WITHDRAWAL PREDICTIONS. There was a high powered panel this morning at APSA on strategic withdrawal from Iraq. It included James Wirtz of the Naval War College, John Mearsheimer, Juan Cole, and Stephen Biddle, and unlike many high powered panels actual resulted in some good discussion.

Biddle summarized his recent congressional testimony about partial withdrawal, noting explicitly that the only intellectual defensible options regarding Iraq lie at the extremes. Escalation has a low chance of success (Biddle pegs it at 10%), but complete withdrawal is preferable to virtually any scheme for leaving sixty to eighty thousand American troops in Iraq. Such a force will be unable to cap violence, unable to close the borders, unable to target Al Qaeda, and suffer a very precarious logistical situation.

Cole agreed that violence will increase in the wake of a US withdrawal, pointing out the three most important conflicts that we're likely to see. Shiite groups will continue to fight and probably escalate around Basra, while Sunni-Shiite conflict around Baghdad and Kurdish-Sunni/Turkomen conflict over Kirkuk will increase. On the first, Cole held out some hope of compromise, and he believed that the Kurds would very likely win the last, although the means of that victory might risk Turkish intervention. The Baghdad conflict is the most serious, and Cole suggested it wasn't a foregone conclusion that the Shia would win.

John Mearsheimer was very direct and deeply pessimistic. Ten years ago, I doubt I would have believed that Mearsheimer's critique of US foreign policy would essentially mirror a standard leftist perspective. There are differences, of course, but on Iraq Mearsheimer is making an argument that would fit very comfortably into the netroots. Mearsheimer argued that Iraq has been and will continue to be a disaster, but that because of domestic politics and institutional dynamics we'll still be there in five years and beyond. The stab-in-the-back narrative that's being prepared by the Republican Party will succeed in scaring a Democratic president and Democratic congress from taking any decisive steps to end the war. At the same time, the senior theater leadership in the armed forces are committed to not losing, due to their perception of the institutional disaster that resulted from the Vietnam War.

All told, it was a grim panel.

--Robert Farley

HILLARY HOME RUN. It’s a convenient knock against Hillary Clinton that she’s cold or impersonal, the classic calculating woman. The favorite dig of Rush Limbaugh and other nags like him is that Hillary reminds men of “their first wife.” (I wonder whom Limbaugh uses as a referent point for the rest of the platoon of his former wives; this is a guy who, on a personal level, can’t make a single person happy, including his drug-addled self.)

But if you saw Hillary’s performance on Letterman last night—even realizing that doing a top-10 allows for plenty of advance planning and practice—she was pretty damn good and very endearing. Let Karl Rove and Co. continue to convince themselves that she’s some sort of fatally flawed candidate. That would be a fatal flaw on their part, not hers.

--Tom Schaller

REID'S COMPROMISE. So Reid is willing to loosen the definition for withdrawal in order to attract Republican cosponsors. That seems sound. I've always thought the Salazar-Alexander bill, which would make the Iraq Study Group's recommendations official US policy and has already attracted 12 Republican cosponsors, is a smart first step. It's not perfect, but it creates some forward motion and breaks the taboo against Congress exercising any oversight over the war.

--Ezra Klein

CRAIG'S LIST OF WAYS TO SURVIVE. With rumors flying around the intertubes that Larry Craig may resign I think someone should point out that, from a democratic perspective, that would be a Bad Thing. Ideally, Craig will hold on to his job, barely survive a bitter primary challenge from the right, then, mortally wounded, be defeated by former Rep. Larry LaRocco.

If he can hang on for a while longer Craig might be able to survive indefinitely since news out of Iowa could distract conservatives from his story. A judge in Polk County has ruled the state's gay marriage ban violates the state constitution and thrown it out. At least one gay couple has already been married. A general conservative freakout is sure to ensue and distract from the story of one guy in a bathroom. Alternatively, Craig may stay stubbornly on long after everyone considers his career finished -- Gonzales style.

--Sam Boyd

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Zack Pelta-Heller reviews illustrator Josh Neufeld's 12-part web comic on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath:

Neufield masterfully weaves back and forth between his characters' stories using muted, two-toned colors that underscore the mounting onslaught of the storm. By sticking with the intimate lives of these characters and avoiding the iconic images of the storm (with the exception in the Prologue's illustrations of the Superdome's ripped roof and the city skyline ablaze), Neufeld engrosses us in six tales of survival. Of course, what is all the more extraordinary about these characters, their dialogue, and depictions is that they are all real. A.D. transcends a genre typically relegated to fantasy.

Robert Reich ponders the fate of labor day in the age of discount stores and cheap goods.

Terence Samuel looks back at Larry Craig's history as a senator. "Imagine all those years in which he walked around playing the Western statesman with the big baritone and fake gravitas, knowing eventually he would be brought low by something sordid he'd do in a public bathroom."

Finally, Art Levine asks what happened to the opposition to FISA.

--The Editors

ENDANGERED SPECIES SIGHTING. We have a sighting of that increasingly rare beast, the principled, internally consistent pro-lifer! In response to an Anna Quindlen column that produced the usual outpouring of comically transparent illogic and evasion from anti-choicers, Matt Abbott is willing to actually apply his principles with some measure of consistency:

That said, I do believe, in some cases, the abortion-seeking woman is indeed the perpetrator. She knows very well what she’s doing. She’s not coerced by anyone. Perhaps she’s even going against the wishes of her loved ones. This is the woman who should be treated as a criminal – if not a murderer, then an accessory to murder.

What would be an appropriate prison sentence for such a woman?

Fifteen years-to-life sounds reasonable, no? Of course, one would have to take into account all the circumstances in a particular situation, and it wouldn’t be an easy task. But it could be done.

Meanwhile, Dana points us to an even rarer animal: the pro-lifer who actually considers how abortion laws work in practice. The novelist Anne Rice, despite being a Catholic opposed to abortion, is endorsing Hillary Clinton because criminalizing abortion doesn't actually work. This may seem like a rationalization or contradiction, but it's actually a completely coherent position. Clinton's set of policies, Rice correctly notes, will actually lead to fewer abortions than the illegal abortion-reactionary gender relations-irrational sex ed-threadbare safety net policies favored by most American "pro-lifers." (Cf. Canada and Western Europe vs. Latin America.) A similar argument was made in book form by Mark Graber, who's a reverse John Hart Ely: a pro-lifer who thinks Roe v. Wade was correctly decided. When you look at the inevitably sporadic and arbitrary application of abortion laws, it actually makes perfect sense.

--Scott Lemieux

COME VOTE FOR THE PARTY OF FORCED PREGNANCY, LADIES! Kimblerley A. Strassel argues that the majority of women who vote Democratic are out there for the Republican plucking. What, might you ask, is the strategy? Well, apparently women no longer care about such trivial "70s" issues as whether they will be discriminated against in the workplace or whether the state will force them to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term (and certainly it's not like either of these are live issues that could turn on recent Supreme Court appointments or anything!). No, what's really important to women -- although we're not treated to anything as gauche as evidence -- is...tax cuts for the wealthy. Finally, a Republican with the courage to propose something new!

Most married women are second-earners. That means their income is added to that of their husband's, and thus taxed at his highest marginal rate. So the married woman working as a secretary keeps less of her paycheck than the single woman who does the exact same job. This is the ultimate in "inequality," yet Democrats constantly promote the very tax code that punishes married working women. In some cases, the tax burdens and child-care expenses for second-earners are so burdensome they can't afford a career. But when was the last time a Republican pointed out that Ms. Clinton was helping to keep ladies in the kitchen?

So let me get that straight. As a political strategy, the Republicans should appeal to an already Republican group (affluent married women) by proposing a policy that will do absolutely nothing to help an expanding group that is for obvious reasons fleeing the GOP in droves (single women.) I'd also be interested in seeing a defense of the proposition that treating the income of male and female earners in a marriage equally is the "ultimate in inequality" while pay discrimination is trivial. And then there's the "burdensome" problem of "child-care expenses." How is the state going to address this problem while forgoing substantial amounts of revenue by treating the income of married people exactly like single people? Look, it's Halley's Comet! And, finally, apparently Republicans appeal to contemporary women by simply assuming that men will be the primary breadwinner and women are secondary workers responsible for the childrearing.

I think this strategy needs some work.

--Scott Lemieux

CRAIG CONSIDERING RESIGNING. So reports the Associated Press this morning. Most amusing bit from this report comes from Sen. John Ensign, the Republican Senate campaign committee chair, who offered his take on revelations of the arrest of self-avowedly heterosexual Idaho Sen. Larry Craig in a Minneapolis men's room for apparent invasion of an undercover police officer's personal space:

"'I wouldn't put myself hopefully in that kind of position, but if I was in a position like that, that's what I would do,'' Ensign told The Associated Press in his home state. ''He's going to have to answer that for himself.''

Hopefully? Sen. Ensign doesn't know that he wouldn't put himself in that position? What's with these straight guys?

On the other hand, the cop who arrested Craig proves himself to be a bit of a philosopher. Responding to Craig's denials, in the AP's words, "that [Craig] had used foot and hand gestures to signal interest in a sexual encounter," Sgt. Dave Karsnia told the AP, "'Embarrassing, embarrassing. No wonder why we're going down the tubes.''

--Adele M. Stan

AND IN FURTHER GOOD IRAQ NEWS... Turns out companies are winning contracts by bribing American officers in Iraq. You know, if things over there get any more awesome, we'll have to bomb the country again so the rest of the world doesn't get murderously jealous of the the effective governance and deep-seated sense of personal fulfillment our invasion brought the Iraqis.

--Ezra Klein

PRESSING RESET.. Here's what we appear to have learned from the Surge: First, Maliki's government, which the surge was supposed to strengthen, needs to be replaced. Second, the Iraqi security forces, which the surge was supposed to embolden, need to be replaced

This will be the conclusion of an independent commission convened by Congress to examine the Iraqi police. The commission, headed by General James Jones, found that the security services are shot through with corrupt officers and sectarian militia-members, who we've been arming and training to the detriment of Iraq.

Problem is, we've already disbanded the army once before. It was a disastrous mistake. It turned 500,000 heavily armed Iraqis out of work, onto the streets, and into the militias. Now we're going to do it with the police? On the other hand, can we really keep trying to train an Iraqi police force that takes our guns and uniforms by day and uses them in death squads by night?

As a problem, it's almost the perfect encapsulation of the Iraqi War: You have two options, both of which manage to be worse than the other. Tell me again how the Surge is supposed to fix this.

--Ezra Klein

WHEN YOU BUY A FAKE PURSE YOU'RE BUYING DEATH!!! This is just ridiculous. According to the New York Times, that fake purse you bought down on Canal Street last time you were in New York was made by a Colombian child working for Al Qaeda in China:

Most people think that buying an imitation handbag or wallet is harmless, a victimless crime. But the counterfeiting rackets are run by crime syndicates that also deal in narcotics, weapons, child prostitution, human trafficking and terrorism. Ronald K. Noble, the secretary general of Interpol, told the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations that profits from the sale of counterfeit goods have gone to groups associated with Hezbollah, the Shiite terrorist group, paramilitary organizations in Northern Ireland and FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

Sales of counterfeit T-shirts may have helped finance the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, according to the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition. "Profits from counterfeiting are one of the three main sources of income supporting international terrorism," said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland.

Because clearly, an organization dedicated to going after counterfeiters has no incentive to exaggerate and the statement that "profits from" counterfeiting have gone to groups "associated with" terrorism leaves no room for ambiguity. Look, I'm sure that there is some truth to this, but the over-the-top rhetoric is ridiculous. Child labor and international terrorism have many causes, and I highly doubt that even if everyone in the world stopped buying counterfeit goods either scourge would go away. After all, this kind of fear-mongering has worked so well to reduce drug use and copyright infringement ... oh wait it hasn't at all. The real problem is expressed with admirable briefness my Miuccia Prada:

"There is a kind of an obsession with bags," the designer Miuccia Prada told me. "It's so easy to make money."

--Sam Boyd

DISPATCHES FROM APSA. I'm at the American Political Science Association Conference in Chicago this weekend, and amongst all the noise there actually are some interesting things going on. I attended two panels this morning, the first on blogging and the second on the ISG report.

Dan Drezner chaired the blogging panel, which also included Laura McKenna of 11D. While some of the papers were of the "Saying the Obvious in a Methodologically Rigorous Way" vein that political scientists are so fond of, McKenna's paper involved a survey of journalists at elite newspapers regarding their attitudes on blogging. Long story short, a lot of big journalists read blogs, and while most hate the bloggers that comment on their stories, they tend to think that blogging is good for the journalism profession as a whole.

The panel on the Iraq Study Group included Jay Parker, Meena Bose, and Stephen Biddle. Most panels are decided upon many months in advance, so it wasn't as clear then that the ISG would be fundamentally a dead letter on arrival. In any case, Parker gave a good account of the process of putting the group together, a process which was, for the lack of a better word, serious about both finding multiple viewpoints and ensuring that space existed for debate. Bose compared the ISG process unfavorably with the Eisenhower administration's Operation Solarium. Biddle made a couple of very good critiques of some of the ISG policy recommendations, mainly regarding the faulty assumptions of training and negotiation strategies.

Tonight more drinking, tomorrow more panels.

--Robert Farley

RE: SADR. To say a bit more on Sadr's freeze of the Mahdi Army. My understanding, based on a briefing today, is that no one really knows what this means, but that there are a few candidates. The most interesting is that Sadr has lost control of some of his militias, which helps explain why they're killing 50+ people in tactically moronic clashes in Karbala. He's shutting them down in part to regain control over them.

Another argument is that Sadr's attempts to move towards a political role are growing ever more sophisticated, and he's concluded that being part of the current sectarian violence can only hurt him. In six months, when the surge is supposed to end, he'll reactivate the Mahdi Army, step into the breach, and clamber to the top of the political heap.

But I think the honest truth is that no one really knows what he's doing, nor what it means. Conservatives will claim it's evidence of a working surge, but that's bluster: For now, we have no idea what, if anything, it's evidence of, nor what Sadr's endgame in the political reconciliation business is.

--Ezra Klein

STAY CLASSY FOX NEWS, STAY CLASSY. Fox News apparently thinks that Katie Couric's trip to Iraq is completely irresponsible because she has kids:

I would say the same thing if this were a man journalist going out there, a male anchor, because when you look at the choice she's making, she's saying my ratings are more important than my children. That's the bottom line.

Wow. Just wow. Never mind that 16,000 female soldiers have been put in the same position for far longer or that a man would never be held to the same standard. I guess that's Fox News -- taking the "poorly concealed" out of "poorly concealed sexism."

--Sam Boyd

THE SELF-CORRECTING NATURE OF THE BLOGOSPHERE AND GEORGETOWN RESTROOMS. Tucker Carlson responded yesterday evening to the flurry of criticisms of his description of attacking a gay man in a Georgetown restroom. His explanation of the event is plausible and does justify his actions completely:

Let me be clear about an incident I referred to on MSNBC last night: In the mid-1980s, while I was a high school student, a man physically grabbed me in a men's room in Washington, DC. I yelled, pulled away from him and ran out of the room. Twenty-five minutes later, a friend of mine and I returned to the men's room. The man was still there, presumably waiting to do to someone else what he had done to me. My friend and I seized the man and held him until a security guard arrived.

Several bloggers have characterized this is a sort of gay bashing. That's absurd, and an insult to anybody who has fought back against an unsolicited sexual attack. I wasn't angry with the man because he was gay. I was angry because he assaulted me.

Being one of those several bloggers I apologize (I wrote my original post based on his description on MSNBC). However, I still find the original clip pretty creepy. Dan Abrams and Joe Scarborough, who didn't have this explanation in front of them, giggle uproariously at what seems to be a story about a hate crime. They, I think, have something to explain. Carlson could have been clearer, but he's guilty only of being insufficiently clear.

--Sam Boyd

ENDORSING YOUR CAKE AND EATING IT TOO. In one of the weirdest political moves I've seen in a while the International Association of Machinists has decided to endorse Hillary Clinton (surprising, but understandable) and ... Mike Huckabee. The Clinton endorsement seems to be straight-up pragmatism:

Hillary Clinton earned the IAM's endorsement by focusing on jobs, health care, education and trade -- the bread and butter issues of the American middle class.

Because Edwards and Obama totally don't care about jobs, health care, and trade.

The endorsement of Huckabee came, apparently, because he was the only one who bothered to show up to the Machinists' convention. Good for him, but shouldn't getting the support of a union involve a bit more than that? I'm willing to believe that he'd be the least bad Republican on union issues, but shouldn't he at least have to express some positive policy views to merit an endorsement? The explanation given by the machinists is pretty lame:

Mike Huckabee was the only Republican candidate with the guts to meet with our members and the only one willing to figure out where and how we might work together.

Shouldn't he at least give some idea of how he'd be "willing to work" with the union before he is endorsed? I mean, if he wins the nomination this makes it hard for the IAM to give much help to Clinton who is presumably much better on union issues than Huckabee.

--Sam Boyd

SOCIAL CONSERVATISM FOR THEE ... Matt says:

A reasonable politics of "family values" needs to contain some penalties for heterosexuals with anti-family behavior (see, e.g., Dick Vitter, Rudy Giuliani) and support for gays with pro-family behavior. What they have right now is just loathing of gay people masquerading as defense of the traditional family.

And this is why gay-baiting is such a useful Republican tactic, even for the many closet tolerants among GOP elites. To put it mildly, it's not obvious why gay marriage is a greater threat to family stability and "traditional values" than, say, no-fault divorce. But there's not going to be a constitutional amendment to ban no-fault divorce introduced in Congress or serious attempts to get rid of it in most states -- somehow, social conservatism always loses most of its appeal when restrictions on your liberties and privileges, rather than those of a stigmatized minority, are involved.

--Scott Lemieux

THE VOTE FRAUD FRAUD: THE COVER-UP. Via Marcy Wheeler, Tova Andrea Wang, a member of the Election Assistance Commission, explains how the report was whitewashed:

We said that our preliminary research found widespread agreement among administrators, academics and election experts from all points on the political spectrum that allegations of fraud through voter impersonation at polling places were greatly exaggerated. We noted that this position was supported by existing research and an analysis of several years of news articles. The commission chose instead to state that the issue was a matter of considerable debate. And while we found that problems of voter intimidation were still prevalent in a variety of forms, the commission excluded much of the discussion of voter intimidation.

We also raised questions about the way the Justice Department was handling complaints of fraud and intimidation. The commission excised all references to the department that might be construed as critical -- or that Justice officials later took issue with. And all of the suggestions we received from political scientists and other scholars regarding methodologies for a more scientifically rigorous look at these problems were omitted.

Of course. Republican interest in vote "reform" pretty much begins and ends with using greatly exaggerated or entirely bogus claims of vote fraud to suppress the vote.

--Scott Lemieux

GUILTY PLEASURES. Jamie Kirchick takes a stand:

"I'll admit, the New York Post is a guilty pleasure. It's the first paper I buy whenever I'm in the city. Like most of its readers, I take it for what it is, and enjoy it for a few minutes on the subway. It's fun and understands its role as a tabloid, which is to say, it has a sense of humor. One of the best Post headlines was a front-page spread showing Yasir Arafat's grieving wife at his funeral: "THE FAT LADY SINGS."

But New York magazine shows that the Post's coverage of the Larry Craig fiasco--perfect fodder for the tabloid--isn't even funny. You can click on a link in the Post's news story to take their "Are you a gay senator?" test, which just traffics in old stereotypes. "Do you sing show tunes in the car between political events?" it asks."

Did I really just read that? Did Kirchick just write that making fun of a grieving widow for being fat is really funny, but referencing gay stereotypes about a Senator caught cruising an airport men's room crosses the line? Personally, I'm going to take this opportunity to come down against both of those things, but I am curious why Jamie thinks the former is okay? Oh, that's right, fat Suha Arafat is Palestinian. And he's a bigot. Never mind.

--Matthew Duss

VIGUERIE'S PICKS FOR ATTORNEY GENERAL. With Karl Rove now banished from the White House Office of Strategery, Richard Viguerie, an architect of the religious right, is stepping up to offer advice on a replacement for soon-to-be-former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

First, Viguerie advises playing clearly to the base, nominating a hard-core "conservative" (read: right-winger), and promises the president outstanding personal gain for his trouble:

Confronting the Democrats and rallying the conservative base is also a way for you to raise your approval ratings from the 30s, perhaps even into the 50s.

Not to mention the boon to the party:

A Democratic refusal to confirm a conservative as Attorney General is an issue that the Republican presidential candidate-- whoever he is--can carry all the way into the White House in 2008.

Here are some of the names offered by Viguerie that amount to fightin' words : Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum, Edith "School Discipline" Jones, William "Cuff 'em to the Hitching Post" Pryor, Charles W. "Defender of White Votes" Pickering, and my personal favorite, Ed "The Shredder" Meese.

One name on the list was less amusing, however: Ted Olson, Bush's former solicitor general, who lost his wife, Barbara, on the plane that plowed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The Bush administration has never been loath to exploit the nation's shock at and grief for the lives lost on that terrible day, and that one single fact of Olson's biography most likely makes him a very appealing figure for the president's consideration. Olson, however, has carried this burden in a most dignified fashion, leading this observer to suspect that he wouldn't allow himself to be used in this way. And besides, he's hitched himself to Rudy Giuliani's star.

--Adele M. Stan

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. An early caucus date could be bad news for presidential hopefuls who are relying on Iowa college students' votes, reports Garance Franke-Ruta from Des Moines.

"Christmas vacation ends a week after the January 14 caucuses," Des Moines' Drake University Democrats president Jordan Oster, 20, noted after catching New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson at the Iowa State Fair earlier this month. "That's definitely a big concern….[in 2004] people got back onto campus the weekend before the caucuses."

"The earlier date just makes it more difficult for everybody," he added.

It will also make it difficult for any political campaign that is relying on student organizers to drive older voters to the caucus sites, go door-knocking in the weeks before the caucuses, or win student precincts based on simple spill-over effects from younger Iowans' general enthusiasm for their candidate.

Read the whole thing here.

Also today, Sarah Posner reports that Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt's office contracted with Christian legal group the Alliance Defense Fund to represent the state in a lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood over newly enacted regulations targeting abortion clinics. Blunt's office circumvented the person that Missouri elected to represent the state, Attorney General Jay Nixon (who, incidentally, is the expected '08 Democratic gubernatorial candidate), because he was deemed "too pro-abortion."

Ezra Klein explains why federalist approaches to health care reform are destined to fail.

And Harold Meyerson reminds us that mending Iraq's fundamental divisions was beyond Nouri al-Maliki's reach from the start. Does he really deserve the criticism he's getting for Sunni and nonsectarian parties' decision to withdraw from his cabinet?

--The Editors

MUQTADA CALLS A TIME OUT. The big news from Iraq is that Muqtada al-Sadr has ordered his militia to stand down, though he has stated they will continue defensive operations against the occupation forces. Muqtada's image has suffered greatly from the perception among Iraqis that elements of his Mahdi Army incited the violence we saw earlier in the week. Starting a fight at the birthday observances of the imam after whom your group is named doesn't speak well of your piety, which is one of the strongest things he has going for him, so he has to do some serious damage control.

The Washington Post article quotes both U.S. military sources and sources close him who suggest that the freeze is also part of an effort by Muqtada to root out factions of his militia which he believes to be directed by Iran. We can add this to the pile of evidence against the claim that Muqtada is an Iranian proxy, despite that claim being constantly stated as fact by those who seem intent on compounding the tragedy of the Iraq war with an Iran war.

Speaking of the Bomb Iran Chorus, Yglesias links to this report by Kimberly Kagan on Iranian interference in Iraq. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I was struck by a passage on page 7, regarding Muqtada's relationship with Iranian Ayatollah Kazem al-Haeri:

"Teheran had a natural Shia proxy in the Badr Corps and SCIRI, but it hedged its bets from the beginning by backing Moqtada al Sadr as well. Sadr visited Teheran in June 2003, and was apparently receiving funds from Iranian Grand Ayatollah Kazem al-Haeri until October of that year when al-Haeri started to cut his ties to Sadr."

There's nothing "apparently" about this: Muqtada was clearly receiving funds from Haeri, for the simple reason that Haeri was the designated successor of Muqtada's father (a position which Muqtada did not yet have the scholarly credentials to claim), and as such was responsible for disbursing funds to maintain the elder Sadr's clerical network. Kagan notes that Haeri later cut ties to Muqtada, but neglects to mention why: Because of Muqtada's outspoken opposition to Iranian interference in Iraq. Tell me again how this demonstrates Muqtada’s fealty to Iran? If I didn't know better, I'd think Kagan was trying to trick me...

--Matthew Duss

CRACKDOWN! In Virginia, Republican state legislators are pushing a bill to bar all public colleges from accepting undocumented applicants, even if the kids were brought to the country as infants and attended public schools all their lives. Because that's what we want: Fewer highly-skilled, productive members of our economy. On the bright side, The Washington Post tells us that "The proposals are more restrained than past statewide efforts to deal with illegal immigration," though, to be fair, it's really rather hard to top the Draw-and-Quarter-Them Act of 2005.

--Ezra Klein

HOPE IS A PLAN! And according to Officer Kyle Teamey, so is posturing. That, after all, seems to be what his op-ed suggests we do. "In this fight, the appearance of strength or weakness is often much more important than actual strength or weakness." So we must appear strong. "While debate over a war's merits -- and whether to withdraw -- is a sign of a healthy democracy, Iraq unfortunately highlights many of the difficulties a democracy faces in a long-term counterinsurgency or nation-building campaign. Such debate can be detrimental to the battle for perceptions." So we must not debate withdrawal. Etc, etc.

This is one of the more interesting strategies you see used against war critics, and it's always struck me as the Iraq-version of The Secret: It suggests that what we say will become reality, so we can't say anything negative. It doesn't try and argue that the negative things aren't happening, or that the analysis of the critics is wrong, it just implies that such statements make things worse and so anyone hoping for success -- no matter their estimation of its likelihood -- should stop honestly evaluating the situation out loud. The effect of this, of course, would be a continued deployment, as you can't withdraw troops if you're not allowed to say it's time to withdraw troops.

--Ezra Klein

IS THE SURGE WORKING? The GAO doesn't think so:

The draft provides a stark assessment of the tactical effects of the current U.S.-led counteroffensive to secure Baghdad. "While the Baghdad security plan was intended to reduce sectarian violence, U.S. agencies differ on whether such violence has been reduced," it states. While there have been fewer attacks against U.S. forces, it notes, the number of attacks against Iraqi civilians remains unchanged. It also finds that "the capabilities of Iraqi security forces have not improved."

"Overall," the report concludes, "key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds," as promised.

In other words, agencies of the American government are now leaking draft reports to the press in order to preempt the administration from changing their conclusions.

Nice country we got here, eh?

--Ezra Klein

AVOIDING THE CENTRIST ABORTION REGULATION TRAP. As a follow-up to Dana's post below, it's worth noting that there's no way of writing prohibitions on particular forms of abortion into an enforceable legislative enactment. Attempt to use cries of "eugenics" notwithstanding, the real choice remains stark: you can trust women, or you can trust affluent women while forcing poor ones to get unsafe abortions. That's it; there's no third "women can only get abortions that the Washington Post editorial board thinks are appropriate" option. And if anyone has any evidence that women in countries where abortion is legal and safe get abortions for "worse" reasons than countries where abortion is formally banned, I'd sure like to see it. (They certainly don't get fewer abortions under the anti-choicers' preferred model.)

Also, any discussion of the subject should include this post from Michael Berube.

--Scott Lemieux

HA! Apparently pranksters wrapped Karl Rove's Jaguar in plastic wrap with an "I love Barack Obama" bumper sticker while it was parked on the West Wing's private driveway. Talk about national security.

--Kay Steiger

ABORTION "EUGENICS" DEBATE GATHERS STEAM. As I was reminded during my month of travels in Europe, from which I returned Monday, the abortion debate is by no means confined to America's borders. I saw anti-choice posters featuring fetuses on the street in downtown Vienna. But that's old-school anti-abortion activism; one newer strategy, in both the U.S. and abroad, is to portray the procedure as a form of "eugenics," whipping up moral panic over the fact that due to advances in prenatal genetic testing, up to 90 percent of expectant parents who receive a definitive prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome are now choosing to terminate their pregnancies. Now, as Agence France Presse reports (via Kaiser Daily Women's Health Policy Report), Italy is awash in controversy over a botched June abortion in which the wrong twin fetus -- the one without Down syndrome -- was aborted. The pregnant woman chose to abort her second fetus when she learned of the mistake, and reported her doctors to the police. The Vatican's newspaper called the woman's original choice to abort "illegitimate." And an Italian senator wrote an op-ed declaring, "What happened in this hospital was not a medical abortion but an abortion done for the purposes of eugenics."

The intersection of reproductive justice and disability rights is one of the thorniest in medical ethics, and pregnant women are feeling the pressure on all sides. It shouldn't be presumed, for example, that women of color, poor women, or single parents will be more interested in terminating Down syndrome pregnancies because of fewer resources to care for a disabled child. In fact, in the American Latino community, more parents choose to continue such pregnancies.

But families who do decide to abort -- and who often go into genetic testing knowing they will terminate an affected pregnancy -- should not be pressured to meet with parents raising children with Down syndrome. Such programs are gaining popularity in the Down syndrome community, since parents of kids with the condition are understandably concerned that fewer people with Down syndrome means fewer resources devoted to helping people with the disease. It is this anxiety within the disability rights community that anti-choicers are poised to exploit, even as disability advocates reach out to the pro-choice community in an attempt to increase understanding. If you're interested in learning more about that dialogue, check out this piece of mine from In These Times.

Of course, it's long been an anti-choice tactic to create an acceptability hierarchy of women's reasons for choosing abortion. Remember South Dakota state representative Bill Napoli saying that the only moral abortion would be for a religious teenage virgin who'd been brutally raped and sodomized? The problem, of course, is that most people live in a world not of moral absolutes, but of gray areas, and want their laws to reflect that. That's why South Dakota voters rejected their no-exceptions abortion ban last year. So in a time of increased worry over the uses of genetic medicine, we should be on the lookout for attempts to smear women's choices with the label "eugenics." It's simple common sense that not every family can, at any given point in their lives, accept the burden of raising a severely disabled child, just as not every family can accept the burden of raising any child.

--Dana Goldstein

IOWA CONSERVATIVE: CRAIG SCANDAL NO RELFECTION ON ROMNEY. The arrest and guilty plea of Iowa G.O.P. frontrunner Mitt Romney's Idaho state chairman in a public restroom gay sex sting is unlikely to have an impact on the presidential preferences of Iowa social conservatives, said Iowa Christian Alliance president Steve Scheffler today. Idaho Sen. Larry Craig stepped down from his position with the Romney campaign as soon as news of his arrest broke.

"He could have been working for anybody or supporting anybody," said Scheffler. "I mean, he's a Republican. I don't see that that's directly a problem for the Romney campaign."

Craig also served as a Romney liason to the U.S. Senate. Romney, who is running as social conservative, condemned Craig's actions on a CNBC show, saying:

"The truth of the matter is, the most important thing we expect from elected-an elected official is a level of dignity and character that we can point to for our kids and our grandkids, and say, `Hey, someday I hope you grow up and you're someone like that person.' And we've seen disappointment in the White House, we've seen it in the Senate, we've seen it in Congress. And frankly, it's disgusting."

"I guess the bottom line is, if the allegations are proven to be accurate, or he was involved in what it looks like it might be, then yes, I think he should resign," continued Scheffler. "People and individuals who talk about family values ought to be a moral example."

Still, said Scheffler, "A candidate can't possibly be expected to monitor everyone's personal and moral background."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TODAY ON TAP ONLINE. Paul Waldman parses Republicans' perfection of media manipulation:

Why does it work so well? It gives television news programs a piece of video they can play again and again, and newspapers something they can quote repeatedly. But more important, it takes an abstract argument and makes it concrete.

Deborah Pearlstein argues that the real Gonzales problem will not be solved by his resignation:

He has been a poster child for the more systemic failing of this administration -- its inability to recognize a difference in this country between politics and law.

Finally, don't miss Robert Kuttner's examination of what is really behind the sub-prime mortgage mess.

--The Editors

TUCKER CARLSON: BEATING UP GAY PEOPLE IS FUNNY! In this MSNBC clip Tucker Carlson describes how he and a friend attacked a guy who hit on him in a restroom in Georgetown. Meanwhile Joe Scarborough and some other guy giggle away like it's the funniest thing they've heard in weeks. We have a name for beating up gay people for their sexuality Tucker, it's called a hate crime and I'm kind of amazed you can just describe one on TV without consequences. Note that, whatever the initial action was, Carlson describes leaving and then returning with a friend which rules out self-defense and makes it pretty unambiguous that he was beating up the guy because he was gay.

--Sam Boyd

QUOTE OF THE DAY. "Of course, I believe I have an unfair edge over most of my colleagues right now. My mind works faster than my mouth does. Washington would probably be a better place if more people took a moment to think before they spoke."

That was Tim Johnson in his first public appearance since suffering a hemorrhagic stroke.

Welcome back, Senator.

--Ezra Klein

COUNTERINTUITIVE OPINIONS. "Giuliani is wrong on abortion and went through two messy divorces; Romney is a slick, pandering flip-flopper and the member of a controversial religion; McCain is too old and too cantankerous, having alienated most of the party’s base; Thompson looks indecisive with his delayed entry and seems often upstaged by his micro-managing Trophy Wife; Huckabee can’t seem to raise money, and his background as a Baptist preacher would alienate Catholic voters." Nevertheless, says Michael Medved, this may just be the best GOP presidential field...ever!

--Ezra Klein

WHAT DOES THE CENSUS SHOW? According to the New York Times' headline, it shows a "Modest Rise in U.S Income." According to the story's third paragraph, it shows "Experts said the rise in income was mainly a reflection of an increase in the number of family members entering the workplace or working longer hours. Average wages for men and women actually declined for the third consecutive year." That's pretty modest alright! And their editorial on the subject says "The median household income last year was still about $1,000 less than in 2000, before the onset of the last recession. In 2006, 36.5 million Americans were living in poverty — 5 million more than six years before, when the poverty rate fell to 11.3 percent. And what is perhaps most disturbing is that it appears this is as good as it’s going to get."

The moral of the tale? Don't read headlines.

--Ezra Klein

TRIANGULATION, PAKISTAN-STYLE. The Associated Press is reporting that Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto have reached a power-sharing deal that, should their respective parties together retain a plurality of votes in the coming parliamentary elections, would allow Musharraf to hold on to his position as president and permit Bhutto to return to Pakistan from her exile to stand for prime minister. At least that's how I'm understanding this, thanks to Griff Witte and Imtiaz Ali of the Washington Post. South Asian politics are always a bit baffling to at least this Western mind.

The fly in the ointment here is the Pakistan Supreme Court's decision to allow former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to return from his exile. Sharif has sworn to end the rule of Musharraf, the army chief who unseated Sharif in a 1999 coup d'etat.

In the deal with Bhutto, Musharraf has said to agreed to "taking off his uniform," as the saying goes. But this is Pakistan, where the army has ruled for so long -- even under ostensibly civilian governments -- that it's impossible to believe that the specter of Musharraf in a business suit or shalwar kameez will make a whit of difference. Both Bhutto's and Sharif's governments were known for their corruption, so it's difficult to see what the beleaguered people of Pakistan -- a nation caught between hard-line Islamists, a control-freak army, kleptomaniacal civilian rulers, and U.S pressure to ignite a holy war -- really get out of this deal.

A great primer on how Pakistan got to be the way it is today is found at National Geographic's site.

--Adele M. Stan

FAUX-POLOGY WATCH. Larry Craig paraphrased: I'm sorry that I accidentally pled guilty to a crime I didn't commit because a newspaper asked me a bunch of questions.

"Please let me apologize to my family friends and staff, and fellow Idahoans, for the cloud placed over Idaho," he said. "I did nothing wrong and I regret the decision to plead guilty and the sadness that decision has brought on my family, friends, staff and fellow Idahoans, and for that I apologize.

Craig said he overreacted after the June arrest, in a men's room in the Minneapolis airport. "I chose to plead guilty to a lesser charge in hopes of making it go away," he said. Not seeking counsel was "a mistake and I deeply regret it."

Craig said his state of mind was troubled then because of the Idaho Statesman investigation into rumors circulated by a blogger and published by many other papers in the state.

He said he and his family "have been relentlessly and viciously harassed by the Idaho Statesman."

This is, for the record, a totally useless apology. What he's apologizing for is not what he's getting flak for from the press. For more on political apologies see my piece from July.

You could, of course, argue that Craig has done nothing illegal as Scott Lemieux and Garance have done. Craig is denying he was trying to solicit sex and it's possible he was in earnest and, if he sticks to that position, he theoretically shouldn't apologize at all. Still, his statement took the form of an apology and as such it was terrible.

A side note: while most people agree that Craig would have been violating the law had he actually had sex in a bathroom stall Garance points out the important (and fantastically named) Limberhand precedent which overturned the conviction of a man caught masturbating in a stall in a public restroom.

--Sam Boyd

RURAL BLUE YONDER? The Daily Yonder’'s Bill Bishop has a great post up that dismantles the whole notion that the Redneck Caucus” of newbie Democratic senators (Claire McCaskill, Jon Tester and Jim Webb) were elected because of a surge in rural voting. “That didn’'t happen,” writes Bishop. “These three R.C. members in fact did no better in rural counties than had other (unsuccessful) recent Democratic candidates. All three won because of large turnouts in urban areas.”

Bishop is spot-on, and I’m always puzzled that people think that if Democrats win in red states that they necessarily did so because they converted the red portions of those states. As I have written for the Prospect, though Steve Jarding and other good consultants like him deserve credit for improving the margins for Democrats in rural areas, there just aren’t enough votes there. All these supposed “rural Democrat” winners like Mark Warner and Webb won because thanks to improved support and turnout from urban and inner suburban areas. If the “rural renaissance” is a useful rhetorical fiction for Democratic candidates and their consultants, fine, but it is a fiction nonetheless.

--Tom Schaller

BUSH DOGS IN RED AMERICA. Over at Open Left, I have a post up about the South/non-South splits of the 40-member “Bush Dog” coalition that Matt Stoller and his colleagues have been trying to hold accountable for their FISA votes.

--Tom Schaller

DO WE DESERVE RECESSIONS? Paul Krugman says no, and, for good measure, says the so-called "Austrian theory" of the business cycle (that recessions are the necessary consequence of expansions) is "about as worthy of serious study as the phlogiston theory of fire."

--Ezra Klein

RE: GENETIC TESTING AND HEALTH CARE. To say a bit on the issue Sam raises, genetic testing in health insurance, it's a common belief that such advances will essentially make single-payer health care inevitable. That's a bit simplistic. What they'll do is make the current insurance market non-viable, as either patients or insurers will have far too much information. But in some private scheme where we have mandatory insurance laws -- so folks have to purchase insurance -- and community rating with guaranteed issue -- so insurers have to offer insurance -- it won't much matter. Insurers won't be able to cherrypick and consumers won't be able to opt-out, so everyone will just have to make the best of it. Alternately, something closer to the current market could be preserved by using the genetic results to compute a risk-adjusted score (something we do now, but very crudely, through demographic factors like age, race, etc) and insurers could be reimbursed on that basis, which is close to what the voucher proponents want.

Lastly, folks get too excited over the genetics stuff. Predictions with any level of accuracy and comprehensiveness are a long ways off, and even then, straight genetics only account for a small proportion of our health ailments, and the interplay between genetics and environment (wherein certain genetic propensities are triggered by certain lifestyles) assures no set of results will really be determinative. Even a fairly clean bill of genetic health will probably do little to dissuade most folks that they'd be better off having insurance of some sort or another.

--Ezra Klein

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Adele Stan wonders if post-Gonzales Congress will pursue its oversight role:

What is truly surprising about Gonzales's resignation is its implication that congressional scrutiny of his role in some of the executive branch's most unsavory actions could somehow have consequences for the administration as a whole -- as if Congress actually had its act together in the oversight department. I want so badly to embrace this idea, but I dare not, for fear of yet another fallen hope.

Chris Van Buren reviews ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero's new book, In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror.

Robert Reich argues bailing out hedge funds should not include excusing, or overlooking, the consequences of their actions.

And Terence Samuel weighs in on the Michael Vick case.

--The Editors

STRANGELY, HEALTH CARE INVOLVES CARING FOR HEALTH. Continuing the health care theme on TAPPED today, I wanted to point out that one funny thing about conservatives is that they consistently forget that health care involves making people not sick which is not analogous to, say, making them able to drive a car. For example:

Maybe we should also make these people eligible for food stamps, housing subsidies, and free cigarettes. Why should anyone have to pay for anything anymore?

Come on, people! We're talking about whether the government should pay for your two kids' health insurance plans when you make more than $51,000 a year (more than the new national median income). I know that health insurance is not cheap, but neither are your mortgage and car insurance. You're not going to ask the government to pay for those too, are you?

Really? David Freddoso can't see any difference between buying health care for children and cigarettes for adults? And if adults choose not to insure their kids for whatever reason, what then? Tough luck for the kid? Also, the image of a bunch of conservatives sitting around the offices of the National Review saying to each-other "$51,000 a year is plenty of money!" is pretty hilarious. Finally, you've gotta love the condescension in the "these people" phrase.

--Sam Boyd

SAT SCORES DOWN! The horror! I woke up to the news that the SAT scores this year are the lowest since 1999! What is happening here?

The simplest answer is that more students are taking the test. Given its intended objective to predict college performance in the first few years, those who have traditionally taken the test have been the ones most likely to plan to go to college. When the pool of test-takers increases for various reasons a larger percentage of them will consist of those who have not done that well at school and are likely to score lower.

The SAT tests have always been controversial. For instance, they predict college performance better for some ethnic groups than others, and the way the questions have been framed or adjusted over time has been argued to favor certain social classes or one of the genders. Given this background, it is interesting that the new writing section in the SAT is called controversial because it increases the length of the test and causes more student fatigue. It also happens to be the one part of the tests which showed a significant difference in favor of female test-takers in 2006, the first year the test was included.

--J. Goodrich

MORE UNINSURED. According to the new Census report (pdf), the uninsured population grew from 44.8 million in 2005 to 47 million in 2006. The number of children without insurance increased by over 600,000. And in the midst of it all, George W. Bush is fighting tooth-and-nail against an expansion of the program that funds health coverage for uninsured children.

You know, in a civilized country, we'd revolt.

--Ezra Klein?

CALIFORNIANS MAY VOTE ON IRAQ PULLOUT. A measure just passed the California State Assembly which, if passed by the Senate and signed by Governor Schwarzenegger, would put a measure on the next ballot asking Californians if they support immediate withdrawal from Iraq. It's symbolic, but my home state does contain one in eight Americans, so our opinion should carry quite a bit of weight. More interesting to me will be what Schwarzenegger decides to do. On the one hand, vetoing the bill will hurt his popularity and undermine a potential Senate campaign. On the other, signing the bill destroys what little credibility he has left with his own party. It couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

--Sam Boyd

VOUCHERS! In making a case for a voucher-based health care system (not the best option, not the worst), Lawrence Kotlikoff writes:

It's also a progressive solution that Democrats should love. (Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel has endorsed it.)

In any case, voucher plans float around every so often, so it's worth spending a moment on them. As Kotlikoff explains the idea, "The government would give everyone a voucher each year for a basic health plan. The size of the voucher would be based on one's health status. Those in worse health would get bigger vouchers, leaving insurers no incentive to cherry-pick. Furthermore, insurers would not be permitted to refuse a voucher or otherwise deny coverage."

The obvious concern with a voucher-system is complexity. If the insurers can't reject your voucher, then the whole of the battle will be between insurers trying to make vouchers more generous, and government trying to keep costs down. If the insurers lose the battle to make vouchers more generous, they'll try and make their plans more stingy, or advertise only in rock-climbing magazines (where the young and healthy are likely to go). It's a very, very complicated way of creating a national pool -- one that simultaneously robs insurers of their ability to make profits, while still leaving them a host of manipulable variables with which to game the market.

A good way of thinking about how this would work are the Medicare+ plans, which are almost exactly the same. There, the government opened Medicare to private HMOs, who would get the same amount of money Medicare expected to pay per person. The idea was the HMOs could hold down costs better than Medicare and, in turn, offer more expansive coverage. The opposite happened, and we're now paying the participating companies 120% of what Medicare pays per person -- but the Republicans refuse to roll back the program, and keep greenlighting the rip-off. I don't see how the vouchers idea differs, or protects against a precisely similar outcome, except that there's no "control" government program to serve as an alternative. It would be a bit better than the status quo, to be sure, but it's the sort of plan that may be acceptable as a final compromise, not the sort that you want to start with.

--Ezra Klein

GENETIC TESTING MAKES UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE ALL THE MORE NECESSARY. We've known for a while that genetic testing for disease susceptibility will become much more powerful and common relatively soon. The problem is that insurance doesn't work if we can predict the likely costs of insuring a particular person. No problem you say, we'll just forbid the use of genetic information in insurance decisions as Congress is about to do. Not so fast! Even if insurance companies obey the law (which they will have extremely strong incentives not to do), it creates a new problem -- asymmetrical information.

The buyer of risk (the insurer) will have less information about the seller's condition than he or she does. This is the same problem facing buyers of used cars and was explained in a famous paper by George Akerlof called "The Market for Lemons." This is, to some extent, already a problem in health insurance, but as genetic testing inevitably improves the problem will only worsen. Smarter people than me can asses how much of a problem this is, but, combined with the likelihood that insurers will use what genetic information they can get their hands on anyway, this means that genetic testing will eventually require universal health care of some kind. Richard Posner has a conservative take here.

--Sam Boyd

DARWIN... DARWIN... ANYONE? ANYONE? You didn't think "Intelligent Design" was going away, did you? After the devastating defeat of the Dover decision, in which a judge ruled, based upon scientific testimony as well as internal documents from ID's own proponents, that ID was little more than religion dressed up in cheap science costume, the ID gang have regrouped, and now present themselves as brave, embattled scientific insurgents.

The Discovery Institute's rather optimistically named blog ID:The Future (fingers crossed!) touts the soon-to-be-released "docudrama" Expelled, which harnesses the white-hot star power of Ben Stein (Abe Vigoda was unavailable) to expose the disgraceful suppression of Intelligent Design by the Darwinist establishment and its dogmatic insistence that a scientific theory offer a falsifiable hypothesis.

As much as the science-averse eighth grader in me enjoys the idea of answering "Because the Designer designed it that way!" to any and all questions on a biology test, something tells me the Dark Forces of Charles Darwin are not trembling in their boots.

--Matthew Duss

PARTISAN HOMOPHOBIA. Yglesias and Balko are right that pretty much any substantive defense of the proposition that what Louisiana Senator David Vitter did is less serious than what Craig did comes down to "pure homophobia." Indeed, discussing the Craig scandal at all poses a bit of a dilemma; I don't have much sympathy for him, given his relentlessly anti-gay voting record, but it seems pretty clear to me the arrest of Craig wasn't justifiable.

In the specific case of Hewitt, though, there's probably a more important factor: Louisiana's governor is a Democrat, and Idaho's is a Republican. Craig resigning would mean a Republican incumbent going into the 2008 election; Vitter resigning would mean another Democratic Senator. So no conservative pundit should get credit for standing on principle for demanding that Craig resign, and that goes triple if they haven't made the same call for Vitter (who actually violated the law, although he did so in a more heterosexual way that will help to earn forgiveness from conservatives.)

--Scott Lemieux

AT LEAST HE HASN'T COMPARED LIBBY TO THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS. YET. It's not exactly news that the very reactionary but relatively sane Robert Bork who wrote The Antitrust Paradox has vanished forever, but just for a reminder a reader points us to these ravings:

More recently, we have witnessed the disgraceful performance of Patrick Fitzgerald, who, knowing from day one who had leaked the name of Valerie Plame and that no crime had been committed [er, no--ed.], not only continued his “investigation” but persuaded those with knowledge of the truth to remain silent. The upshot was press and public suspicion of the president and of Karl Rove for months on end. Moreover, Fitzgerald is responsible for the blatant miscarriage of justice in the conviction of Scooter Libby, whose scandal amounted to recollecting a phone conversation differently from Tim Russert, a feat reminiscent of Mike Nifong’s less successful adventures in prosecutorial abuse.

At a time when the administration, the press, and the public should be focused on Iraq, Iran, and the worldwide struggle against jihadists, we will instead be preoccupied with furious partisan battles over essentially irrelevant questions.

Lying under oath strikes at the heart of our system of justice and the rule of law. It does not matter in the least what the perjury is about.

--Scott Lemieux

SMACKDOWN. It's nice to see the Washington Post's readers react with such warranted fury to the paper's proposal to heighten tensions with Iran. " We have seen this show; it 'bombed,'" writes one, "and it does not bear repeating. To its everlasting shame, The Post was in the forefront of the cheerleading that helped give us the Iraq disaster. Regarding Iran, you appear poised to reprise your disgraceful advocacy."

The interesting question is whether this sentiment has teeth. When there were fewer alternatives and more comforting circulation trends, papers like the Post could sacrifice readers for influence, reasoning that they were better served by staying in the center of the Washington consensus than taking a stand against it. That calculation may no longer be so safe. Readers have easily accessible alternatives now, and if the Post's cheerleading for blind hawkery grows into a pattern rather than a mistake, the consequences in a marketplace with so many alternatives, particularly as the Left appears ascendant, may be dire. Washington is already served by a growing rightwing paper in The Washington Times. It's not a stretch to imagine a similar niche opening on the left...

--Ezra Klein

LEAVE THE GUN, TAKE THE HADGI BADAH. Today's LA Times, on the difficulties of rooting out Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army:

Many soldiers also say practices that worked against insurgencies in other wars or in other parts of Iraq may not apply to Baghdad's Shiite neighborhoods.

The Al Mahdi militia is not a textbook insurgent group. To Iraqi Shiites, the militia offers a source for basic services and support for the political and religious work of popular anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada Sadr.

"The Mahdi militia provides services and protects the region," said a 25-year-old clothing salesman in the Shiite neighborhood of New Baghdad who gave his nickname as Abu Atwar. "Militiamen do some killings from time to time, but we do not care about the crimes they commit. Only God can make them pay for that because, as you know, no law is working in Iraq now."

The Mahdi Army may not be a textbook insurgent group, but they are in many ways a textbook Islamic resistance organization. Like Hamas and Hezbollah, the Mahdi Army define themselves as self-defense movements, providing services and protection to their respective communities in the space created by irresponsible and incompetent regimes. With Sadr, however, the security and services vacuum left by U.S. forces after the fall of Saddam was so large, and Sadr's organization so well-positioned to take advantage of it, that he's been able to create run what is essentially a state within a state, controlling most if not all aspects of life within his territory. As the article states, insurgent groups typically fight against the state. In many Shi’i neighborhoods Sadr's organization is the state. They maintain support through a combination of social services far better than anything delivered by the central government, as well as mafia-style violence, extortion, and revenge.

Interestingly, the word mafia is most likely derived from the Arabic mu'afiyah, meaning "refuge." The various secret societies we've come to call mafia began as organizations for protection against governments that either had no interest in protecting them, or that openly preyed upon them, first in Italy, and then among the immigrant communities in America. This is very close to what we're seeing with Sadr's organization.

This isn't to say that Muqtada is just Tony Soprano with a turban, or that Jamaat al-Sadr is just a crime organization -- far from it. It's unlikely that Muqtada bothers to meet with the various Tony Sopranos they have working for them, as long as they keep earning and kicking upstairs. Muqtada has folded the various criminal enterprises of the Mahdi Army into his larger movement, a movement that speaks to and for the aspirations of thousands of poor Iraqi Shi'is, and has roots that go back decades. When various generals and politicians talk about confronting the Mahdi Army, they are in fact talking about confronting this entire organization, as well as the people it serves.

--Matthew Duss

THE MATH. The fact of inflation is one of those thing I "know" about, but not one of those things that I automatically correct for in my head. So the Marshall Plan's $15 billion grant to Europe, though clearly generous and obviously worth something more than $15 billion, never struck me as a particularly staggering amount. That's because I never did the math:

To gauge the true importance of the Marshall Plan, it is crucial to get a sense of the amounts involved. Behrman writes, “From June 1947 to its termination at the end of 1951, the Marshall Plan provided approximately $13 billion to finance the recovery . . . of Western Europe.” This was less than half the Europeans’ initial request and four billion dollars less than President Truman’s initial proposal to Congress, but it was still serious money. Behrman computes that, in today’s dollars, “that sum equals roughly $100 billion, and as a comparable share of U.S. Gross National Product it would be in excess of $500 billion.” That’s actually an understatement. In fact, the total amount disbursed under the Marshall Plan was equivalent to roughly 5.4 per cent of U.S. gross national product in the year of Marshall’s speech, or 1.1 per cent spread over the whole period of the program, which, technically, dated from April, 1948, when the Foreign Assistance Act was passed, to June, 1952, when the last payment was made. A Marshall Plan announced today would therefore be worth closer to seven hundred and forty billion dollars. If there had been a Marshall Plan between 2003 and 2007, it would have cost five hundred and fifty billion. By comparison, actual foreign economic aid under the Bush Administration between 2001 and 2006 totalled less than one hundred and fifty billion, an average of less than 0.2 per cent of G.D.P.

On a related note, this, from The New Yorker's profile of Nicolas Sarkozy, was striking:

When Sarkozy met Condoleezza Rice, she said, ‘What can I do for you?’ And he said, bluntly, ‘Improve your image in the world. It’s difficult when the country that is the most powerful, the most successful—that is, of necessity, the leader of our side—is one of the most unpopular countries in the world. It presents overwhelming problems for you and overwhelming problems for your allies. So do everything you can to improve the way you’re perceived—that’s what you can do for me.’

--Ezra Klein

SANJAYA HAS LEFT THE BUILDING. Six years into the tenure of television's hottest "reality" show, the wags were calling it all but cancelled. Then an asexually cute but incompetent contestant kept enough viewers from changing the channel and so, we're told, American Idol will live to see another season.

Surely Alberto Gonzales is to the Bush administration what Sanjaya was to Idol, a useful fool who kept the Fox television fan base from straying too far. But, like Sanjaya, Gonzales was destined to be voted off the show as the viewers grew hungry for something real. No amount of thick, brown hair or teddy-bear eyes could obscure the fact that when he got in front of the hearing-room cameras, Alberto still hadn't learned to sing very well.

After Sanjaya's exit from American Idol, the contest finished with a wholly unsatisfying victor. I can't even think of her name. But the series was renewed for yet another year. Even with ratings significantly lower than what they once were, Idol remained one of television's top-rated shows. Not so for the 110th Congress, or the 43rd president.

--Adele M. Stan

ON RIGHTS AND MARKETS. Paul Krugman in today's New York Times gives us the conservative case against expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP): to let the markets reign, and then strikes it down in a very clever way:

Suppose, for a moment, that the Heritage Foundation were to put out a press release attacking the liberal view that even children whose parents could afford to send them to private school should be entitled to free government-run education.

They'd have a point: many American families with middle-class incomes do send their kids to school at public expense, so taxpayers without school-age children subsidize families that do. And the effect is to displace the private sector: if public schools weren't available, many families would pay for private schools instead.

So let's end this un-American system and make education what it should be -- a matter of individual responsibility and private enterprise. Oh, and we shouldn't have any government mandates that force children to get educated, either. As a Republican presidential candidate might say, the future of America's education system lies in free-market solutions, not socialist models.

O.K., in case you're wondering, I haven't lost my mind, I'm drawing an analogy. The real Heritage press release, titled "The Middle-Class Welfare Kid Next Door," is an attack on proposals to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Such an expansion, says Heritage, will "displace private insurance with government-sponsored health care coverage."

Krugman draws a neat parallel between the opposition to health insurance for all children and education for all children. For are both of these not necessary for the equality of opportunity that even conservatives support?

It's a nice argument, though only one among several that could be used to support public funding of education or health care. But my impression is that many conservatives are actually not that happy with universal public education and would get rid of it if that were politically feasible. Indeed, the voucher plans that conservatives support could be seen as the first tentative step in the privatization of basic education: First move from public provision of the facilities to just providing money for private choices. Then, over time, that money can be reduced and finally stopped altogether.

Whether this is actually in the plans is unclear. But so is the whole conservative adherence to the ideal of equal opportunity.

--J. Goodrich

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. In a piece from our September issue, Ron Brownstein notes that "it seems more relevant than it has in many years to ask how Democrats would govern if provided unified control of Congress and the White House." He then launches into his review of Matt Bai's new book on the future of the Democratic party and its newly invigorated left wing.

Bai shares this movement's disdain for the Washington Democratic establishment (which he sees as timid and cautious), and he generally views both the activists in the suburban tract homes and the rich donors in the houses on the hill as rejuvenating influences in a party desperately in need of them. Yet, characteristically, Bai is also keenly aware of the movement's limitations, such as a studied, even defiant, aversion to history. To most bloggers, he writes, anything that had occurred before Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1998 "felt as ancient … as the underlying causes of the Peloponnesian War, and about as useful." He doesn't blink at the pettiness and arrogance displayed by many of the Democracy Alliance's benevolent plutocrats. And he wearies of the movement's elevation of tactics over substance, and its demand for unrelenting, unconditional political warfare, writing sympathetically about Barack Obama's amazement after he generated a ferocious backlash from Kos readers with a plea for more tolerance of diverse views within the Democratic coalition and greater outreach to those voters and interests outside of it. [...]

The conflicts between that ardent base and more consensus-oriented Democrats -- The Argument that inspires so much passion among Bai's subjects -- inevitably would resurface if the party wins the White House next year. (If either Obama or Hillary Clinton is elected, their shared instinct to seek consensus could inspire many of the same complaints heard in the book about Bill Clinton.) But for now, the fight among the 2008 Democrats is less about where the party should go than about who best can take it there. Bai might have captured more of that somewhat surprising dynamic if he had included among his characters some insiders -- congressional leaders or a presidential candidate -- actually weighing these considerations as they set their course.

Read the whole thing here.

--The Editors

PLACE YOUR BETS! In the wake of the sad, sad news that Alberto Gonzales will be resigning, inevitably the speculation has begun about what appalling choice Bush will put forward, secure in the knowledge that several Democratic Senators can be counted to abdicate their responsibilities. The odds are as follows:

• Michael Chertoff: 5-1.
• Michael Brown: 4-1.
• Hugh Hewitt: 10-1.
• Robert H. Bork: 8-1. (HT: MJD.)
• Charles Colson: 15-1.
• Oliver North: 12-1.
• Vote Fraud Fraud pioneer Jeff Sessions: 7-1.
• Paul Wolfowitz: 8-1.
• Scooter Libby: 10-1.
• John Yoo: 3-1.
• The mummified corpse of Augusto Pinochet: 2-1.

--Scott Lemieux

EDWARDS GOT SOME 'SPLAINING TO DO It's not much of a secret that I've a lot of sympathy for John Edwards' populist turn. And I've actually argued it's not as much of a stretch from his past as some suggest. The main objection I hear, though, is that the turn isn't genuine -- it's simply a classic primary swerve. And bits and pieces of his past voting record pop up that make that hard to rebut.

Here's one: At the Democratic forum today, Edwards spent some time -- as he often does -- lamenting the fact of medical bankruptcies. This is no surprise: Elizabeth Warren, who's done the seminal work in this area, informally advises him.

But when the Bankruptcy Bill -- which Edwards voted for -- came up in 2001, then-Senator Paul Wellstone offered an amendment to "create an exemption for certain debtors that can demonstrate to the satisfaction of the court that the reason for the filing was a result of debts incurred through medical expenses." In other words, to prevent medical bankruptcies. The amendment failed, 65-34. Edwards was one of the 65 voting against it (as was Biden -- Clinton and Dodd both voted for, and Obama wasn't yet in the Senate). In doing, he broke with just about every liberal in the Senate. At times, votes like this can be out-of-context, as Senators kill good liberal amendments to get an important progressive bill to the floor. But the Bankruptcy Bill was hardly that. It's a hard vote to explain. But I'd still like to hear what the Edwards camp has to say.

--Ezra Klein

AN UNREASONABLE MAN? In a Legal Times profile from 2004, Paul Clement is described this way:

"He can make the unreasonable sound reasonable."

That, in a nutshell, seems to be the job description for an AG in the Bush era.

--Ann Friedman

WHEN MINI-ME'S ATTACK. There's a small scuffle going on over at Andrew Sullivan's place. Yesterday, guest-blogger Jamie Kirchick posted this bizarre item, in which he interpreted a couple of Barack Obama's statements to derive The Obama Doctrine: "The United States will remain impassive in the face of genocide."

Fellow guest-blogger Hilzoy responded with a lengthy, detailed post, arguing that, sure, that makes sense if you ignore everything else that Obama has ever said or written on the subject. Kirchick then lamely responded that he was "was hoping to be provocative and stir some debate," which, while being an incredibly weak defense for accusing someone of ignoring genocide, is what people tend to say after they just been totally pwned.

This sort of careless drive-by on a Democrat is typical for Kirchick. I've long wondered what, exactly, this self-described "libertarian" is doing writing for The New Republic? Are there many other TNR writers who also have gigs writing for the Weekly Standard and Commentary(!)? As best I can tell, Kirchick's fitness for TNR is based entirely on his sharing his boss Martin Peretz's hostility toward Arabs and Muslims.

--Matthew Duss

IT WAS YOU, FREDO. A few thoughts on the at-long-last end of a rags-to-fascism success story:

• One of the few contrarian arguments ever to turn out to be right was Yglesias's qualified defense of John Ashcroft. The Bush administration has not only pursued poor-to-catastrophic policy outcomes, but is also frequently unable and/or unwilling to carry out the basic functions of government, adhere to the law, etc. Ashcroft was, at least, competent and unwilling to push the Bush administration's lawlessness past a certain point. Gonzales failed utterly on all counts. And whether or not he was personally more moderate than Ashcroft, it certainly didn't discernibly affect the policy agenda of his office. All that matters is whether you're willing to carry out the administration's dirtiest work, and he certainly was. He's the man who could make you miss John Ashcroft.
• Evidently, Gonzales's reign will be be most remembered by his further facilitation of Yoo-generated theories of arbitrary executive power and his dissembling before Congress. But firing otherwise well-evaluated U.S. attorneys because of their unwillingness to pursue bullshit "vote fraud" cases or for actually believing that Republicans should be subject to the law is also a definitive example of modern Republican governance.
• Even more scary: The GOP base considered Gonzales too moderate to be appointed to the Supreme Court, largely because he was willing to construe a law permitting minors to obtain judicial bypasses as actually permitting judicial bypasses to be issued, a conservative no-no. So he did get more lawless as time progressed. On another Republican-statist note, the one positive thing I can say about Michael Chertoff is that he's mildly more civil libertarian than Bush's most recent lifetime Supreme Court appointment. I'm pretty confident that his old-fashioned belief that the police actually need valid warrants before strip-searching people in their own homes will be abandoned if he's willing to take the AG's position, though.
• I'll give the final word to Jack Balkin: "As for Mr. Gonzales, he was a disgrace to the office. There are many roles he could have competently filled -- and did fill -- in his career. The nation's chief law enforcement officer was not one of them. He abused his office for political gain, repeatedly misled Congress under oath --and probably out and out lied on more than one occasion -- and turned a once proud institution of government into an object of deep suspicion."

--Scott Lemieux

TRADING A LIAR FOR A DISSEMBLER? With reports of the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales barely an hour old, wags were already naming Michael Chertoff, secretary of homeland security, as the likely nominee for Gonzales's replacement.

For Democrats -- and the American people -- this should be the perfect week to shoot down that idea. Marking the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina this week, scrutiny of the government's abandonment of the people of New Orleans should be turned on Mr. Chertoff. A former prosecutor and judge, Chertoff either misled reporters in 2005 or displayed an unforgivable lack of understanding when he asserted that no warnings had ever been served by scientists of a storm with the force of Katrina approaching New Orleans. Here, from CNN on September 3, 2005, just days after the storm:

WASHINGTON (CNN) --Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur.

But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years.

A replacement, perhaps, in the spirit of the Gonzales appointment.

--Adele M. Stan

ELITE GENERALS. Fred Kaplan has an interesting look at the officer structure in this week's NY Times Magazine. The armed forces, like many institutions, are slow to adapt and change, and the way officers are promoted hasn't changed much either, leaving a genuinely homogeneous pool to plan war strategy. This is a problem I've heard many people from inside and outside the military complain about. The same kind of innovation that comes from diversity in the private sector could help the military as well. But the pool itself is in trouble. The officer class from West Point has gone through some major flux in the last two years, Kaplan reports:

West Point cadets are obligated to stay in the Army for five years after graduating. In a typical year, about a quarter to a third of them decide not to sign on for another term. In 2003, when the class of 1998 faced that decision, only 18 percent quit the force: memories of 9/11 were still vivid; the war in Afghanistan seemed a success; and war in Iraq was under way. Duty called, and it seemed a good time to be an Army officer. But last year, when the 905 officers from the class of 2001 had to make their choice to stay or leave, 44 percent quit the Army. It was the service’s highest loss rate in three decades.

Hardly surprising, considering how the blame for the failures in Iraq is shared by high-ranking officers in addition to administration officials. The article addresses an important question:

Lt. Col. Allen Gill, who just retired as director of the R.O.T.C. program at Georgetown University, has heard versions of this discussion among his cadets for years. He raises a different concern about the Army’s “can do” culture. “You’re not brought up in the Army to tell people how you can’t get things done, and that’s fine, that’s necessary,” he said. “But when you get promoted to a higher level of strategic leadership, you have to have a different outlook. You’re supposed to make clear, cold calculations of risk -- of the probabilities of victory and defeat.”

The problem, he said, is that it’s hard for officers -- hard for people in any profession -- to switch their basic approach to life so abruptly. As Yingling put it in his article, “It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late 40s.”

There's an increasing tendency to blame the current situation in Iraq on poor planning -- an attitude that's almost approaching conventional wisdom. Since generals are called on to propose strategies only, this becomes a danger. Officers are trained to work on the "how" of a problem and they never are allowed to question the judgment of the decision itself. The administration called on generals to plan a war, but it was never their role to think about whether going to war was a good decision. Is this a good way to train the highest level of advisers to the commander in chief? Probably not.

--Kay Steiger

PEOPLE ARE MORE EXPENSIVE THAN CARS. Guess who made that profound comment and when?

It was Mitt Romney last year, explaining the new Massachusetts health insurance policy which included an individual mandate. The policy was modeled on car insurance, and Romney explained the individual mandate in the policy with these words:

"We insist that everybody who drives a car has insurance," Romney said in an interview. "And cars are a lot less expensive than people."

Well, that was then. This year Romney proposes a health insurance policy for the whole country which doesn't include the requirement that people must buy health insurance if they can afford it. Now the idea is to transform the federal assistance states currently get to cover the uninsured into block grants, to add a few tax deductions and to turn an even blinder regulatory eye on the health care industry.

The Romney plan has at least two serious problems. First, the financial solutions he suggests are insufficient to cover the costs of any universal health insurance plan. Second, his plan would still have uninsured people requiring health care, and some additional funding would be needed to cover those folk. Unless we decide to let them die in front of emergency rooms.

--J. Goodrich

FOR $300,000 YOU TOO CAN BE PRIME MINISTER OF IRAQ. Over at TPMMuckraker Spencer Ackerman has the goods on the $300,000 lobbying contract Iyad Allawi gave to a prominent DC firm in return for its help in building support for installing him, once again, as prime minister of Iraq (because it went so well the first time). Which raises the question: how bad shape is a country in before it's leadership can be bought for a fourth of the price of a Bugatti Veyron? On the other hand, Allawi may be making a savvy investment. Last time he was PM, his supporters managed to steal more than billion dollars from the government.

--Sam Boyd

NEW DEMOCRATS IN IOWA AND NEW HAMPSHIRE. Garance's post about the unpredictability of who will participate in the Iowa caucuses bring to mind another dimension of both Iowa and New Hampshire that has a potentially important effect on both the nominating process and the general election:  Both are states with enormous numbers of new Democrats. And by new Democrats, I don't mean the somewhat more conservative Democrats of the DLC, but literally people who have become Democrats only in the last few years.

How many? The New Hampshire blog Graniteprof reported recently that Democrats had added 45,000 new registrants since 2002, while Republican registration had stagnated. Registered Republicans still outnumber Democrats, but by less than half the margin of 2002. Traditionally it's taken about 80,000 votes to win a multi-candidate New Hampshire Democratic primary, so 45,000 new Dems will both raise the number and potentially be a significant factor in themselves. In addition, the largest portion of New Hampshire voters are independents who can vote in either primary; they are far less likely to vote in the Republican primary than in 2000, when large numbers of them supported McCain. (A recent Rasmussen poll confirms that intuition, reporting that most N.H. independents who plan to vote in the primary say they'll do it in the Democratic one and disproportionately favor Obama.)

In Iowa, the story is similar. Last fall, Democratic registration in Iowa reached 606,000, according to David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register. The last available data from the Secretary of State's office (May 2007 ) puts the number of Democrats at 597,000. In May of 2003, the number of registered Dems was 532,000. Over the four year period, the number of Republicans has dropped from 585,000 to 574,000. Registered Democrats now outnumber Republicans in Iowa by 20,000.

Both states were decided by razor-thin margins in 2000 and 2004, but in 2006 Democrats gained two congressional seats in each state, and both seem to be moving rapidly from purple to blue. The new Dems are part of that story. But they could be even more significant to the nomination.

It's not known exactly how many people participate in the Iowa caucuses, but's thought to be about 100,000.  As in New Hampshire, 65,000 new registered Democrats could make quite a difference, if they choose to participate. Some of the increase probably comes from new registrants, including young people who will more heavily Democratic may still be unlikely to participate, but presumably there are also some number of people who have made an active choice to leave the Republican party, an indication of a significant level of engagement.

As Obama in particular tries to avoid the fate of the "wine-track" candidate who appeals to better-educated voters in the odd-numbered year, but is overwhelmed by the Democratic base once the primarying starts, these 110,000 new Democrats in the two states could be a key factor. These are people who by definition weren't part of the Democratic base in the 1990s or later, and probably have no Clinton nostalgia. Another way to think of it is that playing to the party base is a different thing when the base is expanding than when it's shrinking.

-- Mark Schmitt

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Ryan Thoreson reports on the conservatives' plans to revive anti-gay ballot initiatives as a wedge issue in 2008.

Jesse Singal susses out the message and motives of the new pro-war group "Freedom's Watch."

Terence Samuel calls out Bush's recent inclusion of Vietnam into the list of reasons why we should stay in Iraq.

And Brian Beutler asks what else FBI Director Robert Mueller knows about government abuse of the national security letters program.

--The Editors

UNDERMINING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE. I'll have a longer piece about the general subject coming up next week, but in the meantime Brian Beutler notes an interesting proposal by California Dems. In response to the California GOP's "21st century democracy for thee but not for me" initiative, the Democrats have a proposal that would award the state's electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Given current circumstances, it's not a terrible idea; it would still be unilateral disarmament, but at least the it would matter much less frequently, and would have a better chance of being balanced by a couple other states. I still probably wouldn't support it, but as a way of undermining the electoral college through initiative (assuming that Article II is read so as to permit this at all) it's probably the best one can do, at least without a trigger requiring other states to come on board before it goes into effect.

--Scott Lemieux

THE TWILIGHT REALM OF HIS OWN SECRET THOUGHTS. Given the inexplicable high regard in which he's held by the conservative foreign policy elite, Charles Krauthammer is always a pretty good indicator of what new, delusional strategy they're banking on this week. Today he suggests that now, rather than creating secure space for political reconciliation, the point of the surge is to buy time for Nuri al-Maliki's government to be replaced:

"We should have given up on Maliki long ago and begun to work with other parties in the Iraqi Parliament to bring down the government, yielding either a new coalition of less sectarian parties...

The choice is difficult because replacing the Maliki government will take time and because there is no guarantee of ultimate political success. Nonetheless, continuing the surge while finally trying to change the central government is the most rational choice because the only available alternative is defeat — a defeat that is not at all inevitable and would be both catastrophic and self-inflicted."

Just for fun, I'd really like to know which "less sectarian parties" Chuck's thinking of. My suspicion is that he hasn't a clue. In any case, do you think it ever enters Krauthammer's mind that claiming to support Iraqi democracy while at the same time speaking of its government as if it could be hired and fired at the president's pleasure might be somewhat contradictory?

--Matthew Duss

EATING (AND GROWING) LOCAL. I've got a piece up today over at In These Times on the rise of community urban agriculture programs. Agriculture and community gardens have a long history in urban areas, but a new generation of urban agriculture programs is focused on using agriculture to address food access and urban blight, and in the process, offering an new approach to food politics. Erika Allen, of Chicago's Growing Power put it this way:

"We’re using food to make social connections. It’s not just about growing food -- it’s about practices and how people form relationships, get comfortable with each other and learn to communicate through really owning the food system.”

In 1996 a coalition of food advocacy groups lobbied to put funding for urban agriculture programs in the farm bill, and while the version passed the House in July increased that funding, it was also changed from mandatory to discretionary. It remains to be seen what will happen to the bill in the Senate.

--Phoebe Connelly

CAUCUSES SHOULD STAY IN JANUARY. Iowa Secretary of State Michael Mauro says Democrats and Republicans have told him that they are committed to keeping the caucuses in January 2008.

"We are bound and determined to hold the thing in January," Mauro said in a phone interview this morning, reiterating the position he has taken all month. The parties "want it to be held in January."

Iowa Democrats are in Washington this weekend to negotiate the final date for the caucuses, now scheduled for Jan. 14. "This Saturday we will work to solve the fluidity of the calendar and our Chairman Scott Brennan has been in touch with his counterparts in New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina to work out the best solution possible," Iowa Democratic Party communications director Carrie Giddens said.

Brennan and Iowa Gov. Chet Culver have previously sought to reassure voters that the caucuses would remain in 2008. "The 2008 presidential campaign has been fast and furious in Iowa, but the nominating calendar will start in 2008 with the Iowa Caucuses," said Brennan in an Aug. 10 statement.

"The caucuses need to be in January," agreed Gov. Culver.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE SURGE. Kevin Drum compiles the relevant data and notes that along virtually all significant metrics the surge has failed to stop things from becoming worse that they were in 2006. It seems worth emphasizing that 1) the only way that the surge or any other military strategy can work is if it leads to a stable Iraqi state, and 2 )the chances of a stable Iraqi state emerging as the supply of basics like electricity and gas get even worse -- with the devastating economic consequences that will inevitably follow -- are roughly on a par with the chances of the Natural Law Party winning the 2008 Presidential election. This isn't the "fault" of the surge per se -- given the number of troops available, protecting the national power grid, oil and gas pipelines, etc. in the absence of a viable state is impossible. But the lesson is that the surge is wasting money and lives to try to accomplish goals that it is beyond the ability of American military power to accomplish.

By the way, doesn't the decline in diesel fuel supplies create a problem for that amazing so-atavistic-it's-new generator-powered electricity system that Ken Pollack told me about? Maybe they run on the same essence de unicorn that will cause a political reconciliation to emerge out of nothing.

--Scott Lemieux

THE MAN BEHIND CRANDALL CANYON. Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. has publicly attacked Crandall Canyon's co-owner, Robert Murray: "I thought the way the families were treated was unconscionable and they deserved better," he told The Salt Lake Tribune.

Huntsman is one of the few political leaders in Utah or elsewhere who has gone after the mine's co-owner -- despite numerous lapses in safety standards at Crandall Canyon and a dodgy background. Murray had previously been an outspoken opponent of additional regulation of the coal industry, "even going as far as to call Sen. Hillary Clinton 'anti-American' for suggesting the nation needed a president who is for workers' safety," according to an August 7 Salt Lake Tribune article. Long before the August mining accident, which has entombed six workers, Murray had "made huge contributions to the GOP and (surprise!) got a troublesome mining safety inspector transferred," writes my friend Ron Rosenbaum on his blog. Murray had disappeared from public view in recent days and was, according to family members of lost miners, no longer "available" to them, writes Rosenbaum: "Find Him and Charge Him!"

--Tara McKelvey

START ASKING CANDIDATES ABOUT CONTRACEPTION! Cristina Page had a great op-ed in the Baltimore Sun this week, making a plea that when journalists question presidential hopefuls (of both parties) about their reproductive rights beliefs, that they specifically bring up contraception access.

Why? Because when the Republican presidential hopefuls speak to a roomful of forced-pregnancy advocates, they are doing everything but declaring their desire for a birth-control ban. These are things they're not saying in interviews with national media, or during the debates.

Before this year's National Right to Life conference, which several Republican frontrunners attended, NARAL issued a list of questions for the candidates, and made sure to ask about their position on access to emergency contraception. While the questions were predictably ignored, at the conference Romney declared, "I fought to define life as beginning at conception rather than at the time of implantation." He's essentially saying he opposes hormonal contraception methods, because they could prevent implantation. Which -- newsflash! -- isn't just emergency contraception. It's the Pill, the NuvaRing, the IUD -- a slew of birth-control methods. Page explains,

Mr. Romney's code, deciphered, meant, "I, like you, hope to reclassify the most commonly used forms of contraceptives as abortions." In fact, he told the crowd, he already had some practice redefining contraception: "I vetoed a so-called emergency contraception bill that gave young girls abortive drugs without prescription or parental consent."

And it's not just Romney. The other Republican candidates are also working to deny women birth control:

Presidential hopeful Sen. Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, beefed up his anti-contraception resume by co-sponsoring a bill to de-fund the nation's largest contraception provider, Planned Parenthood, by excluding it from Title X family planning for the poor. Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain's campaign officials boast he has "consistently voted against taxpayer-funded contraception programs." And Mr. McCain reports that his adviser on sexual-health matters is Sen. Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who leads campaigns claiming condoms are unsafe and opposing emergency contraception.

But Page and the repro-rights groups seem to be the only one talking about this issue. (Even the National Right to Life's crib sheet on the candidates doesn't feature their stance on contraception.) Yesterday the Washington Post had an article all about Romney and abortion, with nary a mention of birth control. It's time for the national media to start paying attention and quit narrowing reproductive rights issues down to abortion only. Because while the nation may be divided on how we feel about abortion rights, there is widespread and unequivocal support for contraception access. Moderate Republican voters should know that Mitt Romney wants to take away their birth control pills.

I'd also like to see the Democratic frontrunners highlighting this divide on contraception between them and the Republicans. If some political analysts are to be believed, single women are a highly coveted group of voters. And even 80 percent of self-described "pro-lifers" support contraception. The Democrats are with the vast majority of the country on this issue, and it's time for them to start shouting about it.

--Ann Friedman

URGH. I can't imagine this news will please the British, given that they've been complaining about excessive U.S. aerial bombing in Afghanistan:

A bomb dropped by a U.S. fighter jet was believed to have killed three British soldiers in southern Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defense said Friday. Two other soldiers were injured.

The ministry said the troops, from 1st Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment, were patrolling northwest of Kajaki in Helmand province on Thursday evening when they were attacked by Taliban insurgents.

The ministry said that ''during the intense engagement that ensued, close air support was called in from two U.S. F15 aircraft to repel the enemy. One bomb was dropped and it is believed the explosion killed the three soldiers.''

-- Robert Farley

THE WRONG QUESTION. Peter Rodman:

Military historians seem to be converging on a consensus that by the end of 1972, the balance of forces in Vietnam had improved considerably, increasing the prospects for South Vietnam’s survival. That balance of forces was reflected in the Paris Agreement of January 1973, and the (Democratic) Congress then proceeded to pull the props out from under that balance of forces over the next 2 1/2 years -- abandoning all of Indochina to a bloodbath.

I don't think that Rodman is quite wrong, but he's extremely misleading. I suspect that most major historians of the Vietnam War would concur that, as long as the United States continued to pour blood and treasure into the war, South Vietnam could have been propped up indefinitely. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces had more or less contained the expansion of the Viet Cong, although they had been unable to force it out of South Vietnamese territory. South Vietnamese ground forces were consistently torn apart by their North Vietnamese counterparts when they encountered them in anything like equal terms, but heavy US air support and the deployment of relatively small numbers of U.S. ground troops could hold off conventional North Vietnamese offensives.

None of that means much, though. U.S. military action had utterly failed to do the two things necessary to producing even a draw in the war; destroy North Vietnamese will to unify the country, or create a South Vietnamese state that could stand against the North on its own. By 1972, the North Vietnamese had been fighting for over thirty years for a unified, independent Vietnam, and they showed no indication of giving up anytime soon. They agreed to the settlement of 1972 because they understood a full U.S. ground withdrawal was the death knell of South Vietnam; they had offered nearly identical terms four years earlier, on the same understanding. Moreover, everyone else understood this, too. The Christmas Bombing was designed more to assure the South Vietnamese political class that they weren't being abandoned than to bring the North to the table. There's ample evidence that Kissinger and Nixon understood the peace in 1972 to be strictly temporary, and in fact fighting between the North and South began almost immediately after the armistice. As for the fates of Laos and Cambodia, continued U.S. presence in South Vietnam had done little to stem Communist gains in the former, and had abetted the rise of the Khmer Rouge in the latter.

In narrow military terms, the U.S. had the capacity in 1972 to prevent South Vietnamese collapse, and in some sense the South Vietnamese position was stronger than it had been during parts of the 1960s. But these facts are almost irrelevant to the conclusion of the war; the North Vietnamese weren't going to give up, and knew that they could force the U.S. to pay a higher price than it was willing to by continuing the fighting. Everyone on all sides of the conflict understood these basic points, and only someone who utterly refuses to acknowledge the political dimension of military conflict could misunderstand the situation as badly as Rodman.

--Robert Farley

HUCKABEE'S WAITING GAME. Des Moines, Ia. -- Rather than kicking his Iowa campaign up a notch, second-place Ames Straw Poll finisher Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas downsized his Iowa operation to just three paid staffers in the wake of his low-budget achievement.

"Right now were back down to three. We had, gosh 16 or 18 here for the Straw Poll," Huckabee Iowa campaign manager Eric Woolson told the Iowa Indepenent. "Those folks have kind of scattered to the four winds."

Woolson, who also serves as the Iowa campaign's communications director and press secretary, said the lean campaign had imported much of the rest of its pre-Ames staff from other Huckabee offices around the nation in the weeks leading up to the Straw Poll. "We had four folks out from New Hampshire, we probably had 8 or 10 people from Little Rock, so we probably had closer to 20. This pace was packed!" he said, gesturing around the campaign's small downtown Des Moines headquarters, which has plate-glass windows that overlook a busy street and advertise the candidate to passersby. "Some full-time volunteers came in from a couple of different states, so we were really packed for the Straw Poll."

"Obviously, we'll ramp back up for caucus time," he continued.

Huckabee, who will return to Iowa next week for The Lance Armstrong Presidential Cancer Forum in Cedar Rapids, has been traveling widely since coming in second in the poll and is making the most of his national media appearances, which the campaign says are helping to bring in much-needed financing.

"Iowa is not really a fertile state for fundraising," Woolson explained. "Iowans expect you to spend money, not raise money."

"Money doesn't replace time, it doesn't replace message, it doesn't replace grassroots orginazation," he added. "It can buy you some grassroots organization."

Endorsements have also started to pour in, he said, though for now the campaign is keeping the Iowa ones under wraps.

The campaign today announced a string of New Hampshire endorsements following a Huckabee visit to the Granite State.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WAR PHOTOGRAPHY. More than 90 percent of soldiers survive their wounds in the Iraq war. This is, of course, a positive development. But recovery is a long, difficult process often done in isolation. The producers of a new HBO documentary, "Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq," which will air in September, and photographer Nina Berman, who is showing her work at the Jen Bekman Gallery in New York, are hoping to change that. Their images of maimed soldiers, trying to rebuild their lives after the war capture the experience, are searing. In one of Berman's photos, a 21-year-old bride is standing next to a badly disfigured groom at their Illinois wedding. Her expression is blank. His is unreadable: He lost his nose and chin in a suicide-bomb attack. These two projects are long overdue.

The Iraq war has been one of the most obsessively documented -- by journalists and soldiers alike -- yet the picture of post-war recovery is still murky for most Americans. It has just not been something that people want to deal with (as Holland Cotter pointed out in the Times, the photo of the Illinois wedding couple was shot on assignment for People magazine but was not used for the story; instead, the photo editors chose a more upbeat picture of the wedding party). But these experiences are part of the Iraq war.

At a memorial service I attended in Fort Lewis, Washington, on August 8, two slain soldiers, Cpl. Rhett Butler, 22, of Fort Worth, Texas, and Cpt. Brandon M. Craig, 25, of Earleville, Maryland, were honored. Evergreen Chapel was filled with survivors -- soldiers who had been to Iraq -- as well as soldiers who were on their way. Many of them walked with the help of crutches, or had bandaged arms and swollen feet poking out of casts, or were otherwise stitched up, showing in a relatively minor way that the effects of the war reach beyond the death ledgers -- and has yet to be tallied. It is possible these two new shows, "Alive Day" and Berman's photo exhibit, are signs that Americans are now more willing to look at lingering aspects of this war.

--Tara McKelvey

THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE IS GETTING INTERESTING. In Pakistan, that is. There, the Supreme Court, headed by the recently restored Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, has cleared the way for the immediate return to Pakistan of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, whom Gen. Pervez Musharraf removed in 1999 in a bloodless coup. Musharraf had forced Sharif into a 10-year exile, which he's been taking in Saudi Arabia. In elections widely believed to have been rigged, Musharraf "won" Pakistan's presidency in 2002.

Sharif is a rival not only to Musharraf, but also to former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who is said to be the U.S. choice for a power-sharing arrangement with Musharraf. Already compromised by his alliance with the U.S. in the so-called "War on Terror," Musharraf was recently weakened further by the unrest that followed his removal of Chaudhry from the Supreme Court; clashes spread across the country, forcing him to return the chief justice to the bench. Word was that Musharraf wanted Chaudhry out ahead of the coming national elections in order to allow the general to carry on as head of the armed forces while also serving as the head of state -- a violation of Pakistan's constitution. Apparently, Chaudhry has some fondness for the rule of law.

The return of Sharif could be a big fly in the ointment of the purported U.S.-backed power-sharing deal, which was already looking like a "solution" of dubious character to the instability of one of South Asia's two nuclear powers. Sharif is said to intend to lead his party in parliamentary elections this fall, and declared to Reuters today, “It is the beginning of the end of Musharraf.”

Iraq may soon be yesterday's news.

--Adele M. Stan

A FAREWELL, AND THANKS. The Prospect staff would like to say a hearty thank-you to Sam Rosenfeld, who recently left the magazine to pursue a graduate degree in history at Harvard. Sam spearheaded our site re-design this spring, edited this blog during it's award-winning year, and commissioned/edited/wrote hundreds of amazing articles.

We wish him the best of luck as he transitions to academia, a far more lucrative career than journalism, to be sure. He'll be missed around the office and at happy hour, but is likely to continue to post on TAPPED once he's settled in Cambridge.

With Sam's exit, we're joined by a new associate web editor, Phoebe Connelly, who was previously the managing editor at In These Times. I've taken over Sam's former role as web editor, and hereby pledge to uphold TAP Online's proud tradition of counter-counterintuitivism and anti-wank.

--Ann Friedman

SAVE THE MOUNTAINS! Democrats are starting to issue statements condemning the administration's new rule allowing coal mining companies to blast the tops off mountains and deposit them in streams, but if you're looking for citizen action on the subject, I am reliably informed that ilovemountains.org, a site produced by Appalachian Voices and former Howard Dean-campaign blogger Mathew Gross, is your go-to site for the fight against mountaintop removal.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

A PET PEEVE. Dear Pollsters,

Al Gore is not running for president. He is not going to run for president. Could you please stop running polls with him in the race? Thanks ever so.

Most gratefully yours,

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WAITING FOR GARDOT. I'm not sure this topic is even TAPPropriate, but since it's August, what the hell: On Sunday night, my wife and I caught Melody Gardot -- whom we recently discovered on XM Radio -- in concert at World Live Café in Philly. Of the hundreds of live concerts I've seen -- from the Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense" tour 20 years ago to the Old 97's 20 days ago -- this was the best. (The Café is also a superb venue.)

Forget Dido or even Norah Jones: If there's any justice, Gardot's stirring, soulful voice will become the female voice of the decade. Her first album, Worrisome Heart, is fantastic, and the songs she performed from it Sunday night, including the title track and "Goodnite," were surpassed only by her moving covers of "Summertime" from Porgy & Bess, and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Judy Garland's got nothing on her.

And what a stage presence Gardot has -- not to mention a compelling personal story. (At 19, she survived getting hit by a car while riding a bike, and still uses a cane.) Trust me when I say that if you're in Manhattan this Saturday you'll never spend a better $11 than seeing her at Joe's Pub.

--Tom Schaller

THIS IS A STRANGE COMPETITION. Hans at Strategic Security Blog notes that very recently both the British and Chinese governments have declared themselves to have the smallest nuclear arsenal of any NPT recognized nuclear power. After doing some digging, Hans concludes that either may be right; while secrecy precludes a determination of the exact number of warheads, both countries probably have around 200 total. The Chinese have more operational warheads than the British, although all of the British warheads are on extremely secure Trident missiles.

This likely won't be a competition for long, as the Chinese are expected to increase their warhead levels, while the British will likely stay at the same level or decline.

-- Robert Farley

WASTED OPPORTUNITY. Matt points us to data demonstrating that, according to current state-by-state polling, Hillary Clinton would beat the GOP's strongest candidate, Giuliani, fairly handily. Particularly given that Giuliani isn't terribly likely to actually win the GOP nomination, I think this should make clear that claims that Clinton is "unelectable" are nonsense.

On the other hand, I think this also explains why those of us who aren't Clinton supporters are somewhat frustrated by the fact that she's the likely nominee. Presidential elections are (at least given that primaries weed out the most obviously "unelectable" candidates) determined much more by structural factors than by individual campaigns, and structural conditions are likely to be very favorable for the Dems in '08. In this context, it's obviously regrettable to run the most centrist major candidate in an election in which a more progressive one would remain a favorite. Compounding this, of course, is the fact that Clinton is a centrist who for the most part won't be perceived as more centrist than the other candidates.

--Scott Lemieux

SPEAKING OF LOBBYISTS. Christina Davidson of IraqSlogger (via TPM Muckracker) has this important scoop on the way Republican lobbyists are trying to influence American foreign policy and oust the Prime Minister of Iraq, and how the firm of America's former envoy to Iraq is now working against the Iraqi leader backed by the American president:

Republican lobbyists with close ties to the Bush administration are aiding and supporting the efforts of an Iraqi opposition leader who is calling for the ouster of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The anti-Maliki crusader is former Iraqi interim prime minister Ayad Allawi, and the Washington firm retained to spearhead U.S.-focused efforts on his behalf is the Republican powerhouse group of Barbour, Griffith, and Rogers (BGR).

BGR International's president is Robert Blackwill, the one-time White House point man on Iraq, holding the title of President Envoy to Iraq in 2003 and 2004....

IraqSlogger has learned BGR's work for Allawi includes the August 17 purchase of the Web site domain Allawi-for-Iraq.com.

In recent days, BGR sent hundreds of e-mail messages in Allawi's name from the e-mail address DrAyadAllawi@Allawi-for-Iraq.com.

Amid growing U.S. and Iraqi frustration with Maliki's leadership and speculation about whether President Bush might welcome Maliki's departure, President Bush made a forceful statement of support for Maliki....

Allawi is not new to the world of Washington lobbyists.

In 2004, while interim Iraqi prime minister, Allawi spent nearly $400,000 with the Washington lobbying firm of Theros and Theros....

BGR has another major Iraqi client: the Kurdistan Regional Government.

U.S. intelligence sources also have little faith in Maliki, and some Democrats are calling for his resignation, so it's not clear that the effort to remove him is entirely a bad thing, though the idea that there is some non-sectarian individual who can unify the country is probably fallacious, and the search for one could be damaging to the already fragile Iraqi government. The one thing that is completely clear, though, is that the one place Iraq has suceeded in establishing something like national normalcy is inside Washington. Electricity in Baghdad may be down to just two to six hours a day, thanks to the militias that run the electric power switching stations as political power bases, but the Iraqis now have teams of Washington lobbyists, just like the Turks and Israelis.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MORE UNHINGED CONSERVATIVES. It's easy to forget that there's a large contingent of conservatives who think we're at war with an entire religion. Really. Over at the National Review, Mark Krikorian makes the following prediction (via Josh Patashnik at The Plank):

When Iran's Islamic regime finally unravels, some significant number of nominal Muslims will quickly become apostates, embracing Bahai or Zoroastrianism or Christianity (or Buddhism or even Judaism). As this becomes a more widespread and public thing, some of the many remaining fundamentalists will start beheading newly Christian school children and raping newly Zoroastrian women and blowing up newly constructed Bahai temples, intensifying the existing popular disgust with the Islamic faith and thus accelerating conversions to other faiths.

Eventually, as the number of former Muslims begins to constitute a large percentage of the population, the various keepers of Islam will see the need for a new version of the faith that people won't abandon -- thereby ushering in the long-awaited but ever elusive "moderate" Islam, where jihad really does mean nothing more than spiritual struggle, where the many problematic suras and hadiths are explained away as historical artifacts. Muslims won't make this change if they don't have to, but they will when the only alternative is the disappearance of Islam.

Moving past the patently ridiculous idea that a change of regime in Iran would lead people to renounce the religion they've followed for more than a thousand years, this is mainly interesting because it reflects the assumption that we're fighting an entire religion--that there's something inherent in Islam as it is practiced across the middle east that makes all Muslims our enemies. It's an absurd idea and one that we should try to ensure stays as far from policy-making as possible, but large segments of the conservative commentariat accept it as gospel and that's downright scary.

--Sam Boyd

AT LEAST HE'S HONEST. This essay, published by Family Security Matters (an arm of the influential Center for Security Policy) really has a to be read in its entirety to be believed, but a few quotes should give you a feel for it:

By elevating popular fancy over truth, Democracy is clearly an enemy of not just truth, but duty and justice, which makes it the worst form of government. President Bush must overcome not just the situation in Iraq, but democratic government ....

If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestige while terrifying American enemies.

He could then follow Caesar's example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.

The author, Philip Atkinson has since been completely scrubbed from FSM's Web site, but he was listed as a "contributing editor." This needs to be a bigger issue, if only to make clear just how nuts some people on the right can be. Will the major media outlets pick this up? I hope so, but somehow I'm not optimistic.

--Sam Boyd

NEWBIES AT THE CAUCUSES. Since I noted the stories of some women who were being drawn deeper into Iowa's intensive political architecture by Hillary Clinton and who had not caucused before, I should also note that between 40 and 60 percent of caucus-goers each election cycle are first-time caucus goers, and that it's not unsual to meet people who've never caucused before at events. Because only about 6 percent of eligible cacucus-goers attend the meetings, and because the make-up of that 6 percent changes with each election, all the candidates have to win over experienced caucus-goers while also attracting new ones. Clinton, unsurprisingly, appears to be bringing new women into the caucus orbit. Barack Obama, for his part, has been attracting loads of younger Iowans to his events, and his campaign is hoping to see their enthusiasm spill over on caucus-night. Already, the percent of young Iowans caucusing jumped markedly from 2000 to 2004:

According to caucus entrance polls taken by the national poll team of Edison/Mitofsky, 17 percent of 2004 Iowa Democratic caucus participants were under the age of 30. That was a four-fold increase in numbers of young caucus goers, compared with the 2000 Democratic Caucus, when these younger voters accounted for 9 percent of all participants.

Meanwhile, Bill Richardson has been reaching out to the state's Hispanics, with hopes of drawing new caucus-goers from that small but growing population.

No one can yet predict which of these efforts will be most successful. But it seems entirely possible that all of them will meet with enough success that the caucuses this January (December?) will be thronged by a record-breaking crowd.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE CULTURE OF CORRUPTION IN ILLINOIS. A reader writes in to point out that, despite Barack Obama's good intentions and successful sponsorship of what Ruth Marcus yesterday called "a far-reaching ethics and campaign finance bill in the Illinois state Senate", the campaign finance laws now on the books in Illinois remain much in need of reform. The Brennan Center for Law and Justice at New York University Law School in February called Illinois campaign finance laws, even after Obama's reform attempts, the "Worst in the Midwest." According to the Center's February release:

The study finds that an absence of any campaign contribution limits or public financing, limited disclosure, and poor enforcement of existing campaign finance laws are pushing campaign costs through the roof and fueling a pay-to-play culture that threatens to undermine public confidence in state and local government.

“Illinois has long been proud of its brass-knuckles, results-oriented political culture. Reform for its own sake has never been a fashion. Yet a look at Illinois’s campaign finance laws, in the context of the rest of the Midwest and the rest of the country, is sobering,” said Suzanne Novak, Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center and the lead author of the report.

“Illinois is one of the only places in America where literally anyone can walk in the door and spend whatever they want to influence the outcome of an election. The system is almost an open invitation to corruption,” said Novak....

“Illinois has chosen to forgo almost any regulation of campaign money in the hope that full disclosure will create enough incentive for politicians and special interests to avoid ethical impropriety. Unfortunately, the disclosure system is so riddled with loopholes that tens of thousands of dollars can move from lobbyists to politicians without attracting any public notice,” continued Novak.

When it comes to campaign finance laws, the devil really is in the details, which can rapidly render even the best-intentioned reforms meaningless. That said, I can't imagine that any one of the Democrats now vying for their party's presidential nomination would be so corrupt as to appoint a former mining industry lobbyist as deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior, as George Bush did, with the predictable and enraging result that "The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation on Friday that would enshrine the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE ANTI-LOBBYIST. To Ruth Marcus's excellent, beyond the rhetoric column on the Democratic presidential candidates' records with regard to campaign finance reform and lobbying -- which concludes that "Obama leads the pack" on this issue -- I have only this to add:

That's the front of Barack Obama's downtown Des Moines headquarters. Every one of his nearly 30 offices across the state has a similar sign. Obama has, writes Marcus, "co-sponsored bills to overhaul the presidential public financing system and public financing of Senate campaigns." I expect we're going to be hearing a lot more on this issue.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

AIR WALDMAN. Tomorrow Paul Waldman will be on The Young Turks radio show discussing his column today on the Petraeus report.

Listen on Air America Radio at 7:30 a.m. Eastern on Thursday morning.

--The Editors

MS. PRESIDENT & THE GIRL SCOUTS. Also at the Corn Boil in Clinton, Iowa, I met some Girl Scouts -- Haley, Hunter, Cameron, and Chrissy -- who were set to be given a merit award by Sen. Hillary Clinton for the "Fit and Fabulous" program they'd run for girls at the local YMCA. More interesting than this little act of off-stage politicking -- Clinton gave them their "Silver Award" before taking the field to speak, and I'm sure the whole troop's parents will be talking about it for days -- were the badges some of the older scouts were wearing.

We sure didn't have those back when I was a Girl Scout. As it turns out, the Ms. President Patch was launched in 2002, in collaboration with The White House Project, according to the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.:

The White House Project Ms. President Patch For All Ages

Do you want to see a woman in the White House one day?

The White House Project, an organization that is changing the way people think about women in leadership roles, worked with Girl Scouts of the USA to develop the Ms. President Patch. Take time to celebrate those women who have paved the way in social and political reform, as well as to learn about those who are on the frontlines of government today....Girls at each age-level may participate in any number of activities they choose in order to earn the patch.

I wonder to what extent the five-year-old patch now acts as a kind of ongoing reminder to everyone who deals with scouts who wear it of Clinton's campaign. Certainly there's no risk of some other woman becoming Ms. -- or Madame -- President next year.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BAIT AND SWITCH. Sara Mead alerted me to her Higher Ed Watch blog through the New America Foundation today, and although she wrote this post on veterans education benefits last week, it's still good stuff.

She talks about how veterans come back to find the promised benefit only pays for about 75 percent of the cost of tuition at a public 4-year university, not including books and housing. What's more, these veterans are asked to pay $1,200 out of pocket and up front. She says that "the fact fewer than 10 percent use all their education benefits suggests it’s low." Her analysis concludes:

But there’s a deeper issue here as well—the widening class divide in higher education access. Rising college costs, stagnant aid, and the elimination of high-wage/low-skill jobs have priced many from low-income and working class families out of the public four-year college market (forget about private colleges and universities!), leaving community college, trade school, or the military as their only options for higher education. Meanwhile, affluent parents go to ever greater lengths to get their children into expensive slots at the most elite colleges and universities.

This is an underreported issue, and most don't realize how little the GI Bill is actually providing. When Senators Clinton, Murphy and Webb introduced legislation to make the bill more comprehensive, the administration said it would cost too much. It's typical that we're willing to spend money on defense but not education for those that do the dirty work of war.

--Kay Steiger

MAN-CHILD IN A BUBBLE. This aspect of Bush's attempts to prevent any of that nasty "dissent" from sullying his rallies [via The Talking Dog] is particularly remarkable:

But that does not mean the White House is against dissent -- just so long as the president does not see it. In fact, the manual outlines a specific system for those who disagree with the president to voice their views. It directs the White House advance staff to ask local police "to designate a protest area where demonstrators can be placed, preferably not in the view of the event site or motorcade route."

I'm not sure that sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "la-la-la-la-I can't hear you" is really a good theory of governance, but it certainly explains a great deal about how the administration operates ...

--Scott Lemieux

CLINTON'S APPEAL TO THE NON-COLLEGE EDUCATED. Clinton, Ia. -- Survey after survey shows Hillary Clinton wiping the floor with Barack Obama when it comes to attracting non-college educated Democratic voters, especially white women who haven't gone to college. At Iowa State Rep. Polly Butka's 12th Annual Corn Boil fundraiser on Saturday, the reasons for that appeal started to become clearer. Namely, Clinton is using her stump speech to specifically recognize the non-college-educated as a constituency that needs help. Said Clinton:

And one more thing we’ll do is were going to have work opportunities for people who don’t go to college, because -- you know what? -- most people of any age group don’t go to college and graduate and I’m tired of them being left out.

Let’s have more skills programs and apprenticeship programs. Let’s help hard-working young men and women who built things like this [gestures around stadium] and keep our economy going, that were going to take care of them as well.

This statement was met with stronger applause from the audience of several hundred, arrayed in the stands of a Little League baseball stadium, than was her speech's section on making college more affordable.

After her speech, Clinton was mobbed by people trying to get her autograph and to take pictures with her. I talked with some of them, and found that she is -- just as Tom Schaller has predicted -- attracting new women into the political system. Angi Determan, 43, of Camanche, has never caucused before but says she's probably going to caucus this year, along with her sister, who has also never been to the caucuses, because of Clinton. "She's great," said Determan, a purchasing manager at a long-term health facility. "She's so much for the middle class, too. She's not just for the wealthy." Already, Determan had turned up for the fundraiser, at which several presidential candidates spoke, because of Clinton. She saw it as a teaching moment for her girls, Kaitlyn, 12, Morgan, 11, and Madison, 5, who accompanied her to the event. "I want them to see they can do anything," she said.

Danica Baker, 31, a writer from Clinton who'd come to the fundraiser with her young, wheelchair-bound daughter, was also attracted to the idea of Clinton as a breaker of the glass ceiling. "I think Hillary Clinton is great," she said. "I'd love to see the first woman president." Baker's friend Danielle Judd, 35, a physical therapy assistant, concurred. "We need new things," she said. "We need something that will update us." Neither woman had caucused before, either. But, thanks to Clinton, they now might.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHY NOT GO ALL THE WAY? Barack Obama is getting some flak from his opponents for coming out in favor of some mild alterations in the Cuba embargo. So my question is, why not go all the way and advocate ending the embargo completely?

But we can't annoy those Cuban-American voters, can we? Gotta prove we're tough on Castro! The collective cowardice from both parties on this issue is truly stunning. If there was ever a policy that we can all agree has been a complete failure, it's this one. Anyone who thinks that after 45 years, if we just hold out a little longer we'll crush Fidel's will, has to be insane. And the only voters who care so much about this that they'll vote against anyone who opposes the embargo are aging Cuban exiles who are utterly devoted to the Republican Party anyway.

Here's a golden opportunity for Obama to show that new thinking he keeps telling us about. What if he said this: "After 45 years, we know the embargo is not working. My opponents are too afraid of losing a few votes to tell you the truth. But I'm not afraid. I will tell you the truth. Let's do what we're doing with China: engage the Cubans, trade with them, show them the virtues of capitalism and democracy. I'd like to see any of my opponents tell us just how continuing a policy that has failed for nearly half a century is in our interest or the interest of the Cuban people. This is why the public gets cynical about politics: when politicians won't do what they know is right because they're scared they'll lose a few votes. That's the kind of politics we need to put behind us." And so on. Not only would he be praised in editorial pages across the land for his courage, it would dovetail perfectly with the rest of his message.

And if Obama doesn't have the guts, why doesn't somebody else pick up the ball? John Edwards could say, "Barack keeps talking about change, but he won't even come out against the failed Cuba embargo."

The reason the candidates can't see the political advantage in this is that they're still taking a reductionist view of the electorate and their own candidacies. They look at an issue like this and say, the only voters who care about the embargo are the ones that favor it, so there's no advantage in opposing it. But doing so communicates something about who you are -- brave, innovative, etc. -- to everyone, whether this is their most important issue or not. It's a political winner. Too bad none of the Democrats see it.

-- Paul Waldman

MORE INSOLENCE. Over at the Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris responds to my criticism of the Monthly's college rankings at the behest of Kevin Drum, who agrees with me. My criticism was that the "research" component of the rankings is not scaled by size and so penalizes small schools for being small even if they produce a great deal of research relative to their size. Glastris defends the practice on both theoretical and practical grounds. First, the theoretical:

There's no reason to suppose that large schools would have a natural advantage over small schools in, say, recruiting and graduating low-income students. But there are reasons to believe that large schools have several legs up when it comes to doing cutting-edge research (decoding genes, exploring subatomic particles) and producing graduate students who are familiar with that research. Sure, such work can be done in small schools. It's also possible to make great films, design innovative software, or publish award-winning glossy magazines in small towns and provincial cities. But it doesn't happen nearly as often as it does in LA, Seattle, or New York, in large part because these large metro areas can support the thick labor markets and webs of interconnected companies that are required to do this kind of collaborative work easily.

This doesn't hold water at all. Glastris may very well be right that large schools have network effects that promote research, but, if this is the case, large schools will do well in the rankings even if size is corrected for. To use his example, if you divided the number of films and magazines produced in LA by the number of people who live there and did the same for Des Moines, LA would still come out ahead. In fact, the only way to know for sure if the large schools are in fact inherently better at producing research is to correct for size.

His second reason is practical:

Say you wanted to get rid of the bias towards large schools. To do that, you'd have to divide each institution's total PhD and research output by some other factor -- say, total faculty, or total number of faculty members teaching graduate students or doing research. The problem is that schools don't report faculty and researcher numbers in consistent ways. Some only count professors, not adjunct lecturers or researchers in university-based institutes, who often do much of the graduate-level teaching. Others count researchers -- say, at affiliated hospitals -- who never set foot in the classroom. Judging the research-and-PhD component by the reported number of faculty would give schools with the narrowest definition of faculty an edge.

I feel for him, but, if we accept that it would be better to adjust for size, this is not a sufficient excuse. No measure at all is better than one that vastly distorts reality while purporting to represent it. Let's say you didn't know the population of American cities. Would you try to measure their creativity by simply looking at the number of movies each produces? You could, but you wouldn't actually be producing any meaningful knowledge about where an aspiring filmmaker should move. Nor am I convinced that the methodological problem is insurmountable. What if they looked at the total number of graduate students (who do most research anyway)? Or the number of tenured faculty?

I'd be interested in his response and, for that matter, his explanation of why the rankings include the Peace Corps but not teach for America or Americorps, and what he says to people who point out that the inclusion of the ROTC numbers discriminates against schools with large gay populations. I'm pursuing this because I believe in the concept behind the rankings, and I think that, if they became more widely followed, they might encourage schools to do a variety of positive things. A world where administrators get bonuses for raising their Washington Monthly rankings as well as their U.S. News rankings would be a better one. But this can only happen if the ratings are credible and, right now, they aren't.

--Sam Boyd

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Paul Waldman casts a gimlet eye on the Petraeus report:

There has never been much dispute over the fact that throughout his career he has been a capable and accomplished, even brilliant, officer. But Petraeus was selected for his current job because of his willingness to support "the surge" (even today, saying it gives you that little shot of testosterone, the scent of victory wafting into your nose). And if he has any desire to keep his job, he will be sure to deliver the message the White House wants.

Read the whole thing here.

Alissa Quart champions Michael Winterbottom, director of this summer's A Mighty Heart, as "a filmmaker for our time." "Unlike Sicko's Michael Moore," Quart writes, "Winterbottom is interested in conditions and situations rather than in single issues, single villains, or a single dim-witted, belligerent president who dodged the draft and mangles grammar. Note -- it's available to subscribers only.

Also, check out Brian Beutler's article on the thermal science technology oil companies are using to put the squeeze on consumers at the pump.

--The Editors

HEIGHTEN THE CONTRADICTIONS! Now that Michigan may be moving its primary to January 15th, causing New Hampshire to move to, at the latest, the 8th and Iowa to move into December, it's worth noting that, crazy as this is, it has an upside. The runaway rush to be the first is unsustainable, having the ultimate effect of making the case for systematic reform, be it federal legislation or stricter party rules, irrefutable. After all, is there anyone who thinks Iowans voting in December of 2007 is a good thing? Of course I could be wrong and Iowans might be voting in July of 2011, but I think that probably won't happen. Breaking the current system is almost certainly the only way to achieve a sensible system in the future -- one where we don't start with two of the whitest states in the union and where we don't pick candidates a year before the election. Therefore I, for one, welcome our new December primaries.

--Sam Boyd

THE LEVEL OF ANALYSIS WE'VE COME TO EXPECT FROM THE NATIONAL REVIEW. Victor Davis Hanson, writing at The Corner, has the following completely vapid observation:

The world is not as you read. Here in Hillsdale, Michigan, teaching, and reading an alarmist account about global warming -- while freezing in an August downpour. Then turned to the supposedly horrendous reports of the economy and the 'smashing' effects of capitalism only to read Harvard now has a $34 billion endowment helped in no small part by this year's 23% rate of return on investments.

The performance of Harvard's endowment is a signifier of the economy's improvement. You couldn't make this stuff up. Hanson uses these alleged gaps between the media's portrayal of the world and his view of it to show that ... wait for it ... Iraq is improving. His evidence? A vague reference to "new reports of progress." Really though, if a cold rain August is all the evidence he needs to reject global warming is it any wonder he thinks we're winning in Iraq?

--Sam Boyd

THE FACES OF THE WOUNDED. The New York Times features an art exhibit with photographs of wounded Iraq war veterans on display at the Jen Beckman Gallery. The photos sampled by the Times are yet another reminder of the human cost of war, costs which will extend far beyond whatever day we are no longer in Iraq. The photographs are worth looking at.

--Kay Steiger

RECRUITMENT. The Times has an interesting article on African-American recruitment into the armed services:

That kind of rejection of military service as an option of young blacks throughout the country has resulted in a sharp drop in black recruitment figures since the war began. Defense Department reports show that the share of blacks among active-duty recruits declined to 13 percent in 2006 from 20 percent in 2001, the last year before the invasion of Iraq began to seem inevitable.

And while blacks continue to account for a larger share of the existing troop level than their share of the general population, as has been the case throughout the 34 years of the all-volunteer force, that margin is shrinking.

The sharpest decline in black recruitment has been experienced by the Army, which has the most troops deployed in Iraq; black recruits dropped to 13 percent of the Army’s total in 2006 from 23 percent in 2001. In the Marines, with the second-largest force in Iraq, the share of black recruits decreased to 8 percent from 12 percent in the same period.

As the article notes, there are a couple of things going on here. First, African-Americans as a group really hate the war, and disapprove of it at an 83 percent clip. It's much harder to recruit from a population that believes the war to be either stupid, fundamentally immoral, or both. Second, African-Americans have traditionally been concentrated in branches that focus on marketable skills, rather than in combat-oriented branches. As the focus of the Army and Marine Corps increasingly turns to combat, service becomes economically less attractive, not to mention more dangerous.

I'm kind of interested in the long term impact this will have on politics within the armed forces. We've learned over the past six years that, although military personnel lean right, there's more of a diversity of opinion than we might have expected. As recruitment continues to draw more from historically conservative populations and less from progressive ones (like African-Americans), I have to wonder if the political profile of the military will move to the right. This may not be manifested in support for the Bush administration or its anointed Republican successors, but could nevertheless prove problematic down the road.

--Robert Farley

FIRST TO GO. Were there ever any doubt about the Bush administration's contempt for the U.S. Constitution in general, and the First Amendment in particular, two stories from the morning papers stick it right in the reader's face -- not that we'd be inclined to do anything about it.

An extraordinary piece by the Washington Post's Peter Baker tells of a White House manual for dealing with protesters at presidential appearances. The manual was released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which got hold of it as evidence in a case brought against the federal government by a West Virginia couple who were arrested for wearing tee shirts bearing anti-Bush messages to a Bush event for which they had tickets. Among the tactics outlined in the manual is the creation of "rally squads" who will surround and obscure demonstrators from the cameras. While other attendees of presidential events are forbidden to carry any form of sign or banner, these form the rally squad's arsenal.

"These squads should be instructed always to look for demonstrators," it says. "The rally squad's task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protestors (USA!, USA!, USA!). As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site."

The good news: the federal government settled with the couple for $80,000 of your tax dollars. Oh, and she got back her FEMA job, from which she had been dismissed after the arrest. No admission of wrongdoing, though. A second story with a bit of good news: the AP reports that the Pentagon is shutting down its database that tracks anti-war groups. Those duties will be shifted to the FBI.

--Adele M. Stan

DNC DOLLAR DROUGHT. As I wrote recently for Salon, Hillary Clinton is building a campaign organization so large and complete that, if she’'s the nominee, she could tell Howard Dean and the DNC to go screw themselves. She won’'t need a name, a list, a dollar, or a volunteer hour from them. After the Denver convention is over, she can fly solo.

We rarely if ever hear criticism of Dean, whose “50 state strategy” has become a Teflon deflector shield against any possible criticism. (For the record, and to prevent the predictable pouncing of critics, in my book I advocate for the 50 state strategy.) For example, a month ago MyDD'’s Jonathan Singer reported fundraising totals for the national party committees. Though congressional Democrats are expected to out-raise their minority Republican counterparts, (as the Republican National Committee has the White House and the Democratic National Committee doesn'’t) party control hardly explains the glaring disparities.

When you subtract debts and obligations from cash-on-hand at the end of June 2007, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had $19,859,758 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s $5,756,425 -- —a ratio of about 3.5 to 1. On the House side, one cannot even compute a ratio because the National Republican Congressional Committee has net negative cash ($-2,343,962), while the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s enjoys a comfortable, $15,359,941 cushion. Yet the DNC is getting creamed by the RNC by a 6:1 ratio— $15,899,563 to $2,667,965. No matter how wisely or long-term the dollars raised are being invested by the DNC, it doesn'’t excuse getting out-raised by such ratios.

So, since nobody seems to be asking for an explanation, I will: Why is it that the DNC, despite the fact that the Democrats are the favored party a year out from the election for perhaps only the second time (1976, 2000) in
the past three decades,* despite President Bush’'s declining fundraising appeal, still getting whipped by the RNC?

*George H.W. Bush'’s numbers at this point 16 years ago scared Mario Cuomo from the race; and, after losing the Congress in 1994, Bill Clinton's re-election looked anything but certain 12 years ago this summer.

--Tom Schaller

AVERAGE INCOME. What surprised me most about this article was that average income had not, by 2005, recovered to the 2000 level. Noting a drop in median income wouldn't be much of a story, given the degree to which the Bush administration has stacked the deck in favor of the wealthy. But aside from the wealthy, economic growth during the Bush years really has been pretty anemic.

The Bush administration (and in general, conservative) line on this is that it's all the fault of the internet bust and September 11. From what I can tell, that involves pretending that the brief recession in 2001 was actually worse than any economic dip the country has suffered since the end of World War II.

Hilzoy has a bit more.

--Robert Farley

THE MORAL HAZARD MYTH. Repeating a frequent argument, a commenter to this thread says:

The structure of a universal care system should somehow promote and reward healthy living.

How does one deter the freeloaders who take poor care of themselves and then overuse the system for years on end (as sort of mental health therapy)? "It will not happen" is a questionable response - it happens now.

Frankly, this gets us to one legitimate critique libertarians have of universal health care: it can be used to bootstrap lots more nanny statism. I can live with that given the net positives of having a better health care system, but it's regrettable.

For this reason, however, it's worth noting that the argument is lousy, a subset of the utterly bizarre belief that medical care works according to similar incentives as markets for consumer goods.

As Malcolm Gladwell notes with respect to the claim that having health insurance (rather than paying for doctors out of pocket) represents a major moral hazard:

The moral-hazard argument makes sense, however, only if we consume health care in the same way that we consume other consumer goods, and to economists like Nyman this assumption is plainly absurd. We go to the doctor grudgingly, only because we’re sick. “Moral hazard is overblown,” the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt says. “You always hear that the demand for health care is unlimited. This is just not true. People who are very well insured, who are very rich, do you see them check into the hospital because it’s free? Do people really like to go to the doctor? Do they check into the hospital instead of playing golf?”

For that matter, when you have to pay for your own health care, does your consumption really become more efficient? In the late nineteen-seventies, the rand Corporation did an extensive study on the question, randomly assigning families to health plans with co-payment levels at zero per cent, twenty-five per cent, fifty per cent, or ninety-five per cent, up to six thousand dollars. As you might expect, the more that people were asked to chip in for their health care the less care they used. The problem was that they cut back equally on both frivolous care and useful care. Poor people in the high-deductible group with hypertension, for instance, didn’t do nearly as good a job of controlling their blood pressure as those in other groups, resulting in a ten-per-cent increase in the likelihood of death. As a recent Commonwealth Fund study concluded, cost sharing is “a blunt instrument.” Of course it is: how should the average consumer be expected to know beforehand what care is frivolous and what care is useful? I just went to the dermatologist to get moles checked for skin cancer. If I had had to pay a hundred per cent, or even fifty per cent, of the cost of the visit, I might not have gone. Would that have been a wise decision? I have no idea. But if one of those moles really is cancerous, that simple, inexpensive visit could save the health-care system tens of thousands of dollars (not to mention saving me a great deal of heartbreak). The focus on moral hazard suggests that the changes we make in our behavior when we have insurance are nearly always wasteful. Yet, when it comes to health care, many of the things we do only because we have insurance—like getting our moles checked, or getting our teeth cleaned regularly, or getting a mammogram or engaging in other routine preventive care—are anything but wasteful and inefficient. In fact, they are behaviors that could end up saving the health-care system a good deal of money.

None of this surprises me, because the argument also strikes me as illogical on its face. The thing is, being healthy is its own powerful incentive. Maybe I'm unusual, but even though I have decent health insurance I don't actually enjoy being sick, bedridden, in physical pain, spending time in doctor's offices, etc. Do people really think it's common -- even subconsciously -- for someone with a relatively healthy lifestyle to get health insurance and see that as an opportunity to go on that all Popeye's, deep-fried HoHos, and Cutty Sark diet they've been hankering for? I don't understand this reasoning at all. There may be room for some minor disincentives at the margin, but the idea that universal healthcare won't work because the possibility of being bankrupted by medical bills is the major incentive people have to be healthy is bizarre.

--Scott Lemieux

PETRAEUS TO REPORT ON SEPTEMBER 11th. Today, listening to the radio, I heard reiterated what the National Review reported yesterday after a media conference call with Republican presidential kinda hopeful Sen. John McCain: that Gen. David Petraeus will testify before the Senate about the contents of his vaunted report (which, according to whom you believe, he may or may not write himself) on September 11.

A caller to the Diane Rehm Show today asked Rehm's panel of defense policy experts -- Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress and Washington Post reporter Jonathan Weisman -- about the unseemliness of the timing, and all concurred that it was simply a matter of complications regarding the congressional schedule. Perhaps so (I'm not yet convinced), but I really think it should be rescheduled to any other day; I don't care if it's a Sunday.

The administration has exploited the pain of that memory one too many times. Even if that's not the intention here of some White House political genius, more than half of the population will never be convinced of that. So let us remember a horrible day when we all came together without linking it to the war that is tearing us apart.

--Adele M. Stan

TO INFINITY, AND BEYOND! Today's successful landing of the space shuttle reminded me of something I've been wanting to point out. If you're like most people, your memory of the great space race goes something like this:

1957: Soviets launch Sputnik. Americans get serious about education.
1961: JFK takes office, pledges to put a man on the moon in ten years.
1969: Neil Armstrong steps on the moon. Hooray! We win!

The only trouble is, that wasn't the whole story. In fact, for all the extraordinary achievement of our space program, except for the Big Enchilada of getting a man to the moon first, the Soviets pretty much kicked our asses at every other step along the way. Not only did they get the first satellite up, they had the first living being in space (Laika the dog, who sadly did not return to gambol in the Siberian snow), the first man in space, the first woman in space, the first person to orbit the earth, the first man-made object to orbit the sun, the first man-made object on the moon, the first object to "soft-land" (i.e. not crash) onto the moon, the first spacewalk, and the first object to orbit the moon and return to earth. (Here's a timeline of all this if you're interested.)

I don't know about you, but when I found all this out I was pretty surprised, since in my youth I didn't hear about any of it, with the exception of Yuri Gagarin being the first person in space. The story was one of unmitigated American triumph. For some reason, the one I found most challenged my view of it all is the fact that when the Apollo astronauts got to the moon, there was a Soviet spacecraft sitting there.

Again, I don't mean in any way to diminish the amazing things our scientists and astronauts accomplished. But it just goes to show, we tell ourselves the stories we want to hear.

--Paul Waldman

SHOOTING FISH IN A BARREL. Stanley Fish evidently doesn't know anything about politics. His column yesterday was filled with bizarre assertions. First, he claims that Hillary Clinton inevitably will win the nomination because... well because he says so. No actual evidence is offered. This, of course, means that "the only remaining big question is, Who should her running mate be?"

Fish then goes on to claim, without evidence, that:

Her running mate can't be a woman. But, on the other hand, he does have to be white, or at least kind of white. The pundits keep wondering whether the country is ready for a woman president or a black president; it sure isn't ready for a woman and a black on the same ticket. Nor is it ready for a woman and a Jew, which rules out Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania.

None of this is supported with any evidence whatsoever. He then goes on to claim that "the conventional wisdom is that even if Senator Clinton wins the nomination, she couldn't win the general election" (it is? I'm apparently missing a few memos) but that this is not correct. (I'm sure Senator Clinton will be relieved.) He supports this, bizarrely, by claiming she'll win, among other states, Louisiana where "the Bush administration has a bad odor." Never mind that the state supported Bush by a large margin in 2004 and has since lost several hundred thousand Democratic voters. This, he says, "leaves us where we are always left on election day -- watching Pennsylvania and New Jersey" -- yeah, if it's 1992. (And was NJ ever a competitive state in presidential elections?)

After endorsing the choice of various dull white men from Midwestern states (Jim Doyle, Evan Bayh) he considers Bill Richardson whom he describes as "unpolished" (uninformed would be more accurate). But, not content to have on paragraph in his column actually make sense, he describes Melissa Etheridge's question to Richardson about whether being gay is a choice as "sandbagging."

The column ends with what has to be the purest example of Broderism I've ever seen outside of an actual David Broder column:

So there's the list -- Warner, Bayh, Easley, Richardson, maybe Doyle. No one who sets the pulses racing, but no one, at least on the evidence so far, who would be a total mistake. The mistake would be if Senator Clinton decided to get creative and adventurous, but on the record there seems to be little danger of that.

I mean that as a compliment. Even conservative commentators have been saying that she is running a model campaign -- disciplined, prepared, thoughtful, calm, on message. One might call it presidential, which is a good reason, among many others, to elect her president.

If conservatives say it, it must be true. You'd think the world's best newspaper could afford someone who actually understands American politics, evidently you'd be wrong.

--Sam Boyd

MORE ON COLLEGE RANKINGS. A recent New York Times article discussed the shadow side of the U.S. News & World Reports annual college rankings: It is in the interest of the colleges to game them by, say, evaluating other colleges negatively or by inflating their own apparent applicant pool so as to allow the college seem more selective:

Indeed, the rankings are so influential, two decades after they were started, that one clause in the contract of Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, promises a $10,000 bonus if he can raise its standing. Frustrated college officials and high school guidance counselors say the magazine is not only reporting on how colleges perform, but is also changing their behavior as they try to devise gambits to scurry into the top ranks.

Take admissions. A college's acceptance rate, or the proportion of applicants it admits, counts towards its rank, and the more selective the college is, the better.

So some colleges try to increase the number of applicants they receive -- and turn down -- by waiving fees and dropping requirements. Some send out applications by e-mail, with most of the student's personal information already filled in. Others send out persistent e-mail appeals to high school sophomores, with breathless subject lines like "Time is running out."

"It's pumping up the numbers, it's making colleges look more selective, and it's contributing to the frenzy," said Robert J. Massa, vice president for enrollment at Dickinson College. "What if we become ridiculous and just go out to a shopping mall and hand out applications?"

Then there is that survey that asks college officials to rate other colleges and universities. The survey, which counts for 25 percent of a college's overall ranking, is the most heavily weighted factor.

That has spurred colleges to send glossy promotional brochures and updates on new programs to high-ranking officials at other colleges around survey time in hopes of impressing them. Despite such efforts, college officials say they suspect that some in their ranks deliberately downgrade their competitors to try to drive down their showing.

This is a pretty obvious and predictable outcome of a ranking system which has become influential over time, you might say. True. But the need for college rankings of this sort has an interesting economic story to tell, a story which may explain why not a single university or a college in this country is run as a for-profit enterprise.

Note how very difficult it is to measure the quality of a college education. Prospective students and their parents can't just go out to an education store, look at the course package and instantly judge how good it is. Neither can they buy just a little of the product for a conclusive quality or taste test, and the product can't be consumed passively but must be combined with the buyer's own work effort and talents. The only real way to get the information for quality assessment is to attend the college or the university for the full four years or so.

But this is an impractical way to learn about different colleges. Hence the need for rankings of the kind the U.S. News&World Reports provide. But these rankings are at best only proxies for the real quality measures which we can't obtain. And, as noted in the linked article, the rankings can be gamed.

How does all this relate to the non-profit status of colleges and universities? Consider the incentives for gaming the rankings for a for-profit university, or the more general question concerning its desire to increase the quality of the educational experience it provides. Nonprofit firms don't have claimants to their residual income (which would be called profit in a for-profit firm), because they have no owners. The extra income the firm makes stays within a firm, to be used in ways which may increase the quality of the firm's products. In contrast, the residual income of a for-profit firm is just good old profit and it is often in the shareholders' interest to have that distributed out as dividends rather than invested in difficult-to-measure quality improvements. If the quality of the firm's output is so tricky to measure in the first place, who is to say that this isn't the best approach?

What all that speculation boils down to is this: U.S. colleges and universities might be nonprofit firms because they provide a service which is very difficult to evaluate. For-profit firms would have added incentives to reduce the quality of the service, given that such quality reductions themselves would be hard to spot. It wouldn't even really matter if the for-profit firms acted in such a manner. All that is needed is that the buyers of higher education services place greater trust on the nonprofit form of colleges and universities.

Is there any political morale in this long and dry detour into economics? How about comparing the reality of the higher education industry (or industries such as health care) with the simplistic conservative jargon about "free markets" and their supposed omnipotent powers? Those markets never seem to contain nonprofit firms or information problems. Real economic markets are much more complicated and much more interesting.

--J. Goodrich

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Spencer Ackerman reports on the Bush administration's latest recipe for Iraq success:

Baghdad politics is outré. The new fashion is what's called "bottom-up reconciliation" -- that is, political advances in Iraq's 18 provinces meant to reveal a new spirit of Iraqi brotherhood. Expect to hear a lot about bottom-up reconciliation in next month's congressional testimony from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. And expect it to be as disingenuous as every other portrayal of political progress in Iraq.

Nationally there has been a target on McConnell's back ever since he was promoted to minority leader this year. He is, after all, one of President Bush's chief cheerleaders in the Senate. And for Democrats, a McConnell defeat holds a certain allure, retribution for then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's loss in 2004.

LUCKY DUCKIES! In addition to what Roy says, I'd like to highlight this odd part of Megan McArdle's counter to Ezra's attack on Giuliani's health plan:

Moreover, as a class, the old and sick have some culpability in their ill health. They didn't eat right or excercise; they smoked; they didn't go to the doctor as often as they ought; they drank to much, or took drugs, or sped, or engaged in dangerous sports. Again, in individual cases this will not be true; but as a class, the old and sick bear some of the responsibility for their own ill health, while younger, healthier people have almost no causal role in the ill-health of others.

Virtually any health care thread will eventually produce someone making this kind of argument: We shouldn't pay for health care for sick adults because it's their fault for smoking, drinking, being fat, or some other lack of virtue. What these arguments leave out, however, is that 1) everybody dies regardless of their personal habits, and 2) people who die tend to get sick and rack up lots of health care costs at the end of their lives. For this reason, for example, it's far from clear that smokers are more expensive consumers of health care; smokers consume more health care when they're alive but also die earlier, which saves expenses later on. And then when you consider that as a class smokers are also much less expensive in terms of Social Security ... this argument is pretty clearly specious.

What's really going on here, in most cases, is what John Holbo in his classic review of Dead Right called "dark satanic millian liberalism": To some libertarians, the fact that letting poor people die of preventable illnesses will compel them to be ascetic, conformist, risk-averse drones is a feature, not a bug. This puritan wing of the libertarian movement is especially easy to reject, and I don't know about you, but for me it's not much of an argument against providing universal health coverage.

--Scott Lemieux

THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY'S COLLEGE RANKINGS ARE RIGGED. As part of TAPPED's continued commitment to counter-counterintuitivism I should point out that the "research" component of the Washington Monthly's much ballyhooed alternative college rankings are deliberately rigged in favor of large schools:

A school's research score is also based on three measurements: the total amount of an institution's research spending (according to the National Science Foundation); the number of science and engineering PhDs awarded by the university; and the number of undergraduate alumni who have gone on to receive a PhD in any subject. For national universities, we weighted each of these components equally to determine a school's final score in the category. For liberal arts colleges, which do not grant doctorates, baccalaureate PhDs were given double weight. As some readers pointed out last year, our research score rewards large schools for their size. This is intentional. It is the huge numbers of scientists, engineers, and PhDs that larger universities produce, combined with their enormous amounts of research spending, that will help keep America competitive in an increasingly global economy.[emphasis added]

That justification is powerfully lame. Is a school with 50,000 students and $500 million dollars in research spending doing more for the country than one that has 5,000 students and $250 million in spending? The rankings are ostensibly meant to help "alumni wanting to get a sense of their alma maters' commitment to the public interest" and "elected officials trying to think of ways to get more bang for the public bucks they're charged with spending on higher education." Yet wouldn't either of those groups care more the efficiency of the university than its overall size? Isn't a college that is small but extremely efficient at producing research more admirable than one that is vast, but only spends a small part of its resources on research?

My guess is that the decision not to control for size is a deliberate attempt to promote state schools. If size was taken into account, the overall rankings would almost certainly look more like the U.S. News rankings and therefore garner less attention for the Monthly. A less counterintuitive result would be less interesting and therefore less attractive to the Monthly's editors.

--Sam Boyd

MORE ON MITCH IN TROUBLE. To add to what Andrew Green says in his TAP Online piece today, Matt Gunterman of Ditch Mitch highlights a Washington Times article also suggesting that Mitch McConnell might be in serious jeopardy in 2008:

When the Washington Times is running stories about Senator Mitch McConnell’s extreme vulnerabilities in Kentucky, you know the buzz on him is not good inside the Beltway.

Take a look at the comments in this article by Larry Forgy, a Lexington lawyer and former Republican gubernatorial candidate who came within a hair of being elected governor in 1995. He’s adopting a very Pat Buchanan-esque populist Republican message. I think he’s taking the possibility of a run against McConnell very seriously. What does he have to lose? The McConnell branch of the Kentucky GOP already hates him, and the Fletcher and Nunn branches of the party would rally around him (thus Forgy would have a ready and energized base). He’d humiliate McConnell in the process by at least taking 30 percent of the votes (hell, you’d better believe I’d switch my registration to Republican to vote against McConnell in a primary), and in a perfect storm the little bugger might actually win that primary.

The best Democrats in Kentucky have been reluctant to throw their hats into the ring, because most everyone still believes that Jim Bunning's seat, which comes up in 2010, will be more vulnerable than McConnell. Nevertheless, with the support of an enthusiastic anti-Mitch crowd and what appears to be a series of events not developing in McConnell's favor, victory in 2008 is hardly unthinkable. McConnell's position as the Senate point man for the Bush administration isn't helping his cause, either. It's interesting that on opposition to McConnell on both the left and the right has developed out of national instead of state issues; the war, and immigration seem to be hitting him the hardest.

Green is right to note that McConnell has a lot of money and is a solid electoral strategist, so if I were forced to I'd probably bet on him keeping his seat, but if even McConnell's going to be in trouble it speaks very well of the chances for serious Democratic senatorial gains in 2008.

--Robert Farley

THINGS YOU CAN BLAME ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS FOR. According to Tom Tancredo, the real reason for the increase in violent crime in Newark, NJ, is -- just guess -- illegal immigration. He's encouraging families of victims to file a lawsuit against the city for allowing undocumented residents to live there. Nevermind that immigrants have lower crime rates than native born residents; Tancredo is properly demagogic enough to ignore that fact. Previously Tancredo blamed illegal immigrants for sex crimes against children since the seemingly unrelated date of 9/11. So what's illegal immigration's next victim going to be? Probably just happiness.

--Steven White

THE COURTS UPHOLD MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO KILL ZOMBIES (ON MY COMPUTER). The New York Times reported yesterday that, despite their continuing popularity, laws restricting the sale of violent video games have universally been found to be unconstitutional. This is, I think, a good thing. As Richard Posner, who wrote one early opinion, put it:

Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low ... It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.

It's not the biggest deal in the world, but it does make me feel good about my country.

--Sam Boyd

THE COMING FEDERALISM DIVERSION. As Republicans fight in the coming years to preserve an indefensible health care system, one argument is inevitably going to be that health care should be "left up to the states" rather than being addressed by a "one size fits all" federal solution. As Bush's actions yesterday make clear, however, this is unprincipled nonsense. Republicans have no problem with federal standards and programs in health care if they mandate a lower baseline for support than states would otherwise choose, involve funneling large amounts of subsidies to pharmaceutical companies, etc. As is almost always the case, federalism is simply a dodge to avoid discussion of substantive issues someone would rather not engage on their merits.

This argument will be necessary in health care debates because a rational, universal health care system will require federal intervention to succeed, but crying "federalism" is a lot easier than trying to defend a health care system that ensures less coverage for more money without better health outcomes than other comparable democracies.

--Scott Lemieux

A DANGER TO THEMSELVES. As has been reported in several places, Russia is resuming trans-oceanic bomber flights after a break of longer than a decade. Via Danger Zone, Richard Weitz at World Politics Review writes:

Russia's aging equipment and Russian air crews with less comprehensive training than their American or Soviet-era counterparts make the bombers more vulnerable to mechanical problems. During the Cold War, Soviet and U.S. bombers transporting nuclear weapons sometimes crashed, leading to costly environmental restoration programs and other hazards. At present, it is unclear whether they are carrying nuclear warheads on their patrols, though Putin's use of the term "combat duty" suggests such a possibility.

In a related story, Defense News is reporting that the Admiral Kuzentsov, the only aircraft carrier in the Russian Navy, has returned to service after an unexplained two year absence. Of course, Russian Navy exercises became very dangerous affairs in the early part of this decade, as the submarine Kursk exploded and sank with all hands, and a Russian admiral declared that his nuclear powered battlecruiser flagship "could explode at any moment". Giving that aging Russian ships have proven so unreliable, it's entirely reasonable to be concerned about long distance flights by aging Russian aircraft that may carry nuclear weapons. This effort to reassert national greatness may be pushing the Russian military beyond its capabilities, with dangerous results.

-- Robert Farley

MILITARY JUSTICE. Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan is scheduled to face a court-martial in Fort Meade, Maryland, this week. He is "the only military officer accused in the prisoner abuse scandal at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib," writes Fanny Carrier of the French Press Agency. His trial is being closely watched by military experts, lawyers, human-rights advocates and journalists -- for good reason. Military courts are a useful venue for people who are trying to learn more about a scandal like Abu Ghraib. Previously undisclosed evidence of detainee abuse as well as testimony describing the role of officers high in the chain of command have been revealed in the trials of people implicated in detainee-related abuse over the past couple of years -- along with documents that had been withheld from the media.

As it turns out, Jordan's court-martial may be less interesting than it had seemed: The main charges against him -- making a false official statement and false swearing and obstruction of justice -- have just been dropped. He had, for instance, been accused of lying to a military investigator, General George Fay, in 2004 when he claimed he had not personally seen incidents of detainee abuse. Fay got in touch with prosecutors on Sunday, writes the Associated Press's David Dishneau. Fay said he had made a mistake during a March pretrial hearing when he claimed he had read Jordan his rights during their 2004 interview. In fact, said Fay, he had not. As a result, the two significant charges were thrown out.

Fay is a familiar name to people who have been following the Abu Ghraib scandal. A reservist and former executive vice president of Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, Fay was considered to be an unusual choice as the head of an investigation into the detainee abuse. As human-rights attorney Scott Horton and other critics of the administration have pointed out, Fay was a financial supporter of the New Jersey Republican Party. Horton and others believe he was chosen for that reason. Horton told me that Fay's report was flawed in many ways. It was "whitewashing," Horton said. "During the interviews, [Fay] would say, 'Now if anyone saw anything and failed to intervene, they can be charged with a crime. Did anyone see anything and fail to intervene?'" Horton said. "They'd all say, 'No, sir!'"

By his own admission, Fay had not been as careful as he should have been in following legal steps during the investigation when he spoke with Jordan. As a result, the court-martial of Jordan will cover significantly less ground. It is good news for Jordan -- and disheartening for those who are hoping for a rigorous accounting of what happened at Abu Ghraib.

--Tara McKelvey

MY HANDS REMAIN UNWRINGED. To follow up on what Sam wrote below, I'm frankly not sure even what to say to Josh Patashnik's response to my post from earlier today. Essentially, he concedes the merits of the arguments Matt and I made, but argues that "it would be comforting to at least see a bit more hand-wringing and equivocation from Yglesias and Lemieux before condemning Wittes's piece" because Wittes -- unlike us -- is "grappling with the real conundrum here."

But the "conundrum" is perfectly straightforward. Senate Democrats acknowledged the need to update FISA and hammered out a deal. The administration reneged, and then the Democrats simply gave them what they wanted, and what they wanted was essentially a blank check. I don't think any "hand-wringing" is required to reject this legislation because 1) once these powers are given it's almost politically impossible to take them away, and 2) because I don't think unchecked, arbitrary executive power is an effective means of protecting national security, and our Constitution is based on the same premise. The solution, in this case, is worse than the status quo, and it's also extremely problematic to accede to the blackmail of crying "national security" every time the President chafes against legal restraints.

In addition, as I said last week it's a mistake to focus too much on the particular nature of the Bush administration. Obviously, it's especially foolish to give broad powers to a President who has demonstrated again and again that will push any powers to the brink of their limits (and in some cases, as with FISA, beyond them), but it would be unwise to trust any administration with this authority. This would be bad legislation under a President Clinton or Obama, just as it's bad legislation now.

--Scott Lemieux

COUNTER COUNTER COUNTER COUNTERINTUITIVISM. Over at The Plank Josh Patashnik criticizes Scott Lemieux and Matt Yglesias for their mockery of Ben Wittes's TNR piece in support of the much-derided warentless wiretapping bill. The only problem is that he doesn't actually disagree with them. No, he just wants "more hand wringing":

I'm not entirely convinced by Wittes's claim that the bill Congress passed was a sound one, but I also can't help but feel that Yglesias and Lemieux are being a bit cavalier in their dismissal of the need for expanded surveillance powers in the first place. There's probably no good way out of this dilemma (so perhaps a law with a strict sunset provision isn't such a terrible place to start), but it would be comforting to at least see a bit more hand-wringing and equivocation from Yglesias and Lemieux before condemning Wittes's piece.

It's not every day you see a call for more equivocation. The basic argument is just as silly. There isn't a choice between the bill that was passed and no change. Rejecting a proposal with obvious problems doesn't preclude passing a reasonable one. Both Matt and Scott make it clear they want a proposal with meaningful checks and balances because, without them, it doesn't matter what the law says, the executive will do whatever it wants. Witte is right that there are technical changes that need to be addressed, but for Patashnik to suggest that any bill that addresses them should be rejected only extremely reluctantly is absurd. Sometimes the cure is far worse than the disease, and when the cure is basically unlimited surveillance powers I don't need to equivocate very much before rejecting them.

--Sam Boyd

LIFTING THE VEIL. Lots of people are talking today about whether Karl Rove is attacking Hillary Clinton in order to boost Clinton's chances to become the Democratic nominee, on the assumption that she is the most beatable candidate. What's unusual about this is that some in the press (see the Los Angeles Times) are trying to discern Rove's motives by contemplating the idea that he might be attempting to get them to write a particular story, as opposed to just taking his words at face value. Back when Rove was considered a political genius, the press was much more likely to examine his words for their inherent wisdom and brilliance. Consider July 4, 2003, when during an appearance at an Independence Day parade, Rove made a big show, in front of reporters, of letting it be known that Howard Dean was the candidate Republicans saw as the weakest in the general election. Here's how the Washington Post reported it:

Rove Spends the Fourth Rousing Support for Dean
By Juliet Eilperin
July 5, 2003

Talk about lining up the competition. President Bush's chief political adviser has seen the possible presidential candidates among the Democrats and has found one he apparently thinks his man can beat: former Vermont governor Howard Dean.

Karl Rove tried to stir up enthusiasm for Dean marchers yesterday at the 37th annual Palisades Citizens' Association Fourth of July parade along the District's MacArthur Boulevard, which always attracts plenty of politicians.

As a dozen people marched toward Dana Place wearing Dean for President T-shirts and carrying Dean for America signs, Rove told a companion, " 'Heh, heh, heh. Yeah, that's the one we want,' " according to Daniel J. Weiss, an environmental consultant, who was standing nearby. " 'How come no one is cheering for Dean?' "

Then, Weiss said, Rove exhorted the marchers and the parade audience: " 'Come on, everybody! Go, Howard Dean!' "

Apparently, the idea that Rove said what he did because he wanted reporters to write that he thought Howard Dean was a weak general election candidate -- and not that he actually thought Howard Dean was a weak general election candidate -- hadn't occurred to Eilperin. And why was Dean so weak? At the time, the prevailing belief was that Republicans would easily caricature him as a liberal Northeastern elitist. So do you think they had an iota of doubt that they could do the same thing to John Kerry? Please. What's more likely is that they were actually afraid of Dean, because unlike most Democrats back then, he was of the opinion that when the other side hits you, you should hit back. Rove may not be as smart as people used to think he was, but he was smart enough to know that the Democrat considered most "electable" in 2004 was the one he'd have the easiest time eviscerating, and the more Democrats based their primary votes on electability, the better off the Republicans would be.

Point is, now that all of Rove's grand plans have come crashing down, the veil has been lifted from reporters' eyes. It's not that they didn't consider that he was thinking two or three steps down the road -- of course they did -- but they rarely accepted the possibility that when he spoke to them it was something other than the great master sharing a pearl or two of wisdom, and that he was capable of using his reputation as a master strategist to get them to write pretty much whatever kind of story he wanted.

--Paul Waldman

IS THIS A PLOT CONCEIVED BY MICHAEL SKUBE? Tristam Shandy points us to this extraordinarily weak piece of media criticism from perpetual punchline Pajamas Media. As TS points out, the biggest problem is that it's mostly unfounded speculation. But there are a couple more gems. I like this one:

Let’s go into the fact-checking department. [Beauchamp's wife] Elspeth Reeve was one of three fact-checkers at the magazine.

Did she fact-check her husband’s articles? While it is hard to believe that an established magazine would make such an elementary error, so far no one at the magazine has bothered to address the question. That’s an interesting omission.

Even if Reeve did not double-check her husband’s reporting, she worked alongside the other two fact-checkers and often shared a take-out lunch with them in the magazine’s conference room.

She... had lunch with some of her co-workers! Truly, an enormous scandal. Similarly, I've heard rumors that Dick Miniter once had lunch with Roger Simon and Glenn Reynolds, so clearly his piece wasn't fact-checked at all! And the scandal deepens:

Perhaps the fact-checkers believed that they didn’t have to check his work thoroughly because they knew and trusted his wife, who they affectionately called “Ellie.”

Clearly, we know that TNR committed journalistic malpractice because they called the wife of the person whose article was under review... by her name. I'm convinced! It's entirely possible (although, the assumptions of this story aside, it's hardly been proven with any publicly available evidence) that Beauchamp made up the entire story, but this is pretty feeble stuff. I am looking forward to the story about how that journalistic beacon Pajamas Media was suckered into a laughably false story that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had died, though...

--Scott Lemieux

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Garance Franke-Ruta reports from the wilds of middle America on Sunday’s Democratic presidential candidate debate.

The corn in the fields that blanket much of this agricultural state's one-time plains may be high and tufted, but the would-be presidents at Sunday's Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate at Drake University understood that it's not yet harvest season. Under aggressive questioning by debate moderator George Stephanopoulous of ABC News, the candidates refused to take strong stands against each other, preferring to water arguments they'd already sown and keep their disputes quietly growing. This rendered the early morning debate a largely sedate affair. The candidates hewed to the lines of attack laid down during the more prominent Yearly Kos and AFL-CIO debates earlier this month, but by and large did not lay out new ones.

In further presidential news, Intern Extraordinaire Steven White parses Ron Paul's rhetoric on abortion. Read it here.

Chris Van Buren has an interview with Dennis Ross discussing the latter's new book Statecraft, And How to Restore America's Standing in the World.

And yesterday TAP Executive Editor Harold Meyerson was on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer discussing Karl Rove's departure. Read the transcript, watch the video, or listen to the audio. It's all right here.

--The Editors

SEPARATION ANXIETY. Like my colleague Sam Boyd, I was quite entertained by yesterday's Rove-a-thon on the Sunday talk shows. While brother Sam duly noted perhaps the most amusing iteration of Rovian grandiosity ("I'm Beowulf; I'm Grendel), I found myself most riveted by the former deputy chief of staff's interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. For Rove, not only does the Constitution live, so do its founders, who apparently speak to him from the beyond, granting new powers to his favorite branch of government. On Meet the Press, he explained to David Gregory just why he would not testify before Congress:

KARL ROVE: We have a constitutional separation of powers. The founders talk about this. They, they understood this issue, and they wanted to insulate the judicial, the executive and the legislative from each other in this respect.

Wait; it gets better:

KARL ROVE: It should not— -- the Constitution should not be weakened, and we should not weaken the prerogatives of the power of the presidency just because somebody wants to have kind of show hearing on the Hill.

Somebody needs to let this guy in on this little secret: The phrase "executive privilege" does not exist in the U.S. Constitution. I suggest that he, and the rest of the executive branch, be make to read this fascinating disquisition on the subject by Harvey Silverglate, who defended then-Senator Mike Gravel when Richard Nixon's Justice Department went after Gravel for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Best suggestion therein: If the White House refuses to allow its Justice Department enforce congressional contempt of Congress citations, the sergeants-at-arms of the House and the Senate need to arrest the offenders themselves.

--Adele M. Stan

MORE GIRLS = MORE LEARNING.A new study flagged by Tyler Cowen finds the more girls that are in a classroom, the better everyone performs, regardless of gender. The causal factor is simply that girls behave better. According to the abstract "a higher proportion of female peers lowers the level of classroom disruption and violence, improves inter-student and student-teacher relationships as well as students' overall satisfaction in school, and lessens teachers' fatigue."

This has the interesting effect of explaining why all-girls schools, which have become quite popular in recent years, consistently produce better educational outcomes than other gender balances. It also suggests that they are somewhat unfair to boys who already are less likely to attend college or graduate from high school. Also, unless the school system is completely rigidly separated, the more girls schools there are he worse the girls who don't go to them will do since the proportion of girls in mixed-gender schools will go down (unless there are as many all-boys schools as all-girls schools).

--Sam Boyd

DCCC HAS 10-1 FUNDING ADVANTAGE, BETTER CANDIDATES, STRONGER STANDING IN THE POLLS. The Washington Post, in a very odd article on the congressional outlook for 2008, neglects to mention until the 23rd paragraph that the DCCC has ten times as much cash on hand as the RNCC. Ten times! The rest of the article is also a bit baffling. For instance:

But lawmakers, pollsters and Congress watchers say it is not clear whether the Democrats have convinced the public that they can do the job an angry electorate handed them in November -- or whether, once again, all incumbents will be vulnerable next year, regardless of party.

Again? In 2006 the Democrats didn't lose a single seat. There was anger at Republicans, not incumbents. The piece does have some juicy bits though:

Privately, however, Republican campaign strategists remain downbeat. One strategist with close ties to House Republicans agreed that the political environment probably will brighten for his party next year, but by then, it might be too late -- the malaise has severely dampened fundraising and hurt candidate recruitment.

It also details how both committees are going negative early in an attempt to break down strong targets. Traditionally, wave elections like 2006 are not followed by further gains, but the last few years have upended a lot of political conventional wisdom. Republicans remain unpopular and the rolling catastrophe that is the Republican presidential primary suggests that the eventual GOP nominee won't help congressional Republicans very much...

--Sam Boyd

KARL ROVE: PATRIOT, SON, AND LEGENDARY MAN-EATING BEAST. Karl Rove is now free to tell us the truth about his many adventures in the White House and it turns out that ... nothing was his fault. Not even the "MC Rove" sketch which he claims was planned without his knowledge and only explained to him as he was pulled on stage. The best part, though, is this incredible blend of incoherence and arrogance:

"Let's face it, I mean, I'm a myth," Mr. Rove told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday when asked about his critics. "You know, I'm Beowulf, you know, I'm Grendel. I don't know who I am. But they're after me."

--Sam Boyd

AUGUST READING. I’ve read some pretty good magazine articles lately, several of them in the latest print issue of The Prospect. (Michael Lind’s piece on using the payroll tax as a transformative policy issue, and Terry Samuel’s piece on the new generation of black leaders are just great). Moving beyond our own pages, I’d also recommend these:

• This New Yorker piece about the curious, unsolved murder of Tom Wales, a gun-control advocate and beloved Assistant U.S. attorney from Seattle, and the murder’s weird connection to the firing by Alberto Gonzales of Republican-appointed John McKay.
• New TAPPED editor Phoebe Connelly's old rag, In These Times, has a good piece by David Moberg about John Edwards and labor unions. Edwards must be frustrated as hell: He’s doing and saying all the right things for unions, and it’s not rebounding to his electoral benefit as much as it should.
• And, although in today’s media cycle this is now ancient history, Bush speechwriter Michael Scully's takedown of fellow speechwriter Michael Gerson in The Atlantic is a must-read and, if you’re already read it, maybe even worth a quick re-read. (Subscription required.)

--Tom Schaller

THE LEGAL PRINCIPLE OF "TRUSTING PEOPLE WHO CANNOT BE TRUSTED." Matt points out the obvious with respect to Ben Wittes' inevitable support for the Bush administration's position on every legal issue (which, remarkably, goes back to the wholly indefensible Bush v. Gore itself.) Absent any means of enforcement or disclosure, the idea that the fact that arbitrary wiretapping will be confined by language limiting it to those "reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States" is frankly absurd. And it's unclear why, at this late date, one would trust the administration with unconstrained power, given the competence it's shown so far. Checks and balances are good not only because they protect liberties but because they make government more focused and effective. Giving the administration more leeway to go on wild goose chases is not good for national security, even leaving the civil liberties out of it.

It also seems to me that Wittes misunderstands the political dynamic. Does he seriously think that in 6 months Congress will be in a position to withdraw powers it already gave to the Bush administration? Leaving aside exactly how Congress is going to effectively determine how a largely secret program is working, in an election year powers given to the executive will be almost impossible to take back. Which is why the Democrats' capitulation was so disgraceful.

--Scott Lemieux

PATRICK HENRY AND MARK LILLA. I had the same reaction to Mark Lilla's long article on faith and politics in the New York Times as Matt; I'm not convinced that we can reasonably say that the religification of politics is in America's past. Lilla:

As for the American experience, it is utterly exceptional: there is no other fully developed industrial society with a population so committed to its faiths (and such exotic ones), while being equally committed to the Great Separation. Our political rhetoric, which owes much to the Protestant sectarians of the 17th century, vibrates with messianic energy, and it is only thanks to a strong constitutional structure and various lucky breaks that political theology has never seriously challenged the basic legitimacy of our institutions. Americans have potentially explosive religious differences over abortion, prayer in schools, censorship, euthanasia, biological research and countless other issues, yet they generally settle them within the bounds of the Constitution. It’s a miracle.

POINTLESS BORDER DISPUTES. Defense News is reporting that India has begun substantial infrastructure improvements along the disputed area of its border with China. These include roads and airbases large enough to accommodate the C-130s that the Indians are buying from the U.S. The Indians say this is in response to similar moves on the Chinese side, which may well be true.

If there's one area of the world where we don't need any tension, it's along the Indo-Chinese border. The territory is nearly worthless in and of itself, and there seems little to be gained by re-opening a conflict that happened 45 years ago. Since no one lives in the disputed area, there isn't even a constituency of disaffected refugees to keep the conflict alive. I do have to wonder whether India's moves are at least partially in response to the belief that it will receive increased backing from the U.S. if it antagonizes China...

--Robert Farley

OBAMA'S INNER CHURCH LADY. One cool thing about listening to candidates on the stump is that you get to see them do and say all kinds of things that don't have news value -- and so won't generally get reported -- but which are nonetheless interesting and revealing. For example, Barack Obama, who is often criticized for his cool, cerebral style, brought down the house Saturday night at the Hawkeye Labor Council Presidential Forum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with an impassioned call and response chant that had the whole rowdy union crowd on its feet, cheering. He did it by ending his remarks with a little story that, he said, "indicates what one voice can do." Here's Obama whipping up the crowd:

I was down in a little town in South Carolina called Greenwood, South Carolina and I had been driving two hours to get there. The only reason I was going was there was a state representative who said she’d endorse me if I showed up in Greenwood. And I didn’t know how far it was, and I had to wake up early to get there, and it was rainin’ and I was feeling kind of grumpy. And I get to Greenwood and there’s this small building and I walk in and, after driving two hours, there only about 20, 30 people. And everybody’s kinda feeling sleepy and look like they’re a little grumpy too. And I’m shaking hands and doing what I’m supposed to be doin’ and suddenly I hear in the back, this woman says, “Fired up!” and I look. It’s this tiny woman, she’s maybe five-two, five-three, wearing sort of a church dress and a big hat. And it turns out she was the city councilwoman and she repeated, “Fired up!” And finally everyone in the room says, “Fired up!” and she said, “Ready to go!” And she says, “Ready to go!” And after she did this for about three minutes I gotta admit I started feeling kinda fired up. [applause] And I was ready to go. And that’s what this election’s about, about each of us individually getting fired up. [applause] Each of us getting ready to go, to take back America, to take back this country. [inaudible, applause] America, are you fired up? Ready to go? Fired up! Ready to go! Fired up! Ready to go! Alright [inaudible, applause, cheering] let’s go get em!

This is apparently part of Obama's routine stump speech that he brings out when the occasion seems right, as before before black audiences, or, in this case, a working class one. But I've never seen him do it in Washington, and you won't catch him doing it during televised debates.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

ESPIRT DE CORPS. My friend, an Army officer, sounded upbeat on Friday. He called me on his cell phone, waiting for a flight at Reagan National Airport, and told me he was on his way to Fort Benning, Georgia, and then to Baghdad. He will be working closely with the Iraqi military over the next several months. Earlier this year, I met with a soldier in Columbia, Maryland, who told me about a zoo project she had been involved in Iraq. "You think, 'War -- it's so sad because of the people,'" she told me. "But what about the animals and the land?" She said it was satisfying to help Iraqis fix up the zoo grounds. She and my friend are proud of their work in Iraq.

Yet as a group of military authors explained yesterday in their New York Times op-ed, "The War as We Saw It," things are not so great over there in Iraq -- despite the success of some individual projects.

The authors seem to be responding to the Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack op-ed, which said U.S. troops are in good spirits. It is yet another sign, they claimed, things are headed in the right direction. "Today," O'Hanlon and Pollack wrote, "morale is high."

The military authors seem to feel otherwise. Iraqi Army commanders are not, by and large, "reliable partners," the soldiers explained, and Sunnis are forming militias "sometimes with our tacit support." Ultimately, the idea that Americans will win the war in Iraq is "far-fetched." Nevertheless, the military authors are committed to the mission, especially when the goal is to allow Iraqis to "take center stage in all matters."

Individuals in the military -- like my friend and the Maryland soldier and, apparently, some people who spoke with O'Hanlon and Pollack -- may feel good about certain projects. But small-scale success, along with the mood swings that accompany them, are irrelevant, say the soldiers in their op-ed. "We need not talk about our morale," they write. "As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through."

--Tara McKelvey

CENTRIST ABORTION REGULATIONS DON"T WORK. I have a review of Helena Silverstein's new study of judicial bypass provisions in parental involvement statutes up. My bottom line:

The particularly salient lesson to draw from Silverstein's book is that it's important to ask whether abortion regulations actually accomplish anything, even on their own terms. "Basing a policy that regulates the right to abortion on confidence that the law stands outside of politics and free of bureaucratic red tape," writes Silverstein, "is a mistake fraught with consequences for those whom the right ostensibly protects."

Support for these laws is often more about the assumption that compromise on abortion is inherently desirable rather than arguments about what benefits will come from the legislation. Is there any evidence, for example, that the lack of abortion regulation makes the decisions of Canadian women less responsible? Whatever their merits in the abstract, in practice "centrist" abortion regulations do little but put up obstacles in the path of the most vulnerable women while not accomplishing any useful objective. Parental involvement laws -- which are largely superfluous for young women in good family situations and potentially dangerous for young women in bad situations -- are a case in point, especially since the safeguards intended to protect the latter don't work. Silverstein makes a careful, meticulous, and ultimately powerful case that even those who support the ends of parental involvement laws should reject them in practice.

Most abortion regulations that represent the compromise beloved by so many pundits are bad laws, for two different reasons. The first is that the regulations usually have no rational connection to the asserted state interest: statutes that allegedly advance goals such as "not using abortion as birth control" or "only allowing abortions that William Saletan thinks are appropriate" in fact obstruct some classes of women from obtaining abortions irrespective of the circumstances and do little to stop other classes of women from obtaining abortions irrespective of the circumstances. With parental involvement laws, there is at least a connection between the policy and the asserted interest, and the problem becomes that the policies just don't actually achieve the results.

--Scott Lemieux

SOUTHERN FRIED ELECTION NEWS UPDATE. A new Rasmussen poll shows Hillary Clinton has a pretty remarkable 20-point lead over both Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson in -- wait for it -- Arkansas. The poll also shows Clinton has a 65 percent favorability rating in the state. Of course, it doesn't hurt that she was the former first lady in the Arkansas governor's mansion, but this is still pretty impressive. Despite all the Hillary-resentment around the country, it's notable that at least one southern state seems to be completely behind her.

Another recent poll shows Clinton slightly edging out Barack Obama in South Carolina, but as Eric Kleefeld notes, these results hinge on race. Obama currently has the support of 55 percent of black Democrats in the state -- who make up about half of SC Democratic primary voters -- but the poll's respondents were only 40 percent African American. If that number were higher, Obama could be slightly in the lead. Who actually wins the state will depend on a) how high the black turnout is on election day, and b) whether more black voters give their support to Obama or return to Clinton, who also has a lot of support among African Americans.

In John Edwards news, while critiquing David Brooks' latest somewhat contradictory column, Matthew Yglesias writes that "one of the strongest parts of the Case for Edwards" is the following: "out of his mouth, totally banal phrases strike many people as culturally conservative." I'd also add that when they come out of Edwards' mouth, rather liberal economic policies sound relatively mainstream and common-sensical. Both of these facts are due to some unfortunate realities of racism and regionalism in American culture: Edwards inherently sounds less liberal not only because he's the white candidate, but specifically because he's the Southern white candidate. That little twang moderates or even conservatizes views just as liberal (or more liberal than) Clinton and Obama's policy proposals.

--Steven White

COMPASSIONATE TORTURE. Jason Zengerle says the "quote of the day" is John McCain saying that as president he would "never torture another person in American custody." Before liberals start swooning over McCain, let's remember he voted to authorize the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which was billed as a fix to put our detention policies in line with the Geneva Conventions, but really ended up granting unchecked power to the executive branch, and contains a lot of loopholes. McCain is good at saying that he opposes torture, but he's bad at actually voting to stop the policies that enable it.

--Kay Steiger

BROOKS CONTRA BROOKS. The thoughtful, not merely glib, David Brooks made two appearances this week -- but they managed to cancel each other out. The other day, Brooks used a discussion he had with a trucker in restaurant in Virginia and a gloss of a terrific comparative study of working class men in France and the U.S. by Harvard sociologist Michele Lamont to argue that the American, white, male working class frames its world view via a moral code, "not in economic terms", and therefore the argument by the left that the rich systematically exploit them will always fail. (The Lamont book is particularly shrewd in revealing the racial differences within both countries of how men perceive their class position, and how notions of racial superiority "color" their perceptions of class -- so Brook's choice of white trucker is congruent with the her argument of about a certain segment of the white, male working class.)

Left unsaid, but implicit, is that these folks aren't very interested in the government programs that the left proposes, either. What people like the trucker really want, writes Brooks, is to work hard, own their little piece of the American dream (like the truck and home this hardy owner-operator has for himself), and to respect the same about others, no matter how much money they've got or how big their houses are. This truck driver is "inner directed," he doesn't "try to ingratiate," Brooks tells us. In short, he's not a professional smoothie, the kind of office con-man we computer jockeys see around us everyday. But he's not angry at the wealthy, the people who control the commanding heights of the economy. This trucker, like Lamont's subjects, according to Brooks, was interested in the "moral centrality of work", and could care less about the those who had greater wealth than himself. Men like the trucker value honesty and transparency above all; manipulation, rather than sheer wealth, is held in greatest contempt. In summary, as Brooks says, "This is why their [the working class] protests are directed not against the rich, but against the word manipulators -- the lawyers, consultants and the news media."

Today, Brooks writes a sympathetic column about John Edwards,a son of the working class, who becomes a millionaire trial attorney by "beating and beating again" in the courtroom corporations who systematically exploit working-class people. Brooks note that a "fierce" "resentment toward those born to privilege" drives Edwards's ambition and is entirely consonant with his world view. Brooks has followed Edwards on the campaign trail in this cycle and in 2004, and writes that he has a terrific ability to connect to white, working-class voters. Edwards also proposes, in great detail, government programs -- income-transfer programs -- that he purports will help these white, working-class voters. If Brooks had bothered to write about Edwards's stirring support for labor unions -- non governmental, yet collective, voluntary, activist, working-class institutions of civil society -- his head might have exploded because he could not readily integrate unions into how he read class in either of these columns.

In short, today Brooks writes in praise of a superb lawyer, a quintessential "word manipulator, "fueled by resentment of the privileged," shoveling government programs by the truckload at apparently enthusiastic working-class voters. When we add the fact that Edwards is also praising unions, and urging these same voters to join these communitarian organizations rather live the romantically desolate life of the truck driver Brooks met (five marriages, one truck) -- we must conclude that, yet again, David Brooks is not making sense, while doing so with a depth and sensitivity he has not displayed in months. And this time he did it without misreading a single piece of economic data, the critique of which I leave to those more competent to do so than I.

In his first column, Brooks writes that class in America is "complex." Indeed.

--Rich Yeselson

FRED THOMPSON THEN AND NOW. Via Marc Ambinder, we have two sides of Fred Thompson, who no one remembers was also sort of considering a presidential run back in 1998:

Fred Thompson Then

From a August 21, 1998 article in Commercial Appeal:

Taking a jab at such career campaigners as former Gov. Lamar Alexander and Vice President Al Gore, Thompson responded to a question about a possible presidential candidacy by saying, ''Contrary to popular belief, I don't think you have to run for president for 15 years. Or four years.''

He said he would wait until later this year or early 1999 before making a decision about whether to run. He asked rhetorically whether it was more important to accomplish some important things in the Senate that he feels need to be accomplished ''or spend two months in Iowa talking about abortion.''

Fred Thompson Now

Heading off to Iowa to spend two three and a half months talking about abortion.

--Steven White

MAKING A BAD POLICY WORSE. A great article by Erwin Chemerinsky about the latest appalling cutback on habeas corpus rights. The odious Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act gave a one-year time limit to file a habeas petition in federal court. The limit could be cut down even further to six months, but only if the state provided lawyers for a federal appeal. You can probably see the classic Republican bait-and-switch coming:

When it reauthorized the Patriot Act last year, Congress added a little-noticed provision that lets the attorney general, rather than federal judges, decide whether states are complying with the 1996 law. No one paid much attention, until now.

Gonzales, it has been widely reported, is about to certify California and other states as being in compliance with the 1996 law, in essence just giving them the six-month statute of limitations. But these states have done nothing that this law requires. Everywhere but Arizona, death row inmates still have to pay for their attorneys (unlikely), get pro bono representation (difficult) or represent themselves (unwise). Any "certification" is a lie.

Those who favor the shorter statute of limitations are frustrated by the long delays before executions are carried out. But Gonzales' move is not about preventing delays; at most, it speeds things up by six months. It is about preventing some inmates from having a habeas corpus petition heard at all.

Gonzales continues to exemplify the remarkable Van Halen trend in the AG's office, where somehow things started with John Ashcroft and yet have gotten much worse. The other lesson, of course, is that as is often the case the Patriot Act contained a number of provisions that had nothing whatsoever to do with fighting terrorism but were simply longstanding reactionary-statist proposals warmed over and repackaged under a more appealing label.

--Scott Lemieux

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Deborah Pearlstein writes that the Bush administration's decision to allow the use of torture will have long-ranging effects on whether justice is possible in terrorism cases.

It is of course true that criminal prosecution alone is not a sufficient response to the threat of terrorism. I know no one who argues that it is. But in those cases where criminal prosecution is possible, it remains one of the most powerful tools we have for securing the long-term detention of individual terrorists and the meaningful punishment of terrorist acts. This power comes not just from raw force, but from the basic respect the idea of American criminal justice is afforded here and around the world. The prospect that this justice system would consider crediting statements made under torture and cruel treatment -- when anyone would say anything to make it stop -- destroys this respect.

Read the whole thing here.

Also today, Terence Samuel declares the Republican revolution officially dead. It all started going downhill for them, he notes, when they lost the Social Security battle.

--The Editors

ARMY SUICIDE RATES AT ALL-TIME HIGH. Via C&L. The AP reports that in the last year there were 99 suicides, half of which were by soldiers under the age of 25. A Pentagon psychological consultant put the blame on "failed intimate relationships," but it's hard to believe that relationships suddenly got more stressful in the last year. The consultant, Col. Elspeth Ritchie, grudgingly admitted that extended deployments can add to relationship stress. This is true, but relationship stress I'm sure isn't the only cause of suicide. I think soldiers being in a place where they could be blown up at any given moment by a car bomb (known in military language as an IED) has something to do with it.

--Kay Steiger

THIS SHOULD MAKE THINGS INTERESTING. The Associated Press reports:

The son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is preparing for deployment to Iraq next year.

Capt. Beau Biden, a Judge Advocate General in the Delaware National Guard and the state's attorney general, is part of the 261st Signal Brigade that has been told to prepare for duty in Iraq in 2008. They have not been given a date of deployment yet.

"I don't want him going," Delaware Sen. Joe Biden said from the campaign trail Wednesday, according to a report on Radio Iowa. "But I tell you what, I don't want my grandson or my granddaughters going back in 15 years and so how we leave makes a big difference."

Quite a contrast with Mitt Romney's sons, eh?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

A MEDIA THAT MEDIATES. Katharine Seelye over at The New York Times' indespensable The Caucus blog -- your daily one-stop shop for colorful vignettes from the field and the latest polls -- nicely fact-checks Karl Rove's latest jab at Hillary Clinton and finds (surprise) that's he's not quite telling the truth:

contrary to what Mr. Rove said on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, her unfavorable rating is about 10 points lower than where he thought it was and her favorables are higher than her unfavorables, although barely.

His point was this: “There’s nobody who has ever won the presidency who started out in that kind of position.”

In fact, Mrs. Clinton’s husband was in that very position and did win. And Mrs. Clinton’s numbers are better than his were at this point in his first campaign for the White House.

In April 1992, only 26 percent of voters had a favorable view of Bill Clinton, while 40 percent viewed him unfavorably, according to a Times/CBS poll. By June 1992, his favorables had plunged further, so that only 16 percent had a favorable opinion, with 40 percent still unfavorable.

After Mr. Clinton won the nomination and after his convention, his favorable rating began to rise. By October 1992, his ratings had become about even, with 34 percent favorable and 35 percent unfavorable.

I recall making a similar argument last March:

High unfavorable ratings are a product of having a national profile in a divided nation with a pugnacious, mudslinging political culture....

In June 1992, candidate Bill Clinton had an unfavorable rating of 47 percent, according to a Times Mirror survey -- nearly identical to what his wife's is today. He managed to reduce that dramatically come fall (as his wife will need to) and win the election. Similarly, Gore had a 43 percent unfavorable rating in April 1999, according to a Pew Research Center survey, but managed to knock that down to the mid-30s by October 2000 and win the popular vote in November.

None of this means Clinton will win the general, should she win the primary -- it just means that it's not impossible on the grounds Rove was giving, because his facts were wrong. (Shocking that, I know.) Indeed, I'm less worried about her current high negative ratings than I am about the possibility of a Mitt Romney-Mike Huckabee ticket that pits two governors against a Democratic ticket almost certain to be led by a senator, since the historical precendent is that governors fare better than senators in presidential contests. Think about it: in a contest with Clinton, that ticket would erase any advantage she might have in Arkansas and much of the disadvantage Romney might have with the evangelical base in the South (as a Mormon).

--Garance Franke-Ruta

GIULIANI'S LEARNING CURVE.

(Photo: Rudy Giuliani (L) and Gene Hart, Greenfield, Iowa, August 15, 2007)

The Atlantic's Matt says "something's amiss when Rudy Giuliani spends 6,000 words on foreign policy and doesn't mention Pakistan at all." That's not the only thing that's amiss about Giuliani's recent moves in the political arena.

After catching Giuliani yesterday at the Nodaway Diner in Greenfield -- a town in Southwestern Iowa so small it boasts about a "European-Style Square" -- and then again at the State Fair, I'm starting to think Giuliani's campaign for the presidency has basically two main planks, both of which happen to involve giving the G.O.P. base the exact answers it wants on top issues, but that it's somewhat neglectful about everything else. To begin with, Giuliani's forthright pro-wall stance on border security and illegal immigration is a threshold trust issue for voters who rank such issues as their top priorities. His multi-pronged approach on the issue begins, "First, build a fence." That's what he told State Fair goers, and that's what G.O.P. voters in the state have repeatedly told me they want someone to do. He's also pro-English, and was met with vigorous applause for saying at the fair, "We want people to come here who want to learn to read and write and speak English." And he is willing to be the exact kind of law and order hardliner such voters crave. "Anyone who is in this country from a foreign country who commits a crime should be thrown out," he said. "Throw them out." Second, Giuliani promises voters an aggressive military posture. "I believe America should be on the offense against terrorism," he said at the State Fair. "America doesn't lose. America wins. America prevails."

So far, these stances -- and they are stances, not programs or plans, per se -- have been enough to vault Giuliani into the lead in national polls, but it's not at all clear they will be enough Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina, where voters want a candidate who is willing to run a ground-level race, rather than one from 50,000 feet. In Iowa, Giuliani did not seem terrifically up to speed on other issues of the day, or to have done a huge amount of homework or organizing heading into the state.

For example, rather than lunching with a local functionary in Greenfield during his five-stop, one day tour, Giuliani lunched with an old friend from New York City, Gene Hart. Hart lives out in Omaha, Nebraska, but he went to Manhattan College with Giuliani, and made plans to drive all the way to Greenfield to meet him for lunch. "We go back to 1962," he said. And so the tiny Greenfield event began with Giuliani quietly lunching with someone not from Iowa, while his New York staff sat at the diner's counter, eating pie a la mode and thumbing their BlackBerries. "He's not doing speeches," Loren Knauss, a Pottawattamie County Supervisor and Giuliani's Southwest regional chair, explained. "He's just coming in to shake hands." After lunch, Giuliani, dressed as if heading to a natty reception in the Hamptons, shook hands with the small number of locals in the diner, then sat and methodically autographed campaign fliers while taking questions from a table full of people that included a local reporter and a representative from the advocacy group Iowans for Sensible Priorities, which has been dogging all the candidates. Including Giuliani, the group numbered less than 10. Giuliani discussed the threat of a nuclear Iran, earmarks, gun policy, and infrastructure investment, and also exclaimed over the amount of corn he'd seen on the way to the rural town on a road that passed between fields. Is it the ethanol biofuel that's driving all this corn? he asked. The Iowans politely said they didn't think so. And wasn't the harvest date "pretty soon"? Giualiani further inquired. The Iowans informed him that it wouldn't be until November. Sensing they might think him a rube, the former mayor quickly explained that on Long Island, "they pick it about now, in late August."

Still, it was a line of questioning that made Giuliani look as if he were either coasting and slightly out of it, or else had made a calculated decision to treat the people of Iowa the same way he treated historically important constituency groups in New York City which he believed had too great a hold on power and needed to be resisted -- along with their "shakedown" Straw Poll -- as much as coddled.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MEANWHILE, IN IRAQ. The emergency political summit called by president Jalal Talabani has failed. The Sunnis are still outside the government. As Kevin Drum points out:

It's not exactly news or anything, just further confirmation of the obvious: the eventual fate of Iraq (outside the Kurdish north) is the establishment of a Shia theocracy closely aligned with Iran. As far as I can tell, no one has even a colorable argument that things are moving in any other direction, and equally, no colorable argument that there's anything we can do to stop it.

I wrote pretty much the same in my salad days as a blogger in 2004 when we were told how good the invasion was for the rights of Iraqi women. Even Dick Cheney in the 1990s knew that invading Iraq would lead to its destruction as a secular state:

Is the surge in Iraq succeeding? This discussion sometimes sounds like listening to a bad radio which picks up two stations at the same time. Mostly we hear the experts pontificating on the tactics and the definitions of words such as "surge", but in the background, faintly, we hear another program asking what the ultimate point of the exercise might be. What would a successful Iraq look like? Does it look like a theocracy? Or an American client-state with civil war somehow kept under wraps? And what is the price to be paid for such a success if it somehow could be achieved?

--J. Goodrich

IS ROVE OFF THE HOOK? He may have used the personnel and apparatus of taxpayer-funded government agencies for partisan political purposes, but even if that's proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and in violation of the law, Karl Rove's imminent exit from the West Wing may just let him off the hook.

As I reported earlier this week, among the many fingers pointing at Rove is one belonging to Scott J. Bloch, director of the Office of Special Counsel, which administers the provisions of the Hatch Act, a 1939 law that regulates the role of government employees in electoral politics. Detailed here by CQ's Shawn Zeller, Bloch's investigation has come as close as any to really nailing Rove, having turned Rove's special e-mail account with the Republican National Committee (RNC), which he apparently used to communicate with government employees at their "dot-gov" e-mail addresses.

But that, even when leveraged by investigations by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (led by the indefatigable Henry Waxman of California), may amount to little more than a hill of beans in Rove's case for this simple reason: the Hatch Act carries no criminal penalties. The strongest, most dire corrective it offers is removal of the offender from his or her government post.

Because of a tight deadline during a congressional recess, I was unable to get an answer to the question by press time. However, I got a call yesterday from Phil Schiliro, the committee's majority chief of staff, who told me, "One of the things the committee will be looking at is whether the law works." Does that mean a legislative fix is in the offing? Schiliro couldn't say, but he replied that legislation of that sort is certainly part of the committee's purview.

In the meantime, the committee still awaits the RNC's compliance with its April subpoena for all e-mails that appear to involve the "use of official government resources to help [in] political activities." The RNC has already complied with the committee's first subpoena in this investigation -- a request for preliminary information.

--Adele M. Stan

NICE COUNTRY YOU'VE GOT HERE. IT'D BE A SHAME IF SOMETHING HAPPENED TO IT. Via Greg Sargent, we get the latest sample of Rudy Giuliani's singular charm:

Answering questions at a town-hall meeting, Giuliani was asked why he should expect loyalty from GOP voters when his children aren't backing him.

"I love my family very, very much and will do anything for them. There are complexities in every family in America," Giuliani said calmly and quietly. "The best thing I can say is kind of, 'leave my family alone, just like I'll leave your family alone.'"

Is it just me, or does that sound like a thinly-veiled threat? If I were that voter, I'd invest in an alarm system for my house.

Eight years ago, we were told that what was really important to voters was which candidate they'd rather share a beer with. The thing about Giuliani is that, simply put, the guy's a jerk. Not even his own supporters, I suspect, would seriously disagree with this point. In New York, he got elected because he convinced voters that a jerk was what they needed; then four years later he convinced them that his particular brand of jerkishness was working (and let's be honest, he didn't exactly have a tough task overcoming the political typhoon that was Ruth Messinger).

It's becoming obvious that Giuliani's pitch to GOP voters is essentially, "Whether it's fighting terrorism or securing our borders, what we need is a president so mean even his own kids hate him." If it works, it'll certainly be a first.

--Paul Waldman

POTEMKIN WITHOUT THE FACADE. Josh Marshall reports that the "Petraeus" report that has been used by Iraq dead-enders to preempt all criticism for months might be delivered by Condi Rice and Robert Gates. While the Democrats are probably right to "actually want to hear from Gen. Petraeus," from a political perspective I'm baffled as to why the administration would do this. Isn't the whole point of using the "Petraeus" report as a shield to imply that the tendentious reports of progress that will be delivered under his name are a nominally independent analysis? If the administration-written report is actually delivered by the administration, what's the point?

--Scott Lemieux

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Ezra calls out Bill Richardson's economic policies:

Richardson is an economic opportunist. He's adopted the conservative's rhetorical critique of liberal economic thought in order to distinguish himself from the other candidates, most of whom are responding to this moment of mortgage crises and insecurity with a forthrightly progressive vision. Richardson's vision, which ticks off the same checkboxes as all the other candidates (crumbling infrastructure, rising college debt, 45 million uninsured, Social Security under attack, etc), comes couched in a superficial critique of anti-growth Democrats he won't name and a strain of economic thought he won't specify.

Also, read the full transcript of Ezra's interview with Richardson here.

Harold Meyerson chimes in on Rove's retirement, arguing that Rove's miscalculations will continue to plague the Bush administration and Republicans.

In the wake Gov. Mike Huckabee's second-place showing in last weekend's Iowa Straw Poll, Sarah Posner examines the strong support he is receiving from the Christian Right.

Also on the '08 tip, Garance Franke-Ruta questions the fine line between gossip and what passes for political journalism today. Warning -- it's available to subscribers only. Consider subscribing today!

--The Editors

DIVIDED BY DISASTER. The NYTimes reports on how, less than two weeks after the Minneapolis bridge collapse, partisanship is showing. I'm always surprised by the mistaken belief that disasters will cause the parties to set aside their differences and work together. That sounds rosy, but the reality is that the two parties have fundamental differences, and how to handle a disaster naturally exacerbates these differences rather than diminishes them.

We saw calls for bipartisanship following 9/11. That worked badly. We ended up with unchecked executive power and major election and legislative losses for Democrats and progressivism. What people really mean when they talk about bipartisanship is one side giving up an agenda and ceding to whoever is in power. The bridge collapse allows Democrats to highlight a major platform issue: investment in public goods. It offers an excellent opportunity to point out that this is an extreme case, but it illustrates the problems with cutting back spending on social programs and public infrastructure, and allows Dems to point out that there is a real cost that comes with constant tax-trimming. Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty wants to rebuild as quickly as possible while trying to maintain his "no new taxes" policy in an attempt to impress party leaders. These divisions are basic about the function of government, so it's no surprise that such partisanship is showing.

--Kay Steiger