FRIDAY FIVE O'CLOCK FOLKWAYS. The entire American labor movement has been atremble today, waiting for the National Labor Relations Board to deliver its decisions in the Kentucky River cases -- decisions in which the Board is widely expected to reclassify as many as 8 million workers as management, and hence ineligible to join or belong to unions. The ruling would apply to nurses who schedule shifts or offer training on some new devices, say, to other nurses, perhaps to carpenters who help train apprentices -- you get the picture. The whole point of the ruling, labor fears, is to further cripple its ability to organize and represent workers -- and crippling unions and afflicting workers, after all, is the very the raison d’etre of the Republican and management hacks who constitute the majority of the board.

It turns out labor must tremble a little longer. With the board's current deliberative term at an end as the month ends, the word, as of 5:00 PM Eastern time today, Friday, is that it will make no public announcement of its rulings, but rather will Fed-Ex them to the parties in the cases either by Fed-Ex’s last pick-up time tonight, or some time tomorrow. The recipients will learn of the decisions, then, either tomorrow (Saturday) or Monday.

Hands-down, this wins the “They Did What?!”-Ruling-in-the-Dead-of-Night Award for this year, perhaps for the entire decade. Issuing controversial decisions late on Friday afternoons is a time-honored way to ensure that publicity will be minimal, but the Kentucky River non-announcement takes that to a whole new level. You’d think at least the NLRB would have the decency to dispense with its communications director, since communications is the last thing the Board wants to have.

And digressing on communications for a moment, I think the Bushies lost control of this news cycle, along with a Florida congressional seat and perhaps a few wayward bowels, with the news of Mark Foley’s resignation this afternoon. First Woodward; then Foley, on the very day that Congress is supposed to adjourn with a strategic display of Republican resolve manfully battling Democratic defeatism. A helpful reminder that the Republicans’ biggest problem this November isn’t the Democrats; it’s reality.

--Harold Meyerson

BROWN'S VOTE. Surely Sherrod Brown's vote in favor of the detainee bill was one of the more notably dispiriting to behold this week. As it happens, Jim McNeill has a profile of Brown in the new print issue of the Prospect that sets up his race as the test case for a certain kind of (very Prospecty) political approach -- the bet that amped-up economic populism can trump social and security issues in red states. But certainly this week showed that Brown isn't above casting a compromised vote on a security question if its profile is sufficiently high.

These political questions were actually hashed out at some length at the Prospect breakfast event with Brown back in March. The transcript of the discussion is here, and I think it's highly worth taking another look at. There's much about Brown that impresses, but his answers touching on both the substance and politics of national security really nicely capture, I think, some of the continued pathologies that afflict Democrats in that area.

UPDATE: On the issue of Democrats and the detainee vote, I strongly agree with Scott Lemiuex's point here.

--Sam Rosenfeld

FOLEY. Not sure what to add regarding the news of Florida congressman Mark Foley's resignation (looks like the GOP is going to have a hell of a time trying to keep that seat Republican). In the spirit of kicking a guy while he's down, I guess I'll just note that, yes, he did vote to impeach Clinton.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE LESSONS OF WARS. You often hear of Vietnam Syndrome, that odd affliction wherein liberals who noticed America's last occupation attempt didn't go that well made the crazed extrapolation that this one wouldn't either. Loons! But Spencer Ackerman notices that the right has their own dysfunction left over from the war or, at least, its aftermath:

Disillusionment with a war usually follows a predictable pattern, particularly among elites: support or acquiescence for the enterprise; a tortured recognition of the war's poor fortunes; and, finally, denunciation. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative founding father, followed exactly the opposite course with Vietnam. In 1971, as editor of Commentary, Podhoretz wrote despondently about the war, "I now find myself ... unhappily moving to the side of those who would prefer ... an American defeat to a 'Vietnamization' of the war which calls for the indefinite and unlimited bombardment by American pilots in American planes of every country in that already devastated region." By 1982, however, Podhoretz had relocated the true fault for the Vietnam debacle--not among the war's architects, but among its critics. In Why We Were in Vietnam, he accused the antiwar movement of bearing "a certain measure of responsibility for the horrors that have overtaken the people of Vietnam." Over the intervening decade, Podhoretz had somehow grown illusioned with the war and disillusioned only with its opponents. [...]

This would prove a potent template. When Nixon prosecuted an even more savage war with no appreciable change in its fortunes, an emboldened Congress, led by Democrats, voted to cut off funding in 1974. This had an unintended and profound consequence. Suddenly, the right, which had spent the previous five years and the entire Johnson administration recognizing that the war was bleak, if not totally futile, had a new scapegoat: the forces that had ended the war before giving their preferred strategy time to work. Those forces were twofold: first, the representatives and senators who had betrayed the troops in the field; second, the antiwar movement that had pressured them to do so.

--Ezra Klein

UNIVERSAL INSURANCE.. Bad news for the middle class in this new CAP report. Wages are flat, average job growth is one-fifth that of previous business cycles, the top five expenditures of most families (health care, housing, food, cars, and household operations) are racing upward, fewer than a third of families have savings that could weather three months of income loss (and that number is going down), and so job loss and health emergencies are more dangerous than ever. They don't call me Happy McSmiles for nothing!

All of which reminds me of an idea I've been meaning to plug. In his new book The Great Risk Shift, Jacob Hacker argues for a new scheme of economic protection he calls Universal Insurance. The plan is to have an all-purpose form of insurance that covers catastrophic expenses from health emergencies, job losses, or whatever. How much is covered depends on the extent of the loss -- did you take a pay cut or lose your job? -- and how high your income is. So a massive income drop for a low-income person will result in relatively generous benefits, while a moderate drop for a wealthy individual will attract less generous compensation.

This all-purpose economic security would protect families from the eventualities and unexpected events that they are, for now, clearly unprepared for, and in doing, would ease the need for bankruptcies, credit debt, and all manner of nasty compensation practices that are bad for both families and our economy. It's a clean, efficient idea for calming the rampant insecurity that threatens folks across our economy. Seems to me like something savvy politicians may want to take a look at.

--Ezra Klein

TNR'S CLINTON PROBLEM. What is it that so infuriates the folks at The New Republic about the Clinton Global Initiative? Clinton could be drawling out old war stories on the golf links, like, say, Gerald Ford. He instead spends his time charming rich folks out of their money in order to help out the poor. Slick Willie plays Robin Hood. The first year Bill Clinton held this conference, he raised a couple billion. This year, he raised more than seven billion. And TNR, whose karmic balance currently strains under their cover for a misguided war and starring role in the destruction of the 1994 universal health care push, sees this is as worth repeated mockery. Glad they've got their priorities straight.

TNR's first swing at the CGI pinata came last year, when Michael Crowley greeted the first conference with an article mocking Clinton's wonky tendencies and superstar trappings. To Crowley, the couple billion raised by the effort was less worthy of attention than Clinton's "pathological need for adulation" or the occasional platitudes he offered. But if Crowley couldn't actually know the good the CGI would do, Leon Wieseltier operates from no such informational deficit -- Clinton's conference is now a proven mechanism for raising massive amounts of cash to fund programs widely acclaimed by the HIV/AIDS and humanitarian communities. Nevertheless, Wieseltier found the event -- which, again, raised more than seven billion to help the poor and needy -- "peculiarly repellent," loathed "the cult of the personality" it exhibited, condemned the "fatuity" and "banality" of the meeting, and lamented the "vanity" of the whole affair. And this was all before Wieseltier launched into a superficial recounting of Maimonides' hierarchy of charitable giving in order to shame the do-gooders. Sadly, Wieseltier was forced to admit that, "[i]n many ways the experts and the donors at the CGI honored this [highest] ideal of self-reliance, which the philosopher says is "exceeded by none."' Oh-what-oh-what circle of hell could be hot enough for these louts?

Wieseltier's actual problem is that the CGI folks flubbed the next item down Maimonide's list: Anonymity. Wieseltier feels this crowd is immodest in their giving, and the world must be warned. But Maimonides' injunction focused on keeping the recipients of charity from knowing their benefactor's name and the donor's from knowing their recipient's identity. It was to avoid a situation in which small communities had various poor members feeling inferior and indebted to the rich. Thankfully, I highly doubt each dose of ARV drugs given in Africa is attached to a picture of the tech mogul who purchased it, and then the mogul is handed a polaroid and name card for each AIDS-ravaged African he helped out. Maimonidies can relax.

Moreover, what neither Crowley nor Wieseltier seems to have noticed is that there's a method to the vanity. Easy as it may be to snipe at self-importance from a magazine perch (and really, what job is more egotistical than ours, which is predicated on the idea that the world should and must be exposed to our opinions, at great length and for a couple dollars a pop?), the self-important superstardom Clinton cultivates is actually central to his fundraising success. As David Remnick, who offered up a much more serious and judicious analysis of Clinton's post-presidency in a recent New Yorker, wrote:

Clinton is the first post-President to tap into the newer generation of wealth-the hedge-fund and retail moguls, who have bigger planes to lend and more cash to burn than their upper-class predecessors ever had. Ronald Burkle, a supermarket tycoon, is another frequent travelling companion and airplane lender; Burkle made Clinton a partner in one of his investment funds. Clinton's appeal for these tycoons is obvious: in exchange for giving money to a good cause-the Clinton Foundation's budget last year was thirty million dollars-you not only have the usual tax break and the knowledge that you are doing good but also get to play Oh Hell until five in the morning with a two-term ex-President who knows how to have a good time. You become a certified Friend of Bill, which still has some currency, six years after one Clinton White House and, possibly, two years before another. Writing a check to the March of Dimes hardly provides the same multi-layered reward.

--Ezra Klein

CURT WELDON (R - CRAZYTOWN). Atrios passes on news that Pennsylvania congressman Curt Weldon is facing an increasingly serious challenge from Dem challenger Joe Sestak, which reminds me to plug Laura Rozen's piece in the latest print issue of the Prospect about Weldon -- "the House's most erratic member."

--Sam Rosenfeld

DEPARTMENT OF DELICIOUS IRONIES. The headline and subhead from this Washington Post article today are almost too good to be true.

Now, Even Allen's Apologies Are Getting Him in Trouble
Sons of Confederate Veterans Is the Most Recent Group Offended by Senator's Comments

So now, according to the Post, even the Lost Causers are demanding their pound of flesh:

"He's apologizing to others, certainly he should apologize to us as well," said B. Frank Earnest Sr., the Virginia commander of the confederate group at a news conference. "We're all aware, ourselves included, of the statements that got him into this. The infamous macaca statement. He's using our flag to wipe the muck from his shoes that he's now stepped in."

--Ben Adler

BACK TO THE COURT? The detainee bill passed by the Senate yesterday came as a result of the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision, so some obvious questions now include whether this bill will itself end up being looked at by the Court, what the prospects are for it being struck down, and what the grounds would likely be for that action. Scott Lemieux thinks the odds are overwhelming that the Court will not find this bill unconstitutional (adding as a crucial grace note that "that opponents of this scandalous legislation should not use the courts as a crutch"). The Washington Post's write-up today includes some scholars who think questions might be raised on 14th amendment "equal protection" grounds, regarding the provision declaring conspiracy to be a war crime, and, especially, regarding the elimination of habeas corpus rights. Even a Pepperdine University prof who supports the bill told the Post that he thinks the habeas corpus provision might not stand up in court. Speaking of "using the courts as a crutch," the reservation about the habeas corpus provision is shared by...some of the more spineless senators who nevertheless still voted for the bill, as The New York Times notes:

Even some Republicans who voted for the bill said they expected the Supreme Court to strike down the legislation because of the provision barring court detainees’ challenges, an outcome that would send the legislation right back to Congress.

“We should have done it right, because we’re going to have to do it again,” said Senator Gordon H. Smith, Republican of Oregon, who voted to strike the provision and yet supported the bill.

As always, continuous highly-informed shrillness on the subject can be found here.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WITH GOD ON YOUR SIDE, WHO NEEDS THE FACTS? Kirsten A. Powers wrote a piece for TAP Online on the pope controversy that is, in part, a rebuttal to my essay, "Benedict the Bombthrower". Powers misrepresents my work as a defense of the violence perpetrated by some Muslims in the name of God, and accuses me of partly blaming the U.S. for the murderous and abusive actions of Islamic theocracies. Hers is a tactic more commonly used on the right: State that someone said something she clearly did not, then berate her for having supposedly said it.

An honest rebuttal would have taken on my interpretation of the pope's speech, which is what my piece was about.

Anyone who read my essay knows that I in no way condoned the violent reaction to the pope's comments. My commentary simply takes the pope to task for pouring, in an apparently deliberate manner, gasoline on smoldering coals, and it sets his words into context, assessing actions by the West (not just the U.S., as Ms. Powers asserts) that ignited those coals long ago, and which have since kept those coals stoked. I do indeed hold the pope accountable for the practical results of his rhetoric, just as liberals, including (perhaps) Ms. Powers, hold the Bush administration responsible for stoking, as outlined in the just-declassified National Intelligence Estimate, the rage of jihadists to the detriment of the American and Iraqi people.

Powers' first misrepresentation is made in the very first sentence of her piece: "The week before last, Pope Benedict cited an ancient text that criticized Islam for being too violent." The pope indeed quoted "from an ancient text" -- a Byzantine emperor telling a Muslim that the Prophet Mohammad had brought nothing new to the Abrahamic faiths but evil, inhumanity and violence. That's a bit more of an insult than saying that Islam is "too violent."

Powers says that "at any rate [the pope] apologized." Not exactly. He never apologized for making the comments; he simply said he was sorry that people were upset by them. When I was a kid, I remember one of my brothers being made to apologize for some transgression he had made. My parents were not amused when he told the person he had offended, "I'm sorry you're so stupid." That's pretty close to what the pope did here.

Now we get to some brass tacks; because I wrote one piece focused on what the pope actually said in the speech that enraged so many Muslims, Ms. Powers writes:

Adele Stan argued in these pages that “to throw a rhetorical bomb such as that the pope tossed into the teeming cities of the Muslim world is to commit an act tantamount to violence. It appears to be a taunt designed to provoke a response, and provoke one it did." It’s a curious world where liberals decline to focus condemnation on a violent reaction perpetrated in the name of a religious ideology (Islam) that jails women for being raped or declares it legal for women to be murdered in the streets by angry male relatives. Even stranger to side against a religious ideology (Catholicism) that has vigorously opposed the Iraq war, torture, the mistreatment of detainees, and the death penalty.

As for Powers' claims about the compassion of the Roman Catholic Church (of which I am a member), I suggest she study the statistics on AIDS deaths in Africa, where the church is doing all it can -- quite successfully in some nations -- to block the distribution of condoms. Of all women living with HIV or AIDS, 77 percent reside in Africa, where some 12.3 million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. Six thousand Africans die of AIDS each day. Closer to home, let's consider a bill sponsored by the Missouri Catholic Conference that would have rendered the killing of a doctor performing an abortion a justifiable homicide. And let's not forget the psychosexual torture of children by a number of depraved priests, acts to which the church, for decades, turned a blind eye.

Powers continues:

Attempts to falsely equate the Catholic Church and Islam usually lead to a discussion of the Crusades -- which, of course, happened in the 11th century.

But the idea that Islamic culture would be pristine but for the interference of ugly America is an analysis that ignores how repressive Islamic governments can be even with their own people.

Then, her attempt at a coup de grace:

Are U.S. military operations responsible for Islamic governments torturing their own citizens, killing gay citizens; stoning women for adultery; amputating thieves’ hands; murdering schoolgirls who violate Islamic dress or jailing people for “insulting” the government? In 2004, a 16-year-old Iranian girl was hanged in the public square for “crimes against chastity.” Is the United States to blame for that?

Only the protests of The Feminist Majority, backed by advocacy journalists such as yours truly, kept the administration from recognizing the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan -- that is, until, in 1998, al Qaeda bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, to which President Clinton responded with a barrage of cruise missiles into Osama bin Laden's encampment, missing the terrorist by only hours.

Ms. Powers seems to believe that because one has a right to do something that will incite those inclined to harm others, one bears no responsibility for the fruits of such action. But true feminism involves caring about women whose lives are threatened not just by your enemies, but by your friends as well. And she appears not to have learned that true liberalism requires self-examination; jingoism -- whether in the name of God or country -- is not liberalism at all.

(A more comprehensive critique of Ms. Powers' piece appears on my blog, AddieStan.com.)

--Adele M. Stan

NELSON: CASE IN POINT. I don't want to keep beating up on Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) -- I realize he may be the best one can hope for out of Nebraska -- but today he once again cast a decisive (corrected, as commenters had noted) vote of major importance. By a 51-48 margin, the Senate rejected an amendment to strike provisions on habeus corpus review from the putrid "compromise" bill on torture. It was a party-line vote, Nelson being the only Democrat voting with the majority. This is not long after Nelson earned the dubious distinction of being the only Democrat to vote against funding for embryonic stem cell research. If the Senate is more closely divided next term, liberals will need to bring some pressure to bear on guys like Nelson.

--Ben Adler

HOUSE ENACTS A POLL TAX. Following up on my post from yesterday about the importance of election oversight at the state level comes news of an attack on voting rights at the national level. From Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation:

Republicans in Congress are on the job and doing everything they can to further disenfranchise voters.... The House recently passed a bill along party lines requiring voters to present a photo ID beginning in 2008. Starting in 2010, voters would need to pay for a government-issued proof of citizenship -- a virtual poll tax.... Demos, a national public policy organization, reports that the legislation would disproportionately impact people of color, individuals with disabilities, rural voters, people living on reservations, the homeless, and low-income people -- all of whom studies show are less likely to carry a photo ID and more often have to change photo ID information.

--Ben Adler

LUCKY WE CUT THOSE TAXES. Following this bit of good news out of Iraq, there is a new congressional analysis showing that we're spending $2 billion a week on the war -- more than twice as much as it cost per week during the first year of operations. The change in spending is coming both from increased combat, but also from "the building of more extensive infrastructure to support troops and equipment in and around Iraq and Afghanistan." Here's how that looks:

All in all, the Congressional Research Service estimates we've spent more than $500 billion on war since 9-11. One might wonder what we're getting for all that money, particularly with the new NIE report showing it's made us less safe from terrorism, but then they'd be weak-kneed Defeatocrats.

--Ezra Klein

A UNITER. I think it's time for liberals to admit that, at least in Iraq, George W. Bush is a uniter, not a divider. For instance: He's united more than 60 percent of Iraqis in support of attacks on U.S. troops. He's united even more than that in terms of those who the Americans out within a year. And he's united nearly 80 percent behind the proposition that our presence provokes more violence than it prevents. That's some impressive uniting! Now, if only his administration would listen:

The State Department, meanwhile, has conducted its own poll, something it does periodically, spokesman Sean McCormack said. The State Department poll found two-thirds of Iraqis in Baghdad favor an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, according to The Washington Post. McCormack declined to discuss details of the department's poll.

"What I hear from government representatives and other anecdotal evidence that you hear from Iraqis that is collected by embassy personnel and military personnel is that Iraqis do appreciate our presence there," he said. "They do understand the reasons for it, they do understand that we don't want to or we don't intend to be there indefinitely."

Do chew on that for awhile. The State Department's polling shows Iraqis want immediate withdrawal. But fear not, Sean McCormack has taken a representative sample of stories U.S. personnel have told him about grateful Iraqis talking to troops. Don't you dare confuse his anecdotes with your data!

--Ezra Klein

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING. As per usual, if anyone is still confused as to the median voter's stubborn resistance to admitting the economy's overall awesomeness, new data showing that health premiums went up 7.7 percent in 2005 may help illuminate things. After all, 7.7 percent was more than twice the inflation rate and the growth in worker's wages. In fact, since 2000, health premiums have gone up by 87 percent. Somehow, I doubt the average worker's salary has done the same.

--Ezra Klein

SPEAKING OF POST COLUMNISTS... David Broder continues his "political independence" jihad today, this time with a column celebrating Arnold Schwarzenegger's political transformation from righty to moderate deal-maker, which "demonstrat[ed] in the most dramatic way possible the value of political independence." But now I'm really confused. As Broder's own recounting shows, Arnold's shift was borne of dire political necessity -- his efforts to govern and legislate as a right-winger were completely rejected by the California electorate, and so in response he's shifted gears and tried to mend fences with the Democrats who have real power in the state. There's plenty of ways to spin this as a positive thing (democracy in action, responsiveness to the voters, etc.), but chalking it up to "independence" seems almost perversely inapt. (I now see that Susie Madrak already put this more pithily.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

"VOTE"? I don't think George Will actually knows what the word "vote" means. He appears to believe that it has something to do with purchases. So since I, say, don't actually buy cholesterol-lowering drugs for myself, I am registering a "vote" against their existence. Or since many taxpayers forget or don't care enough to donate three dollars to a public financing system that doesn't work, they are against public financing.

Poppycock. It's no secret that we lack an actual public financing system in this country, and anyone mulling over whether to check that box would probably remember that it doesn't appear to fund any program that anybody uses. Last year, both party's presidential candidates declined public financing: It simply doesn't offer enough money to compete. Is it any wonder taxpayers decline to throw money down that hole?

Meanwhile, the polling isn't confused in the least. A full three-quarters of Americans support serious public financing for campaigns, which is to say that a full three-quarters of Americans support an end to politicians spending half their time dialing-for-dollars and the other half meeting with lobbyists for bribes. Will believes that voters, totally disgusted by an obviously corrupt and deranged political system, are not checking their box because they want Jack Abramoff and his ilk to continue roaming the halls of Congress. I'd order the causality very, very differently.

--Ezra Klein

HOW ABOUT SOME SOS LOVE? Massive disenfranchisement in the closest swing states have marred the last two presidential elections, and with that in mind, now would be a good time for progressives to focus on putting control of election oversight in the hands of competent and honest officials. While Secretaries of State Ken Blackwell and Katherine Harris have made nakedly partisan rulings to the benefit of their political patrons, progressives should focus on protecting every citizens' right to vote. Efforts like the Secretary of State Project (SOS), which attempts to raise money for incorruptible secretary of state candidates, are one way to go about this. Secretary of State elections are just as important as the House and Senate races that garner all the attention and money. Just as state legislatures have national importance because they control congressional redistricting, putting honest public servants in charge of election oversight at the state level has major implications -- for American democracy, and for who controls Washington.

--Ben Adler

SCHMUCKS So can we just agree that the New York Post has decided terror is a laugh riot and should no longer be taken seriously when they run screaming headlines on the issue?

--Ezra Klein

MIKE'S PLANS. Everyone is missing the point. I mean, seriously, look at this schedule. More cupcakes than Hostess makes in a month. The SEC is full of good teams that are all going to have one loss by Thanksgiving. The PAC-10 and Big 12 are landfills. Mountaineer Mike's firing up the black-and-gold RV and we're not going to see him until WVU beats Ohio State for the BCS national championship next January.

We will miss him, though. A lot.

--Charles P. Pierce

GOODBYE, HELLO. To say a bit more than the shadowy "Editors" did, we learned today that Mike is stepping down. The Big Bossman, Supreme Leader, Creator of Light and Bringer of Fire wants to get back to writing. So, for all of us at The Prospect, there is little joy in Mudville today.

On a personal note, Mike is the first real boss I've ever had. And, if from this I’ve gained the impression that bosses tend to have their feet on their desk and a tail of floss hanging from their teeth, he’s to blame. He's been an extraordinary editor, mentor, and friend. He's looked past the fact that I'm (give or take a few years) eleven years old, and not only believed in my writing and my ideas, but extended me the freedom to pursue, develop, and publish them. This has been, and remains, a dream job for me, and Mike not only gave me the golden key, but ensured that it worked in all the locks. During my year or so here, the magazine has become more visible, more influential, and simply better. I'm enormously proud to be part of the institution, and he's a big reason why. I assume his departure is my fault, and look forward to massive therapy bills in the future.

His replacement, Harold Meyerson, deserves a similar heaping of superlatives. When I first started at The Prospect, he introduced himself as the place's institutional memory. At the time, I thought he meant the magazine's. It turned out he was talking about, among other things, the left in general, the state of California, and cinema. We're in good hands, and if he can continue the magazine's rapid upward climb Mike set in motion, so are all of you.

--Ezra Klein

BOSSMAN, WE SALUTE YOU. Speaking for myself, I just wanted to say it's been a great couple of years working for Mike and, while he'll certainly continue to be a part of the enterprise, I'll miss having him around the office every day; he's been a supportive editor and friend. But Harold's great, too, so it's all okay. Meanwhile, to put on my web editor hat for a moment, I'll just say the website's going strong (I hope readers agree) and the only changes you might expect looking forward are further expansions and new folks coming on board. At any rate, regularly scheduled Tappeding shall resume soon!

--Sam Rosenfeld

TOMASKY STEPPING DOWN. After three years, Michael Tomasky is stepping down as editor of The Prospect. He will pursue writing projects and will stay with the magazine as editor-at-large. Harold Meyerson will become acting executive editor. The press release is here.

--The Editors

IT WAS WAL-MART, IN ARKANSAS, WITH THE CORPORATE MEMO. That's that, then. Wal-Mart, the largest employer in America, has decided to cease offering traditional health care plans and move entirely to high-deductible, HSA-style offerings. Wake-Up Wal-Mart got their hands on some internal benefit memos, and here's what they showed:

Among the most striking findings outlined in Wal-Mart’s 2007 benefits booklet is the substantial health care cost a low-paid Wal-Mart worker would be forced to pay under the so-called ‘Value’ plan. A typical individual Wal-Mart worker who enrolls in the Value Plan will face high upfront costs because of a series of high deductibles, including a minimum $1,000 deductible for individual coverage, a $1,000 in-patient deductible per visit, a $500 out-patient surgical deductible per visit, a $300 pharmacy deductible, and a maximum out of pocket expense of $5,000 for an individual per year.

In total, when factoring the maximum out-of-pocket expense and the cost of the yearly premium ($598 a year for an individual under the Value Plan), a typical full-time worker (defined by Wal-Mart as 34 hours) who earns 10.11 an hour or $17,874 a year, would have pay nearly 30 percent of their total income for health care costs alone.

Incredibly, the health care cost burden actually worsens should an uninsured Wal-Mart worker enroll their family under the Value Plan. Again, because of multiple deductibles for each family member, and when factoring in the cost of the medical premium ($780) and maximum out-of-pocket expense ($10,000), a Wal-Mart worker whose family is insured under the “Value Plan” could pay as much as 60 percent of their total income towards health care costs under Wal-Mart’s most “affordable “health care” plan.

Yikes. This, of course, is only further evidence that it's time to stop asking Wal-Mart to offer decent health care -- which they will clearly not do -- and simply rip the responsibility away from them, ensuring all of their "associates" have generous, serious coverage they can fall back on.

More worrisome, though, is that Target has promised the same move, which will mean that the two largest retailers will both eschew traditional health care plans for low-cost (to the company), high-risk (to the employee), astonishingly stingy offerings. Now, of course, any retailers who seek to compete with them -- and that includes supermarkets, clothing outlets, and all the rest -- will be at a competitive disadvantage if they fund traditional health care plans for their employees. It also means producers will be under added pressure by Wal-Mart and Target to make the same shift in order to lower their labor costs and, thus, prices. If the producers refuse, Wal-Mart can simply replace them with their in-house brands. This is how a race to the bottom starts. This is how employer-based health security dies.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WHO RIDES THE ELEPHANT? Tom reviews Ryan Sager's new book, The Elephant in the Room, a libertarian lament of the modern GOP.

--The Editors

DOG-WHISTLE POLITICS. One almost -- almost -- feels sorry for social conservative leaders who, like true Pavlovian devotees, believe that they can keep ringing the bell and the dogs will come running even though the politicians have stopped delivering the treats. As Noam Levey in The Los Angeles Times reports, House Republicans are desperately trying to pass another restrictive abortion bill to dupe their base into believing that somehow the most wasteful-spending Congress in American history is still run by conservatives:

Scrambling to pass anti-abortion legislation before they recess for fall congressional elections, House Republicans on Tuesday won passage of a bill that would make it a federal crime to evade one state's parental consent laws by taking a minor to another state for an abortion.

But in a mark of the majority party's struggles with its "values" agenda, Senate Republicans may run out of time to vote on the measure before lawmakers leave town at the end of the week. That would leave Republicans with few trophies to show their socially conservative base as they try to motivate voters in the final six weeks of the fiercely contested 2006 campaign.

--Tom Schaller

PHONY MODERATES. The Prospect's own Harold Meyerson earns his pay today with a Washington Post column excoriating the notion that moderate Republicans are, in fact, moderates:

Chafee and his moderate band are an ever weaker force in a party whose very essence is extreme, whose electoral strategy is solely to mobilize its base, whose legislative strategy is never to seek votes across party lines. And unless these moderates boldly go where they have not gone before and cast their vote for majority leader (and I don't mean in caucus, I mean on the Senate floor) for someone other than the nominee of their party caucus, they are not moderates at all. They are loyal and indispensable foot soldiers in the Republicans' continuing campaign to drag the nation rightward and backward.

And guess what. The moderates will vote for the extremist. "Moderate," after all, is only an adjective; "Republican" is a noun. Chafee, Snowe, the whole lot of them, are moderate enablers of an extremist party. That leaves those voters in Rhode Island, Maine, Ohio and other states where these self-proclaimed Republican moderates are running only one choice if they seek a Congress to check and balance the president, if they want a more moderate nation: Vote for the Democrat.

Which they, of course, will not do. Their moderation is a posture and a pose. For it to work, it requires the extremism of the Republican Party to be a foil. After all, without the Senate's nuttier elements holding power, how will David Broder know that its chin-stroking moderates disapprove of Tom Coburn's actions?

--Ezra Klein

LOOKING FORWARD TO IT. I always find it helpful to exit the world of progressive electoral prognosticators and head over to John McIntyre's RealClearPolitics which, while right-leaning, offers a rather dispassionate aggregation of poll information and political predictions. This week's forecast is particularly interesting:

while the national numbers have improved for the GOP over the last month, on balance the state polling has not. Looking at the RCP Averages in the contested Senate races, the Democrats are poised to pick up seats in Pennsylvania, Montana, Ohio and Rhode Island, while the Republicans look likely to win in New Jersey. That gives the Democrats a three-seat pick up with the need to pick up another three seats to win control. The problem for the GOP is Tennessee and Virginia have moved into toss up status, along with Missouri. The Democrats' odds of capturing the Senate have actually improved the last two months at the same time their national numbers vis-à-vis the Republicans have declined.

The better analogy politically for 2006 may be 1986 when the Democrats picked up 8 Senate seats and only 5 House seats. Because of Reagan's landslide in 1980 there were many weak GOP incumbents in 1986 that were taken out. Today Republicans have less of an issue in that regard as their 1994 weak incumbents were taken out in 2000 (Grams, Abraham, Ashcroft, Gordon, and Roth). The point of the '86 analogy is not that the Democrats are going to taking over the Senate, but rather that because of the inability to gerrymander states, Democrats might be headed for better success in the Senate than the House.

There is a reason 99% of incumbents win reelection in the House and right now even with the Democrats looking strong in the Senate they are only poised to pick up around 10 seats in the House. With the economy humming at 3%+ growth, unemployment below 5%, the Dow near all-time highs and gas prices back below $2.50, these are not exactly economic conditions associated with a "throw the bums out" type of election.

Much of that strikes me as plausible, if not correct. The House races tend to be harder to predict, if only because there's less polling and data flowing out of individual districts than whole states. Moreover, the GOP's GOTV advantage will likely make the difference in a number of marginal races where Democrats lack sufficient funds to power major turnout operations. That will likely be less true in the Senate, where there's more money, institutional support, and voter excitement.

--Ezra Klein

DEWINE LOOKING FOR DIVINE INTERVENTION? Mike DeWine may be able to distance himself from his fellow Ohio Republicans' ethical scandals, from Ken Blackwell's God-centered politicking, and even, just maybe, from Bush, but will he distance himself from the Armageddon hunters? In this photo, circulated by Rod Parsley, DeWine is shown meeting with Parsley and Ohio delegates of John Hagee's Christians United for Israel (CUFI) this summer, discussing "his support for the nation of Israel."

But for Hagee, Parsley, and their CUFI followers, "supporting Israel" has meant lobbying against the cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah and clamoring for military intervention against Iran. Their motives do not stem from a love of the nation of Israel, as Israel-supporting Jews in Ohio might expect. Rather, they seek a world-ending conflagration leading to the Second Coming of Christ. As Parsley put it in his newsletter with the photo of DeWine, CUFI is "an organization that supports Israel in matters related to Biblical issues." That means not the safety and security of Israeli citizens, or a peaceful, two-state solution with the Palestinians, but the fulfillment of what CUFI followers believe to be Biblically prophesized events, including the wiping out of non-believers (i.e., Jews and Muslims). That DeWine -- and all the other members of Congress who cozied up to CUFI at its kick-off lobbying event this summer -- can justify giving credence to CUFI's end-of-the-world war-mongering shows not a toughness against the terrorists, but a spinelessness against religious fundamentalism.

--Sarah Posner

LET'S GO TO THE TAPE. Condi Rice says the Clinton folks never left her an anti-terror strategy. So what exactly does she call this?

--Ezra Klein

DEMOCRACY BUILDING AT HOME. I was going to let the Clinton interview pass, if only because the green fields of Wingnuttia are so alive these days with natives reliving the spirited days of their feckless political youth. But, watching it again, and sliding through the endless grinding of Chris Wallace into potato salad, I noticed that the former president said this, long after everything had settled down some:

I think the question is, what's the best way to do it? I think also the question is, how do you educate people about democracy? Democracy is about way more than majority rule. Democracy is about minority rights, individual rights, restraints on power. And there's more than one way to advance democracy.

The old boxing guys say that you never see the right hand that comes behind the hook, the one that puts you out. Sure, he was talking about Iraq. Sure, he was.

-- Charles P. Pierce

TIM RYAN. Plenty of people may have noted this before, but when it comes to floor speeches, this guy is really something.

--Sam Rosenfeld

GETTING RATHER-IZED. Did Chris Wallace get Rather-ized on Sunday? According to reporting by Norah O’Donnell on the NBC's Today show yesterday:

Liberals and conservatives alike are buzzing about whether Mr. Clinton outfoxed FOX News by planning this attack. One of Mr. Clinton’s advisers admitted to me that, “We didn’t go into it looking for a fight, but we had our lead pipe ready.”

If this is true, that means that Clinton didn’t go ballistic, blow his Vesuvian top, or any of the other disparaging labels now being invoked by conservatives to disparage his performance -- and ignore the substance of his comments. Instead, this media moment harkens back to the famous exchange between then-Vice President George H. W. Bush and Dan Rather on January 25, 1988, when the elder Bush was trying to shake the “wimp” label. That episode, the transcript of which can be read here, is considered a great act of political jujitsu by Bush, who got himself a two-fer by showing some backbone and embarrassing Rather, live, on his own program.

Of course, maybe the Clinton adviser is just spinning after the fact what was an extemporaneous Clintonian outburst; given how quickly the interview came on the heels of ABC’s recent 9-11 “mockumentary,” Clinton’s comments may very well have been unplanned and unrehearsed. But the detail and specificity with which Clinton articulated his criticisms could be taken as a sign that Clinton had material “in the can” if Wallace provided an opening. (Of course, Clinton is known for his precise memory and communication skills, so what looks like a prepared soliloquy to most of us may have been completely off-the-cuff for him.)

Perhaps only Clinton and his closest confidantes will know if Wallace was set up. If so, Wallace ought not to be chirping and slapping himself on the back, because he got Rather-ized.

--Tom Schaller

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ROGUE STATE. Regarding last week's torture "compromise" in the Senate, Matt gets very shrill.

--The Editors

ASYMMETRIC ISSUES. This article on Democrats using free trade as a cudgel against their Republican opponents is an interesting one. In the abstract at least, free trade enjoys broad support. But trade, like abortion or taxes, is a voting issue. While "fair trade" isn't the most broadly agreed upon policy -- unlike the minimum wage or Canadian drug reimportation -- for the fraction of voters affected or unnerved by globalization, it moves them to the polls.

In recent elections, Democrats have tended to emphasize the issues with the broadest constituencies, not the most intense ones. So they've ended up touting policies the electorate agrees with but does not vote on -- after all, if the electorate agreed and did vote on that issue, the GOP would quickly notice its wisdom and make it a central policy plank. So while this strategy garnered very high numbers of Americans telling pollsters they agreed with the Democratic position, it didn't lead to all that many voting for the Democrats.

Strategies built on smaller, more intensely supported policies have been more successful, at least to judge from the Republican Party's recent history. And many of these issue are asymmetrically intense -- someone in agreement will vote for you because of your support, but someone in disagreement will not vote against you because of that issue. My guess is trade is one of those issues, where those affected will make it a first-order priority, while the rest may vaguely believe in free trade, but won't particularly allow it to influence their vote. And if that's right, you may see a lot of Democrats mounting stronger-than-expected challenges in the Rust Belt.

--Ezra Klein

LISTEN UP. Matt notes that Democrats actually held an unofficial oversight hearing on the Iraq War yesterday. "Naturally," he writes, "the press more-or-less entirely ignored this event, since people only report on the Democrats to mock them for being in 'disarray.'" True. Remember the Roll Call story from a couple days ago that Democrats were going to cease mentioning national security and the Iraq War and focus entirely on economic issues? That becomes a bit self-fulfilling if the press refuses to report Democratic events on national security and the Iraq War.

For all the complaints about Democratic messaging, it often seems less like they lack a message and more like they lack a press corps receptive to repeating that message. The apparent clarity of the Republican Party certainly isn't harmed by George W. Bush's ability to demand that all the networks cover his latest speech or press conference. This is a structural advantage for the GOP that's often mistaken for an expertise advantage. Without power or charismatic leaders, Democrats often speak and find that, with no press around to listen, they're not making a sound.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THEY'RE BACK. Laura Rozen reports on new evidence that some old and unsavory Iranian intelligence-peddlers are once again getting a hearing in Washington. Deja vu all over again.

--The Editors

THE ‘ESSENTIAL DILEMMA’ RAISED BY THE NIE. A contact familiar with the April NIE on terrorism says that buried in the discussion of the report so far is this dilemma: “The report notes that ‘victory’ in Iraq would be a blow to the jihadists, and that failure (especially if it led to the establishment of an al-Qaeda sanctuary or if veteran foreign jihadists dispersed out of Iraq to engage in terrorism in other parts of the world) would also be very bad. Thus, the report highlights the essential dilemma Iraq poses for the war on terror: staying fuels the al-Qaeda-inspired movement, creating a net increase in the terrorist threat; while leaving Iraq in chaos would also worsen the threat. The Democrats tend to focus on the first part of the dilemma; the administration focuses on the second part. They are both right (and wrong) -- and the debate would be greatly served by focusing on the dilemma itself.” With both the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence committee calling for the report to be declassified, we may soon get to understand the report’s analysis, sans administration spin, for ourselves.

Update: Bush says he'll declassify parts of the NIE.

--Laura Rozen

DEERHUNTER. The controversy over George Allen’s racial attitudes and behavior took another sudden turn -- for the worse, in Allen’s case -- yesterday with the release of a Salon story in which Michael Scherer reports of accusations by three former friends of Allen’s who claim that the future senator used “nigger” as a frequent racial epithet. Scherer’s piece is book-ended by the superb reporting of The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza, who put this storyline into motion last May with a cover piece and then published an online piece last night confirming much of Scherer’s story, with added sources and details -- Allen, of course, having used the racial epithet.

The sickest part of the latest reporting is the claim by R. Kendall Shelton that Allen -- who called Shelton the “Wizard,” because Shelton shared the surname of a former KKK imperial wizard -- once cut the head off a deer and asked where the nearest black person lived, and promptly shoved that head into the person’s mailbox. This may be the episode on which Allen’s Senate career (I think his presidential career has gone the way of the deer’s head) may turn, for two reasons. First, because an incident like this, if true, is not only grotesque and craven, but reveals a general hatred rather than an anger directed at a specific individual. It’s not like Allen was miffed that some guy, who happened to be black, sold him a used car that turned out to be a lemon. If Shelton’s account is true, for Allen any black suffices for intimidation and ridicule.

The second toxic element here is the verifiability of the event. If teenage pranksters egged your house on “mischief night” (October 30) 25 years ago, you might soon forget it; if somebody stuffed a deer’s head in your mailbox, you don’t. More to the point, some local official, such as an animal control officer or a local sheriff’s deputy, may well have been called to report the incident, perhaps creating a paper trail. If Scherer or Lizza are able to document this incident, or if a credible source comes forward to confirm, get your butter and jam out, folks, because Allen is toast.

--Tom Schaller

SATAN NEEDS AN AGENT. The devil is certainly getting a lot of press these days. Not to be outdone by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who last week called President George W. Bush the devil, the Rev. Jerry Falwell one-upped him by naming Hillary Clinton as something even worse than the devil. At the "Values Voter Summit" convened this past weekend by the Family Research Council, Rev. Falwell addressed a gathering of pastors. From the Los Angeles Times:

"I certainly hope that Hillary is the candidate," Falwell said, according to the recording. "She has $300 million so far. But I hope she's the candidate. Because nothing will energize my [constituency] like Hillary Clinton."

Cheers and laughter filled the room as Falwell continued: "If Lucifer ran, he wouldn't."

Apparently, no one did a sniff test for sulfur around the podium at the Omni Shoreham from which Falwell delivered his speech.

--Adele M. Stan

HOW CUTE. Yes, it's all fun, folks, until somebody ends up with Kinky Friedman as their governor. Eccentric vanity campaigns are a luxury nobody can afford any more, which is why an admittedly brilliant media guy like Bill Hillsman shouldn't be running around Texas trying to get this clown elected. If there's a worse raison d'etre for a candidate in 2006 than one that combines the notion that Anyone Can Do It with the now-wholly-discredited Naderite philosophy of Not-A-Dime's-Worth-Of-Difference, I can't think of one. They're debating torture in the U.S. Congress, folks. Seriously. Eyes on the ball, please.

Hillsman should be praised forever for being the initial driving force behind the political career of the late Paul Wellstone, and his work on behalf of Ned Lamont in Connecticut has been sparkling. But Ralph Nader's legacy is an unspeakable one at this point. Governor Jesse Ventura turned out to be as ludicrous an experiment as the idiot football league for which he fronted, and The Body is Daniel Webster compared to the lemon Hillsman's trying to sell to the people of Texas. I don't mean to sound like Dean Vernon (No more fun of any kind!) Wormer here, but this is a really terrible time in history to be electing clowns because they seem to be good at it.

--Charles P. Pierce

HUNDTING CHINA. Reed Hundt has a new book on China that's reached some rather radical conclusions. It seems to me his recommendations are a tad too influenced by his years researching, regulating, and admiring the Internet -- not all industries are comparable to the Net, nor would they all benefit from the same structure that encouraged the chaotic development of the Web -- but Reed's a bright guy and it's thought-provoking stuff.

--Ezra Klein

WHAT WOULD MURROW THINK? Are they trying to make Edward R. Murrow rise from the earth and bite off their faces? The Couric Experiment at CBS is a transparent nightly disaster, but Katie's interview with Condoleeza Rice on 60 Minutes last night makes her newscast look like See It Now. And just when you thought there were no depths of sycophancy and general fluffitude to which she could not dive, Couric suits up, climbs into the bathysphere, and descends into the realm of sightless fish on her new blog. They should just leave this stuff off the Internets and let Katie scrawl it on the cover of her History notebook during study hall.

--Charles P. Pierce

NOW COMES IN CRUEL AND STUPID. As a follow-up to the earlier post on Medicare's donut holes, an e-mail from Jon Cohn reminds me of the recent New England Journal of Medicine study that found Medicare plans with caps on drug benefits actually cost the system more money, as seniors would bow to financial pressures and cease taking their medicines, leading to emergencies that cost the system much more than covering the preventive medications would. As the NEJM concluded, "The savings in drug costs from the cap were offset by increases in the costs of hospitalization and emergency department care." So not only is the donut hole cruel policy, it's a verifiably stupid policy, and will cost far more money over the long haul than simply offering stable and expansive drug coverage. And none of this even gets into the absurd giveaways to Big Pharma and the insurance companies that make the program far more expensive than it need be.

--Ezra Klein

THE RATIO. The scuffle between former President Clinton and Chris Wallace on FOX News Sunday was, in my rather biased opinion, at least a TKO if not a woodshed ass-whuppin’ by Clinton. Like all conservatives, Wallace will now play the victim, because conservatives love to talk tough about social Darwinism and how gritty they are, but whine and moan like babies whenever somebody calls them on their crap.

Now, of course, media conservatives will play the misdirection game, making a lot of fuss about Clinton’s demeanor, mood, finger-pointing, and other non-verbals, because they’d rather avoid responding to the, well, verbals: the assertions Clinton made about the withdrawal from Somalia emboldening Osama bin Laden; the stark contrast in counter-terrorism efforts by his and the current administration, and so on. While they avoid discussing inconvenient facts -- like Clinton’s nicely articulated reminder to Wallace that the Bush team has dedicated only one-seventh the military manpower to finding Osama as deposing Saddam Hussein -- let’s see if any of them mention the real, issue-inspecific takeaway from Clinton’s interview: Clinton had the guts to apologize and lament his failures, noting that he told the 9/11 Commission to report widely those failures as a warning to prevent future mistakes. Aside from wishing he could take back his “dead or alive” and “bring it on” comments, President Bush can neither admit errors nor apologize for the harm caused by them. Worse, Bush rarely works to correct the patterns that create problems in the first place.

If there is some type of cosmic balance sheet that awaits presidents when they arrive at the pearly gates, St. Peter’s ledger would undoubtedly show that the transgressions-to-apologies ratio are far, far better for 42 than 43.

--Tom Schaller

MURDOCH'S CONSCIENCE MONEY. Okay, Bill, you got in Chris Wallace's stuff good and proper. (Wallace has been on my radar since he ran one of the most dishonest pieces of reportage I've ever seen over on ABC when he assaulted the Supplementary Security Income program based on fake data and spurious -- remember Crazy Checks? -- anecdotes. Of course, when Clinton signed the Welfare Reform and Re-Elect My Ass Act of 1996, SSI took a pretty big whack anyway, so there's karma all over the place here.) I wish you'd known that the phrase is "make your bones," and not "move your bones," but that was a "forget it, he's rolling" moment anyway. Here's what you can do now. You can call a public press conference today and announce (loudly) that you're sending back every nickel donated to your Clinton Global Initiative by Rupert Murdoch. It's what we used to call in the old Church "conscience money." The biggest crook in the parish always bought the most elaborate decoration for the church. If we still sold indulgences, Murdoch would've tacked them onto the Wingo games.

Murdoch's a blight, and I say this as a former employee. Why not take some money from Richard Mellon Scaife and the Bradley Foundation while you're at it. There are plenty of honest billionaires around, and I'm sure that Richard Branson would be happy to make up the difference. Do this, Bill, and try to get Hillary to stop hanging around the Aussie tits 'n bum merchant as well. They hate you. They are always going to hate you. Don't take their conscience money.

--Charles P. Pierce

ANOTHER RECRUIT. It looks like Gary Hart has joined the legions of the shrill. If only the October Surprise scenario he lays out -- an attack on Iran – weren’t so plausible, or likely.

--Ezra Klein

WHEN DONUTS ATTACK. Up till now, seniors have been mostly satisfied with the Medicare Drug Benefit. Bad bill though it is, it remains better than no bill at all, and since that was the comparison, approval ratings have remained high. Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations. Unfortunately for the Bush administration and the Republican Congress, that may be about to change. Millions of seniors are about to tumble into the donut hole, a coverage gap that extends (usually) from $2,250 to $3,600, at which point federal insurance kicks back in. Most seniors, as we already knew, were unaware of the gap. And this is what it looks like when they fall in it:

Frances Acanfora, 65, had been paying $58 for a three-month supply of her five medications. But this month the retired school lunchroom aide learned that her next bill would be $1,294. She had entered the doughnut hole.[...]

After talking to her doctor, Acanfora decided to temporarily stop taking a drug as part of her treatment for breast cancer. She hopes to obtain some free samples of eye drops for her glaucoma. Three other medicines -- for high cholesterol, diabetes and osteoporosis -- cost $506.62, which Acanfora put on her credit card.

"I pay a little bit at a time," she said. "What am I going to do? I need it. . . . Sometimes, just to think about it, I cry."

In case anyone's wondering about the staggeringly strange structure of it all -- don't. It makes no sense. The concept behind donut holes is that they ensure coverage for basic care, so folks don't skimp on preventive and diagnostic services, then impose a certain level of cost-sharing in order to incentivize all those magical things price-conscious consumers apparently do, then pick up the coverage again for those who are simply ill. It makes a certain amount of sense -- unless you're dealing with prescription medications for seniors.

Prescriptions aren't unexpected costs. They don't rise and fall on the consumer side -- they're prescribed by doctors and purchased at a monthly fixed sum. If the federal government thinks seniors don't need the prescriptions they're taking, it should direct doctors to stop prescribing with such abandon. But you're not going to change prescription behavior with cost-sharing, except to make people take less of them. Which could kill them, or land them in the ER with hypertension and a stroke. But rendering a senior unable to purchase her breast cancer medication isn't going to somehow alleviate or cheapen the burden of the illness; it's just going to endanger her life and possibly force the system to spend far more on chemotherapy and intensive treatment. It will also make her, as well as her friends and family, angry. She multiplied a million times, in retirement communities and assisted living centers all across the country, six weeks before an election, with nowhere to place her fury save a ballot.

--Ezra Klein

LIKE FRIST, ONLY COMPETENT. Another Sunday, another exceedingly unimpressive appearance by Bill Frist on a chat show. Meanwhile, Zachary Roth and Cliff Schecter have a good piece in The Washington Monthly about the man who will succeed Frist as Republican Senate leader (be it in the majority or the minority) when the latter retires this term -- Mitch McConnell. Looking back over his highly undistinguished tenure as majority leader, I'm tempted to say that Frist was something of a victim of his times -- being caught in the tension between the partisan and parliamentary turn under Bush on the one hand and the still-extraordinarily sticky, inefficient, non-majoritarian structure of the Senate on the other. That is to say, he was handpicked by the White House and then tasked with delivering legislative wins for the GOP that were impossible for anyone to pull off in the Senate. Be that as it may, Frist's basic ineptness at parliamentary tactics and vote counting only compounded the difficulties of an inherently difficult job. Roth and Schecter demonstrate pretty persuasively that McConnell will serve as a much more competent -- and ruthless -- partisan tactician in his role as leader.

The only mitigating factor will be the likelihood that, even if the GOP does maintain control of Congress, the whole disciplined and mobilized legislative apparatus the Republicans maintained during Bush's first term will have ground to a complete halt by 2007, with a lame duck president and various factions positioning themselves behind various would-be presidential candidates.

--Sam Rosenfeld

VALUES VOTERS' VALUES. I just got back from the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit. The audience was what you'd expect -- white and old. The speakers, on the other hand, mixed things up a little. Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR), addressing George W. Bush's original "compassionate conservative" framework, suggested that being "pro-life" also means caring about the fetus's safety after it's born. This sentiment, perhaps because it sounded as though it could have come from Jim Wallis, drew much more tepid applause than the Brokeback jokes (e.g., everyone should stand against gay marriage "until Moses comes down with two stone tablets from Brokeback Mountain.")

It was only toward the end of the speech, when Huckabee finished off his appeal for the welfare of children by calling on the audience to imagine "what we could do if instead of paying half their income in taxes, but gave a dime of every dollar to their church or charitable organization," that it became apparent what Huckabee's real game was: speak the language of compassion while resolutely opposing any governmental action to address those in need. He even miraculously spun the government's incompetence in dealing with Hurricane Katrina to that end. The audience, clearly relieved, gave Huckabee an enthusiastic standing ovation.

--Ben Adler

INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN INEPT. Bloggers are in an understandable uproar over a Roll Call article in which a hodgepodge of nameless Democratic aides reveal that the leadership is readying to party like it's 2002 and refocus the election on economic issues. I'm a bit skeptical. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi haven't proven themselves to be obvious idiots (indeed, quite the contrary) over the past couple of years. And given, as Kos says, that 2002 and 2004 were both disasters based on that very strategy, I have a tough time believing they're itching for a repeat. Add in that "unnamed Democratic" strategists and aides could be anybody and tend to be willing to spout whatever counterproductive pabulum reporter's want, and I'm a bit hesitant to jump on this one as gospel truth.

So I called up some folks in the Democratic leadership to ask them whether the story was truthful. The answer I got was "sort of." There are certain campaigns -- like Amy Klobuchar’s in Minnesota, and Sherrod Brown’s in Ohio -- that are pounding in a primarily economic message as that's what voters are worried about there. But the national messaging from the Democratic leadership has been almost all national-security focused. "Go through the press list of the last two weeks," one of aide advised me. "Count the number of events done on Iraq and national security, and those on the economy. There's been one event on the economy and I think eight on national security." Additionally, the next couple of weeks will feature an increase, not a decrease, of pressure on the Iraq issue.

So I'd counsel a bit of caution here. Given the ineptitude of recent Democratic campaigns, it's natural to assume this one will be no different. But the truth is my aide friends were right: There's been very little messaging on economic matters, and a pretty significant amount on national security and, mainly, Iraq. The DCCC press releases archive offers little save corruption and Iraq, while on the Democratic Senate Caucus's page, there is a massive banner for "The Real Security Act of 2006: Learning the Lessons of 9/11," and their newsroom is little different. All that, of course, can change, but it's worth watching to see whether it does rather than jumping to the conclusion that it will. For now, that article strikes me as very poorly sourced, and if folks didn't think the Democrats were running a domestic campaign strategy yesterday, they shouldn't assume any different today.

Update: This is what I meant by pressure on Iraq is about to increase. Guess the Democrats leaked it early in response to the Roll Call article. In any case, as I said: It really looks like that RC piece was a bunch of off-base anonymous quotes.

--Ezra Klein

GUEST POST: FASTEN THE ROPES. Senator McCain and his colleagues deserve some credit; they have, once again, pushed back on an administration that is congenitally allergic to the rule of law. When faced with the senators’ insistence -- along with the stern warnings of two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs and more than two dozen other senior retired military leaders -- that the Geneva Conventions should be preserved as a baseline standard for detainee treatment, administration lawyers did indeed scramble to resurrect Common Article 3 of the treaties, despite their initial attempt to write that commitment out of U.S. law altogether. According to Sen. McCain, speaking on the Today show this morning, the agreement makes clear that it is a war crime to engage in the waterboarding technique allegedly used against CIA-held detainees in the past. The agreement also appears to leave in the criminal category techniques like induced hypothermia and stress positions -- the apparent cause of more than one detainee death in U.S. custody since September 11. Even if administration lawyers think they’ve preserved an acrobatic way of reading the language to let such practices continue, the language is at best just blurry enough to leave the choice in the laps of CIA personnel in the field: Will our agents take the Bush Justice Department’s word for what counts as a war crime, or trust the former Joint Chiefs’ read of where the law draws the line? Given DOJ’s track record on such issues in the Supreme Court these past few years, the wise insurer would stick with the Chiefs.

So the compromise in this sense may leave the administration in its post-Hamdan box. The real problem, once again, is that the administration would like to continue to rely on the historically fallible “trust us” method of ensuring the executive branch remains true to its word. A law -- any law -- that is not effectively enforceable in an independent court is not much of law at all. Yet by purporting to strip the federal courts of authority to enforce any provision of the Geneva Conventions, the compromise legislation not only treads dangerously on the powers promised by the Constitution to the judiciary, it calls into serious question the United States’ commitment to taking its own obligations seriously. We can’t credibly expect our own troops and agency personnel to be protected against cruelty, humiliation, and unjust detention when we decline to hold our own accountable for doing such things to the many enemies we now face. And we can’t credibly advance the rule of law abroad when we value unreviewable power over enforceable promise.

My constitutional law professor back in law school used to describe the Constitution in our democracy as something like Ulysees’ tying himself to the mast of his ship, to save him from the temptation of the Sirens’ song. Ulysees knew he couldn’t trust himself enough not to give in; he needed something outside himself to make sure it didn’t happen. We’re always going to be facing the Sirens. Congress needs to be strong enough to fasten the ropes.

--Deborah Pearlstein, Human Rights First

YOU LISTEN. This is just a heads up that Max Sawicky's always terrific MaxSpeak blog now looks to be even more interesting and frisky with the addition of decidedly non-EPIish center-left economist Jason Furman to the roster of contributors. Much mixing-it-up has already ensued. It will definitely be worth checking out.

--Sam Rosenfeld

AMERICANS AND TORTURE. Shrill Charlie Pierce and the unshrill New York Times editorialists are correct -- it was substantively a fool's game and a disgrace for Democrats to consciously refuse to engage the torture debate, and, as The Times puts it, "it’s time for them to either try to fix this bill or delay it until after the election." I totally agree with this. I will only note -- not by way of defending the Democrats, but merely of lamenting the state of the nation on this issue -- something Sandy Levinson said yesterday. He asked why, if the Democrats can openly be called the party of death, the Republicans shouldn't be known as "the party of torture":

Presumably, Democrats are hesitant to use such a term as "the party of torture" either because it would be viewed as over the top (unlike "the party of death?") or, more ominously, because they fear that too many "median-vote" Americans actually like the idea of tortuous modes of investigation against those the administration declares, by fiat or otherwise, to be "deserving" of such treatment.

I too find the second possibility ominous. But not implausible. It's true that, when talking to pollsters, it's usually the case that less than a majority of Americans are willing to say affirmatively that torture is justified as an anti-terror policy (though at least a third of those polled usually are willing to say that). But I think the polling, combined with the way political fights like Abu Ghraib and the 2004 election actually played out, provide evidence that at least a small majority of Americans aren't exercised or politically motivated by anti-torture arguments, and are open to being influenced by (implicitly pro-torture) right-wing appeals on the issue. I hasten to repeat that this does not justify Democratic silence and acquiescence on the issue, given not only its bedrock importance but also the clear existence of a very substantial anti-torture constituency of Americans. But I think the grounds for gloom regarding this issue and this moment in American history go beyond merely the cowardice of the Democrats.

--Sam Rosenfeld

CAN'T SAY I LIKE DOOR #2, EITHER. Kevin Drum explains that there are three methods Wal-Mart uses for keeping their prices down.

1) A spectacularly efficient supply chain and logistics system that's the envy of the industry.

2) A willingness — in fact, an almost palpable enthusiasm — for using their enormous size to beat the lowest possible prices out of their suppliers.

3) A scorched-earth campaign to prevent unions from organizing at Wal-Mart sites, thus keeping wages and benefits as low as possible.

Progressives, he says, merrily embrace #1 and #2, but oppose #3. Well, as embarrassing as it is to wreck a consensus, I have to confess that I have some concerns over #2 as well.

My guess is that Wal-Mart's size and might is having much more profound effects on our economy through the demands and strains it places on suppliers than through their lowish wages and benefits for direct employees (although those labor standards give them a competitive advantage over chains with higher standards, and so we race to the bottom...). So much as I want the latter to improve and unionization to spread across the land, I'm more worried that Wal-Mart's size and status as the indispensable outlet for products, when coupled with their virtually maniacal (though fully understandable) demands for lower pricing, are pushing down wages and work conditions throughout the country and, for that matter, the world. Suppliers simply can't pay better and push the marginal cost to consumers -- Wal-Mart will drop them faster than you can say "Always low prices."

What that means is that suppliers simply can't pay better. And if they already do, Wal-Mart will make them stop. High labor costs translate to higher product costs, and if that's what the producer values, Wal-Mart, by far the largest retailer in the world, will simply promote an in-store brand or a competitor, pushing the high-paying producer out of business. It's a real problem, and one folks aren't giving enough thought to. As I've said before, I'm unsure of what the appropriate solution is, but it's long past time that we recognize that Wal-Mart's demands are literally shaping and planning our economy, and we must decide whether the economic norms they're setting are ones we want. As the economist Rashi Fein likes to say, we live in a society, not an economy. And we need to think about how Wal-Mart's actions comport with the sort of society we inhabit. For more on this argument, read that piece I'm always recommending by Barry Lynn. I think it really is essential to understanding the dynamics of the coming economy.

--Ezra Klein

THE SILENT PARTY. You worthless passel of cowards. They're laughing at you. You know that, right?

The national Democratic Party is no longer worth the cement needed to sink it to the bottom of the sea. For an entire week, it allowed a debate on changing the soul of the country to be conducted intramurally between the Torture Porn and Useful Idiot wings of the Republican Party, the latter best exemplified by John McCain, who keeps fashioning his apparently fathomless ambition into a pair of clown shoes with which he can do the monkey dance across the national stage. They're laughing at him, too.

The New York Times has the right of it here, limning the pathetic gullibility at the heart of the "compromise." There is nothing in this bill that President Thumbscrews can't ignore. There is nothing in this bill that reins in his feckless and dangerous reinterpretation of the powers of his office. There is nothing in this bill that requires him to take it -- or its congressional authors -- seriously. Two weeks ago, John Yoo set down in The New York Times the precise philosophical basis on which the administration will sign this bill and then ignore it. The president will decide what a "lesser breach" of the Geneva Conventions is? How can anyone over the age of five give this president that power? And wait until you see the atrocity that I guarantee you is coming down the tracks concerning the fact that the president committed at least 40 impeachable offenses with regard to illegal wiretapping.

And the Democratic Party was nowhere in this debate. It contributed nothing. On the question of whether or not the United States will reconfigure itself as a nation which tortures its purported enemies and then grants itself absolution through adjectives -- "Aggressive interrogation techniques" -- the Democratic Party had…no opinion. On the issue of allowing a demonstrably incompetent president as many of the de facto powers of a despot that you could wedge into a bill without having the Constitution spontaneously combust in the Archives, well, the Democratic Party was more pissed off at Hugo Chavez.

This was as tactically idiotic as it was morally blind. On the subject of what kind of a nation we are, and to what extent we will live up to the best of our ideals, the Democratic Party was as mute and neutral as a stone. Human rights no longer have a viable political constituency in the United States of America. Be enough of a coward, though, and cable news will fit you for a toga.

However, because I know it is vital for the Democrats to "recapture" the good Christian folks, there's a passage from Scripture that seems apropos: "When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it."

-- Charles P. Pierce

THE DEAL ON THE DEAL. So here's the "compromise" on detainees:

[T]he legislation will enumerate "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions which, if committed, could expose US officials to criminal prosecution. The list includes acts such as rape, murder and intentional infliction of bodily harm. For less-than-grave breaches, however, President Bush would be given authority to interpret the Geneva Convention provisions through an executive order. Defendants and their lawyers will not be given access to classified material in military tribunals, and prosecutors will enjoy wide latitude, according to Hadley, in the use of hearsay evidence, with burden on the accused to show that such evidence is either unreliable on irrelevant before it could be excluded.

More in-depth analysis is available here. So Bush got, basically, everything he wanted. The other day, in TAP's weekly editorial meeting, a few of us were puzzling over the motivation for McCain's actions. Why would he sacrifice his accelerating rapprochement with the right over this issue, particularly right before the 2006 election. Various theories were bandied about, from a realization that Republican voters no longer venerated Bush to thoughts on a possible independent candidacy. Our honorable editor man, however, leaned back and offered the novel interpretation, "Maybe McCain just believes in this, and is doing what he thinks is right."

I was sort of struck by that. It had barely even occurred to me that McCain, whatever he did or did not think right, retained motives distinct from his presidential ambitions. It seemed like a good reality check to my preternatural cynicism: These are still people up there, and they deserve to be analyzed as such. But scratch that. As happens so often these days, my cynicism proved not to be too great, but totally inadequate. McCain postured and orated, but when it came down to actually protecting prisoners, folded to the White House. And now the feckless, cowering Democrats who yoked their hopes to his independence have no basis for opposition. What a shameful day on all sides. Oh. And good morning.

--Ezra Klein

IRAN'S GAME. It was nice to see Charlie Rangel and Nancy Pelosi attack Hugo Chavez's ham-handed attempts to condemn President Bush. Chavez is a clumsy, crude political actor, and his extended comparison of Bush and the devil looked over-the-top and foolish. More interesting, and more relevant for American interests, is the current charm offensive of Ahmadinejad. From this Time piece, you could easily get the impression that Iranian leader had just finished Lakoff. Every other sentence was an appeal to approach the world with logic, love, respect, and humanitarianism. His basic argument was that George Bush is a wacked-out aggressor who, for inexplicable reasons of his own, seeks to dominate Iran and keep them from nuclear technology. Meanwhile, Iran has previously called for total disarmament of all nuclear weapons, and wouldn't want a nuke even if they could get one. "We are opposed to nuclear weapons." He said. "We think it has been developed just to kill human beings."

So the line is that Iran just wants the fuel cycle for energy purposes and regional prestige. This strikes at the heart of the problem with Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The NPT, in Article IV, encourages the spread of nuclear technology. The rest, however, argues against nuclear weaponry. The trouble is, once you have the technology the NPT allows, you're hours or days away from an actual bomb. The inspections regime imposed by the NPT effectively delays that, but a country that had the peaceful technology could withdraw from the treaty and rapidly turn around a weapon. So even if Iran achieved the fuel cycle and didn't create a bomb, they would effectively possess the capacity to turn one out in a matter of moments. It's tricky stuff, and it'll remain so as Bush's staggering lack of credibility at the United Nations and goodwill effectively softens other nations up for Ahmadinejad's apparently peaceful appeal. That blunts the international community's willingness to refer to the Security Council and the Security Council's willingness to act strongly and unanimously. It's fun to beat up on a clown like Chavez, but Iran is seriously outplaying us on the international stage.

--Ezra Klein

NATIONAL I.D. To follow up on Ben's post, I see Kevin Drum makes a similar critique of the GOP legislation, but also comes out in favor of a universal I.D. given to everyone in the country. This is an idea that Boston bossman Bob Kuttner proposed in 2004. I remember finding his old column on the subject highly persuasive -- it's worth a read.

--Sam Rosenfeld

DEMOCRATS FOR REPUBLICANS? In his latest piece, Jacob Weisberg addresses the question of whether the party that loses the midterms will, as a result, actually win in the long run. Although I think he takes the silly proposition a little too seriously, he admits that the right answer to this is the "boring" one: "the real winner in the November election will be the winner."

While Weisberg raises some good points to support that position, there are a few others worth noting. First, the main premise of the "Dems should win by losing" line is that they will do better in the 2008 presidential election by being completely out of power, and therefore be able to run against the Bush administration's incompetence without any constraints. But given that the 2008 Republican front-runner is the MSM’s favorite son, John McCain, who has carefully distanced himself from Bush at times, and the Democrat's prohibitive favorite is the wildly unpopular Hillary Clinton, the Dems would be unwise to make any strategic gambles on the basis of their inherently low chances of winning that election. Secondly, Weisberg doesn't address the question of what would actually good for the country for the next two years. As I just noted, the House Republicans are still passing laws that disenfranchise poor voters, which is both bad on the merits and further hampers the Democrats long-term prospects.

--Ben Adler

WAL-MART...GOOD? Some of my right-wing readers may think this'll make my head explode, but Wal-Mart's embarking on a new initiative to use its size and weight to bargain down the prices on generic prescription medications. In other words, the company I always accuse of acting like a monopsony is now going to use their might to act as consumer advocates on health care -- which will be good for consumers and bad for Pharma. Hooray!

It's worth saying, though, that this is exactly what I and most Democrats are always calling for the government to do, and it's precisely this apparently unfair tactic that the Republican Party barred Medicare from using in the 2003 Modernization Act. It's rather weird that Congress felt the need to outlaw Medicare from bargaining down pharmaceutical prices, but thinks Wal-Mart should run wild.

--Ezra Klein

THERE MAY NOT BE ROOM, BUT THERE'S CERTAINLY MONEY. The Big Bossman and I had slightly different interpretations of Mark Warner's admonition that Democrats shouldn't alienate the wealthy by opposing their tax cuts the other day. I viewed the move as politically unhelpful anti-populism of the type favored by influential elites but harmful to the progressive project, while Mike saw the effort as a substantively insignificant move that would project electability and centrism and allow Warner space to push the progressive line on other subjects. Maybe we're both wrong.

Writing in the New York Observer, Jason Horowitz details Warner's hunt for funds among rich Democratic donors unconvinced about Hillary Clinton's viability. It may indeed be that if Warner sees an opening on Hillary's right, part of that opening contains megawealthy funders unnerved by the renewed populism of many in the Democratic Party. Signaling that he'll be a centrist, incrementalist executive in the pro-wealth, Bill Clinton mold may attract donors with political doubts about Hillary but ideological fears about the rest of the field. And that may provide Warner with not only the space, but the money, to project his progressivism on safer, more consensus-oriented issues.

--Ezra Klein

I.D., PLEASE. Much like how the PATRIOT Act included a host of provisions that had been on the right's wish list for years before 9/11, House Republicans are using the current uproar over immigration (which they themselves have stoked) as an excuse to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters. From The Los Angeles Times:

Republicans pushing for tougher means to stem illegal immigration got a boost Wednesday when the Senate agreed to consider a bill that would build a 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border and the House approved a measure that would require voters to show photo identification at the polls.

Republicans in both chambers said the steps were necessary to protect the United States from illegal immigrants entering the country or trying to corrupt the voting process.

--Ben Adler

MISLEADING POLLS. I tried to run through this data yesterday at The Blog I Shalt Not Name, but I did a really crappy, confusing job of it (and remember: donate to my awesomeness!). So let's try again. A fair amount of attention is going to the new NYT/CBS poll, which has pretty encouraging news for Democrats: Congressional approval is down, Bush's ratings are down, the proportion who want to reelect theirrepresentative is down, and so forth. But like in many of these polls, voters don't appear to blame their representatives. When asked "How about the Representative in Congress from your district? Do you approve or disapprove of the way your Representative is handling his or her job?" A full 53 percent approve of their representative, and 29 percent disapprove.

This number has remained generally steady throughout the last year, and it's often brandished as evidence that voter discontent won't translate into congressional changes. Voters would vote against Congress if they could, but they'll only have the chance to vote for or against a representative they approve of. What interested me about this poll, though, was that it had trend lines dating back to the mid-80's. So for comparison, in 1994, 56 percent approved of their Congressman, and only 17 percent disapproved. Democrats lost 54 seats that year. In 1998, when Democrats won an unexpected five seats, 64 percent approved of their representatives, and 19 percent disapproved. In 1990, the last time representative approval was in the low 50's, Democrats, the majority party, gained eight seats (including Bernie Sanders).

In other words, this number is meaningless. Going by history, Democrats will either gain 60 or so seats, or lose eight. Either way. But what'll decide that is the distribution of unhappy voters: if they're clustered in close districts, Republicans have a problem. If the unhappy electorate is more scattered, they'll make less of a difference. However it plays out, it's time to retire this useless, misleading question.

--Ezra Klein

ALLEN AND HIS MOM. I believe the innocent possible explanation for this would be that Allen's mom thought he’d be mad because she had kept this a secret from him for so long, and he had been saying publicly what he thought was true -- that she wasn’t Jewish.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHY WOULD A MAN STOP LOVING HIS MOTHER OVER SUCH A THING? George Allen's mother recalls the moment, last month, when she told her son that she was raised Jewish: "When I told Georgie, I said, 'Now you don't love me anymore.'" To his credit, Allen replied "Mom, I respect you more than ever." But is it not somewhat weird that Mrs. Allen would initially assume that her son would stop loving her over this? Makes you wonder.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

POVERTY HEARTS NYC. All the way out there in New Yawk City, Mayor Mike Bloomberg is apparently getting serious about poverty. He's giving pay-for-responsibility policies a serious try, creating obvious and immediate financial incentives positive behavior among the poor. So folks will get paid for showing up to school, making medical appointments, getting good grades, and all the rest. It's an approach with pretty genuine promise and a long and successful track record. Richer folks, for instance, use it all the time. But they call it an allowance, and no one bats an eye. Heather Mac Donald, however, has apparently forgotten this, and has a rather pessimistic take on Bloomberg's plans, praising them for finally admitting that the poor are at fault, but fretting that:

It will inevitably set up an expectation among the underclass that they have a right to cash for simply conforming to the norms of civil society. The list of responsible behaviors for which bounties will be offered will inevitably grow. Not just attending classes, but refraining from hitting your teacher, not bringing a gun to school, showing up for an exam, taking your child to be vaccinated, bathing your kids and feeding them - all will be candidates for a bribe.

And what is the end-game? The mayor has not said how he proposes to wean off the subsidized poor from the inevitable pay-me-or-else mentality, nor how he'll determine who gets paid for behaving in personally responsible ways and who has to act responsibly "for free."

Yikes. That's some confidence in good behavior Mac Donald has, to believe that once folks are socialized into being functioning members of the working class, they'll find the rewards inadequate and lapse into ghetto pathologies absent the lure of paltry financial prizes. If acting in a fashion consistent with the expectations of society doesn't produce a better life and rapid rewards, maybe there's a problem with our economy and culture that's not, in fact, the fault of the poor but is nevertheless denying them the incentives that made, say, my efforts to work hard and make appointments worthwhile.

Mac Donald then goes on the tired tear about how subversive and totally taboo it is to promote marriage, blah blah blah. Maybe that was the case a few decades ago, but as she notes, Bloomberg's panel actually recommended promoting marriage. John Edwards routinely makes it a part of his stump speeches. Brookings releases endless papers on the subject. There's nothing sadder than someone still seeking rebel cred by backing a now-mainstream idea.

--Ezra Klein

"ARCANE." Ritual disclaimer: Keith Olbermann is a friend of mine, has been for years, ever since we were baby reporters in Boston and all the way through my ill-fated attempt to be hepcat enough to get hired by the embryonic ESPN 2.

Last night on his show, he hosted Dana Milbank of The Washington Post for one of his regular state-of-the-pols chats. The topic was the ongoing bipartisan debate between a Republican president and a Republican Congress over what sort of authoritarian powers the president should have. Milbank resolutely stuck to the argument that this debate is a good one because it shifts the political debate away from the ongoing debacle in Iraq to the president's war on the evil terrorists, and that's to the White House's advantage. At one point, I believe that Milbank used the word "arcane" to describe the details of the fight over what kind of torture we'll allow. Olbermann, ever the gracious host, seemed a bit stunned by this.

I'm not gracious. So I'll say it. Dana Milbank seems like a good egg and he's generally a decent reporter. However, if the parameters of our political life are now that we seriously discuss whether talking about torturing people is enough to blunt the political disadvantage of talking about an illegal war based on stovepiped intelligence and the messianic fantasies of a bunch of think-tank cowboys and war profiteers, we are well and truly lost in this country. I don't care if Milbank wants to make a buck out of it, but he should at least recognize the bloody surrealism of the discussion.

--Charles P. Pierce

ROTTEN EGGS. After those words of warning from Bossman Tomasky, Brother Pierce will no doubt take heart in an assessment of the president's speech delivered this afternoon at the very podium from which our commander-in-chief promised Bossman's neighbor to the people of Darfur.

Bloomberg is reporting that, in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly two hours ago, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez referred to George W. Bush, the leader of the free world, as old Beezulbub himself.

"The devil came here yesterday,'' Chavez, 52, said in remarks that included accusations that the U.S. is plotting to overthrow him and that the UN is helpless to combat the threat posed by U.S. power. He said the podium in the General Assembly hall still "smells of sulphur today,'' a reference to what is termed the devil's element in mythology.

Or perhaps it was a reference to the president's love, as reported last month by Paul Bedard in U.S. News & World Report, of flatulence jokes. Wrote Bedard: "He's also known to cut a few for laughs..." Assuming that the president had eggs for breakfast -- well, just follow your nose. ("Heh, heh, heh, Hugo...")

--Adele M. Stan

BLAME THE POLLS. This revelation, courtesy of Tom Edsall in The New Republic, actually explains an awful lot:

In late 2000, even as the result of the presidential election was still being contested in court, George W. Bush's chief pollster Matt Dowd was writing a memo for Rove that would reach a surprising conclusion. Based on a detailed examination of poll data from the previous two decades, Dowd's memo argued that the percentage of swing voters had shrunk to a tiny fraction of the electorate. Most self-described "independent" voters "are independent in name only," Dowd told me in an interview describing his memo. "Seventy-five percent of independents vote straight ticket" for one party or the other. Once such independents are reclassified as Democrats or Republicans, a key trend emerges: Between 1980 and 2000, the percentage of true swing voters fell from a very substantial 24 percent of the electorate to just 6 percent. In other words, the center was literally disappearing. Which meant that, instead of having every incentive to govern as "a uniter, not a divider," Bush now had every reason to govern via polarization.

This ran counter to Rove's previous thinking. In 2000, he had dismissed the tactic of running on divisive issues like patriotism, crime, and welfare as "an old paradigm." And Bush had followed his advice by explicitly reaching out to the center-left. For instance, during the campaign, he held a press conference with a dozen gay Republicans and sharply criticized the GOP Congress for a plan to save money by slowing distribution of tax credits for the working poor. But Dowd's memo changed all that.

That, to me, had always been the great mystery of the Bush administration: How the humble candidate appealing for unity and decorum became an arrogant, bellicose, imperialist-minded partisan. That 2000 was all strategy -- and once the polls changed, so too did the strategy -- makes a lot of sense. It may be, as the administration likes to say, that the president doesn't read polls. But as Josh Green pointed out and Edsall reinforces, his advisors sure do, and he listens to them rather closely.

--Ezra Klein

THE PARTY OF MORE STUFF. I'm not sure whether this is funny or sad, but at the end of a David Leonhardt column arguing that middle-class growth and improvement is deeply understated by the inflation rate, Leonhardt admits:

In recent years, the government’s economists have gotten much better at measuring inflation, introducing some new products, like Viagra, into the index within months. Of course, this means that incomes lately have not been understated by much and that their growth really has been miserly. (The recent reports showing healthy gains all refer to averages, which have been driven by huge gains at the top.) For all the sunny numbers that Republicans have offered up, the reality is that not a single piece of government data shows that most workers have gotten a significant wage increase since 2002.

Ah. Well okay, then. The larger point, that snowblowers and cell phones and beta blockers and iPods have improved our lives, is, I think, self-evident and something of a red herring. Life without the Internet strikes this child of the Apple age as nasty, brutish, and unacceptably lacking in online pornography. Whether technology makes life objectively better is a philosophical question that rests on your definition of "better," and requires some deep thinking about how trustworthy self-reported happiness indices are. That we have more stuff able to do cooler things is certainly true, though.

None of this, however, answers whether life has improved as much as it should've for the middle and working class. There's plenty of evidence suggesting that the top few percent now control a much greater portion of the economy than they ever did before, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask why that is, whether it's positive, and if not, how it should be changed. Those questions do not obviate the goodness of iPods. Indeed, they suggest that everyone should be able to own one, and many of us should be able to purchase models with more storage space.

--Ezra Klein

BUY THIS BOOK. Last week, Brookings held a great book launch event for Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France by Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse. The book hit the Prospect’s office today, and it appears to be an exceedingly important read for anyone trying to understand how governments can help promote (or stunt) the integration process of Muslims immigrants to Europe.

This book challenges alarmist takes from right-wing quarters that demographic and other factors are fostering an “Islamization” of Europe. Using France as a case study, Laurence and Vaisse flip that argument to show that Islam is becoming “Europeanized” instead; “French Islam,” they argue, “is replacing Islam in France.” Concurrently, the integration of Muslims in France is generally on a positive path. As they put it, “There is little reason to subscribe to the conventional view of an increasingly fractured society in which immigrants and citizens of Muslim origin form anti-Semitic hordes on the verge of imposing shari’a law.”

Interestingly, this recent Pew Report (which I assume was published too late to include in the book) would back up this claim. French Muslims are far less anti-Semitic than their counterparts in other European countries. And at rates greater than other European Muslims, French Muslims consider themselves a “national citizen” (as opposed to a “Muslim”) first.

In any case, I couldn’t recommend it more highly for those wishing to understand the dynamics of Islam and migrant integration in Europe today.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

EZRA -- STILL A WRITING FELLOW IN NEED. As we said yesterday, the Prospect depends on reader donations. Do consider helping out Ezra, the writing fellowship program, and the magazine with a donation.

--The Editors

WATCH IT, PAL. Listen, Pierce: Andrew Natsios is my next-door neighbor. I’ve never met the man, but I consider an attack on him to be an attack on all of Woodside Park. And those rumors that he wants to build a $312 billion vehicular tunnel under Clement St. are just that!

--Michael Tomasky

MAKE YOU FEEL SAFER? One of the recurrent questions I get on panels, call-in shows, and e-mails is "What will be required to change the health care system? What can be done?" It's not a query I'm particularly well-equipped to field, but I think a good start would be photocopying this article on retroactive cancellations by insurers and handing a copy out to each and every American. No other piece I'm aware of exposes the absurdities and cruelty of the system as clearly, and so irresistibly signals the need for reform.

The actual facts in the report are basic: California state regulators are investigating Blue Cross for unlawful cancellations of policies. When you buy individual coverage, unlike when you buy into group coverage, insurers can reject you based on your health history or conditions. In order to protect against fraud -- say, someone being diagnosed with heart disease, then applying for insurance the next morning without mentioning it -- the law allows for insurers to cancel policies if the applicant engaged in "willful misrepresentation." What's clever is how the insurance industry has redefined the standard: If you had a condition you didn't know about, they'll seek to not only yank your policy, but dispatch debt collectors to recover what they've already paid out.

In practice, the scam works like this: Selah Shaeffer, age four, was found to have an aggressive, cancerous tumor in her jaw. The family had been with Blue Cross for about a year, and the bump was examined and biopsied after they'd bought their insurance. But because it was growing before, Blue Cross cut off reimbursement for surgeries it had already authorized, and is now trying to recover $20,000 from the Shaeffers. Or take the Nazertyans, who had premature twins. They were covered by Blue Shield all throughout the pregnancy, and disclosed all facets of the birth and operations. Blue Shield not only dropped them, but was trying to get back $98,000 they'd already paid under the rationale that the Nazertyans hadn't disclosed an earlier miscarriage. After the Los Angeles Times reported the story, Blue Shield called off the debt collectors.

What's so remarkable about all this is what it exposes about the health insurance system in this country: We rely almost exclusively on private insurers whose primary business imperative is not to pay when we get sick. They do that by seeking to deny coverage before the fact, or reject claims afterwards. They pay for platoons of employees who have no job other than to scrutinize thousands of policies a week in the hopes of finding sufficient cause for cancellation. Say what you will about the inefficiencies of the public sector, but can it really match the ruthlessness and absurdity of insurers spending large amounts of money so they don't have to insure? Is that sort of profit motive really what you want underlying your health care coverage?

--Ezra Klein

MISSING MICHAEL BROWN. Yesterday, at the United Nations, the president sought to reassure the world that he really has its best interests at heart. Here’s the speech. Now, there was a passage in the speech's late innings that caused the ol' head whiparound in a lot of us here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) It was that moment when the president spoke to the people in Darfur and told them that he would send one Andrew Natsios there as his own super-special presidential envoy.

For those of you keeping score at home, that would be this Andrew Natsios, who, oddly enough, is also this Andrew Natsios. In other words, the president is dispatching to the middle of an ongoing genocide a man whose oversight have already been central to some of the biggest foreign and domestic clusterbumps of the past 50 years. This must be what happens when you lose Michael Brown's phone number. Anyway, it is likely that people will continue to die in Darfur, but our government has made certain that there will be shabbily built, overpriced highways on which to bring out the bodies.

--Charles P. Pierce

ALLEN'S QUICK TURNAROUND Senator George Allen embraced his Jewish ancestry only yesterday. And it took him precisely 24 hours to play the anti-Semitic card.

Yesterday, Wadhams accused Webb's campaign and liberal bloggers of anti-Semitism for raising the issue of the senator's religious background…

Wadhams also accused Webb's campaign of mailing an anti-Semitic flier to Virginia voters during the state's Democratic primary this year. That flier depicted Webb's Jewish opponent, Harris Miller, with money coming out of his pockets. "They have been continuing that anti-Semitic strategy through their paid bloggers," Wadhams said.

When it comes to ethnic baiting, Allen's the real victim here.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

EUROPE WORKS. Whatever the European social policy you may be advocating for, the almost inevitable, and usually instant, response from ill-disposed interlocutors is to bring up Europe's apparent unemployment problem and wonder if that's the future you're securing for the United States. Well, let them. The latest round of OECD employment data shows (PDF) that Europe has almost entirely closed the employment gap with the United States: The difference is now 1.1 percent, attributable entirely to low female workforce participation among women in Italy and Spain. Indeed, if you factor out the disadvantage conferred by our massive incarceration rate, they may well be ahead.

Notice here that we're talking about employment rates: The United States often has lower unemployment rates for the simple reason that we cease counting people when we consider them no longer looking. But if you look at the more telling side of the coin -- the actual percentage of the population employed in gainful labor -- we're basically tied. And yet they all have health care...

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: LAMONT TALKS. On September 6, we had our seventh Prospect breakfast event -- the guest this time was Ned Lamont. The audio of the hour-long discussion between Lamont and an array of journalists is here, and now we've posted the full transcript of the event. (Both are also available on our multimedia page.)

Lamont fielded questions on subjects ranging from horse-race politics to health care to foreign policy. His answers were at times surprisingly candid.

On the Dems and Iraq:

It’s easier for me as a candidate to be clear than it is for Senator Harry Reid, who’s got 47 cats he’s got to herd. So that’s why we end up with “2006 will be a year of transition,” whatever the hell that means. I have tried to be clear, tried to be respectful, but clear. That a change of course is going to mean tough love with the Maliki government and setting some guidelines and supporting a way that we comprehensively get our troops out of harm’s way and have the Iraqis step up.

I think Joe Lieberman is terribly damaging to Democrats, Democratic candidates across the country. He challenges our patriotism. He challenges our national security position, and he accuses us of being partisan and un-American in some ways. And I think that plays right into a Republican frame. I think they’re pretty happy having Senator Lieberman carry that water. So what happens if he gets elected to the Senate and 80 percent of the votes he got end up being Republican, how’s he going to vote on the next Supreme Court nominee? I don’t know. But I’d worry….I think it’s a vote Republicans will be more likely to count on next time around. He had a hard time voting with the Democrats back when he had 80 percent Democrat support…Now he’s going to be liberated from any obligation to or thoughts about a Democratic constituency.

He claims it’s bipartisanship that he represents, that there’s too much partisanship in Washington. You know, I find that’s one of the most abused words … partisanship, bipartisanship. To them, bipartisanship means you agree with me and you’re a good American, and if you disagree with me you’re a partisan hack. I think it’s a word we’ve got to be careful with. I’m a guy in business; we sit across the table, we negotiate, we make things happen, we move things forward…but we also have our principles.

I think Republicans have over-learned the lessons of World War II. They think any time you talk to an adversary you’re Neville Chamberlain. And that’s nonsense and it’s wrong. You can make a case that maybe liberals have over-learned the lessons of Vietnam a little bit, and that sometimes we don’t realize that there’s a place for the military and a place for force in the lexicon, but my God, they’re so wrong. The prism through which they see the war in Iraq reflects that. Everything is not a Nazi monolith. We’ve got a crescent going from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas, and to say that Hezbollah and the Shias and the Sunnis and the Iranians, Chechnya to Kashmir, is all some sort of terrorist monolith and we’re going to fight this war on a uniform basis is wrong-headed and understands nothing about history. And I think we ought to be clearer about that.

I just think it’s unconscionable that this country compromises its values like it does, be it on the military tribunals, be it on Guantanamo, be it on playing fast and loose with the Geneva Conventions. Joe Lieberman was one of the few Democrats who supported Gonzales, who said the Geneva Conventions were quaint. That’s not America. I think it’s important for Democrats to stand up and say that’s not America, that’s not our tradition, it weakens us when you compromise us that way.

--The Editors

IRAN: IRAQ DEJA VU? I've got to agree with The Nation’s Ari Berman on Bush's speech to the United Nations today. Following on the heels of retired General Sam Gardiner's statements on CNN last night that we are already dispatching forces to Iran, the administration's continued hardline approach toward Iran does seem to suggest they may already have designs -- beyond mere contingency plans -- for military strikes.

This catches Democrats in quite a bind. They want to keep the focus on Iraq for the midterms. At the same time, as focus on Iran grows, they will be caught in a 2002 redux: to acquiesce to aggressive action or risk being painted as dovish. More on Iran can, of course, be found at Matt’s site.

--Ben Adler

JUST REMEMBER. Every time McCain does something that Richard Cohen likes, his chances of winning the GOP nomination decrease. So, rather than get upset when center-libs throw themselves at McCain, you folks ought to rejoice, because every instance of such makes it that much less likely that the R’s most formidable man will gain his party’s support.

--Michael Tomasky

HELP EZRA HELP US ALL. 'Tis the season for liberal magazine fundraising drives. This month we've been running a donation campaign through our weekly email subscriber list to raise funds for our writing fellow program and other projects here at the Prospect. And we wanted to make sure Tapped readers got a chance to kick in some dough as well, if they're so inclined.

You all know who our current writing fellow is. It's Ezra. Check him out, determined and focused, spreading liberal light at his usual million-words-per-minute clip:

Alumni of the writing fellows program include Nick Confessore, Mark Greif, Chris Mooney, and most recently Matt Yglesias. If you enjoy what you read here and want to see more of it, consider making a donation. (It's tax-deductible.) Do right by Ezra.

UPDATE: More past fellows: Noy Thrupkaew, Jed Purdy, Ayelish McGarvey, Drake Bennett, Mark Leon Goldberg, Natasha Hunter, Kate Cambor, Alex Gourevitch, Richard Just, Laura Maggi...

--The Editors

WHY DO LIBERALS HEART MCCAIN? That more liberals are showing their support for John McCain publicly may be frustrating, but should also come as no surprise -- liberals have been for some time his single strongest group of supporters. This was well-documented by the Pew Research Center report Beyond Red and Blue in May 2005. The Pew Center found that liberals -- defined as people who were "the most opposed to an assertive foreign policy, the most secular, and take the most liberal views on social issues such as homosexuality, abortion, and censorship....strongly pro-environment and pro-immigration" -- were twice as supportive of McCain as any GOP sub-group:

Sen. John McCain is extraordinarily popular among Liberals, drawing a positive rating among this group that is actually a bit higher than among Republicans generally (66% vs. 61%). However, his favorability ratings among GOP typology groups are significantly lower than Giuliani's or those of the president and other administration officials....

John McCain's extensive popularity among Liberals is evident in early opinions about the 2008 presidential race. Overall, about a third of the public (32%) say they would like to see McCain nominated as the GOP candidate, slightly more than the number who favor Giuliani (27%). But much of McCain's strength comes from the Liberal group. Fully 55% of Liberals say they most want to see McCain win the GOP nomination; that is more than double the percentage in any GOP group that wants McCain to capture the nomination.

McCain, despite being anti-choice, hawkish, and a supporter of the Patriot Act, was, according to the survey, the liberal fantasy of what a Republican candidate should look like. Why this should be so is another question entirely, though it certainly seems to have something to do with the power of emotional appeals in politics and McCain's capacity for agenda setting, since it appears to have little to do with his stands on the issues.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

ONE-AND-A-HALF CHEERS FOR WARNER. Okay, he’s trying to fashion himself the common-good candidate, so naturally I hold a soft spot in my heart for Mark Warner. So take that for what it’s worth as I offer an alternate theory of the case to Ezra’s.

Here, to me, is the big 2008 picture (assume for the moment no run by Gore). You have Hillary. You have Edwards, who is now, by dint of a primary calendar that is so incredibly Edwards-friendly that I find it hard to understand why the other campaigns let it happen, a sort of co-front-runner. They’re your Jordan and Pippen, if you don’t mind a metaphor that exposes how long it’s been since I closely watched professional basketball. After them, your card is full of indistinguishables -- at this point.

But one of the B-level players will distinguish himself. Why? Because there will be concern (or, is concern) that HRC is not electable for personal reasons, and that Edwards is not electable for ideological reasons. So the Graham Greene candidate -- that is, the Third Man -- will at some point emerge.

History and logic tell us that this candidate will possess the following attributes: fairly centrist; respected (perhaps grudgingly, perhaps happily) by the pundit class; and, most of all, electable. I suspect that Warner may be the Third Man. So that’s obviously how he’s positioning himself.

Now, as to substance: I’m all for repealing the tax cuts. But I do wonder how much difference Warner’s position will make to the federal treasury. That is, President Edwards would presumably seek to repeal the cuts in 2009. President Warner would let them expire at the end of 2010. That’s just one year’s worth of revenue -- somewhere around $35 billion if I’m remembering correctly. And the difference may not even be that great: President Edwards’ repeal, with the way tax law goes, would not take effect immediately when he signs the repeal in 2009 (and getting such a repeal passed in his first year is itself a best-case scenario), but probably sometime the following year -- i.e., the same 2010 that represents Warner’s position.

So the revenue difference, in federal budget terms, is getting pretty close to negligible to my mind, although I imagine Ezra will out-wonk me and produce more dramatic numbers.

On the point that seems to have our commenters worked up -- the 98 percent strive to be like the 2 percent -- I agree that that’s bad language that Warner shouldn’t be using. I suspect his progressivism, and he does have some, will manifest itself in other ways, on education and public infrastructure spending and broadband access and (Ezra, take note!) even health care. So Warner may merely be signaling that he’ll spend his political capital in other places. And remember, folks: He DID raise taxes in Virginia!

--Michael Tomasky

A STARTLING ADMISSION. From President Bush's address to the United Nations: "Freedom by its nature cannot be imposed. It must be chosen." That he thinks so is news to me, although I couldn't agree more.

--Ben Adler

FRUSTRATING SUPPORT FOR MCCAIN UPDATE. I'm afraid we may have to make “Liberals for McCain” a regular Tapped feature, a la Ezra's Gorewatch. Jonathan Chait and Jacob Weisberg pioneered this trend, then Nicco Mele of EchoDitto joined the chorus, and today so did Richard Cohen in The Washington Post. Their rationales vary -- in fact, they conflict. Chait and Weisberg pursue the "he doesn't really mean all those rightwing votes he casts" argument, while Cohen uses a logic more like Mele's: He's a man of principle, and though I disagree with him and X on Y, he'd make a great president. Here's Cohen:

[W]hile the Democrats are awash in potential presidential candidates, they have nobody who even remotely approaches McCain's stature. I say this not because I agree with McCain across the board -- not on abortion, for sure, and not on Iraq, and not with his bellicose statements regarding North Korea -- but because he embodies a quality for which the country yearns: integrity. He is a man of his word.

I cringe every time I see a liberal engage in this thinking. As Matt has convincingly argued before, "integrity," in the sense of standing on principle, is the most overrated virtue in politics. It doesn't matter whether a politician is secretly pro-choice or anti-choice; what matters is how he or she votes. McCain's record on reproductive freedom is reprehensible. This defense of McCain also contradicts the Weisberg/Chait argument, which is that he doesn't really mean half of what he says or does. That McCain seems to somehow get everyone to see what they want to see in him is more than a bit maddening to those of us who, while we appreciate the issues on which he is better than most Republicans (as Cohen points out, he is currently leading the fight against torture), do not want to see another right-wing president.

--Ben Adler

MEDICARE MEETS MEPHISTOPHELES. I spent last night at D.C.'s best bookstore/coffee shop, Politics and Prose, reading through David Hyman's new book Medicare Meets Mephistopheles. Hyman is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and his book, as you may have guessed from the title, takes as its conceit that Medicare is a demonic program sent to encourage all manner of deadly sins and, eventually, bring down the American republic. Spending so much time in the blogosphere, where libertarians are over-represented, I occasionally forget that libertarianism is a distinctly fringe ideology. Seeing them (jokingly) suggest that the massively popular and successful (if deeply in need of reform) system of health insurance for the elderly has Satanic origins helpfully reminds me of that fact.

That said, the book is actually quite good. I'd happily recommend it to anyone with a basic grasp on health care and a desire to learn a bit more about Medicare. Hyman is a felicitous and fun writer, and he conveys an impressive amount of history and data in as accessible and absorbable a manner as one could hope. I know how tricky it is to make health care a quick and gripping read, and I tip my hat to anyone who is capable of enriching the debate and educating readers by doing so.

What always fascinates when I read right-wing critiques of American health care is how similar our diagnoses are, but how diametrically opposed our treatments would be. For the right, more consumer risk is required in order to encourage wise treatment decisions on behalf of patients. That means, of course, that those who make poor decisions, or simply get really ill, face financial ruin. That seems crazed and cruel to me. While I do think the left needs to take financial incentives more seriously than it does, I'd favor having many more carrots than sticks, and I'd want to separate out poor decisions and behaviors from simple bad luck. HSAs and all the rest punish the illogically stricken as surely -- or more surely -- than they do the stupid. And I'm not even ready to punish the stupid. So much as I think it inadvisable that half of those with HSAs haven't deposited a cent, I've no interest in abandoning them to the consequences of that oversight.

--Ezra Klein

CHECKING IN ON WILLARD-MITT. Hey, it's Primary Day here in the Commonwealth (God save it!). Three decent Democratic candidates have been vigorously belaboring each other for the right to face Republican Lieutenant Governor Kerry Murphy O'Faolain O'Flaherty Maud Gonne Healey in the general election. (There is also an Independent candidate named Christy Mihos, and he's probably the happiest candidate since Hubert Humphrey bubbled off this mortal coil, but he has less chance of being governor than he does of swimming to Greenland.) Now seem like a good time to check in on the only governor we actually have, Willard Mitt Romney. What's he up to?

Well, he's out there being an idiot. As you know, Willard Mitt wants to be president, but one of his biggest problems is that he's a high-rent Mormon, and an awful lot of the folks around the country were raised to believe Mormons had two heads and both of them pagan. Willard Mitt needed an issue to reach these folks and, since all the theological ones were unavailable, he apparently has settled on torture as his outreach to the good Christian folks.

Here he is in today's Los Angeles Times. "I am foursquare behind President Bush," says Willard-Mitt, if you scroll down far enough. "Sen. McCain's position is mistaken on this issue." (It's in moments like these when it's helpful to remember that John McCain has to drive a car with his elbows almost straight out to the side because his arms were broken so badly by his captors in North Vietnam.) Just so we're clear -- I now live in a state governed by a man who believes that the president of the United States has the inherent authority to order the torture unto death of anyone the president sees fit to render, and that the president's authority in that regard is absolute, beyond the reach of constitutional limits, international conventions, or moral scruples. This makes you, according to the Los Angeles Times, a "centrist." This man wants to be president of the United States. This man wants to be able to torture. Being governor of Massachusetts shouldn't make you this crazy.

--Charles P. Pierce

IRAQ FOR SALE. Last night, I attended the Washington premier of Robert Greenwald’s latest documentary, Iraq for Sale, about the abusive, sinister and wasteful state of private contracting in Iraq. As with Greenwald’s previous docs, especially his Wal-Mart exposé, I found myself so mind-numbingly angry and frustrated by the end that I wasn’t sure whether to punch a hole in the wall or crawl into one.

Greenwald tracked down procurement officials in the Defense Department, retired Brig. General Janis Karpinski, truck drivers who worked for Halliburton/KBR, and a variety of experts, many of whom attended the screening at the new Woolly Mammoth Theatre. (Woolly’s digs are quite nice.) He works through the refusal to hold accountable any of the private contractors who supervised the torture and humiliation of detainees at Abu Ghraib. (Karpinski and a bunch of her reservist underlings took the fall, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon brass quickly shifted blame.) He then exposes the problems of “cost-plus” budgeting, which induces contractors to burn, crush and destroy vehicles so they can replace them with new ones that are then sent across Iraq, sometimes to carry a single bundle of mail at a time -- if they are carrying anything at all. And then there are the sordid details of the Blackwater contractors who were killed, mutilated and burned in effigy in Fallujah in 2004.

It is a great film about a rather sore, sordid subject that President Bush (shown giving a pathetic, mocking answer to a questioner who dared asked about accountability for private contractors), former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and other neocons would rather not discuss, ever. Which is why people should buy the DVD and watch it, with friends.

P.S.: During the post-film Q&A session, a Senate Democratic committee staffer informed the audience that Republicans in Congress -- shown repeatedly in the film blocking amendments by Byron Dorgan and Chris Dodd that would have established some form of oversight and accountability for private contractors -- are actually moving to get some of the CEOs from the top contracting firms awarded civilian medals. Call it the Tenet-ization of the private military. All in all, another truly disgusting episode in this failed war. Awards all around, fellas!

--Tom Schaller

WARNER'S ANTI-POPULISM. If you want to know why I think the hype about Mark Warner is oddly misguided, look no further than his recent comments lambasting the Kerry campaign for attacking Bush's top-bracket tax cuts. He takes up that favorite of chin-stroking op-ed columnists everywhere, arguing that "Even though the Bush tax cuts only applied to the top 2 percent of Americans, what I think the Kerry campaign missed was that the other 98 percent of Americans still aspired to get to the point in their life."

Color me unconvinced. Not only is Warner philosophically wrong here -- I don't know what sort of Democrat believes it's supportable public policy to raid the federal treasury to enrich the wealthy -- he's not even backed up by the polling data. Support for Bush's tax cuts is, and always has been, low. They've never been as popular as one might expect. Moreover, they've become less popular as time passed. In 2000, exit polls shows that voters naming "taxes" as their top issue went for Bush 80 percent to 17 percent -- it was by far his biggest advantage on any issue. In 2004, a number of those hardcore partisans were surely naming terrorism, but nevertheless, those obsessing over "taxes" were now voting a rather different ballot, favoring Bush by a mere 57 percent to 43 percent, a 49 percent swing in Kerry's favor.

So where exactly is the evidence of all this aspirational abhorrence of populism? Polls show, and have shown, massive preferences among voters for the vast majority of Democratic economic positions. Few dispute that Bush won the election on national security and social conservatism, and most of those who do dispute it simply don't think Bush won the election. So while Warner's genial rejection of class warfare may play well on The Washington Post op-ed page, there's no reason to believe it's a good strategy, and lord knows it's terrible policy, particularly in an era when the federal treasury is starved for revenue and Democrats actually want to enact some social programs.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE FORTUNE COOKIE GAME. Matt intervenes in the ongoing democracy debate. To Matt, democracy, human rights, liberal reforms -- they're all great. The real issue isn't the policy objective, but the method of achieving it:

There's a game that kids (and, OK, me too) like to play with the fortune cookies you get at Chinese restaurants. Read the fortune, but append the phrase "in bed" to whatever it says. Hilarity ensues. The game illustrates that in fortune-telling, as in everything else, context matters. A couple of additional context-setting words transform platitudes into dirty jokes. Much the same could be said of the ongoing debate about the role of democracy promotion in American foreign policy...

The way I see it, there's less to this dispute than meets the eye. The real problem is what's missing -- those crucial additional words that determine context. And context makes all the difference. From my perspective, you can take any of these proposals -- "let's promote x," "let's promote y" -- and add the phrase "through legitimate international institutions and mechanisms of international law" and it's all to the good. Absent that phrase, it's not so good...

--The Editors

THE CURSE OF BUSH. The topic du jour over at The Corner is an exploration of what a mean guy and poor candidate George Allen is. K-Lo thinks he often comes off "as a disturbingly nasty guy," Jonah notes that when he's backed into a corner "he becomes decidedly unReaganesque both in his sometimes gormless retorts and his slightly nasty and/or defensive streak," and J-Pod describes Allen's response to a question about his grandfather's religion as "just...weird."

Allen's got to be right up there with Bill Frist for the most stunning falls of the 2008 cycle. Folks will remember that Frist was, at one point, Rove's golden boy, a perfectly serious contender for the presidency who was supposed to use his medical background, telegenic nature, and irrepressible charm to be the second coming of the compassionate conservative. His ascension to majority leader was merely part of that path. His implosion once there was astonishing.

Allen, actually, was then the guy who took up the mantle. This was back when Bush was popular, and so McCain's candidacy didn't yet look like a powerhouse effort. Rather, a genial, southern-seeming good ol' boy was just what the spin doctors ordered, and polls of GOP insiders began naming Allen as the frontrunner. Then, Bush's fortunes fell, and Allen actually had a race, and The New Republic found he had an obsession with the Confederate Flag, and he slurred an Indian kid, and is now facing a serious challenge by a relative nobody. Six months ago, this guy was going to be president. Now he might lose his job. If so, he and Frist can commiserate on the porch of the Retirement Grounds For Former Bush Successors. Turns out that's proven to be a surprisingly insecure career path.

--Ezra Klein

FUNNY BUSINESS. Mark Schmitt's column in our September print issue is a rumination on businesses' efforts at mass voter registration, and the challenge that presents to progressives. Mark mainly focuses on the manufacturing sector, which is sufficiently beleaguered for job loyalty to often trump class loyalty -- as workers "see their economic interest as bound up in their employers’ interests." That precise dynamic wouldn't presumably be at work in Wal-Mart, but The Hill reports today that the company "is planning to launch a voter registration and education campaign this fall targeted at its 1.3 million employees in an effort to combat growing criticism from Democrats and labor unions." Details are very skimpy at the moment, but this will certainly be something to watch this season.

--Sam Rosenfeld

POVERTY & THE DEMS -- AN UPDATE. A couple of weeks ago, during one of the rounds of the blogosphere debate on poverty, I cited Elizabeth Warren's article from The Democratic Strategist, where she said:

When I talk with families about politics, I often hear a variation on this theme: "Democrats care most about the poor. They tell me I'm better off than the poor, and that I should give up more of my money to help the poor. Well, I'm stretched to the breaking point, and I just can't do it any more." Whenever a Democrat stands up and says, "I'll help every child go to college," then cuts off benefits at $20,000 a year, the message just burns deeper.

Several bloggers questioned the existence of a program backed by Democrats that cuts off aid at this level, so I wrote her and asked for clarification. As it turns out, Warren was thinking of the federal Pell Grant system, which preferentially provides grants to those who come from families earning less than $20,000 per year, and which Democrats have fought tooth and nail to maintain in the face of Republican efforts to undermine it. Warren explains:

There is $20,000 "automatic zero" in the federal need analysis system in the Pell grant system. This means that if family income is less than $20,000, the family contribution is automatically zero. And, not surprisingly, the median family income of Pell Grant recipients is under $20,000. But above that level it can still be zero, if the recipient can show the need. In that case, family income may go as high as $45,000. So the benefits are concentrated below $20,000, and the automatic, easy access version is below $20,000, but there is some possibility of use above that number.

And there you have it.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BEYOND RECRIMINATIONS. Perhaps not surprisingly, I second what Matt said about Jon Chait's column on the incompetence dodge and don't have an enormous amount to add. (I should at least say that I very much appreciate Chait establishing the grounds of the debate pretty accurately and arguing in good faith.) Noam Scheiber's intervention today does help to underscore one point worth emphasizing. Scheiber says that "Yglesias and Rosenfeld set the bar on themselves too high."

To show that blaming Bush-administration incompetence for the Iraq disaster amounts to a "dodge," you don't need to prove that the Iraq project was impossible to pull off under any circumstances -- something I don't believe. You just need to show that the administration's mishandling of Iraq was extremely easy to foresee, which in fact it was. The administration basically advertised that it intended to botch post-war Iraq during the run-up to the war.

Scheiber elaborated on this point in a piece last year, and I agree with most of it. The reason Matt and I were interested in setting the bar higher than the "liberal hawks should have known Bush wouldn't conduct a proper liberal hawk war" point is that we were very much interested in making a forward-looking argument about future foreign policy issues -- what, on the level of doctrine, we think liberals ought to learn from the Iraq debacle -- rather than merely casting blame about bad judgment in 2002 and 2003 (we did some of that too).

The bar we set, I should say, wasn't quite the notion that "the Iraq project was impossible to pull off under any circumstances" -- "under any circumstances" is so expansive as to be unhelpful here -- but rather that there were no reasonable grounds on which to think the prospects for success were likely. Looking to the future, when the president and his team are out of office and perhaps a super-competent and credible Democratic administration is in power, there may be conflicts that arise where many see humanitarian grounds for an American invasion; our article was intended to make some arguments that could inform those future debates. (Speaking just for myself and moving slightly beyond what Matt and I argued in the piece, I'd say much of what we argued would speak to future conflicts where some seek to launch an invasion for fairly speculative strategic reasons as well.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

A BELLWETHER BLOWOUT? More trouble is brewing for Ken Blackwell’s gubernatorial bid in Ohio. Last week, three prominent Ohio Republicans publicly denounced Blackwell as being outside the mainstream of the Republican Party and announced their support for his Democratic opponent, Ted Strickland. Might Karl Rove, John McCain, and the editor of Human Events, to name a few, be out of touch with what real Americans, real Ohioans -- and even real Republicans -- want?

Leading the charge was Charles “Rocky” Saxbe, a well-known Columbus attorney, former member of the Ohio House of Representatives, and one-time Republican candidate for state attorney general. Saxbe’s father, William Saxbe, is a powerhouse in the Ohio Republican Party, having served as Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, Ohio Attorney General, a member of the United States Senate, and Attorney General of the United States in a political career that spanned four decades.

I caught up with Saxbe this morning, who predicted that Strickland will win in a “blowout.” Saxbe cited Blackwell’s “staunch defense of cutting taxes and starving government” as “wrong for Ohio.” He called Blackwell “intentionally divisive,” adding that his “caricature” of gay people has offended many Republicans and that his position on abortion is too extreme. Saxbe said his view that Blackwell is too radical for the Ohio Republican Party is shared “by a vast number of Republicans.”

Blackwell, who “has been drinking his own Kool-Aid,” is still working off of what Saxbe called the “Bush-Rove 2004 playbook,” which won’t work this year because of a stagnant Ohio economy, a scandal-plagued state GOP, and the unpopular Iraq War. And the GOP won’t have God to fall back on this year, either, according to Saxbe. “This regular recital of having God supporting us and somehow what we do, what the Republicans do that offends a lot of people is nevertheless countenanced by God, I think that’s a hard pill to swallow.”

What about Saxbe’s legal work for Rod Parsley, who often claims God speaks through him and has publicly supported Blackwell? Saxbe drew a line between his own political activities and his law practice, saying that he’s an “equal opportunity lawyer.”

And, of course, inquiring minds want to know: Do Republicans for Strickland -- piled onto the myriad ethical problems faced by the Ohio GOP, from Noe to Ney and beyond -- signal more widespread Republican discontent, and will they have any effect on Ohio’s closely watched Senate race? According to Saxbe, no. Mike DeWine still has their votes.

--Sarah Posner

GORE SPEAKS. Around the time Al Gore's movie came out, a number of conservatives criticized the film for not advocating for a carbon tax. By obscuring the necessity of that policy choice, he was making his case look too easy and the solutions artificially simple. But whether or not he acknowledged it the film, Gore has long been a lover of carbon taxes, and today he came out in favor of one (and basically every other pro-renewable policy you can think of) in a major speech at NYU.

The address is an enormously detailed look at global warming and the myriad ways in which America could respond, so I urge interested readers to take a look at the whole thing. For now, however, I want to comment on the most buzz-worthy of Gore's proposals: He wants to eliminate all payroll taxes (including those for Social Security, unemployment, and Medicare) and replace the revenue with pollution taxes. The proposal would be revenue neutral, which is to say that total revenue would be precisely the same. Progressive-related concerns aside, this seems impossible.

Gore provides no specific numbers for this proposal, but let's say, for the sake of argument, that reaching neutrality requires a $10 tax per gallon of oil (I suspect the actual number would be much higher). As Gore says, the new tax "would discourage business from producing more pollution," which is to say that it would encourage them -- and everyone else -- to use far less carbon – which, in turn, would mean less tax revenue. The government would then either grind to a halt or have to radically and rapidly increase the carbon tax, leading to lower consumption of carbon, which would again deprive the government of revenue, meaning we'd have to either...and so on. I'm no economist, but replacing payroll taxes, which accounts for more than a third of the government's total revenue, with nothing but carbon taxes seems entirely impossible. Given the size of the tax it would require, you'd certainly see a drastic reduction in carbon usage. But you'd be almost as certain to leave a wrecked and ruined economy in your wake.

You can make the argument for or against a carbon tax (I tend to fall slightly against, for reasons I've previously articulated), but this doesn't seem like a logical way to implement it. On the other hand, in the speech, Gore says that, "I was strongly opposed to the nuclear freeze movement, which I saw as simplistic and naive. But, ¾ of the American people supported it — and as I look back on those years I see more clearly now that the outpouring of public support for that very simple and clear mandate changed the political landscape and made it possible for more detailed and sophisticated proposals to eventually be adopted." Gore's a bright guy and this policy seems totally unworkable. But it is radical enough, and simple enough, to spark a conversation, as it's done here. Nicely played, Mr. Gore.

Update: Some back-of-the-envelope math from Nick Beaudrot (scroll down to the third comment) makes me think I'm wrong about this, am radically overstating how hefty the tax would have to be, and making a mistake conflating gas taxes and CO2 taxes (dammit, I know better). So be warned: The author of this post has ventured outside of health care, and may have no idea what he's talking about...

--Ezra Klein

FLACK WATCH. If ever a blog cried out for a snarky, anonymous author, it's this one. But, alas, the new Potomac Flacks blog, dedicated to the "comings and goings of D.C.'s spokesguys and spokesgals" and penned by former Joe Lieberman '04 spokesguy Adam Kovacevich, maintains the decorum one would expect from the Assistant Vice President at Dittus Communications, the title that Adam now holds. With an open comment policy, however, I suspect the snark won't be far behind...or hard to find.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

YOUR LIBERAL MEDIA. Real Clear Politics has entered a content deal with Time magazine, and will now have their blog hosted on Time's servers. "TIME.com hosts a diverse chorus of political voices," said Josh Tyrangiel, the editor, "and we're excited to add the Real Clear Politics blog to the mix."

Except that's not true. Real Clear Politics is an unabashedly conservative site. It's a very, very good one, and there's no conservative commentary I prefer to read, but it's happily and totally right-of-center. A glance at Time's other blogs shows no more "diverse" voices. They have Andrew Sullivan, an occasionally heterodox conservative; Mike Allen, a political reporter; and then a smattering of health, science, and television blogs. Those may all be good blogs, but they don't represent a "diverse chorus of political voices." The chorus lacks, for instance, a single left-of-center voice. Sort of a large oversight, it seems to me.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: SCHOOL'S OUT. You may have caught the new round of debate over the efficacy of homework. Conor Clarke explains both why the homework critics may indeed be correct, but also why this debate, just like most other arguments over education policy as such, matters less than one might think.

--The Editors

WHY DO THEY TORTURE? Ron Suskind, writing in last week's Time, details the path of the al-Qaeda 14, the captured terrorists whom Bush based his appeal for torture on, and provides a good look into the politics of torture within the Bush administration. As he tells it, there were two operating paradigms in the immediate aftermath of Afghanistan. The first belonged to the FBI, which had found "al-Qaeda members assumed their jailers would dismember them. When instead the interrogators presented a tough but very human face, the detainees were confused. Small amenities -- an FBI agent's knowledge of the Koran, unlimited videos and even an operation for an al-Qaeda member's child -- were the kinds of things that eventually turned them." On Bush's other shoulder, wearing horns and a cape, was the CIA, "bursting with urgency and a taste for "whatever's necessary" improvisation." That's the direction Bush took: A directive was issued ordering that top-level detainees would go to the CIA. According to Suskind, it was a mistake:

What is widely known inside the Administration is that once we caught our first decent-size fish--Abu Zubaydah, in March 2002--we used him as an experiment in righteous brutality that in the end produced very little. His interrogation, according to those overseeing it, yielded little from threats and torture. He named countless targets inside the U.S. to stop the pain, all of them immaterial. Indeed, think back to the sudden slew of alerts in the spring and summer of 2002 about attacks on apartment buildings, banks, shopping malls and, of course, nuclear plants. What little of value he did tell us came largely from a more sophisticated approach, using his religious belief in predestination to convince him he miraculously survived his arrest (he was shot three times and nursed to health by U.S. doctors) for a reason: to help the other side.

But in any case, Bush said the CIA's aggressive tactics led Zubaydah to reveal the location of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Again, not quite:

While bits and pieces about Binalshibh and K.S.M. arrived from many sources, the key to capturing the former was information passed to the CIA by the Emir of Qatar--information taken from the files of an al-Jazeera reporter (the Emir owns the network) who secretly visited both terrorists in the Karachi apartment where Binalshibh was subsequently captured in September 2002. As for K.S.M., the key was a cooperative source who met with K.S.M., summarily called the CIA, guided agents to the terrorist's safe house, then collected his $25 million reward and is now safely relocated, with his extended family, somewhere in the U.S.

All of which brings us to the question Paul Krugman asks this morning: "why is the Bush administration so determined to torture people?" Krugman thinks it's the pursuit of executive power. I think it reflects a fundamental immaturity in their approach to the War on Terror and a deep disrespect for empirical data that conflicts with the president's instincts. But it is, in any case, a damn good question.

--Ezra Klein

THE TRUE SPIRIT OF '94. Over the weekend, the Post began its (premature) obituary for congressional Republicans with an electoral advisory issued by none other than Joe Scarborough. I’m happy to give Joe credit for showing, both in the Post and in his Washington Monthly piece, the courage to wonder aloud about how the supposed revolution swept in by the 1994 election has so quickly collapsed, as he did in the opening sentences yesterday:

I can't help but feel sorry for my old Republican friends in Congress who are fighting for their political lives. After all, it must be tough explaining to voters at their local Baptist church's Keep Congress Conservative Day that it was their party that took a $155 billion surplus and turned it into a record-setting $400 billion deficit. How exactly does one convince the teeming masses that Republicans deserve to stay in power despite botching a war, doubling the national debt, keeping company with Jack Abramoff, fumbling the response to Hurricane Katrina, expanding the government at record rates, raising cronyism to an art form, playing poker with Duke Cunningham, isolating America and repeatedly electing Tom DeLay as their House majority leader?

But what’s Joe’s solution for his former colleagues? Blame Bush for everything. And that’s where he loses my vote for Conscientious Conservative of the Year.

Sure, Bush deserves plenty of blame. But to make the president the fall guy is to let Joe’s former colleagues off the hook. He shouldn’t be feeling sorry for them for passing these earmark-laden budgets, or letting Bush ignore the laws they pass by issuing dismissive signing statements; he should be pillorying them. You can’t blame members of Congress for not fulfilling their responsibilities by telling them to shift the blame for their inaction and failures to the president so they can survive another two years…and start bailing on their future responsibilities, too.

Save yourself...blame somebody else! On second thought, maybe that does reflect the true spirit of the 1994 revolution.

--Tom Schaller

THE BULLY IN CHIEF. Back in the 1990s, we were treated to all manner of stories regarding how Bill Clinton, his wife, their marriage, and his presidency were all coming unglued at once. When they were sourced at all, they were sourced as well as the average story concerning Ferris wheels on Mars. The crack pipes on the White House Christmas tree. The tossing of the vase -- or was it a book, a globe, or a bust of Grover Cleveland? Inquiring minds wanted to know.

Somehow, though, it all stayed behind closed doors -- and within the lurid imaginings of people like Gary Aldrich -- since Clinton himself remained capable of sailing through press conferences and interviews by drowning them in wonkish minutiae. No Nixon-shoving-Ziegler moments for him.

This all came back to me because, quite frankly, I think the president of the United States is getting ready to slug somebody. And, based on several recent on-camera performances, all of them readily available to anyone who wants to watch, you wouldn't have to say anything about his momma, his wife, his kids, his dogs, or the fundamental legitimacy of his pedigree to get him to throw down on your ass like the genuine Earnie (The Acorn) Shavers. It appears that all that would be necessary is for you push a question about his policies beyond the limits of whatever talking-points he has on the subject.

First, there were several petulant moments on the sidewalks of New Orleans with NBC's Brian Williams, and then there was that stone-weird episode where he started poking at Matt Lauer while the two were talking in the Oval Office. Then, there was Friday's press conference, and nobody will ever tell me that he wasn't thinking about popping, say, David Gregory in the bazoo around the second or third follow-up. My old friend and mentor, the late George Reedy, wrote extensively thirty years ago about the destructive isolation that is the inevitable byproduct of White House sycophancy and careerism. There are presidents who can rise above it, and presidents who can't, but none of them ever looked like they were ready to toss hands because people questioned their right to torture. It's become truly startling how close we seem to be coming to the "Because I said so, that's why" moment.

--Charles P. Pierce

A DIFFERENT TYPE OF IMMIGRATION. Sebastian Mallaby has a good column arguing that lax immigration policies are one of the better developmental strategies open to wealthy countries. As he argues, if rich countries opened their borders to allow in the equivalent of three percent of their workforce, it would be equal to an extra $300 billion in developmental aid -- and it would be more effectively directed, too, going through remittances rather than Third World bureaucrats. Better yet, many of those who would train in wealthy countries would later repatriate, bringing new and more globally marketable skills, methods, and ideas back to their homelands. Win-win, right?

But one thing Mallaby doesn't go into is that part of any new immigration consensus should, if it seeks to enrich poorer nations, focus on high-skills immigration. For a variety of reasons, when we think of immigration, we tend to mean the importation of menial labor into the country. But as TAP's own Dean Baker loves to point out, that's not inevitable; it's a result of "free trade" deals that focus solely on removing the barriers that impede the flow of cheaply-made manufactured goods or low-wage labor. But what if, instead, the agreements focused on removing the obstacles that prevent bright kids in developing nations from becoming doctors, lawyers, journalists, and researchers in the United States?

Somehow, the case against protectionism in those sectors tends to be less persuasive to an intellectual class convinced of their own unique abilities and irreplaceable contributions. But little would be better for the developing world than to train more of their best and brightest in the lucrative, elite professions that drive global commerce and command global respect. And whatever inefficiencies and inflated costs that currently exist in the manufacturing sectors are miniscule compared to those in the protected, professional sectors. Plus: Deep down, don't we all really want to see Tom Friedman's column reach its logical extension and get outsourced to a bright recruit from elsewhere in this flat world of ours?

--Ezra Klein

GOREWATCH. Obviously no one is saying Al Gore is going to run. Obviously no one is insinuating Al Gore is running. Obviously no one is suggesting that his decision to write The Assault on Reason for Penguin Press and publish it next May is in any way motivated by an impulse to keep testing the field at the precise moment speculation will be highest. Obviously no one is pointing out that a high-profile book tour on a Serious Subject in May 2007 will make Gore look even more attractive while the other candidates hang out at fish frys and chili cookoffs. Obviously no one is noticing that it'll let him tour the primary states and gauge the reaction without officially entering the race. Obviously no one is saying this is a fairly brilliant way to keep his options open and ensure his relevance and visibility if he wants to jump in. Obviously.

--Ezra Klein

WAITING FOR AN ARGUMENT. Better lawyers than I will have fun conducting a weeklong autopsy of John Yoo's execrable attempt in the Sunday New York Times to recast American history as Peronism In Powdered Wigs. However, I was struck by this particular passage:

A reinvigorated presidency enrages President Bush’s critics, who seem to believe that the Constitution created a system of judicial or congressional supremacy. Perhaps this is to be expected of the generation of legislators that views the presidency through the lens of Vietnam and Watergate. But the founders intended that wrongheaded or obsolete legislation and judicial decisions would be checked by presidential action, just as executive overreaching is to be checked by the courts and Congress.

The changes of the 1970’s occurred largely because we had no serious national security threats to United States soil, but plenty of paranoia in the wake of Richard Nixon’s use of national security agencies to spy on political opponents. Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution, which purports to cut off presidential uses of force abroad after 60 days. It passed the Budget and Impoundment Act to eliminate the modest presidential power to rein in wasteful spending. The Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act required the government to get a warrant from a special court to conduct wiretapping for national security reasons.

These statutes have produced little but dysfunction, from flouting of the war powers law, to ever-higher pork barrel spending, to the wall between intelligence and law enforcement that contributed to our failure to stop the 9/11 attacks.

And then there's this: "The White House has declared that the Constitution allows the president to sidestep laws that invade his executive authority." Well, that certainly settles that, doesn't it?

They're not even trying hard any more.

--Charles P. Pierce

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP. Thanks to the folks at AmericaBlog, we have this little preview of a fun family event. Now, aside from the fact that there is no attempt by the good Christian folks at the Family Research Council to distance themselves from the odious Coulter -- who is a walking, living, breathing example of what the nuns used to call a "sin against charity" -- there are so many other wonders to behold. For example, I count at least five people -- George Allen, Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and my own governor, Mitt Romney -- who are rumored to be running for president and who come to wallow with a woman who recommends the assassination of Supreme Court justices. (Hey, Mitt. Bring Annie up here to campaign for your chosen successor, Lt. Governor Kerry Murphy O'Donoghue O'Callaghan Kathleen ni Houlihan Healey.) Not that we here at Tapped engage in guilt by association, but, wow. I hope they're selling Hazmat suits at the hotel gift shop.

Also, just for fun, let's see how many of the Seven Deadly Sins we can total up just in the list of speakers. Personally, I think Newt Gingrich and Bill Bennett both might come damn close to hitting for the cycle, with sloth being the only one in real doubt. It should also be noted that the attorney general is scheduled to come and schmooze this festival of ideological offal. That's the part that's not funny.

--Charles P. Pierce

SOMEHOW, I DOUBT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL WILL NOTICE. This is a great post by Kevin. Over the past couple of decades, California's per capita energy usage has actually declined, even while the nation's shot up. Our smog levels have fallen and our air is cleaner. Why? Because we passed laws -- regulations -- making it so. And while the corporate community howled and promised us economic Armageddon if we dared regulate their activities, the state's done just fine. What a shocker.

--Ezra Klein

BUSH'S MICRO-TARGETTING SUCCESS AND MARKETING FAILURE. That said, I also happen to be in the corner of Boston that draws the most Washington types, and a couple of days ago it drew former AP chief political reporter Ron Fournier, Bush '04 strategist Matthew Dowd, and Democratic consultant Doug Sosnik to talk about their new book, Applebee's America: How Successful Political Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community, which grew out of the seminar Fournier taught at the Institute of Politics and which will be reviewed by E.J. Dionne in the upcoming print edition of The Prospect. A freewheeling discussion followed, and I thought Dowd's admirably candid comments in particular might be of interest to Prospect readers, since Dowd's micro-targetting initiatives were so central to Bush's win in '04:

* The old model of political affiliation, according to Dowd, is that people have stances on issue that lead them to identify with a political party, which then leads them to chose candidates. The new model, which is particularly something you see at work in the exurbs, is that people make lifestyle choices and then look for candidates who seem in tune with their lifestyle choices. Those candidates happen to have a party, and that party has issue positions, but the first mover is lifestyle choices and cultural identification, not issue positions.

* Bush is probably not going to be able to regain the support of the American people unless something big and transformative happens. "You can't market your way back to a gut value," Dowd said, referring to a gut-level connection with the public. "Once you lose that gut value and that gut connection with the American public, you can't get it back through five press conferences." What happened with Bush is that he had the trust of the American public up through the summer of '05, and then over the course of that summer the number of deaths in Iraq rose; the president went on vacation; Cindy Sheehan went after him; and gas prices spiked. This all led to a growing feeling that "the president seems disconnected." "Then all of a sudden Katrina hits, and bam!" people started saying to themselves, "'OK, I was right, he's not the guy I thought he was.'"

* Heading into the fall and into '08, the question the country has is: "Who's going to be the person to make things work again?" "Every time they turn somewhere they get disappointed," said Dowd, so the person who can say, "Let's make stuff work that doesn't work" -- whether that be our disaster response or our military or our economy -- is the person with whom voters will develop a gut-value connection.

That sounds about right -- which means we can now add Dowd to the long list of Republican thinkers who are starting to sound like Democrats. Of course, Dowd's most recent electoral accomplishment was, as E.J. Dionne notes, "trying to identify and bring anti-Bush voters to the polls to renominate an anti-Bush senator who is his party's only hope for holding a Senate seat in a very anti-Bush state," so he could also simply have been reflecting his recent scholarship in anti-Bush thinking.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

PASSING THE BUCK ON DARFUR. During this morning's press conference, the president had this to say about the United Nations and Darfur:

The problem is, is that the United Nations hasn't acted. And so, I can understand why those who are concerned about Darfur are frustrated. I am.

I'd like to see more robust United Nations action. What you'll hear is, "Well, the government of Sudan must invite the United Nations in for us to act." Well, there are other alternatives, like passing a resolution saying, "We're coming in with a U.N. force in order to save lives." …So you asked of levels of frustration. There's a particular level of frustration.

First things first: Legally speaking, the Security Council does not need to pass another resolution to deploy peacekeepers to Darfur without Khartoum’s permission. However, the logistics on the ground in Darfur require that Khartoum grant its consent; the 17,000 troops authorized by Resolution 1706 somehow need to get to the remote region, and once there, they would need to be supplied.

To be sure, this is frustrating the U.N. process, but it is not an insurmountable diplomatic obstacle. So far, China and Russia, which have close ties to the government of Sudan, have been unwilling to press the Khartoum into accepting the blue helmets. If President Bush were truly serious about stopping the genocide, he would pick up the phone, call Hu Jintao and Vladamir Putin, and make Darfur a priority of our bilateral relations with China and Russia.

However, it would seem that the president is not willing to make Darfur a priority that is commensurate with his label of genocide. And so instead of leaning on China and Russia to, in turn, apply pressure on Khartoum, the president would rather absolve himself of responsibility by making the United Nations a scapegoat.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

A PIECE THAT NEEDED TO BE WRITTEN. Many, including this blog, have criticized Rich Lowry and Bill Kristol for their recent proposal to continue and expand the American military presence in Iraq. Some raised the question of whether there are actually troops available to fulfill that mission. Now, two experts have definitely answered that question. Surprise! The answer is no.

Daniel Benjamin and Michèle A. Flournoy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies write that:

According to in-house assessments, fully two-thirds of the Army's operating force, both active and reserve, is now reporting in as "unready"—that is, they lack the equipment, people, or training they need to execute their assigned missions. Not a single one of the Army's Brigade Combat Teams—its core fighting units—currently in the United States is ready to deploy.... In terms of ground-force readiness, the United States is in worse shape than at any time since the aftermath of Vietnam

While this renders the debate over more troops in Iraq moot, it raises a more disturbing question: How exactly would the United States respond to a military crisis in another part of the world?

Also, on a tangential note, doesn't it seem like this issue would be the logical talking point for congressional Democratic candidates struggling to frame redeployment as the more security-conscious position?

--Ben Adler

BOSTON BLOGGING. I'm spending the fall in Boston as a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, but will still be popping over to Tapped to blog every so often. I have to say, after nine years in a Washington whose days of Democratic rule are but a distant memory (even during the late Clinton years, the town's central narratives were set by Republican attack, rather than Democratic initiatives), the most striking thing about being again in Cambridge (other than the 20 degree drop in temperature) is no longer feeling myself to be outside the political mainstream of the local community. In Washington, I've become used to being presumed to represent the left-most point on the spectrum of acceptable opinion in most every room I am in, and long ago made my peace with the frequent razzing for being a "a big lib" that comes with working at The Prospect during this era of Republican dominance. How odd then, to find a community of people here who sound as if they could, without much stretching, be members of the Prospect's editorial staff. And it's not just that the Kennedy School of Government is animated by the spirit of a former Democratic president and his vision of politics as a noble profession. Some of the locals, in fact, are regular Prospect contributors: Jed Purdy, for example, is just down the hall, where's he's spending the year as a fellow at the center for The Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics.

Washington may be as heavily Democratic as Boston, but its liberalism is of an entirely different variety. Indeed, I sometimes think that D.C. liberals are actually more in touch with America than those outside the Beltway, if only because so many of the city's significant players are Republicans and from the hinterlands, and because of our proximity to Virginia and the rest of the South. Live in Washington long enough and you inevitably develop friendships with Republicans, southerners, conservatives, and people in the military and allied agencies, which are headquartered just across the river and whose wealthy contractors and lobbyists have apparently been partly responsible for the outrageous run-up in local property prices. As Michael Crowley so nicely documented, the social and power center of Washington life has moved to Virginia, and whereas the city might once have seemed more in tune with Maryland and the North, these days its orientation is toward the sprawling communities of the new South across the river. This makes D.C. liberals far more conventional than those in New York or Los Angeles, the two great bastions of cultural liberalism and creativity in America, and more pragmatic, perhaps, than Bostonians. It's also why real progress in American life can't come out of Washington. We share too much of the mindset that those liberals who live in real liberal centers are trying to change. This does make us more in tune with America, but also much less capable of leading it in creative new directions.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TIMING IS EVERYTHING. Just as his former deputy confessed to being Robert Novak's source in the outing of Valerie Plame, Sir Colin the (Self-) Righteous came riding into the Senate on a white-paper horse (PDF), stating his moral indignation and opposition to the Bush administration's attempt to legislate the terms of its torture of so-called "enemy combatants."

I must admit, like many in the media, I salivated at the specter of Karl Rove in cuffs, so perfect a villain is he. On the other hand, most reporters I know who have dealt with former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage like the man, believing him to be, in the words of one editor of a respected journal of politics, "a straight-shooter."

But alas, Novak's insistence that Armitage summoned the Prince of Darkness to the State Department in order to dump those beans makes good sense. After all, the argument debunked by Joe Wilson in his famous New York Times op-ed was the one that Powell made himself before the United Nations: that Saddam Hussein had tried to procure uranium yellowcake from Niger. Nothing has ever sullied Powell's reputation so deeply as Wilson's account of his investigation.

By so publicly protesting the president's policy on the treatment of enemy combatants -- and by doing so in a letter to Senator John McCain, a victim of torture himself -- Powell has deftly removed himself, for the moment, from scrutiny in the continuing saga of Plamegate.

Do note, though, dear reader, that nothing in the revelation of Armitage as Novak's Deep Throat exonerates Rove or former vice presidential chief of staff I. Scooter Libby from their roles in dropping the same information, respectively, on Matt Cooper and Judith Miller or, in the case of Libby, lying to the grand jury. And nothing has changed in a timeline that suggests it wasn't Vice President Dick Cheney himself who got the whole counteroffensive rolling against the Wilsons.

--Adele M. Stan

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: W AND THE TB-GB'S. James Crabtree tells the tale of the "curry house coup" that has brought down Tony Blair, laying out how the "Bush's poodle" factor influenced events and why Lebanon may have been the tipping point.

--The Editors

TURNING UP THE HEAT. To follow up on Ezra’s points, let me add that President George W. Bush came out with both barrels blazin', demanding that Congress pass his two bills -- one sanctioning the sort of tribunals the administration wants to use for adjudicating the cases of the "enemy combatants." One can't help but wonder why he's pushing so hard and so indignantly against the likes of Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-Va.), and Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

On the second bill, George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley has repeatedly explained why the president wants the Specter version of the surveillance bill to pass: Without it, Turley says, Bush could be revealed to have broken federal law some 30 times in his domestic spying program.

When a reporter posed a question about what he called the "eavesdropping program," Bush corrected him, saying, "We call that the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program,' Hutch." Later in the press conference, Bush again mentioned the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program,' and then, snickering, asked something along the lines of: "Or, what was it that you called it? The Illegal Eavesdropping Program? IEP instead of TSP?"

Yes, actually, Mr. President, that's what I would call it.

--Adele M. Stan

BUSH'S PRESS CONFERENCE. This is by far the pissiest press conference Bush has given. He's furious. I assume his feet are manacled behind the microphone. Otherwise, he'd be stalking across the stage, tearing apart the podium, and occasionally leaping into the crowd to rip out David Gregory's heart. The content is no finer than the normal Bush fare -- he's currently blaming the U.N. for not stopping the genocide in Darfur -- but the attitude is entirely different. Where Bush is generally petulant and unhappy at these events, he's now snapping at reporters, straightforwardly insulting them, yelling from the podium, losing control, and generally evincing a combativeness and barely suppressed rage that I've never seen from him before. On the bright side, his suit finally fits.

Update: Okay, I was going to end on the suit fits note, but Bush just said: "I don't think the Democrats will take over, because our record on the economy is strong. If the American people take a step back and realize how effective our policies have been given the circumstances, they will embrace our philosophy of government...I believe the reason is because we've cut taxes, and at the same time showed fiscal restraint here in Washington."

I mean, wow.

Update: Okay, he just gave Ann Richards a very generous and respectful remembrance. Good for him.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: HUFF'S FLUFF. Dana Goldstein is more than a little disappointed that Arianna Huffington's new book, On Becoming Fearless, is actually quite timid.

--The Editors

IN WHICH I MAKE VARIOUS POINTS ABOUT HEALTH CARE. NO, REALLY. I've a feeling lots of folks’ eyes glaze over when I start posts with "there's a new study out of...," but hang on a second, this one's a good one. The Commonwealth Fund reports that a full nine out of every 10 Americans who seek private insurance never buy. Of those who do apply for a plan, 20 percent are turned down or charged much more for a preexisting condition. And of those who settle for a cheaper, high-deductible plan, 40 percent eventually realize that some of their medical costs aren't covered by insurance.

In other words, insurance in the private market is expensive -- too expensive for most of those seeking it. Employers aren't picking up a portion of the costs, there's no risk sharing, so your past conditions and personal proclivities come into play, and it's not tax deductible, as it is for businesses. Add in that most folks rich enough to easily purchase private insurance will work in a position or for an employer who offers coverage, and you get a sense of how we're subsidizing -- through employer deductibility -- the wrong end of the spectrum. The bottom line is, for most folks, the only road toward comprehensive coverage is through corporate headquarters.

It is, of course, a little unclear what social good is advanced by making it far cheaper (even in total terms) to buy coverage through your workplace than on your own, unless we believe that avid entrepreneurs should chill out and keep on with their data entry or think corporations don't have quite enough power over their workers. It has always seemed to me that a system where the government guarantees everyone insurance is optimal, and one where individuals are all forced to purchase coverage is workable. But the employer-based system is scarcely even a distant third -- it's a mess. Assume you've got a great idea, a dull job, and a kid with asthma. You look into private-market insurance and realize it's too expensive, or risky. So you stay at your job. That's not precisely the outcome I'd think our society would, or should, favor.

Health care could be an enabler: Were it guaranteed to us all, it could offer the base safety and security that would allow us to pursue dreams, and larks, and low-compensation-but-potentially-high-return ideas. You could start a band, or finance an invention, or start-up a start-up. When those work out, they could be lucrative and beneficial to society. When they don't, you can reenter the mainstream workforce. But if you can't afford health care, but feel you need it, you never get that chance. In that way, employer-based health care drags down our economy, not to mention our personal efforts at fulfillment and innovation. It could be quite the opposite, with health care providing the base security for all sorts of wonderful things and guaranteeing that a failure will not bring long-term, disastrous consequences down on you or your family. It could be.

--Ezra Klein

KRAUTHAMMER ADDENDUM. I think Ezra's comments on Krauthammer's column are apt, but surely his most dubious claims come right after the passage Ezra cites. It's straightforward, after all, that Iran's strategic position in the region would at least be strengthened by becoming a nuclear power, notwithstanding Krauthammer's stronger claims about that. Not at all straightforward (or "undeniable," in Krauthammer's words) are his exceedingly strong claims about the dangers of "permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired by religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days." He goes on: "The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age...Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish." This kind of talk is tough to take seriously -- "infinitely," for example, is sort of a difficult quantification to assess and verify. And these descriptions of Iran's Islamic regime simply don't jibe with that regime's actual 25-year history on the world stage. This is the Islamic version of the dubious "madman" critique of deterrance; it's impossible to definitively disprove such claims, but it's certainly wildly inappropriate to bandy about speculations in such certain and emphatic terms -- not that this is a surprise coming from Krauthammer, or from the editorial page that publishes him and is about to add Michael Gerson.

--Sam Rosenfeld

FEAR NOT THESE DANGERS I PREDICT AND CREATE. I was impressed, reading the latest Charles Krauthammer column, to see that he'd included a relatively accurate assessment of what an attack on Iran would cause: Namely, a death spiral for America's economy, worldwide instability, a vast and rapid increase in retaliatory terrorism, and lots of killing. I was less impressed, and depressingly unsurprised, to watch Krauthammer pull off the predictable pivot to supporting war. His argument appears to be that a nuclear Iran will exercise total hegemony over the Middle East. "Today," writes Krauthammer, "[Iran] is deterred from overt aggression against its neighbors by the threat of conventional retaliation. Against a nuclear Iran, such deterrence becomes far less credible. As its weak, nonnuclear Persian Gulf neighbors accommodate to it, jihadist Iran will gain control of the most strategic region on the globe."

It's unclear why the other nuclear powers in Iran's neck o' the woods -- Israel, Pakistan, and Russia -- will cede the all energy supplies and regional autonomy to old Iran. Nor is it clear why, if Iran currently fears conventional retaliation, they wouldn't buckle under the threat of total, American-led, annihilation if they sought expansion. Indeed, all that's really clear is that Krauthammer wants to go on record saying war will be really, really, really bad before he agitates us into one. That way, he's both prescient and tough. And when you've got those two under your belt, "strategically sound" isn't really an urgent acquisition.

--Ezra Klein

ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS. I think the finest entry in TAP's debate over the fate of the middle class comes, sadly, from Paul Krugman in The New York Times. As he argues, the very fact that there is a debate is, in itself, the answer. In the period after World War II, the living standards of Americans improved unambiguously. Not so since. Over the last three decades, the rich have rapidly gained ground, while the middle class saw their climb slow. That they may have remained affluent enough is not a satisfactory rejoinder to the question of why their growth slowed.

That's not to say there's been no improvement, or that the internet isn't worth something. You could jack up my income into the millions, and I'd still prefer to exist on my paltry salary in the age of the web. That doesn't mean, however, that I don't want my salary to be better today, nor that it shouldn't be. The country can enjoy technological advances and relative affluence while still wondering why growth has accelerated among the rich and slowed for the middle class. As Krugman argues, "What we should be debating is why technological and economic progress has done so little for most Americans, and what changes in government policies would spread the benefits of progress more widely." The questions over the affluence of the middle class, while interesting, are basically beside the point.

--Ezra Klein

ROSE RESPONDS. See Steve Rose's newly published response to his tough crowd of critics in our debate on the middle class; Larry Mishel will have his second-round thoughts posted early next week.

--The Editors

CAPITOL DOMES AND HOWDY DOODYGATE. Eve Fairbanks points us to Radar's "worst hair in Congress" rankings. Readers with good memories will recall that two of the three exponents of trend number four, "Childlike hair," played key rolls in the "Howdy Doody-looking nimrod" incident of 2005.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE ACTIVISM INDUSTRY. Dana Fisher, author of the new book Activism, Inc., argues that the left's model of outsourced grassroots canvassing weakens progressive politics in America.

--The Editors

THE LESSON OF RHODE ISLAND. The Republican story on Connecticut and Rhode Island, repeated a little too credulously by much of the press, is that the Dems shoved aside their moderate incumbent, Joe Lieberman, while the Republicans wisely kept theirs, Lincoln Chafee. But hold on a minute. Didn't voters in both states' primaries choose the guy who is opposed to Bush's Iraq War? The man who narrowly lost to Chafee, Warwick Mayor Stephen Laffey, was actually the faithful Bush supporter, just like Joe Lieberman. The RNC held its nose and poured money into Chafee's race, calculating that the moderate Chafee had the better chance of holding onto the seat for the GOP in the blue, blue Ocean State. But Chafee's win hardly validates voter enthusiasm for Bush.

Maybe the Republican National Committee should be disparaging Chafee in the same terms they disparage Lamont. (How do you spell Defeat-o-Rep?)

--Robert Kuttner

A GOOD START. The always worthwhile Jon Cohn has a terrific article on the burgeoning Democratic consensus around card check that stumbles on one point. "Bloggers on the left," he writes, "take notice: Last week, the dreaded Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) got something right. And the only major political writer who seems to have noticed was the equally dreaded David Broder."

That something was endorsing card check. As it currently stands, the path to creating a union runs through an NLRB election process so difficult and skewed that employers can essentially decide the outcome. Add in that the fines for firing organizing workers are laughably low, and organizing has become nearly impossible -- it's too dangerous for the workers involved. The alternative is card check, where if a majority of workers sign a card expressing their desire for a union, they have one. It's already the law in Canada, and progressives are seeking to import it here. This week, the DLC endorsed it. Good for them.

That said, this example of the DLC getting it right is the exception that proves the rule. Card check isn't some edgy policy preference; it should be the bare minimum required for entry into polite, progressive company. I'm glad to see the DLC supporting it, but the fact that their endorsement of such a fundamental and fair policy change makes news is proof that they still have a long way to go.

--Ezra Klein

THE THORNY ROSE OF TEXAS. The reasons liberals will miss former Texas Governor Ann Richards, who died yesterday of cancer, are many -- not least among them her biting wit and willingness to turn it on the Bushes. She first caught the nation's eye as the keynote speaker at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, at which she took on the transplant-to-Texas and bumbling George Herbert Walker Bush, playing on the Connecticut native's patrician roots. "Poor George," she said in her trademark twang, "he can't help it; he was born with a silver foot in his mouth."

Of course, the Bushes -- that vindictive dynasty of mediocrity -- got their revenge when, in 1994, Richards was defeated in the Texas gubernatorial race by none other than our current president.

My reasons for mourning Richards are more personal. She was a feminist, a champion of civil and gay rights, and a recovering alcoholic who went public with her recovery. It was as if she were my personal champion, the patron saint of queer, feminist recovering alcoholics.

Any of those things would mark her as a woman of courage anywhere in the country; but to be all of those things in the great state of Texas, as it turned ever-rightward, required a steely gut. Throughout her life, Richards remained true to her larger-than-life self without descending to the cheap trick of self-parody.

I last saw Richards at a 2004 Democratic fundraiser I covered for the Washington Blade, the capital city's gay newspaper. With the GOP flogging the gay marriage issue to shore up its base, the Democrats, it seemed, wanted to talk about anything but. Their purpose that night -- in addition to raising lots of money, of course -- was to demonstrate party unity, apparently by expressing a middle-of-the-road message. It would have worked, perhaps, except for the fact that Richards had been chosen as the evening's emcee.

"We are so unified," she said, "that before their wives got wind of it, Joe Lieberman and Al Sharpton were on their way to San Francisco for a marriage license."

May she rest in peace.

--Adele M. Stan

OH, THE HORROR. It's nice that the administration's Torture Enabling Act of 2006 -- a provision of the Omnibus Gin-Up the Crazee Base bill -- may well get sunk by its own side, and equally spiffy that the last of the scales seem to have fallen from the eyes of Colin "Day Late, Dollar Short" Powell. However, it seems to me that the struggle over this issue is distracting from the equally atrocious attempts to legitimize retroactively what are pretty clearly impeachable offenses -- namely, the president's brazen law-breaking with regard to warrantless electronic surveillance. The Specter bill is awful for a whole host of reasons -- not the least of which for the demonstrable surrender of congressional powers that is part of its very existence, and for the craven surrender of American values without which there would be nothing left of the bill except the punctuation marks. Any compromise that I've seen -- even Feinstein's, which is the best of them -- is simply a higher class of horrid. On the one hand, in the context of overseas prisoners, we have John McCain talking about how we should hold to our values while, in the context of the rights of the average American citizen, there seems to be no great effort to keep from pitching those values, piecemeal, out the window in order to appease the lawless.

--Charles P. Pierce

AIRING THEIR DIRTY LAUNDRY. Ezra's nice grab of the Verizon-NSA connection from Raw Story happily recalls the glory days of Bush Scandals Past -- specifically, the long, complicated and very unresolved Bush 41 jiggery pokery involving the Banco Nazionale del Lavoro and its possible role in using agricultural credits to arm...wait for it...Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and the subsequent efforts of the Department of Justice in stonewalling the investigations thereof.
Here’s a good précis of the whole business, and if you read this speech from the late great Henry Gonzalez, you will note that he didn't think very much of the work done by William Barr, then the acting attorney general and, in today's news, now the chief legal apologist for Verizon.

One of the worst mistakes the old Democratic congressional majority made was in not fully closing the coffin lid on things like this, the BCCI affair, and the Iran-Contra scandal, and not doing so in such a way that public careers were decisively ended. (This is a lesson I hope is remembered, if Congress changes hands this fall, by every Democratic congresscritter who becomes the head of an oversight committee.) Instead, many of the principals came back in 2001, and we're now seven years on into the Night of the Living Dead.

--Charles P. Pierce

THE WAR ON TERROR/ISLAM/RADICAL ISLAM/BROWN PEOPLE. Last night, Steve Clemons hosted an evening with George Soros. Held at The Metropolitan Club -- which initially turned me away for lacking a tie, and only admitting me once I'd radically enhanced my elegance with the finest in $4 neckwear sold by the umbrella stand at 17th Street and I -- the evening was dominated by an argument pitting the dynamic duo of Mort Kondracke and Adrian Wooldridge against Soros on the acceptability of the War on Terror metaphor.

Wooldridge, Kondracke, and the rest of that peculiar breed of conservative who spends their days beating their chests and their nights cowering beneath the bed are, to me, among the most baffling figures in American political life. Their argument last night was that the War on Terror was, if anything, a PC understatement, a way to inoffensively mask the true battle which was against "radical Islam." Why you'd err in that direction, rather than calling it a War on al-Qaeda, escapes me. When someone is killed in a drug crime, the police don't declare war on everyone who seeks to enrich themselves through extralegal means.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the Islamic world is right. In the minds of those behind this campaign, this is indeed a war against Islam. The enemy is religious, his skin is brown, his God is Allah. When Wooldridge and Kondracke complain that liberals don't adequately respect the massive exercise in self-restraint and multiculturalism exhibited in the moniker, they lay bare that they're seeking an entirely different fight. Most liberals I know think we're literally at war with al-Qaeda, its operational affiliates, and its imitators, and are bogged down in a useless fight against Iraq. Elements of the right, it seems, are engaged in a clash of civilizations. A crusade by any other name...

--Ezra Klein

ADVENTURES IN PICKING UP THE DAMN PHONE. George Will is scandalized today by page 38 of "the American Prospect, an impeccably progressive magazine," which carries "a full-page advertisement denouncing something responsible for ‘lies, deception, immorality, corruption, and widespread labor, human rights and environmental abuses’ and for having brought ‘great hardship and despair to people and communities throughout the world.’" That something? Coca-Cola. Dum dum dum!

For those interested in the allegations, KillerCoke.org can fill you in. Will, however, is struck by this example of "liberalism as condescension," a "philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes." Or something. So far as I can tell, Killer Coke is worried about all the union organizers who keep getting murdered when they try to unionize foreign Coca-Cola plants, which isn't something I assume the average American consumer supports.

That aside, though, this seems like a bit of a stretch -- grabbing a random advertisement in a liberal magazine and using it as evidence of the movement's philosophy. Curious about the accuracy of this journalistic method, I picked up the (damn) phone and called the advertising department of Will's employer and publisher, The Washington Post, where I talked to a wonderfully friendly sales representative. I read her the Killer Coke ad and asked if they had any guidelines that would forbid it.

"Well," she said, "obviously all corporate advocacy ads have to be approved by our legal department and we are a family newspaper and want it to be acceptable for all ages, so nothing explicit or graphic. But as long as they are not offensive -- like escort ads -- that would be okay." So could I run this ad, I asked? "I would say definitely so. In my opinion, it's perfectly fine."

Why does George Will hate capitalism?

--Ezra Klein

LES ETUDIANTS. Over at Open University, David Bell makes an argument about Harvard's decision to drop early admissions:

Two cheers for Harvard for getting rid of early admissions.... Yet if Harvard really wants to do something to make admissions fairer, it should consider doing away with the most inane and manipulable part of the present process: the application essay.

Bell goes on to explain how the emphasis on "character" demonstration through the personal essay and extracurricular resume is ineffectual at actually gauging character and presents an opportunity for the wealthy to give their children an unfair advantage in admissions. But here's the catch; as Bell acknowledges, all systems, even the most ostensibly meritocratic, like France's, where elite college admissions are determined entirely on knowledge-based test scores, will be gamed by people with the most resources. But, as Bell points out, at least a system like France's would mean our ambitious students would spend their time studying actual subjects on which they'll be tested rather than amassing an irrelevant checklist of athletic activities and studying for tests like the SATs.

This is all valid, but it's worth considering the difference between the college experience in France and that in the United States. In France most top universities are large schools in large cities. Students live off-campus, and many live with their parents. Student social-life does not revolve around campus to anywhere near the same extent that it does in most American universities. So schools in America are not merely looking for the best-educated student body. They also want students who will contribute to a lively environment outside of the classroom. Looking at extracurriculars, and using other soft measures of personality, make a certain amount of sense for schools with those considerations. Now, I think a lot of schools place far too much emphasis on athletics, at the expense of academic quality and other considerations. But the proper balance may lie somewhere between our current system and the French one.

Also, there is the question of what is best for the students. There is plenty of evidence that Bell is right to advocate for a more rigorous education for high school students. But many of the activities that college admissions officers currently prize have their own rewards, and, in some cases, like community service, they contribute to society as a whole. Having a reward structure in place that encourages high school students to put some of their time outside the classroom into productive non-academic endeavors, be they artistic, athletic, or volunteer, has intrinsic value. Again, I think Bell is right to encourage some shift in the other direction, but I'd say Europe's system is not entirely superior to ours when it comes to higher education.

--Ben Adler

"OUTRAGEOUS AND DISHONEST." The Washington Post's Daphna Linzer has one hell of an aggressive piece out today on the IAEA's apoplectic reaction to the House Intelligence Committee's recent report on Iran's nuclear capabilities.

Yesterday's letter, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post, was the first time the IAEA has publicly disputed U.S. allegations about its Iran investigation. The agency noted five major errors in the committee's 29-page report, which said Iran's nuclear capabilities are more advanced than either the IAEA or U.S. intelligence has shown.

Among the committee's assertions is that Iran is producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz. The IAEA called that "incorrect," noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent under IAEA monitoring...

Privately, several intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate. Hoekstra's office said the report was reviewed by the office of John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.

Negroponte's spokesman, John Callahan, said in a statement that his office "reviewed the report and provided its response to the committee on July 24, '06." He did not say whether it had approved or challenged any of the claims about Iran's capabilities.

--Sam Rosenfeld

IT'S ALRIGHT, MA BELL. Ezra's post on Verizon's cronyish involvement in the administration's spying program prompts me to mention this piece by Zander Dreyer that we ran a few months ago, which makes a useful argument drawing the connection between the adminsitration's pro-monopoly line on telecom issues and its interest in domestic surveillance. It's worth a look.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: COLD CASE? The New Jersey Senate race is getting mighty ugly, with a Republican U.S. prosecutor opening an investigation into property leased by Bob Menendez and Democrats whispering about dropping the candidate. How strong are the ethics charges? Midterm Madness's own Thurmon Hart takes a look.

--The Editors

WILLIAM BARR: WORKING FOR YOU. My good friend Brian Beutler just published an explosive piece at Raw Story potentially implicating Verizon in the NSA wiretapping scandal and illuminating a fascinating nexus between the company's legal department and the Republican Party. It turns out that William Barr, Bush 41's Attorney General and a top Reagan advisor, is the head legal counsel and a VP for Verizon. Not surprisingly, given his experience in government, he's routinely called up by the Senate to testify on legal and intelligence matters. Here are a few choice samples:

"I believe that the critical legal powers are granted directly by the Constitution itself, not by Congressional enactments. When the Nation itself is under attack by a foreign enemy, the Constitution vests the broadest possible defense powers in the President...No foreign threat can arise that the Constitution does not empower the President to meet and defeat."

"While the PATRIOT Act was a major step forward and remedied FISA's most severe problems, I believe FISA remains too restrictive in a fundamental respect. It still requires that the government establish 'probable cause' that an individual is either 'a foreign power' or an 'agent of foreign power'"

In other words, a Vice President and head legal advisor of Verizon is a longtime Republican appointee who has repeatedly appeared before Congress to advocate for greater executive powers, dismiss FISA as "too restrictive," and deride the idea that "the government [should] go to a judge to obtain an order" as making "absolutely no sense since it is precisely in the terrorism context that the need for speed is most acute." To appreciate the full hackishness of that quote, you need to remember that wiretaps can be placed immediately, and the judicial order can be granted retroactively within three days.

The questions this raises regarding Verizon's role and transparency are obvious. As a Verizon customer, I don't feel particularly protected knowing my bills are going to pay William Barr's salary so he can assure the company's top brass and the United States Senate that warrantless wiretapping is A-OK. And I'd like a clear answer from the company as to what their privacy policies are, and whether they too think "probable cause" is too restrictive a standard.

--Ezra Klein

FORWARD TOGETHER. Today saw some truly horrific carnage in Baghdad, with over 100 people killed or found dead throughout the city, and another of the double-wave bombing attacks designed to maximize deaths:

At least 62 unidentified bullet-riddled corpses--all bearing signs of torture--have been found throughout the city since Tuesday night, said Brig. Gen. Abdullah Mahmood of the Interior Ministry.

Some of the bodies had been beheaded. Attacks on police patrols killed an additional 27 people Wednesday morning, officials said.

The bloodiest scene unfolded at 9 a.m., when a car bomb exploded near an indoor stadium in Baghdad, killing 12 traffic policemen and wounded 13 others, authorities said. When a crowd gathered to help the wounded, another bomb detonated, killing seven civilians and wounding 47 others.

Yesterday's much-discussed Lowry-Kristol column focused on the urgent strategic need to secure Baghdad, and in fact a more modest version of that project was actually launched last month -- a security crackdown called Operation Forward Together meant to curb rampant sectarian violence in the capital city. The operation appeared to yield results, with commanders touting a remarkable 52 percent drop in Baghdad's murder rate from July to August. But then the Iraqi Health Ministry released figures showing that the number of violent deaths in the Baghdad area in August -- 1,536 -- was actually quite close to July's figure. It turns out (link via Americablog) the military had only counted drive-by shootings and torture and executions by death squads, and excluded deaths by mortars, rockets, bombs, and suicide attacks from the count.

--Sam Rosenfeld

CONSERVATIVE CASE FOR REPUBLICAN DEFEAT. The new issue of the Washington Monthly has a truly inspired collection of conservative arguments for a Republican defeat this November. The highlight is surely Christopher Buckley's piece, which expresses the libertarian scorn for George W. Bush's "compassionate" conservatism. Buckley coins a new term for it, "incontinent conservatism," which seems particularly apt given his list of grievances ("bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief.")

Perhaps the reason that Buckley's disappointment seems so genuine, while one may suspect David Frum of crying crocodile tears, is that Buckley concedes that Republicans betrayal of conservatism is nothing new. He acknowledges a laundry list of instances where Richard Nixon and even conservative savior Ronald Reagan (gasp!) sold out to the big-government beast. But he adds, reasonably enough:

Despite the failures, one had the sense that the party at least knew in its heart of hearts that these were failures, either of principle or execution. Today one has no sense, aside from a slight lowering of the swagger-mometer, that the president or the Republican Congress is in the least bit chastened by their debacles.

It would be nice to think that the country is filled with principled conservatives who will stay at home this November, but I'm sure instead they'll just go for option B and figure out a way to win on good old-fashioned fear-mongering.

--Ben Adler

TO FIRE, OR NOT TO FIRE? It looks, rather surprisingly, like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner are readying to take substantive stands against the Bush administration’s attempt to torture by another name. The nut of the disagreement is over Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." The Bushies, through some complicated legal footwork, are trying to invalidate that prohibition. McCain, Graham, and Warner appear unwilling to allow it, and are crafting their own compromise that actually follows the Geneva Convention.

Right now, we basically have two tiers of interrogation: The Army, which fully abides by the Geneva Conventions, and the CIA, which tortures. That may make sense, save for the total lack of evidence that the CIA’s program is either more effective or a useful compliment to the traditional methods of interrogation. Lt. General John Kimmons, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, explained to reporters last week that:

No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that. And, moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, through the use of abusive techniques, would be of questionable credibility, and additionally it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can’t afford to go there. Some of our most significant successes on the battlefield have been—in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically all of them, have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized humane interrogation practices, in clever ways that you would hope Americans would use them, to push the envelope within the bookends of legal, moral, and ethical, now as further refined by this field manual. So we don’t need abusive practices in there.

Now, either the Bush administration believes Kimmons is dangerously uninformed on the outcomes of various interrogation methods and should be fired, or they agree with him and should listen to his advice. If, however, you think the War on Terror is The Most Important Thing Ever and no mistakes can be made nor weaknesses allowed, retaining a deputy chief of intelligence who doesn't understand the art of gathering intelligence from prisoners is a pretty massive oversight.

--Ezra Klein

WHY EMANUEL HATES DEAN. In a funny bit of intra-Democratic news from this week, the burgeoning rapprochement between Rahm Emanuel and Howard Dean included an agreement on how much the DNC would spend in 2006, and almost contained a "good behavior" clause in which the DNC would donate more money if Emanuel stopped bashing them to the press. It's a testament to Emanuel's loathing of Dean that the DNC even considered such a play, but it's more understandable in the context of this article reporting what the two national party committees will spend on 2006: The DNC will contribute $12 million to Democratic efforts, the RNC will give $60 million.

This, by the way, is why I remain somewhat bearish on the Democrat's chances in 2006. While the national mood may favor the left, the GOP still enjoys a massive advantage in funding, voter technologies, microtargeting databases, and GOTV efforts. Add in dropping gas prices and the power of the bully pulpit (which Bush has used to great effect over the last month), and Democrats face a steeper uphill road than the media is necessarily reporting. Whatever the mood is now, the right has not yet begun to campaign. And while voters don't much like how they govern, they tend to respond to how they politick.

--Ezra Klein

WYNN WINNING. A while back our boss Bob Kuttner (assisted by wunderkind intern Asheesh Siddique) put some real thought and effort into actually discerning who were the most indefensibly sell-outish Democrats in the House. Among the "faithless fifteen" they came up with was Maryland's Al Wynn, who's of course garnered blogospheric attention more recently for his anti-net neutrality shenanigans and faced an extremely serious primary challenge yesterday from Donna Edwards. Though it may still be too close to call, it now appears that Wynn will be able to pull out a victory against Edwards. But this is the kind of primary challenge -- a strike against bad behavior engaged by incumbents who don't need to be engaging in bad behavior -- that's healthy and fruitful even if it doesn't succeed.

Check out Midterm Madness today for more coverage of yesterday's primaries.

--Sam Rosenfeld

IT'S NOT A CRUSADE; IT'S AN AWAKENING. The Washington Post's Peter Baker today reports some mind-blowing remarks made by President George W. Bush on the subject of America the Good versus the collective Great Satan known as the Islamo-fascists:

President Bush said yesterday that he senses a "Third Awakening" of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as "a confrontation between good and evil."

(Look here for an authoritative explanation of America's "Great Awakenings.")

The president's remarks were made to a "handful of journalists," described by Baker as conservative, in an on-the-record meeting Bush convened in the Oval Office. (Alas, despite my religious fervor for fighting evil-doers, I was not invited.)

Baker notes that after weathering criticism in the days following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, for defining the U.S. response as a "crusade," the president has been careful to avoid characterizing our nation's conflicts on Islamic terrain in such medieval terms.

But, as evidenced by Bush's description in Monday night's presidential address of current U.S. adventures abroad as a "clash for civilization," we're in an election year, so any escalation of vitriol and violence evoked by such a characterization can only help the administration's cause.

--Adele M. Stan

TALKIN' BOUT MY GENERATION. Talking about the strange perceptual gap wherein the middle class feels insecure even while it wields relative affluence, Scott Winship writes:

it's the I'm OK-They're Not Syndrome at work. In The Optimism Gap, journalist David Whitman described a phenomenon common to a number of areas of public opinion. People will often perceive society to be in trouble or declining on some indicator while at the same time perceiving themselves to be doing quite well. So the educational system is a mess, but my kids' school is just fine. Politicians are corrupt, except for mine. Family values are a thing of the past, except in my family where they thrive.

In other words, Americans accurately perceive their own situation, but misperceive the economy at large. And we, as political pundits, watchers, and observers latch onto their judgments about the country as a whole, not about their personal situations.

To some degree, that's correct. Or at least, was. But I'd argue that the actual data shows deterioration among individual's perceptions of their own situation. When The Washington Post coined the term "mortgage moms," they did so based on numbers showing a solid majority of voters believed their incomes were not keeping pace with inflation. And so much as I talk about the uninsured and quality of care, the real driver of political concerns over health insurance is that individuals fear their ability to afford future illness. So while Scott has a point about the “I'm OK, You're Not” strain in American life, I'm not sure it explains the paradox he's examining. A better -- and simpler -- explanation is that the middle class, while relatively affluent, isn't gaining ground that rapidly, and sees various key costs (e.g., fuel, energy, rent, insurance) easily outpacing their incomes. In other words, they're right.

--Ezra Klein

WAR SUPPORTERS' LAST THROES. Everyone's getting their digs in on Rich Lowry and Bill Kristol’s "More troops to Iraq!"column in The Washington Post, as, indeed, they should. But I think today's chutzpah award has to go to TNR's Lawrence Kaplan, who has a new article hectoring pro-withdrawal commentators for feeling insufficiently bad about the sectarian bloodletting that will likely accelerate in the absence of the current buffer provided by U.S. forces. "The moral cost of abandoning a country we have turned inside-out seems not to have made the slightest impression on opinion-makers," he writes.

This is not actually true -- plenty of advocates for withdrawal have wrestled soberly and in earnest with the likely consequences for Iraqis of an American withdrawal. (Matt's dispatch in the September print issue argues explicitly that dynamics have reached a point in the Iraqi civil war such that neither withdrawal nor some other drastic American policy change, including the secure-Baghdad-at-last plan, can reasonably be expected to produce an improved outcome for Iraqis.) It is indeed true that professional politicians like John Kerry prefer to frame their advocacy for withdrawal in a hopeful argument that may have once been true but is now probably outdated (i.e., "this could spur Iraqis to try to resolve their own disagreements politically") rather than to make a lot of explicit statements along the lines of "we must finally retreat in full dishonor from this fiasco and leave Iraqis to accelerate the cycle of sectarian and ethnic slaughter that our own war of folly unleashed upon them." This provides Kaplan with some easy-target quotes to call out in indignation, but it doesn't really tell us much.

Kaplan, meanwhile, fails to do either of two things: On the one hand, he refrains from really making the explicit argument that Americans should continue to die at slow but steady rates indefinitely, with no compelling prospects of dynamics changing in Iraq, for the sole purpose of continuing to provide the buffer preventing Iraq's medium-intensity civil war from accelerating into a high-intensity one. On the other hand, he doesn't offer any actual prescription for changing the dynamics of the war -- something Lowry and Kristol at least have the conviction to do, whatever the merits of their advice. All Kaplan calls for is "staying until Iraqis have the means to restrain the forces unleashed by our own actions." But a good deal more than sheer "heartlessness" underlies withdrawal advocates' skepticism about the feasibility of the U.S. military resolving the Iraqis' own internal political conflicts. Matt and I discussed some of the issues and difficulties associated with third-party engagement in civil conflicts here and here -- in the context, I should note, of explaining why it had been a bad idea to launch this war in the first place.

The essence of a quagmire is, of course, the absence of any good options. Withdrawal advocates argue that it's the least bad option. Kaplan, the war supporter, now attacks those advocates for failing to appreciate sufficiently that the Iraq War is, in fact, a quagmire and that their preferred bad option is, in fact, bad. Call it the politics of churlishness.

UPDATE: More from Kevin Drum here.

--Sam Rosenfeld

A DIFFERENT LOOK AT 9-11. The leading lights of conservative thought labor through the day to produce enough big fish to fill enough small barrels. A woman casts herself wistfully as the Mrs. Miniver of World War III (or IV.) The editor of Commentary wallows in existential dread and can't keep it from between his toes. A suburban dad is baffled as to why he -- and his local Best Buy -- are not living their lives in a garrison state, and is even more confused about whether or not that's a good thing. The second generation of the Pipes family looks around for another threat to which he can attach the family helium bottle. And the World's Second-Most Annoying Canadian -- David Frum's retired the Champion's Cup, alas -- once again wins a round of the JEOPARDY home game against two opponents made entirely of straw. Of course, it's the liberals who are bereft of ideas. Gaze in awe.

--Charles P. Pierce

GOREWATCH. Pat Buchanan, no stranger to insurgent candidacies, is arguing that Al Gore is well-placed to defeat Hillary Clinton and take the Democratic nomination. Most of his points are, I think, perceptive and convincing, but his final grafs falter. "Hillary," Buchanan writes, "has the option of waiting much longer to decide when and whether to get in. Gore must decide soon after November."

I think it's quite the opposite. As I argued in my profile of Gore, the longer he stays out, the stronger his chances of winning become. Were he to enter early, the initial shock would wear off and the psychodrama of Gore versus Clinton would emerge, harming and marginalizing both candidates. More likely is the scenario wherein Gore enters late in 2007, becoming the exciting deus-ex-machina candidate of the race. If Hillary is dominant but not thrilling, or absent but not replaced, Gore could enter as the bigfoot the Democratic base (and media) was waiting for, grabbing headlines, attention, and momentum along the way. In that scenario, the heretofore ineffectual anti-Hillary voters would coalesce around the last, best hope for an alternative, and Gore could argue that his entrance was motivated by the timidity, torpidity, and ineffectuality of the current crop of candidates. That's always a better reason than the more honest "Because I want to be president."

--Ezra Klein

CHOOSING FRANK LUNTZ OVER DARFUR. If the political dynamic surrounding Darfur remains static, the region has about three weeks before African Union forces are replaced by the Sudanese military and its genocidal proxies. Meanwhile, Kofi Annan is struggling to sound the alarm on the sheer urgency of the crisis. Yesterday, he appeared in person before the Council and, in an attempt to raise the individual Council members to action, gave a rather
stirring speech.

In unusually blunt language, Annan called on “additional voices” (read: key member states like China, Russia, and the United States) to do their utmost to press Sudan to consent to a U.N. peacekeeping operation for Darfur. But rather than stick around to give the American response, sources tell me that Ambassador Bolton skipped out of the briefing immediately following Annan’s speech. And though other permanent representatives, such as Emyr Jones Parry of the United Kingdom, stayed, Bolton dispatched only a mid-level “minister counselor for political affairs” to represent the United States for the duration of the Security Council meeting.

So why was Bolton in such a hurry? He had an important U.N.-trashing fete to attend across town at the Hudson Institute. There, Republican pollster Frank Luntz rolled out a new survey showing that Republicans could profit from making the United Nations a “wedge issue” in upcoming elections. And to make sure that the U.N. press corps got this message, the United States mission invited Luntz to the U.N. building and organized a press briefing for him there. Hackish articles, like this one from Benny Avni of the New York Sun, followed.

Meanwhile, I can only help but think that if Ambassador Bolton expressed a similar determination to publicize that Darfur is three weeks from doomsday, more would get done to avert the possible disaster. But apparently his priorities are elsewhere.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

FIGHTING BACK. When we last checked in, the Corner's Cliff May had used the occasion of croc hunter Steve Irwin's death to mount a sustained stingray-as-Islamofascism metaphor, noting that "every stingray is a very real and present danger." It appears that Australians may have missed the metaphor part of May's call to arms and are retaliating swiftly against stingrays all along the country's eastern coast. Australians' resolve is both notable and admirable, but there's clearly a danger of going too far here. What's needed is for a leader to calm the nation, as President Bush did in his famous Friday speech after 9-11, and emphasize that this is not a war against stingrays -- a species of peace -- but rather those who would tarnish that noble species' name through terror.

--Sam Rosenfeld

LIVE LONG AND PROSPER, DEPNDING ON WHO YOU ARE. I talk a lot about health care and economic inequality, but too rarely about health inequality. But a new study out today sheds some light on this issue: If you subdivide various demographics, you find life expectancies differ by decades, with some American groups exhibiting outcomes more typical of developing nations. Indeed, if you compare Asian women with urban black men, you see a life expectancy difference of 21 years. That's huge.

So much as I'd like to blame this on a lack of insurance and care disparities, actual medical coverage probably accounts for only a small portion of the inequality. Lifestyle factors -- notably stress, obesity, diet, smoking, exercise, etc. -- were the primary determinants. Some of it, like diet and stress, connects heavily to economic inequality, some is cultural. But, when taken together, the difference is shaving decades off the life of massive swaths of America.

The article also ranks the states by life expectancy. Number one is Hawaii. Number 51 -- the shortest life expectancy -- is Washington, D.C. Yikes.

--Ezra Klein

THANK YOU FOR CARING. This morning, on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show, NATO Commander Gen. James L. Jones, Jr., who is leading NATO efforts in Afghanistan, thanked the host for showing "interest" in "this important part of the world." He sounded truly grateful. That, on the day after the fifth anniversary of al Qaeda's attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and given the current chaos and killing in that troubled land, the general should be in anything other than extreme demand as a talk-show guest is downright pathetic.

NATO appears to have led successful attacks, killing hundreds of Taliban fighters in recent weeks, but the Taliban remain strong and resurgent. Recently, a provincial Afghan governor was assassinated by the Taliban. Then, marchers in the governor's funeral procession were killed.

Calls by NATO brass for more troops for the Afghan campaign have so far gone unheeded by the alliance's member countries. And precious little has been done to create any kind of infrastructure in this nation, where fewer than 10 percent of households are hooked into an electrical grid. Gen. Jones today asked, as liberal internationalists have advocated for years, for a real commitment from the West for the rebuilding of an ancient nation.

--Adele M. Stan

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: TOO MUCH INFORMATION. Since the president and his team are going on the offensive once again in touting their tough security posture in the war on terror, it's worth emphasizing a point: Moral qualms aside, pervasive surveillance and torture don't actually serve as effective investigative techniques, as Matt reminds us today. They produce bad info, and way, way too much of it.

--The Editors

EARMARKS. In his triumphant New Republic debut, Brad Plumer makes the liberal case for pork. "It's not," he writes, "because pork projects are defensible on the merits, although they sometimes can be. It's not because they create jobs, although they can do that, too. Rather, it's because, without pork, activist government would wither and die." Using the examples of Reagan's 1986 Tax Reform and Clinton's first budget, he explains that pork are bargaining chits that allow tough, controversial pieces of legislation to squeeze through the legislative process.

I'll buy that, but I wonder if it's not becoming a relatively obsolete consideration: As Congress continues evolving into a more parliamentary institution and party loyalty grows easier to enforce, I think we'll begin seeing an easier ride for tough legislation. Think of the Medicare Drug Bill, which was anathema to the left and a grotesque mutant to the right, but which nevertheless squeezed through. If massive legislation with no natural constituency can survive, large programs satisfying long-held ideological desires should be able to rush through on party-line votes. Minorities, of course, are and will continue to be completely impotent.

Nevertheless, I find it tough to get exercised over pork. While much of it is somewhat unnecessary, I don't really have a problem with less than one percent of the federal budget going to infrastructure, cultural, and commemorative projects around the country. All of them create jobs, many of them are worthy on their own merits, and a fair fraction make the country a culturally richer and more distinctive place.

Indeed, to get a more accurate idea of what these earmarks actually represent, I spent some time playing around with the Sunshine Foundation's Earmark Exposer. It's a sweet bit of technology that lets you travel around the map and check out the earmarks created in the 2007 budget. It's supposed to generate disgust in the user, but as the first few items I saw from my home area were $300,000 for health information technology at Orange's Children's Hospital, $50,000 for an arts education program for underserved Huntington Beach youth, and $450,000 to Long Beach's Miller Children's Hospital for medical equipment, I'm actually coming away impressed by the quality of the appropriations. The “Bridge to Nowhere” is undoubtedly bad, but it may not be representative. But hey: Play around with the tool and see for yourself.

--Ezra Klein

LAUER STEPS UP. How I mourn, and if I mourn, is nobody's business but mine. It's not the business of network news organizations, and it's certainly not the business of the ambitious young hacks of local news who send the latest Lisa or Brian to New York to stand over a mass grave while maudlin piano music tinkles away in the background.

However, one little bit of video did catch my attention this morning. Matt Lauer of The Today Show got an interview in the Oval Office with George W. Bush. The first odd thing about it was that both men were standing. Usually, as was the case with Tim Russert's famous "Make-My-Dad-Proud" moment a while back, such conversations are held with both participants sitting down and practicing their best First Communion posture. In this case, Lauer and the president looked like a couple of local sportcasters in Green Bay, standing outside the stadium, chatting over the Packers game. To Lauer's enormous credit, and given the strange circumstances, he pushed as hard as was possible on the subject of the president's right to torture people. The way you knew he'd pushed hard was that the president began talking in smaller and smaller circles. He needs to be able to do this to keep people safe. He kept repeating that he needed these powers "within the law," and that "we don't torture." Lauer started to describe "water-boarding." The president refused to talk about "techniques that we use on people." He began to sputter, "Let me finish." Once again, he climbed on his little one-man railroad that traveled from "protecting the nation" to "we don't torture" to "within the law." You half-expected little springs to start bouncing out of his ears. "It's my job to protect YOU," he told Lauer at one point. What was more significant was the president's demeanor. He was loud. He was poking at Lauer's chest. He seemed convinced that his argument would be more compelling if he e-nun-ci-a-ted it like a man chewing steel and if, while doing so, he JUST MADE IT LOUDER. I swear, he looked like someone making a dubious point in a bar. Utterly, completely bizarre, at least to me. You can make your own judgement.

--Charles P. Pierce

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CULTURE CLASH. The clash of civilizations theory isn't, in fact, all bogus, says Addie Stan; but the conclusions the right has drawn from it are the reverse of what's really called for.

--The Editors

BEATING DR. BEETROOT. In the world of the AIDS pandemic, South Africa is, as Stephen Lewis, the U.N. Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, memorably termed it, "the unkindest cut of all." The only country in the region rich enough to truly mount an aggressive campaign against the disease is hampered and hamstrung by an administration so aggressively opposed to science that they make the Bush crew look like the MIT Electron Microscope Appreciation Club. South Africa's health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, believes beetroots, garlic, and African potatoes are an effective replacement for anti-retroviral drugs, which the government fought to keep out of the hands of their citizens.

The murderous negligence is taking its toll: One out of every eight HIV cases in the world is currently in South Africa. Nine hundred of the country's citizens die every day from the disease. For perspective, if you scale their population to ours, that would be 5,744 daily deaths, or almost two 9-11s every single day. The ire and anger of the world's scientific and humanitarian community, though, has begun to shame the nation into action. The sharpest blow came at the recent Toronto AIDS Conference, where the delightfully impolitic U.N. bureaucrat did exactly what U.N. bureaucrats are not supposed to do and blasted the South African government's "wrong, immoral, indefensible" approach to the crisis. "It is the only country in Africa," said Lewis, "whose government continues to propound theories more worthy of a lunatic fringe than of a concerned and compassionate state...The government has a lot to atone for. I’m of the opinion that they can never achieve redemption." Now, South Africa's health minister is being sidelined and a new commission will be created to coordinate AIDS treatment. Here's to hoping.

--Ezra Klein

FALSE SENSE OF INSECURITY? Yesterday's New York Times Week in Review piece about the state of the war on terrorism does the service of raising a notion and a possibility that no politician has found very useful to acknowledge:

[F]ive years of evidence suggests that the terrorist threat within the United States is much more modest than was feared after 9/11, when it seemed quite possible that there were terrorist sleeper cells in American cities, armed with “weapons of mass destruction” and awaiting orders to attack…As time has passed without a new attack, the voices of skeptics who believe that 9/11 was more a fluke than a harbinger are beginning to be heard.

The GOP, needless to say, has lacked much incentive over the last five years to dampen the sense of danger and crisis stemming from the terrorist threat. But doing so has proven to be distinctly off-message for the Democrats as well, given their relentless (and, to be sure, accurate) emphasis on the Bush administration's shortchanging of homeland security measures and the counterproductive folly of the Iraq War (it being a "distraction" from the truly important and necessary war against al-Qaeda, etc.).

For a while after 9-11 it was quite understandable to think that a genuinely new and pervasive threat was on the scene, and that further spectacular attacks were in store relatively soon. In the ensuing years, not only the fact that there hasn't been a repeat attack on American soil (excepting the unsolved anthrax attacks) but also the eventual publication of serious empirical research on the relevant issues -- Mark Sageman's profiles of the actual members of transnational terrorist networks, Robert Pape's work on suicide bombers, etc. -- have, I think, lent some ample support for the suspicion that the terrorist threat to America, while obviously real, is simply less extensive and acute and more manageable then we had thought. (John Mueller is the go-to person to read for the strong version (PDF) of this claim.) One impression you get from a lot of this work is that, contrary to the image of poor Muslim masses flooding into madrassas and emerging as motivated al-Qaeda recruits that we all came to internalize from the first round of post-9-11 commentary, the actual number of individuals who comprise transnational terrorist networks and possess the will and capacity to carry out major, long-planned attacks on American soil turns out to be, simply, very small. Islamic terrorists lack the numbers and means that most of us originally assumed they had to execute sustained and repeated mass-casualty attacks.

It's politically dicey, of course, to put forth this argument, and substantively one can certainly veer too far in the direction of complacency (particularly given the scandalous failure so far to secure loose nuclear materials around the world, which affords terrorists their only means of posing a real existential threat against anyone, however unlikely it may be). In that light, James Fallows' Atlantic cover story about "declaring victory" puts the case for scaling back the fear and war-like mobilization around fighting terrorism in as palatable and persuasive a manner as I've seen. In that piece he quotes David Kilcullen comparing the contemporary jihadist threat to anarchist terrorism at the turn of the last century -- a really important, overlooked parallel. Then, as now, there was a small number of people committed to carrying out serious and high-profile acts of political violence in the West. Then, as now (I believe), the extent of the direct threat they posed was actually smaller and more fleeting than feared. And then, as now, the really serious and high-stakes danger came from how states responded to the inevitable violent acts that would be successfully carried out from time to time.