• Mike Enzi and Charles Grassley don't want to make a deal on health-care reform. They want to kill it. That leaves Olympia Snowe as the lone reasonable Republican member of the "Gang of Six" but it's not clear what sort of a quid pro quo she's looking for to make a deal. Hopefully, she won't take the advice of National Review, which approvingly links to road signs in Maine describing death panels which, apparently, already exist.
• There hasn't been a while lot to say about the gubernatorial race in Virginia, but now it seems the Republican candidate, Robert McDonnell, has attracted a great deal of negative publicity over the contents of his master's thesis, which describes working women as "detrimental" to the family, and that unmarried couples shouldn't cohabitate or have access to contraceptives. Conservatives treating women as subhuman is nothing new. And McDonnell's insistence that his views have changed over the past two decades doesn't wash.
• Michael Hiltzik writes in The Los Angeles Times about William Wirt, who had 15 minutes of fame back in 1934 charging the Roosevelt administration with being agents of a Bolshevik takeover of the United States. Of course, these same accusations are being made today about Barack Obama, but notice what's changed in 75 years. In the 30s, there actually was a Bolshevik regime in existence; today, there is not. Once Wirt's conspiracy theories were proven to be false, he lost support of Republicans who thought this was their ticket to destroying the New Deal. Today, top Republicans regularly refer to Obama's socialism. Lesson: the right wing hasn't changed tactics, but they are incredibly more tolerant of their cranks, and even give them television shows!
• The tea bag crowd doesn't disguise that it considers taxation little better than theft, and if they talk about what our tax dollars are spent on at all, it's usually an excuse to bash welfare recipients or inflate foreign aid figures. With this in mind, I wonder if any of the secessionists down in Texas who had a little tenther rally over the weekend have ever stopped to consider the consequences of Texas suddenly becoming an independent nation. How would they finance themselves? Would they raise an army? Are secessionist senior aware that dissolving their relationship with the United States would, in fact, take away their Medicare and Social Security?
• Weekend Remainders: The Washington Post ombudsman notices that reporters don't like reporting policy details; don't let Mike Huckabee trick you into thinking he's just a folksy weirdo; what is it with conservative Christian leaders and their insatiable love for violence; The Wall Street Journal endorses the view that 24 is an accurate depiction of terrorism/counterterrorism; Megan McArdle is still, inexplicably, supported by The Atlantic; and is there reason to be optimistic after the summer of town halls?
  

--Mori Dinauer

Via Matt Yglesias, Patrick Egan and Nathaniel Persily have data showing that, notwithstanding the countermobilization myth, judicial decisions favoring same-sex marriage and civil unions do not have a significant lasting effect on public opinion:

* All states, regardless of whether they’ve had high court rulings in favor or against gay couples, have shown significant increases in support for gay marriage over the past 20 years.

* States in which same-sex marriage cases have reached high courts (regardless of the outcome of the ruling) have consistently been more supportive of same-sex marriage than those with no rulings.

[...]

* If anything, the three states in which pro-gay court decisions have been in place the longest - MA, and NJ, VT - have exhibited steeper rises in approval of same-sex marriage than the national trend.

And I think the case against the backlash-against-the-courts argument is even stronger than this sounds. For elections, what matters is not just public opinion but how likely people are to act on their nominal views. And Andrew Gelman has amassed data showing that issues like same-sex marriage and abortion matter more to affluent, educated people than they do to other parts of the electorate -- and, of course, educated affluent people are likely to be more supportive of liberal social positions than other voters.

The idea that victories in the courts are counterproductive because judicial opinions produce more backlash is the kind of cute, contrarian thesis that leads to getting op-eds published. Like many contrarian ideas, it's also wrong.

--Scott Lemieux

Courtney Martin on the mistakes of Ted Kennedy's youth and his attempts to compensate for them:

As Sen. Edward Kennedy was put to rest this weekend, cable news networks filled airtime by exhausting every angle of his life. They waxed poetic about his leadership style, debating who would be the Senate's next "lion." They delved into the history of America's most beloved and, many would argue, most doomed first family. They looked forward, wondering how the senator's death might serve as motivation in the ongoing debate over health-care reform.

There was one topic that every producer and biographer struggled to integrate with the whole: the so-called "Chappaquiddick incident." In July of 1969, a much younger Kennedy drove his car off a bridge, and his passenger, a former campaign worker for the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy named Mary Jo Kopechne, was killed. Ted Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and received a suspended sentence.

KEEP READING ...

Ezra has a good catch with this fundraising letter [PDF] sent out by Senator Chuck Grassley, ostensibly the chief Republican negotiator on health care reform:

I had to rush you this Air-Gram today to set the record straight on my firm and unwavering opposition to government-run health care.

... And ask your immediate support in helping me defeat "Obama-care."

I'm sure you've been following this issue closely. If the legislation sponsored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives and Chairman Ted Kennedy in the Senate is passed it would be a pathway to a government takeover of the health care svstem. lt would turn over control of your health care decisions to a federal bureaucrat ... and take it away from you and your personal physician.

... the simple truth is that I am and always have been opposed to the Obama administration's plan to nationalize health care. Period.

It it wasn't already, it should be clear at this point that Grassley isn't negotiating in good faith and is actually spreading bad information about the bill. The letter was apparently delivered on August 10, so the fundraising off of Ted Kennedy's name isn't entirely boorish, although it was certainly known that the senator was fading fast when the letter was sent. Politesse aside, plenty of people have talked about the possibility of a health care reform deal with the Republicans, or finding a concession that would bring a few Republican votes to a health care bill; today, former Senator Bill Bradley suggests exchanging malpractice tort reform for health care reform. But Republicans aren't interested in a deal, they're interested in stopping health care reform.

Which is why I think it might be wise to listen to another Republican, this one former Senator Bob Dole, who thinks that Obama should introduce his own bill. While not everything in his op-ed is smart or even accurate, Dole's suggestion would put Obama back in charge instead of squabbling congressional leaders, and more important, it would give health care reform supporters something to fight for, rather than a menu of options and committees that prevents any kind of affirmative action but provides openings for all kinds of negative disinformation.

Everyone interested in health care reform has been hoping that a confluence of events -- the end of the president's vacation, Congress returning to session, the decreasing impact of the various anti-health care reform activists, and now, the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy -- would provide an opportunity to reset the conversation around reform. There will be an opportunity for leadership from the White House to have a tangible effect, and it would be a shame to miss it.

-- Tim Fernholz

In his column this morning, Ross Douthat sets up a dichotomy between Ted Kennedy and his also recently departed sister, Eunice. Ted was a Bad Kennedy and a Bad Catholic because he was pro-choice; Eunice was a Good Kennedy and a Good Catholic because the cause of her life was disability rights, and she supported anti-abortion rights organizations such as Femnists for Life, the Susan B. Anthony List, and Democrats for Life.

But Kennedy's legacy on abortion and disability is actually far more complex than Douthat acknowledges. In 2005, Kennedy co-sponsored a bill -- the Prenatally and Postnatally Diagnosed Conditions Awareness Act -- that expanded federal financing for support programs for expectant and new parents who receive a Down syndrome diagnosis. Research shows that doctors delivering such a diagnosis often share very little information about living with the disease, and presume that the patient would prefer to terminate her pregnancy. Indeed, about 90 percent of couples who receive a prenatal Down syndrome diagnosis do choose abortion. But enriched by his sister Rosemary's life, Kennedy sought to link expectant and new parents with mentor families already raising a child with Down syndrome, as well as create a national registry of families willing to adopt disabled infants.

Kennedy's partner on the bill was conservative Catholic Sen. Sam Brownback, who regularly compares abortion to slavery. During negotiations between the two offices, Kennedy held fast to his belief that the law must go further than just dissuading abortion; he wanted to be sure the legislation offered funding to improve the lives of disabled people and their caretakers. Last October, the bill was signed into law by President Bush. In a testament to Kennedy's coalition-building genius, it was even supported by NARAL President Nancy Keenan, who said it offered women choices without undermining their right to an abortion.

Only Ted Kennedy could bring NARAL to the table with Sam Brownback. And that's because he knew, in his heart, that there was no contradiction between being deeply pro-choice and deeply pro-disability rights.

For more on the moral complications of genetic testing, disability, and abortion, check out my 2007 In These Times feature, "Genetic Disorder."

--Dana Goldstein

So for the past few months, the GOP has been hammering Nancy Pelosi for her assertion that the CIA misled Congress in a series of briefings on torture -- the CIA's notes on the briefing didn't actually settle the matter conclusively. Still, the GOP has been relentless in asserting that Pelosi was "attacking" the CIA, even though the CIA has in fact previously lied to Congress, and that it wasn't so long ago that the GOP itself was accusing the CIA of lying about Iran's nuclear weapons program to undermine then-President Bush.

Today, Michael Scherer at TIME reports that Sen. John McCain claims, contrary to a July 2007 OLC memo from Steven Bradbury, that he objected to the use of coercive interrogation techniques in intelligence briefings with the CIA. Bradbury wrote, based on the CIA accounts of those briefings, that "in those classified and private conversations, none of the Members expressed the view that the CIA detention and interrogation program should be stopped, or that the techniques at issue were inappropriate." McCain says that's not true, that he spoke up forcefully, particularly against sleep deprivation.

The uproar over whether Pelosi knew about waterboarding, and her assertion that the CIA lied, became more important than the actual lawbreaking involved in the use of torture -- things may be different now that McCain, a media darling, is making a similar claim. But this story has larger implications than simply making it more difficult for the GOP to portray criticism of the CIA as an issue of recklessness or lack of patriotism. As Scherer explains, Bradbury based the legal reasoning approving of sleep deprivation for use by the CIA partially on the the alleged response of members of Congress -- because no one objected, Bradbury argued that the methods did not "shock the conscience." 

UPDATE: Marcy Wheeler points out that McCain himself suggested Pelosi could have objected to the methods in those CIA briefings and therefore prevented torture from occurring. Of course, now he's in the awkward position of explaining that he did object, but the CIA ignored him.

-- A. Serwer

Sarah Garland explains why segregation, not immigration, is to blame for the growth of Hispanic gangs:

Jessica stood in a clearing in the woods where the ground was strewn with used condoms and broken bottles. Cicadas hummed in the country club grounds edging the campus of the Hempstead High School, a brick fortress with narrow windows and a weedy green lawn. Beyond the trees that separated the high school from the golf course, commuters from Eastern Long Island zipped along the expressway on their way to work in New York City. It was September of 2000, Jessica's first week of seventh grade, but she would not be going to class.

She felt both anxious and excited as one of the older boys standing next to her pulled out a black-and-white marbled notebook from his backpack and handed it to her. Scrawled inside it were the secrets of his gang, Salvadorans With Pride -- its handshakes, history, and symbols, and even some photographs of its teenage enemies. She was instructed to memorize it. She had 15 minutes, and then she would be quizzed. If she passed, she would move on to the beating.

KEEP READING ...

In the days since his death, Ted Kennedy has been hailed on the left as a friend to organized labor. Here at TAP, our own Harold Meyerson wrote that Kennedy was a lifelong defender of workers "unable to join unions" and an opponent of Jimmy Carter's agenda of "deregulating industries." But Doug Henwood, editor and publisher of Left Business Observer, remembers Kennedy differently, as a supporter of deregulation in trucking and air travel. And sure enough, the conservative Washington Times editorial page hailed Kennedy as the leading congressional ally for Carter's deregulation agenda.

Last week Matt Yglesias wrote that Kennedy's history as a deregulator should be lauded, since it increased competition and brought down prices for consumers. But as Henwood demonstrates -- with charts! -- since deregulation, truckers' wages have declined and airline prices have inflated.

Of course, breaking up these monopolies cut down on corruption and organized crime. The Kennedy family was no friends of the Teamsters; as a Senate investigator, Bobby Kennedy interrogated Jimmy Hoffa harshly on his ties to the Mafia, and in 1960 wrote a book, The Enemy Within, about crooked unions. Teddy was close to Bobby and likely internalized this vendetta. "Bobby Kennedy saw Hoffa as absolute evil," historian Ronald Steelf has said. "And so he could elevate this struggle against Hoffa into some kind of titanic moral issue, which is why he became so dedicated to it." Indeed, for a time after JFK's assassination, Teddy suspected Mafia involvement as a result of Bobby's Hoffa investigation.

Henwood though, sees something simpler, a back door between Kennedy's staff and companies that made a profit busting unions. "What a remarkable achievement: a policy that has led to huge losses for both labor and capital," Henwood writes. "And any tribute to Teddy Kennedy that omits his prominent role in this disaster is incomplete."

--Dana Goldstein

I have a lot of friends who spent a great deal of money, and went into a lot of debt, to learn how to be professional broadcast journalists. They are now struggling to find work in a profession that is -- to put it bluntly -- contracting. So when I first heard that Jenna Bush Hager, the former president's daughter, was getting a job with The Today Show, I wondered what her qualifications were.

Hager, a 27-year-old teacher in Baltimore, said she has always wanted to be a teacher and a writer, and has already authored two books. But she was intrigued by the idea of getting into television when Bell contacted her.

Oh. She "always wanted to be a teacher," and was "intrigued" by television, so I guess that qualifies her to be an education reporter over all those journalists with actual experience and education who are struggling to find jobs.

As Glenn Greenwald writes, there's unlikely to be any outrage on the right over Hager getting a job she's manifestly unqualified for simply because she's the former president's daughter, despite right-wing affectations toward "meritocracy." There's something revealing here about the right's attitude toward those who succeed despite not being privileged -- the only way they can make sense of someone like Sonia Sotomayor rising to excellence from modest beginnings is through "preferential treatment," because what does it say about their own privilege, intelligence, or ability if that's not the case?

Last week, Greg Mankiw wrote a post casually asserting that people with "good genes" make lots of money and pass their intelligence off to their kids who then get high SAT scores. John Sides and Brad DeLong demolished Mankiw's argument, but I think Mankiw's assumption is informative here: The right doesn't mind privilege being retained, by whatever means, within those groups that already have it, because it proves their theories about meritocracy. But when someone like Sonia Sotomayor goes from the South Bronx to Princeton valedictorian to the Supreme Court, it forces the question of how much people of privilege depend on their circumstances -- their financial and social advantages -- to succeed rather than their ability or intelligence. That's uncomfortable for some people to think about, and it's part of why Sonia Sotomayor provokes outrage over "merit," while glaring examples of preferential treatment for the privileged do not.

-- A. Serwer

Everyone wanted things to go well on August 20, and few people have worked harder to make the polling stations safe and secure than the U.S. Marines. Lt. Col. Dale Alford was there on the day that Hamid Karzai was elected, overseeing a unit of men who were providing security at the polling sites. Up until that moment, they had been concerned about what would happen.

“Back then,” he recalled, “everybody thought Al Qaeda would do massive disruption, but they didn’t.” This time around, he knew about the obstacles facing the people in Afghanistan and how difficult it would be Afghans to keep the peace on Election Day. “There are thousands of polling places that have to be guarded,” he told me.

American troops had worked hard to help train Afghans who were protecting the polling stations, and the election was held, and people felt relieved when it was over. Unfortunately, however, as The New York Times says, reports of fraud continue to multiply, putting the legitimacy of the election into doubt. Carlotta Gall writes:

Afghan election officials said Sunday that the serious fraud reports that they were considering had suddenly doubled — to 550 from 270, in a development likely to stoke public outrage and perhaps even delay the official results past September.

The high incidence of fraud makes the American efforts at nation-building seem futile, and it threatens the overall security of the region. What is the likely outcome of the Afghan experience for the United States? "We'll fight for two years and then a successful transition,” as David Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerrilla told The Associated Press. “Or we'll fight for two years and we'll lose and go home." As a blogger on Ink Spots points out, Kilcullen's comment is “notable for its absence is any mention of ‘winning.’"

--Tara McKelvey

Josh Marshall flags this item about General Russel Honoré moving back to Louisiana, writing that even New Orleans Democratic Mayor Ray Nagin, "when asked whether he'd support retired Gen. Russel Honoré if he gets into the Louisiana Senate race as a Republican, 'Oh, man, I'll support that guy any way he goes.'"

Setting aside that the article doesn't mention the Senate race or parties, only whether or not the retired general might get "into politics," (more context here), Honoré doesn't strike me as any kind of Republican we're familiar with, despite his apparent social conservatism and his military background. When I had the chance to speak to him extensively for this piece on disaster preparedeness in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Honoré absolutely focused on economic justice. A major failure in the response to Katrina was the lack of planning surrounding poor residents of New Orleans, who did not have the resources to evacuate themselves. Here's Honore:

Outside of FEMA, there are broader issues of federal policy that will affect the government's capability to respond effectively to disasters. One of the most critical is poverty and community development.

"If you have an impoverished area, you have to have a good evacuation plan because poor people may not have cars to leave with," Honoré said. "If they do have a car, they don't have a credit card to call and reserve a hotel. The majority of the people we evacuated out of the city were poor people."

After Katrina, anti-poverty efforts briefly became a national issue as disproportionate effects of the disaster on low-income, minority residents of places like the 9th Ward in New Orleans became clear. Similarly, reports suggest that Hispanics suffered more than others did during California's wildfires. The problems in these communities include everything from limited access to vehicles and mistrust of government officials to a lack of education and information, both generally and on emergency preparedness.

..."What Katrina uncovered is what happens when a disaster hits an impoverished area and the impact of the disaster on the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and small businesses," said Honoré.

For Honoré, then, disaster preparedness had to include improving the economic situation of New Orleans' residents. He stresses education reform as central to combating poverty. But he also made a point of remembering when New Orleans supported a black middle class, thanks to strong unions in the city ports, and how important fair wages and jobs are to building a solid community. He also discussed the need for more support of affordable housing efforts. One oft-repeated phrase in our conversation was, "It's not main street or Wall Street; it's railroad street. That's where the poor people are."

I don't get the impression that Honoré, who has spent the last few years since his retirement focused on rebuilding efforts in the Gulf, is particularly partisan or even particularly liberal. But looking at the issues that are important to him, it's hard to see him stepping into a Republican primary and winning. Nonetheless, given his popularity in New Orleans, where he really turned around the federal response to the disaster, his Creole background, and his blunt charm, he'd be a formidable candidate. And it would be an interesting experiment in whether Republicans could field a candidate who doesn't fit in with the usual party orthodoxies.

-- Tim Fernholz

Over the weekend, the Washington Post, citing anonymous "officials" wrote that Khalid Sheik Mohammed went all Frank Lucas on Al Qaeda after being waterboarded, freely providing intelligence information. Naturally, torture apologists everywhere are ecstatic: KSM is first and foremost, as the suspected architect of 9/11, an unsympathetic figure -- so not only is torturing him "justified" for intelligence reasons, especially if torture "worked," but the right still sees torture as an issue of who is being tortured rather than a matter of law.

At any rate, the Inspector General noted in his report that:

The effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained cannot be so easily measured, however.

If it was as simple as "we waterboarded KSM, and he started talking," there's no reason for the IG to have said otherwise. There are about 24 pages of redacted material following the mention of KSM being waterboarded 183 times, which means that the pro-torture sources quoted in the report are again taking advantage of the gap between publicly known information and classified material to make their case. What is known is that KSM talked after being waterboarded; the report does not claim that he talked because he was waterboarded. These sources are arguing a causal link that can't be verified because of the redacted information, which means reporters have no way of assessing how accurate the claims are. We've seen this pattern before -- it's how we ended up in Iraq.

Despite not coming to a conclusion about the "effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques" the IG did state in his report that:

Officer's are concerned that future public revelation of the CTC Program is inevitable and will seriously damage Agency officers' personal reputations, as well as the reputation and effectiveness of the Agency itself.

Besides the illegality, there are external costs to the use of torture that go beyond whether or not the techniques themselves are individually effective, such as the effect that torture has on the ability to prosecute suspected terrorists, cooperation between domestic agencies, from foreign allies, as well as the willingness of potential sources to cooperate. The documents don't come to a definitive conclusion about the effectiveness of torture against other interrogation methods, but even if they did, there are other problems with using torture that go beyond questions of effectiveness.

-- A. Serwer

• No one should be terribly surprised that the Pentagon is tracking and rating (positive, negative and neutral) journalists based on how they report stories. But it turns out that getting a copy of your profile from the Rendon Group, the company who is collecting this data for the Defense Department, is quite a challenge. The Pentagon is now reviewing the policy in light of the revelations.
• Bobby Jindal, who loves taking federal money and spending it in Louisiana, also believes the federal government is incompetent and corrupt. So it's difficult to wrap one's mind around the fact that he's praising the efforts of FEMA and the Obama administration in rebuilding the Gulf Coast four years after Hurricane Katrina. I'd love to have some sort of consistent conservative theory of precisely what the government is great at doing, and which activities are leading to Stalin's purge.
• These "tenther" activists -- citing the Tenth Amendment to argue most of the federal government's activity is unconstitutional -- are now setting their sights on the interstate highway system. I'm going to assume that these people also believe in American greatness and exceptionalism. How then is the United States supposed to be a great nation without some minimum national standard for education, health care, transportation, voting rights and whatever else they want banned and given over to the states to deal with?
  
• Greg Mankiw weighs in on the nature vs. nurture debate to conclude that rich kids get better SAT scores than their less privileged peers not because of their economic advantages, but because they have genetic superiority. I can only assume Mankiw believes this because he a conservative, and for all the libertarian deification of the individual, real conservatives believe the social order is preordained and mere mortals should not meddle with it. From here it's easy to argue against the government supporting the disadvantaged in society because such efforts are bound to fail to lift up the genetically inferior among us. And if you're a conservative intellectual in the 1960s, you might throw in a reference to the "advanced race" as well.
• Remainders: Obama's policy on energy is still quite popular with the public; immigration reform is still possible, but more difficult without Kennedy; our coming Afghan quagmire; everybody hates Rudy; joking about hunting the president is so funny that you might as well make the crack twice; and meet the "Black Glenn Beck."

--Mori Dinauer

Mark recently did a bloggingheads session with Timothy Noah of Slate. The two discuss Ted Kennedy's legacy, and Mark remembers how he was spared the fate of becoming a college politics hack:

The two also discuss the fate of the public option:

Watch the whole thing here.

--The Editors

Four years after Katrina, government bodies are still shuffling about trying to figure out what is the best future policy for a sustainable, prosperous New Orleans. The challenges facing the Gulf Coast are the same facing the nation: developing housing, improving health care, closing educational achievement gaps, de-concentrating centers of poverty, and achieving security from climate change and its related disasters. Except in the Gulf Coast these problems are much more pronounced. If the federal government were ever to focus on this region, the solutions produced for these social and environmental ills could be applied broadly across the nation.

While campaigning in February, 2008, Obama said, "I will make it clear to members of my administration that their responsibilities don't end in places like the 9th Ward; they begin in places like the 9th Ward." Suffice it to say that the Gulf Coast is the Lower 9th Ward of the United States. And yet, for all of Obama's posturing on 9th Ward primacy while running for office, he's not visited the area once since being inaugurated. Meanwhile, George Bush -- you know, the one who "doesn't care about black people" -- visited New Orleans for every August Katrina memorial, even if he was a day late and a dollar short.

The Institute of Southern Studies recently released a report that assesses how Washington has handled the storm's aftermath. The ISS asked 50 community leaders to grade the Obama administration's Katrina recovery efforts: Obama got a D+, and Bush was given a D-. If graded on an E for effort curve, Bush probably would have gotten the edge given his authorization of millions in Gulf Opportunity tax credits and bonds, and an extension of time under which developers could use them.

Meanwhile, Obama has done little in seven months beyond distributing $50 million in housing vouchers. Unfortunately, families either won't be able to use them because there aren't enough houses built yet, or the vouchers will be of little use because they only cover a fraction of rents, which have risen substantially since Katrina. He's also instituted a plan to sell FEMA mobile units to families for $1 or $5, but many of those trailers are toxicfrom formaldehyde leaks.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) did little for recovery and reinvestment in the Gulf Coast area that needed it the most. Since calculations were made based off current population numbers -- many displaced people throughout the country are still waiting to return -- fewer ARRA dollars reached these congressional districts. ARRA's tax credit exchange program, which cashes in states' low income housing tax credits, also excluded the Go Zone tax credits, leaving over 17,000 housing units hanging in the balance.

Yesterday, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan visited New Orleans to address a room of policymakers, nonprofit directors, foundation heads, and community leaders. He made an announcement that HUD will relax their "duplication of benefits" rules, allowing families who've already received disaster housing recovery funds to receive additional support from community development block grants that will be administered by non-profits. It's a good save for those who've already begun rebuilding their homes. As for those still without homes, the verdict is still out. Donovan claimed his advocacy for another extension of the placed-in-service dates to 2012 was a sign of more progress, but with financing still clogged up, and the value of tax credits far below the dollar, that extension won't have great significance for developers of low-income housing.

A visit from Obama would go a long way here, as would firm commitments for how his government will do the "whatever it takes" that Bush promised for the Gulf Coast. In our special report Redemption and Rebuilding we document the efforts from various non-profits and community organizations to assist government efforts, or fill in where government has fallen short. Once the Obama administration gives the Gulf Coast the attention it needs and deserves, then recovery will become a reality not just for those already with means and resources, but also for those who've been living here without.

-- Brentin Mock

In recent articles, a Stars and Stripes reporter has claimed that officials screen reporters before allowing them to interview people in the military or embed with a unit in Iraq or Afghanistan, and that they have been accepting or rejecting journalists’ requests based on whether or not their previous coverage has been favorable to the military.

Defense and military officials acknowledge that they use assessments provided by a private contractor, the Rendon Group, to learn more about a reporter’s background. Finding out about a journalist, and reading their previous work, before they come for an interview is simply doing due diligence, and that is something that journalists expect. Nevertheless, as The Washington Post reports, some people have claimed that the military has turned reporters down because of stories they have written.

Officials, however, deny that “the analysis has been used to exclude journalists from embedding with U.S. military units in combat zones or to bar them from interviewing military personnel.” In fact, officials have told journalists they could not interview certain people in the military – I know, because it happened to me. Last September, I was planning to visit Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and interview people who were learning how to become interrogators, and I spoke with Tanja Linton, a media relations officer in the Fort Huachuca Public Affairs Office, about the visit. I was very much looking forward to it.

Then, not long before I was scheduled to leave Washington, I got an email from Linton: The subject heading said the following: “Visit to Fort Huachuca cancelled.” In her email, dated September 15, 2008, she wrote: “In preparing for your visit to Fort Huachuca, we had the opportunity to do some more research and learned that you authored Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War and edited One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers. This raised concerns about how our Soldiers would be portrayed and caused us to take a closer look at your original request.”

I was surprised – and disappointed. I had thought that the fact that I had an understanding of the subject of U.S. interrogations and had written about them in my book Monstering -- which chronicles the Abu Ghraib scandal, received a full-page review on The New York Times Book Review, and was praised by one of the Pentagon’s top public-affairs officials on Amazon -- would have put me in a strong position for the interviews that I had planned on doing. Instead, I was barred. I’m not sure what was said between Linton and the other people at Fort Huachuca about my upcoming visit, but the conversations did not go very well, at least from my point of view, because of the cancellation. I also wondered who was involved in the decision, particularly since Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, who was the top intelligence officer in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal, serves as an intelligence commander at Fort Huachuca.

Ultimately, the decision that the Fort Huachuca officials made to cancel the visit seemed very small-town-official-like: We don’t like something you wrote, and so we won’t talk to you. It also seemed below the Army. Most of the people whom I have worked with in the public-affairs offices have been extraordinarily professional and helpful, and I have learned a great deal about the military from them. My experience with the public-affairs office of Fort Huachuca, however, only confirms the accusations against the military, showing that it attempts to choose only those journalists who will write positive stories about them.

--Tara McKelvey

At the Windy, Dave Weigel traces the cause and effect of a Glenn Beck "investigative" story and outbursts at town hall meetings. After Beck ran a hit piece on Van Jones, Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, referring to him as Obama's "green czar" and accusing him of a radical conspiracy to funnel money from the stimulus bill to "left-leaning allies," his talking points were echoed at a town hall in Indiana.

There's no doubt that Beck is playing a crucial role in fueling the mad, conspiracy-driven town hall events. But he didn't dream up the idea of targeting Jones for being a former communist, and for driving smears that he was part of an evil plot by radical black communists to take over the U.S. government by purloining federal funds for their own insidious uses. Back in April, World Net Daily ran a piece by Aaron Klein, "Will a 'red' help blacks go green? White House appoints 'radical communist' who sees environment as racial issue."

Klein is no stranger to accusing Obama and his allies of being communists with links to terrorists, both domestic and foreign. Last year, in the Nation, Ari Berman detailed Klein's role in circulating accusations of Obama's "terrorist connections." These breathless claims made their way around the conservative media, and eventually into the mainstream media as well. After Obama was elected, Klein focused on red-baiting, penning stories like "Communist Party strategist maps out Obama's agenda."

On August 13, two weeks before Beck's broadcast, Klein's public relations firm sent an email with the subject line, "Obama's 'green jobs czar' worked with terror founder." In that email, he claimed that Jeff Jones, a director of the Apollo Alliance, on whose board Van Jones served, was a founding member of the Weather Underground. Sound familiar? Terrorists, communists, they're all taking over Washington!

But Beck is so tangled in his conspiracy theories that he can't tell a communist from a capitalist. After his Jones broadcast this week, he worried on the air that Obama was going to "seize power overnight" -- raising the communist fears -- but simultaneously claimed that his rival network, MSNBC, which is owned by General Electric, number six on the Fortune 500 list -- is in on the act. It's all quite mad: while asserting that communists were poised to control government coffers, he was insisting that MSNBC is an "organ" of the White House. Next thing you know, Beck will be claiming that Jack Donaghy is a communist terrorist jihadist racist bent on destroying America.

--Sarah Posner

On Wednesday, Mark wrote of Ted Kennedy:

If he had known that the administration didn't intend to fund the No Child Left Behind legislation, he might not have lent his support in 2001...It took him a while, as it did most liberals, to appreciate that there were no real opportunities in the Bush years, that steadfast opposition was the only honorable position.

On education, how harshly should we judge Kennedy's cooperation on NCLB? The legislation was underfunded. It allowed states to make up their own academic standards, and dumb them down in order to avoid being labeled as "failing." It subjected American children to more frequent high-stakes math and reading testing, thus narrowing the curriculum away from creative writing, science experiments, art, and music. And it totally failed to deliver on its promise to deliver a highly-qualified teacher to every student's classroom.

NCLB needs to be rethought. But what everyone agrees almost eight years later is that its passage was crucial in one key regard: For the first time, it required states to disaggregate student achievement data by race, class, and English language learner status, allowing us to understand the true breadth of the achievement gap. The race and class-consciousness behind that move may have been more difficult for a Democrat to push through Congress, and perhaps Kennedy understood that.

NCLB's reauthorization has been delayed over and over again since 2007, in part because of intra-Democratic Party debates over the role of teacher evaluation and student testing, and in part because of the prioritization of other issues, such as health care. Early last year, Kennedy wrote in the Washington Post that he supported the reauthorization of NCLB if it could be fully funded, and he introduced the SUCCESS Act. The bill was intended to make NCLB more effective by providing extra dollars to states willing to work together to create higher, internationally bench marked education standards and student assessments. From the Senate floor, Kennedy said:

Experience shows that each year yields greater success when policymakers and educators commit in the long term to higher standards, better teacher training, stronger accountability, and extra help for students in need. The initial implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act has been flawed, but we can’t abandon its vision of an America in which every child is important and deserves to be educated and enjoy the full benefits of our society.

That vision is as enduring as America itself. As John Adams wrote in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, the education of the people is “necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberty.” More than two hundred years later, we need to recapture that spirit, and make “No Child Left Behind” a reality, not merely a slogan.

This is the vision behind the Obama administration's education policy, and also behind a new movement, led by the National Governor's Association, to create national standards. Almost every state has signed-on. Whether that effort yields broad, intellectually rigorous standards -- without over-relying on standardized testing -- remains to be seen. Like health reform, education reform is an incomplete part of Kennedy's legacy.

--Dana Goldstein

In response to a new Washington Post story on how the financial sector's major players have just gotten bigger as a result of the government's drastic rescue efforts, Matt Yglesias comments

We seem to be mostly just consolidating while offering one-sided semi-guarantees with no meaningful new regulations. Prudence alone should keep a new crisis at bay for a little while, but basically as best one can see we’re setting ourselves up for another round of boom and bust.

But the part in bold is not really true -- there are meaningful regulations working their way through the legislative process. No, they're not what many economists would prescribe, they leave too many choices to the discretion of regulators, and they take an incentives-based approach to "Too Big To Fail" rather than an articulating a broader anti-trust philosophy. But the role of the Fed as systemic risk regulator for large and broadly-connected financial institutions is often misunderstood as simply ensuring that banks are prepared for a crisis. Here's how the WaPo describes it:

The administration's regulatory reform plan takes aim at this problem by penalizing banks for being big. It would require large institutions to hold more capital and pay higher regulatory fees, as well as allow the government to liquidate them in an orderly way if they begin to fail. The plan also seeks to bolster nontraditional channels of finance to create competition for large banks.

It's important to understand, though, that larger capital cushions and fees aren't just to make the big banks safer or more prudent. They actively prevent big banks from making higher profits because they limit leverage. Attacking the bankers' profit motive is key to making sure their are smaller financial institutions. The problem of implied government guarantees will likely be solved by the new liquidation authorities and especially the proposal that banks maintain actively updated plans to wind down their business in the cases of a crisis. (Expect those plans to be very specific about how screwed bondholders and investors will be if the banks go down.)

More importantly, the implied narrative of this story and Matt's comments -- that the steps taken to mitigate the crisis have resulted in a worse situation than we had before -- misses a key point: we are still in a financial crisis. The banks are not healthy because we are following policies from last fall's emergency rescue efforts. This is a time of transition while the administration tries to get its actual financial sector policy solutions through the legislature. Once regulatory reform is passed, it's a safe bet that the agencies will be taking action to agressively limit pernicious bank practices. (Besides FDIC Chair Sheila Bair, look for the appointees for both the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency and the proposed National Bank Supervisor to be pretty gung-ho on this front.)

A lot, unfortunately, depends on the legislature at this point. One good bit of news is that Congress, which is generally distrustful of the Fed, has the unusual opportunity of being institutionally inclined to be more progressive than the executive. That does depend on who ends up chairing the Senate Banking Committee; let's hope it's not Tim Johnson, who will be a force against reform should he take charge.

-- Tim Fernholz

Dylan Matthews asks if Adam is good for the Aspies:

Were it not for its titular character's Asperger's Syndrome, Adam would be an unremarkable, color-by-numbers romantic comedy, with a couple who meet serendipitously, fall in love, encounter some obstacle, and try to miraculously overcome it. But whether it is a good movie is somewhat beside the point. By placing Adam (Hugh Dancy) on the autism spectrum, writer-director Max Mayer ensured that the film would be not a 90-minute dose of light escapism but a heavily didactic exercise. Adam is less interested in entertaining than in showing neurotypicals that Aspies are people, too.

In certain respects, Adam fulfills that mission. Mayer captures the lived experience of Asperger's in great detail and with great care. A previously ignorant viewer will leave the theater with a working knowledge of the syndrome's symptoms and at least some empathy for the experiences of those of us who have it. Yet that same viewer would also conclude that, like Adam, Asperger's people have their charms but cannot function in normal adult relationships. In one scene, Beth (Rose Byrne), Adam's love interest, asks the headmaster of the elementary school where she teaches if people with Asperger's are "dating material." The film's answer appears to be "no."

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You'd think that National Review would be trying to put things like its proud advocacy of white supremacy during the Civil Rights Movement to rest, but Fred Schwartz wants you to know that William F. Buckley was right, dammit:

Anyone who knows what “states’ rights” meant in 1964 must shudder at those words; but in retrospect, Goldwater and the editors had at least half a point. When the bill was debated in the Senate, opponents charged that it would require employers and educational institutions to meet rigid racial quotas in hiring and admissions. Nonsense, said the bill’s sponsors (and fully believed what they said). Nowhere did the bill mention quotas; in fact, it repeatedly and explicitly required equal treatment regardless of race. What could be plainer than that? And yet less than a decade later, “affirmative action” became all but mandatory.

The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.

[...]

National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

Regardless of what was being "debated in the Senate," Buckley's support of segregation wasn't based on a fear that big government policies would infringe on personal liberty--the editorial was arguing against black suffrage. The point was that whites were "the advanced race" and therefore entitled to dominate their betters--even to the point of denying blacks the right to vote.

See if you can find Schwartz's "half a point" in that.

-- A. Serwer

Earlier this week, a Frenchman named Marc Aubrière escaped from his kidnappers, who were members of an extremist Islamist group. He then miraculously “appeared on the streets of Mogadishu,” according to The New York Times. He sneaked past sleeping guards, walking barefoot so he would not wake them, and then managed to get free, following the example of Times reporter David Rohde. Earlier this summer , Rohde escaped from his his kidnappers, members of the Taliban who had held him in a mountainous area of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nevertheless, rumors circulated about both of those incidents -- there's been speculation as to whether or not the kidnappers were in fact paid a ransom for the release of the men, and that stories about the escapes of Aubrière and Rohde were concocted to cover up the truth.

There seems to be no real evidence that a ransom was paid for either of the two men, but it is also not surprising that people have wondered about the escapes. Negotiating with terrorists is, of course, a bad idea – or at least that is the conventional wisdom – and it remains a highly controversial move. But in fact, it is done all the time, such as when the Italians tried -- and succeeded -- in gaining the freedom of Il Manifesto journalist Giuliana Sgrena from the clutches of the Taliban in 2005. (Negotiating with enemies worked more recently when Bill Clinton went to North Korea and helped secure the release of two American journalists.)

So, if one is kidnapped by terrorists, should one run away or stay? And should a government or an institution such as The New York Times, in the case of the Rohde kidnapping, enter into negotiations with the terrorists? In the macabre world of kidnapping science, there are no clear-cut answers, only difficult questions. Even the experts in the field get things wrong, or become victims of the wave of violence, as shown by the fact that Felix Batista, an American who ran kidnapping workshops to help people learn how not to get abducted, was himself seized in Mexico last December. Lawmakers in his home-state of Florida are now trying to sort out the best way to help him. There seems to be no takeaway or lessons learned from these chilling accounts for either individuals who face the predicament or the governments that become involved, except that one should stay flexible whatever the situation is -- and be prepared to run.

--Tara McKelvey

Stephen Holmes eviscerates reviews Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:

What will be the consequences for Europe of decades of immigration, much of it from the Muslim world? In the eyes of Christopher Caldwell, a culturally conservative columnist at the Financial Times and an editor at the Weekly Standard, Europe is being remade, or rather unmade, from the ground up. As a result of the growing "nation of Islam" in Europe -- including 5 million Muslims in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Great Britain -- societies that used to be homogeneous and therefore coherent have become multicultural and internally divided.

But multiculturalism may be merely a halfway house. Echoing Edmund Burke in his title, Caldwell suggests that Europe is undergoing a "revolution" vaguely analogous to what happened in France in 1789. In his first letters on those events, Burke claimed to see a human society being dissolved and replaced by a world of monsters. This isn't far from how Caldwell portrays Europe today. The monstrosities he parades before us include honor killings, "menacing North African slums," anti-Semitic outrages, European police who "are petrified of Muslim men," vandals rampaging through the banlieues, and young zealots marching through European streets with signs reading "Death to anyone who insults Islam!"

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Coverage of Ted Kennedy's death has been suffused with the narrative that he was a man held hostage by a sense of family destiny. In 1959, then-Senator JFK said, "Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate. And if Bobby died, our young brother, Ted, would take over for him."

The Kennedy sisters and daughters simply weren't subjected to -- our gifted with -- these powerful expectations. When Eunice Kennedy Shriver died earlier this month, many obituaries noted that she was a natural politician in many ways -- a fantastic organizer, networker, and spokeswoman. But because she was born female in 1921, she never seriously considered running for office.

Did these expectations shift over the generations? Maybe not so much. Just last year, during the brouhaha over Caroline Kennedy's interest in Hillary Clinton's New York Senate seat, I often wondered if the outrage over nepotism would have been as acute if John Kennedy Jr. had lived and decided to toss his hat in the ring. JFK Jr., from an early age, seemed to embody little of his father's or uncles' driving ambition for political office. He was interested in theater and acting. He repeatedly failed the bar exam. He then launched a glossy magazine. Yet many members of his family and the Democratic establishment hoped he would someday run for president.

Of course, Robert Kennedy's oldest daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, served as lieutenant governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003, later losing her gubernatorial bid. But on the whole, the Kennedy family women have been subjected not to political expectations, but to domestic and philanthropic ones. They put up, in the public eye, with their husbands' infidelities. They smiled as their fashion choices were put under the microscope. They got involved with charity. That was their destiny.

For further reading: The Kennedy Women by Laurence Learner

--Dana Goldstein

Dayo Olopade looks at a food-justice movement spearheaded by Gulf Coast youths:

President Obama's daughters get healthy school lunches. Why don't I? So asked a pigtailed black girl plastered on buses and billboards around Washington, D.C. The White House blasted the political ad, which promoted healthy food options in public schools, as exploitative -- but the little girl's complaint should resonate with an administration that has prioritized healthy eating and food security, from both the East and West Wing of the White House.

In 2006, a group of New Orleans elementary school children, freshly returned from displacement after Hurricane Katrina, took up a similar refrain about public school cafeterias as part of a citywide leadership-development program known as Rethink. Their version: "We hate sporks!"

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Dave Weigel, reporting on the right-wing politicization of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and its efforts to draw attention to the New Black Panther Party vote suppression case, gets an astonishing quote from career vote-suppression advocate Hans von Spakovsky:

“That’s not relevant here,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer was Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights during the Bush administration. “When I worked at the [Justice Department], we would never look at election results as a way of determining whether we needed to be involved.”

During the Bush administration, they didn't like waiting for election results before determining whether or not to get involved. Instead, they just fired U.S. attorneys who refused to bring trumped up charges for partisan reasons, or in von Spakovsky's case, blocked investigations of vote suppression cases affecting minorities, because they don't, you know, vote Republican.

On the NBPP case, Weigel writes:

One problem with comparing the Philadelphia incident to the infamous crimes of the 1960s is that it didn’t effectively target potential McCain voters. Rather than targeting white voters, or going to a predominantly Republican district, the NBP went to a largely African-American precinct close to downtown Philadelphia. Obama carried the precinct by a landslide, with 596 votes to only 13 votes for McCain. The Republican candidate fared worse than George W. Bush in 2004, when he won 24 votes there, but better than Bush in 2000, when he won only eight votes. In a race that Obama won by 620,478 votes statewide, the New Black Panther incident was a blip.

Republicans have tried to paint this case as an example of "reverse racism," that what the NBPP did was similar to what the KKK was doing back in the day. But the truth is that the NBPP probably wasn't trying to suppress white votes--they could have gone to a white district for that. They most likely imagined themselves as protecting black voters from evil whites who might try to keep blacks from voting. Instead, they embarrassed themselves and caught a case, providing another example of the utter uselessness of the NBPP.

But the Commission on Civil Right's obsession with this case is absurd, given that these same folks couldn't care less about say--Republicans hiring private detectives to intimidate Latino voters registered by ACORN and demand to see evidence of their citizenship. They haven't suddenly developed a reverence for the right to vote, you won't see the commission arguing for universal voter registration or an end to using social security databases that purge eligible voters. Hating the NBPP is about as far as this incarnation of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is going to go in protecting the right to vote.

UPDATE: I feel obligated to put this in perspective. Flawed Social Security databases used to check voter registrations probably disenfranchised millions of eligible voters last year. The U.S. Comission on Civil Rights is worried about the New Black Panther Party.

-- A. Serwer

Spencer Ackerman takes a look at Admiral Mike Mullen's latest article on strategic communications in Afghanistan, and flags this quote:

I would argue that most strategic communications problems are not communications problems at all. They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or we don’t deliver on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are …

To put it simply, we need to worry less about how to communicate our actions than about what our actions communicate.

It's not just our actions--Mullen points out that the Taliban's ability to make good on its threats is a key part of their strategic communications, or as he put it, "Each beheading, each bombing, and each beating sends a powerful message or, rather, is a powerful message." I suppose it's axiomatic that terrorists are good at this kind of messaging, but worth thinking about in terms of what the U.S. is up against.

For what it's worth, Richard Holbrooke's strategic communications team seems to understand this dynamic pretty well--at the briefing a few weeks ago, Holbrooke noted that the most effective message the U.S. could send would be to reduce civilian casualties caused by coalition forces.

-- A. Serwer

One more post to round out this thrilling week of new budget projections. You've probably noticed that the storyline has been entirely about how the Obama administration has increased the deficit and whether the president can still pursue his aggressive policy agenda. But the first part of that sentence isn't true. Since he was inaugurated, Barack Obama has decreased the deficit. How's that work?

When the budget offices in Congress and the White House release their projections, they use different assumptions. The Congressional Budget Office has to assume that any law on the books will stay that way; that means they assume all the Bush tax codes will expire, even though the administration only wants to repeal some of them, that the annual Alternate Minimum Tax fix will not be used to exempt middle-class people from the tax, even though it passes every year, and that Congress will not pass the annual Medicare reimbursement fix, even though that passes ever year, etc.

The OMB is under no such compunction, and in this administration, tries to make the most realistic assumptions possible, hence their higher deficit number over the long term ($9.1 trillion versus $7.1 trillion over the next ten years). But comparing those two numbers would be like comparing apples and oranges.

Luckily the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has a wonky analysis of the latest information that tries to reconcile the two approaches. They found that after adjusting CBO's numbers to more realistic assumptions and then comparing it to the president's budget proposals, reflected in the OMB projections, the long-term deficit would actually be lower than current laws, most of which hang over from the Bush administration, by $600 billion to $900 billion. That's obviously not enough to solve our deficit problem, but remember as well that a majority of the new deficit comes from the economic collapse or policies related to it, not the president's agenda.

It's obviously important to realize that no matter who caused the deficit, the current White House incumbent has to deal with it. But that's no excuse for getting the facts wrong and blaming him, especially when his premiere agenda-item, health care, would actually work to decrease the long-term deficit.

-- Tim Fernholz

Further Reading:
Don't panic about the deficit.

• It's fairly ridiculous to suggest that Mitt Romney could win a special election in Massachusetts to fill Ted Kennedy's seat, but if you view the politics of the present entirely in terms of the politics of the 2012 presidential race, you're bound to make ridiculous suggestions (Cheney 2012!). But let's point out the obvious objections to this argument. Romney isn't currently a resident of the Bay State. He declined to seek a second term as governor because his approval ratings were in the mid-30s. Barack Obama has a 73 percent approval rating in Massachusetts (as of August 10). And wouldn't it be pretty awkward for Romney, who campaigned as a New England liberal centrist in 2002, then campaigned as a right-wing caricature in 2008, to campaign again as a liberal centrist in 2009?
• Does the RNC really think this survey on health care is going to be some sort of game changer? Featuring such neutral language as "the liberal media," "government bureaucrats," and "socialized medicine," the true gold nugget here is a question that begins "It has been suggested" (I wonder by whom?) "that the government could use voter registration to determine a person's political affiliation," leading to Republicans being "discriminated against." Since the survey's cover letter bears Michael Steele's signature, that makes him not only an idiot, but a liar as well.
• The AP points out that the ARRA's biggest critics are rank hypocrites who want to have it both ways on federal stimulus spending. The story here isn't so much a lack of commitment to so-called principled conservatism, states' rights or limited government, but that for the purposes of their narrow political needs, these Republicans only tend to their constituents' well-being when it's convenient for them to do so.
• The Los Angeles Times has "dust up" between two legal scholars on the subject of whether investigating torture by the CIA would have a "chilling effect" on agents, but only one of the participants points out the obvious: the point of the law is to deter and it should have a "chilling effect" on those who are under its domain (whether a given law is a good law is another question). But as long as there is vocal minority out there who think 24 is an accurate depiction of reality, the nation's soul will continue to rot a little more as we "debate" whether torture is awesome, or merely regrettably awesome.
• Let's go over this one more time so we get it right: The right-wing lunatics and their LaRoucheite pals don't represent a movement and currently don't represent a widespread threat to the security of Democrats, including the president (hangings in effigy aside). But the real villains here are conservative Republicans like James Inhofe, who are openly cheering on revolution and thus encouraging the radicals that someone in power has their back. This is dangerous, irresponsible, and ought to be grounds for censuring Inhofe in the Senate. Too bad the upper chamber is such a congenial place that the likes of Inhofe are treated with a respect he does not deserve.
• Remainders: Bill Richardson clears a federal pay-to-play probe; why would anyone believe the former governor of Alaska is organized enough to run for president?; The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes is an enormous hack; Democrats would be wise to stay as far away from Mark Penn as possible; and Andrew Breibart is one disturbed individual.

--Mori Dinauer

First, there was the article on the "afterbirthers" demanding to see Obama's placenta. Now, we have an Onion segment discussing whether or not using a minotaur to gore detainees is, in fact, torture. Obviously there are two sides to the question.

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

"Forcing prisoners to wander in an infinite labyrinth living in fear of being torn limb from limb by the minotaur may be harsh now, but you have to remember what it was like after 9/11."

Note that while all the other guests are from fake organizations, the woman who says the "minotaur kept us safe" is simply a "columnist for National Review Online."

UPDATE: Screenshot:

UPDATE II: I mean, if you're Andy McCarthy, I suppose you have to be kind of flattered, right?
-- A. Serwer

Robert Kuttner argues that a second stimulus could help states avoid layoffs, program cuts, and tax hikes:

Economic growth declined by only 1 percent from April through June, compared to 6.4 percent in the first quarter -- in these times that passes for good news. Without the Obama stimulus of $787 billion, the damage would be far worse. But there are two areas of the economy where still-deteriorating conditions require more federal intervention. One is unemployment -- 9.5 percent and heading for double digits. The other is the condition of state and local government.

Most state constitutions require balanced budgets. So in a recession, when revenues fall, states are compelled to behave perversely. They cut program outlays just when public needs increase. They lay off workers, defer projects, raise taxes, and resort to budget gimmicks that are bad policy in their own right.

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This is just a minor example of the remarkable stupidity and incoherence evident throughout Michael Steele's disastrous NPR interview about health care, but I was struck by this part of his futile attempt to reconcile his competing positions as Medicare opponent and Medicare supporter:

The reality of it is simply this: I’m not saying I like or dislike Medicare. It is what it is. It is a program that has been around for over 40 years, and in those 40 years, it has not been run efficiently or well enough to sustain itself.

While I disagree with libertarian arguments that Amtrak should pay for itself, I can at least understand them. But who on earth thinks that a program providing health services to a population that is much sicker than average and for the most part doesn't work can turn a profit? Could even Steele be dumb enough to think that private insurers could turn a profit providing universal coverage to that population? This stuff is pathetic even by Steele's standards.

--Scott Lemieux

Harold Meyerson asks if D.C. is the only place in America not affected by the downturn:

The view from Charlie Palmer's Steakhouse is terrific. Look out the massive picture windows and there, above the leafy trees that stretch nearly to the top of the hill, the Capitol dome glistens, refulgent in the late summer heat. Your heart skips a beat, and not just because of the size of the check.

The view inside Charlie Palmer's Steakhouse is also upbeat. Nestled at the foot of the Senate side of Capitol Hill, the place is a magnet for lobbyists and legislators. During the Friday lunchtime when I pay a call, the dining room is a little more than half full, but then it's Friday, when members of Congress have already gone home for the weekend. "Some of the folks we get on Friday," says Lamar, the bartender, "are bummed that they have to be here. Not here at the restaurant; here in D.C."

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National Review's Andy McCarthy, fresh off of considering whether not wearing a tie with your button-down is proof of Islamist sympathies and cheering the birthers, attempts to argue that what the CIA IG report describes isn't torture:

Here, it is necessary to clear up some Holder-induced confusion. The attorney general, like his president, claims that all waterboarding is torture (which is not true) and implies that interrogation practices under Bush’s CIA program were forms of torture even if the DOJ guidance permitted them (which is further still from the truth). That lays the groundwork for Holder to posit that any CIA practices that went beyond what the DOJ permitted were certainly torture.

Well look, not even the CIA claimed that its use of waterboarding wasn't torture, as McCarthy has over and over, on the basis that it's been used to train American soldiers to resist torture.  McCarthy makes the argument again here, noting Holder's testimony that "U.S. government trainers who waterboard military and intelligence personnel cannot be guilty of torture. " The IG report quotes an interrogator who acknowledges that the difference between SERE waterboarding and CIA waterboarding is that the latter is "for real." McCarthy somehow missed that part of the report.

McCarthy then goes on to argue, presumably with a straight face, that the mock executions staged by the CIA were not really mock executions:

This is where the “mock execution” comes in. In assessing whether the interrogator intended to inflict prolonged psychological damage, threats to third parties are relevant. If one were to tell a detainee that if he didn’t cooperate he’d be killed just like X non-cooperator, and then a mock execution of X were staged before the detainee’s eyes, that would be egregious. If a mock execution of X were staged before the detainee’s eyes but without threatening the detainee that he was next, we get into the same “lack of certainty” we saw with the element of imminence. And the threat would be vaguer still if the detainee were told nothing but heard shots fired, was shown an apparently dead body, and was left to speculate about what had happened and what it might portend for him.

Not only does the implied threat of raping Al-Nashiri's relatives not make it into McCarthy's weak defense of torture, neither does the CIA's explicit threat to alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed that "We're going to kill your children." Although one can imagine McCarthy's response--"Not knowing the tone of voice the statement was made in, it's impossible to ascertain specific intent..."

At any rate, not only is McCarthy arguing that torture techniques authorized by the Bush DoJ aren't torture, he's arguing that techniques that weren't specifically authorized aren't torture either, because they also weren't specifically prohibited--as Daphne Eviatar has written, that may have been done deliberately to encourage abuse, in which case it may be a crime. There's also the issue that McCarthy's standard for torture can't be met by an agent of the United States government--it requires a kind of "intent" that, since interrogators were looking for intelligence information, they don't have.

Obviously, that is why the Obama-Holder Justice Department has argued in federal court that government officials do not commit torture, even if they actually do inflict severe pain on a detainee, unless it is clear that torturing the victim was their purpose. If they had a different purpose, there is no torture.

McCarthy not entirely wrong on torture being an "intent specific" crime. It's just that for McCarthy (I'm unaware of the case he's referring to with regards to the administration, but I'm looking into it), one can't "specifically intend to inflict severe mental pain or suffering" if that's not the sole motivation. The statute doesn't say that, and I'm hard pressed to understand how shackling a diapered person in a stress position so they can defecate on themselves without being moved out of it isn't intended to "inflict severe mental pain or suffering." The point is to inflict such suffering in order to get the person to talk.

McCarthy also writes that "We trivialize the concept, and the barbarities committed by history’s monstrous regimes, when we apply the label “torture” to conduct that, though disturbing, does not approach this level of horror."

Even if you agree with McCarthy that our torture techniques gleaned from such models of respect for human rights as China aren't torture, what McCarthy is saying is that as long as an intent to cause harm wasn't the primary motivation for torturing someone, the CIA could do just about anything to the detainees in their custody and it wouldn't be torture, barbarities or otherwise. The CIA officers themselves were more tethered to reality than McCarthy is--they were concerned they might face prosecution as a result of what they were doing.

-- A. Serwer

Gershom Gorenberg on organ-trafficking, shoddy journalism, and a foreign-relations snafu:

Lest there be any misunderstanding: As an Israeli and a Jew, I don't believe that the current government of Sweden is quasi-Nazi, that all Swedes are anti-Semites, or that I should boycott Ikea, the Swedish furniture firm. At the same time, to remove all doubt, I solemnly declare that I have never been involved in the international trade in organs for transplant. I do feel exceedingly silly bothering to make these denials. But they seem somehow necessary in light of the current Swedish-Israeli tensions, which are a product of egregiously incompetent journalism in a Swedish paper and equally irredeemable diplomacy by Israel in furious response.

Technically speaking, the affair began last week with an article headlined "Our Sons Plundered for Their Organs" that appeared in the back pages of Aftonbladet, a major Swedish paper. Writer Donald Boström began by describing the July arrest in New York of Levy Izhak Rosenbaum on charges of buying kidneys from Israeli donors and selling them in the United States to people in need of transplants. From there, Boström leaps to describing "strong suspicions" among Palestinians that Israel has abducted young Palestinian men to "serve as the country's organ reserve before being killed."

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With the passing of Sen. Ted Kennedy, there will be some changes in who will hold some of the Senate's most powerful committee chairmanships. Chris Dodd, the Connecticut senator and good friend of the "Lion of the Senate," has in effect chaired both the Senate Banking Committee and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee since Kennedy withdrew from the Senate in the last six months. Now he'll have to decide which seat to keep.

Either choice is fraught. Dodd's trouble now is his re-election campaign, floundering largely due to Dodd's close ties to the reviled financial industry. Leaving the banking committee to focus entirely on health-care reform might be a good way of putting the issue behind him, but a more direct approach would be staying at Banking and pushing through tough financial regulatory reform. His heart may be set on carrying Kennedy's legacy at HELP, however, and however strong and popular regulatory reform turns out to be, it's not half as a tangible to the average consumer as the health-care reform effort. (Which might not be the best thing politically, as we've seen in the last month).

What happens if Dodd goes to HELP? The ranking member on Banking is South Dakota's Tim Johnson, who is a well-known financial industry ally. It would be bad news for regulatory reform if Johnson took over the committee; he's received nearly a million dollars from the financial industry in the last 20 years and voted against credit card reform efforts earlier in the year. But he has had health problems of his own, and despite leadership support, may not wish to take on the high-profile, high-stress job. The next in line after Johnson is Rhode Island's Jack Reed, who seems to strike a much stronger pro-regulation tone.

What happens if Dodd stays at the Banking committee in an attempt to confront his problematic image head on? Iowa's Tom Harkin will take over HELP. Harkin, a stalwart progressive and union advocate who has focused on managing the labor side of HELP during Kennedy's absence just as Dodd managed health-care reform, would be in a position to bring something of a fresh voice to the health-care debate. He's an experienced legislator who would fight for the public option and the HELP bill given the chance.

The best option might be for Dodd to stay at Banking to try to salvage his reputation with strong regulation, and for Harkin to bring his focus to bear on health care. But if Dodd heads for HELP, making sure that Reed gets the Banking chairmanship -- or at least shares duties with Johnson, an option under discussion -- would become a priority for progressive advocacy groups.

Update: Wise Dylan Matthews observes that getting Harkin to give up his Agriculture Committee chair would be difficult, especially for a legislator from Iowa (A side note: It's pretty strange that Chuck Grassley and Harkin are both elected by the same constituents). The next most senior member is Maryland's long-serving liberal Barbara Milkuski, whose chief legislative interest is education policy.

-- Tim Fernholz

The ever-controversial Cash for Clunkers program, which ended this week, has come under attack for a variety of reasons, but I've been a supporter -- it created demand, rather than simply accelerating future demand; it offered some environmental benefits; it put money in people's pockets by dint of saving their gas money (an average of $821 annually); it made it easier for auto dealerships to accept the carefully calibrated GM/Chrysler bankruptcy deals; and it helped prop up the auto industry. And in so doing, we've found out, it helped save some jobs:

One auto analyst called the program a success, if only because his research showed that it was responsible for saving 39,000 jobs that otherwise would have been eliminated.

"It's really more substantial than we had thought in terms of stimulus," said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research. "This is companies putting people back to work."

General Motors announced last week that it will reinstate 1,350 workers and add overtime for about 10,000 at three plants, as the automaker replenishes inventory sold during the government program. Honda also said it will increase U.S. production.

The other big winners in the program were Asian automakers. Eight of the top 10 new cars purchased through the program came from Honda, Hyundai, Nissan and Toyota, which claimed the top spot with its Corolla. The Corolla, Honda Civic and Ford Focus are manufactured in the United States.

(As a side note, I was suspicious of the "Center for Automotive Research," but at least they're up front about their funding sources [PDF], so make your own call about their partiality.)

Calculated Risk has a table showing where different states benefited, with my home state, New Hampshire, coming in as the top dollar-per-capita recipient (flinty!). As to why D.C. didn't do very well, it's because there aren't very many car dealerships in the District proper, probably due to high rents for a big car lot and the fact that most of the people who drive in D.C. probably live in the Maryland/Virginia D.C. suburbs anyway.

-- Tim Fernholz

The New Yorker's big political story this week is an attack on the New York City teachers' contract, by Steven Brill. By now, most people who follow education news know about the "Rubber Rooms" in big city school districts -- reassignment centers for teachers who have been found guilty of misconduct or incompetence but who continue to earn a regular paycheck and accrue pension benefits. Brill visits one such Rubber Room and highlights the cases of a few teachers inside. One is an alcoholic whom the United Federation of Teachers falsely claimed was removed from her job due to discrimination against older teachers. Another has a history of filing merit-less lawsuits. A third teacher featured in the article regularly lost control of her classroom, claimed to be unaware of basic teacher training material, read her negative performance evaluation out loud to her class, and assigned one student to be the "enforcer" over other children.

These three individuals certainly shouldn't be working with kids. Indeed, there is a very strong argument to be made that teacher contracts need to be rethought from the ground up. Even if one is skeptical of test score-based merit pay as an education fix-all -- as I am -- there are other commonsense reforms. And there is little reason, during a recession when jobs are scarce, to pay incompetent teachers indefinitely for work outside the classroom, or, in the case of the rubber rooms, to pay them to simply sit around doing nothing. Teachers are college-educated professionals. If they leave the school system, many of them will be able to find other, decent work.

All that said, the Brill piece, in its relentless depiction of teachers as bad guys and principals and administrators as good guys, leaves readers with a few misconceptions. It highlights no examples of excellence in teaching, while admitting that only 1.8 percent of New York teachers have been rated "unsatisfactory." Brill also gives the impression that the Obama administration, under Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, maintains an attitude of pure confrontation with teachers' unions. In fact, the White House has been careful to formulate policies that can earn at least begrudging acceptance from Randi Weingarten, the most influential national teachers' union leader, and a villain in Brill's piece. The latest example of such compromise lies in the fine print of the "Race to the Top" education reform grant guidelines: States whose applications include a signed statement of support from a union leader will earn a leg up in the process.

From a public relations perspective, the appearance of this article is certainly disastrous for teachers' unions. A lot of influential people read The New Yorker, people who may not bother to learn more about the nuances of education policy. And those readers have just been treated to a scathing -- though incomplete -- review of teacher contracts and the state of urban education.

--Dana Goldstein

Lawyers for Mohammed Jawad, the Afghan national who was a minor when he was first detained by the U.S. government and was recently released to Afghanistan, intend to sue the U.S. government in part to prevent torture from ever being used again. Jawad spent seven years in detention based on evidence that was gained through torture.

Speaking from Kabul, Maj. Eric Montalvo, Jawad's military commissions defense lawyer, said that "from a policy standpoint, it’s a disincentive for the United States to engage in that type of conduct. ... You have punitive damages, you have a lawsuit that creates precedent ... and it may create a pause for the U.S. government should they decide to do this in the future."

Montalvo said that the Jawad case provided a unique opportunity to deal with the torture issue, because the circumstances of the case are so well known. "The Jawad case is a perfect case to put forward, because there has been documented abuse ... in some of the other cases, there’s a he said she said, whereas here we have tangible evidence of the abuse, so that puts this case in a particularly strong posture to move forward on."

Montalvo added that he had been frustrated with the State Department's efforts on behalf of Jawad's repatriation, arguing that they hadn't provided much financial or medical support for Jawad's transition back into society. Montalvo said this was indicative of a larger problem with the way the U.S. handles the repatriation of detainees. "My concern is that if the U.S. is worried about someone being repatriated and turning to the dark side if you will, or becoming an antagonist in the future, they’re certainly doing a poor job of preventing it by depriving someone of everything but the shirt on their back and sticking them on a bus stop corner.”

Montalvo said that he had met with the State Department earlier that morning, and that they had agreed to offer Jawad more help. The BBC reported earlier this morning that Jawad's lawyers were intending to sue for "compensation."

Adam Blickstein at Democracy Arsenal demolishes Tim Pawlenty's assumptions about the CIA and interrogations, but there's another telling remark Pawlenty made that I want to highlight:

Having the Democrats watch your money and keep an eye over your money is like having Michael Vick watch your dog for the weekend.

So torturing dogs is really terrible but torturing people is fine?

I'm sure a conservative might argue that torturing terrorists is fine, but none of the people who were tortured were actually convicted of any crimes, and the IG report itself notes that "Agency officers report that reliance on
analytical assessments that were usupported by credible intelligence may have resulted in the application of EITs without justification," which was bound to happen if you assume that (a) torturing terrorists is okay and (b) anyone in U.S. custody is a terrorist--you end up torturing someone who isn't.

-- A. Serwer

• Ted Kennedy roundup: It's impossible to separate Kennedy's death from the politics of health-care reform; an interim successor could still be appointed in Massachusetts; Conservatives for Patients' Rights backs off until after Kennedy is laid to rest; his foreign policy legacy is also notable; who will be the Senate's next liberal lion; and guess who was the first Senator to have a web page.
• A suggestion for The Washington Post editorial page: try fact-checking the columns you have people write from the beginning instead of leaving it for your other columnists to do. It might help your readers better calibrate themselves to reality.
• There are two observations to make regarding professional jingo Glenn Beck's latest tirade. First, the conservative movement likely would not exist had there not been the threat of global communism, and second, the conservative movement bafflingly continues to sustain itself 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union by stoking fears of communist infiltrators. I can't decide if their disciplined obsessiveness is impressive or just pathetic.
• The strangest thing about prominent Republicans simultaneously praising and deriding federal stimulus dollars spent in their districts is that it's impossible to determine what they really believe and who their real constituents are. Does Mitch McConnell believe in Keynesian economics or is he just pandering to voters in Kentucky? And if he's pandering, then who is his audience in Washington when he's attacking the ARRA? Perhaps, like Chuck Grassley, McConnell just faces pressure (from whom? Isn't he the minority leader?) from the GOP to never deviate from the party line.
• And Finally: The Fox Business Network has been a failure but at least one Fox News anchor is willing to correct John McCain's B.S. on Senate rules.
  

--Mori Dinauer

In his recent Time piece on abortion and health reform, Mike Scherer confuses the issue. As he writes, under the current House compromise, both private and public health plans operating in the exchanges would not be able to use government subsidies or taxes to provide abortion -- abortions would have to be paid for from the pool of self-paid consumer premiums.

But there is little evidence health reform would dramatically increase access to abortion in the United States, or represent a major victory for pro-choice groups. Even if the public plan does end up including abortion coverage in its minimum benefit package -- if the public plan exists at all! -- it would cover only a small number of American women, since it would be closed to anyone with an employer-provided option. Meanwhile, the majority of private insurers already offer at least some abortion coverage in their plans, but usually only in cases of rape, incest, genetic abnormalities, or risks to the pregnant woman's health.

The basic fact is that under both our current health care system or under reform, people will -- and do! -- subsidize other people's abortions, through health insurance premiums. The difference between a private company collecting this premium or the government collecting this premium (as in the case of a public plan) is academic -- consumers have never had any power over what their insurance premiums fund. Lastly, it's important to remember that 76 percent of abortions are paid for out-of-pocket. Health reform would probably bring this number down very little or not at all, since the vast majority of people will remain yoked to employer-provided insurance plans that offer only very limited abortion services, or none at all.

Still, this isn't enough for anti-choice legislators such as Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), who is offering up an amendment that would essentially ban all non-crisis abortion coverage, even in private insurance plans. This is an attempt to use health reform as an excuse to push a broader agenda against reproductive rights. It is not an attempt to "maintain the status quo." Under the status quo, insurers choose whether to cover abortion, and they decline to cover most abortions. The existing health reform bills would not change that.

--Dana Goldstein

Tim Fernholz explains why the latest budget numbers support the case for health reform:

You've probably already heard that the deficit projections released yesterday are a threat to the president's plan to reform health care. In fact, Reuters tried to tell you this a week ago, in a story headlined "New deficit projections pose risks to Obama's agenda." But these critics, and Reuters, are wrong. The latest deficit projections make reforming health care -- the inclusion of a public insurance option -- all the more important.

The mid-year budget projections from the White House and Congress contain two important pieces of information: First, this year's deficit will be some $250 billion lower than anticipated after funds intended to bail out banks that went unused But the economic crisis has led to slower growth, a decrease in tax revenue, and more money spent on "automatic stabilizers" like unemployment insurance, creating one of the largest long-term deficits ever, about $9.1 trillion over the next ten years.

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Ted Kennedy was a great liberal and a phenomenally effective leader above all because of his personal generosity. There was a seamless connection between his concern for humanity in general and his joy in engaging with people one at a time.

There is the sort of politician who does favors in the spirit of the Sicilian proverb – I don’t do favors; I incur debts – and then there was Teddy Kennedy, who cast his bread upon the waters. Long before practicing random acts of kindness became a bumper sticker, Ted Kennedy was the apotheosis of kindness. It was the genuineness of his love of people that allowed him to befriend Republican conservatives, often finding common ground. What made this improbable strategy work so superbly as politics was not his guile, but his guilelessness.

His capacity to connect on a personal level with so many different kinds of people was utterly real. The loyalty of his staff was legendary, not because of the thrill of working for a celebrity or a powerhouse but because his kindness extended to everyone.

At one of his many 75th birthday parties at his Washington home, I was startled to run into several right-wing princes of darkness, who were there because the recognized Kennedy’s greatness and because they genuinely liked the man. He was a master at winning over even those who wanted to hate him.

Ted Kennedy was also a great friend of The American Prospect. When we moved the magazine from Boston to Washington in 2001, I called Sen. Kennedy’s office and asked if he would be willing to do an event for us. He not only agreed, but he encouraged us to invite a group of 200 intimate friends to his Washington home, where he was the most gracious of hosts. Arriving early, I encountered the senator alone, and he took me around the house showing mementos of one of America’s great political families, with wit and warmth, as if he had not done the small tour thousands of times before. And when the magazine held a 15th birthday celebration in 2006, honoring Boston’s progressive leaders including his wife Vicky, the senator spent a long evening in good humor vouching for the importance of the Prospect’s work.

For one so prominent, he was remarkably unpretentious. In a profession where extreme narcissism is an occupational hazard, he did not have an outsized ego.

And in recognizing politics as the art of the possible, Kennedy never sought the safe center. He was always pushing the boundaries in a more progressive direction. It is a mark of both his high principle and his tactical genius that the Senate’s most effective legislative leader was also one of its most progressive members -- not an easy feat.

If President Obama wishes to honor Ted Kennedy’s memory, he should do more than pass universal health reform. He should remember that great progressive leaders do not seek the center; they define a new center.

--Robert Kuttner

One of the reoccurring themes of today's remembrances of Ted Kennedy is his reaction to Robert Bork's nomination, which has been criticized as "extreme." Scott Johnson of Powerline, in fact, was so intent on reminding us of Kennedy's role in sinking Bork that he cannibalizes a post he wrote more than a year ago slamming Kennedy when he was first diagnosed with brain cancer and posts it as though it were fresh.

This is what Kennedy said shortly after Bork's nomination:

"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is -- and is often the only -- protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy... President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice."

Johnson calls Kennedy's statement "false charges" and accuses him, essentially of megalomania. In hindsight though, Kennedy's statement wasn't so much wrong as it was expressed in the kind of intemperate manner that ruffles feathers in Washington. The fact is, Bork believed only "political" speech was protected by the First Amendment; he, like many other conservatives,  didn't believe that women have the right to make choices about whether to carry pregnancies to term; he was critical of the idea that illegally obtained evidence shouldn't be used in court; and while nominally agreeing that the 14th Amendment prohibited racial discrimination -- as opposed to discrimination based on gender, which he thought it didn't -- in practice, he opposed every single piece of legislation ever passed in order to guarantee the civil rights of African Americans. Searching through old news reports, I can't speak to Kennedy's allegations on Bork's views on evolution in schools, but it's fairly clear that Bork's personal beliefs are anti-evolution.

Not surprisingly, Stuart Taylor Jr. wrote a fairly sympathetic profile of Bork at the time. (Ricci made Sonia Sotomayor a racist, but opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act  and the 1965 Voting Rights Act just made Bork an originalist.) By contrast, William T. Coleman, former Ford transportation secretary and a member of an endangered species (the black, pro-civil rights Republican) wrote this about Bork:

The pattern is unmistakable. When it has counted, Robert Bork has often stood against the aspirations of blacks to achieve their constitutional rights and to remove the vestiges of racial discrimination. And as women and others move ahead to seek their equal share of the American Dream, there is the great risk that the pattern will repeat itself.

I spoke to Coleman, who was one of Thurgood Marshall's legal lieutenants, earlier this year. He told me he pulled the lever for John McCain in last years' election, over the protests of his friends and family. Coleman isn't a RINO; he is a lifelong Republican, a black man and civil rights pioneer who found Bork's views on the subject frightening.

Jeffrey Toobin writes that Kennedy's characterization was "crude and exaggerated,"but it wasn't really all that off the mark. It was just nasty -- and in Washington, D.C., how you say what you say matters more than whether or not it's true. Especially if you're a liberal.

-- A. Serwer

Picture of Bork and Reagan via Wikimedia

As the CIA inspector general’s 2004 report shows, the abuse of detainees was systematic and brutal and as exacting as a lawyer’s brief: “In 2004, when Daniel B. Levin, then the acting assistant attorney general in the counsel’s office, sent a letter to the C.I.A. reauthorizing waterboarding, he dictated the terms: no more than two sessions of two hours each, per day, with both a doctor and a psychologist in attendance,” wrote Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti in The New York Times. The details about the interrogation program are chilling and reveal the extent to which government lawyers were involved in its execution.

Up until now, the role of attorneys in the scandal has been well-known and -- typically for lawyers -- also well-documented. This is particularly the case since John Yoo, the author of the infamous August 2002 “torture memo,” has been publicly defending the work of the Bush administration and its interrogation program. But facts about what the lawyers actually did have been rare -- until the revelations of the report show, for example, how they dictated various, specific aspects of interrogations. Luckily, Scott Horton has been following the story for years and can help shed light on it. Before he was a blogger for Harper’s Magazine, he was a New York attorney with a copy of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech by his former client Andrei Sakharov on the wall. “I never thought I’d end up spending time on torture cases in the U.S.” These days, that is what he does now, apparently full time.

On his blog, Horton explains that the the CIA report demonstrates that “all trails lead to the Vice President’s office.” Moreover, Horton says it is not true, despite claims of David Ignatius, whom he describes as “the official spokesman of the CIA torture team,” that the cases have already been investigated and do not warrant attention. “No grand jury was impaneled or testimony taken,” writes Horton. “What happened instead was inaction.” And that, as is clear from the recent disclosures about the work of the lawyers and other professionals on the interrogation program, is about to change.

--Tara McKelvey

Alec MacGillis on the difficulty politicians have when speaking about the poorest Americans:

In the spring of 2007, I traveled to Allendale, South Carolina, a struggling town near the Georgia line, to interview John Edwards about his ideas on fighting poverty. I watched as, photographers in tow, he strolled the back alleys and shook hands across broken fences with some of the 40 percent of Allendale residents who live below the poverty line.

"We've got 37 million people who wake up every day in poverty," he declared to a group of local Democrats gathered under a giant live oak. "This is not OK, not in the richest country on the planet."

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EPI explains why the deficit has increased since March 2007: It's the economy, stupid. But cutting deficits now isn't a good idea:

Both the CBO and the OMB show deficits falling to more sustainable levels at the end of the 10-year horizon. Key to achieving this goal, however, is a robust economic recovery. A focus on near-term deficit reduction—through higher taxes or reduced spending—would choke-off the recovery and in the end would be self-defeating.

But the long-term deficits are not sustainable. Ezra already wrote about yesterday's budget call with Stan Collender, who argued that some kind of action on the budget is inevitable, but I think Matt's rejoinder is right: it's going to be pretty easy for politicians to avoid making hard choices; in fact, it's what they do best. The politics of budget reduction are going to be insane compared to health care reform.

But Collender did make the very good point that "you cannot take the politics out of a fight that is inherently political," which is to say plans for independent commissions or fancy summits are probably out of the question, simply because "processes don't work unless you have a consensus to deal with what the process should do, and that just doesn't exist." This is going to require some hard-nosed leadership from the president, and it's becoming pretty clear that hunting for bipartisanship isn't going to be very effective.

-- Tim Fernholz

Sadly, I'm going to have to interrupt our Very Serious coverage of torture and Ted Kennedy's death to point out that Rush Limbaugh, referencing the CDC's consideration of circumcision as an HIV prevention method, has said:

"If we need to save our penises from anybody it's from Obama."

--Dana Goldstein

In an interview with Politico yesterday, Rep. Pete King blasted Eric Holder's decision to open a narrow probe into the possibility that CIA interrogators may have broken the law when they went past the torture guidelines established by the Bush administration:

"You're talking about threatening to kill a guy, threatening to attack his family, threatening to use an electric drill on him — but never doing it," King said. "You have that on the one hand — and on the other you have the [interrogator's] attempt to prevent thousands of Americans from being killed."

Despite the conservative war on "empathy" in the law that reached its zenith during the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings, empathy has emerged as the primary argument on the right against prosecuting those involved in torture. In his statement responding to the release of the documents, Dick Cheney said, "The people involved deserve our gratitude. They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions."

During the hearings, Sen. Jeff Sessions and others memorably tried to paint Sotomayor's thoughts on empathy as "bias" that would affect her rulings based on who the plaintiff was. Tom Coburn told Sotomayor that "I, as someone who comes from the heartland, believe, as do the people I represent in Oklahoma, that there is a foundational document and statutes and treaties that should be the rule rather than our opinions.” But in responding to whether or not laws were broken in the interrogation of terrorist suspects, conservatives have argued forcefully that the targets were bad people, or that we were in imminent danger, so the law ought not to matter. As Michelle Malkin put it, she's shedding "no tears" for Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Conservatives now believe that laws should be upheld based on subjective judgments of who is a good person and who isn't. Never mind that even the CIA admitted in the IG report that innocent people were tortured.

This isn't really a divergence from conservative views of the law -- conservatives simply choose different subjects on which to express empathy than liberals do. After spending months arguing that the law is unbending, objective and not subject to interpretation, conservatives are now demanding that the Justice Department ignore the fact that laws were broken because of who the potential targets of prosecution might be.

-- A. Serwer

As we reflect on Kennedy's legacy, I'm struck by how key his January 2008 endorsement of Barack Obama now appears. His announcement came reasonably early (before Super Tuesday), and, as Marc Ambinder pointed out, "allow[ed] him to separate the politics of the Clintons from the politics of Democrats before the Clinton administration." Moreover, his pick helped both to mainstream Obama's appeal and confer the blessing of a very respected wing of the Democratic Party.

Every time I’ve been asked over the past year who I would support in the Democratic Primary, my answer has always been the same: I’ll support the candidate who inspires me, who inspires all of us, who can lift our vision and summon our hopes and renew our belief that our country’s best days are still to come.

I’ve found that candidate. And I think you have too.

His endorsement linked Obama to the legacy of the civil rights movement, and as Jonathan Cohn argued at the time, "Kennedy's embrace speaks directly to the misgivings ... that Obama was insufficiently committed to a progressive policy agenda."

As we've seen, Obama has made good on that promise--coming out strongly against segregation, actively pursuing health care, and perhaps most important, showing faith in the institution of government. Lending support to Barack Obama may be one of Kennedy's great gifts to America.

John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy have, for the past half century, been among the most prominent symbolic figures of American liberalism. But by any real reading of history, both men fall pretty short of what I think might be described as "progressive ideals." JFK started the Vietnam War, and as attorney general, RFK pushed the CIA into one failed plot after another to assassinate Fidel Castro, even enlisting the aid of organized crime. Both RFK and JFK were tragically murdered, but paradoxically, their early deaths are part of what makes inflating their accomplishments so easy.

Edward Kennedy lacked the mystique of his brothers, partially because he was forced to wear his flaws on his sleeve; no one will ever forget Chappaquiddick. In some ways I wonder if Teddy got all the grief people couldn't give his brothers. There was something cruel about the way he was sometimes portrayed, as if he were the loser little brother because he would never quite capture the imagination of the left the way his brothers did. But in terms of actual political accomplishments, Ted Kennedy far surpasses them: His accomplishments on expanding health-care coverage, strengthening voting rights, civil rights, and helping workers are too numerous to list here, although Harold Meyerson does a good job of summarizing: "He was the go-to-guy, the champion, the orator, the deal-maker for the uninsured, the undocumented, the unable-to-join-unions; the senior senator from Massachusetts and for all the excluded in American life."

And not just American life. When Kennedy journeyed to South Africa in 1985, he spoke to an illegal gathering outside Nelson Mandela's prison, calling for his release. When he returned to the Senate, he helped override President Ronald Reagan's veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act which imposed U.S. sanctions on the apartheid regime.

Ted Kennedy wasn't a symbol of American liberalism. He was the executor of American liberalism: He was the real deal, he got it done. He couldn't make the whole country fall in love with him. But centuries from now, when the sentimental attachment of those who can remember the older Kennedy brothers are gone, it is the youngest Kennedy sibling who will be remembered, warts and all, for having most shaped America's path, and most exemplified its ideals. He is, in short, the only Kennedy who wasn't overrated, the only one we saw for who he was, the one we will remember fondly for what he did, not what he said or what he might have been.

-- A. Serwer

Photo of the Kennedy Brothers on Palm Beach in 1957 via Wikimedia

Harold Meyerson on Ted Kennedy's legacy:

He was, as he lay dying, new again. Ted Kennedy outlived the Reagan-Thatcher conservative era to which for so many years he led the opposition. He played a key role in putting Barack Obama in the White House, creating the possibility for a renaissance of American liberalism, the cause he led for the past four decades. He came to Washington one last time to vote for the kind of Keynesian stimulus that had been out of favor in the age of laissez-faire but that embodied, however imperfectly, Kennedy's belief that government had the ability and the duty to create an economy that not only mitigated capitalism's excesses but made it work for ordinary Americans.

He did not get to liberalism's promised land, of course. The universal health coverage he'd fought for throughout his career is still unrealized; his death may make it harder to realize, at least in the immediate months to come. Labor law remains unreformed, and America's 12 million undocumented immigrants still live in the shadows with no legal path to citizenship. These were all battles that Kennedy would have led; he was the go-to guy, the champion, the orator, the deal-maker for the uninsured, the undocumented, the unable-to-join-unions; the senior senator from Massachusetts and for all the excluded in American life.

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Senator Kennedy died early this morning at the age of 77. Here, some excerpts from his 1980 speech to the Democratic Convention, in which he conceded defeat to Jimmy Carter. The speech is incredibly rich; it is about economic justice as the center of the progressive movement, and about cities as the center of the American economy and culture. (It was delivered in New York.) It touches on the history of American liberalism, and how its successes have been co-opted, in generation after generation, by the conservatives who initially opposed progress:

The serious issue before us tonight is the cause for which the Democratic Party has stood in its finest hours, the cause that keeps our Party young and makes it, in the second century of its age, the largest political Party in this republic and the longest lasting political Party on this planet.

Our cause has been, since the days of Thomas Jefferson, the cause of the common man and the common woman.

Our commitment has been, since the days of Andrew Jackson, to all those he called "the humble members of society -- the farmers, mechanics, and laborers." On this foundation we have defined our values, refined our policies, and refreshed our faith. ...

Let us pledge that employment will be the first priority of our economic policy.

Let us pledge that there will be security for all those who are now at work, and let us pledge that there will be jobs for all who are out of work; and we will not compromise on the issues of jobs. ...

The 1980 Republican convention was awash with crocodile tears for our economic distress, but it is by their long record and not their recent words that you shall know them.

The same Republicans who are talking about the crisis of unemployment have nominated a man who once said, and I quote, "Unemployment insurance is a prepaid vacation plan for freeloaders." And that nominee is no friend of labor.

The same Republicans who are talking about the problems of the inner cities have nominated a man who said, and I quote, "I have included in my morning and evening prayers every day the prayer that the Federal Government not bail out New York." And that nominee is no friend of this city and our great urban centers across this nation.

The same Republicans who are talking about security for the elderly have nominated a man who said just four years ago that "Participation in social security should be made voluntary." And that nominee is no friend of the senior citizens of this nation.

The same Republicans who are talking about preserving the environment have nominated a man who last year made the preposterous statement, and I quote, "Eighty percent of our air pollution comes from plants and trees." And that nominee is no friend of the environment.

And the same Republicans who are invoking Franklin Roosevelt have nominated a man who said in 1976, and these are his exact words, "Fascism was really the basis of the New Deal." And that nominee whose name is Ronald Reagan has no right to quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The great adventures which our opponents offer is a voyage into the past. Progress is our heritage, not theirs. What is right for us as Democrats is also the right way for Democrats to win.

--Dana Goldstein

• The predictable comments from torture hawks regarding Eric Holder's appointment of a special prosecutor to look into abuse by the CIA has a frozen-in-amber quality to it. I especially like Joe Lieberman's blanket assertion that the "only" reason there hasn't been another attack on American soil is because unfettered intelligence agencies have been allowed to do their jobs, Rep. Peter King's (R-NY) borderline accusations of treason, and Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) pulling out the old chestnut of the "stabbed in the back" myth. But what the hawks are ultimately arguing is that the nation's top law enforcement official should ignore his obligation to enforce the law by investigating.
• It's undeniable that Republicans want health-care reform killed so they can point to the Democrats' legislative defeat and blame a lack of bipartisanship on the failure. But to call this a conspiracy theory isn't hyperbole -- it's a complete abuse of what real conspiracy looks like. Aren't Democrats openly making these claims, now that the fantasy of bipartisan legislation has dissipated? Aren't Republicans -- the perennially confused Michael Steele excepted -- adamantly opposed to government intervention no matter what?
• Alan Abramowitz takes a look at the 2008 National Election Survey data and reaches the same conclusion anyone familiar with American political science literature would: the "independent voter" mostly votes like a partisan Democrat or Republican and true independents account for seven percent of voters. But since nearly 40 percent of the country self-identifies as independent, the two major parties must "fight" for these free spirits, who libertarians assure us, are soon to usher in a new era of gold standards, laissez-faire government and seasteading.
• Right-wing bloggers are up in arms because Barack Obama is going to "desecrate" the eighth anniversary of 9/11 by calling for a "national day of service" -- repeating the same declaration made by George Bush last year -- insinuating that this is the latest step towards "statist idolatry." I've said many times that much of the country simply lost their minds on that day, but came back to earth eventually. But for the right-wing blogosphere, 9/11 remains not only the date of their genesis, but the event which guides them into perpetuity.
• Remainders: health care reform protesters aren't the only ones packing heat at rallies; for Republicans, fiscal responsibility is a flexible concept; John Miller informs The Corner's readers that some of Conservapedia's entries might not be reliable; GOP Commander Limbaugh is refreshingly candid about his fear of castration; and whatcha gonna do when this former WWF world champion gets all incoherent on government spending on you?

--Mori Dinauer

One little-known fact about the various regional Federal Reserve Banks is that their boards of directors are made up of representatives from the private banks they regulate and from business leaders chosen by those same private banks. A third class of directors is supposed to represent the consumer and public interest but often end up being bankers or businesspeople as well, mostly defeating the purpose of having a broad swathe of economic interests represented in the various regional reserve banks.

Today, though, we have some exciting news, as the new Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank -- by dint of its jurisdiction the most powerful Fed branch -- will be Dennis Hughes, the President of the New York AFL-CIO, a 2.5 million worker union. (The prior incumbent, Stephen Friedman, resigned after facing criticism for conflicts of interest with Goldman Sachs). While Hughes' role is mainly advisory, he will have a strong voice in how the Fed is managed and some say in picking the next president of the Fed, a job previously held by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and now occupied by William Dudley.

Hughes' appointment is a rare instance of having a voice for workers and consumers take an important role in a Federal Reserve Bank -- the national AFL-CIO has been supportive of the administration's plan to move consumer financial regulation out of the Federal Reserve and into a new independent agency -- and an unusually tangible sign that the financial establishment might have learned a lesson or two from the next crisis. While having Hughes in charge certainly doesn't guarantee overnight improvements in regulation, it's certainly a step in the right direction.

-- Tim Fernholz

"Interrogators got results, could face charges." That is a banner headline in today’s print edition of The Washington Times, and it neatly captures the conservative argument for President Bush's so-called enhanced interrogation program.

In this version, the American officers who had waterboarded the terrorists were doing a nasty job, but somebody had to do it, and it is not fair to punish them for carrying out their patriotic duty. It would be easy to dismiss such claims as the views of right-wing ideologues, except that nearly a decade after the terrorist attacks, the argument continues to capture people’s imagination.

The New York Times reports that “the interrogations obtained critical information to identify terrorists and stop potential plots,” which sounds encouraging for aspiring torturers everywhere. Yet a closer look at the information provided by the CIA reveals a more complicated story: One of the CIA reports, which was apparently released in response to the inspector general’s damning 2004 account, according to The Times, says that “information elicited from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, chief planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,” had “dramatically expanded our universe of knowledge on Al Qaeda’s plots.’”

Except that by the time the CIA got to KSM, as he is known, a London-based Al-Jazeera journalist, Yosri Fouda, had already spoken with him. KSM told Fouda the important things he knew during a two-day period they spent together in a secret location in Pakistan, several months after the death of The Wall Street Journal's Danny Pearl. KSM wanted an audience to hear about his horrific exploits, and excerpts from the interview appeared in the London Sunday Times in September 2002, as described in a Guantanamo transcript (Fouda has written about his encounter with KSM in his book Masterminds of Terror). By the time KSM was captured in March 2003, he’d already talked – a lot. Torture was redundant. As experienced interrogators know, the most effective tool is a can of Coke: You put it on the table, and talk to the suspect. Chances are you will find out everything you know, particularly if you are a close student of the subject and know what questions to ask and how to guide the conversation.

Ultimately, though, the question of whether or not torture works is irrelevant, as Adam has emphasized. Even if it were proven to be an effective method of extracting information, Americans should ask themselves whether that is the kind of activity that they want to engage in as a nation.

--Tara McKelvey

After a vacation-week break, TTR is back with the latest geopolitical analysis of the Korean Peninsula, a look at what we'll get out of health care reform, a national security argument for cap-and-trade, and guidelines for regulating greenhouse emissions -- before they're even regulated. We're also happy to introduce the first of our fall class of interns, Linda Li.

• The North Korean wild card.The denuclearization of North Korea remains the primary obstacle to regional security in Northeast Asia, according to a new Brookings paper that examines South Korea’s stance on regional integration and outlines the country’s options for securing peace among its neighbors. The author believes that the Six-Party Talks could be a precursor to a multilateral regime for Northeast Asia, with the United States acting as “regional stabilizer.” What South Korea needs, he writes, is to be an equal partner with a U.S. that facilitates China’s development and reassures Japan of its security promises. South Korea can then turn to engage positively with North Korea, building off of their shared culture and history to pursue inter-Korean cooperation. -- LL
• One more time: Why reform health care? [PDF] In the midst of a the tangled debate over health care reform, it's important not to forget why it's so important to fix our broken health care system in the first place. Families U.S.A has put together a white paper detailing what Americans can expect to see in a final health care reform bill, from an expansion of Medicaid coverage for the poor and new regulations to prevent insurance companies from denying rightful coverage to relief for small businesses burdened by the costs of providing health care coverage to employees. -- TF
• The National Security argument for Cap and Trade. Although the House-passed American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) has been a bit forgotten in the health care debate, it's still due for senate consideration sometime this fall. While opponents of the bill have been focused heavily on its costs, the benefits of the bill aren't just limited to health and environmental protections that will slow the pace of climate change. They also include key national security objectives, including lessening our economic dependence on less-than-friendly foreign regimes, so that U.S. policymakers won't have to choose between cheap energy and an effective foreign policy. -- TF
• The early bird shares the worm? The World Resources Institute details how the government should allocate credit for greenhouse gas emissions reductions that occur before the federal regulation of those emissions, known as “early action.” Depending on the kind of actor and activity as well as when the reductions took place (before the passing of legislation or before it takes effect), the options for evaluating and awarding emissions allowances vary. In general, credits awarded in addition to the federal cap are not recommended because they would negate the emissions benefit from early action. -- LL

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
8/11/09
8/4/09

In the mess of documents released yesterday, Greg Sargent points to a description of the "rendition process"--something the government has argued in court is a state secret in order to urge the dismissal of lawsuits from torture victims. The description of rendition is harrowing enough, but the document sets a pretty high standard that has to be met for a HVD (High Value Detainee) not to be tortured. According to the document:

Interrogators use the Initial Interview to assess the initial resistance posture of the HVD and to determine--in a relatively benign environment--if the HVD intends to willingly participate with CIA interrogators. The standard on participation is set very high during the Initial Interview. The HVD would have to willingly provide information on actionable threats and location information on High-Value Targets at large--not lower level information--for interrogators to continue with the neutral approach.

What's beyond the neutral approach? The document identifies three categories of interrogation techniques, previously alluded to in the torture memos: Conditioning techniques ( forced nudity, sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation) Corrective techniques ("Insult slap", "Abdominal slap", "Facial Hold", "Attention grasp" and Coercive techniques (walling, stress positions, water dousing, and cramped confinement [stuffing someone in a box]).

In other words, if you're categorized as an HVD, unless you provide solid, actionable intelligence immediately, then you're going to be tortured.

Keep in mind that Abu Zubayda gave up all of the useful intelligence he had under traditional interrogation. But he was then waterboarded 83 times, as well as stuffed in a confinement box with gunshot wounds, because the CIA thought he was holding something back. So cooperation was no actual guarantee of not being tortured. But then we already knew that.

-- A. Serwer

At the Times, Stanley Fish argues that college writing courses need to focus more on grammar, syntax, and rhetoric, and less on discussing, debating, and imitating popular writing on hot-button issues. I agree, but don't think higher education can solve the problem of poor writing ability.

Far and away, the most useful class I took in college was called "Seminar in the Teaching of Writing." It was a required training course for my part-time job working as a peer writing tutor. It was also the only class I ever took -- in all my years of school -- that taught me methods for effectively structuring a persuasive essay, how to properly use a comma, and the difference between "that" and "which."

The movement away from teaching grammar and rhetoric and toward "whole language" has deprived a lot of students of this kind of practical education. Grammar and syntax need to be part of the K-12 curriculum; for most people who aren't obsessive professional writers, university is way too late to instill these lessons. But there's something else at play: a lack of serious reading in American high schools. Engaged, experienced readers are simply much better writers. But according to a report by Renaissance Learning, the average American high school senior reads only four books each academic year, including the books he or she is assigned at school. That is a remarkably unambitious number for a full-time student. Beginning in about fifth grade, American kids start reading the Harry Potter series -- and then they remain the most-read books through high school, even though they are written for an elementary and middle school audience.

Even more disastrous for students' lifetime writing skills is that serious nonfiction is so very rarely read in American high schools and middle schools. With the exception of Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir Night, there is not a single non-fiction book among the top 20 books read by American high school students. Of course, compared to fiction, there is much less agreement on what non-fiction is crucial reading. But it's not fair to deprive children of exposure to historical writing, political argument, or academic treatments of great literature, and then expect them to write like adults when they get to college. Most young adults have such rudimentary writing skills that they can't even craft a decent, professional cover letter. We need to focus on basics first, and do so at an early age.

--Dana Goldstein

So in my earlier post I noted that the fact that the documents Dick Cheney long sought to have declassified don't actually prove that torture worked is a classic Bush administration move. But what's fascinating is that it seems to have worked again, as Greg Sargent points out that many major news organizations haven't actually taken a look at whether the documents actually prove Cheney's claims, and Justin Elliott points out that Cheney himself has moved the goalposts from his original statement.

Spencer Ackerman highlighted Cheney's original claim from April:

“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

This is the Cheney statement cited by Elliott today:

"The documents released Monday clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda."

As I noted earlier, the documents don't actually say what information was gained from torture and what wasn't, and as Elliott points out, Cheney's statement no longer makes the claim that the EITs provided the actual intelligence--but rather that the intelligence came from people who were subjected to EITs. We've gone from "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" to "weapons of mass destruction related activities" in about four months--not that anyone outside the blogosphere seems to have noticed.

Not to belabor this point too much, but in case it isn't obvious from this post, none of the major news organizations were looking very closely at Cheney's claims and whether the documents actually prove what he said, and several of the accounts I've read could have been written without having even set eyes on the documents themselves. As far as I can tell, it's bloggers doing all the "fact-checking".

Maybe Chris Matthews should worry a little more about his own colleagues.

UPDATE: Ben Smith gets a statement from an anonymous Cheney aide:

"As the vice president has said repeatedly, the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided critical intelligence that saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks. The documents released yesterday demonstrate that conclusively. Anyone who doubts that hasn't read the documents," said the Cheney source.

-- A. Serwer

Ian Millhiser looks at a radical right-wing movement -- and it's not the birthers:

Almost a year after she called for an investigation to discover which members of Congress are "anti-American," Minnesota's nuttiest lawmaker is back. In a recent appearance with Fox's Sean Hannity, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann accused her colleagues of "forg[etting] what the Constitution says" because they are poised to pass comprehensive health-care reform. Not to be outdone, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina told right-wing activists on a conference call last Thursday that health reform violates the 10th Amendment; he also called on state legislators and governors to "champion individual freedom" by resisting the bill. Two Florida lawmakers beat DeMint to the punch, having already introduced legislation to block health reform from taking effect in their state.

These efforts are all part of a movement whose members are convinced that the 10th Amendment of the Constitution prohibits spending programs and regulations disfavored by conservatives. Indeed, while "birther" conspiracy theorists dominate the airwaves with tales of a mystical Kenyan baby smuggled into Hawaii just days after his birth, these "tenther" constitutionalists offer a theory that is no less radical but infinitely more dangerous.

KEEP READING ...

Yesterday Mohammed Jawad, who was the focus of this months' cover story for TAP, returned home to Afghanistan. A minor when he was captured, Jawad spent nearly seven years locked up--and was subject to torture from both American and Afghan authorities. He was eventually granted habeas relief after the government failed to justify his detention to a federal judge.

I didn't post yesterday on his return because I was still waiting to hear back about the conditions of his travel--during his last court hearing, Jawad's defense lawyers, Lt. Col. David Frakt and Jonathan Hafetz, expressed concerns that Jawad might be hooded and shackled or otherwise mistreated on his trip home. There was also the possibility that he might be criminally indicted before he left, but that didn't pan out, possibly because the prosecution's case was based on testimony from witnesses who had been "financially compensated."

Major Eric Montalvo, who was a member of Jawad's civilian defense team, accompanied Jawad on his trip home--although Hafetz claims that it took some effort to get the Pentagon to agree to take a member of the defense team along (the DoD didn't respond to a request for comment on the matter). Montalvo said that Jawad was shackled during the flight, and had some sort of "eye restriction" but wasn't necessarily hooded. Montalvo added that the conditions were "protocol for 'prisoner' transport for the safety of the guards... [I] don't like it but [it's] hard to argue around."

Still, Montalvo says that with the euphoria of returning home and seeing his family after seven years of confinement, as well as the whirlwind experience of meeting several important Afghan figures including President Hamid Karzai, "what happened on the flight just hasn't been a priority."

-- A. Serwer

We know that waterboarding, which was considered among the most "extreme techniques" was only used on three "high value" detainees: Abu Zubayda, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. But other torture techniques were used on detainees whose intelligence value was negligible by comparison. Consider that Mohammed Jawad was subjected to the "frequent flier" sleep deprivation program at Guantanamo Bay, even though he was probably a minor at the time, and that the government's case against him was so weak that a judge recently ordered his release.

Now consider this statement from the IG report, which Glenn Greenwald pointed out and which I'll reproduce in its entirety:

Agency Officers report that reliance on analytical assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence may have resulted in the application of EIT's without justification.

For American political purposes, everyone detained at Guantanamo is guilty until proven innocent--yet the government has lost 28 of the last 33 habeas petitions from Gitmo detainees, despite the Bush administration's assertion that all of the individuals in custody were "the worst of the worst." Well, according to the 2004 IG Report, not even the CIA believed that.

For some reason though, it seems almost impossible to get this simple point across: Not all the detainees in our custody have done something wrong. They have not been convicted of any crimes. Some of them have been imprisoned and tortured on the basis of very flimsy evidence. Some of them certainly have committed crimes, and should be tried in court--but the only reason torture and indefinite detention remain feasible as policies is that we're still operating from a presumption of guilt by definition. Unfortunately, I'm not really sure how one goes about changing that.

-- A. Serwer

Dana Goldstein on the end of the all-white suburb:

During last year's endless Democratic presidential primary, wonks and activists who cared about integration usually preferred John Edwards to Barack Obama. Edwards' platform called for a million new housing vouchers to help poor families move to safer communities with better schools. And Edwards would have provided subsidies to suburban school districts willing to enroll low-income city kids.

Obama, meanwhile, focused on "Promise Neighborhoods," an anti-poverty strategy based on the Harlem Children's Zone. Select inner-city neighborhoods would be flooded with resources meant to improve health, education, and quality of life. In New York, the strategy has yielded encouraging dividends, and the 2010 federal budget provides a modest $10 million to expand the project to other cities. But Promise Neighborhoods do not alleviate racial and socioeconomic isolation, one of the leading predictors of a child's academic achievement and ability to find a decent job after high school.

KEEP READING ...

This morning, the Congressional Budget Office and the White House Office of Management and Budget released their mid-session budget reviews, essentially updates to future revenue, spending and deficit projections based on the latest economic and policy data. They're going to be the cause of a lot of huffing and puffing -- so far, every headline I've seen has focused on how the new numbers will be a threat to the president's agenda -- but there are a few things to remember:

• No surprises here. The main difference between recent OMB and CBO projections has been the OMB's use of economic assumptions from last December in their budget outlooks; CBO updated their economic assumptions in May when the real intensity of the recession was understood. The one change in OMB's projections that is causing the most kerfuffle -- the 10-year deficit through 2019 growing $2 trillion to $9.05 trillion -- is in line with numbers forecast three months ago by the CBO, whose new report has not deviated substantially from their June numbers. Anyone screaming about big changes in the long-term deficit forecasts either isn't familiar with the issues or has a political agenda (surprise!).
• It's not the most useful analytic tool. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities' Jim Horney wrote a nice fact-sheet on how to understand these new analyses. They're not particularly useful for analyzing current policy debates except in terms of thinking of how to control long-term deficits. Running short-term deficits will have a beneficial effect on the economy, not a negative one, Horney says.
• Most of the deficit comes from past administrations. It's an easy excuse that doesn't mean the current administration doesn't have to deal with debt, but the fact is that most of this deficit came from the Bush administration. The administration wants people to realize that by 2019, the difference between all non-interest spending and revenue is .6 percent of GDP, while interest payments on debt will be 3.4 percent. But more important, most of the deficit spending the current administration has had to do comes from addressing and suffering from the financial crisis: The stimulus package, automatic stabilizers like unemployment insurance and drops in revenue thanks to overall economic decline are the major drivers of the increased long-term deficit.
• The good news is this year. Instead of being a little over $1.8 trillion, the 2009 budget deficit will be about $1.58 trillion. That's still very high -- though keep in mind that it would have been 1.19 trillion if Bush administration policies had simply continued -- but it does reflect a substantial decrease.
• Obama keeps a promise. The president said he would cut the deficit in half by 2012, and according to both CBO and OMB, he will.

That's my first take on the deficit numbers. I'll have more later on that and the new economic projections, and a column tomorrow on what it all means for health care reform.

OMB Mid-Session Review [PDF]
CBO Mid-Session Review [PDF]

-- Tim Fernholz

For the past year, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has run into roadblocks in her effort to institute what would be the nation's most ambitious teacher merit pay scheme -- in part because of criticisms that D.C. simply didn't have a fair system for measuring good teaching. Now Rhee's department has responded with a document -- the "Teaching and Learning Framework" -- that lays out expectations for teachers, getting quite specific.

For example, a teacher who loses three minutes or less per class period due to "poorly designed routines and procedures, poorly organized materials and space, or poorly executed transitions between activities" would score highest -- level four. A teacher who loses five minutes rates as level three, and so on and so forth. The document suggests that to maintain classroom order, teachers should "move close to a group of students who are whispering to each other," and that teachers must have "a system for passing out papers efficiently or for allowing students to move efficiently from desks to the rug." DCPS also expects a "level four" teacher to praise student "positive behaivor" 11 to 15 times during a 30-minute class. And there is an entire section of the document devoted to directing teachers on how to craft routine student assessments -- tests -- and then track students' achievement over time.

This graphic depicts the system's basics. Notably lacking is discussion of specific curricular questions -- for example, how much should teachers emphasize writing or public speaking in formulating student assignments? Is multiple choice more effective than true/false at assessing student understanding? Nevertheless, the framework seems commonsensical. Washington Teachers' Union President George Parker says he supports the document, but worries Rhee's new teacher assessment system will be implemented before teachers really have the chance to absorb the expectations. That is a signal, perhaps, that there is still trouble ahead for teacher contract negotiations.

--Dana Goldstein

In the run up to the Iraq War, a great deal of deference was given by the mainstream press to claims made by Bush administration officials, who assured reporters that they were privy to intelligence information that the press wasn't. The press took these claims at face value, rarely questioned them, and in hindsight things that were "certain" were in fact based on a kind of assumption of what was really unknown. We didn't know what information the administration had, but we assumed that it said Iraq had WMDs because that's what they were telling us.

Dick Cheney basically pulled that trick again over the past eight months. His torture tour has been premised on the assumption that there was some sort of holy grail of CIA documents that proved, definitively, that stuffing people into boxes, slamming them against walls, waterboarding them, (and as was revealed yesterday) implying that their female relatives would be raped in front of them, threatening to murder their children, I could go on--led to information that saved the nation from attack. Again, many reporters took the claims at face value, because it was impossible to know what the classified information said. Those documents were released yesterday--and they simply don't do what Cheney said they would.

As Spencer Ackerman writes, the 2004 document,"Detainee Reporting Pivotal for the war Against Al Qaeda" amounts to the kind of laundry list of anti-terror accomplishments one might find at The Corner, and has a similar fidelity to detail. It simply fails to distinguish between "detainee reporting" information taken from detainees as a whole, and information gleaned from "enhanced interrogation techniques." Marcy Wheeler points out that the 2005 document, "Khalid Sheik Mohammed: Preeminent Source on Al Qaeda", contradicts the 2004 IG report in its assertions about the utility of the information KSM gave up under torture. In other words, while the 2004 inspector general's report simply asserts that the EITs provided information that helped national security, neither of the documents Cheney wanted actually prove that torture "worked" in the kind of straightforward, unequivocal way that Cheney said they did.

So really, how many more times are we going to fall for this same trick, where government officials pretend to be privy to "special information" to make an assertion that can't be objectively evaluated, only to find out that official was simply not telling the truth months later?

-- A. Serwer

Paul Waldman explains why reports of the public option's demise may be premature:

If it could turn back the clock, the Obama administration would probably go back to late November and undertake an elaborate war game on health-care reform. It would lock its smartest people away in a secure location for a week or so and have them play out every conceivable scenario and subplot, detailing plans for all eventualities. Then, when the time came, it would be prepared for anything.

Administration officials don't appear to have done that. But if nothing else, they should have been able to predict that the public option -- a Medicare-like program from which Americans could chose to get their health insurance -- would eventually become the ideological flashpoint of the entire debate. You didn't have to be a genius to see that coming.

KEEP READING ...

This morning, President Obama will announce his intent to renominate Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke to another four-year term in his position. I've already made the case for why Bernanke shouldn't be given a second bite at the apple, but there's plenty of interest in why Obama chose today of all days to unveil his decision, since Bernanke's first term doesn't end until January and the president's on vacation in Martha's Vineyard. Noam Scheiber, as well as sharing my appreciation for Bernanke's extremely effective and pragmatic crisis management, suggests it's about coddling the bond markets, as monetary policy decisions often are.

And Noam's right, but he doesn't mention the specific reason for moving now -- today is the day that the Office of Management and Budget in the White House and the Congressional Budget Office will unveil their mid-session budget reviews, updating economic and other assumptions about future spending, revenues and deficits. The OMB has already leaked that it will be decreasing this year's deficit by about $250 billion thanks to unspent bailout money but increasing the 10-year deficit by about $2 trillion, about 2 percent of projected GDP, as it updates its economic assumptions for the first time since last year. The CBO has already predicted similar numbers, and most experts I've spoken to in advance of this morning's releases don't expect the CBO to be too far off from the OMB's projections.

Despite the fact that these results were expected, and in the case of the current-year deficit, unexpectedly better (more on the reviews later and in tomorrow's column -- briefly: ignore the panic), the bond markets love to freak out at the first sign of increasing deficits. To counteract the deficit news that otherwise would put CNBC and the markets in a huff, the White House is pushing ahead the Bernanke announcement, putting a little honey in the bad medicine. Bernanke is "trusted" by the "markets," in the insane parlance of our times, and this should give them some confidence going forward. (It also won't hurt to take health-care reform out of the news cycle for a few hours or so.) And if, as Noam suggests, Bernanke's market credibility will give him more leeway to wait on raising interest rates until recovery truly comes instead of jumping early, then that will help bring down unemployment and prevent a 1937-style second recession.

But the decision is not without downside. Bernanke's management of the bubble economy left a lot to be desired, so whether he can manage a recovering economy without promoting bubbles and bad practices remains to be seen (his expertise is crises). And though it is comforting that the administration seems intent to remove the Fed's consumer protection functions and place them in a new agency, since Bernanke's greatest failure was entirely abandoning that task, the proposal to endow the Fed with more prudential regulatory authority for systemic risk will bring hard questions from Congress that might make Bernanke's confirmation hearings iffy. There are also troubling questions about his role in the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch merger that could raise further confirmation troubles.

Ultimately, this is a good short-term pick for today, certainly, as well as the next six months or so of crisis management and the short-term reassurance of the bond markets. Whether or not Bernanke will gain the confidence of Congress and be able to make the tricky calls required to manage monetary policy in a transition to recovery without being held hostage by a single class of investors remains to be seen, but he cannot forget that the decisions he makes about interest rates and his extraordinary lending programs will effect the entire swath of the American economy and particularly unemployment. It's clear that, after whatever conversations the two have had, Obama has confidence that Bernanke is his man.

-- Tim Fernholz

• There are a couple of ways you could analyze Obama's declining poll numbers on health care. You could observe that the reduction in support from liberals is the big underreported element of the story. Or you could ask whether Obama's numbers were artificially inflated in the wake of his inauguration and have come back down to more realistic numbers. If you're the editors of Politico, however, you would talk to your sources in the White House, come up with a hazy theory of the administration's legislative goals, and then pronounce that in the opinion of you and your Beltway buddies, Obama has bitten off more than he can chew and soon the whole edifice is destined to come crumbling down.
• The administration is expected announce tomorrow that the ten-year federal budget deficit projection will be $2 trillion higher than originally anticipated, bringing the total to approximately $9 trillion. Before this becomes political fodder, it's helpful to read The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities "Five Keys" to understanding the deficits, particularly number five: "The only clear conclusion that should be drawn from the new deficit estimates is the continued need for action on long-term deficits."
• Paul Krugman responds to the revival of the idea that the left was "reflexively" anti-Bush by 2004 -- and thus not making rational or credible criticisms of the president -- by noting the list of demonstrable lies that had already been pushed by administration on everything from tax cuts, energy and environmental policy, and especially the Iraq war and its aftermath. "Given all that," Krugman writes, "it made complete sense to distrust anything the Bush administration said. That wasn’t reflexive, it was rational."
  
• If I possessed the re-animation powers of a Dr. Frankenstein, I'd be tempted to resurrect Hannah Arendt solely for the purpose of lecturing theatrical provocateurs like Glenn Beck and vainglorious pseudo-intellectuals like Jonah Goldberg on what totalitarianism actually is, and that their willingness to cheapen it for their own gain is an insult to all who have actually lived and died under such regimes. Such analysis is on par with this gentleman ranting about Nancy Pelosi and swastikas.
• Weekend Remainders: Chris Matthews thinks it's 2002 and pajama-clad bloggers are ruining serious journalism; meet Senator Max Baucus, political enigma; it seems like every week that somebody is totally demolishing an argument from Megan McArdle; apparently Mike Huckabee is some sort of expert on sci-fi weaponry; thankfully, Republicans weren't willing to let the government make decisions about the life or death of Teri Schiavo...wait; and it's a good thing we have health care experts Joe Lieberman and John McCain to give us some straight talk about, respectively, recessions and death panels.

--Mori Dinauer

I twittered some of the more shocking parts of the CIA IG report earlier, but this statement on page 13 is of particular interest:

"The Agency, on July 29 2003, secured oral concurrence that certain deviations are not significant for the purposes of the DoJ's legal opinions."

Deviations like...waterboarding someone 183 times! Here's the thing though, Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March of 2003 and Abu Zubayda was waterboarded 83 in August of 2002. Which means that the "oral concurrence" secured by the CIA was months after the abuse actually occurred.

Daphne Eviatar writes that

The Justice Department, then, approved the more extreme and frequent use of the technique — the one that Holder, President Obama and most legal experts have called “torture.” How will Holder be able to limit those prosecutions to only CIA officials? This is exactly the type of evidence that I think will take the investigation not only up the chain of command at the CIA, but should shift it over to the Justice Department as well.

It also seems significant that they got permission to apply waterboarding in a more "extreme" and "frequent" fashion months after they had already applied waterboarding in said fashion--and that the OLC didn't even think expanding authorization of a torture technique was even worth putting it in writing--or maybe having done so after the fact would have looked even more legally arbitrary.

UPDATE: Incidentally, in an atmosphere where permission for going beyond legally sanctioned torture guidelines could be obtained after the fact, it's no wonder that some interrogators may have felt they had a free hand to do whatever they wanted.

UPDATE II: I should note that the full statement from the IG report is:

There were a few instances of deviations from approved procedures [redacted] with one notable exception described in this Review. With respet to two detainees at those sites, the use and frequency of one EIT, the waterboard, went beyond the projected use of the technique as originally described to the DoJ. The Agency, on July 29 2003, secured oral concurrence that certain deviations are not significant for the purposes of the DoJ's legal opinions.

So the technique in question is waterboarding, the instances going beyond "projected use" as originally described, and this occurred with two detainees, which I'm assuming are KSM and Abu Zubayda.

-- A. Serwer

Torture apologists have been arguing for months that "waterboarding isn't torture" because it's utilized in the SERE program which trains U.S. servicemen to resist torture. I wrote a long time ago that "the non-simulated use of torture is torture" and this small paragraph on page 45 (summary point 79) of the recently released IG report, about the discrepancy between waterboarding in SERE and waterboarding as the CIA, pretty much says the exact same thing:

One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency’s use of the technique differed from that used in SERE training and explained that the Agency’s technique is different because it is “for real” and is more poignant and convincing.

In other words, CIA waterboarding is different from SERE waterboarding because it involves actually torturing people. Imagine that.

-- A. Serwer

The Guttmacher Institute released new research that shows the abortion pill (mifepristone, still known by some folks as RU-486) hasn't broadened abortion access in the United States. One of the reasons that feminists worked so hard to get the FDA to approve mifepristone is that they hoped it would be a way for your average OB/GYN to discreetly provide abortions. That it would, in essence, make it impossible for anti-choicers to protest women who were seeking abortions, because they would have to protest outside every clinic and doctor's office. However, Guttmacher found,

Most mifepristone abortions were performed at or near facilities that also provided surgical abortion. Only five mifepristone-only providers of 10 or more abortions were located farther than 50 miles from any surgical provider of 400 or more abortions.

There are a lot of reasons for this. As I wrote last year,

The requirements for being a provider of medical abortion and a provider of surgical abortion are actually very, very similar. Insurance premiums still go up when doctors decide to start providing medical abortion. Also, those doctors still have to get proper training in how to perform a surgical abortion, in case the drugs don't work. When I researched this issue awhile ago, for a story about how mifepristone has affected abortion politics, most people I talked to said the number of ob/gyns and other doctors who became providers of medical abortion (but not other methods) were very small. (Mostly for the insurance and training reasons named above, but also because of the stigma attached. Word gets around in small towns, even if you are only dispensing pills.)

The Guttmacher study won't come as a surprise to those working in the field. In 2006, I interviewed Beth Jordan, the medical director of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals, who described the incredibly high barriers to providing the abortion pill -- basically, doctors need to perform an ultrasound to determine a woman is, in fact, pregnant and need to have the ability to perform a surgical abortion in case the pills do not work. So there is a training barrier. "If we're seeing trends that the drug is not being picked up," Jordan told me, "there are some real on the ground tactical obstacles."

And despite feminists' wishes, the pill did not reduce the stigma and threats that come with being an abortion provider -- especially in more conservative parts of the country. Karen Kubby, with the Emma Goldman Clinic in Iowa City, Iowa, told me, "It was scary for many people to think of being an abortion provider, even quietly and for your own cadre of clients. Especially because of the harassment."

Increasing numbers of women who seek abortions are choosing mifepristone (a development I have mixed feelings about). But much to the dismay of feminists and women's health advocates who thought the abortion pill would change the landscape of abortion politics, the pill is no silver bullet.

--Ann Friedman

This is relatively huge: Jewish uber-philanthropist Edgar Bronfman -- one of the main funders behind the Birthright Israel program, which sends young American Jews to Israel to develop their Zionist sympathies -- has come out in the Huffington Post as a supporter of the Obama administration's call for the Israeli government to freeze all settlement growth. What's more, he uses the "a" word -- apartheid -- to describe the direction in which Israel is trending:

[Former Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon became convinced that the demographic threat to Israel's existence outweighed his life's work of settlement construction. As Sharon understood clearly, there was no way to keep controlling the Palestinian people indefinitely and to simultaneously maintain Israel's Jewish and democratic character.

At a certain point, there will be more Arabs than Jews living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, thereby leading to one de facto apartheid state if no resolution to the conflict is reached via a two-state solution.

Bronfman also clearly states that most American Jews support President Obama's Middle East agenda, and that official resistance to that agenda within Israel is driven by the religious right:

The expansion of settlements in the West Bank, as we all know, has been promoted by the religious Zionist right in Israel as a form of holy work, meant to hasten the return of the Messiah through the possession of the entire biblical Land of Israel. Governments all across the Israeli political spectrum have allowed this to continue for decades, due usually to political expediency and pressure.

Read the whole thing.

--Dana Goldstein

The Washington Post is reporting that Attorney General Eric Holder has indeed decided to appoint a prosecutor who would investigate if CIA interrogators or contractors broke the law during the interrogation of terrorist suspects. The prosecutor is reported to be John Durham, who has spent the last two years investigating whether the CIA had obstructed justice by destroying videotapes of interrogations, which we now know probably included the threatening of suspected U.S.S Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri with a gun and a power drill.

Durham's mandate, the sources added, will be relatively narrow: to look at whether there is enough evidence to launch a full-scale criminal investigation of current and former CIA personnel who may have broken the law in their dealings with detainees. Many of the harshest CIA interrogation techniques have not been employed against terrorism suspects for four years or more.

By "broken the law," we mean surpassed the legal threshold established by the Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel that allowed treatment that would have been illegal under torture statutes and the Geneva Convention. Technically, or at least as far as this DoJ is concerned, all the torture that occurred within those guidelines was "legal." Several human rights advocates have suggested that going after low-level interrogators rather than the architects of the torture policy itself is counterproductive. Personally, there's something that bothers me about CIA interrogators being prosecuted for behavior policy-makers essentially endorsed -- but I suppose it's possible (if doubtful) that the initial cases could lead to higher-ups being implicated.

Politically, this doesn't come as an opportune time for the president, since the GOP has had some success on national security issues and the White House is already on the defensive on health care. But it's worth noting that the attorney general is meant to be independent from the White House, and the president isn't supposed to be allowed to tell him who to prosecute and when. I realize that's something of a change from the last administration, but if Republicans want to criticize Obama for letting Holder go forward with these prosecutions, then they're essentially criticizing the president and the attorney general for not being corrupt.

UPDATE: Read Leon Panetta's reaction here. ABC reported that his initial response was considerably more emotional.

-- A. Serwer

I was excited to see the package of articles in The New York Times Magazine yesterday on the state of women's rights globally -- it's an issue that feminists bring up repeatedly, but one that tends to get little traction in major media outlets. Times columnist Nick Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn, authors of the lead article, attempt to show that women's rights are not a niche concern or a "soft issue" but are core to fixing the major problems that plague the world today. The simple fact is that in places around the globe where women are doing well, everyone is doing well. If only our foreign policy reflected that fact. (As Michelle Goldberg reported in our June issue, Hillary Clinton is working on it, but it's a long road.)

Yet there's something about the article that rubbed me the wrong way. I think the banner on the Times' Web site sums it up:

Saving the World's Women? When I tweeted last week that the "we Westerners must save women!" phrasing rubbed me the wrong way, a few folks piped up to offer alternatives. Emily Douglas suggested, "How about getting out of the way so women can save the world?" I like that perspective much better.

The international women's rights groups that have worked on these issues for years (WEDO, MADRE, AWID, etc.) are absent from the article. And, consequently, so is their framing that in order to build a better world, women need to be empowered to be an active part in making that change. The U.S. swooping in to "save" them will not actually fix things in a sustainable way. International women's rights groups, most of whom are working in collaboration with women on the ground, emphasize the importance of supporting grass-roots movements and change that is driven by women rather than imposed on them. (Yes, microlending is a way of directly supporting women, but Kristof and WuDunn fail to make this broader point about how Western nations should approach international women's rights.)

Anna North at Jezebel has another critique of their approach:

It may be true that a society is more peaceful when women are empowered, but the idea of promoting women's equality in order to reduce terrorism is still problematic. First, as WuDunn and Kristof are no doubt aware, there are plenty of examples of female terrorists. But the very idea of helping women because they behave the way we want -- not drinking, whoring, or planting bombs -- implies that we have a certain ideal of how developing countries should operate, and we want to shape them according to that ideal. It's also not necessarily good for women, who must continue to behave well in order to retain their status as model recipients of aid.

Just to be clear, I am thrilled to see global women's issues brought to the forefront. However, the way we look at these issues is just as important as the fact that we're looking at all.

--Ann Friedman

In one of Obama's first acts as president, he outlawed the use of "extraordinary rendition", or the process of transferring suspected terrorists to countries where we knew they would be tortured. During Counterterrorism Official John Brennan's speech a few weeks ago, he implied that the prospective candidates for "preventive detention" were dwindling, and that the U.S. would instead rely on other countries to detain terrorism suspects who the government believes pose a threat.

Today, the Task Force on Interrogation has issued new guidelines for rendering suspects to other countries, but we're not actually going to stop sending terror suspects to countries that are known to torture people in their custody. Instead, we're going to rely on a system of "assurances" from foreign countries that the individuals in question won't be tortured, as well as an undescribed "monitoring mechanism" to ensure the receiving nations are keeping their promises. Daphne Eviatar was on a conference call with the Washington Times' Eli Lake, who attempted to get the administration to clarify the new policy, but the administration official wouldn't offer much more than what's been set out in the press release.

So: Possibly, in order to avoid housing terror suspects indefinitely, we're going to rely on other countries to detain them -- countries that torture people -- even though we're technically not supposed to do that anymore. They promise not to torture them, and we maybe have a way of making sure they keep their promise, but it's not clear how we would do that, and -- forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical here -- it seems like there's still the possibility that all this is a kind of theater that's just meant to prevent the U.S. government from being at fault should these people be tortured.

The bottom line is, the way to avoid other nations torturing terror suspects is to avoid sending suspects in our custody to countries that torture people. But we're not going to be doing that.

-- A. Serwer

Dana Goldstein asks if New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg can pay people to do the right thing:

Groundwork is a tiny, storefront service agency that sits across the street from a hulking housing project in East New York, the Brooklyn neighborhood infamous for being one of the poorest and most dangerous in New York City. Though on the surface many blocks in East New York lack the blight of inner-city Detroit or Baltimore, the statistics here speak volumes: The infant mortality rate is double that of the city as a whole. Half of all residents rely on public assistance. Two years ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg shut down the local public high school, which had a graduation rate of only 29 percent.

On a rainy spring morning, a string of East New Yorkers visit Groundwork's office, looking for help. A middle-aged man with a speech impediment is confused about the status of his taxes; a staff member offers to call the Internal Revenue Service for him. An elderly woman wants to arrange nurse visits for a homebound friend. A laid-off Verizon fieldworker comes in to update the staff: He has successfully applied for food stamps.

KEEP READING ...

The New York Times reports that the CDC is weighing recommending routine circumcision of baby boys, and even adult circumcision for populations at high-risk of contracting HIV. As I've written before, this would be a curious and rather hasty move. While it's true that the World Health Organization recommends circumcision, the studies that showed the procedure significantly decreased the risk of HIV contraction are not easily applicable to the United States. The research was conducted entirely in Africa, among heterosexuals. But in America, half of all new HIV cases are among men having sex with men, compared to 33 percent among heterosexuals engaged in what the CDC calls "high risk" sex. And gay sex is simply much riskier than straight sex, meaning that any method short of a condom is unlikely to provide much protection against STIs.

There's another interesting health policy link here: the American Academy of Pediatrics says circumcision of baby boys is "not essential," so in many states, Medicaid -- which pays for 40 percent of all American births -- does not cover the procedure. That means low-income boys, who are disproportionately black and Hispanic, are less likely to be circumcised. They are also more likely to be exposed to HIV.

Medicaid should cover circumcision, so that all parents can weigh the pros and cons and make a choice. But it would be a dire mistake to send the message that circumcision is a highly effective HIV prevention method -- especially in those communities most likely to contract the disease. The public health messaging needs to be consistent and based on good science: We know condoms work, for both straight and gay people. Other methods simply aren't as effective.

--Dana Goldstein

Howard Kurtz moans that the "death panels" wouldn't die in spite of journalistsic efforts to debunk the ridiculous notion, writing that "even when they report the facts, [journalists] have had trouble influencing public opinion" and calling the experience "a stunning illustration of the traditional media's impotence." Let me identify a problem that has helped create this impotence: a lack of follow-through.

Having identified Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Chuck Grassley, John McCain and, today, Michael Steele, as spreading falsehoods about health care reform even after they have been broadly discredited, will the journalists Kurtz mentions offer them any sanction? Or will these public figures continue to be extensively quoted in newspapers and on television?

Recall the 2000 narrative that sprung up around Al Gore, painting him as untrustworthy. For some reason I don't think Grassley et al. will face any questions about their honesty the next time they appear on Meet the Press. In fact, none of these people will. The next time some wild misinformation spreads about a public-policy issue, Kurtz will wring his hands about how no one trusts the press, and that's because the press is content to trust liars.

-- Tim Fernholz

Mark Schmitt on the changing demographics of the Democratic Party:

Several years ago, I spoke on a panel where an audience member posed the rhetorical question, "Can any of you envision a robust progressive movement that doesn't have organized labor at the center of it?"

The appropriate answer -- the one that wouldn't cause the labor-heavy audience to throw rotten tomatoes at us -- was, "No." And that was also the right answer. None of us could envision a vibrant liberal movement without labor because we'd never seen such a thing. From the New Deal to the civil-rights movement, organized labor has borne much of the weight of a broader progressive vision.

KEEP READING ...

Obviously, opinion writers in newspapers have a lot more leeway in interpreting facts than actual reporters do. But I've generally assumed that opinion pages strive for a minimal of factual accuracy in order to avoid embarrassing the publication as a whole. Which is why, like Matt Yglesias, I can't understand why Michael Steele's op-ed was published in the Washington Post today, given the fact that it's riddled with falsehoods, one of the most egregious of which is this one:

Third, we need to outlaw any effort to ration health care based on age. Obama has promoted a program of "comparative effectiveness research" that he claims will be used only to study competing medical treatments. But this program could actually lead to government boards rationing treatments based on age. For example, if there are going to be only so many heart surgeries in a given year, the Democrats figure government will get more bang for its buck if more young and middle-aged people get them.

Fourth, we need to prevent government from dictating the terms of end-of-life care. Many of the most significant costs of care come in the last six months of a patient's life, and every American household must consider how to treat their loved ones. Obama's government-run health "reform" would pay for seniors' meetings with a doctor to discuss end-of-life care. While nonthreatening at first, something that is quite normal for a family to do becomes troublesome when the government gets involved. Seniors know that government programs that seem benign at first can become anything but. The government should simply butt out of conversations about end-of-life care and leave them to seniors, their families and their doctors.

We've moved on from the absurd-sounding "death panels" to the more subtle "government boards." I suppose that since Steele's statement is that "x" could lead to "y," it's technically not a factual inaccuracy, merely uninformed speculation. He's not saying that the Democrats want to kill seniors -- he's just saying that it might happen in the future if health-care reform passes, and who can predict the future?

At any rate, there's nothing like this in the bill; there's no way that something like that would be constitutional if it were; and Michael Steele doesn't even know what kind of health insurance he has. So, the Post might as well attribute the piece to the unpaid intern who actually wrote it, and we can all stop pretending Steele knows anything about health-care policy.

This is worth saying again: The part of the bill, now removed, referring to end-of-life counseling entails Medicare covering voluntary meetings with that person's doctor. The government is footing the bill for session, not dictating what decisions the individual can make. The government is only "butting in" in the sense that it's paying for it. Or it would have, if the mainstream press had been the slightest bit interested in accuracy and the GOP hadn't successfully convinced a large number of people that the government is intent on euthanizing the elderly, a fabrication that the Washington Post editorial page editors don't seem in much of a hurry to correct.

-- A. Serwer

The FT takes a look at how governments have made out after investing in banks to keep them from failing. The U.S. has the best returns:

In contrast to Switzerland, which sold its 9 per cent UBS stake for a SFr1.2bn ($1.1bn) gain last week, the world’s other large economies – except the US – are sitting on combined losses of $10.8bn relating to their holdings in the equity of listed banks they bailed out over the past 12 months.

The US government, by contrast, is sitting on a paper profit of almost $11bn on its 34 per cent shareholding in Citigroup, its only direct stake in a large financial institution.

The key word there is, of course, "paper" profit. But given the fact that the 'let the banks earn their way out of insolvency' strategy has been working thus far (even if it is risky and offers pernicious incentives to the overall financial sector), those paper profits may eventually be realized. More clarity on what will be done about toxic assets would be reassuring on this point.

Update: Commenter SR points to a smart Washington Monthly article on successful bailouts of the past; while it doesn't really analogize well to the financial sector bailouts, it does make a lot of sense in the context of U.S. investments in General Motors and Chrysler.

-- Tim Fernholz

Admiral Mike Mullin, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press that, “I believe we’ve got to start to turn this thing around from a security standpoint in the next 12 to 18 months.” To that end, American commanders want more troops. Given that Afghanistan has 40,000 villages, however, the number of troops would have to be around 480,000, as Dan Ford writes.

More troops will surely end up going, but in far fewer numbers than that. Meanwhile, one of the most important signs of progress in Afghanistan (and an element that is crucial to keeping the support of the American public, which, according to polls cited in The New York Times, has already started to turn against the war), is reducing the level of enemy fire and protecting civilians from the fallout. This has been one of the main goals of General Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, and he has his work cut out for him.

As Marc Garlasco, a Human Rights Watch senior military analyst, explains, civilian casualties are part of a “proportionality analysis” that the military does before bombing a target. He is particularly well-versed in the subject since he worked as an intelligence officer during the early phase of the Iraq War and made recommendations to people in the upper levels of the Defense Department about the areas that should be bombed. His suggestions were passed up the chain of command, and they were ultimately approved or rejected by top military officials who were based in Doha, Qatar. It was a macabre occupation, and Garlasco lasted one year in the job, starting in April of 2002 and leaving 12 months later. Despite its tragic repercussions and moral ambiguity, killing civilians during wartime is not against the law, so as long as the military has attempted to ensure the safety of innocent people and has put them in danger only when the target has been determined to be worthwhile. “If there’s a family in the house, and you have a low-level Taliban guy, it’s probably not,” Garlasco told me on Thursday. “It’s based oftentimes on the importance of the target.”

Many times, the target is a “high value” one, and the civilians who end up dead when bombs are dropped are determined by the U.S. military to be an acceptable, though painful, cost of war. It may be legal, but the repercussions from the air strikes has been enormous, particularly in Afghanistan, and overall the number of casualties in that country continues to climb: More than 1,000 civilians died in Afghanistan during the first six months in 2009, according to a recent U.N. report, which is a significantly higher number than the 800 who died during the first half of 2008. American officials hope that if they take out enough of the al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, the violence will drop. So far, that has not been the case.

--Tara McKelvey

Last week, we learned that the ACLU may have shown pictures of CIA interrogators to clients they're defending at Guantanamo, and Newsweek reported leaked information about the CIA conducting mock executions, including one with a power drill (the videotapes of the interrogation were later destroyed by the CIA). The 2004 Inspector General's report on "enhanced interrogation techniques," which has never been released in its entirety, is due out later today, and according to the New York Times, the Inspector General's  there's an Office of Professional Responsibility report due out later today that recommends reopening "nearly a dozen" prisoner abuse cases involving CIA interrogators or contractors -- mostly in Iraq or Afghanistan. Mock executions were not part of the 2002 memo authorizing torture, so it's possible that whomever was involved in that might be criminally liable, since it goes beyond the program of "legally sanctioned" torture authorized by the Bush-era Justice Department.

That of course, is what makes the idea of prosecuting low-level interrogators so absurd to some human rights advocates -- including Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski, who described such an approach as "worse than nothing at all." The problem was that torture was legally approved at the highest levels of the administration -- it would seem absurd to pursue the "Abu Ghraib" strategy -- prosecute only those who tortured beyond the "legal limit" -- when the policy itself was one of abuse. It seems unlikely, given the destruction of the videotapes for example (which may in and of itself be a crime) that these are all cases of interrogators going rogue.

Other documents along with the IG Report are scheduled to be released, including, Newsweek reported, CIA documents that Dick Cheney requested because he believes they "prove" that the administration's torture program produced valuable intelligence. There's a problem of timing though--if the documents are dated way after the interrogation program ended, they'll look less like definitive proof the program worked and more like a retroactive justification of its existence--one that was crafted in anticipation of a potential criminal inquiry. 

In the meantime, I suspect some of these leaks regarding previously unknown abuses are meant to preemptively justify whatever decision Attorney General Eric Holder makes about prosecutions -- but look for Republicans to attempt to use the inevitable political firestorm to do damage to the president, even though it's technically not his call. The GOP hates "death panels" -- torture panels are okay.

UPDATE: Okay, after reading my post again, I'd like to clarify. The 2004 Inspector General's report on enhanced interrogation that has never been fully released is due out later today, separate from that is a Office of Professional Responsibility recommendation that several cases of detainee abuse be reopened, which is what the Times reported on this morning.

-- A. Serwer

• Obviously, this business of the Senate Finance Committee Gang of Six's desire to "take your time to get it right" is Grade-A B.S. Every other House and Senate committee has already done their work. They've been done for a month. Hell, even Max Baucus had his proposal outlined last year. And unless Harry Reid makes good on his threat to take this to a floor vote under budget reconciliation rules, this is how health care reform dies.
• It's hardly worth bringing it up, but Michael Goldfarb must think people who read The Weekly Standard are idiots, because how else could one explain his contention that because FDR and LBJ were able to secure some Republican votes for their signature domestic legislation, Barack Obama has clearly failed to garner the necessary opposition support for his top domestic priority. Either Goldfarb sincerely believes that partisan and ideological alignment have not changed in over 70 years or he is deliberately misleading people. In either case, The Standard clearly has pretty low, er, standards for the content they publish.
• When I talk about institutional reform, I don't just mean the U.S. Senate. It's dispiriting that the press -- who can only reform themselves -- are still unable to call a lie a lie and do the essential fact checking that is part of their social utility. I doubt some strong words from the president on the matter will changes things much, nor do I have any hope for cable news, which prefers guests who are inflammatory, regardless of how deranged and mendacious they are.
• This nonsense about evoking the 10th Amendment for "nullification" of any federal effort to provide health care might rally the base, but it's not as though it's going anywhere in the courts. Josh Marshall puts on his history professor hat to remind us that nullification was initially rejected in the 1830s (the next attempt led to the Civil War) and we all know how it failed during the South's more recent efforts to resist civil rights legislation.
• Remainders: It's tough out there for multimillionaires; Texas public schools will soon be an excellent place to educate your children on American history from a parallel universe; and compassionate conservatives love that the poor suffer in the richest country on Earth.

--Mori Dinauer

Richard Haass argues that the Afghanistan conflict has become a war of choice.

Now, however, with a friendly government in Kabul, is our military presence still a necessity?

Of course, our interests in Afghanistan include making it difficult for Al Qaeda to mount operations from that country and limiting Taliban use of Afghan territory to destabilize neighboring Pakistan. Minimizing the chance of a terrorist attack on American citizens is vital, as is making sure that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

But even if the United States were to succeed in Afghanistan — with “success” defined as bringing into existence an Afghan government strong enough to control most of its territory — terrorists could still operate from there and would put down roots elsewhere. And Pakistan’s future would remain uncertain at best.

The key problem with the U.S. AfPak strategy is that the White House has yet to enunciate an end-state that is dramatically different from the status quo, except that their strategy will require a much larger commitment of U.S. resources to maintain the current state of affairs. Everything seems to rest on the ability of the international community to make the Afghan government effective and legitimate in the eyes of its people. Yesterday's election will be a step in the right direction, but its not clear to anyone that enough can be done to stabilize the country for the government to survive U.S. military withdrawal, or if the government's survival is necessary to the "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda" goal enunciated by the president. As Matt says, everything is so in flux that it's hard to even do the cost-benefit analysis required for such a war of choice.

-- Tim Fernholz

Flickr photo of Afghans waiting to vote courtesy Rybolov.

Earlier this week, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards rebutted a post by U.S. News and World Report's God and Country blogger, Dan Gilgoff, who unquestioningly suggested that the Obama administration needed to respond to the "demand" of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that abortion services be excluded from health care reform. (Gilgoff, who frequently leaves right-wing spin untouched in his posts, more recently has recruited religious right figures as guest bloggers).

Richards wrote, "Does anyone else see the irony in the U.S. bishops wanting to define universal health care as covering everything except for what they don't support? Under this theory, I suppose women are supposed to wait to see just exactly how the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops comes down on a variety of health care needs to understand what in fact will be considered universal." But since Obama has painted himself into a corner by elevating religious voices (and including a representative of the U.S.C.C.B. on his faith-based advisory council), he finds himself in the squirmy position of trying to answer: whose religion?

Catholics for Choice -- which was not asked to participate in yesterday's call between "people of faith" and the White House, has put out its own passionate and detailed statement on health care reform. (The U.S.C.C.B. did not participate either; anti-choice evangelicals, also not on the call, are now outraged that Obama said spreading misinformation about, among other things, government-funded abortion, was "bearing false witness.")

In his statement, Catholics for Choice president Jon O'Brien calls for contraception to not just be covered, but to be free. "As access to free contraception provides men and women with the resources they need to lead happy and healthy lives and saves money, including provisions for free contraception ought to be obvious to the architects of healthcare reform," O'Brien writes. The outrage, of course, is that this isn't at all obvious to lawmakers, because, as with much of the health care reform debate, the loud voices of irrationality -- some now saying that even contraceptive coverage violates religious conscience -- are still hijacking the debate.

--Sarah Posner

Isaac Chotiner gets a little confused about Paul Krugman's column today about the left and Obama. First, the Krugman passage in question:

And then there’s the matter of the banks.

I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing. But I’ve had many conversations with people who voted for Mr. Obama, yet dismiss the stimulus as a total waste of money. When I press them, it turns out that they’re really angry about the bailouts rather than the stimulus — but that’s a distinction lost on most voters.

Isaac says, "Krugman is conflating a bunch of different things here. Is he saying that people would be more pro-stimulus if the administration had been tougher with the banks?"

Now, I'll concede that this paragraph is a bit incongruous in an article ostensibly about the public option, but even as the public option has become more of a signifier for a "progressive" health care bill than anything else, this column is talking about a larger problem: How the administration has lost touch with both left public opinion and, more broadly, with public opinion in general.

Finding people who don't understand the distinction Krugman refers to is a common occurrence for any of us who report on the stimulus or the bailouts; people really don't understand the differences between the two programs, or that more money has been spent to help regular people in this economy than to fix the banks. But the symbolism of "bailout culture" has overwhelmed the administration's more populist policy choices, and Krugman's point is that a heavier-handed approach to the banks might have helped with this problem of perception. More broadly, displaying a willingness to take on entrenched interests directly would incline the public, and the left, to trust the administration more in health care negotiations.

Isaac goes on to note his surprise that Krugman is "displaying sympathy for voters who are completely clueless. ... When people are completely uninformed about policy, following their lead is probably not the wisest course." Well, doye, I guess. Krugman never says that public opinion should be the guide to financial policy, and when he does make arguments about policy, he makes them with a lot of expertise and empirical data. But this wasn't a column about policy; it's a column about politics, and I'm not sure he can be faulted for taking public opinion into account.

-- Tim Fernholz

Noy Thrupkaew considers the rise of the foodies and finds them lacking:

Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and the de-facto face of the resurgent food movement, celebrates Child as the high priestess of cooking done for its own sake. "Child was less interested in making it fast or easy than making it right, because cooking for her was so much more than a means to a meal," he writes. "It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles. You didn't do it to please a husband or impress guests; you did it to please yourself."

I can see how cooking can become an art and a calling. I think of it as alchemy, a physical practice of an abstract skill in transforming whatever we're given to work with -- literally and otherwise. I can use this kind of purple prose to talk about cooking not only because I love it but because I'm footloose and fancy-free -- I'm single, childless, and have enough economic security to engage in bourgeois salivating over the joy of culinary experimentation. Simply put, I don't have to cook unless I want to, nor do I have to cook anything but what I want. The truth is it's difficult to conceive of cooking being a calling if you have to do it every day on a budget, for demanding audiences like children.

KEEP READING ...

Maybe it's his pro-basketball-playing past, but Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sure does like competition. Yesterday he appeared before a group of superintendents and edu-wonks -- brought together by testing giant ACT -- to herald the launch of "i3." (Yes, it sounds like an Apple product.) Like Race to the Top, i3 is a competitive grant program intended to foster "innovation" and school reform. But while Race to the Top, at $4.3 billion, is targeted at states, i3 is intended for local districts, nonprofits, education "entrepreneurs," school "turnaround specialists," and colleges. The grants come in three categories: up to $5 million to seed "pure innovation," in Duncan's words; up to $30 million for existing programs that need to collect more data on effectiveness; and up to $50 million for scaling-up proven reforms.

When all is said and done, i3, which is funded by the federal stimulus, will dole out $650 million to support efforts to boost student achievement, close achievement gaps, and attract and retain high-quality teachers and principals. Much of this agenda -- particularly the DOE's enthusiasm for charter schools and teacher merit pay -- is borrowed from the world of education reform philanthropy, in which the single most influential player is the Gates Foundation. And indeed, i3's administrator -- Jim Shelton -- used to direct the education division of the Gates Foundation.

i3 is only marginally bigger than the Gates Foundation's latest grant program, a $500 million project to fund teacher development and merit pay in four hand-picked school districts across the country. (Eduflack has more on that.) It's fascinating to watch the extent to which the DOE's agenda, under Duncan, dovetails with Bill Gates' personal philosophy of education reform -- whether you support Gates' vision or believe, as I do, that his foundation's work is well-intentioned and crucial, yet ultimately far too focused on specific, market-driven fixes, such as test-score-based merit pay.

What's even more remarkable is that under Duncan's leadership, the DOE is moving the federal government into the business of providing financial support for unproven "innovations," when traditionally, the role of government has been to scale-up, at the national level, the most successful local and state-level programs. That's what the Obama administration is doing, for example, with its commitment to Promise Neighborhoods, which are based on the already-proven Harlem Children's Zone model. By "seeding" innovation, Duncan is sending a powerful message to educators across the country that he expects experimentation and aggressive improvement. But Ducan is also promulgating a very specific vision of what reform is likely to look like -- one heavily borrowed from Gates.

--Dana Goldstein

Adam Serwer asks why supporters of health care reform haven't brought up the racial disparities of the current system:

Even when minorities are covered by health insurance, they're less likely to have quality care and less able to afford the associated out-of-pocket expenses -- and the results are staggering. Children born to black women are more than twice as likely to die within their first year of life as are children born to white women. This disparity is unaffected by income or education level. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the mortality rate for infants of college-educated black women is 11.5 deaths for 1,000 live births, more than twice that for infants of similarly educated white women, 4.2 for 1,000 live births.

KEEP READING ...

Today, the president offered Ramadan greetings to Muslims in America and around the world:

Good for the White House to continue its outreach to the Muslim world in the face of continuing rumors about the president's origins and religion. It speaks to a kind of confidence that I'd love to see Obama demonstrate in domestic policy.

I once spent the Ramadan month in Cairo and while the fasting really is burdensome, the fast-breaking meals and general festive spirit are not to be missed. Coca Cola had a really excellent marketing tactic where they would station people with bottles of branded water, Coke, and snacks on busy street corners and begin handing them to hungry bystanders and throwing them into the cars of passing commuters the minute the fast ended. Whoever came up with that idea ought to be in charge of our public diplomacy.

-- Tim Fernholz

It seems that Cash for Clunkers has run its course, and the administration is declining to re-fund the program for a third time. (Cash for Clunkers gave rebates to consumers who traded in their older cars while purchasing newer, more fuel-efficient models.) The surprise popularity of the program reminds me a little of the "bold experimentation" spirit of the New Deal, when various programs were tried in rapid succession -- some failed, some took off, and this one falls in the latter category. CARS, as it was officially known, turned out to be a nicely executed piece of temporary, effective fiscal stimulus, with some environmental benefits to boot.

One question remaining is what will happen to auto demand now that the program is over. I think conservative arguments that the program has simply expended all pent-up demand quickly, rather than stretching it over time, are false, and this post does a good job explaining why -- essentially, lower prices don't expend demand but increase it. Car sales will probably decline a little in the short term but return to normal levels as the economy improves.

Incidentally, the Weekly Standard's Matt Continetti and I argued about Cash for Clunkers in this Bloggingheads segment. Matt was concerned that this would become a permanent subsidy to the auto industry, in part because the government owns a big chunk of it; I argued that this was a timely fiscal stimulus that wouldn't be renewed a third time because Congress is leery of further spending to help the economy and the marginal benefits of this kind of subsidy would start to decline. Looks like I won this round, but the point is this: temporary fiscal stimulus is just that, not some kind of back door for permanent government intervention in the economy.

-- Tim Fernholz

A new Washington Post poll is sure to be the talk of the town today, since at first glance it seems to fit in with the pessismism about Democrats meme now tromping around the Capitol. But it also seems to suggest that perhaps the American public understands what's going on pretty well. The president has an approval rating of 57 percent, which is good-not-great by Obama standards, even as 49 percent think he will make the right decisions for the country (weird result there). But the most accurate findings are these:

Forty-nine percent now say they think he will be able to spearhead significant improvements in the system, down nearly 20 percentage points from before he took office.

As challenges to Obama's initiatives have mounted over the summer, pessimism in the nation's direction has risen: Fifty-five percent see things as pretty seriously on the wrong track, up from 48 percent in April.

Seems to me that these results reflect less on a changing judgment about the president and more on a growing public understanding of what osbtacles lie in the path of real change: Broadly, Congress, and more specifically the conservatives therein. As Ezra points out, there isn't a strong record of even the most ambitious presidents actually succeeding in this kind of reform. Understanding that at least helps explain the disparity between Obama's approval rating, along with growing confidence in the economy, and the wrong-track numbers.

I just hope that skittish congressional Democrats are smart enough to understand that these are the nadir poll numbers of a long hot summer of crazy (the results are actually from the end of last week), and that they have the potential to change as the substance of health care reform is brought forward and defended. The negative opinions about reform in this poll result from fear and confusion, and if that leads Democrats to shy away from reform, that will only lead to more of the same public reaction. Only by actually changing something in the status quo do they have any hope of changing their poll numbers.

-- Tim Fernholz

• It makes a lot of sense for Democrats to pass the more contentious portions of health care reform using the reconciliation process and save the non-budgetary provisions for a separate piece of legislation. You see, in fantasyland Washington D.C., the two major political parties each want health care reform but disagree on the details, necessitating serious bipartisan negotiations. In the real world, Republicans want to destroy Barack Obama and tar Democrats as failures so they can ride to electoral victory next year and 2012. Nihilists and hypocrites indeed.
• Tom Ridge isn't blowing any minds by revealing that he was pressured by Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft to use the DHS' color-coded terrorism warning system for George Bush's political gain, but you'd think this would be a auspicious time for some enterprising journalists to point out that Republicans are still politicizing national security, this time to cover their complicity in the use of torture by the government.
• Just because the cover of the new National Review doesn't feature jokes about racial stereotypes or threats of anal penetration doesn't mean the publication is starting to take itself more seriously. I mean, Andy McCarthy still writes for them, observing today that because the president occasionally goes sans necktie, it reminds him "that the Iranian regime has shunned the necktie ever since Khomeini pronounced it a symbol of Western decadence." I'm sure McCarthy felt the same way about George W. Bush. You know, if I were an earnest young conservative looking to get into serious political writing and thought that interning at NR would advance my career, I would be pretty embarrassed by the magazine's commitment to supporting utter nonsense.
• Anti-gay marriage crusader Maggie Gallagher has five predictions about the effects of legalizing same-sex marriage, which seems like a pointless exercise given that SSM is already legal in several states and thus you don't actually need to "predict" anything. But the list does have some value. For instance, she believes that "people committed to traditional notions of marriage will feel afraid to speak up for their views, lest they be punished in some way." By whom? Or prediction six: "Only a small minority of gay couples will seek gay marriages where they are available" because "it makes so little sense for them." In short, gays and liberal PC thugs want to punish "traditional" people, and that is the totality of the push for SSM.
• Remainders: The DNC outraises the RNC in July; Foreign Policy has a good list of the biggest lies being pushed in the United States about other health care systems in the world; lawmakers haven't forgotten about dealing with the estate tax this Fall; since he brought it up initially, is it fair to ask whether John Cornyn is gathering an enemies list?; I find the 'seasteading' movement's undiluted selfishness fascinating; and everything you need to know about the Viper Militia.
  

--Mori Dinauer

Today's must-read: A touching -- but hard-hitting -- column by Joe Klein on health care:

In one of those awful collisions between public policy and real life, I was in the midst of an awkward conversation about end-of-life issues with my father when Sarah Palin raised the remarkable idea that the Obama Administration's attempt to include such issues in its health-care-reform proposal would lead to "death panels." Let me tell you something about my family situation, a common one these days, in order to illuminate the obscenity of Palin's formulation and the cowardice of those, like Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the lead Republican negotiator on the Senate Finance Committee, who have refused to contest her claim.

Both my parents are 89 years old. They have been inseparable, with the exception of my father's service in World War II, since kindergarten. My mother has lost her sight and is quite frail. My father takes care of her and my aunt Rose, lovingly, with some — but not enough — private help at their home in central Pennsylvania. One night in early August, I had a terrible scare. I called home and Aunt Rose was freaking out; she didn't know where my father was. All the worst possibilities crossed my mind — it turned out he was just getting the mail — as well as a very difficult reality: if he'd had a stroke, I would have had no idea about what he'd want me to do. I had lunch with him the next day to discuss this.

Read the whole thing.

--Dana Goldstein

I haven't said much about the election in Afghanistan yet because it's being covered much more effectively elsewhere, and it will be a while few weeks before it's really possible to determine how successful the election was anyway--and it looks like there may be a runoff. That said, both Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah have praised the way the elections have gone thus far, which bodes well both for the legitimacy of the election and for avoiding post-election violence. That said, Spencer Ackerman notes that Abdullah's statement about election security affecting turnout "could still become a pretext for rejectionism."

-- A. Serwer

Adam Serwer on the difficulty of undoing old detention policy:

The cavernous room in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., was nearly empty, except for a few journalists holding yellow legal pads. A small parade of government lawyers marched in and rested their briefcases on their desks before approaching the trio of lawyers representing Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan national who was detained in 2002 after being accused of throwing a grenade at an American convoy, injuring several American soldiers. He was between 12 and 17 years old at the time and has been in U.S. custody for seven years. The hearing, held in June, was not related to Jawad's guilt or innocence. Rather, it was his habeas corpus proceeding -- the legal challenge to the government's ability to hold him in the first place.

It is widely believed that Jawad's confession, offered to Afghan authorities shortly after his capture, was coerced through torture. Jawad is illiterate, and the confession was written in a dialect he didn't speak, accompanied by a separate page bearing only his thumbprint. His military defense attorney, Maj. Eric Montalvo, says that as soon as Jawad was asked about the incident in a language he could understand, he denied everything. Then, Montalvo says, Jawad was handed over to American interrogators who tortured him ("They did things that were classified"). After Jawad attempted suicide in his Guantánamo cell in 2003, he was subjected to the government's "frequent flyer" program, in which the detainee is moved from cell to cell every few hours for days or weeks on end, in order to deny him sleep.

KEEP READING ...

A new cause celebre is brewing for the religious right: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has issued a determination letter to Belmont Abbey, a Catholic college in North Carolina, saying that it discriminated against female faculty by excluding coverage for prescription contraceptives in its health insurance plan. The EEOC also found that the college illegally retaliated against faculty members who filed a complaint with the EEOC by publicly identifying them.

According to Marcia McCormick at the Workplace Prof Blog, courts are split on whether exclusion of prescription contraception coverage violates the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, part of the federal civil rights law prohibiting discrimination in employment. But McCormick noted, "In my view, this is sex discrimination. Prescription contraception is only available for women, and is one of very few ways that women themselves can control when and whether to have children. And having children has a huge impact on a woman's working life, so that female employees are in a position different from female dependents vis a vis work for this employer." Belmont Abbey claims it removed coverage for contraception from its insurance plan because it violates church teaching.

Under EEOC rules, the parties will now try to work out an agreement through a process called conciliation. If that fails, the EEOC can sue the college or issue the faculty members who filed the charge a right to sue letter to bring their own case against the college in federal court.

In any case, the religious right is rallying to the college's defense, and -- surprise! -- tying it to health-care reform. A press release from the anti-contraception American Life League links the EEOC ruling to a plan by the Obama administration to violate religious freedom, saying, "Not only are Catholic schools across the country running to the aid of Belmont, many are gearing up for First Amendment fights of their own in light of the Obama health care 'reform' plan."

Although it is framed as a Catholic issue, the religious right as a whole is gearing up for a fight. Deacon Keith Fournier, of Catholic Online, writes:

The College’s necessary stand against the encroachment of the Federal Government on Religious Freedom is being recognized by Christians, other people of faith and many people of good will around the world, as both an ominous sign and a call to heroic witness.

Fournier adds that he has attended the first steering committee meeting of the Freedom Federation, a new coalition of religious right leaders who are trying to distance themselves from the religious right label, but are nonetheless pushing the religious right agenda by opposing health-care reform, gay marriage, and abortion. "Belmont Abbey College has a set of new supporters, committed to prayer and willing to help," Fournier went on. "The leaders of other Christian communities understand what is at stake."

--Sarah Posner

On Tuesday, Mark offered a history of how the public option became the dominant progressive priority for health reform. This morning, with the future of the public option at risk, its inventor -- Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker -- and its chief political defender, Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future -- held a conference call to ask Congress not to vote for health reform that does not include a strong public plan. Sixty House Democrats have already made that commitment, including Progressive Caucus co-chairs Keith Ellison and Raul Grijalva, who were on the call. But there are reports that some members of that group might consider non-profit health care co-operatives -- the Finance Committee's preferred alternative -- a "public option."

Co-ops "are a political solution to a political problem," Hacker said, "unlike the public plan, which is a policy solution to a real world problem. That real world problem is the consolidation of our health system" under a few private insurance companies. The fact that Congressional Republicans have rejected co-ops, which have little chance of effectively competing with for-profit managed care, shows they aren't serious about reform, Hacker said. "They were offered this olive branch, and they basically burnt this to a crisp. ... That's not a response that is reasoned. ... It is a reflection of an unwillingness to bargain." Giving up on a public plan is a "truly ugly idea," he continued.

When it comes to political strategy, the Wall Street Journal reported this morning that the White House and Senate Democrats are considering splitting health reform into several smaller bills, and relying only on Democratic support to pass them. But that would be a mistake, Grijalva said. "We need to do this as a whole and it has to be comprehensive. It's all a package." He added, "to isolate the finances from the public option and jeopardize any of that, I think, is a mistake." But he admitted the Progressive Caucus remains somewhat removed from the negotiating table. "At this point we haven't become allies in the strategy, but I think we're getting there."

I asked Ellison whether Progressive Caucus members were willing to give-up on priorities like Medicaid expansion in order to draw a line in the sand on the public option. He and Hacker didn't answer the question directly, reiterating that the public option was the best way to cut health care costs.

To read Hacker's paper on how to structure a public plan to be most effective, click here.

--Dana Goldstein

For weeks, people in Washington had wondered what had shocked CIA director Leon Panetta so much that he decided to expose the exploits of a 2004 government program to assassinate high-level Al Qaeda members. As Mark Mazzetti reports in today’s New York Times, it was Blackwater USA that convinced him, since the private security contractors had been hired to assist with the operations: “Bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.”

The fact that Panetta spoke publicly about the program has been a positive move, shedding light on the illicit work and helping to restore a more judicious approach to what Americans are doing in the world. But anyone who was in Iraq at the time that the program was being discussed could hardly be surprised by news of Blackwater's involvement. The company’s scurrilous activities in Iraq have been scrupulously chronicled by Jeremy Scahill in his book on the subject and currently on his blog RebelReports.

Moreover, private security contractors worked alongside military officers and the CIA during interrogations at detention facilities in 2003 and 2004. As I discovered while doing research for my book Monstering, the contractors were the cool ones at places like Abu Ghraib because they did not have to follow the military codes: Instead, they wore fleece jackets and had long hair and also scored with the female soldiers. The contractors were the studs, as the soldiers told me. Along with their freer approach to fashion, the contractors also had a more freestyle approach to the interrogations, mainly because they were not confined by the military rules. In many ways, the contractors were role models for the soldiers and encouraged them to rev up their approach to detainees. It was a vicious cycle, and the detainees paid the price – they were treated harshly by the private contractors, and also by the soldiers who emulated their style.

Given the close -- and brutal -- relationship fostered between the contractors and the military who often worked in tandem with the CIA, as well as the overall importance of the contractors at the prisons and in other areas, it would have been surprising to hear that they were not involved in a program like the one described by Panetta. It does not mitigate the troublesome aspects of contracting out sensitive work to the private sector, but it is a reminder that by and large that was how business was conducted.

--Tara McKelvey

Despite Congress' massive bipartisan effort to keep Guantanamo Bay prison open by refusing to resettle any of the detainees who were determined not to be dangerous in the United States, the Obama administration has managed to find other countries to take them.

Six European Union countries -- Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain -- have accepted or publicly agreed to take detainees. Four E.U. countries have privately told the administration that they are committed to resettling detainees, and five other E.U. nations are considering taking some, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.

Steve Benen writes, "It occasionally pays to have a U.S. president with stature and credibility on the global stage." Well yeah. But that'll only go so far, especially if Guantanamo remains open or Bagram prison remains the alternative legal black hole that it was under Bush.

On the latter point, I'm actually cautiously optimistic. Despite appealing a judge's decision to grant habeas rights to Bagram detainees who were captured in third countries, the Obama administration has already sent the FBI in to mirandize detainees it intends to charge, and this morning Major General Doug Stone said most of the detainees will need to be released.

The final question that really needs to be answered, and that would shed the most light on the Obama administration's intentions, is whether or not they have continued to transfer detainees captured in third countries to Bagram in order to avoid judicial oversight--the same way the Bush administration did.

-- A. Serwer

Matt Yglesias on the fractious nature of Afghan politics:

Today, Afghans head to the polls fearing attack from Taliban forces who've labeled the process a "program of the crusaders." Most likely, Taliban efforts to derail the voting will fail, and incumbent President Hamid Karzai will stay in office. A smooth election, if it happens, should provide a morale boost for an Obama administration that's lately been struggling with grim assessments of Afghanistan's political situation. But even given a best-case scenario, no election result should distract from the United States' desperate need to frame realistic objectives in Afghanistan.

KEEP READING ...

Yesterday, Faith in Public Life -- a leading a coalition of 22 religious groups -- hosted a conference call for "people of faith" and the White House on health-care reform. The message? "People of faith" think we have a moral obligation to provide quality, affordable health care to all our citizens and want Congress to pass a reform bill -- any bill, apparently.

The 40-minute call, filled with platitudes about religion and ambiguities on policy, demonstrated just how much a political organizing effort based vaguely on what "people of faith" think falls short. First, while the moral obligation argument is obvious, it's not so obvious that making that argument to members of Congress would help produce the best bill for consumers. Granted, many of the religious groups who are co-sponsoring this ongoing health-reform mobilization effort have neither the staffs nor the resources to follow the nitty-gritty of Gang of Six negotiations on cost-containment, mandates, co-ops, subsidies, and exchanges. But broad stroke statements about what sort of reform would create the coverage to fulfill that moral obligation would certainly give them a great deal more credibility.

To their credit, the call organizers are striving to counter the lies and distortions of the far-right, which is aided and abetted by the religious right's anti-reform campaign, Stop the Abortion Mandate. They have a threefold aim: to debunk the perception that all "people of faith" fall in line with the religious right on what their faith calls them to do, to foster a more civil debate, and to debunk scare tactics about socialism, death panels, and abortion.

This is useful, as far as it goes. But the coalition does not take a position on, say, the public option, or reproductive health coverage, issues that could make or break the effectiveness of reform. (For the argument on the reproductive health coverage, see Dana's excellent piece.) The non-position was obviously by design in an effort to broaden the coalition. But it weakened the message.

Obama's domestic policy adviser, Melody Barnes, took questions that were submitted from "people of faith," including questions from a Catholic caller who wanted to know about "government-funding of abortions." She asked, "Can you assure us that we can support health-care reform without sacrificing our values?" (Wasn't the whole point of the call that health-care reform is an essential reflection of the values of "people of faith?") Barnes gave the familiar Obama administration answer -- which is to say, she did not further illuminate the issue. She reiterated his support for the "longstanding policy" that federal funds not be used for abortion coverage and added that any reform "is not intended to reduce insurance coverage Americans already have."

The call seemed designed to support but not question the president, which deeply disappointed some religious folks -- showing, again, the uselessness of speaking broadly about what "people of faith" want. The Rev. Jim Moss, a Presbyterian minister I know in South Carolina, was updating his Facebook status during the call. He expressed disappointment at the failure of Sojourners' Jim Wallis, who spoke on the call, to question the White House's abandonment of single-payer and waffling on the public option. After Obama spoke -- and didn't take any questions -- Moss wrote, "What? Obama didn't answer any questions on the Faith for Health online chat. And he didn't say anything he hadn't already said a thousand times. That was kind of a waste of time."

--Sarah Posner

Via Greg Sargent, following the news that the Democrats are going to start playing hardball, Sen. Chuck Grassley is telling the president how to do bipartisanship:

In recent days, however, some Democrats have accused Grassley of trying to undermine the reform effort, for example by refusing to debunk rumors that the Democratic health bills would create “death panels” empowered to decide whether the infirm live or die.

On Wednesday, he denied those claims and fired back at Obama, saying the president should publicly state his willingness to sign a bill without a controversial government-run insurance plan. Such a statement, he said, is “pretty important … if you’re really interested in a bipartisan bill.”

I've already expressed my feeling that there's enough important changes in the bill that it shouldn't be scuttled over the public option. But when the feeling was that the White House was ready to drop the public option and pick up on the transparently useless idea of co-ops, Republicans responded by doubling down on the apocalyptic rhetoric about government takeovers and euthanasia.

Then there's Grassley himself, who here resembles no one more than Lucy holding the football. Aside from consciously hyping the death panels, he's already said he wouldn't vote for a good bill if it didn't have enough Republican support. Frankly, it's useless to make concessions to someone whose already admitted they're not going to vote for the bill unless the sky turns pink. The White House called the Republican's bluff over the past few days when they indicated a willingness to drop the public plan -- and the GOP showed they're only interested in inflicting a humiliating political defeat on the president.

Like I said, the GOP is trying to kill the bill. If at some point in the process, the reform effort itself hinges on whether or not we keep the public option, it should be let go. But at this point in time, the GOP in general, and Grassley in particular, have shown they're not interested in letting anything pass.

-- A. Serwer

• Polling the madness: 45 percent of Americans believe government-run "death panels" are "likely to happen"; 53 percent of Americans support "Barack Obama's health care plan" when given factual details about it; 39 percent of voters (and 62 percent of Republicans) think the government should stay out of Medicare; and only 62 percent of Americans believe Barack Obama was born in the United States.
• To answer Dave Weigel's unstated question about why The Weekly Standard's John McCormack believes the LaRouche conspiracists are "fringe Democrats," the reason is because there is a pervasive belief amongst conservatives that political radicalism is an exclusive phenomenon of leftist politics (for example, Jonah Goldberg is still connecting the dots on his pet thesis). LaRouche's disciples have no relationship to mainstream liberalism, and Democrats purged these people long ago, whereas the right generally and the GOP specifically quietly support and cheer on their own fanatics.
• With the White House now publicly admitting that they don't believe Republicans (who blame Democrats for killing bipartisanship) are serious about achieving bipartisan health care reform -- which, of course, never actually existed -- the pertinent question is Kevin Drum's: "did Obama ever expect anything different? Was his calm, deliberative, bipartisan sales pitch genuine, or did he know it would fail all along?"
• Speaking of reading minds, Matt Yglesias observes the difficulty in determining whether Senate Democratic centrists actually want a health care reform bill and are stomping their feet for political cover, or whether they're opposed to it on principle and are just trying to delay the legislation until it dies. And here's a situation where asking the direct question will yield little helpful information because the Senators in question could simply be lying when they assure you that they deeply desire reform.
• The problem for gun owners who are serious about protecting their Second Amendment rights goes beyond merely being associated with violent, racist fanatics. Rather the real irony is that the ones who are most extreme in their beliefs have backgrounds like this gentleman, whose defense of the 90s militias and ties to domestic terrorists suggest such violence could occur again, which would create the ideal climate for Congress curtailing said gun rights the fanatics were trying to protect in the first place.
• Remainders: Fox News takes a creative approach to the problem of anonymous sourcing; for all the ranting about the dangers of a public plan, most states are already on board; Bobby Jindal loves him some hypocrisy; and Michele Bachmann attempts to interpret the Constitution, fails.

--Mori Dinauer

On an afternoon conference call organized by a coalition of religious organizations pushing for health-care reform, White House Domestic Policy Adviser Melody Barnes said that President Obama "is still committed to" the public option and he thinks it is "the best one."

More on this tomorrow.

--Sarah Posner

Since Peter Suderman linked to me yesterday as an example of liberals being unhappy with the health-care reform effort, I thought I might respond to his assertion that this isn't a failure of leadership, but "a feature of democratic politics" which is a common refrain from libertarians and small-government types: Things would run much smoother without the messy business of politics getting in the way.

"It is not a matter of deciding on the 'right' policy and then making it so -- even when your party controls the White House, the House, and the Senate," he writes, which, again, is typical of those who do not believe the government can tackle any area of public policy without becoming utterly corrupted by its own devices. But it also misreads the intentions of liberals, who very much want to get the policy right, even if the more practical among us realize the ideal legislation will never emerge out of a place like the U.S. Senate. And indeed, the main complaint from liberals closely following this issue is that the Senate is major obstacle. Its anachronisms, seniority system, and anti-majoritarianism have been identified as the prime reasons health-care reform will either die or pass in some watered-down form that does little to fix the problems it was designed to address.

Like Suderman, I take as axiomatic Churchill's quip about democracy being the worst form of government and therefore I have no choice but to accept the reality and ugliness of politics. But that doesn't translate for me into a desire for laissez-faire government. Rather it highlights the need for institutional reform, because it's the institutions which are making it difficult to achieve needed public policy legislation.

--Mori Dinauer

Today, Judge Vaughn Walker denied a motion by various gay-rights organizations -- including Lambda Legal and the ACLU -- to intervene in the federal challenge to Prop. 8. He did, however, allow the city of San Francisco to join, saying its interests were not already represented by other parties. This decision leaves former Bush v. Gore foes David Boies and Ted Olson at the helm of the broadest legal case for gay rights to date.

Major gay legal rights organizations, which have taken a more incremental approach to securing gay rights in court, were quick to warn Boies and Olson about the danger of bringing the case to the Supreme Court too soon, then asked to join the suit once it became clear Boies and Olson intended to continue despite their reservations. The question of whether it's the right "time" to bring gay marriage to the Supreme Court was subject of a New York Times debate forum today, but the point is really moot.

The decision today locks Lambda Legal and the ACLU out of the case, which is just as well: There was bound to be bad blood between these organizations and the pair of lawyers who wrested the reigns from a movement that they've been managing for decades. Whether or not it's a wise decision to strike now, it is better to make a good case than a bad one beset by infighting and conflicting interests.

As Boies and Olson move forward, it is becoming apparent how broad the legal case will be. Based on the "case management" proposals filed by both sides yesterday, Perry v. Schwarzenegger is set to address questions as wide-ranging as whether being gay diminishes one's contribution to society, affects one's ability to raise children, impairs judgment, or constitutes a mental disorder. The state challenge, on the other hand, only dealt with the narrow legal question of whether the measure constituted an "amendment" or a "revision" to the state constitution.

From these documents, it also appears that Boies and Olson are going to take aim at the "Yes on 8" campaign directly. To show that the intent of Prop. 8 was discriminatory, they plan on issuing subpoenas for "documents relating to Prop. 8's genesis, drafting, strategy, objectives, advertising, campaign literature, [Yes on 8 members'] communications with each other, supporters, and donors." They also want to depose Frank Schubert and Jeff Flint, the P.R. moguls who managed "Yes on 8."

In another strange glimpse of what's to come, the defense plans on showing homosexuality is a choice by seeing how many people registered as same-sex domestic partners, broke it off, then got married.

The fact that a court is considering questions such as these is almost farcical. I just hope that when the case goes to trial, the comedy comes through.

-- Gabriel Arana

As Eric Schmitt reports in today’s New York Times, FBI agents have been rushing after thousands of terrorism leads, ranging from a missing 55-gallon drum of radioactive material (it was later found on a loading dock) to threats to shopping malls. They are now key players in America’s counterterrorism effort, and the agents themselves do not seem to mind: “It’s better to do that than find out later you let something get by,” one of them told Schmitt.

Yet running after so many leads may actually be counterproductive, said Amy Zegart, a UCLA professor who specializes in intelligence matters. She explains in the article that this strategy burns through resources at the agency. Besides that, where are the cops in all this? In the U.K., police play a significant role in fighting terrorism: They know who the suspects are in their neighborhoods, and where they hang out, and when they might be planning an actual attack. In the U.S., this job is often done by the FBI, and the results have been underwhelming. There have been arrests -- the “North Carolina jihadists,” as the special-forces soldiers at Fort Bragg called the men in suburban Raleigh who were recently taken in (though the evidence is scant). There was also the Fort Dix case, in which two paid informants recorded hundreds of hours of conversation among several men in the Cherry Hill, N.J. area and may have actually encouraged them to talk about attacking the military base. Meanwhile, some analysts, such as University of Maryland’s Aaron Mannes, have questioned the overall efficacy of going after the heads of terrorism cells, saying that taking out the leaders does not necessarily break up a cell or even reduce its activity.

One leading terrorism expert who advises U.S. police departments believes strongly that the cops should be doing this work, not the FBI guys, and he has a compelling argument. He says that the actions of the FBI agents are like those of an “agent provocateur:” They are attempting to stir things up in order to show, rightly or wrongly, that the threat of terrorism is high and that the FBI has an important job to do. They also show a propensity for conspiracy theories, he says, explaining that they look for suspects in unlikely places and arrest people even when there are few signs that they are planning an attack. The suspects in North Carolina, for example, had been planning to move to Jordan -- and were then arrested. As the analyst tells me, “If you want to see a conspiracy, it’s the people in the Hoover building in downtown Washington.” The number of FBI agents assigned to the counterterrorism duties is staggering -- more than 5,000 -- and they have had a recent history of dubious arrests. One wonders whether this is really the smartest way of protecting the nation from a future attack or whether it is simply the way that a bureaucracy responds to a crisis.

--Tara McKelvey

Michael Dannenberg argues that the conversation about college costs shouldn't end at student loans:

For decades, the politics of higher education have followed familiar lines: Democrats champion higher Pell Grants for needy families, tuition tax credits for the middle class, and cheaper student loans paid for by cutting banks out of the system. Republicans advocate more modest Pell Grant increases and, with a few exceptions, protect the student-loan banks that enjoy a lucrative, risk-free business. President Barack Obama is following the traditional playbook. He has proposed increasing Pell Grants significantly and throwing the banks completely out of the student-loan program. Loans instead would be made directly by the government. "We should not be in the business of propping up banks," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told reporters in April. "I'd much rather be investing in our country's young people."

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A group of women gather at the National Stadium, where Afghan President Hamid Karzai spoke at a rally in Kabul. Photo by (The Washington Post/Nikki Kahn)

As Adam pointed out earlier, many people are questioning whether it's even possible to hold a "legitimate" election in Afghanistan tomorrow given the potential for low turnout due to recent threats of violence by the Taliban. But, as Jeanne Brooks notes, it's not just violence that threatens democracy in Afghanistan -- it's the disenfranchisement of women. President Hamid Karzai recently signed a law that severely restricts women's rights. Among many other appalling provisions, it prevents Shia women from casting a vote without their husband's permission.

As Rachel Reid writes in the Washington Post,

Things got much worse recently when President Hamid Karzai officially promulgated legislation that would make the Taliban proud. Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern: As Karzai's government has grown weaker he has increasingly turned to some of society's most conservative elements for support.

In other words, Karzai has shored up his own power at the expense of women. Among Afghans who are risking their lives to vote, he is seen by many to be the only "real choice" in tomorrow's election.

We've got a feminist Secretary of State who has professed her commitment to keeping women's rights central to her agenda. And yet, Brooks points out, the U.S. and British governments decided not to raise a political uproar about the latest restrictions on women's rights "out of fear of disrupting the election." But if women's voting rights are restricted, the election is already disrupted and illegitimate.

--Ann Friedman

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's decision to send consideration of Troy Davis' habeas case back to a federal court in Georgia for review, its worth reconsidering the law that made Davis' journey so harrowing in the first place. Despite the mountain of exculpatory evidence that emerged in the aftermath of his conviction (recanting witnesses, allegations of police coercion) and the weakness of the initial case (zero physical evidence) Davis' appeals were denied time and again on legal technicalities arising from provisions in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which limited habeas petitions from prisoners sentenced to death in most circumstances. It was passed in the wake of the Oklahoma City Bombing, and my understanding is this was partially to prevent people like Timothy McVeigh from using legal maneuvers to stay their executions. (Incidentally, it is also the law that established the "material support for terrorism" charges that the government has used to secure an astronomical conviction rate against suspected terrorists.)

In this case though, what the law did was prevent a potentially innocent man from obtaining habeas relief in a case where he almost certainly deserved it. I understand the government's interest in preventing frivolous appeals from the convicted in capitol cases, but it's not in the interest of the government or society to execute the innocent, no matter what Antonin Scalia says. It's worth revisiting the habeas provisions of this law and seeing whether it can't be amended to make sure something like this doesn't happen again. Constitutional concerns about AEDPA also aren't new, even if the law has been upheld by the Supreme Court in the past.

-- A. Serwer

Paul Starr on the sacrificial lamb that is the public option:

Contrary to some overwrought reactions on the left, if a public insurance option fails to make it into this year's health-care legislation, it does not spell the end of worthwhile reform.

The president and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius have been entirely correct in saying that the public option is only a small part of the reform effort. The general framework for health insurance that Democrats are advocating does not depend upon a public option. And if a public plan is enacted, it may be so compromised that it could backfire on reformers and become a high-cost alternative rather than the cheaper option that progressives are hoping for.

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