says something that makes everyone mad, and then a mob starts chasing them...I can't imagine a community structured like the blogosphere. That would be really scary.

Bowers was absolutely correct that a progressive community where people treat each other the same way they do on blogs is a place that maintains very few of the characteristics we tend to think of as tying communities together. But the ferocity of this real-world fight is very reflective of an online style.

The other point about all of this is that it does nothing to answer what Grover Norquist told a group of reporters at the Prospect breakfast this morning in regard to successful electoral coalition building: "How do we make more of us and fewer of them" and "not chase anybody out"?

Norquist's question is going to be increasingly worth bearing in mind from now until November 2008, because of a dynamic that was predicted in the single most important blog item I've read in months, Atrios's "The Coming Blogwars":

Overall the lefty blogosphere managed to get through 2003 and early 2004 without too much rancor. I think I cried when The Editors got mad at me about something I said about Wes Clark because I was as big an Editors fanboy as he was a Clark fanboy, but aside from that it seemed blogland got through.

Still I worry that it's going to get a wee bit nasty this time. People are going to be understandably passionate about these things and there are certainly those out there who think it's unfair that the "big bloggers" have undue influence. I'm sure I'll be "on the take" of 5 different campaigns (I wish!) as will plenty of others. I'm sure various big bloggers will end up supporting different candidate, so we'll probably end up fighting with each other too. The various blog factions - wonks, netroots - will imagine the other faction is working out of ignorance and bad faith. And on and on.

I think this is clearly already happening. I just don't think any one expected it to start so early.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL, IMPERIALISM. I hate to ruin a good suggestion about political messaging with a lefty observation that Democrats should arguably refrain from making, but I think Josh Marshall is mistaken about this:

Let's work through a bit of this. If the president had a plan for success he would say, 'I plan to get X, Y and Z done and then we're going to bring American troops back home. I expect those three things will be accomplished by the middle of 2007.' Or maybe he'd say 2008 or the beginning of 2009.

But he doesn't say any of those things. When he says we're staying in Iraq as long as he's in the White House he makes clear that he doesn't have any plan other than staying in Iraq. Other than staying their indefinitiely or basically forever. Isn't it possible his 'plan' could work and have us out in 2008? Obviously, he's discounted that possibility because, again, he has no plan.

Bush has a plan for Iraq all right, and it's trouble with a capital "T" and that rhymes with "P," which stands for "permanent bases". That's the reason he won't even make a vague promise to bring the troops home by Christmas (or whatever). That also explains the curious phenomenon by which the administration keeps hinting at troop withdrawals but insisting that the withdrawals must never have an endpoint. The plan is to withdraw troops -- most of them -- and leave the rest there . . . forever.

Note the existence of the "Iraqi" secret police force funded and controlled by the CIA. Note that the Iraqi military isn't being given the sort of training or equipment that would allow it to deter or defeat foreign armies.

For some reason, the media seems to view discussion of this matter as too indelicate to permit. But, obviously, the United States military has a long history of showing up places and then not really leaving. No doubt, administration officials would site Germany, South Korea, and Japan as the relevant precedents. I would argue that we're more looking at a case like Subic Bay, Guantanamo, or Puerto Rico -- all the spoils of our war with Spain. Obviously, we're not going to annex Iraq the way we did the Philippines, but I think Cuba is probably the relevant precedent. There's not going to be a Platt Amendment but one should keep in mind the point that Iraq's current prime minister owes his office largely to the United States vetoing his predecessor's re-nomination.

--Matthew Yglesias

CONSERVALOVE. This is why it's impossible to hate TNR for very long. Sour as I felt after this morning's Lee Siegel post on blogospheric fascists (who gave him the keys to a blog anyway?), I nevertheless found it impossible not to love this just-posted article where one of their writers, my friend Eve Fairbanks, signed up for a conservative dating site and went out with three of the guys -- political sociology in action. The piece, which could've been cruel, elects not to dynamite its barrel o' fish, and instead surfaces with some genuinely interesting observations on the nature of conservalove. The most fascinating, which tracks with my observations, is that:

The women on ConservativeMatch--at least the women of Washington, Virginia--are both much rarer and more quintessentially "conservative" than the men are. Out of the 40 profiles I considered, only ten were women. Several of these described themselves as "simple," even "prudish" girls with "old-school" values, looking for a "manly" or "boy scout" sort of guy. ("He must not smoke, cuss, or spit.") All ten were seriously practicing Christians, and only one disagreed that sex outside of marriage is immoral. Favorite books included Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (or, as one put it, "anything from 18th century England").

The men are strikingly different. They are not, for the most part, serious values conservatives. Over half of the 30 men I initially viewed believe that sex before marriage is OK ("Heck," one wrote, "I think that some marriages are immoral"), and twelve--or 40 percent--believe abortion may not need to be illegal. Their conservatism manifests itself more in a libertarian sensibility, in diehard patriotism, in the desire for a strong defense, even in matters of taste, like an appreciation for country living.

Seems right. When the women value modesty and the men idealize war, the dates must make for odd interactions. On a related note, a friend and I were chatting after a recent event and conversation briefly detoured to a particularly striking woman who'd been seated nearby. Never mind her, he said, no way she was a Democrat. Why? "Because Democrats don't wear pearls." And there you have it.

Bleg: I feel like there was an awesome article around the RNC convention about a liberal writer who went to a couple Republican singles events. Maybe it was in Salon? Anyway, if anyone remembers, it seems well worth linking to. As I recall, it was about the apex of convention-related punditry.

--Ezra Klein

GROVER SPEAKS, WE LISTEN. The Prospect hosted a breakfast with conservative enforcer and liberal bogeyman Grover Norquist today and, let's just be honest -- the man gives good quotes. No wonder reporters like to call him up. He also took an obvious delight in taking on a room full of liberals. Some of his answers were insightful, some informative, some nuts, some the utterances of a man deep in denial. Which is to say, you could hardly have hoped for a livelier breakfast guest. A few notes:

Grover on political coalitions: "If you keep everyone happy on their primary issue but disappoint them on their secondary issue, everyone grumbles, but no one walks out." This is Grover's way of reconciling what is a tolerant, pro-immigrant, pro-gay worldview with his partisan electoral concerns. He's convinced, or at least hopeful, that gays and immigrants are a second-tier issue, subordinate to taxes and regulations. The trick is figuring out "when you are talking to somebody on a vote moving primary issue and when on something they just heard on talk radio." This strikes me as remarkably naive. To subvert the old Upton Sinclair quote, it is very hard to get someone to understand something when their morality depends on remaining naive.

On institution building: The left, he argued, shouldn't seek to simply mimeograph the right's structure -- CAP for Heritage, Media Matters for Media Research Council, etc. "You don't have to have the same weapons in politics because both aren't structured the same." Back in gladitorial days, one warrior would have a sword, the other a trident and net. You play to your strengths, not to your opponent's. I found this to be a remarkably compelling point.

On Mitt Romney: Grover's a fan if for no other reason than he hopes a Romney candidacy will tamp down on anti-Mormon sentiment. Thirty years ago, nearly half of Americans confessed that they'd oppose a Jewish or black President, now the numbers are in the single digits. Thirty years ago, 18 percent said they'd oppose a Mormon. Today? Seventeen percent.

On Gingrich: Originally, Newt was just toying with a candidacy to hype book sales. But more and more, "I think Newt looks around and says, 'I know all these guys who're doing this, I can do better than this."

On Mark Warner: If he runs in the general, we'll beat him. We know how to beat those guys, guys who lie and then raise taxes. We wouldn't even need to rewrite the literature.

On McCain: "The right-to-life folks have figured out that McCain can't get them their judge. His goal in life is to etch Keating 5 off his tombstone and replace it with 'campaign finance reform.' But no judge will look at the constitution and see room for campaign finance reform but not abortion."

He also let slip that he's spent the last few weeks helping the Bush administration craft a major new health plan focused on a radical expansion of health savings accounts, whose structure he didn't quite seem to understand. Color me excited.

--Ezra Klein

INORDINATE FEAR OF COMMUNISM. The harder I think about it, the less I understand why Bill Perry and Ashton Carter want to bomb North Korea to stop them from testing the Taepodong 2 missile. They say we don't need to worry that the DPRK will retaliate since "an invasion of South Korea would bring about the certain end of Kim Jong Il's regime within a few bloody weeks of war, as surely he knows." But by the same token, he surely knows that launching a nuclear missile at the United States would bring about the certain end of his regime. So what are we worried about?

It seems to me that we shouldn't let the North Koreans send us into these states of periodic panic -- it only serves to encourage them to keep acting up to get a rise out of us. Their technology is crappy, their country is dirt poor and militarily inferior to South Korea, to say nothing of Japan or the United States. There's nothing in North Korea that we could conceivably want (cabbage? starving people? the world's weirdest subway?) and it's the most contained country on earth. The serious DPRK-related policy question is what we and our allies -- notably the aforementioned South Korea and Japan -- will do once the northern regime inevitably falls.

--Matthew Yglesias

PUBLIC HEALTH ANNOUNCEMENT. Don't use your cellphone during a lightning storm. Contrary to popular belief, getting struck by lightning isn't nearly the worst that can happen to you. Generally, the high resistance of your skin works to ground the blast, leaving you little more than singed. According to a new study, however, the presence of a phone disrupts the transmission process, vastly increasing the likelihood of serious internal injury. The findings are particularly on the mind this morning as D.C. experienced an absolutely epic thunderstorm last night. Being a naive Californian who'd only experienced irregular bolts in the past, the constancy of the light led me to believe, for the first half hour, that there were sirens outside. When Zeus nailed my street a few times, though, I revised my opinion. Impressive stuff, but not the sort I want to describe from outside on my LG.

--Ezra Klein

HOUSES, POX ON. The really great thing about the Daily Kos versus New Republic war is that the more each side opens their mouths, the worse you think of them. Markos's initial impulse to stay silent in the face of Chris Suellentrop's allegations seemed sound. Suellentrop didn't really have the goods. Let some time pass and the goods would either surface or not and there was nothing worth saying about it. But then Jason Zengerle started spinning a rather implausible conspiracy theory. Folks were rising to Kos' defense, but then Kos chose to ruin everything by penning a laughably self-regarding response (as I've been muttering around the office, the only real scandal in Kosland is that Markos is a bit of an egomaniac, but I assume you'd have to be in order to succeed in creating a massive online community) in which the key metric for judging TNR's degree of progressivism isn't their warmongering, but . . . their opinion of Markos.

As of late afternoon yesterday, I was ready to declare TNR the winner on points for having been less embarrassingly ridiculous about this, but then this morning I saw Lee Siegel's contribution to the debate explaining that not only Markos but "the blogosphere" generally is -- wait for it, emphasis will be added -- "hard fascism with a Microsoft face." Because, of course, Mussolini was well known for posting strident critiques of his political foes on the internet. Or maybe that was Hitler? Franco? Who knows. And what's soft fascism anyway?

The most regrettable element of the whole thing is that it seems to have distracted Siegel from his Kos-esque determination to wage jihad against Malcolm Gladwell which, to me, reeks of hard fascism with a Microsoft face. Perhaps others will disagree. Personally, I use a Mac, so my fascistic efforts to silence my enemies by subjecting them to criticism in public fora all come with a human face.

--Matthew Yglesias

SOFT BALANCING. In an important post on the TNR soccer blog, Alex Massie notes that it's not just the World Cup we're losing, American performance in international athletic competitions generally has been poor in recent years. He asks, "So what, fellow Goal Posters, is it about the United States that makes this country so apparently and congenitally hopeless at team sports?" In a later post Brian Sinkoff observes that, among other things, we were beset by very unfortunate officiating. The same thing happened to USA Basketball in the 2004 olympics in Athens. Coincidence? I think not. Welcome, friends, to the exciting world of "soft balancing" in international relations:

Soft balancing occurs when weaker states decide that the dominance and influence of a stronger state is unacceptable, but that the military advantage of the stronger state is so overwhelming that traditional balancing is infeasible or even impossible. In addition to overwhelming military superiority, scholars also suggest that democratic peace theory suggests a preference toward soft, rather than hard, balancing among democracies.

As opposed to traditional balancing, soft balancing is undertaken not to physically shift the balance of power but to undermine, frustrate, and increase the cost of unilateral action for the stronger state. Soft balancing is not undertaken via military effort, but via a combination of economic, diplomatic, and institutional methods.

To make a long story short, this is the problem. Frustrated by American unilateral militarism, but unable to stop it, the nations of the world are giving other teams all the calls ("a combination of economic, diplomatic, and institutional methods") in an effort to "increase the cost of unilateral action" for the United States. If you want to win these things, you need to pass a "global test" first.

--Matthew Yglesias

I COME NOT TO BURY TNR... Consider this a "before we get too far" post. It should be said, amidst Markos's assault on TNR, that no magazine where the publisher just penned a Gore 2008 endorsement should really be considered "on the other side" or the "Joe Lieberman" weekly. Ryan Lizza's recent work on George Allen's neoconfederate sympathies has been superb, anyone on the left who has the slightest interest in Iraq should be reading Spencer Ackerman's every word, and the magazine is, in general, a strong and forceful advocate for progressive domestic policies. I do, like Jon Chait, worry about the "with us or against us" overtones of Kos's riposte -- the left should judge its allies on more than friendliness and tone.

That said, I was unimpressed with Jason Zengerle's post yesterday and said so. It's simply untrue that Markos commands fealty by dangling advertising revenue. But I take no joy in the accelerating split between "the netroots" and TNR. The basic issue, it seems to me, is not that TNR isn't on the left, but that they don't like much of the left. And, to be fair, the feeling is, at least with Markos, mutual. But while that may be bad, it's deeply distinct from an abundance of ideological disagreement. They can be an intellectually interesting and worthwhile magazine while not being part of the movement. Frankly, the left has too often criticized Bush's binary "with us or against us" scheme to begin falling prey to it themselves.

On a sort of related note, it would be nice if this massive blogospheric infrastructure did more to support the magazines they do like. You hear a lot about the insidiousness of TNR and The Weekly Standard, but there's little effort to strengthen alternatives like The American Prospect or In These Times. The blogospheric audience is a natural fit for a magazine like ours, but I fear there's little crossover between our subscription rolls and TAPPED readers, much less Kos diarists. It shouldn't be that way. If the energy expended on blasting the conservative or "establishment liberal" media were instead channeled towards the affirmative strategy of strengthening forthrightly progressive outlets, we'd all be better off. And by "we all," I'm thinking particularly of myself.

And c'mon, you didn't really think I'd close this post without an exhortation to subscribe, did you? So subscribe!

--Ezra Klein

HACKERY UNBOUND. You'll have to search far and wide for more egregiously hackish behavior than that engaged in this week by the chairmen of the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, respectively. These guys are real tributes to their posts.

--Sam Rosenfeld

CAN THIS MAN SOLVE POVERTY? He's good. Better, in fact, than you remember. I just got back from a National Press Club luncheon where former VP candidate John Edwards gave the first substantive policy address of his yet-unannounced 2008 candidacy. News that Edwards can command a crowd's attention is scarcely news at all, so I'll not dwell on that. Nor will anyone be particularly shocked -- though some will be enthused, and others inspired -- to hear that Edwards wishes to make the elimination of poverty a national crusade. Here's what is new:

• Poverty is going to be John Edwards foreign policy. That's not to say he'll lack a variety of proposals and opinions on our dealings with other countries. He's called for the immediate withdrawal of 40,000 troops from Iraq and just coauthored a book on Russia with Jack Kemp. But his vision, his mega-critique of our foreign policy direction, will be about poverty. Edwards's big idea seems, at least from this speech, to be downright Beinartian -- America can only restore its moral authority around the world by showing some here at home. As other countries intently watch our nation, their willingness to accept our leadership depends mightily on their estimation of our righteousness. "How we work to improve our country and lift our people up," he said, "is critical to restoring American leadership in the world." Put another way, if we're stronger at home, we'll be more respected abroad.

• It will also be his domestic policy. But for Edwards, poverty isn't about the poor, it's about the rich. "Ending poverty is not something we do for others, but something we do for all of us. It says something about us." Poverty, in his hands, is about us, not them. Its perpetuation isn't the fault of the unemployed minority, but the shame of the blessed majority. He's attempting to transform the issue, rendering it a referendum on the moral character and compassion of the country.

• He's also moved to specifics. During the Q&A, he said his poverty plan would cost about $20 billion. That obviously ignores the health care plan, which he's not yet released the details of but has promised will guarantee comprehensive coverage to all -- "no wiggle-words" or excuses. As for poverty, here are the major proposals:

1) Reform the poverty measure, which is a 1950s era anachronism based on food costs. Get an accurate metric which delivers an accurate count. Early estimations show that we'll have about a million more folks in poverty using such a standard.

2) Create a million "stepping-stone" jobs over five years. These positions would be open to individuals who have searched for a private sector job for six months and found nothing. They would pay minimum wage and last up to a year. These would be public works or non-profit positions.

3) Raise the minimum wage to at least $7.50, triple the Earned Income tax Credit for workers without children, and end the marriage penalty hidden in the way it treats low-income couples.

4) Strengthen labor laws and pass the "Employee Free Choice Act."

5) Radically reform the department of Housing and Urban Development and create a million new housing vouchers to economically integrate neighborhoods. Create tax credits and asset-building programs to aid first-time homeowners. Crack down on predatory lending and open easier avenues for home loans.

6) Promote savings through "work bonds," a new income subsidy that would match wages up to $500 annually and deposit the cash directly into a bank account.

There were also some miscellaneous promises to expand access to college, incentivize marriage, help rural communities, etc. This was a meaty speech, though, not the type of address you deliver if you're not hungrily eyeing an office with the power to implement it. There's been no announcement, but based on what I saw today, and the series of speeches promised for the next year or so, I'd say Edwards is almost definitely running.

--Ezra Klein

THE REPORT. Keep scrolling through TPM Muckraker for some choice excerpts from and analysis of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee's final report (PDF) on Jack Abramoff's Indian tribe shenanigans. As has been noted, committee chair John McCain had been quite careful in steering this investigation away from intensive looks into the actions of sitting members of Congress; discussion of Bob Ney, however, was unavoidable in a final, comprehensive report. Go to pages 162-180 for the goods. The report's authors are very careful in how they structure the account of the Tigua tribe's work with Ney, documenting Ney's contradictions of other witnesses' claims without explicitly rendering a judgment on the he said, she said disputes. Plenty of the material is damning, though:

During his interview with Committee staff, Congressman Ney said he was not familiar with the Tigua.272 He could not recall ever meeting with any member of the Tigua.273 When asked about a possible two-hour meeting, Congressman Ney said he “wouldn’t even meet with the President for two hours.”274 After the interview, counsel to Congressman Ney, who was present during the interview, indicated that, according to an internal email describing Congressman Ney’s calendar for the relevant period, a meeting was scheduled in Congressman Ney’s office with the “Taqua,” from 11:00 - 11:30 a.m.

Hmm….Meanwhile, I'm still working through the report, but one tiny tidbit I wasn't aware of before was Michael Scanlon's claim to have hired Harold Ickes in 2002 to lobby Dems in the Senate on the Tigua legislation. The only problem: "The Committee has seen no evidence suggesting, much less establishing, that Scanlon had hired Ickes." With Scanlon especially, the b.s. just never seemed to end.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WEIRD LEDE OF THE DAY. The Hill takes the prize:

When Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter stepped into the shower yesterday, it was an elusive immigration overhaul, not a slippery bar of soap, that he most hoped to keep within his grasp.

--Sam Rosenfeld

IDEAS, FIRST PRINCIPLES, THE PHILOSOPHY GAP, ETC. To add to the pushback against liberal "ideas" hype, I recommend reading Greg Anrig's post as well as Alan Wolfe's essay in the latest Washington Monthly. Neither actually make arguments against the transcendent relevance of big ideas to political parties, but they both make a refreshingly obvious point that relates to that debate: namely, that conservative Republican governance -- the culmination of the right's storied decades-long efforts to build a movement and an intellectual infrastructure and to incubate new ideas while out in the political wilderness and blah blah blah -- has been an unmitigated fiasco and embarrassment. Most of the right's big ideas have turned out to be less than half-baked, and the right in power has failed to advance most of the basic goals of political conservatism.

Wolfe makes a very sweeping and historical case for the inevitability of conservative failure in power ("A conservative in America, in short, is someone who advocates ends that cannot be realized through means that can never be justified, at least not on the terrain of conservatism itself."), but even focusing more narrowly on the contemporary scene, it seems clear to me that right-wing pundits' penchant for incessant ruminations about first principles, conservative intellectual history, and What Would Hayek Do? games represents a dodge -- a way to avoid facing up to the glaring lack of an actual practical Republican governing agenda or arguing about issues of policy and priorities. There are actual, important debates to be had about policy and priorities among liberals (here's an example at random), but, crucially, those debates can't be hashed out at a high level of abstraction. The state of modern conservatism doesn't lead me to think that liberals have a great deal to gain from a lot of intense haggling over first principles or feverish "new idea"-mongering.

--Sam Rosenfeld

NDN GETS BACK TO ITS ROOTS. So the annual NDN Conference gets under way at noon today, and guess who's on the speaker line-up? New Democrats. People who have ties to the Democratic Leadership Council. People accused on blogs of centrism. The main political speakers at the conference are: Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; former Virginia Governor Mark Warner; Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, chair of the DLC; and Senator Hillary Clinton. There's Bernard Schwartz, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Loral Space & Communications -- a defense contractor and major Democratic funder -- and also... Markos Moulitsas Zuniga , described on the conference schedule as an "internet pioneer."

Last time I saw Markos speak, at the Yearly Kos conference, I turned to my seat-mate and said: That man is going to run for office one day. Between his media trainer's styling advice (which included such tips as wearing hair-gel) and his now extensive public speaking experience, he is one of the very few bloggers who has really shown a capacity for personal growth and evolution in his relationship to the political and media mainstream, even while he has remained as hot-headed in his writing as he ever was. And where once it looked like NDN was getting sucked into the most noxious corners of what Jane Hamsher calls "greater Blogistan," today it looks like it's actually the bloggers who are getting sucked into NDN's mainstream, which seamlessly made room for those few capable of learning how to play the Washington power game. Some of them, like Markos, will be able to make a life in politics for themselves and perhaps be major players twenty years hence, if they chose to be, while others appear even now to be on the verge of losing it because of the stress of newly increased media scrutiny. And so the great story of the evolution of the Democratic Party that started in early 2003 with the linkages Joe Trippi built between the Howard Dean campaign and the blogs is continuing, and has entered a fascinating new phase.

It's not just that Markos is now an insider at a forum that includes only anti-Iraq withdrawal deadline presidential contenders affiliated with the DLC. It's that Joe Rospars, who just three years ago was writing for a blog called Not Geniuses, is today running Internet strategy for the entire Democratic National Committee, and that when I see him around town now he's got the harried, somewhat stolid look of a Washington operative who spends all the time he doesn't spend at the office with one eye on his BlackBerry. There's a whole generation of Dean people like him who moved to Washington in late 2004 and have since become this city's technocratic elite and successful political consultants. It's not co-optation, to use the favored insult of political activists, but rather a natural part of the dynamic of American democracy, in which whatever is marginal and active eventually becomes established and central, and is moderated by the process of responding to public scrutiny as it gains power.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUPITER RISING, WAGES STUCK. In all innocence, I went on to the Washington Post's home page on Wednesday afternoon to see who voted how in the Senate vote on raising the minimum wage. I found what I was looking for: the eight Republicans (Chafee, Coleman, Collins, DeWine, Lugar, Snowe, Specter, Warner) who voted along with the Democrats to raise the wage. (That gave the forces of good 52 votes, but the Republicans had structured the vote to require 60.) Then I noticed that the Post had the vote broken down not just by party but by state, region, gender, and boomer and pre-boomer (not a very revelatory category: boomers backed the proposal by a 24 to 21 margin; pre-boomers, by a 28 to 25 margin). What to my wondering eyes should then appear but one more category: Astrological sign. Yes, the Post lets you know the vote breakdown among all those Cancers and Geminis. The most pro-raise sign was Sagittarius (6 yes, 3 no); the most anti was Virgo (2 yes, 6 no).

For anyone with a double major in political science and astrology, this is pure gold.

--Harold Meyerson

JUST POSTED ON TAP: CAT SCRATCH FEVER. Tom Schaller describes his run-in with Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, the Democrats' Dixie huckster, and discusses some of the problems the Democrats face in the South.

--The Editors

SOMEBODY CALL A BLOGGER'S ETHICS PANEL. I have my problems with Kos, but this sort of gotcha journalism is silly. The story, as intrepid reporter Jason Zengerle has uncovered it, is this: After the news about Jerome's settled SEC case broke, Markos sent an e-mail over a closed list saying he thought the story was worthless and the best way to respond was to deny it oxygen or impact. And so he, and others, did. The e-mail could have been sent to a private CC list of the biggest bloggers, but he instead transmitted it through a semi-private message board with hundreds of members. One of the many hundreds of members forwarded the note to Zengerle, who breathlessly posted it up on the Plank. Butwaittheresmore!

Zengerle's follow-up post is a series of dark insinuations over the financial leverage Kos holds on the other bloggers. As the causal chain goes, Markos and Jerome founded the Liberal BlogAds Network, and thus have their talons lightly piercing the skin of all of our necks. The idea here is that Kos asked the other bloggers not to write about Jerome's closed SEC scandal, and because he can deny them revenue by expelling them from the list, a thousand keyboards instantly ceased clicking.

Poppycock. I'm a member of the Liberal BlogAds Network. I've mocked Kos's "Libertarian Democrats" concept, derided his elevator pitches, and generally been surly and disagreeable when it suited me. The idea that Markos can just throw folks off the list is a bit silly, particularly for any of us who remember the endless e-mail thread when Jerome and him tried to create some uniformity in the rules for entry. Some blogs -- unfairly in my view -- were tossed because they weren't blogs, and weren't in technical compliance with the rules (mainly things like no pop-ups, prominent display of the advertising button, etc). Agree or disagree, it was hardly an ideological purge. And yet it raised such an interminable hue and cry that most of us shut down our e-mail servers and took a vacation from the internets till it finished. Had the conflict been enforcement-oriented, it would have been a war, and a public one. Bloggers are too enamored with their own independence, and BlogAds doesn't provide nearly enough revenue, for Markos to demand fealty. You would've seen resignations in droves, and Markos would've been massively reviled. As it is, he's never shown the slightest bit of interest in communicating with the network's members, much less leveraging its...whatever. I've never even thought of the ads when attacking Kos, and Zengerle's statements to the contrary are irresponsible.

As for the radio silence over Jerome's SEC violations, here's a kicker: Tapped wrote about it, and we're part of the Liberal BlogAds Network. I know! And we weren't kicked off! As for why we courageously broke with the DailyKos hegemon, Tapped wrote about it because Garance finds that sort of thing interesting. She's a reporter, and looks for different stories than, say, AmericaBlog does.

Most liberal bloggers link to stories that help their cause or side. Most conservative bloggers do the same. Visit Memeorandum when bad news breaks for Bush and the place is awash in liberal referrals. Do the same when the Prez's poll numbers rebound and the conservatives own the joint. So the story would have been ignored unless there was some way to counterspin it -- it's the nature of a medium that's about advocacy rather than reportage. Townhouse -- the coordinating e-mail list Zengerle fingered -- doesn't include all, or nearly all, of those on the BlogAds network, and the network is never, and has never, been used as an enforcement tool. If you want to take a victory lap for exposing the open secret of the list's existence, go for it. Bloggers can communicate privately over normal e-mail, and Townhouse was actually a far more transparent medium, but whatever. To springboard, however, towards darker speculation about shadowy coordination and sinister use of financial leverage is an unfounded overreach. The speculation does give me some hope, though. Maybe one day, BlogAds will actually bring in enough revenue that it can be used to control and constrain. Whatever the implications, when that day comes, I'll be able to eat out more often.

Update: Max Sawicky makes some similar points.

--Ezra Klein

MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE DEFEATED. It needed 60 votes, it got 52, so for the moment, the minimum wage increase is dead. Of the eight Republicans who voted for it, four are up for reelection this year. Congrats to The New York Times, by the way, for accurately diagnosing the state of play: "While Democrats depend on organized labor to win elections, Republicans are closely aligned with business interests that oppose any increase in the federal wage floor or would like changes in the current system." Ted Kennedy has promised that the minimum wage will be among the first bits of legislation Democrats consider if they retake Congress this fall. Other members of the party should repeat that promise, loudly and often.

--Ezra Klein

TEENAGERS? With the minimum wage returning to the forefront of the political agenda, time's ripe to knock down the oft-deployed stereotype that it just affects a bunch of teenagers. Putting aside the general incoherence of that perspective (uh, why should teenagers be paid poorly?), it's simply untrue. The best work (PDF) on this subject comes from Heather Boushey at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. She analyzed the Survey of Income and Program Participation and found:

• The overwhelming number of minimum wage workers are adults. Fewer than one in five are under 20, and more than half are between 20 and 54. Let's repeat: over 50 percent are between 20 years old and 54 years old. 87 percent are over 20.

• The average minimum wage worker brings home 68 percent of their household's income. Many of them are supporting a family on nothing but the minimum wage, which is to say $10,500 a year -- well below the federal poverty line.

• The minimum wage can be sticky. For more than a third workers, three years after they start, they've received neither a raise nor a promotion. This is far more prevalent among middle-aged workers, who need the increased income the most.

• The percentage of the American economy relying on the minimum wage has dropped in the last decade. In 1992, 8.6 percent of men and 16.4 percent of women were stuck at the bottom, now it’s 5.6 percent and 8.6 percent respectively. Notice the drop in female reliance on the wage to 3 percent higher than men, down from 7.8 percent.

• Interestingly, workers in states with a minimum wage above the federal level are less likely to remain in a low wage job and more likely to advance upwards.

So most minimum wage workers are adults, and the positions can be sticky, which is to say that raising the wage will create a serious income subsidy for needy folks. Also important (but rarely mentioned) is that raising the wage will also increase the value of the Earned Income Tax Credit, as the EITC is tied to earnings and the deterioration of the minimum wage in comparison to inflation has harmed the EITC's worth.

--Ezra Klein

FUN WITH INFLATION. Man, monetary policy is the most boring subject ever. Nevertheless, it's utterly, crucially important to people's lives. Ergo, it's worth pointing out that Robert Samuelson's column on why we must fear inflation is bunk. As he notes, the trouble with inflation is "that inflationary psychology, once embedded in price- and wage-setting practices, is stubborn and destructive." But the thing about the current rise in inflation is that wages haven't been rising above trend productivity growth. Quite the reverse -- productivity has risen much faster than wages over the current economic cycle. Ergo, we're not yet at the point where one need be concerned about a wage-price spiral.

That, at least, is the argument the anti-anti-inflation lobby is making. Yet Samuelson doesn't acknowledge the point at all or try in any way to debunk it.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOLY JOE'S BLASPHEMY. My colleague Harold Meyerson has a nice column today dissecting a particularly astonishing comment by Joe Lieberman. The Holy Nutmegger told David Broder that this election is really a referendum on tolerance. Is the Democratic Party big enough to support pro-war views? If not, then they will die, as have all parties that demanded some sort of basic ideological agreement. Harold cries that "I thought that elections were held to enable voters to choose between candidates espousing different points of view on the most important issues. Lieberman seems to believe that elections exist to enable voters not to choose -- indeed, to 'accept diversity of opinion.' And that if voters have the temerity to go ahead and choose anyway, they have crossed the line between party and sect in their zeal 'to have everybody toe the line. '"

Anyone else think Lieberman's breath must smell a lot like a foot these days? In any case, Joe is actually assuming a time-honored Republican position on elections. Since the right has often had to square a circle by both supporting business interests and relying on middleclass voters, various members of the party have made elections referendums on character traits. I've always particularly respected Jesse Helms's famous dictum that you may not agree with him, but at least you know where he stands. That's right. Elections aren't about policy agreement, but rather how voluble and courageous the candidate is in broadcasting his disagreement. Joe is just pushing the wimpy version of the Helms appeal: Where Republicans highlight their courage, Lieberman is highlights tolerance. And tolerance of the worst, most meaningless sort; the precise sort of "tolerance" for toxic opinions that Joe so constantly decried in portions of the left. Yet here he is, deploying the worst of the PC liberal buzzwords to aid his brutal, misguided war. What a noxious rhetorical twofer.

--Ezra Klein

CREDIT. Hillary Clinton hasn't let her routine spats with the blogosphere stand in the way of good policy: She's come out as cosponsor of a strong net neutrality bill. This, by the way, is evidence of why nothing she does to the blogs or the blogs do to her is particularly dangerous over the long haul. If Clinton wins the primary, the netroots will still unite around her because, of the two candidates, she's the one most likely to govern in a way they can stomach. And she'll welcome them into the fold, because they bring cash and energy. There'll be some grumbling, sure. And when the rapprochement begins grinding forward and the internecine battles wind down, you'll see a bunch of "Why I Support Hillary" posts, most of which will prominently feature this bill. Bandwidth is thicker than water, after all.

--Ezra Klein

AT LAST, SOME SENSE. So House Republicans have opted to nix any real chance of passing a comprehensive immigration reform bill this year in favor of holding purely political hearings on border security in select regions this summer. That makes some sense. The way the immigration fight (largely among Republicans) has unfolded this year -- particularly the President's bizarre insistence on publicly pushing a policy that's very unpopular within his party without expending any real effort to twist arms -- has been genuinely baffling to behold. Wedge politics and targeted demagoguery in an election season is a whole lot easier to understand.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BIG IDEAS. It's sadly locked behind The New York Times cursed subscription wall, but Maureen Dowd has penned one of the best op-ed columns I've read in months. The context is yesterday's launch luncheon for Democracy, where Andrei Cherny, Ken Baer, Bill Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, and Mike Tomasky batted around the worth of "Big Ideas." Cherny recalled a conversation with a conservative pundit who asked, "Who's on your tie?" Apparently, the Reaganites signaled their seriousness by using Edmund Burke and Adam Smith as neckwear. This struck me as stupid: John Kenneth Galbraith may be a massive influence for me, but there's not a doubt in my mind that he would consider anyone wearing his face on their chest a doofus. The intellectuals I revere were too iconoclastic and skeptical for that sort of hero worship. But I'm in the minority: The aesthetics of seriousness are in vogue now, and it's only a matter of time before George Lakoff becomes a fashion statement.

It's odd, though. The sartorial symbolism of our unnamed conservative is just one manifestation of the rightwing punditocracy's sort of ostentatious intellectualism, which is usually signaled by smug and constant reminders of their slavish devotion to philosophical forebears. WWHD? What would Hayek do? What's weird is that he wouldn't get nominated by the right. "Republicans," Dowd writes, "don't own all three branches of government because of little cameo pictures of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke hanging over their blue Oxford button-down shirts. Mr. Smith and Mr. Burke would blanch at the shape W. and Karl Rove have given conservatism — the political muscle of the Christian right, the withering of the social contract, greedy capitalism, fiscal profligacy." Their standard bearers, after all, aren't tweedy guys who quote Burke, but swaggering Texans who misquote Christ. George Bush, not George Will. I've always assumed that to be the root of this obsession with past thinkers; the party's cherished anti-intellectualism forces its intellectual elite to over-project erudition.

Indeed, as Dowd writes, Big Ideas, and great minds, get things wrong. Fukuyama's a dazzling intellect who offered a huge idea, but history, last I checked, stubbornly continues. Kristol's neoconservatism made for some good speeches but a very bad war. When big ideas go wrong, their scale turns a mistake into a catastrophe. So rather than scouring the earth for ever-larger concepts, maybe it's time to simply think about who could best package, implement, and explain current solutions. The search shouldn't be for bigger ideas, but better people. Speaking of which, Ross Douthat, in today's Wall Street Journal, thinks Barack Obama should run in '08.

--Ezra Klein

WHEN PRINCIPLE MATTERS. See, man, you try to insert a little nuance into your argument and the young punks jump all over you. But here's the rub -- on issues that are going to be before Congress one way or another, principles don't really matter. Does Joe Lieberman really think the Employee Free Choice Act is important, or is he just pandering to a key liberal interest-group? I don't care. What matters in this instance is that he'll vote for it. It seems that he will, and that's all to the good.

But not every issue has that dynamic. An unprincipled foe of "indecent" pop culture mouths the ritual denunciations when the issue is thrust onto the public agenda. This is unfortunate. The real villains, however, are the people who insist on thrusting the issue into the public agenda in the first place. There are many reasons one might become an agenda-thrusting indecency foe, but principled opposition to indecency is certainly a frequent cause. This gives us, I think, particular reason to worry about principled-but-wrong positions on certain sorts of issues as oppose to unprincipled-but-wrong positions on those topics.

For better or for worse, though, principles tend to matter least on the most significant topics. Therefore, one is generally safe not spending one's energy trying to discern who the principled politicians are and who the unprincipled ones are.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE MAGAZINE READER. Is the age of small magazines once again upon us? And has Washington become America's new intellectual center? Washington certainly is looking like the new Boston this week, with the launch of The Democratic Strategist, an online journal, and the aforementioned journal Democracy. Indeed, the city looks, in particular, to be entering an era of intellectual ferment on the left (and center-left) the likes of which it has not seen in some time. Small political magazines used to spring from the minds of New Yorkers and residents of the other big, liberal metropoles, and while today such cities produce magazines like n+1 and The Believer, it's been some time since they produced any new innovative political journals. Meanwhile, The Prospect, born in Boston, has become ensconsed in the District, and the much-larger Boston-bred Atlantic magazine has turned D.C. into its new, congenial home. Like The Atlantic, The New Republic is under new leadership. Another newcomer, The American Interest, was launched in the District last fall to examine America's place in the world. From such collections of people are eras made.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

PRINCIPLES. I generally agree with Matt's article today, particularly his conclusion that principles are "only good if your principles are the right ones." But he seems to be contradicting himself here:

Lieberman at least plausibly really does think the role of a United States senator ought to be complaining about "Friends"’ time slot. If so, that’s all to the worse. Politicians who pander to misguided public concerns are problematic; politicians who genuinely share those misguided concerns and help to feed and create them are worse.

Parenthetically, I think Matt would agree with me that his point would be just as true in reverse. That is to say, just as it is utter nonsense when people argue that Lieberman's more conservative positions are more excusable because he really believes them and he isn't just pandering to NASCAR dads, or whomever, it is also utter nonsense when John McCain's liberal fans argue that his hardcore anti-choice record is OK because he doesn't really believe it, he's just sucking up to the base. This is all sophistry. The most important thing about public officials is what they do in their capacity as public officials. Their private motivations are irrelevant to whether someone should vote for them.

--Ben Adler

MEANWHILE IN AFGHANISTAN. I've avoided commenting on the apparently deteriorating situation in Afghanistan because I don't understand the dynamics over there very well, but it is worth noting that the situation certainly does seem to be getting bad: "Suspected Taliban guerrillas in the southern province of Helmand ambushed and killed 32 people on Sunday, all of them relatives and tribesmen of an influential member of Parliament, among them a former local government official, the legislator said Monday."

The obvious point to make about all this was that there was almost certainly a significant cost to our Afghanistan policy involved in taking our eyes off the ball and shifting attention to Iraq. In part, this is just a question of force size. But it's also a question of money. We've spent a phenomenal amount of cash on the Iraq War -- far, far, far more than anyone would ever have contemplated spending on Afghanistan. And having tons and tons of money to throw around makes pretty much any situation easier to cope with. Most important of all, though, is just the question of attention. The top officials in the government are busy people with complicated lives and crowded schedules. It's impossible to quantify the exact cost that literal distraction on the part of folks at the White House, at the Pentagon, and at CENTCOM has had, but it's almost certainly been a big one.

--Matthew Yglesias

I COME NOT TO BURY DEMOCRACY, BUT TO PRAISE IT. Like Matt, it wasn't my intent to greet Cherny and Baer's new magazine with a negative post, it just happened that I wandered into an article that I had to hack my way back out of. So let me take the opposite tack now and highly recommend Gar Alperovitz's piece on a progressive ownership society. He goes through the usual -- though undoubtedly important -- asset-building stuff, but I'm more interested in his rundown on employee-owned corporations, of which there are now nearly 12,000, with some mega-companies boasting revenue in the billions. Alperovitz notes that "[a] recent survey by Rutgers University sociologist Joseph Blasi, Rutgers economist Douglas Kruse, and BusinessWeek reporter Aaron Bernstein demonstrated that such firms have consistently higher productivity records than comparable non-employee-owned firms. Average hourly pay in ESOP firms is also significantly higher than pay for comparable work in non-ESOP firms. And employee-owners of ESOPs commonly end their careers with higher retirement benefits than others with similar jobs." Well sign me up.

I've long felt that the way we treat shareholder enterprises helps explain some of the economy's ills. Because the corporation is charged with turning a profit for a diffuse group of investors, there's no single entity in particular who can be be held morally accountable. So you had, a few years back, the overwhelmingly strange spectacle of market analysts blasting Costco for spoiling a well-run, highly profitable business model with absurd levels of generosity to the employees. That critique could only survive if Costco were responsible not to its employees or self, but to some theoretically sympathetic group of "shareholders" who were being wronged by the company's misplaced priorities. It's an attack that would make no sense if leveled against an employee-owned company.

Employee-owned corporations, though, are just one stop on Alperovitz's fascinating tour through alternative ownership models. Unlike Bush's ownership society -- which simply gives you the deed to financial risk and ruin -- Alperovitz's proposals imagine ownership in a far more progressive and socially responsible way. It's the sort of thing liberals should think harder about, and the first step is giving him a read.

--Ezra Klein

WHEN THE BEST IS NOT ENOUGH. Excellent, a chance to tread over some more Iraq/incompetence terrain. Kevin Drum writes:

Actually, not everyone seems to have realized this. In fact, it's a point of considerable controversy, isn't it? Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias made the opposite point explicitly in "The Incompetence Dodge," arguing that "administrative bungling is simply not the root source of America’s failure in Iraq." I made the same argument myself a couple of years ago, though I remain sort of ambivalent about it, largely because of stories like Babylon by Bus. If you're operating at 80% efficiency and your plan doesn't work, it probably means the plan was just plain bad. But if you're operating at 20% efficiency, it seems at least plausible that better execution could have produced success. It may be that democratization by force is a chimera, but the level of incompetence in Iraq has been so monumental that it seems almost impossible to draw any enduring conclusions from our experience there.

The flipside of this is that we're really, really, really far from the goal of creating a stable, pluralistic democracy in Iraq. From a lot of Iraq-related talk you hear, you'd think the primary reason countries aren't democracies is that they're beset by violent guerilla insurgencies, that they lack hyper-competent domestic security forces, or that they've never held elections. Step back and think about it, though, and this is clearly mistaken. In terms of assessing the prospects of coercive democratization, the whole insurgency is in many ways a distraction from the irrealism of the task. Wave a magic insurgency-vanishing wand tomorrow and Iraq isn't a liberal democracy, it's going to be a typical petrokleptocracy equipped with a ruling elite loath to abandon power and the security forces at its disposal to stay in charge. Democratic transition is really, really hard, especially for countries well-endowed with natural resources. The precedents of, say, Venezuela, Russia, and Nigeria aren't really encouraging, nor is the regional cast of characters -- forget the "axis of evil" and look at Egypt, Jordan, and Qatar.

Or, for that matter, look at the better-executed state-building endeavors of the Clinton years. In Bosnia we managed to stop people from killing each other, but there's no kind of pluralistic democracy there. Nor is there one in Kosovo, where we managed to stop Serbs from killing Albanians, but can't stop Albanians from killing Serbs. Haiti? Somalia? This isn't to say that intervention is useless -- we achieved some very useful things in the Balkans. But it's simply the case that nobody, anywhere, knows how to export the rule of law and the other things we would have had to do to achieve the post-hoc democratization goals of the Iraq War. Bush is inept, but at the same time the task is just really, really, really hard. I don't want to say it's impossible because, hey, anything's possible. I do, however, want to say that we lack any reliable methods that have a reasonable chance of success and that it's both unwise and immoral to launch wars whose aims you don't have good reason to believe you can accomplish.

--Matthew Yglesias

HIGHLY EXPLICABLE. It's a small point, but one passage in the aformentioned National Review article made me laugh out loud:

If Republicans want credit for spending restraint, they also should have some high-profile program eliminations. Corporate welfare presents obvious targets. It seems inexplicable that Republicans haven’t taken up this issue despite the fact that every conservative think tank has pushed them to do it for years.

--Sam Rosenfeld

ADVICE, GOOD AND BAD. The latest National Review cover story by Kate O'Beirne and Rich Lowry offers a blueprint for Republicans to save their congressional majorities. Much of their advice, I think, is actually (unfortunately) pretty sound, including their forthright endorsement of the renewed GOP efforts to make a lot of noise about security issues and the Iraq War in spite of the war's unpopularity. The authors say that the "the most important point to make" regarding the war is that "the cost of failure is dear" and that a pullout would create more problems than it would solve, and indeed, I think it's clear that George W. Bush and the GOP retain the ability to capitalize politically on the abject failure of their own war initiative, with the quagmire they've created serving the function of a gun pointed at the heads of American voters. ("Of course the war's a disaster -- vote for us if you don't want it to blow up in your face.") The piece gets less and less persuasive as it degenerates into yet more maniacal conservative earmark-obsession and predictable calls for Congress to finally get serious about slashing spending, but certainly at least some of O'Beirne and Lowry's analysis is quite sensible.

The bigger problem with all such late-in-the-game macro-strategy prescriptions -- for both parties -- remains the fact that November's outcomes are to an uncomfortable degree outside of any political strategists' control, dependent on structural and demographic factors that legislative gimmicks and campaign tactics can't do much to change significantly. I'd say the most significant and, for the Democrats, highly troubling recent indicator of how things might shake out in November has been the surprisingly low turnout seen in the primary and special elections in California and Virginia. I'm far from certain about what even explains those low turnout figures, let alone what steps might be taken to seriously reverse the dynamic.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MAKING NICE. Just to avoid the appearance that Ezra and I are waging some kind of anti-Democracy jihad, let me say I liked these two book reviews a great deal, and nobody can accuse Jedediah Purdy of failing to put forward bold, outside-the-box ideas here. Indeed, that's so bold and outside the box I really can't think of anything to say about it at blog-speed . . . perhaps after some consideration. I'll have to give the rest of the issue a read and you should too.

--Matthew Yglesias

SHOULD I JOIN THE ARMY? If you haven't heard, the much-rumored Democracy: A Journal of Ideas is now up and running, with all content seemingly available online for the low, low price of a somewhat cumbersome registration process. It "will serve as a place where ideas can be developed and important debates can be spurred." So let's debate. Kathryn Roth-Douquet writes "The Progressive Case for Military Service," but I don't understand what she's trying to say.

The article starts out with a Tomasky-esque tour of the difference between rights-based liberalism and civic republicanism à la Michael Sandel, except she unhelpfully uses the term "civic progressivism" instead. What's more, she rather bizarrely identifies John Locke and Immanuel Kant with the civic republican side of this divide rather than the rights-based liberalism side. Idiosyncratic history of ideas aside, it at least seems clear where we're headed. Communitarianism + pro-military = conscription, à la the Carter/Glastris progressive case for the draft.

But Roth-Douquet turns out not to be going there. Instead, we get a tour of declining progressive participation in military service that's heavy on the idea of "anti-military sentiment" on the left and manages not to mention at all the small fact that in the early 1970s we went from being a country featuring mass conscription to the current all-volunteer force. One might consider this relevant to changing service patterns, but I guess not. Then we get page three's paean to the military, suggesting that the military is a good institution, citing Markos Moulitsas Zúniga's American Prospect column to that effect.

The upshot is the rhetorical question -- "Isn’t it time, then–as progressives rally themselves and their younger generation to engagement in the public sector–that they encourage military service as well?" -- paired with the walkback observation that "military service is not for everyone, progressive or otherwise. Nor does it need to be–the military requires only a small percentage of our population." So where are we? Seemingly back in the terrain of rights-based liberalism. It's good for some people to join the military, but not necessary for everyone to do so, and, indeed, the wrong choice for some people. People, it seems, should be left to make the decision on their own. Which is just exactly the status quo. So what was that about? I really couldn't say. I suppose I agree with the conclusion that if you're a person such that it would be a good idea for you to join the military, then you should join the military, whereas if you aren't such a person, you shouldn't. This, though, strikes me as a bit banal.

--Matthew Yglesias

DEMOCRACY: A JOURNAL OF IDEAS? Congrats to Andrei Cherny and Ken Baer on the coming out party for their new journal Democracy. It's long been a frustration to me that I can enter a bookstore and find the shelves dotted with serious -- which is to say oddly sized and densely written -- conservative journals, but can't pick up anything save the occasional copy of Dissent when I'm in the mood for some lefty wonkery. That said, I'm a bit confused by the wonkery on display. Explaining the "why" of their magazine, Cherny and Baer write that "Progressives too often have come to eschew bold ambition, preferring to take shelter in the safe harbor of 'realism' and 'competence.'" As a result, Democracy will "not seek to publish policy papers or political plans; we’ll leave the budget line items and electoral strategies to others. Rather, Democracy will serve as a place where ideas can be developed and important debates can be spurred. We see our role as upsetting accepted assumptions and pushing the boundaries of what is accepted by, and expected from, progressives."

Alright! So let's flip forward into this bold, visionary future that eschews budget line items and pushes the boundaries of progressive thought. Indeed, let's flip straight to Jason Furman's feature on fixing the health care system by -- wait a sec, this can't be right -- limiting the deductibility of health insurance? Slightly restructuring our tax code? Oy. This approach, at least, promises "little risk of undermining the employer-sponsored health system, because the proposal would retain the current structure of tax subsidies for employer-sponsored insurance." Now that's how to push a boundary -- shove it all the way back to where the recommendations of George W. Bush's tax commission left it. Furman declines to explain, however, why retaining the employer-based system is a feature, not a bug. What he does advise is that "progressives should focus more on efficiency," which sounds a lot like "realism and competence" to me. "Some progressives," he warns, "may say that such a plan is timid," -- yes, and I'm one of them -- "that the United States should move aggressively toward a Canadian-style national health service." Heavens forfend!

Sigh. So Furman not only launches this bold new experiment in ideas with the most deadeningly technocratic quasi-fix imaginable, but he derides his hypothetical progressive interlocutors as supporting Canada's system -- a mediocre-at-best alternative that virtually no serious health wonks champion (indeed, I've made the case against CanadaCare previously). There's a case for moving aggressively towards the French system, or maybe the German system, but invoking Canada's demonized and uninventive structure is a way of shutting the argument down. Which is really the last thing Democracy should be doing. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm excited for this venture. I thrill to new periodicals. But Furman has offered a plan with all the worst aspects modern liberalism: It's timid, it won't solve the underlying problems of health costs or care quality, and it'll be wildly unpopular. Would it be better than the present system? Sure. But let the politicians inch the ball forward; Democracy should be aiming farther downfield.

--Ezra Klein

ABOVE THE LAW. An informative but odd Washington Post editorial about detention policy notes all the ways the post-9-11 Bush administration has violated pre-9-11 rules against abusing prisoners, then notes all the ways the Bush administration has sought to evade post-Abu Ghraib efforts to get them to comply with the law, and then concludes with . . . suggestions for more stuff Congress might do. But Congress has already banned torture -- several times, depending on how you count.

The only way to get the administration to conform to the law would be to replace the personnel -- starting with the President -- with different people, people willing to obey the law. Alternatively, Congress could try and use the power of the purse to force the administration to start following the laws it's already passed. But simply trying to pass new laws won't change anything. Worse, it seems to involve implicitly conceding that it was somehow okay for the administration to have been breaking laws in the past. But torture, cruelty, inhumane treatment, etc. are all already illegal and have been for some time. There's no point in pretending this is some kind of legal dispute about which loopholes may or may not exist in the law. What we've got are two parallel moral disputes in which the people in the White House believe that torture is good policy and that lawbreaking is acceptable.

--Matthew Yglesias

LITTLE FISH EAT BIG FISH. Bloggers were in a tizzy all weekend over a New York Times report by Opinionator Chris Suellentrop on Friday unearthing the fact that Mark Warner PAC Internet strategist Jerome Armstrong was charged with being a stock tout in the late 1990s, hyping a worthless company in which he held stock without disclosing the conflict of interest, leading to an Securities and Exchange Commission investigation that alleged that “there is sufficient evidence to infer that the defendants secretly agreed to pay Armstrong for his touting efforts”; a permanent injunction against Amstrong touting stocks; and ongoing litigation over potential penalties. Suellentrop then called "the links between online stock speculation and online politics...delicious." The New York Post picked up the story on Sunday, running with the much harder-hitting -- it's a tabloid --"SHILL TO HACK: CELEBRATED LIB STRATEGIST HAS SHADY MARKET PAST."

Since Friday, speculation has raged in blogosphere backchannels that this has to be some kind of intra-primary take-down effort, with blogger uber-villain Hillary Rodham Clinton's team having pitched the story as some kind of oppo hit designed to screw the netroots as payback for how their leaders have spurned her.

This is absurd. I called Suellentrop, who is a friend, for insight. He just laughed when I mentioned the HRC speculation. He'd gotten the story from an e-mail tipster who did not ask that his identity be held secret. "I strongly believe that the all-caps e-mail I received about this is not from the HRC campaign," he told me. Chris and I talked, and then he and his source talked, and the upshot was that his source is happy to go on the record about being his source.

The man's name is Floyd Schneider. According to records maintained at FEC.gov, he has never donated to a political candidate. But he was the subject of a 2900-word BusinessWeek story in 2002 called "The Revenge of the Investor" that described him as a "citizen investor" who "turned the powerful information resources of the Internet against interconnected networks of promoters who use the Net to peddle stocks." He's quoted in The New York Post's story, and has apparently had a beef with Armstrong since the late 1990s:

Floyd Schneider, a New Jersey mortgage broker and investigator of penny-stock scams, said he was a repeated target of Armstrong's attacks because he criticized the finances and business models of firms Armstrong supported.

"[Armstrong] was among the nastiest and ugliest stock touts from that era," said Schneider. "The stocks he touted were dogs and rigged, so it makes sense that he had a deal with promoters."

The funny thing about this little micro-scandal is that it mirrors the exact same dynamic as the micro-controversy over the outing of Daily Kos front-page diarist Armando. The original culprit in that story was a fellow Kossak calling himself "jiggy flunknut" whom Armando had gone after full-bore after the Kossak posted a poorly-sourced item about the alleged upcoming indictment of Karl Rove; jiggy flunknut's item then became the basis for a larger media story in National Review Online. That's the thing about the 'sphere: The people most likely to want to take bloggers down are not campaign hacks, who have bigger fish to fry, but all the little people who feel dissed or screwed by the big boys along the way.

UPDATE: Boy, this Schneider fellow seems to get around. According to this St. Louis Post Dispatch story: "Since 1998, he has posted more than 30,000 messages on Internet stock boards, raising questions about companies and digging into the backgrounds of their officers, directors and consultants. He has been sued by three of his targets and racked up nearly $60,000 in legal bills." He's also a known quantity to The New York Post business reporter who wrote the Sunday story, in that he's been in his stories before, and apparently helped Infoseek founder Steven Kirsh "bust up global money-laundering operations." At least one of the lawsuits against him charged him with making false and defamatory statements; he was a target of an early "cyber-smear" lawsuit, as well, though that case was ultimately dismissed. Pseudonyms -- those again! -- he's used in the past include "The Truthseeker" and "Flodyie."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MORE MINIMUM WAGE FUN. From EPI's inimitable Jared Bernstein:

The federal minimum wage has been raised 19 times by Congress since its introduction in 1938. Eighteen states, covering about half of the national workforce, have minimum wages above that of the Federal level. And over 100 cities have living wages--a higher minimum that applies to workers on city contracts or at firms with local government subsidies.

In other words, more than any economic policy, we've had hundreds of "pseudo-experiments"--rare in economics--that allow us to test the impact of wage mandates on various outcomes. These experiments allow us to compare before and after, or, even better, compare nearby places that face similar economic conditions but have different minimum wage laws.

The question that has received the most scrutiny is whether increases in the minimum wage lead employers to lay workers off. You probably don't want to hear the results from me, but here's how Nobel laureate in economics, Robert Solow, put it: "The main thing about this research is that the evidence of job loss is weak. And the fact that the evidence is weak suggests that the impact on jobs is small."

A great example comes from the last Federal minimum wage increase, back in 1996-97. The usual suspects predicted massive job losses among those affected by the increase from $4.25 to the current level of $5.15. Instead, low-wage workers experienced the strongest job market in 30 years. Poverty fell to historic lows, particularly for the most disadvantaged workers, such as less-skilled minorities and single-mothers.

My God, has anyone informed the law of supply and demand!? Snark aside, Jared's overview of the subject is great. Read the whole thing.

--Ezra Klein

THE IRAN OVERTURE. Yesterday, Kevin Drum mentioned a Washington Post article recounting the contents of a secret 2003 letter to the United States from Iranian officials putting a huge slew of issues on the table for direct negotiation (nukes, recognition of Israel, etc.). Drum notes that the Post buried the article. I'll just note, again, that if anyone hasn't yet read Gareth Porter's comprehensive feature story in the June Prospect, "Burnt Offering" -- Porter, like the Post, got his hands on a copy of the actual 2003 letter -- they really, really should.

--Sam Rosenfeld

CLASSLESS. Nobody admires Markos Moulitsas more than I do for breaking new ground, and for unleashing as much political energy as he has during an apathetic age.

But linking to the unspeakable Wonkette's photos of Brian Bilbray's kids at a party is a cheap shot unworthy of his site. (I'm linking neither to Kos nor to his source material. Find it yourself, if you suddenly find yourself lacking any class whatsoever.) Bilbray's spent his entire career as a wholly owned subsidiary. He's fair game. But his 19-year-old daughter has a right to as unruly a social life as, say, I had without having the photographic proof spread all over the Internets. Absent a criminal charge, a politician's kid should be out of bounds. I have no use for Wonkette under either its old or new management, but Kos should be better than this.

-- Charles P. Pierce

GET IN LINE. Shadi Hamid is appalled by Zaid Shakir's declaration that all "honest" Muslims would hope the United States becomes an Islamic nation, "not by violent means, but by persuasion." Hamid says "it is incumbent upon moderate Muslims who believe in freedom, democracy, and the US constitution to repudiate such remarks." But why? This is hardly an exceptional position in public life. Evangelical Christianity is a potent political force, and it's rather straightforwardly interested in widespread conversion. As it should be. If you truly believe those outside your group are sacrificing their relationship with the divine and set to roast in hell for an eternity, of course you'd want to convince your neighbors. And since the Koran makes basically similar claims, Shakir's hopes strikes me as rather predictable. Now, he possibly should have kept them to himself as a matter of political expediency, but given the widespread acceptance of fundamentalist Christianity, I see little out of the ordinary about yet another leader fessing up to the obvious implications of his religious beliefs.

--Ezra Klein

GOREWATCH. A few weeks ago, a friend suggested that the way to really put Gore in a bind would be to ask him who he supported in the Lamont/Lieberman race. Well, it looks like Bloomberg TV did exactly that, and Gore refused to take a side. Joe's "a great guy," said Gore, "and he's right on a lot of other issues." Of course, when you've recently become a progressive hero and your former running mate is getting toasted by the left, a non-endorsement is neutrality in name only.

--Ezra Klein

SAVE AMERICA: BAN FLUFF. And here I was earlier this morning complaining that there's nothing worth blogging about when Jacob Sullum comes to the rescue:

A Massachusetts legislator, allegedly representing the very district where Fluff was invented, wants to ban the stuff from public school cafeterias. "A Fluff sandwich as the main course of a nutritious lunch just doesn't fly in 2006," said state Sen. Jarrett T. Barrios, who was outraged when his son, a third-grader, requested Fluff at home. "It seems a little silly to have an amendment on Fluff, but it's called for by the silliness of schools offering this as a healthy alternative in the first place." Barrios did not explain the nutritional advantages of jelly.

As people may recall from my turn as Josh Marshall's understudy, I don't like peanut butter, and peanut butter detractors throughout the nation have long felt oppressed by America's love affair with the stuff. The fluffernutter sandwich was one of the banes of my existence as a child. So while a Fluff ban will sadly fail to address the underlying issues, it is, perhaps, a step in the right direction. On the other hand, friends will recall that one of my endless series of complaints about my stint in Massachusetts was that it seems to be the state where everything is illegal so this isn't helping.

At any rate, during that aforementioned stint, Barrios was my state representative, and during that time I worked in a minor capacity for his state senate campaign. The man has crazy charisma and a Chuck Schumer-esque nose for getting himself press based on the most random issues imaginable, and I semi-seriously believe that he'll be President someday, though others have tried to convince me that nominating a Massachusetts liberal who's also gay and Latino wouldn't be a huge improvement on the Kerry/Dukakis model. I actually think this is wrong and charisma is king, but maybe Big Fluff will manage to strangle his political career in its cradle.

--Matthew Yglesias

LIKE RATS FROM A SINKING SHIP, CONT'D. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick is resigning to take a position at Goldman-Sachs. Formerly the administration's trade representative, Zoellick was one of the crew's rare grown-ups, and there was much rejoicing with he got the job at State over the expected hire, John Bolton.

You've heard quite a bit about the President's rebound over the last few weeks. The hiring of Henry Paulson, the non-indictment of Karl Rove, the death of Zarqawi. Of similar importance to the administration, though, is the slow leak of its most talented members: top speechwriter Michael Gerson last week, top China hand Zoellick this week. This doesn't look like any rebound I've ever seen.

--Ezra Klein

AND THE MONEY GOES MARCHING ON AND ON, HUZZAH, HUZZAH? There’s an interesting bit of political entrail reading from The Wall Street Journal, which notes that Big Business, beginning to feel a little shaky over prospects of a Democratic resurgence, is funding donkey candidates at a level not seen since Dick Gephardt was majority leader. According to the article, "[t]he Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has, so far in this election cycle, raised more than its Republican counterpart for the first time since Democrats lost control of Congress in the 1994 election. In the House, Republicans have raised more money than the Democratic campaign arm, but the gap is narrower than in previous campaigns. "Democrats are realizing the importance of working closely with business leaders," says Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the top fund-raiser for Senate Democrats."

How charming. Before 1994, the corporate world split its contributions basically evenly between the majority-holding Democrats and the minority Republicans. After Newt Gingrich's Republican revolution threw 50 or so Democrats against the wall, though, business all but abandoned the Democrats, becoming part and parcel of Tom DeLay's House. Now, sensing change, they're seeking to buy back some good graces. For the Democrats, this is a positive development, as it means more money for the 2006 race. But for the left, this may prove less laudable, as the Democratic Party's renewed populism and spine flourished in the absence of corporate backers and big money bonds. When those ties that bind are restored, you may see a party with more electoral success, but less ideology and conviction to show for it. It's a variant of Upton Sinclair's famous dictum: It's difficult to get a party to believe something when their financial viability depends on their not believing in it. And with the insurance companies and tobacco firms rapidly increasing their contributions, 2007 might see a Democratic Party that's forgotten much of what it knew in 2006.

--Ezra Klein

THE DEVIL READS TAP. Dig the plug for our fair magazine in the opening graf of this New York Times article on the new movie version of The Devil Wears Prada. The concerned father described in the piece seems to be operating under a couple of notable misimpressions about relative status and prestige in the journalism business, but it's probably best not to discuss those too explicitly here on the The American Prospect's website.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP: HARD LABOR. Harold Meyerson notes in our July/August issue that the Change to Win leaders had big plans last year when they left the AFL-CIO to do more organizing. The resolve is there -- but so are all the usual impediments.

--The Editors

MOTIVATIONISM. Picking up on Greg Sargent's latest post on the media, let me note that there's something rather illogical about the habit of dismissing media criticism from progressive blogs or, say, Media Matters on the grounds that it's "partisan" in its motivations. After all, what's motive got to do with it? If The New York Times were to, say, slander a new car from Toyota as unsafe when it was, in fact, quite safe, one assumes the Times would hear about it from someone at Toyota. Toyota's interest in the matter would, of course, be the corporate bottom line rather than an abstract concern for journalism. But, still, you'd have a car, its actual safety record, a Times article, and what the article says about the car's safety record. If the article was wrong or unfair, that's a problem. If a Toyota PR guy points out the problem, you don't question his motives, you fix the problem. Of course, if the Toyota PR guy complains about negative coverage that actually was fair and accurate, then you dismiss him. But you dismiss him for being wrong, not for his motives.

Political coverage is the same way. Of course, progressive audiences and progressive institutions are overwhelmingly going to have partisan and/or ideological axes to grind as they offer their complaints. But so what? Anyone who complains about anything is going to be doing it for some reason or other. The question becomes: Is the complaint warranted or isn't it? Calling the critics' motives into question isn't a defense or even the beginning of a defense.

--Matthew Yglesias

FROM AT IT AGAIN. Ah, they apparently unlimbered the Jaws Of Life to pry Al From out of a corporate hospitality tent long enough to write another op-ed, this one for The Washington Post on Sunday. The equally inevitable Bruce Reed is accessorial to the argument in which the Democrats (again) are urged to knuckle poor people sufficiently so as to build a shining new Clintonism on their spavined bones. This is an old tune played badly, but even my cynical eyes popped at the following sentence: "Clintonism has never been about mushy compromise and electoral expedience."

Holy Jesus H. Christ on a suck-egg mule.

This is funnier than whistling fish. For all his obvious advantages, including his invaluable gift for making all the right enemies, Bill Clinton would have sold his white-haired granny to the Malay Pirates for four points in a Gallup Poll.

Not about electoral expedience? The man who left the campaign trail to sign the execution order for Rickey Ray Rector, who was so aware of events that he left the dessert from his last meal behind so he could eat it later? The man who saved us all from the existential threat that was Sister Souljah? The man who turned the screws further on an already punitive welfare-reform bill two months before the 1996 election? The man who hired Dick Morris...TWICE?

Not about mushy compromise? The man who signed the Defense of Marriage Act? The man who took the biggest whack out of habeas corpus since Lincoln, and who was the worst President on the Bill of Rights in my lifetime until the current crew arrived in Washington and started using it for a bathmat?

Al From's political raison d'etre is political expedience, for pity's sake. At least for now. He's obviously got a solid career as a comedian, if he wants it.

--Charles P. Pierce

JUST POSTED ON TAP: HARD SELL. Garance Franke-Ruta reports on the icy reception Mark Warner received at this year’s Yearly Kos convention.

--The Editors

PRACTICALITY. I recommend that folks read Garance's sharp analysis of Mark Warner's impact at YearlyKos. Most interesting to me was news that the famously pragmatic, nonideological Markos is scornful of a potential meeting with Team Hillary. When a Hillary staffer reached out to him a year ago, Markos ignored the invitation. Indeed, he offers a willingness to take it a step farther, saying that if Clinton requested a meeting today, “I’d probably say no … I don’t think she has anything to say to me.”

Fair enough, though snubbing the party's likely nominee isn't exactly a "pragmatic" move. But neither was it the first time: in 2004, Markos swiftly rebuffed Cam Kerry's efforts at outreach after his brother secured the nomination. At least, it wasn't on first blush. But upon further thought (second blush?), both moves are perfectly, even ruthlessly, pragmatic. Clinton doesn't need Kos -- his netroots won't prove a major force in her fundrasing machine, her victory won't be attributed to his support. A Warner or Feingold triumph, by contrast, would.

When Markos bragged that "popular movements are rarely so practical," it's important to focus in on the word movement because that, it appears, is what Markos is focused on. His pragmatism has mostly been painted as an obsession with winning, and attacks against him tend to focus on his rather poor electoral record. But that's because Markos picks prospects rather than winners, campaigns and candidates who attract little establishment support and whose victory, thus, can be attributed to the netroots. No gambler gains a reputation by betting on 50:1 favorites, but any gambler can make one by putting enough money on a 1:50 longshot.

The "netroots" are, I think, a revolution of tone, not ideology. They've got a few defining characteristics, none of them ideological. A contempt for the establishment is one. An appetite for pugilism is another. Clinton offers neither. In addition, her victory wouldn't enhance the aura of the netroots' one iota. Remaining hostile during the primaries, in fact, forces the sort of electoral frisson the media so loves to cover, thus enhancing the netroots' insurgent reputation. Once the primaries end, as happened in 2004, the netroots can drop in line: one tent, one cause. If Clinton could forgive and welcome the Senate Republicans who destroyed her during the 90's, she'll happily welcome back the netroots. But till then, supporting, or even offering a rapprochment, with Clinton, holds no upside; it's a bet with no payoff. And while popular movements are rarely practical enough to resist the lure of establishment acceptance, the netroots' may be just practical enough.

--Ezra Klein

UNFOUNDED CONFIDENCE. Responding to claims that America's apathy towards soccer adds to international irritation with us, Jerry Taylor wonders whether the world would really be happier "if America took this game seriously and, as a consequence, cut through their footballers like a hot knife through butter?"

That's just silly. Our record in international competitions ain't exactly so hot. Baseball, a sport we theoretically dominate, just held the World Baseball Classic, a sort of World Cup for our national pastime. We lost to Korea, Mexico, and Canada, getting eliminated before the finals. We're just lucky we didn't play Cuba, who would've delivered a rather embarrassing whupping. And we all remember the 2004 Olympics, where the Dream Team was summarily demolished by Puerto Rico -- our very own colony!

So comforting American exceptionalism aside, it's not clear to me how a national focus on soccer would lead to us tearing through the Brazilians. Do we, as a country, pay insufficient attention to baseball and basketball? Do you think the Europeans simply don't spend enough money on their players, and that's why Brazil continually runs them over? If America were to get serious about soccer, it would import some South Americans, create an exciting league, and every four years, watch the best players don their home country's jerseys and effortlessly drill the ball into the back of our net.

--Ezra Klein

BUT WHAT WILL BE THE CAUSE OF DEATH? I spent this morning at a Brookings/New America Foundation event on the future of employer-based health care. The consensus? The system, captain, she canna' take anymore!

The morning's most interesting speech came from Andy Stern, head of the SEIU and catalyst for last year's union split (which gets a dim review from Harold Meyerson in the upcoming issue of The American Prospect). And make no mistake, the guy can talk. Despite having a look and speaking style unsettlingly similar to Bill Maher's (if Maury Povich ever has a "Long Lost Brothers" show, and Maher or Stern is waiting uneasily on stage, you can be sure that the other is set to stride out from the wings), he gave a ripsnorting condemnation of the current system -- a decaying, dying structure -- and called on the room's business leaders and policy wonks to show some damn leadership and hasten what comes next.

It was powerful stuff, and Stern knew how to deliver it. His union, after all, represents more than a million health care professionals, and his federation's organizing efforts are being stymied by employers terrified of assuming health costs. But despite an effortless facility with the material, there was no "there" there. Stern demanded that we move past policy discussions -- "We've got the policy! There's tons of good policy!" -- and towards leadership and political will. How that'll look, he couldn't say. Indeed, leadership and political will are easy enough in health care. When all Bill Clinton was doing was showing leadership and political will, his poll numbers soared and the punditocracy was positive his reforms would get passed. It's when his policies solidified that all the stakeholders erupted, that the Republicans united, that business launched its airwave war, that his reforms crashed upon the shoals of their specifics.

When I asked Stern about that, he shrugged it off. "This isn’t 1993," he said, "it’s thirteen years later. Many of those from 1993 who now meet in their salons all admit it was a huge mistake. I think there’s a much more sober reality facing us because the numbers are so appalling and the situation is so bad. Not only are we morphing into catastrophic care, but employers are pulling money out of the system. [In 1993], we didn’t have one business leader get out in front. This will not change until the employer’s demand it. But this is a business crisis now." And maybe it is, but that's what we thought in 1993, too. Hence John Judis's classic article on how and why the business community unexpectedly abandoned health reform. Are things different now? Sure. Different enough? Who knows. But I would've been more comfortable if Stern's call to leadership seemed more of an agenda and less of a hope; more a promise that his unions would ruthlessly lash employers until they got with the program and less a belief that business would finally look at its balance sheet and start marching with the angels.

--Ezra Klein

IDEALISM AND SUCH. Writing like this from Richard Just makes me suspicious. Ostensibly, the argument is that "there are plenty of ways short of military action that America can oppose tyranny in Iran and elsewhere" and that we should do so. The post doesn't, however, name any such ways, cite any arguments that such ways would be effective, or debunk any counterarguments against any such proposals. Instead, the actual weight of the post is just dedicated to bashing liberals. I'd be interested in hearing about what these ways are -- really!

My read, though, is that the tragedy of the situation in Iran is that there's actually very little we can do to affect internal Iranian developments -- we have almost no leverage over the situation. We might be able to do more vis-à-vis friends and allies, like Saudi Arabia and Tunisia, but even there I'm not sure, in practice, what can really be done. I think it would probably be somewhat helpful if countries that don't have suspect geopolitical ambitions in the region -- Brazil, Norway, South Africa, whatever -- leant a bit more in the way of rhetorical support but, again, one doubts that this sort of thing is actually going to be decisive.

Elsewhere on the idealism front, I'm not much of a civil engineer but one assumes we really could help out with Angola's lack of clean water and consequent cholera epidemic in Luanda. The Angolans, according to The New York Times, don't even really lack the money – they just don’t have logistical ability to organize an effective solution. We could definitely pony up the $24 million dollars the U.N. says it needs to assist the 16 million Africans said to be "facing starvation or debilitating malnutrition." To our credit, and in contrast to our general stinginess with foreign aid, the United States is already a major player in the world of food aid (something about the farm lobby, I think), and this would be a seriously cheap way to help people with little-to-no downside.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE WAR: IT'S HERE, IT'S REAL, GET USED TO IT. Yesterday's scummy GOP political stunts over Iraq were, of course, scummy. At the same time, though, Democrats are paying the price for the ostrich-like attitude they've taken to the war ever since the 2004 election. There's been this persistent hope that either the Bush administration would declare victory and go home, or else that the mounting casualties, costs, and unpopularity of the venture would somehow allow a bipartisan truce to prevail letting Democrats wage a campaign that's all about ethics and prescription drugs.

There's a lesson in yesterday's events that Democrats need to learn, and quickly: The Republicans are confident -- very confident -- about the politics of national security. Confident enough to try and sell a war based on bogus intelligence. Confident enough to, in the wake of the intelligence's evident wrongness, simply revise history and say it was about something else. Confident enough to try and make the war a winning issue years after it's launch, even though it's unpopular.

Democrats need to be prepared to fight this battle. They need to figure out what they think about Iraq and then they need to put in whatever time is necessary to craft a compelling message out of that policy. And they need to do it before they get ambushed by congressional Republicans, and before something or other forces them to talk about the war. And, no, totally unprincipled gambits don't count as an answer to this problem.

--Matthew Yglesias

BEN-GURION REDUX. All right, on this David Ben-Gurion business, I was trying to be provocative and maybe should have just gone with Menachim Begin whose Irgun is less controversially considered a terrorist group. That said, the different pre-independence groups did work together before the King David Hotel bombing, and Ben-Gurion's group was involved with "kidnapping of British officials in Palestine and sabotaged the British infrastructure in Palestine."

My inclination would be to say that kidnapping British officials serving in Palestine or other colonies wasn't terrorism. It's conventional, however, to describe the attacks on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, on the Khobar Towers installation in Saudi Arabia, on the USS Cole at sea, on our embassies in East Africa, and on various American officials in Iraq as terrorism. If those things were terrorism, then so were Haganah’s tactics.

Be that as it may, my intent was less to compare Zarqawi to Ben-Gurion and Michael Collins than to contrast the former with the latter two. Ben-Gurion and Collins demonstrated much more restraint in the application of violence, along with a willingness to compromise and turn against more extreme elements within the Israeli and Irish national movement. They were, I was contending, not just better people than Zarqawi for it, but actually much more successful in achieving their goals. I think George Will's backhanded compliment of calling Zarqawi the "most successful" terrorist is just part-and-parcel of a general conservative overestimation of the efficacy of violence.

--Matthew Yglesias

OF COURSE I THINK THE MEN SHOULD STAY HOME WITH THE BABIES. But just in case the guys are too busy and are thinking of using a little outside help, this week, New York Times business columnist David Leonhardt trumpeted the results of a 2005 economics study of Canadian child care, which concluded that “across almost everything we looked at, the policy led to much worse outcomes for kids.” Leonhardt fails to mention that the study, which was promoted by the ultra-conservative C.D. Howe Institute, was immediately and heavily challenged (PDF) by the child development experts at the University of British Columbia’s Human Early Learning Partnership, Drs. Hillel Goelman, David Kershaw and Clyde Hertzman, who objected to results on the grounds that they were inconsistent with all other analysis, included no longitudinal data about the children, and most importantly did not include data on the quality of child care provided. As these real experts note, no peer-reviewed child development journal has touched it.

Jane Waldfogel, the female expert Leonhardt invokes to provide cover against the obvious antifeminist effects of the “study,” is one of the experts cited by the authors of the study itself and does not even think children benefit from pre-kindergarten programs.

The child care program the economists attack is essentially the same as the programs in the rest of the developed world, except for the United States. (Of course, maybe the dire effects of day care in the rest of the developed world account for the general failure of other Western leaders to recognize the terrific idea of going to war in Iraq. That day care attention deficit can last a lifetime, no?)

--Linda Hirshman

THE MOST EFFECTIVE DEMOTED TERRORIST. Following up on Matt's item below, it's worth noting this Eli Lake report yesterday that a move was afoot to lower the price on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's head before he was killed because of a somewhat different assessment of his importance on the part of U.S. forces:

Even as American and Iraqi soldiers were closing in on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the commander of the American forces in Iraq was trying to get Washington to lower the terrorist leader's importance and profile.

In May, the Multinational Forces in Iraq sent a cable marked "secret" to the Pentagon requesting that the reward of $25 million for Zarqawi's capture be reduced, according to military and administration officials.

The request was part of a recalculation by American war planners who had noticed that the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq's role in the insurgency was gradually diminishing after Iraq's foreign fighters, Islamists, and irredentist Baathists in January formed a new umbrella terror organization known as the Mujahadin Shura Council, or consultative council of holy warriors.

The new constellation of car bombers and kidnappers significantly reduced the role of Al Qaeda in Iraq, relegating it to just one of a number of groups under the leadership not of the Jordanian-born Zarqawi, but an Iraqi, Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi.

This development, according to two military sources, persuaded America's top generals that the enemy's organization had become less reliant on a top-down hierarchy. The strategy to reduce the monetary reward for Zarqawi in part reflected a recognition that the man himself had been demoted.

Also, I'm inclined to agree with Eric Umansky, who, in the comments on Matt's item, questions Matt's comparison of Zarqawi to David Ben Gurion as well as his sense of who gets called what. This article on "Jewish Terrorism" makes it very clear that historians are quite willing to call certain founders of the Jewish state terrorists, but Ben Gurion is not the person at whom they generally point fingers.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

LIKE RATS FROM A SINKING SHIP. Michael Gerson, the exceptionally skilled speechwriter who put all them purdy werds in the President's mouth, is retiring. "It seemed like a good time." Gerson said. "Things are back on track a little. Some of the things I care about are on a good trajectory." Apparently, one of the things he cared about was not the Bush presidency, now languishing in the mid-30's.

--Ezra Klein

PLEASE, NO MORE JACKBOOTS STOMPING ON HUMAN FACES! To add a slightly more frivolous point to Matt's post below about Jonah Goldberg, isn't it high time to retire the "jackboots-stomping-on-a-human-face" cliché that Goldberg quotes "Derb" as using? I mean, does any military outfit itself with jackboots anymore? That's a real question. Anybody know? My inclination is to think that the only people who wear jackboots and might want to stomp on human faces these days are off begging on St. Mark's Place in New York's East Village. Such people stopped seriously stomping on human faces in the early 1980s, if they ever really did it at all.

Even if there are jackboots in military use today, it's still a very bad idea to use the phrase. It unwittingly reveals a writer's sneaking belief that he or she is the modern-day re-incarnation of George Orwell, who famously wielded the image to great effect. Sure, many people who do this for a living have a germ of a desire somewhere to be a modern-day Orwell, but it's a desire best not shared with the outside world, lest it invite comparisons between oneself and the Great One. What's more, using the "jackboots" phrase also reveals a latent but self-aggrandizing urge to see oneself as on one side of a modern-day global struggle between good and evil similar to the one Orwell participated in over 60 years ago. The world's changed a bit since then, though an updated version of such a world view is frequently championed by some important people these days. That, to me, is one of the more objectionable things about the phrase "Islamo-fascist," too. So please, no more "Islamo-fascism" -- and above all, no more jackboots!

--Greg Sargent

BASEBALL IS ONE THING, BUT PLEASE, NOT BASKETBALL. I sincerely hope that Matt is wrong about the imminent takeover of basketball by the saberrnetric kudzu that's come to spread itself over baseball. I have no problem with it there. After all, the difference between the essential thrill of watching the average major-league baseball game and the essential thrill of adding up long columns of numbers is not vast. But more than any other sport, basketball relies on its performance esthetic for its essential appeal. This began with James Naismith's eureka moment when he decided to put the goals of his new sport off the ground, thereby guaranteeing that, sooner or later, people would leave the ground to get to them. The fact that gravity always has been incidental to the sport is one of the reasons why basketball's fundamentals change as quickly as they do, why basketball took less than four decades to go from the standing guard to Michael Jordan, whereas it took baseball nearly 100 years to develop the relief pitcher. There always will be something about basketball that resists the dully empirical analysis, thank God. I have never seen the sheet music to John Coltrane's "Alabama," but my life would be poorer if I'd never heard it.

--Charles P. Pierce

ECONOMICS 101. In regard to the minimum wage debate, I'm getting a little tired of appeals to "Economics 101" (or Social Analysis 10, as the case may be) as a conversation-stopper in political debate. After all, there's a reason they offer more economics classes and you don't get your degree after taking just one. A lot of introductory physics classes don't deal with relativity or quantum mechanics, which doesn't make quantum mechanics wrong; it makes introductory physics an oversimplification of complicated reality designed to provide a foundation for further learning.

Advocates of minimum wage increases aren't fools who don't understand a stripped-down supply and demand model (okay, to be fair, there are lots of fools in the world and presumably some are on our side), which is exactly why you don't find people arguing for a $100/hour minimum wage. I promise you that all these dudes (PDF) took introductory economics (I took the Advance Placement test), and it's perfectly possible to construct more sophisticated models of the labor market showing that minimum wage increases will have beneficial effects. This is why you find economists with a range of views on the subject. The issue at hand, as it almost always is, has to do with empirical disputes as to how the labor market actually works and what sort of model best captures the situation. We're probably not going to resolve this in a blog exchange, but suffice it to say that Ec 101 has very little to do with anything -- like any very basic set of principles, it's the first word on a subject, not the last.

--Matthew Yglesias

SINCE WHEN HAS SHAME STOPPED THEM? I'm going to disagree with Matt's hypothesis that intellectual writers are focusing of football because all the other sports have become too math-heavy for them. First, like my friend Brian Beutler, I think the upsurge in football commentary is a function of the quadrennial World Cup, rather than some sort of soccer fetish. Where was all this commentary, as Brian wonders, in the halcyon days of three weeks ago? Add in that blogs and websites have given writers a virtually unlimited amount of space on which to opine, and so their quirky soccer obsession doesn't have to compete with Haditha, and I think you've got your answer.

The second reason the math hypothesis doesn't hold up is that the punditocracy has never shown any reluctance to approach data-heavy subjects with nothing more than a sack of adjectives and a dream. As much as baseball can be statistics-heavy, economics and policy are really far more empirically grounded, and yet the nation's op-ed writers have little shame about tackling such subjects research unseen. Remember Richard Cohen's classic boast that he doesn't know algebra, and it's never hurt him yet? Yet here he is writing about Social Security, possibly the most data-heavy subject known to man. And if the proudly ignorant Cohen can so blithely bloviate about the pension system, he'll have no problem bullshitting his way through a game of baseball.

--Ezra Klein

DEFENDING BUSH FROM JONAH'S SMEARS. I think Jonah Goldberg's notion that the Bush administration has erred by emphasizing democracy over other liberal values -- the rule of law, pluralism, etc. -- is appealing, but basically mistaken. I also thing he's missing the point that this has actually become a fairly standard attack on Bush from important left-of-center circles. My argument on this score, which I've made before, is basically stolen from Thomas Carothers, the Carnegie Endowment's rule-of-law guy, who's neither a Bush fan nor (as you can tell from his job description) one inclined to overlook the importance of the rule of law.

The basic problem here is that contrary to the impression one gets from, say, Fareed Zakaria's book, liberal autocracy, while certainly a conceptual possibility, doesn't seem to be much of an empirical possibility. If you're compiling a list of modern liberal autocracies, you're going to start with Singapore and you're going to end with . . . Singapore. Singapore's nice and I wouldn't be too eager to press for change there, but it's also an unusual situation and it's far from clear that there's a generalizable model here. If you want to find examples of liberal autocracy as a stable governing model, you really need to look back to nineteenth-century Europe (or to some extent eighteenth-century Britain). Even there, you'll find that the main theme was less autocracy per se than some combination of a restricted franchise and/or power sharing between elected parliaments and hereditary monarchs. The nineteenth-century United States in some ways fits this model as well, though nobody talks about it that way.

Taking the long view, that trajectory of political development was fairly beneficent. It's clear, though, that it's simply not something that can be replicated in the modern world. Which leaves us with the problem that, as Carothers put it, nobody really has any good ideas as to how to promote the rule of law abroad. The most successful thing we've had has been the European Union expansion process, but that has a very limited applicability. By contrast, for all the flaws of the democracy-first approach, both the U.S. government and our international partners have gotten pretty good at organizing reasonably free and fair elections. So we do what we can do.

The difficulty is that it remains the case that liberalism is more important. The main lesson to be learned, I think, is that we need to temper our ambitions and our aspirations. Naturally, we hope for liberalism and the rule of law to spread. And to some extent, it is spreading. But we know very little about how to do this, and it mostly seems to be a process that outsiders have a very limited capability to impact. We shouldn't confuse our ability to help organize democratic elections, or the widespread appeal that such elections have around the world, with an ability to achieve what really matters in terms of political values.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE ON THE MINIMUM. Will Wilkinson is a bit exercised because my argument against the minimum wage wasn't a bulletproof econometric conclusion to the minimum wage debate -- also, because he appears to not understand that an argument against obvious correlation isn't an argument for positive correlation. Sigh. This isn't an endable debate. But Will's argument against me is one of the more frustrating turns in it, an oversimplified appeal to "economics 101." So let's have a lesson...

First, there is no hard and fast law that "as the price of something goes up, consumers will tend to buy less of it." It's a good guideline, but it's got no end of exceptions. It's well understood, for instance, that many companies overprice luxury goods because consumers use cost as a heuristic for quality, and often purchase greater quantities of products priced expensively to signal their worth. Cost and demand exhibit no clean inverse relationship, and consumers and producers react neither rationally nor predictably to changes.

Think of it this way: The price of oil has been skyrocketing for the better part of the last five years. Here's a graph. And here's domestic oil consumption. Folks playing at home will notice something funny: Both are going up. So as prices have increased -- indeed, shot up -- even the growth in demand has failed to slacken appreciably.

Obviously, were oil a billion dollars a gallon now, that would change. But not all price points are yet at the level where an increase will greatly harm demand. They weren't there in '90s, clearly, when Clinton's minimum wage increase was succeeded by staggering low-income job growth. They weren't there in the '60s, when the minimum wage reached its highest absolute level and unemployment was 3.5 percent. And I'm convinced they're not there now, when the minimum wage is at a 54-year low against the average wage.

Will also deploys the general conservative slippery slope here -- "So what about $8? How about $12? $15.75?" -- but it's pretty weak brew. It requires a belief that this period of record profits, high employment, and paltry wage growth is actually one of the weakest economic moments in the last century, and the first that would prove unable to absorb a minimum wage increase. There's plenty of money flying around this economy, but just about none of it is reaching the bottom. So it's time to raise the bottom.

That said, unlike some others, I want it to be clear that I have the courage of William Niskanen's convictions. I completely agree with his argument that the Republicans should separate out the minimum wage provision and make a statement by publicly and overwhelmingly defeating it. And after they do, I think Dennis Hastert should grind a copy of the legislation beneath his jackboot heel while the cameras click and flash.

--Ezra Klein

BUSH AND HISTORY. Ever since Bush turned unpopular and conservatives conveniently decided that Bush wasn't a conservative after all, a lot of liberals have been trying to nail down the argument that, no, the failures of today's GOP just are the failures of conservatism. I think Alan Wolfe writing in the new Washington Monthly does the best job I've seen yet. Among other things, the article just includes a lot of great quips. The lead quip, though, is actually something I have complicated views about: "Search hard enough and you might find a pundit who believes what George W. Bush believes, which is that history will redeem his administration."

I just may be that pundit. My view, unpopular though it is, is that the historical trajectory of Bush's reputation is going to roughly resemble what's happened with Woodrow Wilson, a pretty awful President who seems to be well-regarded because he basically put a lot of appealing-sounding ideas in play that later politicians turned into something useful and workable.

--Matthew Yglesias

BEST. TERRORIST. EVER. That's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to George Will. Or at least he's "the most effective terrorist in history." That seems misguided. Zarqawi's dead. What's more, I'm quite certain that his long-term goal of constructing a pan-Islamic neo-Caliphate or whatever isn't actually going to be achieved. Where's the love for Michael Collins or Haganah-era David Ben-Gurion? They both managed to more-or-less get what they wanted by recognizing that maximum violence and maximum unwillingness to compromise aren't actually the best approach to these questions? Or were they so successful that none dare call it terrorism?

--Matthew Yglesias

THE TWO CULTURES. Like Bryan Curtis, I've been puzzling recently over the apparent upsurge in intellectuals' interest in soccer. I don't think I really understood it, though, until I read this Frank Foer post noting that "[s]occer is largely immune from sabermatrics and other instantiations of mathematical nerdiness."

There, I think, is the rub.

The rise of analytic approaches to sports has been, in my opinion, an excellent development. But for a certain segment of literary types in America it's produced a crisis. Baseball turns out to be the most quantifiable of all major sports which has seriously threatened its status as a pretext for long-winded airy writerly musings. Football and basketball aren't far behind in coming to be dominated by pundits arguing that most of the Dallas Mavericks' "defensive improvement is an illusion" that vanishes once you adjust for pace factor and look at efficiency rather than raw points, and counter-arguing that the sample size was too small. Only in soccer does the purely qualitative style of analysis still flourish, creating a strong incentive for the mathematically disinclined to try and foist it on the American public.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE GITMO. An Afghan government delegation says they'd just as soon not have their citizens held indefinitely in legal limbo on an American Navy base in Cuba. What's more, "about half of them were not guilty of serious crimes." Fortunately, "the officials said the Afghan detainees were not being held in bad conditions." Except, of course, for the sense in which being imprisoned for years without trial is a pretty bad condition.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE MINIMUM WAGE. To follow up on Matt's post below, while reasonable people can disagree on the impact of minimum wage laws, it's time they stopped. William Niskanen, in arguing against a federal boost to the wage, trots out the same old canards about wage increases decimating jobs. And yes, if you jack the wage up to $16 an hour, jobs will be lost. But up to $7 over a period of years? The evidence doesn't back him up. And, luckily, it's so easy to check that you folks can play along at home. Just crosscheck this list of state minimum wage laws with this rundown of state unemployment rates. The lowest unemployment rate in the country is Hawaii's 2.8 percent, which somehow survives with their $6.75 minimum wage. Second lowest? Florida, with a luxurious $6.40 per hour. Vermont, resting comfortably at number 5, has a minimum wage of $7.40! And the very highest unemployment in the nation? Mississippi, with no minimum wage laws at all.

And this is how it is. The minimum wage, of course, doesn't decide employment on its own. Michigan has a decent wage floor, but the destruction of their manufacturing sector left them with a high unemployment rate. And Mississippi's problems aren't related solely to their laughably low labor standards. But any attempt to correlate minimum wage increases with joblessness falls on its face. When Clinton raised the wage in the mid-‘90s, low income employment skyrocketed. Some catastrophe. And we can take this as far back as folks want. Check this graph, showing the real value of the minimum wage (now at a historical low). Its peak was 1968. The unemployment rate in ‘68? A brilliantly low 3.5 percent.

As Brad DeLong would say: Raise the minimum wage. Raise it now.

--Ezra Klein

THE QUEEN RANIA FACTOR. I was in Whole Foods the other day, like a good out-of-touch elitist, shopping for cheese, and at the checkout stand I saw a glamour shot of Queen Rania of Jordan on the cover of Washington Life magazine. I have to say that I've long been bugged by Western elites' fascination with this particular queen. Here she is hanging out with Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and George Soros. And here she is with Laura Bush. Here she's written up in Hello magazine. She's a bipartisanly loved celebrity -- everyone thinks she's great! And she certainly is good looking and appears to be involved in some worthwhile charitable endeavors.

But here's the thing.

As you'll recall, pretty much everyone nowadays is in some sense interested in promoting democratic reform in the Arab world. And Queen Rania isn't a fun cosmetic constitutional monarch like you have in England or Spain. She and her husband are actually existing despots who make their living exploiting the productive members of Jordan's population, and maintain their control over the country and its resources through the use of coercive violence and other standard means of repression. Take a look at the State Department's Human Rights report on Jordan. It's far from the worst dictatorship on the planet, but it's a real and true dictatorship -- "Citizens may participate in the political system through their elected representatives in parliament; however, the king may at his discretion appoint and dismiss the prime minister, cabinet, and upper house of parliament; dissolve parliament; and establish public policy." You can be arrested for criticizing the royal family, and the freedom of association is severely restricted. This is done because if it wasn't, Rania and her husband would lose access to their lavish globe-trotting lifestyle and possibly even their invitations to fun parties.

I'm not saying we should invade Jordan, but can we at least stop pretending that Rania and her husband are brave allies in some noble quest to bring freedom to the Middle East. They could create the world's first functioning Arab democracy tomorrow if they wanted to by stepping back and handing authority over to the Jordanian people's elected representatives. But they don't want to. They'd rather stay in charge. And so Jordan has no democracy. And they deserve to be talked about accordingly -- no doubt if her title were "the dictator's wife" rather than "queen," people would find the situation less glamorous and appealing. But what's the difference? Certainly the mutual affection between American and Jordanian political elites isn't generating any great affection for the United States among the average Jordanian.

--Matthew Yglesias

LARRY AND ME. As my time guest-blogging at TAP begins to draw to a close and as someone who’s had a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere lately, I want to say that the level of the comments here is pretty impressive. Now it would not be hard to be more rational and literate than much of what goes on amongst the mommy-bloggers (see the recent eruption of “Linda! Vomit!” on the ABC news website after I appeared in the second hour of Good Morning America yesterday to suggest that people might want to read my new book). But evidence of the occasional quality of the commentary here is that one particular comment to my piece on David Brooks’ Sunday “eeew, Jane Eyre” column picked something up that no one has noticed, even though it has been in plain view for months.

That is, much of what I say on behalf of working women and much of what Harvard ex-President Larry Summers says sound the same. As the commenter cleverly laid it out:

Feminist Linda Hirshman, in TAP:
"Even the most devoted lawyers with the hardest-working nannies are going to have weeks when no one can get home other than to sleep. The odds are that when this happens, the woman is going to give up her ambitions and professional potential."

Troglodyte Larry Summers, That Talk:
"Another way to put the point is to say, what fraction of young women in their mid-twenties make a decision that they don't want to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week...Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men?"

Feminist Linda Hirshman:
"The rule here is to avoid taking on more than a fair share of the second shift. If this seems coldhearted, consider the survey by the Center for Work-Life Policy. Fully 40 percent of highly qualified women with spouses felt that their husbands create more work around the house than they perform."

Troglodyte Larry Summers:
"And the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children,"

Here’s the difference. I think the plain truth Summers found is terrible. If you actually read his speech, Summers presented this terrible news about the unfair treatment of women in academia in a kind of morally neutral, quizzical way. How interesting that women would be engaging in behavior that, as I say in Get to Work, means they will never be the ones to discover a cure for cancer.

What the commenter also left out is the part of Summers’ (and Brooks’) analysis that I hotly dispute. In his New Year’s Day column about my article, Brooks wrote that women are by nature fitted to bear the repetitious physical work of housekeeping and child rearing, and therefore it is fair to load them with the burden of the household and disable them from the work of the larger world. Defending this hypothesis, Summers said “most of what we've learned from empirical psychology in the last fifteen years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization.”

As Summers’ critics have repeated until only the most willfully ignorant individual would ignore it, we have little or nothing that counts as evidence that women are, by nature, different from men in any way that matters to working in the industrialized, market economy. But we have a lot of evidence that, in a controlled study, faculty hiring committees heavily favor resumes with male names, even where the qualifications are set up to be identical.

Unlike Summers, I recognize the really scary, dangerous and unjust implications of asserting that the evolution of women’s brains render them less eligible for good, honored, well-paid, socially significant work, like science, and perfectly fit for food shopping. Dragging the ancient belief that the household, like the squishy content of women’s lit, is for the females to deal with, and facing a bunch of employers who will pick Bill over Jill when the qualifications are identical, it’s hard to figure out how much of a role to assign to conditions on the African savannah a million years ago.

--Linda Hirshman

WORDS TO LIVE BY! In case you're wondering why the GOP leadership doesn't spend a lot of time taking advice from libertarian intellectuals, take a gander at William Niskansen's view that "the House Republicans should split off the minimum wage provision from the appropriation bill, allow a separate floor vote on this provision, and demonstrate the absurdity of this proposal by a defeating this measure by a large margin."

Obviously, people disagree on the merits of the minimum wage issue. But nobody can seriously deny that this would be a ridiculous stratagem from the House Republicans to take up. Year after year GOP candidates try as hard as they possibly can to obscure the fact that they want the minimum wage to go down while Democrats want it to go up. And they know what they're doing. Following Niskansen's advice would just make Nancy Pelosi very, very, very happy.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHO SHOULD YOU CHEER FOR? The World Cup's a tough time for wannabe cosmopolitan progressives. We always hear about the Europhiles populating the left, but the truth is, Europhilia requires a bit more than a taste for good cheese and an affection for the welfare state. Indeed, it demands a near encyclopedic knowledge of soccer. And not just teams who've already penetrated the literate lefty's consciousness (I'm looking at you, Barca and Arsenal), but the unknown squads, the local teams, the regional powers. And even that knowledge, once acquired, proves itself rapidly obsolete come World Cup time, as the multinational European outfits disassemble so their players can rejoin their native country's all star teams. So who to root for? Who's good?

The latter question is tricky, though Brazil, Germany, Italy, and Argentina are all good answers. But as for who you should cheer for, there's help a-coming. Who Should I Cheer For lets you support soccer the way you support Europe: on humanitarian and socially democratic criteria. "How about supporting the team that gives the most aid to poor countries?" it asks. "Perhaps cheering on the country that spends the most on healthcare? Or booing the country that spends the most on weapons?" Yeah, how about it?

Take today's match-ups. Germany versus Poland ends in a rout for Poland, though for reasons I don't understand. Germany, after all, has a higher life expectancy, spends a greater percentage of its GDP on healthcare, spends less on its military, more on aid, and has less income inequality. On the downside, Germany belches out more carbon, and has more multinational corporations, a metric that strikes me as pretty dumb. But hey, this is science folks, and Internet science at that, so Poland it is.

Trickier, it seemed, would be Tunisia versus Saudi Arabia, mainly because I know nothing about Tunisia. Luckily, WSICF is here for me! Tunisia, it turns out, is the third most supportable team in the tournament, while the Saudis languish back at number 29 (one slot ahead of the United States). They emit 15 tons of carbon per person, spend almost 8 percent of their GDP on defense, have "very high" income inequality, eight top multinationals, and a poor human rights record. Plus, Tunisia, with 52 percent external debt, gets sympathy points. So there you have it. Better soccer watching through science.

--Ezra Klein

IGNATIUS ON GITMO. We need some content up here quick, so let me just say that David Ignatius is certainly right about this. It's hard to maintain consistent focus on the Bush administration's bizarre and inhuman passion for degrading the United States' record on core human rights issues, but what they're doing in Guantanamo is an enormous outrage.

--Matthew Yglesias

EVERYBODY LOVES IRAN. One interesting result of the latest Pew Global Attitudes survey (PDF) is the high level of Muslim support for the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Pluralities in Egypt and Jordan and a majority in Pakistan say they want to see Iran get the Bomb. That's not opposition to American military intervention in Iran, that's people actually favoring Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons on the merits. Thirty percent of Indonesians and 23 percent of Turks are also on board.

I think you're seeing here the poisonous fruits of the "clash of civilizations" dynamic that we've been drifting toward for years now. And suffice it to say that this is very bad news. When people's level of dislike for American hegemony is growing so intense that they start looking on things like Iranian nukes as a positive development, we have a problem. In part, it's a serious problem for our Iran policy. In part, it's a symptom of an underlying issue that's going to create problems for us all over the map.

--Matthew Yglesias

LESS SUBSTANCE, PLEASE. Sigh. From Ana Marie Cox:

Considering the lavish party Mark Warner had thrown for them the night before, perhaps bloggers should not be so hasty with accusations of schmooze. Still, schmoozing is basically harmless if it doesn't affect what one writes — and if bloggers are re-inventing the journalist wheel, they're still getting around to that one. At the Q&A Warner held with bloggers after his speech, the questions were respectful and sincere. The first one was about whether Warner was correct in asserting that Iran is a greater threat to our national security than Pakistan. A better question might have been, how valuable is the opinion on such matters when it comes from a one-term governor of Virginia?

So that's how the pros do it.

--Ezra Klein

LABOR 101, PLUS SOME EXTRA CREDIT. You owe it to yourself to read Nathan Newman's inspiring, irresistible "Why Unions? Labor 101." Folks here know I'm a health care guy, but one of the reasons why is my belief that among our health system's many destructive tendencies, it's largely helped doom the labor movement. To be fair, the union movement was often complicit, offering insubstantial support to national proposals and preferring to expend resources on improving limited benefits for their direct members. It's a sin they've long since repented for, with yesterday's UAW convention offering only the latest example. All that said, the most demonic, nightmarish vision for anti-union employers is letting a union arise and corner them into so-called "gold plated" health benefits. Given the double-time march of health costs, reasonable contracts negotiated now may prove financially unfeasible twenty years down the road (see the auto industry for an example of that), but an active union makes the removal of benefits well-near impossible. So as hard as employer's may fight against the promise of better wages and regulations, they'll battle exponentially more viciously against any force that would compel generous, and inflexible, health benefits.

For that reason, I think government-provided universal health care would substantially ease the Labor movement's struggles. And nothing, in my estimation, is one-tenth as important. As we move towards a service economy populated with relatively unskilled jobs, only unions will be able to demand and extract dignity for the bulk of Americans toiling in that sector. Newman explains how Labor made Vegas a union town and brought fairness and respect to cocktail waitresses, but it goes far beyond that. One of the most compelling events at YearlyKos was the Labor and Power panel, which featured an organizer with UNITE-HERE's hotel workers campaign explaining that the much-touted "Heavenly"-brand mattresses weigh over a hundred pounds, and yet older women, working on their own, are having to flip eight or ten of them a day, for minimum wage, and with no health insurance, despite the fact that hotel work features more occupational injuries than virtually any other profession. These people deserve more, and not only would they never get it, but we'd never know it, if not for unions.

One more thing. Before I started at The American Prospect, my colleague Sam Rosenfeld suggested I read Thomas Geoghegan's Which Side Are You On? Being for Labor When It's Flat On Its Back. Politically speaking, it was the most transformative book I ever read, and it ranks as my favorite nonfiction work to this day. If you haven't read it, you should. Once you do, you'll thank me, profusely, just as I did Sam. On a similar note, Chris Hayes of In These Times published an exquisite essay on the concept of Solidarity a couple months back. Read that, too.

--Ezra Klein

LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLE! Slate is hosting a debate between former New Republic Editor-at-Large Peter Beinart and American Prospect Editor -- and advanced, multidimensional life form -- Mike Tomasky on Beinart's new book The Good Fight. Attentive readers will already have read Mike's review of the book, but if not, check it out, then grab your ringside seat to Slate's prominent pundit thunderdome.

--Ezra Klein

BORROWED TIME. I'm not going to try and strain to work myself up into a lather of ineffectual indignation about it, but obviously beating a crowd of 200 women's rights protestors in Teheran in loathsome. The article even comes with bonus Islamic Republic weirdness: "Throughout most of the confrontation, female officers beat female protesters and male police beat male protesters there to support the women. Male police generally are not permitted to touch female suspects."

What I will observe is that there's clearly a rather large level of political unrest in Iran. I'm not really among those who believe there's very much the American government can do to affect the pace of political change over there. Rather, I think the thing to remember here is that there's no need to get panicky and paranoid about a regime that's clearly living on borrowed time. Even if a U.S.-Iranian diplomatic accord doesn't hold up over the long term, the Iranian regime probably won't either. Meanwhile, a rapprochement and greater Iranian integration with the world economy will probably open up somewhat more breathing space and information for Iranian civil society.

--Matthew Yglesias

UNCHARITABLE. Cato's David Boaz has a gleeful post whipping Andrew Cuomo -- and by extension, all liberals -- for his relatively paltry commitment to charity. "In 2004 and 2005," Boaz writes, "Cuomo had more than $1.5 million in adjusted gross income. And he gave a total of $2,000 to charity. He made no charitable contributions in 2003, when his income was a bit less than $300,000. It’s no wonder that Cuomo believes passionately in taxing Americans to support all manner of welfare and transfer programs. Looking within himself, he quite understandably fears that in the absence of coerced transfer programs there would be no support for the poor. Yet in fact Americans gave about $250 billion to charity in 2004, or an average of about 2 percent of income."

Oh boy, 2 percent of income! You hear this quite a bit, that liberals support large welfare programs because they fear their own selfishness. It's a nifty bit of ideological jujitsu. Liberals, who want to codify sufficient support for the poor, are actually less generous than conservatives, who would fund a parallel welfare state out of the goodness of their own hearts but are continually foiled by progressive taxation. Since paltry amounts of unprompted giving are considered somehow purer than a willingness to support large coerced contributions, conservatives are better people. QED.

But let's look at the data a bit more closely. In 2004, charitable donations totaled $248.5 billion, a 2.3 percent increase over 2003. Given that the growth rate in 2003 was 3 percent, charitable donations grew more slowly than the economy. How generous. Of that $248.5 billion, $187.9 billion came from individuals, $28.8 billion from foundations, and $12 billion from corporations. So for individual contributions, which Boaz is talking about, the operative amount is just shy of $190 billion. But even that vastly overstates how much money is donated to aid the needy.

Remember that charitable donations don't necessarily equal food and roofs for the poor. A disproportionate amount goes to the arts, much to foreign aid, and a ton to local churches, through tithing and bequests and old cars and so forth. In fact, religious institutions absorbed the bulk of 2004's charity, with $88.3 billion -- a bit over a third of the total. Next came education -- think alumni giving -- with $33.8 billion. The health sector (disease research and so forth) ate up $21.9 billion, while "human service" -- which is to say, charity supporting the poor -- took $19.7 billion. Arts, cultures, and humanities received $14 billion, animals and the environment $13 billion, and international affairs $5 billion. So what the poor are really getting is some fraction of the religious giving through faith-based outreach programs, and the $20 or so billion going to so-called "human services." Some riches.

Nor is all giving equal. Rich families funnel a couple million to charity before the estate tax kicks in so they can dodge the penalty. Many more -- particularly at the high ends of the income bracket -- donate for deductions, seeking lower marginal tax rates. And I'm not certain that charity in service of lower taxes is really morally superior to coerced redistribution. Even if it is, it's clearly insufficient to replace the welfare state. The patchwork couple of billion going to aid the poor simply can't fund the alternative structures necessary to deal with society's needs. Boaz may like to mock Cuomo's stinginess, but in the final analysis, one of them is willing to ensure the indigent have health care, the other isn't. And I know which record I'd prefer to flash before St. Peter.

--Ezra Klein

THE QUIET IRAQI. Check out yesterday's Spencer Ackerman post noting that the Iraqi government includes a man by the name of Muhammed Shahwani who was appointed back in the Iyad Allawi days. He apparently can't be fired by Allawi's successors, is paid by the United States of America, and runs a secret police outfit that, likewise, is accountable to the American government rather than the Iraqi one.

--Matthew Yglesias

THERE'S THE BEEF. The New Republic has obliged those of us puzzled by their previous Darfur editorializing with a new one spelling out what exactly they think we should do. I have some concerns. "The consensus among experts," they write, "is that it would take approximately 20,000 troops to secure Darfur." At the same time, the explicit model for this operation is Kosovo where the initial KFOR deployment was over twice that size, and even today "more than 16,000 peacekeepers" are on the ground. Darfur contains 2-3 times as many people as Kosovo, is over 20 times as large in terms of area, is more diverse in ethnolinguistic terms, and is less conveniently located to NATO's home base. So why should a much smaller mission suffice?

And what if Sudan doesn't want to be invaded by 20,000 foreign troops? Well, if they resist, "NATO would have to follow through on its threat and attack Sudanese military installations from the air until Khartoum got the message. This is precisely the strategy that NATO used in Kosovo--and it worked." That's not really what happened. Take a look at this RAND Corporation study of Slobodan Milosevic's surrender and you'll see that, for one thing, we bombed plenty of civilian targets (power plants, factories, etc.), and an important factor was Milosevic's belief that we were "prepared to employ 'massive bombing' to demolish their country's entire infrastructure--including its remaining bridges, electric power facilities, telephone systems, and factories." In addition, "The increasing talk of an eventual NATO ground invasion was probably another, though lesser, factor in Milosevic's decision." Are we prepared to make -- and carry out -- those threats? Is Sudan -- a much less developed country than Serbia -- even as vulnerable to these kinds of threats? What's more, Milosevic's surrender depended crucially on NATO's eventual ability to get Russia to withdraw its support for the Serbian position -- will Khartoum's supporters in Russia, China, and the Arab League similarly come around? It's very possible that mild coercion will change Sudan's thinking, but it's also possible that it won't, and it seems unwise to launch a war without being prepared for things to go poorly.

They say that "The ultimate goal of Western intervention is not to make Darfur an independent nation; it is to establish an international protectorate that would seal Darfur off from the rest of Sudan." This, again, seems to involve misreading the Kosovo precedent, wherein a very similar strategy was implemented but is clearly heading in the direction of Kosovar independence. Maybe Darfuri independence is a good idea, maybe it's not; but that's what's going to happen if you prevent the state that Darfur is currently part of from governing the region.

Last, I don't think the editorial has a very plausible response to those of us who worry "that American troops entering another Muslim country would further inflame anti-American sentiment around the world." They say "the perpetrators of the Darfur genocide are Muslims, but, as in the Balkans, the victims are Muslims, too" which is basically non-responsive. We're not looking at an issue of abstract logic ("should Muslim opinion oppose a western invasion of Sudan?") but at an empirical issue. Call me crazy, but my observation is that public opinion among the world's Muslims is disinclined to give the United States the benefit of the doubt. Especially among Arab Muslims, I think that after Iraq, Abu Graib, and Haditha, an effort to wage war against an oil-rich Arab government in hopes of dismembering its country is not going to be well-received. TNR is more-or-less committed institutionally to the view that how Muslims feel about the United States of America should be irrelevant to our foreign policy, but that's the kind of thinking that's going to wind up getting a lot of Americans killed one day.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE MYTH OF THE FREE RIDE. Via Tom Lee I see that in the course of editorializing against network neutrality, The Washington Post's editorial writers have decided that big Internet firms "want their services delivered fast but don't want the pipe owners to extract fees from them." This is misinformation pure and simple. As Tom writes, "Content providers pay for their bandwidth." Here's a quick-and-dirty experiment that can prove the point to readers. Try to start a website. Go do it now.

Give it a shot, and you'll see soon enough that to start a website you need to pay someone to host it and for the bandwidth it uses. Right now, my website is a TypePad site. To start one, you need to pay Six Apart a monthly fee. As you'll see here, for $4.95 a month you get two gigabytes per month of bandwidth, whereas $8.95 a month will get you (among other things) five gigabytes per months of bandwidth. It costs money. As it should. Bandwidth is a valuable commodity, so if you want it -- either from a user end or from the content provider end -- you're obviously going to need to pay for it. Which you do. This is a total red herring as far as the neutrality issue is concerned.

What's especially odd about this is that, obviously, The Washington Post has a website. Did Fred Hiatt think the site had no costs? Was the bandwidth it uses free? They could have cleared this up by asking someone around the office, but instead they seem to have just decided to reprint some telecom industry talking points wholesale.

--Matthew Yglesias

SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK. On the great David Brooks debate, can I suggest a compromise? Let kids read what they want. Give them a list of books to choose from and allow them into the classes, or into the groups, that are studying books they'd actually like to read. As it is, Brooks' contention that boys are desperate to read Hemingway but foiled by a feminized education system is a bit silly. Hemingway, for one, would think any male lacking the gumption to stride into Barnes and Nobles and pick up the damn book himself deserved a whupping. Except he would've said so with fewer commas.

As for Mike Tomasky's musings about what kids actually read, a quick glance at college syllabi shouldn't be that hard. My experiences with the educational system are relatively recent, so here's some anecdotal evidence: High school offered lots of literature that I was too young to appreciate. None of it was the estrogen-laden sludge of feelings that Brooks identifies. I don't know why he thinks The Babysitters Club has been incorporated into the canon. I did read Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice, but then so too did I study Steinbeck, Twain and Vonnegut. And yes, I preferred the latter. But what I really preferred doing was not paying attention in class, and so I nearly failed out of English. I blame the feminists, 'cuz they made me lazy by promising wage earning women who could support my sensitive, philophizin' self in fine style.

As for college, since I wasn't an English major, I didn't read much fiction at all. I was at feminization-central: UC Santa Cruz, home of the gender-neutral banana slugs. And I took the most extensive core course at the college: Stevenson's Self and Society. But even there, the menu was light on fiction. I studied some Italo Calvino, Chinua Achebe, and Philip K. Dick, but I mainly read religious texts, and Marx, and Plato. Beyond that, the college, like most colleges, lacked a set curriculum, so I read -- or more accurately, pretended to have read -- whatever I wanted. So sure, Brooks is a bit off base. But Hirshman is too quick to dismiss some underlying truths in his column.

The rigidity of a teenager's education -- be it because of multiculturalism, lack of resources, or whatever else -- is an excellent way to extinguish whatever dim interest in learning they might have once had. And while I don't know that the same-sex education Brooks advocates is a good thing, Peggy Orenstein's book on the educational socialization of young women sort of left me wondering. In any case, I think the problem is Brooks doesn't go far enough. Forget separating by gender, I'm for separating by type. We already have schools for the artistic and the science-oriented, now let's make more of them, and maybe even add some categories. Let teens go to a school that focuses on their interests and is likely to accept their personalities, and I bet you'll see far better outcomes in both sexes.

--Ezra Klein