A FOND FAREWELL. Friends, after almost three years as one of the contributors to TAPPED, today is the day I'll be saying goodbye, at least for a little while. Starting tomorrow, I'll be on a leave of absence from The American Prospect in order to focus on writing a book. I'm going to keep writing a column for TAP Online and will probably do something or other for the magazine in the interim, but no more group-blog for me. I won't be out of the blogging game by any means, but in order to simplify my life and get the task down to a manageable size, I'm just going to post at a single eponymous site -- MatthewYglesias.com -- and leave this one to my colleagues.

Change, of course, is nothing new to The Only Blog That Matters, and our two founding writers -- Chris Mooney and Nick Confessore -- have both been gone for some time now. And as you've no doubt noticed, we've taken on a larger cast of characters over the past few months and launched several additional blogs featuring the Prospect brand. Everything, in other words, is going to be okay. Except, perhaps, for me. It's been a pleasure to work alongside -- and virtually alongside -- my various estimable colleagues, co-bloggers, and editors, and if any of you aren't familiar with my work on other sites, you have no idea how bad my spelling can get in an unedited forum.

At any rate . . . good night, and good luck.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: TACTICS MAKE PERFECT. We hear a lot of clamoring for the Democrats to nationalize the midterms around a positive, coherent policy agenda. That's easier said than done, obviously. Tom makes the case for nationalizing the elections tactically, through the use of a few effective gambits across the country that convey basic Democratic priorities and critiques of the GOP. He's got five proposed examples. Take a look.

--The Editors

QUANTIFYING A LIE. The new print issue of the Prospect features a disagreement in the letters page between Todd Gitlin and Alan Abramowitz over the question of just how often the meme "Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet" appeared in the American media during the 2000 campaign. Since the media’s war on Gore is something I’ve written about before for the Prospect, I thought I’d settle this dispute.

(Before we get there, of course, let’s just make it clear: Al Gore never said he invented the Internet. In an interview with CNN on March 9, 1999, he said, “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” This comment was plainly about his service in the Congress in the 1980s, when Gore was in fact the chief advocate for providing the funding that would transform the Internet from a tiny network linking a few university research facilities into the benevolent provider of shopping opportunities and Paris Hilton videos we enjoy today.)

In his review of Eric Boehlert’s Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, Gitlin quoted Boehlert saying that “more than 4,800” news stories during the 2000 campaign made reference to the phony Gore-invented-the-Internet meme. In his letter to the Prospect, Professor Abramowitz says, “a Lexis-Nexis search reveals only 19 mentions of the 'Gore-invented-the-Internet' charge in major American newspapers between January 1, 2000, and Election Day.” Responding, Gitlin writes: “when I did [a search] just now, Lexis-Nexis turned up neither 4,800-plus entries, nor the 19 that Professor Abramowitz found, but 445.”

They’re obviously not doing the same search. The meme is captured in the phrase “invented the Internet” -- in 2000, it showed up in jokes, in Republican ads, and in numerous asides from reporters. So the best search would simply be on stories mentioning Al Gore, and using the phrase “invented the Internet,” with both present and past tense covered. The complete search string should be “Al Gore and (invent the Internet or invented the Internet)”.

We’ll search both the Lexis-Nexis “All News” file, which includes everything there is, and "Major Papers," and we'll search just in 2000, as they did, and also go back all the way to Gore’s original CNN interview in March 1999. The results:

Major papers, January 1, 2000 to November 2, 2000: 503
Major papers, March 9, 1999 to November 2, 2000: 740
All news, January 1, 2000 to November 2, 2000: 1724
All news, March 9, 1999 to November 2, 2000: 2625

How did Abramowitz come up with his number? My suspicion is that he actually searched on the phrase “Gore invented the Internet,” and perhaps limited his search to "Major Papers."

The point always to come back to is this: First, Gore made a perfectly accurate statement that was twisted by Republicans into something he never said; second, the lie about Gore was taken by reporters as a symbol of what they already believed to be true about Gore; third, it was then repeated so many times that everyone just assumed it to be true; and finally, it had a severe impact on Gore’s electoral fortunes. I’ve done analyses of 2000 opinion data, and after you control for party identification and race, the strongest predictor of vote choice was not any issue, but whether voters thought each candidate was honest. They thought Gore wasn't, and that Bush was. How quaint it all seems.

--Paul Waldman

THE PERILS OF READING WHEN TIRED. Yesterday, I wrote that Arnold Kling's book failed to define the terms "very poor" and "very sick." Today, he writes that "In the simulation of my proposals in the chapter on matching funding to needs, I define poor as below the poverty line and I define very sick as having annual expenses over $5000 for the non-elderly and over $20,000 for the elderly. " He's right -- I'd missed it on my first read-through. Mea culpa.

--Ezra Klein

IT AIN'T ABOUT HARRIS. I'm pretty sympathetic to the point Jon Chait raises in his terrific piece on Katherine Harris: Now that the GOP spin on Harris is replete with admissions that she's a few crayons short of a full box, shouldn't that force them to reconsider the legitimacy of her decisions during the 2000 recount? In other words, if Harris is nuts, then why trust that in 2000 she was sane. Maybe Bush did lose.

The problem is Jon seems to counteract his own thesis in the article. As he writes, Harris was ignorant of election law and completely incapable of making these decisions. So the GOP sent in a ringer:

Republicans close to Bush dispatched J.M. "Mac" Stipanovich, a veteran Florida Republican lawyer well-versed in election law, to serve as Harris's close adviser. From that point on, decisions became more decisive and uniformly pro-Bush. When asked by the Post if he was coordinating his decisions with the Bush campaign, Stipanovich tellingly refused to offer a denial.

Harris may have been a concerned relative away from a white coat with buckles, but she was little more than a marionette. The real decisions were made by a hack sent by the central committee.

In some ways, this is precisely the problem. The decisions made during the recount were grotesque miscarriages of justice that clearly and obviously subverted the will of the electorate and the integrity of the election. But it wasn't because they were rendered by a lunatic or an incompetent; it was because they were nakedly calculated power plays that prioritized partisanship above and beyond the public good. For some reason, we're able to question and vilify the incompetent (see Miers, Harriett), the corrupt (Cunningham, Duke), and the insane (Harris, Katherine), but we’re unable to lay a glove on the far more lethal and routine manipulations of power that serve the ambitions and interests of the wealthy. Harris will get hers, but even if her mania did spur a reassessment of her role, we'd be comforting ourselves by condemning a mere vessel. The question isn't how to expose Harris, but how to expose Stipanovich and those who sent him.

--Ezra Klein

REALITY TV AND UNION-BUSTING. For years now, I've been telling anyone who'll listen that reality television isn't just bad aesthetics -- it's union-busting. Initially, the idea was simply to come up with programming that didn't involve unionized writers because it actually didn't involve writers, thereby allowing the networks to better-immunize themselves against the threat of a strike. More recently, it's reached absurd heights where you have "reality" shows that actually do employ writers, just not unionized ones covered by the collective bargaining agreement. Campus Progress has a good article up about how this is playing out behind the scenes of America's Next Top Model.

Let me also add that while America's entertainment unions don't involve especially large numbers of people and their actions don’t have especially dramatic implications for the American economy as a whole, they do have a certain significance. Specifically, the success of the Writer's Guild of America, the Screen Actor's Guild, and similar unions serves as an important demonstration of the fact that, yes, even independent-minded professionals can gain a lot from a strong union. Can, that is, unless the reality television goons get to them.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHERE THE PATIENTS HAVE TAKEN OVER. Now, it is important to remember here that Sean Hannity has already proved himself incapable of experiencing combat with an opponent any more vigorous than Alan Colmes. So we should probably be grateful that Sean has found a cause for which he’s willing to lay down his life.

In a more sensible media universe, of course, anyone who said something this preternaturally idiotic into an open microphone -- Kyra Phillips made far more sense accidentally earlier in the week -- would be patted gently on the head, handed a complimentary company pen, and sent off toward the commissary with the rest of the tour group from the nervous hospital. Is there nobody at FOX who looks at the people who say things like this and wonders, "How in God's name did I end up in this monkey house?"?

--Charles P. Pierce

FRODO'S FATE. Last week, philosophy doctoral student and ethical werewolf Neil Sinhababu argued against the conception of personhood and moral status advocated by Ramesh Ponnuru in his book The Party of Death. Neil concluded that to adopt Ponnuru's outlook would be "to shrug at the enslavement of hobbits, the slaughter of kittens, and the destruction of all life beyond earth." Now Ponnuru has responded with an article of his own (he says Frodo's safe), and Neil has responded to Ponnuru in turn.

--Sam Rosenfeld

GLOBAL WARMING: THE GOOD NEWS. I wrote earlier this week about the clever name change that persuaded lots of people to open farms on the Great American Desert Plains. The greatest climate-nomenclature scam of all time, however, was run by Erik the Red, who named the ice-bound island he discovered "Greenland." At the time, the world climate was warmer than it is today, and Greenland, though very cold, did actually support some marginal agricultural production and dairy farming. Consequently, he got a bunch of Vikings to move out there and build a settlement. A few hundred years later, it got colder and all the Norse settlers wound up dead.

Nowadays, though, thanks to the munificence of fossil fuel consumption, the world is heating up again. And, according to Der Spiegel, it's getting warm enough to farm Greenland once again. Sadly, way more people live in the destined-for-devastation portions of the world than in the looking-forward-to-less-permafrost portions of the world. It's also my understanding that, weather aside, Greenland doesn't have very promising soil for long-term farming, thanks to the lack of trees and the associated topsoil-retention issues.

--Matthew Yglesias

CLEAN, GREEN, AND POPULAR. Let's just take a moment to enjoy this description of Big Business’ reaction to this major piece of legislation in the glorious Golden State:

Business interests, especially oil companies, were irate and said they felt abandoned by the Republican governor, who had pledged to work for a bill they could support. They accused Schwarzenegger and Democrats of cobbling together behind closed doors a haphazard bill that could create unintended economic chaos.

Ahhh. What a difference a few years makes. Remember when it was Cheney and the Big Business interests working behind closed doors to cobble together an energy bill that padded their pockets and accelerated our ecological decline? Yeah, me too.

Anyway, this a Schwarzenegger film, top to bottom. Conscious of the perils of running for reelection in California, he's playing up the issue area where his progressive impulses appear genuine: environmentalism. In recent weeks, he's sought a compact with Tony Blair on global warming, and in recent days he's crossed California's extractive industry's to mandate a 25 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020. It should be said here that California is actually rather green already, with our vehicle requirements rendering the exhaust out my auto's tail pipe cleaner than the L.A. air it mingles with, and so our state, with the sixth largest economy in the world, accounts for a mere two percent of carbon emissions.

Nevertheless, this is a model for what other states can do, and if, as looks likely, it sinks the final nail into the incompetent campaign of Phil Angelides, it'll serve as a template for other governors seeking to burnish the popular aspects of their progressivism. If the federal government insists on ignoring emissions, the states needn't emulate its irresponsibility. Schwarzenegger, whom I've no particular love for, deserves credit for getting this done.

--Ezra Klein

POLITICS AS POLITICS. Have I ever mentioned that I hate baby boomers? Sometimes I think this is irrational on my part. Then along comes Andrew Rosenthal's infuriating contribution to today's New York Times editorial page. In essence, he went to hear Crosby, Stills, and Nash play, started thinking about the old Crosby, Stills, and Nash shows he's seen, waxes nostalgic about the sixties, and demands to know why the kids these days aren't as awesome in terms of mounting an anti-war movement as the kids were back in his day.

Well, what's happened is that a broad coalition of boomers who've managed to grow up, along with the vast swathes of the American public either too old or too young to have been at Woodstock, are trying to avoid the catastrophic mistakes made by the anti-war movement in the late 1960s. Specifically, we're trying to not link the war question up with a broad countercultural movement that managed to become less popular than the war itself. Specifically, rather than engaging in a lot of self-indulgent political theater, contemporary anti-war people have managed to get the vast majority of the Democratic Party -- along with a few Republicans, like the desperate Chris Shays -- to shift toward a position favoring an end to the war in Iraq, and we're now hoping the 2006 midterm elections will put such politicians in a position where they have the power to do something about it.

There's just very little reason to think that organizing mass demonstrations or getting more people to listen to "New Kicks" or "Celebration Guns" would advance any important political goals in a useful way.

--Matthew Yglesias

I LOVE IT WHEN YOU POLL ME. There are some interesting results in the new AP/Ipsos poll (PDF). Only a bit over 40 percent of Americans worry about "becoming a victim of terrorism," and the vast majority say they do so only "occasionally" (hell, living in D.C., I'd fit into that category too). That's compared to 56 percent who simply don't fret over the prospect. And only 25 percent think D.C. and New York are more dangerous vacation destinations than before 9-11, while 14 percent think they're safer.

Fifty-nine percent of Americans approve of the way Bush has handled terrorism, a stat that makes me think he's not been as successful at connecting Iraq to terror as he had originally hoped. Indeed, when an interviewer asked him last week what Iraq had to do with 9-11, he said "nothing," an admission by the administration that Iraq is now so unpopular that linking the two would poison public feelings on Bush's terrorism chops, not lighten attitudes towards Iraq. All that said, Democrats now enjoy a seven percent advantage on protecting the country (and, if you constrain the results to D.C. and New York, the two at-risk cities give them 17 and 25 percent advantage respectively), a finding which may connect to the majority who say they're not confident the government will ever capture or kill Osama.

Seventy-four percent of Americans have at least considered that the cost of fighting terrorism is simply too high, while 64 percent have wondered if the terrorists are "winning the war on terrorism" and 60 percent are embarrassed by America's image in the world. Sixty percent think our invasion of Iraq will generate more terrorism.

Party ID was standard in the poll -- 27 percent of voters considered themselves Republican, 35 percent Democrat, and 22 percent Independent. What was interesting was that a few more Democrats were "strongly" Democratic than Republican were "strongly" Republican, while more conservatives were "very conservative" than liberals were "very liberal." Whatever the ID and whatever the leanings, though, it doesn't take a genius to see that these are bad numbers for the right. Even after the London plot, Americans aren't particularly fearful, and they're surprisingly disinclined to trust the GOP to keep them safe. Time for another Orange Alert, I guess...

--Ezra Klein

THE TWO AMERICAS. Charles Barkley, all-time great undersized power forward and potential politician, takes on America's inequality problem: "America is divided by economics. It's the rich against the poor. And the gap is widening. We've got to find a way to uplift poor people. It shouldn't be the haves vs. the have-nots."

Sounds good to me. It always seems a little goofy, but at the end of the day I think it makes sense to try and recruit charismatic celebrities to run for office. Barkley on religion ("Religious people in general are so discriminatory against other people, and that really disturbs me") probably isn't going to sell very well at the polls, though I appreciate the sentiment he's trying to express.

--Matthew Yglesias

A MESSAGE FROM DR. JOHN. I got a minute with New Orleans legend Dr. John after he performed at the star-studded concert, "New Orleans: Rebuilding the Soul of America," headlined by Wynton Marsalis Tuesday night at the New Orleans Arena. Asked what he wanted liberals in Washington to know about the state of things in New Orleans, he replied, "We been tryin' to get any help here, and there ain't been none comin'... the wetlands has been disappearin' for 50 years, and that's the only thing that protects this state and Mississippi and all down in the Gulf. And since all the money has been, I would say, under corruption for 50 years, has disappeared, and is still disappearin', with FEMA and all of the rest of the people, we're bringin' people back to New Orleans one at a time."
(Emphasis his; take my word for it.)

I mentioned that Cyril Neville had told me that some people still don't know where their friends and family members are.

"Some people?! " he said, his eyes wide with indignation. "Over half this city don't have a clue. They're either missin' in action, dead in St. Gabriel and nobody knows who they are -- and I could go on with a list of gripes. So there, babe."

And with that, his handler said, "We've got to go." Dr. John eased himself down into the back seat of his car, and off he went into the muggy night.

--Adele M. Stan

KEEP MY SKIN OUT OF IT. Yesterday, I went to Cato to see right-wing health economist Arnold Kling debate the Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby and contrarian progressive economist Jason Furman (who looks more like Chuck Klosterman than any economist has any right to) on his new book, a Crisis of Abundance. CofA argues that our health system suffers from an overuse of highly specialized and technologically advanced treatments. In that respect, it's undoubtedly correct -- modern medicine suffers from a grotesque lack of good treatment data, and I welcome Kling's proposal for a health care equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office (a nonpartisan research facility).

From there, we part. Kling's other solution relies on a massive increase in the amount of health costs that come out of pocket. The "very poor" would be subsidized, as would the "very sick" (neither term is defined in his book), but everyone else would be paying for their own care. This makes sense in a very specific sort of world -- one in which you believe consumers have the capacity to make rational health care decisions -- and to a very specific sort of person -- one who believes those who make mistakes with their health care should simply pay the costs, be they financial ruin or death.

I am not that sort of person, and I am highly dubious of that world. I see no evidence for the claim that a gas station manager in Bakersfield, California, will be able to second- or third-guess his cardiologist's recommendation of an angioplasty. Will he have the money to get a second opinion? A fourth? Or will Kling's system convince him to foolishly underestimate his risk? Economists, after all, have shown time and again that we overestimate the pain of financial loss -- that, when it comes to money, we are not nearly so rational as one might hope.

What so strikes me about the "skin-in-the-game" approach towards health care is its unmistakable cruelty. It will, of course, be sold in gleaming, positive terms -- "personal responsibility," "individual control," "the genius of the consumer," and all the rest. It will focus on how wise our choices can be, not how foolish they often are. But it abandons us with our mistakes -- it's a philosophy emphasizing the justness of consequences, an approach I find neither just nor realistic.

A good example of this came from Mallaby, who mocked Minnesota's insurance climate for mandating coverage of massage and wigs. (Minnesota, incidentally, has the lowest uninsured rate in the nation.) Ho, Ho, Ho. He had a good laugh over that one, I'm sure. Except the wigs are for chemotherapy survivors -- the sort of thing none of us expect to need, but may one day find necessary to continuing our lives. Good wigs, sadly, are very expensive, and few major businesses appreciate Cancer Chic among their employees. Without one, a breast cancer survivor can scarcely hope to continue her normal life. And massages, which sounds silly, are often more effective, less costly, and safer than over-the-counter medicines in treating back pain. Few folks know that. Like Mallaby, they've not read the studies. Unlike Mallaby, they're not professional domestic policy thinkers. Yet if he could make so elementary a set of oversights, why do we expect the average American can do better? And why are we so willing to abandon them if they fail?

--Ezra Klein

THE WAGES OF MACACA. Elsewhere in TAP blogdom, Steve Benen and Brendan Nyhan both have analyses of the latest news regarding George Allen's race problems. They're both worth reading, and also provide me with another chance to bring up this picture:

That's all.

--Sam Rosenfeld

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH VERSUS THE UNKNOWN LOBBY. This post by Alan Dershowitz, arguing that human rights groups' criticisms of Israel should be dismissed, overwhelmingly focuses on Amnesty International, but does offer up a token attack on Human Rights Watch:

The two principal "human rights" organizations are in a race to the bottom to see which group can demonize Israel with the most absurd legal arguments and most blatant factual misstatements. Until last week, Human Rights Watch enjoyed a prodigious lead, having "found" - contrary to what every newspaper in the world had reported and what everyone saw with their own eyes on television - "no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack."

Shocking. Now let's look at what the HRW report "Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon" (PDF) actually says:

The Israeli government claims that it targets only Hezbollah, and that fighters from the group are using civilians as human shields, thereby placing them at risk. Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack. Hezbollah occasionally did store weapons in or near civilian homes and fighters placed rocket launchers within populated areas or near U.N. observers, which are serious violations of the laws of war because they violate the duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. However, those cases do not justify the IDF’s extensive use of indiscriminate force which has cost so many civilian lives. In none of the cases of civilian deaths documented in this report is there evidence to suggest that Hezbollah forces or weapons were in or near the area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack.

That sounds much more reasonable, does it not? But selective quotation and spurious attacks on the motives of human rights groups is a lot easier than trying to rebut the specific accusations HRW has leveled. Now what is true is that the evidence HRW presents is overwhelmingly drawn from interviews with Lebanese people. Probably at least some of the interviewees are lying or misremembering. And it's at least possible, though certainly unlikely, that they're all lying. But this is the standard method for cases like these. HRW reports -- as do other human rights groups -- about violence in Darfur or the Anfal campaign in Iraq that idealism-minded American Jews otherwise have no problem citing. And rightly so; albeit imperfect, this is the best way available to get information about crisis situations.

You can see more on The Lobby That Must Not Be Named's attacks on Human Rights Watch here. I found the Dershowitz article, naturally, through a link proferred by Martin Peretz who complains of "the treachery of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch." In his very next post he reminds us of an article that ran on his magazine's website that was, in Peretz's words, "dealing with the same subject" without mentioning that the article, while critical of Amnesty, praised Human Rights Watch for its principled commitment to criticizing both sides in an even-handed manner.

--Matthew Yglesias

BEYOND THE LINES. The naming of the National Tennis Center for Billie Jean King at the commencement of this year’s U.S. Open is quite a tribute to the tennis great, and one she fully deserves. Sports pioneers often break barriers in American culture by their “firsts,” such as Jackie Robinson’s shattering of the color line in baseball. Though it undoubtedly takes a special person to handle the pressure of being a “firster” while still excelling on the field, being first is a role that by its very definition is confined to a few.

Having a lasting impact on sports and America life, however, is an opportunity available to far more athletes yet accepted by too few. King has had that lasting impact: She spoke openly about having had an abortion in the early 1970s; she was courageous and respectful in divorcing her husband and admitting her homosexuality; and, of course, she took down chauvinist circus act Bobby Riggs in Houston’s legendary “Battle of the Sexes.” Moreover, the advances King made for the business side of women’s tennis are too many to recount. (By the way, I recommend highly HBO’s one-hour documentary about King, Portrait of a Pioneer.)

So forget her record 39 Grand Slam titles, including her 13 U.S. Open singles, doubles, or mixed-doubles championship wins. Billy Jean King deserved the honor bestowed on her this week for all she did beyond the lines and courts now named for her in Flushing.

--Tom Schaller

DON'T SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU. We take a break from breathlessly guffawing at this latest example of incompetent administration cronyism to remind you that, in the classic political thriller Seven Days in May, the secret code for launching the military coup d'etat was embedded in an apparently innocuous all-services dispatch concerning ...(drama sting)... a horse race. Just sayin'.

--Charles P. Pierce

TIMES CHANGE. Jonah Goldberg has an interesting column on the somewhat random subject of efforts to wield Barry Goldwater's views as a cudgel against social conservatives. Roughly speaking, Jonah's argument is that Goldwater became more libertarian over time, but that at the time Goldwater was leading the nascent New Right movement, he was, in fact, a social conservative. In other words, it's Goldwater who changed, not conservatism.

That seems plausible, though I don't really have the chops to assess it. What I will observe is this. People often take up what I think is a fairly confused attitude toward the rise of organized, politicized Christianity in this country. They observe that it wasn't a major factor 40 years ago, that it is a major factor today, and thus conclude that we're in some kind of march to theocracy (if you don't like social conservatives) or else headed for an awesome moral revival (if you do like them). The truth, however, is that you didn't have "Christianist" politics in 1964 because you didn't have secularist politics in an important way back then. It's fairly clear that liberals, rather than conservatives, were the ones who fired the first shots in the God wars -- the Supreme Court case on prayer in public schools, and the various causes associated with feminism and the sexual revolution. Social conservatism as we understand it didn't exist in the ‘50s and early ‘60s because everyone was socially conservative (everyone who mattered politically, that is; there were always libertine-minded intellectuals and so forth) so there was nothing to mobilize around.

Instead, you had culture mobilization primarily around race and race-linked topics. Once liberals put a more robust conception of a secular state on the table and feminists began demanding serious revisions in traditional gender roles, then you saw a meaningful political movement in defense of older ways that, previously, had been conventional wisdom rather than a political cause.

--Matthew Yglesias

SMALLER GOVERNMENT, HIGHER TAXES. Occasionally, you see arguments over whether the conservative movement sees smaller government as an end or a means, that is, whether they support the privatization of public services only when it results in cheaper and more efficient outcomes or whether they'll allow greater expense and inefficiency in order to satisfy an ideological distaste for government. Over at the IRS, we're seeing evidence for the latter:

Unless Congress steps in to stop it, the IRS is set to begin implementing a wildly inefficient plan to outsource the collection of past-due taxes from those who owe $25,000 or less. IRS employees could collect these taxes for about three cents on the dollar, comparable to other federal programs' collection costs. But Congress has not allowed the IRS, which is eliminating some of its most efficient enforcement staff, to hire the personnel it would need to do the job. Instead, the agency has signed contracts with private debt collectors allowing them to keep about 23% of every taxpayer dollar they retrieve. Employing these firms is almost eight times more expensive than relying on the IRS, but, according to IRS Commissioner Mark Everson, it fits in with the Bush administration's efforts to reduce the size of government.

Over 10 years, the companies hired are projected to collect overdue taxes totaling $1.4 billion, $330 million of which the companies keep as fees. According to the IRS' own estimates, over those same 10 years, the agency could collect $87 billion in unpaid taxes at a cost of just under $300 million — if allowed to hire sufficient personnel. In total, utilizing the private sector instead of augmenting IRS personnel would leave in the hands of delinquent taxpayers more than $85 billion owed to the federal government.

This is really a rather important test case: I've no particular investment in whether IRS employees or outside firms conduct tax enforcement. I would, however, like to save money and collect taxes. Similarly, I'd happily support a health care system expanding private options and offering vouchers for private insurance, if I'd seen any evidence that such a structure would offer cheaper or better care. The problem is there are too many examples of conservatives outsourcing government functions simply because they loathe government, and seeking ways to rationalize or justify the added expense and inconvenience because they're unwilling to deviate from the ultimate goal of a reduced public sector. The changes underway at the IRS are merely one example.

Pay close attention, also, to the news that Congress simply won't appropriate the funds to fully staff the IRS. We're seeing this at the Patent Office, the FDA, and a variety of other government agencies as well. The right refuses to allocate the necessary money for them to function properly, and then points to the inevitable mistakes or inconveniences of an understaffed, underfunded department as proof that their duties should be handed over to the private sector.

--Ezra Klein

BIRTH PANGS. "Women giving birth are smuggled out of Baghdad and into clinics in safer provinces." Why's that? Well, because hospitals run by the new Iraqi government's Health Ministry have been infiltrated by Shiite death squads who like to massacre Sunni Arab patients.

--Matthew Yglesias

YOU'RE SEXY WHEN YOU'RE SCARY. I'd love to know which "major public-relations offensive to strengthen support for the Iraq War" we're at now. Is this the fifth? The seventh? The twelfth? Because while Rummy accuses Democrats of "campaigning on fear" (see, irony's not dead!) and Bush denounces all of us who eventually want to stop running Iraq, I'm getting, well, bored. This is the third set of major speeches Bush has given on the issue this year, and the song and dance remains the same. We can't abandon the mission, we must stay the course, any sort of orderly withdrawal or redeployment is catnip for terrorists, and so on.

That's weak. I want some good old-fashioned fear-mongering -- wild insinuations that Hussein personally hijacked the jets, promises that the terrorists will hide in the wheel wells of our aircraft and use our retreat to gain entry into the United States -- whatever. Just give me something to go on here. And, while I can't speak to the set of speeches Bush is about to give, if his remarks at a recent fundraiser for Lynn Swann are any indication, I'm going to get my wish. If we withdraw from Iraq, Bush warned, the "enemy will follow us home."

Now was that so hard?

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MIND THE GAP. Justin Logan discusses the lingering divide between Democratic voters, who by now have come to unambiguously repudiate the Bush doctrine on security issues, and Democratic foreign policy elites, who haven't quite done so.

Simply asking candidates about their views won’t promise much insight as to the way they’ll conduct foreign policy: recall that Bush’s mantra during the 2000 campaign was foreign policy “humility.” If his presidency has demonstrated anything, it’s that people installed in bureaucracies drive policy. Thus, the best way to tell what could happen in a Democratic administration might be to handicap top prospective political appointees and look at the things they’ve been saying. And from [Kenneth] Pollack to Madeleine Albright to a whole host of Dem heavyweights, there is a genuine disconnect between the elites and the electorate.

--The Editors

LIKE APPLES TO MANATEES. Earlier today, I met Cato's Michael Cannon. We had a perfectly nice chat. Indeed, he was so pleasant that, for a little while, I forgot how crazy I think his ideology is. But I'm helpfully reminded by this post in which he compares the welfare system to health care costs. He argues that Congress stopped "just throwing more money at [the welfare system and] poverty fell and remained lower in 2005 than at any point in the 17 years leading up to welfare reform...Congress kept throwing more money at health care by expanding government programs (e.g., SCHIP). The result? Unlike the poverty rate, The Official Uninsured Estimate continues its steady climb."

Where to begin? Michael is implying that the Congress's stubborn insistence on funding such programs as SCHIP (the State Children's Health Insurance Program) is accelerating the growth of the uninsured. After all, Congress began kicking folks off of welfare and the poverty rate dropped, why not do the same with health care?

Putting aside the question of whether the decrease in poverty was due to welfare reform or the expansion of the EITC and the massive economic growth of the late-90's (poverty, by the way, increased every year between 2000 and 2004), to compare the number of folks in poverty and the number of folks uninsured and suggest the same policy strategies might apply to both is far beyond apples to oranges (which, as Chuck Klosterman has pointed out, are relatively similar things), it's more like apples to manatees.

Poverty is a function of growth and its distribution. The uninsured, on the other hand, are the product of health insurance getting more expensive. Premiums are far outpacing inflation. And that goes even more so for private insurance. That's why folks are losing their coverage: They can't afford it. Michael and I both have favored policy strategies to slow the growth, but I can't imagine we've terrifically different diagnoses for its causes. While some conservatives literally did believe that poverty was a product of welfare (a hard position to take seriously considering that, in 1996, the poverty rate was 11 percent, while a decade after welfare reform, it's at 10 percent), I don't know any health care wonks who think medical cost inflation is a product of government spending on SCHIP.

Serious reform is needed, to be sure -- but it needs to offer more Americans affordable health insurance, allow them to pool their numbers, unshackle the government's ability to bargain down costs, and generally do all those big government things Michael finds repellent. Unlike with welfare reform, Congress can't just step back, drop the kids from SCHIP and the pregnant mothers from Medicaid, increase the incentives for employment, and hope a uniquely robust economy covers up the costs. More and more, insurance is a problem for the gainfully employed and the middle class, who simply can't afford decent coverage. This isn't a question of behavioral modification, it's a question of income. And yeah, you may need to throw some money at that. Particularly if, like Mike, you don't want Big Government to start pummeling the medical-industrial complex.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FEAR OF A NINTH PLANET. Matt calls out astronomers for this Pluto crap:

Astronomy, clearly, had been progressing just fine in previous decades without a rigorous definition of “planet.” Telescopes, NASA-launched probes, and other instruments were bringing us more and more information about which objects exist in the solar system and about the nature of those objects. The term “planet” meanwhile, had long since ceased to play a substantive role in the science of astronomy. Before Copernicus, celestial bodies were divided between the planets (the moon, Mercury, the sun, Jupiter, etc.), which moved, and the stars, which didn’t. Contemporary astronomy, however, distinguishes among objects according to what they’re made of, so that the sun is a star and so forth. The very notion of a planet is, at this point, a piece of folk culture, not an important element of science. And according to cultural tradition, there are nine planets and Pluto is one of them.

There neither was nor is any need for busybody scientists to gin up a rigorous definition and then tell us Pluto doesn’t make the cut. It would be akin to gathering a giant conference to decide on a formal distinction between “bugs” and other small, gross animals. If we include worms do we need to include slugs? If we have slugs, then what about snails? And did you know that round worms (nematodes) are no more closely related to segmented worms (annelids) than they are to humans (chordates)? Well, I learned it about a year ago and suffice it say that I still use the word “worm” despite its lack of solid scientific backing. The world is getting on just fine.

--The Editors

THE RAIN IN AMERICA FALLS RARELY ON THE PLAIN. An amusing conclusion to today's "Today's Papers":

Finally, the NYT reefers a big piece on arid conditions in the Great Plains, which have left "farmers and ranchers with conditions that they compare to those of the Dust Bowl of the 1930's." It's the worst drought since … well, maybe 2003, "an extremely dry summer that … brought back memories of the 1930's Dust Bowl" (NYT, Sept. 5, 2003). Or maybe 2002, when "farmers shrug[ed] and wonder[ed] if a new Dust Bowl [would] soon be upon them" (NYT, May 3, 2002). Or 1998: "a dry spell that officials say shows signs of developing into the costliest and most devastating the region has seen since the Dust Bowl years" (NYT, Aug. 12, 1998). Or 1996: "Coming after two years of low rainfall and a number of other weather problems, the ferocity of this year's drought has slowly begun to evoke memories for some here of the Depression-era Dust Bowl" (NYT, May 20, 1996). Or 1988: "Since the spring's dry weather evolved into the worst drought since the Dust Bowl, the farm policy has been turned upside down" (NYT, July 10, 1988). Or 1982: "And when the winds come, turning the sky dark with dust and burying fence rows under shifting dunes of soil and thistle, those who are old enough remember the bleak days of the Dust Bowl." (NYT, May 14, 1982). Or 1980: "Is the nation in for a new Dust Bowl or at least a succession of scorching summers?" (NYT, July 17, 1980).

The thing of it is that before some clever rebranding, the area we currently know as the "Great Plains" was called "The Great American Desert." It's not genuinely a desert, but it really is quite dry. And, of course, an area that's dry-ish most of the time is going to be subject to frequent droughts. Many Native American practiced agriculture, but the ones who lived on the plains/deserts generally didn't and this was not a coincidence. The local climate has its ups and downs, but it's a fundamentally marginal area that already stays viable mostly because of federal protections for domestic agriculture products. It seems a bit perverse to just encourage the empty-ish part of the country to get emptier at a time when housing is becoming increasingly expensive, but it got empty-ish out there for a reason. Before it was flyover country, that's the part of the country you would try and pass through in a covered wagon before reaching the more promising terrain in Oregon.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: AGAINST DEMOCRACY. Last week, Shadi Hamid argued (here and here) that, to close the "vision gap" on foreign policy, progressives need to resist the realist temptation and reclaim democracy promotion from the neoconservatives. Today, Spencer Ackerman responds with a call to "uncouple human rights from democracy" and make promotion of the former the lodestar of liberal foreign policy:

I don't want to be too hard on Hamid. He wrote his essay in the service of a vital progressive (and American) pursuit: to chart a foreign-policy course that eschews the hegemonic and militaristic disasters of neoconservatism and the cynical and occasionally amoral impulses of realism. Unfortunately, his fetishization of democracy fails both America and liberalism. There is a better alternative for both liberal interests and the national interest: the promotion not of democracy, but of human rights.

What liberal democracy-promoters want to see in foreign closed societies is more precisely located in the advance of human rights: the protection of basic human dignity, freedom, and justice. Indeed, liberal democracy-promoters frequently criticize their neoconservative cousins for their lack of concern with the social protections of civil and legal rights. But it's time to uncouple human rights from democracy, and recognize that democracy has value only to the degree to which it safeguards human rights -- which is to say the degree to which democracy is liberal. Democracy in that respect is a fine and worthy thing, but the emphasis for the United States and for liberalism should be on the end, not the means.

--The Editors

HE FORGOT ABOUT AZERBAIJAN! Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proposes a televised debate between himself and George W. Bush only to see the Bush administration spurn the idea in a humorless manner with a statement from spokeswoman Dana Perino:

"I'd refer you back to what the president, Secretary Rice, and others have said about the Iranian regime knowing what it has to do to engage constructively with international community,” Perino said. "We’ve said we are willing to talk to Iran in the context of positive response to the P5+1 package."

What we're seeing here once again is Bush's mastery of the expectations game. By making it seem that he's afraid to debate Ahmadenijad, he's laying the groundwork for being able to declare victory after turning in a mediocre performance. I just hope that someone in the communications office remembers that "P5+1" isn't the kind of thing you want to say in a live debate -- too eggheady.

--Matthew Yglesias

A RISING TIDE DROWNS, ALSO. Now this is comforting:

Since 2000, Americans have been getting poorer, and national rates of severe poverty have climbed sharply, according to a study published in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The researchers reported that the growth in the poverty rate is due largely to a rise in severe poverty and that “moderate” poverty has grown little.

[...]

The percentage of Americans living in severe poverty—earning less than half of the poverty threshold—grew by 20% between 2000 and 2004, and the proportion in higher income tiers fell. The researchers reported that the number of Americans living in severe poverty increased by 3.6 million between 2000 and 2004.

This has never happened before. A few years ago, economists marveled at the first time a three-year expansion had accompanied three straight years of increased poverty. A year later, they wondered how it had happened for a fourth time. We'd never seen three -- much less four! -- years of expansion coincide with straight increases in the poverty rate. In the past, rising economic tides had lifted all boats. Now, the poor are capsizing.

--Ezra Klein

BUSH: DRILL OUR WAY TO A STRONGER LEVEE SYSTEM. President Bush is not even done with his speech supposedly given in honor of the dead and those displaced by the hurricane that hit land one year ago today, and already he has begun trying to spin the needs of Louisianans in a comically cynical way. To rebuild levees costs money, you see. And that's why Bush just urged Congress to open the Gulf Coast for drilling, to help raise the necessary money. Seeing him pull this maneuver should give every environmentalist reason for concern. Remember, Bush used the argument that September 11 proves the need for energy independence to argue for drilling in ANWR.

That said, I'm not too worried that Bush will actually be able to capitalize on this. Whereas Bush's speeches about September 11 have always demonstrated his political charisma at its most adept, this speech, like his handling of Hurricane Katrina all along, has been weak by comparison. Speaking right now on CNN, he is visibly nervous, rushing and pausing at all the wrong moments. It doesn't convey strength, and Bush's underwhelming admission that the government "fell short of its responsibilities" and will "respond in better fashion" during the next disaster are unlikely to inspire the sort of confidence in the American public that will allow Bush to say "just trust me, your fearless leader, when I tell you we must despoil the environment."

Also, can anyone who was watching CNN explain those weird overlays of some woman talking about her love life?

--Ben Adler

GREETINGS FROM KATRINALAND. Here, in New Orleans, on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, there is nothing but Katrina to talk about today. There's plenty to talk about, and much of it distressing.

There is still no electricity in the lower Ninth Ward, the site that generated the most horrific television images of the storm -- dead bodies riding the currents, people trapped on rooftops. With no public services, FEMA will not provide trailers to the people who once lived here. Without trailers, they can't rebuild. I've heard people speak with scorn of the city's call for residents to return home; return to what, they ask.
According to Virginia Rep. Jim Moran (D), the Small Business Administration's emergency loan program is showing the lowest acceptance rate of any previous emergency to whose victims it offered loans. The rate of acceptance for Katrina-related loans, Moran told a local talk-show host here, is 38 percent. In the Clinton administration, he said, the rate was about 59 percent. Worse still, the actual pay-out on the approved loans has been only $1 for every $5 approved.

Yesterday, I joined members of the House Democratic caucus on a tour of Katrina-related sites. Among them was University Hospital and Charity Hospital, which have been reduced to sharing a single makeshift emergency room in a vacated department store. FEMA is putting Charity through a process that will likely make it impossible to rebuild the city's only hospital for the uninsured poor. The hospitals requested a grant of $257 million to cover the losses wrought by the storm. They were initially approved for $23 million, according to Charity CEO Donald Smithburg, but when the grant came back from Washington, their grant was reduced to $16 million.

The rather opulent Ochsner Health Care System Hospital, a not-for-profit private facility, has suffered some $70 million in losses due to the storm, according to CEO Pat Quinlan, largely because it was one of the few area hospitals that turned no one away and remained operational throughout the storm. It also sustained substantial damage. FEMA has approved a reimbursement of $2 million for that loss, and has yet to pay out a dollar of that grant.

Make no mistake: These are the means by which the once majority African-American population of New Orleans is being kept away from its hometown. The population of New Orleans today is half of what it was pre-Katrina. And most of the people who have yet to return are believed to be black. Today, African-American community groups are marching from the Ninth Ward to Congo Square, the historic park where slaveowners once permitted slaves to gather to play the rhythms that form the roots of jazz. I'm headed there now.

--Adele M. Stan

IRONY AT WORK. Sometimes the headline says it all. That the entire civilized population of the United States isn't rolling down the street, laughing uncontrollably, is a measure of what this cabal of constitutional vandals has wrought over the past seven years. I thought sending Karen Hughes out as the Face of America in the Muslim World was going to be the peak of this administration's hilarious gift for inappropriate public irony. Not even close, as it turns out.

Did this rubber-stamp Torquemada tell the Iraqis that the Geneva Conventions are "quaint"? (Something on which he and their most recent dictator could find a little common ground.) Did he school them in these find distinctions? Just send him into the National Archives with a big old bottle of Liquid Paper and be done with it.

--Charles P. Pierce

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: IS OUR PRESIDENT LEARNING? Just how bogus, desperate, and perversely counterproductive is the Bush team's new p.r. push to present George W. as an intellectually minded bookworm? Steve Benen answers.

--The Editors

FUNNY BECAUSE IT'S TRUE. Newcomer blog IvyGate.com unmasks the real secretive cabal that controls the media.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

PHARMA CARES. You may have had your daily Law & Order time interrupted recently by ads congratulating legislators who voted for the Medicare Prescription Drug bill, and blasting those who didn't. The ads were paid for by the Chamber of Commerce -- only they weren't. It turns out the pharmaceutical industry -- the main beneficiary of Medicare’s expansion -- have actually been footing the bill, while the CofC attaches its name to the closing credits. And this isn't the first time Pharma has funded ads supporting their agenda but lacking their byline: Back in May 2002, the United Seniors Association stepped forward with a $10-million blitz praising the new Medicare bill. Officials from USA first denied that Pharma picked up the cost, and then admitted the campaign was paid for through an "educational grant" from the industry.

Now, the only question is why Pharma is so ecstatic over a Medicare plan that supposedly offers severe discounts on their medications. One of their spokesmen bragged that "millions of Medicare patients who previously had no prescription drug coverage are now benefiting from substantial discounts negotiated by Medicare drug plans." You'd think their shareholders would be a bit worried about a business strategy centered around giving out discounts that were negotiated through a new government program. Luckily, Big Pharma is simply too altruistic to care.

--Ezra Klein

WHEN IS A SUPERPOWER NOT A SUPERPOWER? Mark Steyn offers up a classic example of the right's oddly metaphorical view of national strength:

This country has acquired the habit either of losing wars or of ending them inconclusively. A similar result in the Middle East would lead not just the Chinese, Russians, and Iranians but also the Norwegians, Singaporeans, and Australians to conclude that the nation's hyperpower status was some freak accident — like Jerry Lewis stumbling into a boardroom meeting and being mistaken for the new chairman. They would make their dispositions according, there being no reason why anyone should take Washington seriously ever again.

Not to get too thick in the weeds of origins and so forth, but I think it should be pretty clear that the United States' hyperpower status is based on the fact that we're objectively very powerful. We have -- by far -- the world's largest GDP and we spend a relatively large share of it on our military. Hence, we have all these nuclear bombs, aircraft carriers, fighters and bombers, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, tanks, armored personnel carriers, etc. The only militaries vaguely comparable in terms of quality are much smaller and are owned by countries closely allied with the United States. It's a very impressive situation and it means people need to take us seriously. It's just that there are limits to what impressive military power can accomplish. Semi-permanently occupying foreign territory is intrinsically difficult and we need to learn to deal with that.

--Matthew Yglesias

NOW THERE'S AN '08 PRIMARY ISSUE. It's a rare thing when a national issue manifests itself in its most extreme form in presidential primary states, but that appears to be exactly what's happened with America's growing student debt problem, according to a new report (PDF) by The Project on Student Debt. Students who attended colleges in Iowa and New Hampshire graduated in 2005 with the highest debt burdens in America, an average of $22,727 and $22,793 respectively. That made New Hampshire's recent college grads the most indebted in America, with those from Iowa following a close second.

How can this be, given that both states lack clusters of pricey, brand-name private institutions? The answer is somewhat counter-intuitive: Student debt is not a function of tuition costs, but of the economic background of the students combined with the costs of living in an area and the amount of aid provided by states and their university systems. Thus, lower-income students who attend low-tuition public colleges can easily graduate with higher levels of debt than those who attend high-tuition private ones. The private schools often have a large enough endowment to significantly subsidize attendance for lower-income students, and they also attract fewer lower- and middle-income students who need outside aid to begin with. It helps, too, that many of the top schools are clustered in states, such as Massachusetts, that have favorable aid policies for the middle-income tier.

That's why, in a place like Iowa, it's the public-college students who leave school with the greatest debt burden, not the private school ones. Still, between going into debt to attend a public college and going into debt to attend a private one, the public ones can be significantly cheaper. The top five worst states -- from a student debt perspective -- in which to attend private colleges are: Arizona, Alaska, New Hampshire, Idaho, and Montana. The average graduate of a private college in Arizona left school with more than twice the debt of the average graduate of Harvard University ($32,504 vs. less than $15,000) and nearly $10,000 more in debt than the maxed-out Iowa graduates. The most indebted public college students studied in: Iowa, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota.

Candidates, get your policy papers ready.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MCCAINIACS. On behalf of the rest of American journalism, I'd like to apologize for this. The profession lost its mind in 2000, with very unfortunate consequences. There was the War on Gore, which I witnessed first-hand when the vice president got heckled and booed by some of the people watching him on TV in the press room at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Iowa. (Oh, yes, you did, kids, just the way you did in Hanover later on.) I remember telling a veteran reporter who was as agog as I was that this was the kind of behavior that literally would get you ejected from any press box in any American stadium. Then there was the ongoing novelization of that trust-fund cowboy, George W. Bush. The only galloping hallucination remaining from that year seems to be John McCain, Centrist Hero, and its giggling acolytes apparently have it primed for another lap around the country.

Oh, and I'd like to apologize for the John Mark Karr Donkey Show, too.

--Charles P. Pierce

THE NEW IMPERIALISM. Via Robert Farley, William Stuntz explains in The Weekly Standard why we must continue occupying Iraq:

On the other hand, if American forces were to leave Iraq now, the likely result would be an escalating civil war that would radicalize Iraq's Shiites, leaving Sadr and his ilk in control of either the whole country or its Shiite-majority region--along with most of its oil. That would give Ahmadinejad's Iran a chain of likeminded governments stretching from Afghanistan's western border to Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. A jihadist Shiite superpower with nuclear capability at the head of such an alliance is a truly terrible outcome, comparable in world-historical terms to Hitlerite rule over Europe. It is well worth fighting to prevent this--indeed, it is worth fighting harder than America has fought to date.

First off, note that the rationale for the war has switched once again. Rather than worrying that Osama bin Laden will take over Iraq if we leave, we're supposed to worry that Iran will. And, it must be said, this new concern is considerably more plausible than the old one. Indeed, this very possibility was widely cited as a reason not to invade and topple Saddam Hussein's regime. What I don't understand is what we're supposed to do about it. If the Iraqi public by and large prefers to be governed by Iranian-linked Islamist political parties, stationing a giant block of American soldiers in the country isn't really going to alter that. Conversely, insofar as the Iraqi public by and large doesn't want to be governed by Iranian-linked Islamist political parties, then it would be extremely difficult for Iran to establish that sort of domination.

What's more, the whole "chain of likeminded governments" concept is in desperate need of some further analysis. The entire NATO alliance is composed of "likeminded governments" featuring a much higher degree of policy coordination than Iran and Syria. Nevertheless, Canada and Italy, or the United States and Belgium, still are separate countries, not a single unified menace. In practice, it's difficult for authoritarian regimes to sustain intimate cooperation over an extended period of time (the lack of transparency reduces trust and makes it hard to commit credibly) and it seems very unlikely that a unified Iran-Iraq-Syria bloc could remain intact for long. Look at the history of the ill-fated union between Syria and Egypt and you'll see that this is an inherently problematic idea.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE ON VIRGINIA. Adding to our earlier discussion on whether Virginia is following in Delaware’s and Maryland’s historical footsteps, reader David Weigel writes in to point out:

Gov. Tim Kaine isn't a native to Virginia or the South. He was born in St. Paul, MN, and grew in the Kansas City area (the Missouri side) before he went to Harvard for law school. I think this adds some evidence to your concept. In 4-10 years, I think Virginia's politics will look more like Pennsylvania's, with the DC burbs playing the part of Philly and its suburbs. At the very least Democrats are going to start picking up the northern VA congressional seats now held by Tom Davis and Frank Wolf.

Indeed, that seems to be where the long-term trend is going. Furthermore, just double the number of years and, with all the Northern retirees flocking to Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and the rest of the Research Triangle Park area, North Carolina may be in exactly the place Virginia finds itself now. The more immediate question is whether this process is far enough along to affect this year's Senate race. Given George Allen's longstanding popularity in the state, my guess is that once the word Macaca is forgotten, it won't be.

--Ben Adler

ALWAYS LOW SALARIES, ALWAYS. Jonah Goldberg accuses me of ducking his criticisms -- which would be true, only I, uh, didn't see his criticisms. Amazingly, I don't actually read the Corner on Saturdays, and was only responding to those, like Glenn Reynolds, who answered me during the week.

But since I now do see that Jonah answered, it gives me time to be confused. In what must be the most revealing few sentences he's ever written, Jonah promised, "I'll make Ezra a deal. I will forthrightly deal with the progressive case against Wal-Mart, if he explains in simple and straightforward language which issues he considers to be less important than Wal-Mart."

Read that again. Jonah will bring an ounce of intellectual honesty to the table if I accept his demands. He's holding good faith debate hostage, and in doing so, admitting that his Los Angeles Times column was nothing but a smear job, one in which he didn't deal with the opposing arguments forthrightly. I applaud the honesty, but can't accept the terms. I don't negotiate with hacks. If Jonah wants to deal with opposing arguments honestly, he shouldn't need to be bribed into position.

But since I actually do think this is an important issue, I'm willing to deal with queries about my position forthrightly (no conditions!). As I said earlier today: I believe that Wal-Mart is setting the norms for the service economy, which contains most of the job sectors slated for rapid growth in coming decades. Moreover, I believe their size and purchasing power are destroying the private welfare state: Wal-Mart's competitors need to cut labor costs to compete, and their producers need to cut labor costs (and often outsource) to meet Wal-Mart's price points. These are the norms of the service economy -- a mindless pursuit of lower prices, a troubling lack of countervailing powers, and little to no employee power -- and they are causal factors behind the erosion of the private welfare state, the shift of risk onto individuals, and the decline of unions. In the way that bridling GM and Ford was critical to creating the middle-class in the 20th century, taming Wal-Mart is central to sustaining it in the 21st -- and if we can't do that, health care, child poverty, and all those other issues Jonah fears I'm neglecting are going to get a whole lot worse.

--Ezra Klein

DEBUNKING THE SOUTHERN MYTH. If I may add a footnote to Charles’ post below, I am particularly sensitive to the pervasive “conventional wisdoms” about Democrats and the South. One of the most annoying of these analyses -- so common that I wonder if it’s one of those cut-and-paste paragraphs journalist pre-write and insert into their stories about the South -- closed the very piece Charles links to:

“The last three Democrats to win the presidency--Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson--came from the southern states of Arkansas, Georgia and Texas, respectively.”

That statement is true, of course: All three came of age and made their political chops in Southern states. But Clinton is different from Carter and Johnson in a fundamental way: He won his ticket to the White House outside the South.

Here come the numbers, folks: Carter’s margin over Gerald Ford in 1976 was
9.5 points higher in the South than his margin over Ford in the non-South (which Ford carried narrowly). Just four elections and 16 years later, Clinton’s margin over transplanted Connecticut Yankee George H. W. Bush was 9.5 points lower in the South than the non-South, making the Big Dog the first Democratic candidate since the Civil War to win the White House despite losing the South. That’s a net 19-point swing in the two parties’ Southern v. non-Southern fortunes, and yet Clinton still won, making him what we might call the first Northern Southern Democratic president in American history. (N.B: Clinton did carry the South in 1996, by a whopping eight-hundreths of a percent; but, thanks to his bigger surge outside the region, his Non-South/South gap widened to 11.6 points.)

Most telling is the fact that Carter did better in the South than the non-South in both winning the White House in 1976 and losing it in 1980. Clinton did better outside the South in both elections and won twice. The next Democratic president may or may not hail from the South, but s/he will not be elected from there. For my money, the best bet is to nominate a Southerner to win the presidency outside the South (see, e.g., Al Gore, who won the national popular vote without carrying a single southern state).

--Tom Schaller

SINKING FAST. A new Rasmussen poll shows Ken Blackwell trailing Ted Strickland by a whopping 25 points in the Ohio gubernatorial race While I typically spend more time handicapping Armageddon than elections, it’s hard to see how even Blackwell could come up with voting rules draconian enough to keep more than 25 percent of the electorate from voting. While the gap may be explained by Republicans falling out of favor nationally and in particular in Ohio, one might also read into these poll results a growing disgust with the self-righteous political proselytizing of Blackwell and his friends on the theocratic right. (For more on that, see Paul Hackett’s new blog, We United Ohio.) According to the poll, 55 percent of Ohio voters view Blackwell unfavorably, with 35 percent viewing him very unfavorably.

In a move so desperate you can practically see Blackwell groping for his life jacket, his campaign has launched a new blog, Tell The Truth, Ted, which purports to “fact-check” the voting record of Strickland, whom the Blackwell campaign calls a “darling of the radical left.” And even though Strickland has been a minister, psychologist, and member of Congress, all summer the Blackwell campaign has insisted that Strickland “claims” to be a minister and has derisively referred to him as “former prison psychologist Ted Strickland.” Why so down on ministering to the incarcerated? Must be that that paragon of political virtue Chuck Colson has the monopoly on doing God’s work in America’s prisons.

--Sarah Posner

EARLY START. Those people who get exercised when the commercials pushing the Time-Life Treasury of Christmas come on shortly after Labor Day will be happy to note that idiot season apparently opens in August these days. Will your national media fall for this crapola again? And in an election year? Stay tuned to hear Bill O'Reilly sing "Good King Wenceslaus" while accompanying himself on marimba.

--Charles P. Pierce

CAN'T ARGUE WITH RESULTS. Writing in The New York Times, David Leonhardt and Stephen Greenhouse have the crispest, clearest description of how sick our economy has become that I've yet seen:

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards — has risen steadily over the same period.

As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”

And let's not fool ourselves into believing that the difference is made up in benefits; increases there have failed to keep place with inflation as well. The reason that the statistics on compensation haven't attracted more media alarm is that they've remained positive: the media reports mean compensations, where massive raises for the rich have kept the numbers positive, rather than median compensation, which has fallen.

The culprit here is a simple lack of bargaining power on the part of employees. The pernicious fiction that corporations will happily redirect their profits into appropriate raises and benefit increases has been widely adopted -- we're now supposed to assume that whatever Wal-Mart or UBI is paying is exactly what they should be paying, and the willingness of workers to take those jobs is proof that the compensation is adequate. That, of course, is nuts. The balance of power between worker and employer has shifted radically in the employer's favor, and while folks still need jobs, the decline of unions and the rise of conservative (and neoliberal) regimes in government have allowed corporations to set the terms. Those terms, as you'd expect, prioritize executive salaries, corporate profits, and share prices, while seeking to keep labor costs as dirt low as possible. They've succeeded.

--Ezra Klein

ALLEN FALLING. I think Matt is onto something with his observation that Virginia may be evolving into a non-Southern state. In addition to the election of two successive moderate Democrats as governors (the first, Mark Warner, being a non-native to Virginia or the South), the latest Wall Street Journal/Zogby poll in the '06 Senate race gives Democrats some reason for hope. It shows challenger Jim Webb dead even with incumbent George Allen. This is a dramatic shift from a few weeks ago when Allen led by double digits. Observers who thought that Virginia had conquered its Confederate demons were disappointed that Ryan Lizza's exposé on Allen seemed to matter not a whit to the average Virgninian. But apparently Macacagate has taken its toll on Allen. Whether it's Allen's xenophobia per se or his crass bullying that is turn-off to Virginia voters remains unclear.

--Ben Adler

AND THE AWARD GOES TO JOE BIDEN. Give the man credit. It's only August of 2006, and we've already heard the single dumbest thing a Democratic presidential candidate is going to say prior to the 2008 election? Come on down, Joe Biden (D-Finance Charge). So he goes on FOX News and, like so many people recently, accidentally drinks out of Ollie North's water-cooler. (They simply have to mark that thing better.) He then steps before the cameras and produces one of the most stunning pieces of bafflegab imaginable.

I know that, among the various nominal Democrats with whom Biden feels most comfortable, there's a feeling that the party has no future until it sponsors a car at Talledega. And I bow to nobody in my respect for embattled Southern progressives. But this is triangulation covering itself in grits and running amuck down the boulevard. Hell, in George Allen, we already have one Civil War re-enactor running on the other side and, even if we didn't, is there a reason why Biden decided to dress up this weekend as Clement Vallandigham? "My state was a slave state." Holy mother of God.

--Charles P. Pierce

THANKS KATHERINE. A big hand goes to colleague Greg Sargent for finding this little bit of nonsense. Personally, I don't think poor l'il Katie's "Some of my best friends are in the IDF" alibi is going to hold much water, and the real grace note in the piece is where it was that she happened to commit this latest episode in her ongoing attempt to disgrace her opposable thumbs. If "Talking Religion at a Gun Show" isn't the best definition of the modern Republican base ever contrived, then you can swell my head and call me Newt. Without this crazy woman, none of it would have happened. We should remember that.

--Charles P. Pierce

THE SHRINKING SOUTH. Ben Adler and Jason Zengerle both note Joe Biden's odd theory as to why he can do well in the South as a presidential candidate:

You don't know my state. My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country. My state is anything from a Northeast liberal state.

Atrios also chimes in. In Biden's semi-defense, the article is a little unclear, but I think that was in answer to a question about whether or not Biden thought he could win primary elections in the South against the region's native sons. Biden is arguing that the electorate in Democratic primaries in Dixie is heavily African-American and that, in light of Delaware's large black population, he has experience with appealing to that demographic.

Three further points. One is that if Biden genuinely thinks he's going to be president some day, he's seriously deluded, but that sort of delusion is widespread in the Senate. Second is that Atrios and Zengerle are agreeing about something! Third is that I just looked it up and, interestingly, Delaware really was part of the Southern political bloc throughout the 19th century. By the end of World War I, however, that had ceased to be the case and the state regularly went GOP notwithstanding the existence of the "solid South." Maryland has made a similar transition from being politically Southern to politically non-Southern, and a similar process is maybe taking place in Virginia as we speak.

--Matthew Yglesias

WAL-MART: ROUND 2. Sebastian Mallaby's obtuse column about anti-Wal-Mart sentiment among Democrats offers me an opportunity to expand on some comments I made last week. Then, referring to a Jonah Goldberg column on the same subject, I said that "how to handle Wal-Mart is among the two or three most important issues facing the country." A lot of folks ceased reading right there and began accusing me of not taking "Islamofascism" and health care seriously enough. Yes, if only I paid more attention to health care.

Here's the point: It's not about Wal-Mart. Many on the left and the right make to believe this is primarily about how much H. Lee Scott pays his cashiers. It isn't. Rather, Wal-Mart is setting the norms and standards for the coming service economy. Where GM and Ford played this role for the manufacturing sector -- and the unions forced them to use their power to create the American middle-class -- Wal-Mart is assuming primacy as manufacturing's successor, and doing so without the union involvement or commitment to high wages that their predecessors exhibited.

That's a serious concern, and it reaches into every corner of the economy. Take health care. Wal-Mart's paltry offerings -- far beneath what Costco or Target (we'll come back to them) have traditionally offered -- give them a massive competitive advantage against the competition. So let's say you're a midsize retailer with national ambitions. You essentially can't offer a decent benefits package because Wal-Mart doesn't, and you can't allow their prices to remain substantially below yours (where they already rest, thanks to Wal-Mart's economy of scale). Target is a great example here: They used to offer terrific benefits, but have now resolved to move entirely to HSAs. They couldn't compete against Wal-Mart by offering comprehensive insurance, so they stopped.

Or take the supermarket chains. A couple of years back, Southern California saw a massive grocery strike, as the three major chains colluded to destroy benefits and lower wages in order to compete with Wal-Mart's low labor costs. The striker's lost since the supermarkets were too afraid of Wal-Mart's advantage to give in.

Again, this isn't about Wal-Mart. Rather, it's about every company that competes with them, and every producer who sells through them. In the first case, Wal-Mart is driving down worker salaries and benefits by so resolutely grinding their own associates into the dirt. So rather than watching the service economy mature into a middle-class conveyor as the manufacturing industry did before, we’re seeing it move in the opposite direction -- and given the decline of manufacturing and the softness of worker salaries, what choice have workers than to accept their lot? Something is better than nothing, but something remains inadequate.

In the producer's case, the prices Wal-Mart demands have forced them to not only cut labor costs, but have often forced them offshore all together. It used to be that producers could pay their workers decently and keep production domestic by passing higher costs down the line. Wal-Mart's size and market share keeps them from doing so, and it's thrown the whole relationship out of balance -- at least where the workers are concerned. So when I worry over Wal-Mart, I'm fretting over the shift to a low-wage, low-benefit service economy. Wal-Mart's size and power makes the two indistinguishable.

--Ezra Klein

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE R'S IN '08. Bloggers and journalists focused on the Democratic presidential primary contest in '03 and '04 because there wasn't one on the Republicans side, and there still seems to be a bit of a hang-over from that reporting that leads people to pay more attention to possible '08 Democratic contenders than Republican ones. This really needs to end. The most common questions about the '08 contest in my experience involve Hillary Clinton: Will she run? Can she win? etc., etc. But the answer to such questions cannot be found by looking at Clinton's history or the political landscape alone. Clinton's electability will be entirely a function of who the Republican '08 candidate is, as will any Democrat's electability.

This straw poll of Republican bloggers (via a Jerome Armstrong post at MyDD) reminded me of this and of just how different Republican bloggers are from the mainstream of the Republican Party. There's been a surge of support among Republican bloggers for Newt Gingrich, and whereas a recent Iowa poll showed Rudy Giuliani and John McCain to be the two strongest potential candidates at this early date, the bloggers back Giuliani, Gingrich, and Mitt Romney as their top three. Are GOP bloggers an early-warning system for Republican candidates in the same way they are for Democrats? Does McCain have the same blogger-outreach, party-activist problems as Clinton? Only time will tell, but it is interesting to see that it's not just Democratic bloggers who differ from their party's mainstream on '08 candidates.

So, taking the Republican candidate into consideration, could Clinton win a hypothetical match-up against Gingrich? Absolutely. And I'd bet on her against Bill Frist and the post-Macaca George Allen, as well. The real question is: Can Clinton beat McCain or Giuliani? And, if those seem like tough contests for her: Which other likely Democratic presidential contenders could be expected to do better against those two candidates with strong national security credentials and demonstrated electoral cross-over appeal?

Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of discussing Clinton in the abstract. Until someone can make the case for how John Edwards or Evan Bayh would beat McCain or Giuliani, the criticisms of Clinton don't strike me as being much more than the politics of personal distaste. Clinton could probably beat 75 percent of the Republican field. So could most of the Democratic contenders. But the two candidates she'd face a tough race against would be tough for any Democrat to beat, and until someone makes the case for how the other Democrats would do any better in contests against the toughest Republican contenders, it's not at all clear we're actually discussing Clinton's "electability," rather than her personality or gender difference.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MORE ECCODITTO. GFR makes some good points below regarding EccoDitto, the company's founder, and John McCain. That said, I don't think my non-Mele friends at the firm would forgive me if I didn't draw attention to this post on the company's blog from Chief Operating Officer Harish Rao:

Nicco's recent post about his support for Senator John McCain has caused quite a lot of ruckus. We at EchoDitto disagree with his decision. While Nicco does not work for Senator McCain, his support for a possible McCain candidacy runs contrary to many of our core beliefs at EchoDitto. . . .

Everyone in this world has to follow their own heart. Nicco has agreed to, effective immediately, take a leave of absence from our company. We hope he takes some time to re-consider his position. I am assuming Nicco's responsibilities for the duration of his leave of absence.

That said, the Dean/McCain nexus is an interesting one. They have similar images as hard-charging straight-talkers and, in a sense, come out of similar reformist political traditions. On the other hand, obviously, Dean's primary campaign in 2003-04 became the main focus for skepticism about the Iraq War while McCain is probably the most hawkish major politician in America.

--Matthew Yglesias

HORSE'S MOUTH PSA. We're happy to announce a guest who'll be supplementing Greg's work at The Horse's Mouth until Election Day: Brendan Nyhan, of Spinsanity and All the President's Spin fame. We expect great stuff from Brendan, and Greg will still be contributing regularly as well, so be sure to check in on the site.

--The Editors

NICCO & MCCAIN. Alright, I have to weigh in on this. First of all, I should say that I consider Nicco Mele a friend. And now that it's been revealed publicly that Nicco has been talking to Sen. John McCain's campaign, it seems the whole Democratic Internet community is upset or at the very least saddened to see one of their favorites cross over to the other side. But if you look at Nicco's business, this move is not really as much of a shock as some people are making it out to be. My sense is that in the wake of Howard Dean's campaign, the Dean campaign technologists moved to Washington and started two companies, EchoDitto and Blue State Digital, which have increasingly diverged over time.

Blue State Digital, led by Joe Rospars, has increasingly focused on Democratic campaign and candidate work -- they have the thankless task of improving the DNC's web and database operations -- while EchoDitto has worked with a few politicians, such as Barack Obama, but primarily developed a client base of non-governmental organizations, non-profits, and corporations, such as Seventh Generation (which makes those paper products you find at Whole Foods) and Miramax Books. Blue State has evolved into a purely Democratic politics and technology strategy company, while EchoDitto has increasingly become a technology strategy company, period. Nicco's decision to advise McCain just makes that difference all the clearer.

Additionally, Nicco's support for McCain is, I find, distressingly common amongst the male voters I know. My brother, who has never voted for a Republican that I know of, has been known to ask wistfully, "Do you think he'll run?" about McCain, in the same tone he used to reserve for Gen. Wesley Clark. I don't understand it, but McCain has a kind of magnetic personal attractiveness that draws a certain sort of otherwise progressive man toward him. It's not rational, and as much as each such person I've met tries to explain it on the basis of policy, what it really comes down to is that they just like McCain. There's something about him that's compelling to them. It's what makes him such a formidable candidate, and whoever the Democratic nominee will have to deal with this, should McCain decide to go forward with a second presidential bid.

The one silver lining I can think of in any of this is that it ought to spur any and every Democratic '08 contender to snap up the rest of the new techie talent pronto, before someone else gets to them. Whoever wins the Democratic primary may have to go up against McCain's team, after all, and by the sound of it, they'll be more than ready for the fight.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

HOW DID YOU GET TO SCHOOL? Another likely factor in the modern epidemic of childhood obesity and related illnesses like Type 2 diabetes, from the University of Texas:

In 1969, about half of all students walked or bicycled to school. Fast forward 35 years and less than 15 percent of students walk or bicycle to school.

--Ben Adler

IT'S ALL RELATIVE. It's probably inevitable, but this sort of thing irritates me. From The Economist's review of Bruce Reed and Rahm Emanuel's The Plan: Big Ideas for America:

If the system is made more efficient, Mr Emanuel thinks coverage can be extended to all American children. But he concedes that a nation as individualistic as America will probably never accept a European-style national health service—and he should know, having worked on Hillary Clinton's doomed health project in the 1990s. He argues, however, that maybe, some day, every American might receive a voucher for basic health services from the insurer of his or her choice.

How interesting -- Emanuel dismisses the chances for a universal health system, but leaves open the option for an absurdly complicated voucher scheme, precisely the sort offered up by his brother, the bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, in The Washington Monthly awhile back (a well-intentioned but misguided effort that I took on here). On that note, all those who occasionally speculate about Emanuel's fitness for Speaker of the House should take this statement very seriously: He does not believe in any sort of coherent national health care system. On the bright side, his family values seem strong.

Incidentally, I've flipped through The Plan a bit, and I doubt I've ever seen a book with a subtitle so deeply misleading. This is warmed-over, second term Clintonism at its incrementialist. I'm one of those people who get excited over policy papers, and even I wanted to cry. The typical chapter would mention an awesome Big Idea, then decide it's politically unfeasible, and promise to push 1/10th the policy but with More! Awesome! Market! Mechanisms!

Emanuel Family Fun Fact: Did you know the third Emanuel brother is Hollywood super agent Ari Emanuel, also known as the inspiration for Ari Gold on Entourage?

--Ezra Klein

FLOP. FLOP. FLOP. A little over 20 years ago, I went fishing on a cold Wisconsin lake. I pulled in a fairly good-sized bass. It was a handsome critter, and it flopped around in the bottom of the boat. Flop. flop, flop. I had a Polaroid taken of me and the fish and then we threw it back into the lake. I remembered that moment while watching this remarkable hunk o’ video. I can assure you that, as it was flopping around in the boat, believing itself on the way to the fishy afterlife, it was at every second more at ease and articulate than the Ivy-educated lady in the middle panel is in this clip.

--Charles P. Pierce

NIRVANA AND VOTING. Arguably the last great era of FM radio was grunge. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins -- these bands rose from obscurity into the pantheon of rock. It was something to behold. But then there was a shift. Radio stopped taking risks. It slung Backstreet Boys, ‘N Sync, and other over-produced garbage. It brought in a profit and was safer than the garage band that kept sending in their cassette tapes. Result? Radio listenership fell.

The same thing is happening to television. As iPods and YouTube have crept into our consciousness and as media outlets cower before the administration, television news viewership has dropped. Like radio, they’ve opted for the safe route and seem surprised when their viewers have turned their attention elsewhere.

So what do you do when radio and TV fail you? You ask your friends what they like. Online recommendations and recognition are the new way, but we’ve only just begun. MySpace, blogs, even creaky old emails are ways for people we know to suggest things they like. The difference is that today, we’re listening and showing it with our wallets. Politicians will start to realize soon, however, that we’ll be showing it in the voting booths too.

More and more our computers are telling us what we like. Amazon recommendations might suggest what the general public likes, but imagine if there was a political version of Pandora.com. Instead of having an algorithm your analyzes your preferences for 4/4 music, 2-finger bass, and deep female voices, it considers your desire to support candidates who are pro-choice, young women, close to your home in zip code 44406. Change every mention of “music” to “politics” in this recent Fast Company article and you’ll start to get it.

Politicians: Stop wasting money on the TV/radio rabbit hole. Follow the smart money onto Internet, but be ready to invest the time to form relationships there too. I predict that we will see the most unusual of political trends -- a decline in incumbency rates. Name recognition will have the same effect as the latest Britney song -- just another note in the cacophony. Instead, we’ll go to the people we trust for political advice. People are going to tell their friends how they’re voting and convince them. You need to be the one to convince that first guy.

The truth of the schoolyard is real: People really do care what other people think.

--DJ Francis

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FRIDAY REVIEWS. Two reviews today of new films to check out. Tracie McMillan assesses the new PBS documentary on the working poor, Waging a Living, while Alex P. Kellogg recommends OutKast's vibrant, subversive musical, Idlewild.

--The Editors

BUT ARE YOU REALLY SURPRISED? New data out of the Agency for Health Care Quality and Research shows that though the nation's largest employers -- those with over 1,000 employees -- still overwhelmingly offer access to health benefits, fewer and fewer of their employees are able to afford the options. Between 1996 and 2004, megafirm workers purchasing their employer's health insurance dropped from about 88 percent to about 81 percent -- a seven percent decrease in eight years. The most significant drops came in the retail (Wal-Mart) sector, where participation plummeted by 16 percent, but numbers were down across all industries.

The number may not seem large, but we're peering into the most protected, rarified realm of health insurance here. Massive employers can bargain down health costs far better than small employers or individuals, and their ability to spread risk across a large pool ensures fair pricing for all and relatively smooth cost growth. That health inflation is nevertheless driving them to pass costs onto their employees, and the employees to give up on insurance coverage, is very worrisome -- it means that no area of the system remains protected. On that note, you really should read Maggie Mahar's just-posted piece detailing how Lenin would fix our health care system.

--Ezra Klein

WEEPIN' JOE AND BATTY BECK. This is the kind of thing that passes for wit on the rightist radio circuit. Ordinarily, it would float past us unremarked as further evidence that the primary thing wrong with the concept of Intelligent Design is the adjective, and not the noun.

However, it should be noted that, just last week, Weepin' Joe Lieberman (I-Green Room) played kissy-face with this very same tackhammer. They agreed that we are currently in World War III and, if you read all the way to the end, you find that Weepin' Joe is "very proud" of his new friend.

I guess this is what The Washington Post was talking about, back before the primary, when Fred Hiatt or someone went briefly off their meds and decided to launch this editorial from the highest peak of Delusion Mountain. Weepin' Joe is very proud of his new friend who makes jokes about blind people. Weepin' Joe remains the most prominent scarecrow on the Imus Ranch. Principles, my aunt Kate. He'd kick a crutch out from under a cripple if it meant 15 votes in Waterbury.

--Charles P. Pierce

SWEET, SWEET ITALY-BASHING. All last week, on IM, I've been chatting with TAPPED alum and current UN Dispatcher Fast Leon Goldberg, mocking the idea of an Italian-led peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. Italy, after all, has what's got to be the western world's least distinguished military record, managing to get stomped by the disintegrated Austro-Hungarian Empire on various occasions, failing to subdue Ethiopia during the high tide of imperialism, and generally proving to be more millstone than ally during the Second World War. It did, however, occur to me that this might be an unfair smear. Maybe Italy has a distinguished record in contemporary peacekeeping operations. It could happen, right?

Well, it could, but Jeremy Kahn, less lazy than I, takes a look at the evidence and finds nothing but more of the same. It's probably actually irrelevant to the current situation, in which the UN force is more of a face-saving way for everyone to return to the status quo ante and get a new shot at trying to not blunder into mutually self-destructive fiascos in the future than an actual solution to anything. Nevertheless, the facts are the facts -- allies and multilateralism are great . . . the Italian military, not so much. As Kahn notes, much-maligned France actually has a top-notch army that gets medium-sized tasks done about as well as anyone.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHY EDUCATION IS GOOD FOR THE LADIES. Forbes.com executive editor Michael Noer's execrable and poorly reported "article," "Don't Marry Career Women," has been given the thorough mocking it deserves by now, making his name and his site the laughing stock they deserve to be for years to come. Those who are yearning for some real data on what life is like for contemporary "career women" won't have to wait for Noer's ignominy to fade, though. This October, social scientist (and friend of GFR) Christine Whelan will publish Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women (Simon & Schuster), which gathers in one place all the most recent facts about men, women, education, achievement, and marriage. Whelan finds, contra the misogynistic Noer's glib and partial reading of the social science literature, that real career women -- women with graduate degrees or who are high-earners for their age group -- are just as likely to marry as their less accomplished peers, and significantly less likely to divorce. Additionally, for the first time in recorded human history, college-educated women have become more likely to marry than non-college educated ones (and they are, as I reported way back in 2002, significantly less likely to divorce than less-educated women), and, once they reach their 30s, unmarried women with graduate degrees are more likely to marry than even their college-educated sisters.

To the extent that there has been a marriage penalty for women's success, it has vanished. This is news. Today, even wealthy businessmen looking for arm candy want educated partners with their own wardrobe budget. Noer's ideal, the part-time working woman who earns less than $30,000 a year, wouldn't be able to afford the costs of entry into that most competitive sectors of the marriage market -- to whose male members, one must assume, Noer was addressing his Forbes.com piece -- let alone hold her own in conversations within it. Today, as Whelan reports, smart and successful men marry smart and successful women -- and then stay married to them.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WHAT WOULD LENIN DO? Should progressives seek to shore up the employer-based healtcare system in ways that help employees of companies like Wal-Mart, or are such measures actually counterproductive to the long-term goal of replacing that system with national health insurance? Do things need to get worse before they get better? Ezra and Nathan Newman recently tussled over this question. Today, Maggie Mahar weighs in on the debate. She's with Ezra.

--The Editors

THE PERILS OF MULTILATERALISM UNILATERALISM. Charles Krauthammer has another one in his occasional series of columns deriding the usefulness and effectiveness of multilateralism. It would seem, however, that his thinly veiled contempt for the cumbersome process of consensus-building is a bit misplaced -- he's convinced that both North Korea and Iran will finish their nuclear bombs, and nothing we or our allies can do will stop them. That is, of course, true. But it's a truth that multilateralism could have helped prevent.

Going to your allies is not a solely transactional process. You do it to attract their cooperation and material support for your plans, to be sure, but you also do it to get outside feedback on your priorities. If no one is willing to accede to your scheme, it may indeed be a crackpot, counterproductive, or problematic undertaking. So it was with Iraq, which other countries realized would prove an eventual mess. When we were readying to enter the country, Dominique de Villepin, the much maligned French ambassador to the UN foreign minister, said:

To those who hope to eliminate the dangers of proliferation through armed intervention in Iraq, I wish to say that we regret that they are depriving themselves of a key tool for other crises of the same type. The Iraq crisis allowed us craft an instrument, through the inspections regime, which is unprecedented and can serve as an example. Why, on this basis not envision establishing an innovative, permanent structure, a disarmament body under the United Nations?

--Ezra Klein

WORTH SEEING? So far I have watched one-and-a-half of the recently released documentaries about the national tragedies of September 11 and Katrina. On Native Soil is the film version -- presuming a documentary can actually substitute for the National Book Award-nominated Report -- of the findings of the 9-11 Commission. I’m also halfway through Spike Lee’s four-hour film, When the Levees Broke, about the Katrina disaster.

Although the directors of ONS have an advantage in terms of the volume and visual impact of available footage -- is there any more compelling, if horrifying, footage than the sight of that second plane hitting the South Tower? -- Lee paces his film so slowly that I repeatedly found myself wanting to hit my DVR’s fast forward button. Though I’ll reserve final judgment on Levees until I plow through the last two parts of his four-part requiem, the choice of “plow” is the giveaway.

Some of Lee’s interviews are great, especially those he extracted from New Orleans regulars who found themselves in extraordinary situations. The short clip from Sean Penn was also humbling. But some of the comments from survivors could have been edited down, and the self-absorbed mini-dissertations from the breathy Michael Eric Dyson are an infuriating distraction. Most problematic is that the film leaves out some of the basic details of what happened when and where -- there is a single, brief map animation of New Orleans, showing which levees broke and where the water flooded. As a fan of Lee’s dramatic films, thus far I’m disappointed with his noble effort to chronicle the New Orleans tragedy.

On Native Soil, however, is as riveting as the Commission report on which it is based. Maybe I’m just a left-brainer of the worst sort, but the way it methodically presents the timeline of events, interspersing video with narratives and interviews, kept my attention throughout. It takes skill to tell a story when the outcome is so well known to all in advance, but Linda Ellman manages to pull it off. One element in Native Soil which goes beyond the Report is the film’s non-maudlin tribute to the relentless courage of the victims’ families, who would not let the administration and Congress punt on holding hearings to investigate the government’s failures. I may have to watch it again to recharge my batteries before plowing through the second half of Lee’s “requiem.”

--Tom Schaller

PURGE OF MELE BEGINS. As well it should. The New Organizing Institute (a "grassroots training and research program created by experienced online organizers...in conjunction with MoveOn.org") just announced it has "removed Nicco Mele from its Advisory Board after learning that Mele will be supporting John McCain if he should run for president." It is important that someone is taking the lead in drawing the line against progressive support for McCain, and I hope more progressive organizations follow. NOI went on to add, "Senator McCain's record is radically out-of-step with the values of most Americans—and certainly inconsistent with the values of the NOI."

Indeed. As McCain's campaign picks up steam, there is going to be a temptation for some progressive reformers to lose their minds and support him for the same lame quasi-character-based reasons Mele gives: "[his] work on campaign finance reform and his independent streak." I've always been perplexed by this obsession good-government types have with campaign finance reform and certain other reforms like non-partisan redistricting. Some people are clearly willing to throw their progressive values on social and economic issues overboard in their rabid support of reforms that may actually help Republicans (e.g., banning soft money while raising the personal contribution limit, instituting non-partisan redistricting in California with no promise that Texas will do the same.) As Matt pointed outyesterday, when it comes to a McCain presidency, this trade-off is just ridiculous.

--Ben Adler

BREATHLESS FOR THE APOCALYPSE, FROM SAN ANTONIO TO TOLEDO. As talk of war with Iran intensifies, it’s hard not to see the bated breath of the Armageddon brigade fogging up the windows of the White House. John Hagee, the San Antonio televangelist and leader of Christians United for Israel, has used every twist and turn of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah to promote his vision of a world-ending confrontation with Iran. Almost two weeks ago, he told his followers that the shaky ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah will “only be a pause before the coming storm between America and Israel and the rogue nation of Iran.” Written just four days after Bush said on national television that America “is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation,” Hagee’s missive included this dire warning: “The people of America do not want to admit Islamo-Fascism is a threat to this nation. It is! They don't want to believe that Iran would use nuclear weapons against mighty America! They will!”

CUFI, though, was dismayed when Bush, who had come under criticism for the using the term “Islamic fascists,” failed to use the term again in his press conference on Monday. In an e-mail the next day, CUFI asked its followers to call the White House to “congratulate” Bush on the phrase and urge him to continue to use it. “Pastor Hagee and our national leadership have decided that it's important for President Bush to hear not only from his critics, but also from people who appreciate his moral clarity. Therefore, we've sending a letter to President Bush from our leaders thanking him for his important statement.”

Just how much influence did they have on Bush’s lexicon? It’s probably too early to judge, but Wednesday night, at a Toledo fundraiser for Ohio gubernatorial hopeful Ken Blackwell, Karl Rove referred to a global war against “Islamic fascists.” Blackwell’s own “moral clarity” patron, Rod Parsley, one of CUFI’s national leaders, has been, like Hagee, predicting this is the war to end the world. If we are indeed living in the last days, it seems that Ken Blackwell wants to spend them at a fancy country club, hugging Karl Rove.

--Sarah Posner

WHOA: GEORGE ALLEN IS JEWISH? So says The Forward, which has traced his mother's lineage back to a family of Tunisian Jews, making Allen, as we used to say in my German-Jewish family, "Jewish enough to be killed for it, if they start killing Jews again," even though he's a practicing Episcopalian:

Allen’s mother, Henriette (Etty), whose maiden name was Lumbroso, is indeed Francophone and Tunisian born, a heritage that forms a romantic theme in “Fifth Quarter: The Scrimmage of a Football Coach’s Daughter” the memoir of Allen family life written by Allen’s sister Jennifer. What’s more, it is likely that she’s Jewish by birth, although no acknowledgment of that heritage appears in the memoir. Allen’s campaign spokesman, Bill Bozin, did not return several detailed messages, left over two days, that asked what the senator and his family know about his mother’s heritage.

Depending on what additional information comes out on the matter, the controversy could end up resurrecting a dominant theme of the Democratic primaries four years ago, when it turned out that no fewer than four presidential hopefuls had significant Jewish ties: Senator Joseph Lieberman was an Orthodox Jew; Senator John Kerry was descended from Jews and had a brother who converted to Judaism; former general Wesley Clark had a Jewish father; Howard Dean was married to a Jewish woman and raised Jewish children....

...Though Etty Allen seems not to have dwelled on it during her years in the spotlight as a coach’s wife, she comes from the august Sephardic Jewish Lumbroso family. Her father, who was the main importer of wines and liquors in Tunis — including the Cinzano brand — was known in France, where he lived after World War II, as part of the family, according to French Jewish sources. If both of Etty’s parents were born Jewish — which, given her age and background, is likely — Senator Allen would be considered Jewish in the eyes of traditional rabbinic law, which traces Judaism through the mother.

This might complicate life for Allen, a practicing Episcopalian who besides running for re-election this year in Virginia is often mentioned as a possible Republican 2008 contender.

It is really striking, as E.J. Kessler notes, how many prominent Americans have a connection with Judaism, whether that be as an ethnicity, a religion, or a system of law. And I have to say, as odd as George Felix Allen's personal story is, there's something oddly comforting and even marvelous in it, because it reveals that America remains, even in this age of Google, much the same as it was in the age of Moll Flanders: a place in which people can thoroughly reinvent themselves. Only in America can a man who is a French-African Jew by ancestry become a white Southern Confederate-sympathizing Episcopalian with a Roman Catholic football coach for a dad. God bless America, I say -- the land where everyone is free to be whoever they want to be, regardless of who they are, or ever were.

Allen's current problem, though, is that he seems to have chosen his adult identity badly, and picked one that doesn't work so well with his political aspirations, or with the nation's future.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: AN ACCOUNTABILITY MOMENT. Public outrage; political infighting; the outbreak of myriad corruption, real estate, and sex scandals -- Jo-Ann Mort takes us on a tour of the Israeli domestic political scene in the wake of the war in Lebanon. It ain't pretty.

--The Editors

POLITICIZING THE TREASURY. So there I was, happily tracking down some dry budgetary statistics to bore you all with, when I noticed something odd on the Treasury Department's homepage. On the left sidebar, in the top, "DIRECT LINKS" category, the first entry was "Health Savings Accounts." The next was "Refund Status," followed by "IRS Tax Reforms," both categories I would expect elicit more interest than HSAs. Under "Browse Key Topics," you see such standbys as "Accounting & Budget," "Currency & Coins," "Economy," and, yep, "Health Savings Accounts." Not "Health Care," mind you, but "Health Savings Accounts."

It all seemed a little strange to me. The HSA homepage offers such useful resources as "HSA Basics (tri-fold brochure)" -- because the American taxpayer deserves smaller pocket literature, dammit -- and "Fact Sheet: Dramatic Growth of HSAs." It's almost as if the Treasury Department wants to promote HSAs, and is using their web site to further the mission. That, of course, is ridiculous, so I called their press person, certain he could explain to me why HSA's were topping off a directory that wasn't in alphabetical order, and why they merited their own category (what about HRA's? MSA's? Employer deductions?). Oddly, my messages were not returned. Color me puzzled.

--Ezra Klein

HELP IS ON THE WAY. Press release in the ol' inbox today: "Movements for Peace, Katrina Recovery, Immigrants' Rights, Women's Rights, Labor Rights, Environmental Sanity, Electoral Reform, and Impeachment Plan Joint Encampment in Washington."

If Bush gives in to their first seven demands, will they agree that Dick Cheney doesn't need to be made president?

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE McECCODITTO. Following up on Ezra's post, here's the official EccoDitto statement on their CEO's reported flirtation with John McCain:

"EchoDitto was founded to further a progressive agenda online, and we are proud of the partners we've worked with over the past three years and the record we've built doing so.

As a firm, EchoDitto is committed to progressive campaigns and organizations. We do not now, nor will we in the future, support candidates or organizations that are not aligned with our social
mission. Because of that fact, we do not now, nor will we in the future, support Republican campaigns. We have turned down such requests in the past and will continue to do so in the future.

Individually, the members of our team are free to support politically whomever they want -- such is the right of anyone in a democratic society.

Here's what the man himself had to say about McCain on his blog this morning:

A lot of people are asking me about John McCain. When I worked for Common Cause, I worked on the McCain-Feingold bill and worked closely with Sen. John McCain’s office. After Sen. McCain lost the Republican primary in 2000, I traveled with him as part of a group of campaign finance reform staffers as we criss-crossed the country working to secure support for the McCain-Feingold bill. I have long admired Sen. McCain’s work on campaign finance reform and his independent streak. If Sen. McCain runs for president, he’s got my support.

EchoDitto, the company that I co-founded and am CEO of, has not in the past, does not now, and will not in the future do any work for Sen. McCain in any way.

Right now, I’m involved in many projects that have nothing to do with presidential politics. While I currently don’t know what role I’d like to have in 2008, if Sen. McCain runs I hope to be helpful. This is a personal decision for me based on my own first-hand experience. I like Sen. McCain -- I think he should be president!

And why shouldn't he? A handful of additional wars and steep cuts in vital retirement security programs would be a small price to pay for minor alterations to the campaign finance system!

--Matthew Yglesias

MCCAINIACS. Word today is that former Dean for America webmaster and current EchoDitto CEO Nicco Mele is swinging into Camp McCain. Nicco is an old Common Cause guy, and retains the affection many campaign finance reformers have for McCain, so it's not an entirely surprising move. It seems, however, oddly tone deaf on McCain's side. EchoDitto is a political firm formed out of the ashes of the Dean campaign. It serves a variety of clients, all of them liberal, nearly all of them offensive to Republicans. We're talking Air America, the UN World Food Program, Jennifer Granholm, Barack Obama, and so forth. In the same way that Joe Lieberman's choice of a Republican pollster is being used against him by liberals, it would seem that McCain's choice of a Deaniac could be used against him in the Republican primaries.

On the other hand, Mele is also a founder of Unity '08, the surreal effort to draft a third party presidential slate to do...well, no one's quite sure what, but definitely something. If Mele has McCain's ear and is committing to his campaign, is there a chance the Arizona senator is thinking of dispensing with the Republican primaries altogether?

--Ezra Klein

BUSH AND THE FLASHMAN. To me, the strangest thing about the president's summer reading list is not its heft, nor its inclusion of heavyweight history and existential literature, but the indication that the President is working his way through the Flashman series, by George MacDonald Fraser. And no, I don't mean it's odd because Sir Harry Flashman is a coward, a liar, a drunk, and a bully; nor is it odd because Flashman is more than willing to let his countrymen die to save his reputation.

It's somewhat surprising because Fraser is a violent opponent of the Iraq War and of the president's foreign policy. Fraser, an octogenarian Scot, a Tory, and a veteran of HM armed forces, could be heard this year on BBC Radio 4 explaining that "[h]e had never in his life felt more ashamed of his country than he had over Iraq.... He could not get out of his head two pictures, one of a small Iraqi boy with his arms blown off by American bombs, and another of our prime minister smirking sycophantically at President Bush's side." Fraser rates Iraq as "The foulest war crime that this country has ever perpetrated."

But as I say, that makes the choice only somewhat surprising; if the president stayed away from all contemporary authors who oppose his Iraq policy, he'd obviously have slim pickings. What makes it most peculiar is that Fraser thinks the Flashman books themselves -- which feature politicians indifferent to the consequences of their policies and reporters so keen for good stories that they somehow confuse the raping, murdering, craven, but undeniably charming Flashman for a hero -- provide a basis for opposing the Iraq War. As he writes in a preface to the most recent volume, Flashman on the March, when the British Empire went off to fight a bloody war against a cut-rate tyrant (in this case, in Abyssinia), it did so without "messianic rhetoric. There were no false excuses, no deceits, no cover-ups or lies...." And even with those virtues, it still made errors that called the whole enterprise into question.

"There's bound to be an outcry because we're not leaving a garrison to pacify the tribes and police the country," laments one officer about British domestic opinion. "As though Abyssinia were a country to be pacified and ruled with fewer than ten divisions and a great civil power!"... MacDonald allows in a footnote ... that "the brief exchanges among Napier's staff have echoes which continue to be heard today.... Britain's leaving Abyssinia did not become her as well as her manner of entering it."

--Eric Rauchway

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Howard Dean on Hardball:

"Look, I served with George Allen when he was governor. I don't think he belongs in public service, to be honest with you. There are Republicans that are capable and smart, thoughtful people -- and he's not one of them."

--Ezra Klein

YOU, SIR, ARE NO KARL. Just to chime in on the latest macacagate news, it's worth noting that for all the fuss about Dick Wadhams being the next Karl Rove, he sure seems to have forgotten Rule #1 of campaign damage control: Either apologize completely and fully from the start, or don’t apologize at all. Instead of throwing up bogus explanations and semi-apologies and half-apologies and then trying to blame the media, Allen should have either blown the thing off or apologized to S.R. Sidarth the next day. Instead, we are now on Day 10 of Macaca-watch. "Senator Allen made a heartfelt apology,” Wadhams told the Associated Press. “He told Sidarth he thought he would see him on the campaign trail, but Sidarth had headed back to U.Va., so we Googled his name, found his number and the senator called him this morning.”

Googled his name on Day 9? Wadhams or some low-level staffer could have gotten the contact info directly from Webb’s staff on Day 1. Instead, Wadhams waits a week and searches for him online. (This ranks right up there with news also out this week that Joe Lieberman formed his “Connecticut for Lieberman” campaign but failed to register the website for it.)
Apparently, Wadhams lost his Swift Boat playbook -- not the part about how to create negative storylines for opponents, but the part about how not to let them eat you alive for a week before fixing them.

--Tom Schaller

MACACA FRACAS. Over at Midterm Madness, Steve Benen reports that George Allen finally decided to apologize to S.R. Sidarth yesterday -- while leaving to his campaign manager the task of firing up the Republican base with a very different take on the whole matter. (Steve also flags a New York Times article that, by using a month-old poll, gives the entirely false impression that macacagate hasn't had a negative effect on Allen's numbers.) Meanwhile, for those who haven't read Subodh Chandra's web piece on the topic from yesterday, you're missing out on seeing some very cute kids in "macaca" t-shirts.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WELFARE REFORM AS POLITICS. Naturally, discussions of the ten year anniversary of the 1996 welfare reform bill have tended to earnestly focus on the bill's impact on welfare recipients. It's worth recalling, however, that from the beginning the promise to "end welfare as we know it" was primarily a political gambit. And, as this TNR editorial points out, it's been a tremendously succesful one. Not just in the sense that it helped Bill Clinton win elections in 1992 and 1996, but that it accomplished what his "third way" approach is often accused of failing to do -- it vastly improved the overall prospects for progressive politics in America.

Before 1996, both the Democratic Party in particular and the general idea of the activist state were incredibly hobbled by their association with a single small program -- Aid to Families With Dependent Children -- that nobody thought was especially effective and that had become massively unpopular. Eliminating it has vastly increased the public's willingness to contemplate new programs and initiatives and it accomplished that without being nearly as harmful to the poor as opponents predicted it would be at the time. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the architects of that successful strategy have tended to underestimate how successful they were, and you tend to see them in the same kind of defensive crutch that was politically appropriate ten years ago but that has largely been rendered obsolete by their success.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: DON'T LOOK AWAY. Inspired by a blistering speech from a former U.N. special envoy, Ezra reminds us that pleading futility is a bogus excuse when it comes to the global AIDS crisis. In fact, millions could be saved with just a minimal uptick of commitment from Western countries.

--The Editors

AGAINST ASTRONOMIC NITPICKING. The Pluto wars seem to have finally come to a conclusion as astronomers decide it's not a planet after all under their new definition of planet. The Associated Press reports: "The new definition of what is -- and isn't -- a planet fills a centuries-old black hole for scientists who have labored since Copernicus without one."

I think this is silly. If astronomy has been proceeding since Copernicus without a rigorous definition of "planet" -- which is certainly my understanding -- then obviously the world doesn't need a rigorous definition. It's just a folk-cultural term and it denotes nine entities, one of which is Pluto. There's no need for a bunch of busybody astronomers to make trouble for everyone else.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHY WAL-MART MATTERS. I'm of the opinion that how to handle Wal-Mart is among the two or three most important issues facing the country. The conversation hasn't caught up to it, and the arguments being had mostly miss the mark and collapse in their own short-sightedness, but the mega-retailer's impact on the economy, ubiquity across the country, and aggressiveness in using its size will eventually force a reckoning proportionate to its power. Which is why it's such a disappointment to see Jonah Goldberg's sneering, superficial treatment of the subject in today's LA Times.

Goldberg's column decries WMDS -- his acronym for (I'm serious here) "Wal-Mart derangement syndrome," and his argument goes like this: 127 million people shop at Wal-Mart every week, so attacking the store is "electoral asininity." In addition, Hillary Clinton was on their board of directors when the company was fighting for survival in the late 80's and Teresa Heinz Kerry owns stock in corporation. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart does indeed have low prices. So, all the liberal whinging over the company's policies make for "horrific politics, silly public policy -- but a joy to watch." QED.

At no point in the column does Goldberg actually state the progressive critique of Wal-Mart. A casual reader would have no clue why liberals worry about Wal-Mart (save that they're "deranged"). But in case you are interested, it goes something like this: Wal-Mart pays wages barely above the minimum and significantly below the average large retailer. Compared to Costco, or Target, Wal-Mart's salaries, benefits, and worker relations are atrocious. The question is not "Wal-Mart, yes or no?" but whether Wal-Mart can do better on all these metrics. Obviously, they can. Various analyses have found that raising the price of each product by a penny would allow for far better worker compensation packages.

But that radically understates the actual problem. What's worrisome about Wal-Mart is that, like GM and Ford once did, they are setting the norms for the coming (or current?) economy. One in every five retail sales is done at their cash registers; they're larger than the next five retailers combined. Indeed, for major producers, Wal-Mart is just about the only market that matters, which allows them to dictate the production methods, employee relations, and business strategies all the way up the food chain. In action and effect, Wal-Mart is an active monopsony -- a seller able to dictate the price to its producers. They've forced Coke to change their secret recipe, Kraft to lay off thousands of employees, and Vlasic to declare bankruptcy. And because Wal-Mart so obsessively pursues the lowest possible prices, they're not only depriving their own workers of generous benefits and compensation, they're making it literally impossible for their producers to do so, as Wal-Mart won't abide by the minor cost differences that on-shore production and respectable benefits demand. It's a real problem, and it should be discussed in a serious way (as Barry Lynn did, in the best magazine article published in the last year). Goldberg, by chortling over the political downsides faced by Democrats, isn't helping matters.

--Ezra Klein

THE WAGES OF INCOMPETENCE. When I run into conservatives, especially neoconservatives, a point I impress upon them with which they either eagerly or grudgingly agree is this: Because of the bungled, too-few-troops, no-occupation-strategy, go-it-mostly-alone approach in Iraq, we may never know for sure whether the grandiose theories of the PNAC’ers like Paul Wolfowitz are visionary or foolhardy. Although I happen to find the PNAC approach frightening, my view is incidental to that fact. Iraq became a Petri dish experiment in which the “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal” forgot to place the organisms and the stimulant agent inside the dish in the first place. Would a 70-nation, 400,000-troop, coordinated effort with a detailed plan to overthrow Saddam, secure the borders, defend the ministries and oil supply lines, and move in with political and humanitarian assistance have worked? I still think this question will go down as the great counterfactual mystery of the Bush years, despite Matt and Sam having mounted a strong case against the notion that poor management was really the root cause of our problems in Iraq.

Back in the non-hypothetical world, in his latest column over at Salon (subscription or ad-watch required), Sid Blumenthal makes a rather trenchant observation: The more Bush links his Iraq misadventure to the war on terror, the worse it looks for his record of management on the war on terror -- one of his few, remaining areas of general public support. Writes Blumenthal:

President Bush's staggering mismanagement of the Iraqi occupation, making the old colonial "savage wars of peace" appear by comparison as case studies for modern business schools of benign competence, has until recently served his purpose of seeming to defy the elements of chaos he himself has aroused. By stringing every threat together into an immense plot that justifies a global war on terrorism, however, he has ultimately made himself hostage to any part of the convoluted story line that goes haywire.

--Tom Schaller

SPEAKING OF VACATIONS. The RNC may have a beef with Markos Moulitsas taking a vacation, but that's not a position likely to win them more Catholic supporters this summer. Over the weekend, the Pope -- yes, the real, actual Pope -- issued a reminder to his flock that taking a break is the spiritually beneficial thing to do, and should be encouraged:

Working too hard, even for those leading the Catholic Church, is bad for the spirit, Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday as he greeted tourists at his summer residence outside Rome.

During his traditional weekly appearance to bless the faithful, Benedict quoted from writings of St. Bernard in the 12th century meant for the popes of his time on the subject of overwork.

Benedict quoted the saint as advising pontiffs to "watch out for the dangers of an excessive activity, whatever ... the job that you hold, because many jobs often lead to the 'hardening of the heart,' as well as 'suffering of the spirit, loss of intelligence.'"

"That warning is valid for every kind of work, even those involved in the governing of the church," 79-year-old Benedict said.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TALE OF TWO TEXANS. Inspired by this mash note from Time's Blog Of The Year, I remembered that one of the finest moments in Spike Lee's masterful HBO documentary on Hurricane Katrina came when Douglas Brinkley -- who's much more shrill, and gratifyingly so, as a talking head here than he's ever been on Jim Lehrer's show -- recalls the visit that President Lyndon Johnson made to New Orleans the day after Hurricane Betsy made landfall in 1965. Even considering the inevitable Lyndonisms -- "This is your president. I'm here to help you!" -- it didn't make for a very flattering presidential comparison last year, when David Remnick summoned it up, or today, for that matter. Anyway, here's a link to show you what a real president does, and how a real Texan behaves.

--Charles P. Pierce

FREE ADVICE. Far be it from me to give advice to the good folks at the Republican National Committee, and they're certainly entitled to risk death and dismemberment in the dungeons of Grand Vizer Kos. But, given the great vehicle that the Internets are for helping us celebrate anniversaries, do the ambitious little GOP drones really want to get snarky over the next couple of weeks on the subject of someone's relaxing vacations?

Just sayin'.

--Charles P. Pierce

RACE IN REPUBLICAN RACES. Raw Story reporter Brian Beutler has catalogued a surprising number of racist remarks from Republican candidates this year and noted the national party's response -- or lack thereof. Unlike Macacagate, most of these examples have not garnered national media attention. (The heated GOP primary race to fill Katherine Harris's House seat, for example, pits a candidate who issued an official statement noting Muslims' history of terrorism against a candidate who offered the choice nugget, "I know from experience that blacks are not the greatest swimmers, or may not even know how to swim.”)

The frame of Beutler's piece seems to be his assertion in the opening graf that: "Republican leadership is keeping its distance from statements by lesser-known candidates that may be perceived as racially insensitive." But the evidence later in his piece only demonstrates that the RNC and NRCC haven't come out in support of these statements, not that they've repudiated them. Their silence, which implies acquiesence, is notable.

--Ben Adler

WHY INEQUALITY MATTERS. My friend Will Wilkinson is puzzled over the excess concern liberal economists express over inequality. He gets why they'd care about each individual's well-being, but not why they'd worry about the gap between Tom and Bobby, assuming both of them have enough. I'm no liberal economist, but I sometimes play one on the blogs, so let me take a crack at it.

What concerns liberal economists is the relative apportionment of income. Inequality is something of a proxy for this. Take the so-called Krugman calculation which, in the early '90s, showed that 70 percent of the post-1973 rise in incomes had gone to the wealthiest 1 percent. As he put it, "when incomes at the top of the scale are rising faster than the average, incomes farther down must correspondingly grow less rapidly than the average. In an arithmetic sense, we can say that most of the growth in productivity was "siphoned off" to high-income brackets, leaving little room for income growth lower down. "

What we're worried about is what's called the "inequality wedge." The gap in incomes is so vast and the pool of money at the top so great that growth, which once would have rushed all the way down the income ladder (rising tides, all boats), isn't making it down the distribution, instead clogging up at the top percent or two (rising tide, only yachts). To tick off just a few of the data points, poverty has increased during every years of the post-2000 expansion -- the first time that's ever happened. Wages, which used to grow with productivity, have basically stagnated since the '70s, barely keeping up with inflation. A couple months ago, we learned that tax receipts were far higher than expected, but growth was exactly in line with estimates -- turned out that the expansion had gone overwhelmingly to the very rich, who pay more in income taxes. Meanwhile, the greatest gains by far have accrued at the very tippy-top of the rich -- not the highest 10 percent, but the highest one percent.

So there's's the concern – that, through mechanisms we're not entirely sure of, the very richest are siphoning off the economic growth before it flows through the middle and lower classes. The worry is about the distribution of growth, but the suspicion is that the distribution is being warped by the sheer level of inequality. Were the rich accelerating into the stratosphere while the lower quintiles enjoyed robust gains, I'd say "God bless" and go back to making fun of George W. Bush. But that's not been the case, and inequality is, if not the only explanation, the most obvious effect.

Update: To make the conclusion a bit clearer, liberal economists believe growth should be better shared, that the bottom quintiles are not getting enough due, possibly, to the inequality wedge. They don't share the assumption that Tom and Bobby have enough, and they particularly dispute that, if they did, it would signal the end of the conversation.

--Ezra Klein

BUSH V. GORE. Great presidents educate the public, and what's most distressing about the Bush era is that the president has so horribly mis-educated the public on the two biggest public policy decisions of his presidency: taxes and Iraq. On the first count we were told by Bush during the 2000 campaign and many times subsequently that, despite massive debt, annual surpluses were a problem for the public and the economy. (This is akin to telling a person with $10,000 in credit card debt that it would be a bad idea if, finding extra income at the end of the month, he should spend it rather than apply it to his credit debt.) On the second count, I simply don't have enough space to review all of the mid-education at work on Saddam Hussein as a threat, Saddam as an al Qaeda ally, the need and ability to democratize Iraq, etc, etc.

The irony of the Bush presidency/Al Gore non-presidency is that, during Bush's reign, Gore has succeeded rather well in educating the public about his own pet issue: global warming. Though Gore cannot be credited entirely with the rising public awareness on this issue, a Zogby poll released this week shows that 40 percent of Americans are "much more convinced" that global warming is occurring and another 34 percent are "somewhat more convinced." (Not surprisingly, rates are higher among Democrats and Independents than Republicans.) That Gore has achieved success without the benefit of the bully pulpit is all the more remarkable.

There are a lot of reasons why Gore would make a great president, and one of them is that he has managed to educate the public in ways that few non-presidents can. (On issues, like the Internet, he also proved he was capable of educating fellow members of Congress like few presidents have been able to do.) One can only wonder how the 2000 election would have turned out if Gore had taken his favorite issue and campaigned as passionately then as he is now.

--Tom Schaller

DIPLOMACY FOR BEGINNERS. John Judis has a nice piece about the history and sorry track record of conservatives' odd aversion to diplomacy and liberals' tragic failure to adequately resist it. The upshot is that, specific issues and countries aside, the whole assumption that there's anything to be gained by either de facto or de jure denying diplomatic recognition to other countries is wrong. Having ambassadors in each others' countries and regular talks between officials about matters of common concern is just what countries that aren't actively at war with each other do. The idea that talking to Syria -- not necessarily agreeing with Syria about anything, but just talking so as to explore the possibility of agreement or at least understand what we're disagreeing about -- would meaningfully set back the cause of Middle Eastern democracy is daft.

--Matthew Yglesias

NEOCONSERVATISM: DEMOCRACY OR HEGEMONY? Reading Shadi Hamid new article reminds me that I really think liberals ought to stop saying that the Bush administration's foreign policy -- or that of the neoconservative faction within the Republican Party -- has ever really had anything to do with democracy. In particular, framing the foreign policy debate as one in which liberals and neoconservatives agree about democracy, but disagree about methods, while realists disagree with liberals and neocons alike on this topic is, I think, highly misleading.

Neoconservatism is an ideology about American hegemony and the need to defend, entrench, and expand it through constant forceful action. Somewhat ironically, all this used to be better undertood. In the waning days of the first Bush administration, Paul Wolfowitz, working for then-SecDef Dick Cheney wrote a controversial Defense Planning Guidance. As Patrick Tyler reported at the time for The New York Times ("U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop," March 8, 1992), the noteworthy thing about the document was that "With its focus on this concept of benevolent domination by one power, the Pentagon document articulates the clearest rejection to date of collective internationalism, the strategy that emerged from World War II when the five victorious powers sought to form a United Nations that could mediate disputes and police outbreaks of violence."

Democracy and related notions about liberalism and so forth play very little functional role in this. If you look at various regimes or political movements in the Middle East, neoconservative attitudes toward them are formed entirely by their attitudes toward American regional hegemony rather than their attitudes toward democracy. The circle is squared simply because neoconservatives believe that American hegemony is necessary for the preservation of freedom around the world.

--Matthew Yglesias

STRAIGHT HOGWASH. John McCain stopped by the studios of Meet The Press last Sunday, where he was greeted by David Gregory, who is somewhat less of a regular on MTP than the senator is. The conversation got around to the NSA wiretapping decision last week, and the Straight Talker went right to the manure wagon. In fact, "most constitutional scholars" don't believe anything like what the senator attributes to them.

Some believe Judge Taylor's decision to be flawed in its argumentation, and some of them believe its rhetoric to be impolite. (Not me, God knows.) Glenn Greenwald has done a good job correcting the most obvious misinformation coming from the most fervent of these folks. But on the fundamental question of whether or not the president of the United States has the inherent authority to order wiretaps on American citizens without probable cause or a warrant, and in defiance of settled federal law on the subject in the form of the FISA statute, there are an awful lot of constitutional scholars who find the notion publicly risible. (Most of these folks, admittedly, don't draw a paycheck from the Executive branch.) Ultimately, McCain gives the game away by: a) almost immediately blowing a lot of the now-customary smoke about the London bombing plot; and b) endorsing wholeheartedly Arlen Specter's magical realist approach to checks and balances. Question for the senator's many admirers: Is there any doubt that McCain would have launched this program himself, and the law be damned?

--Charles P. Pierce

ONE FOR THE FAMILY. So, this week, we read this about our commander in chief:

He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we're learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he's still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can't get enough of fart jokes. He's also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.

And we recall that, in accepting his party's nomination back in 2000, he read from his teleprompter the following sentiment:

I know the presidency is an office that turns pride into prayer.

Here’s the whole speech. In our new TAPPED home game, match the rhetorical bells and whistles therein with the subsequent Bush administration debacle of your choosing. Begin with Hurricane Katrina. Hours of family fun!

--Charles P. Pierce

HENTOFF OFF-MESSAGE. Nobody in this business has fought harder for the Bill of Rights than Nat Hentoff has, but this piece is just awful. Hentoff ought to be embarrassed to be tossing around accusations of anti-Semitism in the pages of a toy newspaper owned by Sun Myung Moon. The Great Father, after all, is on record as blaming the Holocaust on the fact that the Jews rejected Jesus. (Talk about your Golden Oldies of anti-Semitic theorizing.) He's even more widely on the record as condemning the separation of church and state, a doctrine on behalf of which Hentoff nobly has spilled more than his share of ink. If Hentoff's going to toss this silly charge around -- attributing generally to Connecticut's Democratic voters the idiocies of a couple of blog-commenters -- then he really ought not to be doing so while taking a check from a corrupt theocratic crackpot.

--Charles P. Pierce

IN AIDS NEWS. Hillary Clinton is blocking renewal of the 1990 Ryan White Act, the primary HIV/AIDS legislation covering people with low incomes and little or no insurance. The reasoning is kind of interesting: The old formula apportioned money based on the number of actual AIDS cases, heavily favoring areas like New York and San Francisco that absorbed the epidemic early on. The new formula would hand out cash based on HIV incidence rates, which would give quite a bit more to rural and Southern areas which were hit by the plague hit later and are still undergoing the transformation. This, of course, would take money from New York, which is why Clinton is blocking the bill. Unfortunately, I don't really know how much money is being shifted, and how that relates to the needs of various areas. My quick read is that this is a mixture of parochialism and insufficient resources -- that the new rules are supportable, but that what's needed is more funding in total, not the reallocation of already insufficient grants. But readers with more knowledge in this subject than I should chime in.

Relatedly, Barack Obama is returning to Kenya (where his father is from) to a hero's welcome, and using the spotlight for good. He'll be taking a HIV/AIDS test on live television in order to crack through the stigma of the diagnostic. Good for him.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MIND MATTERS. Neil Sinhababu (everyone's favorite ethical werewolf) makes the philosophical case against Ramesh Ponnuru's views on moral status and personhood in The Party of Death. Read to find out why Ponnuru's philosophy would mean "shrug[ging] at the enslavement of hobbits, the slaughter of kittens, and the destruction of all life beyond earth."

--The Editors

PERPETUAL WAR. Another bizarre Bush press conference led off the week followed by another great column by Fred Kaplan. Something I note in the text of the article that Kaplan doesn't make a big deal about, though, is Bush's statement that "We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president."

Bush has said this or the equivalent several times, but it doesn't seem to have sunken in with people. On NPR this morning, I heard some talk about troop levels and discussion of when those levels might be reduced. But the answer, as you can see plainly if you pay attention, is not until someone else is in the White House at the earliest. Nevertheless, a week and a half ago, I found myself debating this point with a basically sympathetic radio host as if there was some serious doubt as to what Bush was planning. But he says it himself every once in a while -- his plan is to keep the troops there throughout the duration of his presidency, and any like-minded successor will just keep on keeping them there (that's why they call the permanent bases "permanent"). In some ways it's a welcome sign that, though Bush completely fails to grasp the prevailing civil war dynamic, he's finally come to grips with the foolish and paradoxical nature of his earlier counterinsurgency strategy, which held that we could leave Iraq if and only if we first defeated armed forces whose goal was to . . . make us leave Iraq. It was oddly circular and by explicitly endorsing occupation-without-end Bush has neatly wrapped up the package.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: TANF TURNS TEN. On this, the 10th anniversary of welfare reform, we've posted two articles assessing a decade of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. From our March print issue, Chrisopher Jencks, Scott Winship, and Joseph Swingle analyze what went right (or at least, better than feared) and what may still go wrong. And in a new piece, analysts Margy Waller and Shawn Fremstad argue for a basic revision of how we think of TANF; it's many things, but it's not welfare.

--The Editors

BOOKS OF SAND. Chalk me up as one of those skeptics who don't buy, not even for a second, the spin that George W. Bush has read more than sixty books this year (via Steve Benen). C-SPAN claims to have a partial catalog of his reading list, but none of it makes any sense. While I'm pleased Bush is trying to accrue some intellectual credibility, the boast reminds me of nothing so much as Steve Carell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin recounting how "her" breasts felt like big bags full of sand! Right guys!?

In the flick, Carell's boast exposed his inexperience -- only a virgin would think that's how a breast felt. Bush's "sixty books" strikes me as similarly revealing. This is the claim of someone who wants to project dominance in a field he doesn't understand, and so wildly overreaches. Reading books, particularly nonfiction books, takes a really long time. It's hard, and it's boring, and I say this all as an effete liberal intellectual who likes reading long, boring books but can't, like everyone else I know, seem to finish them. I'm pleased to get through one or two a month, and you're telling me Bush, in his time off from running the country, doing a couple hours of exercise a day, and going to bed early, has read sixty? Already? Pshah. Over at Dan Froomkin's site, a reader crunched some of the numbers involved:

Of the twelve books listed, I come up with a total page count of 5,356 pages, including 1,585 pages not available until at least 4/2006 of this year. That is an average page count of 450 pages per book. Multiply by his 60 books so far this year for a total page count of 27,000. 27,000 pages means the President would have to average a little over 115 pages per day. Reading a quick pace of a little over a minute per page, that is two hours a day of reading, and let's be honest, longer if you want to retain information in these types of books. And this from a man who prides himself in not reading the paper. I don't buy it.

Me neither. However, I'm happy to see Bush lying about this. It's long past time ignorance stopped offering bragging rights. And we can only hope that, like Carell's ill-fated but ultimately transformative comment, the mockery over Bush's bookworm pretensions will help him pop his intellectual cherry before too long. Until then, however, I recommend my colleague Matt's article making the counter-counter-intuitive case that, yes, George W. Bush is stupid, and it is a problem.

--Ezra Klein

FROM THE SEPTEMBER PRINT ISSUE: THE RISE OF THE REPUBLICRATS. The Bush era has signalled the death of small government conservatism. What comes next for the GOP? Ezra reads the tea leaves:

...[T]hree longer-term factors have deprived [small govenrment conservatism] of both intellectual legitimacy and popular support: structural changes in the GOP’s coalition, accelerating economic insecurity, and the empirical failure of supply-side economics.

Of these factors, the first is the most noteworthy. Through its use of cultural and “values” issues -- and, since September 11, security concerns -- the Republican Party has captured the allegiance of working-class, socially conservative whites and seen its coalition’s center of gravity shift from West to South. But recent research shows that these voters, whatever their views on gay marriage, are quite fond of the stability and protection of the entitlement state.

The dilemma for conservatism is obvious: How can a pro-business, pro-tax cut, and anti-entitlement creed such as today’s conservatism cater to this constituency without abandoning everything it has believed for 40 years? For much of the old guard, such a radical re-imagining of conservatism may prove impossible. But some younger, less tradition-bound conservative thinkers are sketching out a pro-government philosophy that supports conventionally progressive proposals like wage subsidies and child-tax credits but places them in a new context -- as rear-guard protective actions in defense of the nuclear family. That is, whereas progressives argue for economic justice for a class or classes, these conservatives are arguing for economic favoritism for families, buttressed by government policies that encourage and advantage them as the central structure of American life. It isn’t hard to see the potential appeal of that approach, and it could corner Democrats and liberals into being the party of the poor, while the GOP becomes the party of parents.

--The Editors

NOW HEAR THIS: I AM NOT A TERRORIST. Today Eric Lipton of The New York Times reports on the Bush administration's latest effort to leave no stone unturned in its quest to terrorize the American people:

A proposal by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff would allow the United States government not only to look for known terrorists on watch lists, but also to search broadly through the passenger itinerary data to identify people who may be linked to terrorists, he said in a recent interview.

No big deal, you say? Well, it could be for someone like me -- or maybe even you.

In 1998, I traveled to Pakistan and India on a Ford Foundation-funded research project for a NGO. I spent a week on the Pak-Afghan border in Peshawar, then home to Osama bin Laden, where I entered an Afghan refugee camp in what is known as an "extralegal" manner, through an old-school mujahadeen contact. It was two months after bin Laden had issued his death-to-Americans fatwah.

I traveled home through Delhi, but almost didn't make it out of India. It was the day that India began its nuclear bake-off with Pakistan via a bomb test in the desert. I had a Pakistani visa in my passport, and had to convince airport authorities that I was not a spy. Four months later, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed.

Thanks to the creativity of my Tatar grandfather (at least that's what we think he was; his parents were born in Poland), my "Americanized" last name is the Turkic-language suffix for "homeland." Presumably because of his exotic ancestry, the family coat of arms features a sword flanked on either side by crescent moons. Although mine is spelled in the French, feminine manner, my first name is also bestowed upon Arab boys. Hmmm...I'm even looking like a terrorist to me at this
point. (Never mind the French guy whom I had a fling with in Peshawar, who may or may not have been a mercenary.)

And that's not all. A year later, I traveled to London, where I met the friend who would become my Washington, D.C., housemate -- until he took a post with an NGO in Kazakhstan.

At the end of this week, I'm scheduled to fly to New Orleans through D.C.'s National Airport. If you don't hear back from me, please send a posse to Gitmo.

--Adele M. Stan

WHEN THE OP-ED PAGE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT THE NEWS PAGE IS DOING... Yesterday's Washington Post op-ed page had a very sensible column from education writer Jay Mathews. He argues that the media sensationalism surrounding over-worked, over-pressured high-schoolers is totally misplaced. Media elites regurgitate this story because their own children attend fancy suburban public schools or urban private or magnet schools, where students have too much work, too many extracurriculars, and too much pressure to get into Dartmouth. In fact, as Mathews demonstrates, for the vast majority of American high-schoolers, the problem is that their schools are not demanding enough, and, rather than not having enough time for contemplation, they have too much time for television.

So imagine my surprise when I then turned to the Post's Metro section on the very same day and saw a story on how local Big Three alumni are reacting to this year's U.S. News college rankings. The story was incredibly narrowly focused, only discussing the reactions of Harvard, Yale and Princeton graduates. And it ran at a more-than-sufficient length given that everyone the reporter talked to professed to not know or not care whether their school was first or second this year. It would seem the Post is as guilty as anyone of perpetuating this myth that the important news in American secondary and higher education is how Harvard compares to Princeton, and not stagnant reading and math scores or high rates of college dropouts.

--Ben Adler

BABY GAP. I keep reading arguments like this one in today's Wall Street Journal about how differential birthrates will spell doom for liberalism:

Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a "fertility gap" of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%--explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.

Differential birthrates really do have this kind of effect in countries like Lebanon where politics is structured around more-or-less closed sects. But an 80 percent retention rate is actually rather low. What's more, partisan self-identification and ideological self-identification are different things, so the relevance of the 80 percent figure is unclear. In addition, pluralities of people self-identify as independents and moderates, but many of those people actually have fixed partisan leanings.

If you just do the straightforward thing and look at actual demographic cohorts, 18-30 year-olds are significantly more likely to vote Democratic than are older people, and have more left-wing views on most issues.

--Matthew Yglesias

POSITIVE REENFORCEMENT. Check this out in the Times:

“What matters is that in this campaign that we clarify the different points of view,” Mr. Bush said from the press secretary’s lectern in the White House conference center up the street from the Oval Office. “And there are a lot of people in the Democrat Party who believe that the best course of action is to leave Iraq before the job is done, period, and they’re wrong.”

In calling the opposition the “Democrat Party” Mr. Bush was repeating a truncated, incorrect version of the party’s name that some Democrats have called a slight, an assertion the White House dismissed as ridiculous. (Emphasis added.)

Have you ever seen that before in our precious MSM? I don't think I have. Maybe if everyone agreed to write like that for a month or two, the Republicans would have to knock that particular inane gimmick off.

--Matthew Yglesias

BILL'S MISREMEMBERED BIPARTISANSHIP. Far be it for me to criticize Bill Clinton (or, for that matter, Hillary), but his op-ed today is just nuts. Celebrating welfare reform's better-than-expected results, he generously concludes that "[r]egarding the politics of welfare reform, there is a great lesson to be learned, particularly in today’s hyper-partisan environment, where the Republican leadership forces bills through Congress without even a hint of bipartisanship. Simply put, welfare reform worked because we all worked together. The 1996 Welfare Act shows us how much we can achieve when both parties bring their best ideas to the negotiating table and focus on doing what is best for the country."

Wrong. Clinton vetoed the first two welfare reform bills the Republican Congress sent him for their unimaginable cruelty -- they were punitive programs, focused on punishing, not uplifting, poor blacks. The third bill sparked the most acrimonious and intense negotiations of the Clinton White House, with the president proving unable to decide his course till the eleventh hour and 59th minute. That's because the bill was never meant to be signed. Here's how Jason DeParle, The New York Times lead reporter on welfare reform, recounts the maneuverings in his remarkable book American Dream:

Gingrich and Dole remained opposed [to passing a plan], and they found a new way to stop it: attaching a "poison pill" that would block grant Medicaid, imposing a huge health care cut Clinton (and his wife) wouldn't abide. Shaw and Haskins couldn't believe it: Republicans were propping up the welfare status quo. A strategy memo from Representative Jennifer Dunn showcased a cynicism stark even by election year standards. Emphasize "the tragedy of welfare and its crushing cruelty for the children," she wrote. But "draw opposition and, probably, a veto." Emphasize the suffering of children, and make sure they suffer some more.[...]

The prospects of a bill improved when Dole resigned from the Senate to campaign full-time; now he could no longer block it. But Gingrich remained firmly opposed. "We're not going to give the president a bill he can sign," he told House Republicans.

Eventually, Gingrich and Co. crafted a bill they thought would split the Democratic Party and sent it to the president. Against expectations, he signed it, betting that he could repair its most offensive elements during his second term. On some level or another, he was right. He did improve the legislation. But a bill by Bill -- the welfare reform Clinton wanted -- would have been infinitely better, kinder, more generous, and more successful than the Republican incarnation. Clinton and the Republicans didn't work together -- Republicans worked to undermine him and he sought to foil them. He won. And then he spent the next few years fixing the poison pills and landmines Republicans had added in order to roil the Democratic Party and snooker Clinton. To hold the legislation up as some sort of shining compromise between well-meaning representatives of different philosophies may help Clinton's reputation as a post-political statesman, but it's absolutely false as a characterization of the ugly, cruel, and hyper-partisan genesis of welfare reform.

--Ezra Klein

BLING-BLING VERSUS RING-RING. As a piggyback on Matt’s observations yesterday about Juan Williams’ rather superficial analysis of the problems of bling-bling in the black community, I am reminded of the point Michael Harrington famously made in The Other America more than four decades ago: Consumer commodities (e.g., clothes and jewelry) are distributed by markets, whereas many of the most important community assets are allocated based on political power. Thus, a white kid from an affluent family in the suburbs heading to college in the fall of 1985 could afford to buy the new Air Jordans and throw them in the trunk of the car his folks bought him for graduation a few months earlier -- just as the high-school dropout from the single-mother family in the blighted urban area was able to buy the same sneakers, even though that meant spending his last $100. (The shoe salesman will take money from both.)

Williams might counter that purchasing sneakers with the last $100 of dispensable income reflects bad judgment. Fair enough. But countless studies of evolutionary psychology show that people (especially men) seek ways to project some measure of status as a signal both to others of their same sex and, especially, to the opposite sex. Affluent kids, giggling as they open their dorm rooms, know there is plenty of (delayed) status awaiting them four years hence when they’re sizing themselves up for their college ring-ring; for them, the bling-bling can wait. And by the way: As somebody who graduated from college without a car, credit card, or cellphone, and who teaches college students today, I can assure Mr. Williams there is plenty of conspicuous consumption by middle-class white kids who are simultaneously complaining about rising tuition and book costs while they buy $150 jeans and run up $90-per-month cellphone bills. Might the latter expenses be better spent either on books and lab fees, or reducing their part-time working hours so they can study more, or simply graduating with less credit card debt? I anxiously await Juan’s column about that “cultural crisis.”

The path to delayed success and status is far more clear to the suburban white kid because the political commodities (public safety; good schools with appropriate resources and well-trained teachers), which are distributed politically, have helped mark the way. It’s easy for Williams or Bill Cosby to dismiss the 18-year-old who is working in fast food or selling drugs or running scams to pull together enough money to get the latest Rockawear just to look respectable on Friday night as a shortsighted knucklehead who is wasting the legacy of the landmark 1954 Brown ruling. But if there is no visible path of delayed-gratification and success, can you really blame kids for taking the one clear, available route to status attainment -- even if it is a bling-lighted route? If, after massive investments are made to equalize the quality of public education, we still find young blacks opting for bling-bling over the (college) ring-ring, I’ll be the first to pile on with Cosby and Williams. As elder black men, they can be forgiven a degree of well-intended frustration, but not if it means doing some analytical shortcutting of their own.

--Tom Schaller

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: BODEGA BLUES. Matt elaborates his argument that liberals shouldn't let their criticisms of Wal-Mart lead them into enlisting in the cause of mom-and-pop retail.

--The Editors

SPANISH BOMBS. Yesterday, new Corner blogger Mario Loyola took to task "the hippies . . . the Howard Dean left" for ignoring their historical roots among "the European and American leftists who, during the Spanish Civil War, went to Spain to fight the rise of a fascist dictatorship," a moment said to have been "their finest hour." This strikes me as confused on several levels, but since when did this become the conservative line on the Spanish Civil War? I recall that a couple of years ago some right-winger or other managed to convince me that this particular sacred cow of the left was worth slaughtering.

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the International Brigades more generally were organized by and under the control of the Comintern, which is to say Stalin. The membership was mostly Communists and fellow travelers. There's no reason for contemporary American liberals to look back on that movement as a key model to emulate, and there’s certainly no reason for contemporary American conservatives to do so. Surely some of the other National Review bloggers can be counted on to make these points?

--Matthew Yglesias

ROUGH TIMES FOR SPECTER. And you thought Arlen Specter was having a rough decade, what with all the rolling over, fetching, and mock outrage he's been required to perform in his role as chairman of the kabuki Judiciary Committee of a rubber-stamp Senate during a lawless administration. Now, here come some guys in smocks from a cutting-edge lab, casting doubts upon the great triumph of his youth.

I have no intention of chasing this story any further into the Kennedy Assassination swamps than I already have, and I've forgotten most of the metallurgy they taught me in journalism school, but these guys seem to have no dog in this fight one way or another. Step up, Arlen. Take some time off from vandalizing the Constitution and explain to us (again) why you're not full of beans. (Thanks to Will Bunch for the link, and Susie Madrak for the original catch.)

--Charles P. Pierce

A TRULY UNPOPULAR INCUMBENT. If Sen. Joe Lieberman is ever feeling sorry for himself, he can take some comfort in knowing that at least he's not in as a bad shape as the incumbent governor of Alaska, Frank Murkowski, who is currently running third in the GOP gubernatorial primary contest. Just how unpopular is Murkowski? The AP reports:

Murkowski's approval ratings have skidded over the past four years because of much-criticized decisions such as appointing his daughter Lisa to his U.S. Senate seat and purchasing a state jet after his request for the aircraft was denied by both the federal government and state Legislature.

A statewide poll by the Dittman Research Corp. showed Murkowski with 17 percent, compared with 40 percent for former Wasilla mayor Sarah Palin and 29 percent for former state legislator John Binkley of Fairbanks.

Anti-incumbent fever this year clearly is not limited to just the blue states -- or even the mainland ones.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CALLING FOR RUMMY'S HEAD. Senator Joseph Lieberman sought, on yesterday's edition of Face the Nation, to prove that he really wasn't Bush's point man on the war in Iraq, after all. This he did by calling for the dumping of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Kinda like shooting fish in a barrel, don't cha think?

According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted between April 7 and April 16, 2006, 38 percent of respondents rated Rumsfeld’s favorably, while 40 percent did the same for the president. Now with Bush's rating having dipped to 33 percent, according to the most recent AP-Ipsos poll, it's difficult to imagine that Rummy's hasn't continued its downward slide.

Asked by Schieffer to illustrate his differences with President Bush on the conduct of the Iraq War, all Lieberman, the anti-Democrat Democrat, was able to offer was his call for Rummy's head.

Over at NBC's Meet the Press, Senator John McCain, the maverick-in-name-only Republican, fell absurdly short of calling for Rumsfeld's resignation by saying that the president was entitled to his choice of cabinet officials. However, when asked if he had confidence in the defense secretary's prosecution of the war, McCain said he did not.

Gee, ya think McCain and Lieberman are vying for those Bush-machine dollars?

In the meantime, on FOX News Sunday," Senator Chuck Hagel became what Republicans probably regard as the anti-Republican Republican:

"I think we've lost our way," Hagel said. "And I think the Republicans are going to be in some jeopardy for that and will be held accountable."

--Adele M. Stan

BARONE OFF THE DEEP END. Okay, I'm willing to accept the occasional deeply wing-nutty flavor of the national debate as a price to pay for having a First Amendment. I have a long-established sweet-tooth for the chewiest American brands of it, going back to the rainy Saturday in high school when my father, God rest his soul, gave me his copy of None Dare Call It Treason to read. (If you've never read it, get it now. It's a hoot.) But, I'm sorry, this is just nuts.

Barone used to be a fairly respectable voice; in our house, we still pick up The Almanac of American Politics every couple of years. But, Michael, baby, I think you've been drinking out of the wrong water-cooler in the FOX Green Room, buddy. (Stay away from the one marked "Ollie North Only.") There's so much to be delighted by, but this is by far my favorite passage:

We are taught that some of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders -- and are left ignorant of their proclamations of universal liberties and human rights. We are taught that Japanese-Americans were interned in World War II -- and not that American military forces liberated millions from tyranny. To be sure, the great mass of Americans tend to resist these teachings. By the millions they buy and read serious biographies of the Founders and accounts of the Greatest Generation. But the teachings of our covert enemies have their effect.

Yes, they do. Among them is the fact that Michael Barone now writes like a space alien. Does he seriously believe, for example, that World War II actually is taught Manzanar first? Where? By whom? (And the voices in Michelle Malkin's head don't count.) I am now on my third child in public school, and I can say that that she is more aware of the importance of the Constitution than are, say, either John Yoo or Alberto Gonzales.

Sorry, Michael, but I'm going to be subjecting the next Almanac to what you would call "fine-tooth-comb" analysis, just to make sure you haven't slipped any unicorns in there.

--Charles P. Pierce

ENOUGH OF ST. PAUL. Life would be so much better for a lot of us folks of faith if we could just run St. Paul's sorry ass out of the New Testament the way they snuffed the Gospel of Thomas. Granted, the Book of Revelation has caused an awful lot of trouble, but it has the saving grace of being gorgeously written. Not so with the Bill O'Reilly of Tarsus, "that great blatherskite with his epistles in bad Greek," according to the immortal Flann O'Brien. (In heaven, according to Himself, Paul is repeatedly squelched by his fellow saints, who tell him, "You're not on the road to Damascus now!") Anyway, here's the latest damage he’s done.

The woman taught there for 54 years. Was she silent the whole time, or was the First Baptist Church of Watertown, N.Y., operating a carnival of sin in its Sunday school until the providential arrival of Reverend/Councilman LaBouf? I can only imagine how many of these smaller, manifestly un-Christian incidents take place, day after day, all over the country. (Note that the one in question is from Watertown, N.Y.) Actually, I can do more than imagine, having recently finished Michelle Goldberg's invaluable book on the subject. Tell me again how I have to "respect" people who use Scripture for a cudgel. I'd rather deal with seven-headed beasts.

--Charles P. Pierce

IN PRAISE OF MOM AND POP STORES. There was a bit of discussion on this site and elsewhere toward the end of last week about Andrew Young's criticism of mom and pop grocery stores. Some who disagreed with his racial analysis praised the big chains like Wal-Mart for their ability to potentially provide inner-city residents with quality produce at reasonable prices. And, in general, I agree with the criticism that the mom and pops carry far too many highly-sugared or salted products and very low quality produce, and that chains which put them out of business or force them to improve could be doing inner-city communities a favor. Still, I was reminded over the weekend of one of the great things about the mom and pops, which is that they also frequently carry ethnic foodstuffs that no big American chain will ever stock.

For example, just two blocks up from my neighborhood of new condos and coffee-shops is a still-ungentrified retail and restaurant row that includes two different dollar stores (one run by African-Americans, one by Indian immigrants); a Salvadoran cantina; a pupuseria; a pan-Arab restaurant specializing in the cuisines of Yemen, Somalia, and Egypt; an Ethiopian restaurant; two low-end liquor stores (one run by African-Americans, the other by African immigrants, which does double-duty as a spice and injera outlet); and the Mercadito Ramos. Now, the shelves at the Mercadito look dusty, the wine on sale by the counter proclaims its varietal as "pink," and the produce stocks are limited. But for all that, it's a fantastic full-service Latin-American food store, whose ugly looking avocados are ripe and creamy, unlike the hard, watery, and visually appealing ones you find for twice the price at the Whole Foods not ten blocks away. Same with the mangos: They don't look great, but they are much better than the perfect-looking ones from Whole Foods. Americans are visual snobs when it comes to their produce, but have sacrificed a great deal of taste in their quest for unblemished produce. And as for the slightly damaged peppers, onions, etc., on sale, they are intended for the crock pot and the stove, not salads, where the damage will make no difference but the ripeness will add flavor.

Besides, will stores like Wal-Mart ever carry Salvadoran crema; Mexican-style queso fresco, fundido, and blanco; or three different kinds of horchata drink-mix powders? Will Wal-Mart carry pupusas? Injera and Somalian spices? Goat meat? Corn husks for making tamales? Great big jars of nances in syrup? The complete line of Goya beans and juices? I doubt it. And until they do, the mom and pop places are providing a useful public service to their communities, even if they sell imperfect fruit, or can't provide excellent health benefits.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

ONE WIFE, TWO WIFE, RED WIFE, BLUE WIFE. Over at The Corner, Kate O'Beirne writes:

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that Governor Mitt Romney's great-grandfather had multiple wives and two great-great grandfathers had 10 wives each. The article allows that Romney "is a confirmed monogamist of nearly four decades and polygamy has been absent from his family going back two generations." While some might note the upside of generously sharing those handsome Romney genes in the past, current history is noteworthy. Should Mitt Romney join a 2008 race that included John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and George Allen, the only guy in the GOP field with only one wife would be the Morman.

It's funny ‘cause it's true. For a more serious look at the politics of adultery in the GOP's 2008 field, check out Midterm Madness contributor Steven Benen's piece from the Washington Monthly, which goes over the histories and political implications of these conservative cads in some detail.

--Ezra Klein

EVERYONE A FASCIST. Spencer Ackerman makes the case against "Islamofascism," with a heavy emphasis on the pragmatic value of not infuriating vast swathes of Muslim opinion for no good reason. Bolstering that is the basic point that this is analytically daft -- we're talking about some bad dudes but there's nothing especially fascist about them except insofar as "fascist" means "bad." But we don't call Pol Pot or Foday Sankoh "fascists" and nobody interprets that as apologetics for the people in question.

Indeed, the fascinating thing about the "Islamofascist" fetish is that it has the longstanding left-wing trope of throwing the word "fascist" around willy-nilly as a vague and generic term of abuse. One mostly hears that in recent years from people who are fundamentally just being silly, but it has its actual origins in deliberate Soviet propaganda topics aimed at smearing any and all non-Communist political forces (see, e.g., the bizarre "social fascists" locution). I recall a time when conservatives were, properly, aggravated by this tendency. Now they seem to have embraced it as their own.

--Matthew Yglesias

STRAIGHT TALK. The exchange of the morning:

Question: But what did Iraq have to do with September 11th?

President Bush: Nothing.

Okay, now explain to me, slowly, because I am exceedingly stupid, why any thinking human being should vote for anyone who supported this bloody nonsense and has not yet flogged himself publicly in apology for it, why any thinking human being should listen ever again to the wisdom of the great thinkers -- yes, that would be you, Mr. Pollack -- who enabled this towering fraud, why any thinking human being should take seriously ever again the silly man whose feet haven't touched the bottom of the pool since half-past his first Inauguration Day, and who now claims, spectacularly, to speak on behalf of "the soul of the nation." I'm not sure a nation has a soul but, if this president found it, he'd take it out in the backyard and juggle it with his toes. The McCain-in-'08 people can now explain to me why, when I read about their signing up the campaign operatives who helped foist this meretricious hooey on the country, I shouldn't laugh myself faint every time anyone hereafter mentions The Straight Talk Express. Anyway, go here, if you want to wander back through the Alibi Graveyard one more time.

--Charles P. Pierce

CAN YOU BLOW UP A PLANE WITH LIQUIDS? According to these seemingly knowledgeable fellows (via Tim Lee), it's not really feasible to blow a plane up with a binary liquid explosive:

Once the plane is over the ocean, very discreetly bring all of your gear into the toilet. You might need to make several trips to avoid drawing attention. Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide / acetone mixture into the ice water bath (Champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you'll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you'll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.

After a few hours - assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven't overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities - you'll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two.

Food for thought. And what kind of anti-snake countermeasures do we have in place?

--Matthew Yglesias

THE GUITAR TAB MENACE. Dean Baker has a good post on Big Sheet Music's efforts to shut down websites that publish freely accessible guitar tab sheets for users' perusal.

--Matthew Yglesias

CIRCUMCISION WOES. So try this on for culturally sensitive size: Among the cheapest, easiest, and most effective strategies for reducing AIDS transmission in a populace is to circumcise the men. In South Africa, studies have shown that circumcised groups have transmission rates that are up to 60 percent lower than the average rate. The problem is how do you explain that while circumcision reduces risk, it doesn't end it? How do you keep it from becoming an excuse not to use condoms? How do you separate it from "female circumsions," a mutilating procedure with no known health benefits? How do you train the doctors, nurses, and faith healers on a continent lacking sufficient medical personnel? Trickiest of all, how do you convince grown men to chop off their foreskins?

And yet, with HIV/AIDS blossoming into one of the most devastating plagues we've seen in generations and circumcision proving a cheap and effective weapon in reducing its prevalence, how do you not?

--Ezra Klein

BLAME THE BLING? Juan Williams takes up the "controversial" line that the real source of contemporary African-American poverty is not racism, but rap music -- specifically, "a culture steeped in bitterness and nihilism" which is "facing African American young people today." I always feel like claims of this sort don't get subjected to any of the sort of calm critical scrutiny that ought to accompany a thesis about serious big picture social trends. I mean, don't white kids listen to hip-hop, too? And isn't there a lot of bitterness and nihilism in the segments of teen popular culture that we don't associate with black people? Indeed, isn't bitterness and nihilism the default state for teens?

More to the point, what exactly is the hip-hop theory supposed to explain? The black-white poverty gap long predates the release of "Rapper's Delight." Is it the case that the gap has been growing during the hip-hop era? Well, no. Here's a historical table. The black child poverty rate was 33.6 percent in 2004, 33.2 in 1999, 43.8 in 1994, 43.7 in 1989, 46.6 in 1984, and 41.2 in 1979. For non-Hispanic whites, the series goes 10.5, 9.4, 12.5, 11.5, 13.7, and 10.1. The gap is, in other words, getting somewhat narrower rather than growing.

So should people be encouraged to work hard and stay in school? Obviously they should. But realistically if you look at yonder chart (PDF), poverty goes up when the economy does poorly and down when it goes well. Poverty goes down when the federal government is strongly committed to poverty-reduction, and goes up when it isn't. It's not an incredibly mysterious picture.

--Matthew Yglesias

RIGHTWING RAPPROCHEMENT. For those who remain convinced that John McCain will prove unacceptable to the Republican base, news that McCain is increasingly locking up the support of Bush's loyalists and campaign operatives has to be rather disconcerting. These guys and gals, after all, won't want to hitch onto a losing horse so soon after being on the winning team, and their preferences and willingness to make common cause with an old enemy says something pretty profound about their estimation of McCain's primary chances.

--Ezra Klein

LESSONS LEARNED. I've seen more than one blogger note the irony of Kenneth Pollack and Daniel Bynum concluding their very pessimistic assessment of Iraq with the sentiment that "How Iraq got to this point is now an issue for historians (and perhaps for voters in 2008); what matters today is how to move forward and prepare for the tremendous risks an Iraqi civil war poses for this critical region." I seem to recall something or other about a "threatening storm" playing a role and I'll say nothing more on that.

The return of the Pollack/Bynum liberal hawk writing team does, however, remind me of a less well-known bit of Iraq-related writing they did back in 2003, "Democracy in Iraq" (PDF) published in The Washington Quarterly. They wrote the following:

Providing security is an essential task for intervening powers. Without internal security, the political process will be badly distorted if not entirely undermined, humanitarian relief becomes impossible, and economic recovery a will o' the wisp. Even in places where the transition to democracy has been rocky, such as Bosnia, a strong international presence has had great success in preserving the peace. The Australian-led effort in East Timor was even more successful -- if only because the situation was, in some ways, more challenging -- and could provide a good model for a U.S.-led effort in Iraq.

By leading a multinational force of initially at least 100,000 troops with a strong mandate to act throughout Iraq, the United States and its coalition partners will have an excellent prospect of ensuring the degree of security necessary for a successful transition to democracy. In essence, the goal for the U.S.-led peacekeeping force would be to ensure that no group or individual uses violence for political advantage. International security forces will reassure Iraq's Shi'a and Kurdish communities that repression at the hands of Iraqi Sunnis is at an end. Equally important, the presence of these foreign troops would reassure Iraqi Sunnis that the end of their monopoly on power does not mean their persecution and repression, minimizing their incentives to oppose the process. The presence of multinational troops could prevent small incidents from snowballing and thus could help create the expectation of peace within Iraq -- an instrumental factor in making peace a reality.

Note the pointed absence of a call for 300,000 or 400,000 or 500,000 troops. Rather, "at least 100,000" was said to be adequate. And if you look back at the record, you'll find that this was entirely typical of hawkish writing at the time -- the adequacy of a small force wasn't an eccentric Rumsfeldian view; it was held by almost all of the hawks, liberal or otherwise, who backed the war. The people talking about a much larger force were overwhelmingly invasion skeptics who were not so much calling for such a force than simply raising (warranted) questions about the feasibility of the mission.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHO NEEDS A VACATION? Not the American people, apparently. Sustained time off of work is increasingly becoming a quirky memory, one of those strange traditions practiced by our superstitious ancestors:

The Conference Board, a private research group, found that at the start of the summer, 40 percent of consumers had no plans to take a vacation over the next six months — the lowest percentage recorded by the group in 28 years. A survey by the Gallup Organization in May based on telephone interviews with a national sample of 1,003 adults found that 43 percent of respondents had no summer vacation plans.

About 25 percent of American workers in the private sector do not get any paid vacation time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Another 33 percent will take only a seven-day vacation, including a weekend.

That's a shame for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that vacation time carries substantial health benefits for workers. I've long believed that Democrats could make significant headway by pushing for a serious increase in mandatory vacation time (not to mention paid sick and maternity leave) for workers. Say, three or four weeks.

The problem is the culture has begun to swing against actually taking vacation. PricewaterhouseCoopers apparently closes their office for a few weeks each year so workers have to take time off work. But for those who don't toil beneath such enlightened employers, the choices are trickier. You may have two weeks of vacation a year, but if your colleagues and competitors aren't using their days, the stigma and fear of using yours and being judged insufficiently committed to the cause can be pretty overpowering. Even if you did create mandatory vacation time, you couldn't make anyone take it, and in certain competitive industries, just about no one would. Big government liberal though I am, I've no neat ideas for disrupting that race to a heart attack, but for all the other workers who see a proper work-life balance as important and occupational advancement as unaffected by it, instituting mandatory vacation time would be a real blessing. In a country where so many of us live thousands of miles from our families, ten days of vacation lets us see our parents for one week twice a year -- forget taking an actual vacation in addition. As a society, we can, and should, do better.

--Ezra Klein

SALI SINKING. Not that anyone should care, but I have a new favorite midterm race. Courtesy of some folks at the palace of Grand Vizier Kos, I have come to develop great affection for the race in the First Congressional District of Idaho. Last week, Dick Cheney unlimbered his rhetorical firepower -- the only kind of firepower it is safe for him to unlimber, truth be told -- on behalf of Bill Sali, the Republican candidate running against Democratic hopeful Larry Grant. As you can see from this link, Sali is about as beloved among his fellow Republicans as is The Invisible Man, whose pants can now be seen running by themselves in the Connecticut senatorial contest. Democrats have had nowhere near enough races recently in which Republicans openly discuss out of which window they should toss their candidate. Things are looking up.

--Charles P. Pierce

THIS WEEK IN PANEL BALANCE. Classic Sunday chat show roundtable on ABC's "This Week" yesterday: George Will, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Fareed Zakaria, and Robin Wright. For those keeping score, that's a conservative, a neoconservative, a moderate conservative, and a straight news reporter. The subject was the fiasco of American strategy in the Middle East, however, and an elite consensus of outrage and despair on that subject is clearly beginning to emerge such that the ideological slant of the team didn't prevent the discussion from being, on the whole, fairly cogent and sober-minded. (Another way of putting this is that, particularly regarding Iraq, several of the panelists made the major analytical points that liberals have been expressing for a few years now, which can be taken as a real sign of progress given that it's apparently simply too much to expect that liberals themselves will ever regularly appear on such panels.) Bush has turned out to be a uniter after all.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. Bruce Ackerman argues that we should act now to devise a new statutory frameword for federal emergency powers -- before the next terrorist attack sweeps away the prospects of checking the government's powers.

The emergency statute should recognize that extraordinary powers are indeed justified in the immediate aftermath of an attack. There is a clear and present danger that the terrorists have already organized a second strike, and it is imperative to take special steps to disrupt the plans before it is too late. As a consequence, Congress should authorize short-term detentions on reasonable suspicion -- so long as they remain short-term.

At the same time, the new framework must prevent reasonable emergency measures from becoming permanent restrictions on our freedoms. First and foremost, it should impose strict limits on unilateral presidential power. Presidents should not be authorized to declare an emergency on their own authority, except for a week or two while Congress is considering the matter. Emergency powers should then lapse unless a majority of both Houses vote to continue them -- but even this vote should be valid for only two months. The president must then return to Congress for reauthorization, and this time, a supermajority of sixty percent should be required; after another two months, the majority should be set at seventy percent; and then eighty percent for every subsequent two-month extension. Except for the worst terrorist onslaughts, this "supermajoritarian escalator" will terminate the use of emergency powers within a relatively short period.

--The Editors

COUNTING WHITES ONLY. Back to orthodoxy: Corner bashing! Be amazed as Kate O'Beirne tries to demonstrate that women usually vote Republicans and shows you can, in fact, demonstrate just that, as long as you . . . don't count African-American and Latina women.

--Matthew Yglesias

POLITICIZING TERROR. I assume nobody will be surprised by this, but the Republican Party has apparently settled on its 2006 message: Vote Democratic, and the terrorists will win. That's always been their implicit appeal, of course, but now they're just saying it. On the other hand, why shouldn't they? Terror should be politicized, and if one party or another believes they can do the better job, they should say so. There’s nothing illegitimate about it.

That means, however, that Democrats shouldn't be afraid to mention that the Bush administration is directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of American troops, World Trade Center employees, Iraqi civilians, and adorable little puppies. It also wouldn't hurt to wonder if Bush isn't some sort of Manchurian plant, so dedicated has he been to ensuring that America did exactly what its enemies hoped it would. Block the U.N. from stopping Israel's self-destructive demolition of Lebanon? Why not? Who cares if it'll empower a dangerous terrorist group? Launch a poorly planned, totally inexplicable invasion of Iraq that distracts manpower and media attention from the hunt for al-Qaeda while further radicalizing the region against us? But of course. Refuse to appropriate sufficient funds for port security and WMD detection? Seems sensible. Use tax cuts to deprive the Treasury of needed revenues for war and security measures? Sign him (and thus, us) up!

Democrats too often complain that the GOP politicizes terror. But the response to terrorism is a political issue, and it's to the Democrats' discredit that they refuse to treat it as such. If Orrin Hatch thinks terrorists are "waiting for the Democrats here to take control, let things cool off and then strike again," he should say so. And if Democrats think that Hatch has helped eviscerate our country's security, turn the world against us, and radicalize a whole new generation of potential al-Qaeda recruits, they should let the electorate know.

--Ezra Klein

DON'T CRY FOR MOM AND POP. The other day Jon Chait paid us a backhanded compliment, suggesting we're unduly predictable here at the Prospect. Then I see civil-rights-leader-turned-Wal-Mart-flack Andrew Young getting the sack (with Jason Zengerle's apparent approval) for the following off-message take on why black people shouldn't care if big box stores drive out mom and pop businesses:

In the [Los Angeles] Sentinel interview, Young was asked about whether he was concerned Wal-Mart causes smaller, mom-and-pop stores to close.

"Well, I think they should; they ran the 'mom and pop' stores out of my neighborhood," the paper quoted Young as saying. "But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs; very few black people own these stores."

Except for the fact that, in my experience, the Muslims in the urban convenience store game tend not to be Arabs (demographic fun fact -- most Arab-Americans are Christian and most American Muslims aren't Arabs), isn't this roughly accurate? I appreciate the neighborly service at my local ammi and abbu shop with the classy bulletproof glass around the behind-the-counter area and the moldy-looking apples as much as the next guy. But the last time that really manifested itself was when the proprietor advised me not to buy his milk, which had all gone bad due to inadequate refrigeration, but was still there and seemingly on sale.

Regulatory measures aimed at actually improving working conditions for people at big box retail outlets are great. I worry, though, that progressives are sometimes serving as useful idiots in little retail's efforts to defend itself against larger retail outlets that offer better goods at lower prices. It's not, after all, as if mom and pop are offering pension plans and full health benefits to the local kids either. Keeping inner-city neighborhoods chain-free doesn't help anybody; what you need to do is create a situation where the stores exist but treat people better. The racial demagoguery angle is uncalled for, but it's still the case that progressives shouldn't be making a comprehensive defense of mom and pop the center of our approach to dealing with the economics of retail work.

--Matthew Yglesias

REASONING MATTERS. Glenn Greenwald is incensed at the Washington Post's blithe dismissal of yesterday's ruling that found Bush's wiretapping unconstitutional, and criticizes it for lacking in scholarly complexity. And he's right, the editorial is unbearably smug and self-satisfied, as if the issue at hand is subordinate to the procedural perfection of those evaluating it. But if the Washington Post's case is unconvincing, Publius's demolition of the ruling is much more convincing. "[F]rom a legally technical standpoint," writes Publius, "this opinion is premature, unsupported, and in violation of elementary civil procedure...This is pure naked politics dressed up as law. It is an insult to the legal system. And the Sixth Circuit is going to squash it like a bug."

And that may be the real program. As Scott Lemieux writes, "[I]f this was the Supreme Court the argument would be merely normative. But since it's a District Court, the quality of the legal reasoning matters in a pragmatic way as well: this decision is certain to be overturned by 6CA [Court of Appeals]. For lower courts, the quality of the legal reasoning most certainly does matter, and even a court sympathetic to the outcome will have no choice but to overturn this one." Whoops.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: STORM TROOPER. Addie Stan reviews the new book Through the Eye of the Storm, Cholene Espinoza's account of her time in a small Mississippi town ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. (Our own Tara McKelvey interviewed Espinoza here.)

--The Editors

NEW DARFUR RESOLUTION. In late July, Kofi Annan came up with a novel, next-best option for addressing the spiraling violence in Darfur. With no member state willing to commit troops to a peacekeeping force in Darfur, Annan proposed that the United Nations appropriate resources, such as communications and logistical assistance, and material items, like APCs and aircraft, to the African Union, which has 7,000 troops stationed in Darfur. In a letter to the Security Council on August 10, he urged that the Council to consider his recommendations.

Eight days later, it seems that at least two member states have heeded his call. A couple of hours ago, I obtained a copy of a new U.S.-U.K. draft resolution on Darfur that explicitly endorses Annan's plan for a hybridization of A.U. and available U.N. resources. As envisioned in the draft resolution, this would serve as a stop-gap measure (commencing October 1) and continue until the African Union force has fully transitioned into a 17,300-strong United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS). (UNMIS was created some 16 months ago to help implement the Comprehensive Peace Accord between the north and south, and contained something of a loophole whereby UNMIS forces could provide support for Darfur.) Of significant importance here is the fact that the U.S.-U.K. draft resolution calls for UNMIS to be under a Chapter VII mandate whereby its mission includes protecting civilians and keeping open the lines of humanitarian access.

To be sure, this draft resolution is highly ambitious and there are many obstacles to its implementation. For one, Sudan's acquiescence to a peacekeeping force in Darfur is seen as a necessary prerequisite for certain countries to commit troops to a U.N. force in Darfur. Sudan's approval is also a prerequisite for Sudan's patron, China, to accede to a resolution. All the while, China does not seem to be lifting a finger to help secure Khartoum's approval for a force in Darfur.

For the first time in a while there is some movement on Darfur in the international arena. However, it remains to be seen if this resolution can build true momentum for a peacekeeping force there.

--Mark Leon Goldberg (Full disclosure: In addition to my work at the Prospect, I am now also affiliated with the United Nations Foundation. The opinions expressed here are solely my own.)

WHERE ARE THE UNIONS? One more thing on the health care question: Nathan Newman accuses me of thinking that all the unions, "fair-share" advocates, consumer groups, and those fighting for expansion of the employer-based system are "dumb." What I actually said is that some unions have short-term goals which may conflict with longer-term goals, but that’s beside the point. What I would suggest is that Newman checks out whether all the unions really are standing lockstep behind him lately. Here, for instance, is Andy Stern, head of SEIU, the nation's largest union, admitting that it's time to nail up the coffin of the employer-based care system:

The truth is, we are way past incremental change. It is not going to work. As the Institute of Medicine says and I think it applies here, your trying harder will not work; it is changing systems of care. Well, I think the same thing is true about our health care system. It is not just trying harder. It is not just making incremental changes. It is actually changing the system of health care, so that is designed to deal with all the other economic realities. You can’t apply a 20th Century health care system to a 21st Century economy.

The fundamental change for me means, one, we have to recognize that employer-based health care is ending. It is dying in front of our very eyes. The charts say it there. It will not rebound I believe in the next economic upturn in America. It was a good friend. It served America well in the 20th Century. We love it dearly. Employers, to their credit, lived with it for a long time, despite all of the distortions that it has created, but it is collapsing in front of our eyes. It may still be breathing, but anybody who can look into the future says this employer-based health care system is over in America. If we don’t say that, we are just going to keep building on a very unstable foundation that is not really appropriate.

Maybe they're not so dumb after all.

--Ezra Klein

I HATE WORKERS. Nathan Newman, with typical subtlety and nuance, accuses me of "attacking the Chicago Retail Workers bill as a danger since it might actually improve the lives of Wal-Mart workers." What can I say? Nathan's got me. I'm a mean-spirited cur implacably opposed to any program that makes a worker's life slightly less miserable and any policy that leaves a cashier less likely to collapse into tears in the morning -- that's what I live to forestall. Also: Vote Bush!

Back in reality, what I actually said was "Chicago's law was basically useless for the unions (and possibly counterproductive)." For those who don't know, the Chicago city council passed legislation forcing big box retailers to pay a living wage. This, of course, will make organizing in Chicago a great deal trickier. The likeliest outcome is that Wal-Mart will either open up into the suburbs or, if that gets closed off by legislation, forsake Chicago entirely in order to warn other city councils not to try the same trick. What it won't do is achieve density in urban areas, which would be the easiest for the unions to target.

Newman goes on to reprise a health care argument we have every so often. To Newman, there's precisely no tension between achieving universal health insurance and entrenching the employer-based system. That, of course, is exactly what the history of health care in America shows (as the kids say: Psyche!). He then does some tricky stuff like confusing the Japanese system, which operates under the National Health Insurance Act of 1961 and has only 26 percent of workers covered under employer-operated plans, with piecemeal employer mandates like the one in Maryland that just got declared unconstitutional.

At base, there's a real disagreement here between those who believe incremental reform offers the best hope for the future and those of us who don't. Nathan, stung by past failures in achieving universal care, is now a believer in smaller initiatives that go after individual employer types. I, on the other hand, am not. My guess is such mandates will make for bad health care plans with heavy cost-shifting while simultaneously picking off constituencies who could actually help achieve universal reforms. To me, the system shouldn't discriminate by employment status, shouldn't force widget manufacturers to assume responsibility for medical care, and shouldn't rest till everyone has care. And, from a political strategy perspective, I'm profoundly unsettled by Nathan's willingness to start with half measures rather than demanding comprehensive reform and bargaining downwards. That's a poor negotiation strategy that seems oddly discordant with the fact that 76 percent of Americans fundamental changes to the system.

--Ezra Klein

CHANGING THE SUBJECT. Mercifully, TNR's third editorial hinting we should start a war with Iran but not quite saying so spares us the "ruthless" or "ruthlessly serious" talk. Instead:

At this moment, therefore, it is important to remember that Iran is not only Israel's problem. It is also America's problem. Indeed, it is the West's problem. There is no figure in the world right now--not Osama bin Laden, not Nasrallah, not Ayman Al Zawahiri, not the Sunni insurgency or the Shia death squads in Iraq, not the cells, Al Qaeda or otherwise, in any European or American city--that represents the Islamist danger more perfectly, with greater ideological and physical force, than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But how so? I think there are a number of serious analytical errors here. But before even getting dragged into the details of this, it's simply worth identifying and noting an alarming trend -- an effort through the use of various rhetorical devices to redefine the main strategic goal of the United States away from securing the country against al-Qaeda and associated movements in favor of curbing the growing influence of Iran. There's nothing wrong with arguing for a shift in priorities, but people arguing that ought to be made to be honest about the fact that this is what they're doing -- saying we should drop this al-Qaeda business in favor of worrying about Iran. But why should we do that? And why Iran rather than, say, China?

Instead, they're attempting a sleight-of-hand whereby we say "we're fighting al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda is Islamist, so we're fighting Islamists, Iran is Islamist, so we're fighting Iran." That's silly. "Islamist" is a mighty vague term. It encompasses everything from socially conservative democratic political parties to would-be totalitarians; groups with local agendas and groups with regional or global ones; Shiite groups and Sunni groups; an al-Qaeda movement that has already targeted the American homeland for attack and that has repeatedly threatened to do so again and an Iranian dictatorship that's done neither.

--Matthew Yglesias

ALWAYS MORE SHOES TO DROP. Most of what's gone wrong in Iraq was fairly widely predicted by invasion-skeptics before the event. Still, the doubters have hardly been clairvoyant. One of the most widespread predictions -- that Kurdish separatists would get embroiled in fighting with Turkey -- has really been the dog that didn't bark for years now. But this sounds like a bark to me: "Turkey and Iran have dispatched tanks, artillery and thousands of troops to their frontiers with Iraq during the past few weeks in what appears to be a coordinated effort to disrupt the activities of Kurdish rebel bases."

Meanwhile, lurking at the end of this rundown of sectarian and insurgent violence we see that, once again, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is trying to hint that we should leave Iraq, saying his government's forces "would be able to fill the vacuum if multinational forces withdrew."

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MY SUMMER READING JOURNAL. The president reads Camus and describes his existential journey to writer Julian Sanchez in a series of fascinating diary entries. This is a side of George W. Bush that few have seen before.

--The Editors

HEALTH CARE: STILL SCREWED UP. There’s nothing too new in all this, but in case you were seeking further confirmation that health care is now a middle-class problem, a new study by the Commonwealth Institute reports that 48 percent of adults making between $35,000 and $50,000 report major problems paying for health coverage, as do a fifth of those making between $50,000 and $70,000. Coverage, for that matter, isn't the only issue; 40 percent complain of unsafe or unsatisfactory care under the system and 76 percent say it needs either major changes or complete rebuilding. Possibly most interesting is that about half of Americans making up to $70,000 worry that they'll be unable to afford high-quality care in the future. That's the sort of anxiety a savvy politician could make some great gains by tapping into.

--Ezra Klein

LEE SIEGEL, CALL YOUR OFFICE. At the nexus of blogofascism and Islamofascism lies Mahmoun Ahmadenijad’s new blog. Really. So far there's only one post up and its length indicates that he hasn't yet quite grasped the format. He does, however, promise that "From now onwards, I will try to make it shorter and simpler." The site even has an online poll question: "do you think that the US and Israeli intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another word war?" Newsweek offers analysis.

Early critique: The site seems slow, probably because he seems to be using some kind of Java backend rather than standard blogging software. The design is, however, much more clean and contemporary than what Ayatollah Khameini has to offer. Khameini's efforts to combat rising sectarian violence seem noteworthy: "Discord and disunity is a lethal poison to the Islamic world, and any action causing schism among Muslims and, as a result, serving the interests of the enemies is a betrayal of the Islamic world."

--Matthew Yglesias

I BLAME THE POPE. Ramesh Ponnuru ponders the theory that the Republican Party has become less anti-statist because it's become more religious, and then wonders "let’s assume for the sake of argument that Republicans have simultaneously become more religious-conservative and less anti-statist. What’s the causal relationship here?" My hypothesis would be . . . Catholics.

As the Democratic Party came to embrace feminism in the 1970s, the GOP started successfully counter-mobilizing a fairly generic religiosity -- or at least a generic Christianity -- and began to secure the allegiance of the more devout sectors of America's Catholic population, formerly a core Democratic constituency. This constitutes a convergence with Continental political dynamics where practicing Catholics are typically on the right. At the same time, the conservative political parties in those countries are much more statist than the American right has traditionally been and, in part as a consequence, the Republicans have become more statist in their orientation, offering hints of the Christian Democratic tradition and fewer hints of the classical liberalism that's historically been dominant on the Anglophone right.

UPDATE: And so why, the commenters ask, are Catholics more statist than Protestants? Read your Weber, it makes for strong and healthy bones.

--Matthew Yglesias

UNIONS AND POLITICS. Kelly Candaele, a former Los Angeles AFL-CIO employee, has one of those occasional op-eds counseling that the union movement recede from politics and focus on organizing. A couple thoughts:

• Candaele is using Chicago's law forcing Big Box retailers to pay a living wage as her jumping-off point. But that was a local initiative, not an outcome of the national movement's priorities. And while I agree with her that Chicago's law was basically useless for the unions (and possibly counterproductive), there's little doubt that national labor laws need to undergo radical reform if Labor is to enjoy a resurgence. For organizing to succeed, the context in which it occurs may have to change. For that reason, the real test of the soundness of Labor's priorities is whether they force a Democratic Congress -- which would be largely elected by their GOTV operation and campaign donations -- to liberalize the labor laws. If the unions make Pelosi Speaker, Rep. George Miller's Employee Free Choice Act should be her top priority. As Harold Meyerson detailed, the EFCA "would legalize card check, mandate mediation and binding arbitration if a first contract is not signed within 90 days of the union certification, and increase the penalties for employers who violate the nation’s labor law." If Pelosi doesn't push it hard, unions should simply abandon the Democratic Party in the next election.

• The nature of the union-employer relationship will always be oppositional, but it needn't be as fraught with fear and terror as it is now. Much of what distorts it so dramatically are health costs. The examples of Ford and GM are instructive because, as their current plights show, a perfectly natural coverage agreement today can, thanks to health care inflation, new technologies, and increased longevity, become a totally untenable financial arrangement tomorrow. Wages are defined, set, controllable; health care is unpredictable, massively expensive, near impossible to contain. A company offering insurance and a high salary can, in times of financial distress, freeze pay hikes. They can't stop their employees from getting sick. If the government were to take responsibility for the health care provision, however, unions could go back to arguing over wages, safety regulations, and worker conditions. That's much more natural ground, and while employers won't accept it without a fight, they won't judge it such an existential threat, making the job a whole lot easier for organizers.

• I'll have more to say on this in the future, but it's worth noting that the goals of the labor movement and the progressive movement aren't the same. They intersect, to be sure, but unions are focused on winning tangible gains for their workers now. Progressives are, or at least should be, engaged in a longer-term project of creating a better, more just society for everyone, regardless of employment status. Unions are a necessary portion of that, but they're an aspect, not a substitute. Unions, for instance, may want Wal-Mart to offer better health care now. Progressives, in my view, should want Wal-Mart not to stand in the way of nationalized health care now, and might view a slightly better menu of options for Wal-Mart employees as delaying the ultimate, more important victory.

--Ezra Klein

AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL. The boss, Mountaineer Mike Tomasky, probably thinks that none of his minions read Marie Claire. He's wrong. Yow! I wonder if the latest issue has reached the End Zone Pub in Morgantown yet.

--Charles P. Pierce

IN DEFENSE OF JERRY COLANGELO. The Nation publishes a Dave Zirin article right in my sweet spot -- the intersection of national security policy and professional basketball -- slamming USA Basketball Director Jerry Colangelo for organizing a get-together between the senior men's team and some American soldiers wounded in the Iraq War.

Zirin is against this. But he can't quite seem to say why. As a basketball motivational tactic and team-building effort, everyone seems to agree that it was a good idea. The results of this year's FIBA World Championships won't be known for some time yet, but so far Colangelo and head coach Mike Krzyzewski seem to have succeeded in building a team-ier team than we've fielded in previous international hoops competitions. Nor is their any sign that the troops in question were anything but thrilled to meet LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Team USA's other young stars. Clearly, invading Iraq was a gigantic error and the grievous wounds suffered by many of our troops there are not just tragic, but well-nigh criminal in light of the daft geopolitical vision on whose behalf they were incurred, but the idea that having some of them hang out with NBA stars is objectionable exploitation is silly. Lots of people -- including, clearly, the specific veterans given this mission -- would really enjoy meeting some of their heroes from the world of sports.

Indeed, as the article goes on, it becomes clear that the real objection here is simply that Colangelo is a conservative political activist. And so he is. And, in that sense, he's a bad man and he does a lot of work on behalf of bad causes. Nevertheless, it's political reductionism of the worst kind to suggest that this should disqualify him from the USA Basketball job. He's a very successful sports executive, was the consensus best choice to revitalize what had become a very troubled program, and, as best one can tell at this point, he's doing a really good job.

--Matthew Yglesias

QUOTE OF THE DAY. This comment strikes me as particularly smart:

"Even if Joe Lieberman leaves the race, it will still be a three-way race, me, Schlesinger and Gold. So it's going to be crowded."

-- Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Ned Lamont (D), on Hardball, referring to GOP rival Alan Schlesinger's (R) gambling name, "Alan Gold."

A smart strategy for Lamont would be to focus on Schlesinger, not so much because he considers him to be a serious threat but because he needs Schlesinger to be a real player in this race. The best thing Lamont can do right now is draw attention to Schlesinger and help raise his profile, in the hopes that by doing so he’ll divide Lieberman’s Republican base. Make this a Lamont-versus-Schlesinger race, and Lieberman’s support will soon dry up.

--Alec Oveis

ABOUT THOSE INSURGENTS. "The number of roadside bombs planted in Iraq rose in July to the highest monthly total of the war," reports The New York Times, "offering more evidence that the anti-American insurgency has continued to strengthen despite the killing of the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi." Previous expert commentary on the insurgency:

"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on. We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation." President George W. Bush, July 2, 2003.

"Howard Dean has climbed into his own spider hole of denial if he believes that the capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer." Senator Joe Lieberman, December 15, 2003.

"The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." Vice President Dick Cheney, June 20, 2005.

--Matthew Yglesias

TALKIN' BOUT GROWTH. This is a great catch over at Dean Baker's blog (which TAP, I should remind you, now has the honor of hosting). Baker noticed The New York Times writing about Europe's 1 percent growth rate -- a pathetic, anemic figure, that supports all the conservative crowing about the failure of the social democratic system. Except that the NYT, for God knows what reason, reported Europe's growth only in quarterly terms, and never contextualized it into a yearly rate (the standard measure for growth). By contrast, even when relaying quarterly numbers, America's growth is always extrapolated into yearly terms (see here for an example). So non-economists -- which is to say, mostly everyone -- reading the NYT article would think Europe was pleased over a miserable one percent rate of growth when, in fact, the relevant number for comparison's sake would be 4 percent, nearly a full percent higher than America's average annual growth of 3.2 percent between 2002 and 2005.

--Ezra Klein

YOU CANNOT KILL JOE, YOU CAN ONLY MAKE HIM STRONGER. The latest polling out of Connecticut shows Joe Lieberman beating Ned Lamont by 12 points, 53-41 percent. The "actual" Republican in the race, Alan Schlesinger, is being demolished, clocking in at a mere four percent. Even more telling, though, are the internals. Lieberman gets a full 75 percent of the Republican vote, making him, for all intents and purposes, the Republican nominee. Schlesinger, at this point, is little more than a Republican Green, quixotically proclaiming his superior allegiance to conservatism and doing little but holding down the margins of the "Independent Democrat" who's supplanted him.

The question, of course, is whether Lieberman, in the event of a win, will dance with those that brought him. If given the opportunity to cast that deciding vote for majority leader, will he remain true to his new constituency and preserve the Republican majority? Will he try and screw over all those Democratic senators who abandoned him? And if he doesn't, what will he demand from the Democrats in return for his continued support? It would be bitter irony for the left if their successful challenge to Lieberman left him more powerful than he'd ever otherwise dreamed of being.

--Ezra Klein

IN DEFENSE OF MY DEFENSE OF... Since I'm back in my on-again, off-again role as TNR defender, let me say a couple things in response to Charlie: First, we need to be clear on which circle of counterintuitive hell we're occupying at any given moment. Reeve's defense of Coulter is not the sort of impulse that gave rise to Betsy McCaughey's smear against health care, or the magazine's excerpts of The Bell Curve. What allowed those two atrocities has a name: It's Andrew Sullivan, who edited the magazine during that era and still claims those two pieces as top accomplishments on his bio. More to the point, neither of those were counterintuitive articles. The Bell Curve excerpts were social science pornography: racism dressed up in faulty but, to the layman, impenetrable data. Sullivan could have waited for the book to be peer reviewed and the methodological failings to be discovered. He didn't (here's another good takedown of the book, and here's my takedown of its author, Charles Murray). As for McCaughey's piece, her smear was nothing but a heavily padded lie. She charged, contrary to the very first paragraph of the legislation, that the bill wouldn't allow you to seek private care (hence the article's name: No Exit). It was no more counterintuitive, or less loathsome, than "The Swiftboat Veterans For Truth." Sullivan had an agenda and he sought out willing executors. The magazine has since apologized for that sin, but it's an unforgettable and unforgiveable black mark on the institution.

Reeve's piece is of a different type altogether. She argues that, as a young woman in punditry, something in Coulter's brassy provocation is alluring, and refreshingly different from the general stereotype of women wilting before criticism. I think there's something to that, and knowing my office is overwhelmingly male, and that the gender imbalance is replicated throughout political punditry, I'm not willing to dismiss it so quickly. As for my criticisms of the article (of which there were many), folks can read the original post.

Moreover, as stomach-turning as TNR's record on health care may be, that doesn't mean Jon Cohn didn't turn out a fantastic piece today on John Breaux's industry-funded attempts to broker a health care "compromise." Cohn noticed "Ceasefire on Healthcare," a Pfizer-backed, Breaux-fronted effort that "believes there's too much we all agree on to let incremental, market-based health care reform be blocked by political rhetoric." Of course, we don't all agree on that. At all. In industry speak, incrementalism is just a way of blocking reform, and market-driven refers to the vicious risk-shifting employers and insurers are selling under the anodyne label of HSAs. Breaux's involvement is doubly pernicious because, while he's now a health care lobbyist, he's also a former "Democratic" senator and a darling of the press corps. As Cohn argues, "the p.r. campaign's very existence...reinforces his image as a high-minded, commonsense thinker who is simply out to break through political logjams. It's one more reason why he'll pop up on the talk shows and op-ed pages if and when the next big health care debate takes place. And, more important, it's one more reason why he'll be accorded statesmanlike status." And there's nothing more dangerous than loosing the industry-funded Democrat-in-name-only on the health care debate to Joe Lieberman any and every progressive who pops their head up. Whatever my feelings on Marty Peretz, I'm glad Cohn sounded the alarm.

--Ezra Klein

BATHHOUSE HISTORY. I do thank Ezra for linking to an earlier Kaus post about the Beinart-Coulter slapfest on Larry Kudlow's show, if only because it pointed out another area in which la Coulter knows next to nothing. Here she is, fuming in response to something Beinart said about her anti-gay bigotry:

MS. COULTER: "Wait. Where are all those heterosexual bathhouses? I must have missed that period of the '70's.

Honestly, now. Is there no respect for cultural milestones any more? If Ann needs some more background, perhaps she could go ask, you know, the U.S. Representative to the United Nations. Allegedly, of course.

--Charles P. Pierce

THE INGRATES! I find it troubling that the president seems to be grossly ignorant of how the world works: "the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd." Well, I'm frustrated too. Maybe Bush should consider the possibility that his policies are really, really dumb and are based on a totally unrealistic assessment of the situation in Iraq and the Arab world more generally, and that a wholesale reconsideration of them is well overdue.

The great irony of this all is that if there's one thing the Republican Party does understand really well it's the psychology and politics of nationalism. They understand it, that is, in terms of U.S. domestic politics. It doesn't seem to occur to them, however, that these insights might want to be extended to how foreigners -- who are, after all, human beings just like Americans -- react to things.

--Matthew Yglesias

IN DEFENSE OF COULTER BASHING. I want one of our own youngsters to explain to me (again) how The New Republic should be taken seriously any more by anyone with the intellect of a hamster. (Hey, Ezra tried! Cool.) At the top, we have Crazy Marty and, down below, an assortment of earnest young enablers who have difficulty finding their way to both common sense and the recruiting office. The latest eruption comes from someone named Elspeth Reeve, who has decided that my gal, Annie Coulter, is the rebellious, gun-totin' queen of the Counter-Establishment. The piece already has been picked apart by both Lance Mannion and the redoubtable Bob Somerby. To the surprise of exactly nobody, of course, Mickey Kaus reads the piece, sighs deeply, lights a cigarette, and reaches for a moist towel. As Mannion, Somerby, and anyone who can read will testify, this passage is the crescendo of the stupidity:

"It is a little absurd to hold up a person as an expert judge of the 9/11 Commission Report, for example, just because she lost a loved one."

Does anyone not drawing a check from the Singer Sewing Machine Legacy Project believe that Ann Coulter knows more about the 9-11 Commission Report than, say, Kristin Breitweiser? Is it even necessary to make the argument? Reeve's piece is another one of those smug little TNR exercises in faux-contrarianism that gave us Betsy McCaughey on health care, The Bell Curve on the cover of the magazine, and all those exercises in Krauthammerian Projection throughout the 1980's. Except that this one is profoundly dumber. I swear, Stephen Glass used to make up better stuff than this.

--Charles P. Pierce

WARS ARE BAD. David Ignatius gets smart and eloquent:

There's fear within the administration that this sort of American peacemaking will further traumatize the Israelis in the painful aftermath of the Lebanon conflict. But the best way to keep faith with Olmert is to build on the premise that led him to resist the generals' demands for a wider war: The way out of the Middle East mess is through political agreements, not unilateral moves or quixotic military campaigns. Iran and its proxies have been marking one bloody path to the future; America and its allies must work urgently to construct an alternative.

This is all true. It is, however, worth pointing out that it's hardly only "Iran and its proxies" who've been marking bloody paths to the future. The United States of America and, specifically, the Bush administration also marked out a bloody path with the invasion of Iraq. It's high time that we get off that path and onto a better one.

--Matthew Yglesias

IN DEFENSE OF IN DEFENSE OF ANN COULTER. Not to get too deep into the weeds on this, but I'm going to break with Duncan here and defend TNR's defense of Ann Coulter (which is, surely, the TNRiest article of all time). Coulter is less a political force nowadays than some sort of bizarre rorschach atop which we dump our worst impulses and greatest rages. I don't know a single person who believes she's anything less than a talk show vaudeville act, yet she remains prominent in the conversation. How her trolling retains its effectiveness is worth mining a bit, and it's to TNR's credit that, after publishing some killer takedowns of her last week, they're willing to let Elspeth Reeve explore the other end.

Reeve argues is that a certain fraction of what emerges when liberals face down Ann Coulter has a sexist tinge to it and that, as a woman who enjoys bare knuckle political debate, she thrills to Coulter's decidedly un-lady like willingness to tear apart her assailants. That the response to Coulter so often focuses on her looks also deserves some examination. It's not clear why the venom from a blond, leggy snake should be treated any different than the bile Hugh Hewitt spits out, yet rare is the soliloquy on how desperate the writer would have to become to hit the Hewitt. It's a fair point, and I'd extend it by wondering why liberals seem to have so few aggressive female flacks.

That said, Reeve's article veers into a few less interesting places, underplaying the odiousness of Coulter's remarks (folks were not offended at her characterization of the 9-11 Widows as "broads" but as grief merchants) and allowing comedic value to trump untruth. Were Coulter an admitted satirist, we could all relax and chuckle at her outrageous slurs. Unfortunately, she's a "serious" pundit with a troubling ubiquity on the cable news shows and a Time cover to her name. At one point, Reeve frets that the liberal response to the widows thing makes us look like "weenies" -- I think we're far more weenified when we chuckle at Coulter's attacks, like the high school nerd who tries to laugh along when the joke's on him. Indeed, a good example of how to handle Coulter came from Reeve's editor Peter Beinart who, rather than chuckling at Coulter's latest attacks on gays and Bill Clinton, dismembered her on Larry Kudlow's show, even getting Kudlow to disavow her comments. I'm all for the occasional defense of Ann Coulter, but only when the norm is no-holds barred attack.

--Ezra Klein

BACK TO SCHOOL. From the "cure worse than the disease" panel, the longstanding controversy over whether or not Pluto (not the dog) should be downgraded from planet to planetoid looks set to be resolved by redefining the word "planet" so as to make Pluto fit the bill. The only problem -- the asteroid Ceres, the far earth orbit object 2003 UB313, and Pluto's moon Charon would all count as planets, too under the new rules. This is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Bush administration's radical 2005 plan to alter time and seems likewise ill-advised.

--Matthew Yglesias

OF MOHAWKS AND MULLETS. Ed Kilgore makes an overlooked and amusing tonsorial point over atTPMCafe, something thus far missed in the whole George Allen macaca fracas:

The funniest aspect of this incident is the argument by some of Allen's flacks that their man was trying to say "mohawk," which is what the campaign called Sidarth because of his hair style. Sidarth replied that his hairstyle was actually a mullet.

Well, I suppose "macaca" and "mohawk" are similar words, sorta like "baboon" and "bouffant" are similar. But Lord 'amighty, how can anyone confuse a mohawk hairstyle with a mullet? And moreover, how can anyone look at a man with a mullet and think of him as anything other than uniquely American?

Mullets are, as Kilgore notes, especially popular in rural Virginia. And, come to think of it, the mohawk is about as uniquely American a haircut as you can think of, though it fell from favor several centuries ago until repopularized by working-class Britons in the 1970s during the punk musical rebellion. But mohawks were an American Indian hair style. And Allen's tracker, who wore a mullet, is Indian-American. Who wants to put odds on the Allen campaign dubbing him "Mohawk" not because of his hairstyle, but because he was "Indian"? This whole episode comes across as some kind of classic example of a Freudian chain of unconscious verbal associations, resulting in the accidental revelation of something normally kept hidden. Michael Scherer at Salon has more, delving into what that might be.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

OUCH, BOSSMAN, OUCH! Like Mike Tomasky, I'm no fan of knee-jerk political correctness. And while I'm in agreement with most of Tomasky's treatise on the racist name of D.C.'s beloved NFL team, the last sentence of his lead paragraph gave me a start: "And I can’t quite get behind the idea that people who choose to change their sex should be grouped, rights-securing wise, with people who were born gay." As TAPPED's resident queer girl, I feel compelled to respond.

We could argue all day about the mix of nature and nurture that makes a person gay, as science has yet to figure this all out. And if we were to add transgendered people into that argument, I would find myself arguing that transgendered folks most likely no more "choose" their state of being than do gay people. But all of this is beside the point.

I have long felt that gay leaders make a terrible mistake when, instead of just asserting their rights to live as they see fit, they add in the argument, "And besides, we can't help it." That caveat frames the debate in such a way as to say, if we could help it, it would be wrong, but since we can't, cut us a break. The point is, whether or not any of this is a choice is not the issue. The issue is a person's right to his or her essential identity. Religion is a matter of choice, and it is protected. Creed is a matter of choice, and it is protected.

Admittedly, I do have a particular stake in framing the argument this way; as a person of no fixed sexual orientation (the bacon in the GLBT sandwich), my exemption from protection by virtue of being able to "choose" a partner whose gender in concert with mine is approved by society leaves me pretty vulnerable. Either way, in 22 states, I can still be canned from a job for not being hetero.

Whomever a person chooses to sleep with, however she chooses to identify, and whether or not she chooses to become a "he," dear reader, neither picks your pocket nor breaks your leg, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Jefferson. I don't want special rights; I just want equality in the legal system.

--Adele M. Stan