by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Survey USA now has lots of head-to-heads. I'm going to do a condensed table, where each entry gives the margin of victory of Clinton/Obama/Edwards against Giuliani/Romney/Thompson for each candidate:

First off, we should all be praying for an John Edwards-Mitt Romney matchup, which at first blush would appear to put the entire country into play, though that may be partially due to Romney's low name recognition.

Second, Rudy Giuliani is far and away the most electable Republican.

Third, Barack Obama's "Mississippi will become competitive" argument does not seem to be born out. Increasing black turnout in the South is certainly salutary, but to overcome Obama's disadvantage among whites in the Deep South, African-American turnout would have to increase at least fifty percent.

Fourth, Edwards has a significant advantage over Clinton against both Romney and Fred Thompson in a number of states (AL, IA, KS, KY, MO, NM, OH, OR, WA).

Finally, against Giuliani, Clinton has an advantage of more than 2% in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New Mexico [I'm handwaving over the California result], while Edwards has an advantage in Iowa and Missouri. With polls showing Clinton faring best in Florida, I think this means the current balance of poll results favors Clinton against Rudy, but Edwards against the rest of field. A certain chunk of the public is undecided but at the moment does not want to vote for Clinton.

(Posted by John.)

What's a wingnut to do?

The New York Times reports that, wonder of wonders, life is returning to some semblance of peace in Grozny. The NYT attributes this in no small part to the iron-fisted rule of Moscow's local bastard, Ramzan Kadyrov. But you've got to wonder how the Bush-sycophants read an article like this. On the one hand, you've got an endorsement of the "more rubble, less trouble" mania they're so fond of. On the other hand, the guy getting most of the credit is a muslim. On the other other hand, he's a Sufi muslim (are they friends for the US, or not?) On the other other other hand, he's a tool of the Kremlin and Putin -- and Vlad Putin's basically one war from being the next Hitler at this point, right?

Oh wait.  The nutters don't believe anything printed in the New York Times.  Nevermind.

In other eastern European news, the Prime Minister of Ukraine is running for parliamentary elections using Bob Dole's advisors.  Bizarrely, he seems to be poised to win.

One of the interesting elements in both these stories is the continuing ability of Russia in particular, and the FSU in general, to confound prediction. You could say it about any country over a decent time span (try predicting American politics 4 years from now!) but what shocked me is how quickly Yuschenko in Ukraine went from being saviour to Satan, and how quickly Yanukovich was put back in the PM's office.

You could also point to Turkmenistan, where the death of (crazy crazy crazy) dictator Saparmurat Niyazov seems to have given the Turkmen government the idea of trying to break Russia's monopoly on natural gas pipelines -- something I daresay Moscow didn't see coming when Niyazov died in December.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

This has been another edition of What Oliver Willis Said. Military strikes against against Iran would quite clearly be an act of war; without Congressional authorization it would pribma facie be an impeachable offense. If Freedom's Watch thinks they can convince the US to attack Iran just by running some TV ads they must be more out of touch than I thought possible.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

As a devoted reader of both Barry Riholtz and Brad DeLong, who have forgotten more about finance and economics than I will probably ever learn, I can only offer an uninformed take on this intellectual steel cage match.

DeLong points out that "when increases in inflation are confined to (i) energy and (ii) food prices, odds are that the increase is transitory and will be self-limiting". Historically, that's been true; in the '90s, if oil prices went up a few dollars a barrel, odds are they would come back down. Food prices follow a similar pattern (largely because energy costs greatly affect food costs). But, that no longer seems to be the case; no one really thinks oil prices will get down to even $50/barrel, and between rising energy costs and increased demand for biofuels, food also seems to have permanently risen in price. As Riholtz argues, Core CPI is low, but other market measures of the dollar's strength—currency exchange rates, gold, the dollar, other commodities—show a weak dollar. It seems that these increases are not transitory, but are really the long overdue correction that George Soros bet on back in 2004 (and Warren Buffet bet on more recently).

Now, maybe this correction is not a bad thing, and maybe the inflation in food and energy costs is self-limited (i.e. it will not have an impact on prices elsewhere in the economy), but it does seem that headline inflation is doing an awful job of reflecting reality for most Americans, for whom the increase in commodity prices definitely affects there discretionary income.

And this doesn't even get into increases in things like individually-born health care costs, college tuition, etc.

Update: See both DeLong and Riholtz in the comments. This chart from the STL fed illustrates what's going on. The orange gray line, representing the difference between headline inflation and core inflation, is the important line:

Historically, overall inflation has stayed within 0.5% of core inflation, and even after the energy crunch in the late 70s, there was a period of correction from 1984 to 1991 where energy prices grew less quickly than other prices. But since 2002, the situation has changed dramatically; food & energy prices continue to rise significantly faster than other prices. If this is part of a permanent trend -- if energy costs will continue to rise 1% or 2% faster than overall prices, should we hit the economy over the head with a brick? I don't know. At the moment, probably not ... it's not clear that slamming on the brakes, which might reduce demand for energy but also hurt employment, will make people better off. After all, the price of energy isn't a large budget item in the cost of college tuition, health insurance, or even medicine...

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Which is better, The Big Dog, smoldering and subdued?

Or Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy, going absolutely ape?

Clinton's performance, by the way, has to be the best public display of just how pissed off Democrats are about that m2#(*!*#&!(ing c#!*(##!@er Saxby Chambliss slandering Max Cleland. I really can't even write the Senator's name without getting very close to erupting into a string of expletives.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

I still firmly believe that the second priority after taking back the White House has to be increasing the Democratic margin in the Senate. At this point in the election cycle, the priority has to be making as many seats as possible potentially competitive. Dems already have an edge in Colorado, Virginia, and New Hampshire, so I'll leave those off the list. Otherwise, folks should consider adopting one of these fine candidates and throwing them some coin:

• Oregon: Jeff Merkely Update or Steve Novick
• Maine: Tom Allen
• Minnesota: Al Franken
• Texas: Rick Noriega
• Oklahoma: Andrew Rice
• Idaho: Larry Larocco
• Kentucky: Greg Stumbo (though Andrew Horne might run and get DSCC backing)
• Alabama: Vivian Figures

If none of these candidates strike your fancy, hope that one of these candidates enters the race:

• North Carolina: Grier Martin
• Nebraska: Bob Kerrey
• Kansas: Jim Slattery
• Alaska: Mark Begich

I haven't yet included New Mexico, where Pete Domenici's approval is cratering, or Wyoming, where Barasso isn't really an incumbent yet and Governor Freudenthal might be coaxed into running. At this point, only Lindsay Graham, Thad Cochran, Michael Enzi, and that m##*!)*&#*ing c*#*(!&)er, Saxby Chambliss appear truly invulnerable.

Update: Senate 2008 Guru's Expand the Map! Actblue page specifcally recommends Rice and Larocco to expand beyond the top six of CO-VA-NH-OR-MN-ME.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Let's be very clear on this: while the Burmese/Myanmarese junta is about as repressive as they come, this whole thing got started because the government tried to cut fuel subsidies.

By Ankush

We've seen this movie before. It's not like there aren't legitimate and serious criticisms to be made of Hillary Clinton, but I think Frank Rich actually does Clinton's people a service by wrapping his (barely identifiable) substantive criticism of the Senator in his tired, political-analysis-as-theater-criticism shtick.

Look, successful politicians are inauthentic. You don't come close to being President without developing a carefully cultivated public persona. To pretend otherwise is nonsense, and you tend to see people harp on the A-word most often when all they're really trying to do is say that, on a personal level, they just don't like someone. In 2000, Rich's problem was that serial liar and egghead Al Gore, constantly boring us all with his talk of actual policies. Yawn! Today, we get a couple paragraphs on Hillary Clinton's laugh, with which we're apparently supposed to be concerned. ("Then there was that laugh," Rich writes, at which point you immediately feel a headache coming on. And just for the record, a purportedly serious New York Times columnist making unironic use of a Daily Show segment that mocks a presidential candidate's laugh is exactly the sort of thing that the Daily Show would make fun of.)

There's more of this silliness, of course.  Rich mocks "the track record of Washington's conventional wisdom," as if his performance during the 2000 election never happened. There's his claim that Clinton was "tardy" with her health care plan, as though announcing a plan 14 months before a general election and five months before primaries is somehow meaningless. (And what does Rich think about that plan? Hard to say.) He says that the Clinton campaign "works relentlessly to shut down legitimate journalistic vetting of her record," citing their work in killing a story that was to be "an account of infighting in Hillaryland" and thus not clearly at all about Clinton's "record," as well as a story about the delay in releasing a large number of Clinton's papers during her time as First Lady, even though the story in question never once suggests that Clinton has had anything to do with this holdup.

It's easy to forget this since Rich so frequently -- and, on occasion, devastatingly -- writes about Iraq, but the man is not a particularly good columnist. His grasp of substantive domestic policy is tenuous at best, and his interest in the stagecraft of politics, while entertaining enough when it was in the Arts pages, has devolved into a stultifying self-parody of precisely the sort that a more adept and self-aware version of Rich would savage. With Bush becoming increasingly irrelevant, we're going to get more of this from Rich, and it's a safe bet that unless the Democrats nominate someone of whom he approves, you're going to be hearing quite a bit about the supposed inauthenticity of the liberal in the race. 

And if this were to mean that a liberal New York Times columnist might actually help elect a Republican -- again?  Well, a guy's gotta write columns, doesn't he?

Update: Just as a response to some of the comments, it's not that we shouldn't be concerned with stagecraft at all when choosing a nominee.  The problem is that a lot of that sort of analysis is plainly silly, and when we buy into it -- or don't call people in the supposed liberal media out on it -- we end up shooting ourselves in the foot.  I get the distinct feeling that the kind of people who would call "that laugh" of Hillary Clinton's "the Cackle" are pretty much the same kind of people who complained about Al Gore sighing too much. And it's not that Gore is blameless for 2000 -- his temperament probably contributed to the mostly restrained nature of his campaign -- but it's also clear that he didn't get a fair shake.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

TNR's Noam Schieber writes, "the margin of error for the likely-voter portion of the poll, where Obama leads Clinton by 4 points, is plus or minus 7--i.e., Obama's lead is statistically meaningless." Not true! A 7% margin of error means that there is a 95% confidence that a candidate's true level of support is within 7% of the reported value. In practice, if the pollster's screen of likely caucus-goers is accurate, it means that among likely caucus-goers there's a 67% chance that Obama is ahead. Good odds, but not a mortal lock.

Kevin Drum produced this table that can help you read the polls.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Katha Pollitt repeats the truth:

John Edwards is about the only presidential candidate who mentions the 36.5 million Americans--12.3 percent--who fall below the poverty line ($10,488 for a single person, $20,444 for a family of four), and the additional 19 percent who are what sociologist Katherine Newman calls the near poor--100 to 200 percent above the poverty line.

It's relevant to the issues we've been discussing today that a candidate like Edwards, who earnestly pushes substantial policy initiatives to deal with problems like poverty, isn't going to be a favorite of corporate lobbyists.  Incrementalism and outright pro-lobbyist sentiment, which we've seen from Edwards' two main competitors, are the way to rake in the big money.  Obviously, Edwards' decision to accept public funds is more a strategic choice than some kind of bold moral stand.  But it's a strategic choice that resulted from his having taken bold moral stands in the past on issues like poverty and health care in the past.  Those won him the love of ACORN and the SEIU -- and let's hope the SEIU has the courage to endorse the candidate their members voted for! -- but not the love of the bundlers who fill campaign coffers. 

Back in 2006, when I was suggesting candidates for people to donate to on this blog, I tried to find the races where you'd get the most bang for your buck.  These primarily involved underfunded candidates who were still running very close in the polls.  As a progressive donor, you're basically trying to make the good effects of your donations per dollar spent as high as possible. 

With the Edwards campaign, we now have a situation where federal matching funds will double any donation you make up to $250.  The state spending caps that come with public financing apply mostly to advertising -- a candidate can still spend unlimited resources on his field operation or on having staff travel around the state. 

This produces a really nice high-bang, low-buck situation -- your money is twice as good.  If you feel like donating $10, it becomes $20.  $20 becomes $40.  $40 becomes $80.  So if you want John Edwards to win, but you can only spare $10, this is a great time to give some money.  You can donate through my ActBlue page if you don't have any objections to giving money in a werewolf-themed manner.  I broke through the $250 ceiling some time ago, but I'm good for another $50 now.

Update: The case for Edwards is laid out in pretty embedded-video detail here at Daily Kos.    

By Deborah Newell Tornello
aka litbrit

One early morning in 1981, I was on my way to the reliably decent waves of an inlet nicknamed "The Blowhole", speeding through the foggy plains of north Florida in an equally-foggy VW Minibus with a few surfer friends from my apartment complex.  Suddenly a new and blistering version of The Kinks' You Really Got Me came shrieking out of the tinny old radio.

"Oh wow, turn this up!" I said.

These were the mellow stylings of a band called Van Halen, according to the DJ at WGVL "The Quadship" (or, as we dryly called it, the Quad-skip, given as it was to hiring DJ's who'd play obscure and scratchy old vinyl in the middle of the night and proceed to get too stoned to notice that they'd been broadcasting the same line, over and over, for the past half-hour).

Shortly after graduating from UF (of recent Don't Tase Me, Bro fame) in June of that year, I went to work with a concert promoter in Orlando. And that October, I had the good fortune to be assigned the task of dumping several large bags of M&M's into an enormous glass bowl and picking out all the brown ones, since Van Halen was the opening act for our big fall show--The Rolling Stones--and lead singer David Lee Roth had stated quite clearly in the contract rider that he wanted M&M's in his dressing room--just no brown ones, please.  (The Stones' rider contained a short rejoinder: Mick will be happy to accept any brown M&M's that David Lee Roth doesn't want.  How I loved them for that.)

At one of the various after-parties, held at a surprisingly shabby motel where the band was staying (not my doing, honestly), my old college roommate Mori and I were sitting with the drummer, Alex, and his girlfriend, in the bar. David burst in, all bluster and two-sizes-too-small white jeans, and surveyed the joint as if seeking an exit already.

"The bar's over there," someone said.  Over there, as it so happened, was directly behind the sofa on which Mori, Alex, his girlfriend, and I were sitting. But that didn't slow Mr. Roth down, not a bit. He leaped up vertically, alighting on the sofa with one foot on a cushion and the other on my thigh. Then he balanced himself, grabbing the top of my head as a gymnast would a pommel horse, and leaped once again, this time landing in front of the bar.

I was deeply unimpressed. And as the band grew in popularity over the next few years, appearing on MTV in numerous videos (this was back when MTV actually played music and reality shows were but a twinkle in some network accountant's eye), I frequently made snide remarks about Diamond Dave and his apparent need to use women to propel himself toward his ultimate reward.

I always admired Eddie's thrilling guitar technique, though, and was saddened to learn of his personal battles, first with drug addiction, then with cancer.

So it was with pleasure--the Awesome-but-no-way-they're-that-old-yet kind of pleasure--that I read about Van Halen finally getting its act together and putting on a long-awaited reunion in Charlotte, NC, with Eddie's teenage son Wolfgang manning the bass this time around.  From Rolling Stone*:

And for more than two hours, the gods delivered. From “You Really Got Me” to “Runnin’ with the Devil,” “Dance the Night Away,” “Oh, Pretty Woman,” “Unchained,” “Hot for Teacher,” “Ice Cream Man,” “Panama,” guitar-god solo “Eruption,” “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” “Jump” and about thirteen more classic Van Halen tunes, the band was in top form for their long-overdue reunion. “I’m not going to waste time BS-ing around tonight,” Roth told the delighted, sold-out crowd of predominantly middle-aged guys in white- and blue-collar work clothes and gals who’d retrieved their Eighties bustiers for a night of original hair-metal nostalgia. But he was lying: Roth was at his BS best.

His hair may be shorter and crow’s feet longer, but Diamond Dave is every bit the Vegas showman that he was two decades ago, when he left Van Halen for an ill-fated solo career that took him from cheesy bad to train-wreck worse. He showed his gift for gab — and flamboyant duds — from the get-go, imitating Mick Jagger and martial arts moves, smiling like a clown, riding a giant microphone. And despite old wounds, his bandmates seemed charmed by their new old lead singer. Eddie Van Halen, switching from his signature Peavey “Wolfgang” guitar to his old, red- and white-striped “Frankenstein,” nuzzled up to Roth several times. And drummer Alex Van Halen, sporting his trademark white headband, pounded his kit with a constant smile. If original bassist Michael Anthony was missed at first, it wasn’t long before Eddie’s sixteen-year-old son, Wolfgang Van Halen, had the crowd in the palm of his hands. The teenaged slap-style bass player held his own with style, grace and grit, throwing out picks to the audience as he walked the catwalk into the crowd, his bass in hand, during “Atomic Punk.” There were some bumps along the way, including a few times when Roth missed his vocal cues, but the audience could not have cared less.

Nothing like a trip down memory lane on a rainy Saturday afternoon, huh? Once I finish posting this, I'm going to see if iTunes has some of VH's better songs available for download.

Not Jump, though.

(*Via HuffPo)

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

I doubt that the spending caps that come with public funds will cripple Edwards in the general election, as Ezra and Markos think.  We aren't talking about a congressional campaign here -- we're talking about a race for president, where free media and ads from 527 groups are going to be way more significant than anything the candidates themselves put on air. 

The most significant ads of election 2004 weren't put out by a campaign, and they didn't hit a candidate who was bound by spending caps.  They were the Swift Boat ads, issuing from an independent 527 group and going on air after the Democratic convention.  Especially on the negative side, 527 ads are better than candidate ads, because the candidate doesn't have to take responsibility for them.  If Edwards winning the nomination means that you and I get to pick the pro-Edwards (or anti-whoever) ads of spring and summer by funding our favorite 527s, that's fine with me. 

A presidential candidate -- even one who can't run his own ads -- is one of the most-watched human beings on the planet.  Free media opportunities are all over the place.  If Edwards wants to hit back against an opposing ad, he just has to go on Larry King's show.  And if there's anything that the Edwards campaign has been good at in the Trippi era, it's free media.  From the Hair video to the poverty tour to the constant shower of policy proposals to the clear and powerful distinctions between himself and Hillary that caused most observers to call him the winner of the last debate, Edwards has been able to maintain the media profile of a first-tier candidate, without the first-tier money.  If there's a campaign that can win the free media game, it's the one that Joe Trippi is running. 

Brian Beutler is right that, by the standards of past primaries, Edwards has rather a lot of money. But by the standards of this primary, he doesn't have all that much money at all. Compared to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, he's far behind. And while the absolute sum on hand may have been sufficient to exceed the saturation point in 2004, in 2008, with the compressed primary schedule where California comes only 3-and-a-half weeks after Iowa, it probably isn't. Indeed, this is why Edwards, a couple months ago, forswore going the public route because he needed to remain "competitive."

Also, remember that when you're talking public funds, the downside is that they have spending caps. So however much money Edwards has, his spending in the primary states will be severely restricted (save on field, which doesn't come under the caps). Moreover, the problem with public funding isn't in the primaries, but once they're completed. Kos explains:

Lots of money is spent in January and February. Let's say Edwards emerges the victor -- wins Iowa, and parlays that victory into national momentum. It could really happen, especially if Hillary and Barack beat the crap out of each other.

So he's won, but he's spent his primary money, and he won't get his first general election check until after the Democratic convention. August 25.

So Edwards won't have any money in March, April, May, June, July, and most of August. That's six months of darkness.

Six months in which the Republicans will be beating the crap out of him, because they won't do anything so foolish. Six months to turn Edwards into the devil incarnate, with no money to hit back.

What's worse is that, for once, the Democrats are outraising the Republicans. We'd be in a position to dominate that period. Edwards, in order to get a temporary infusion of funds in the short-term that could help him win the primary, is handicapping himself, and his party, in the longer-term. Now, this may be his best chance to win the nomination. But it's not the best strategy for the general election, and, to my mind, it strikes a real blow against his "electability" argument.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Larry Sabato opens up the floor for outside the box thinking on the structure of our current government. As he points out, the founders thought the Constitution ought to be amended or replaced with some frequency. Instead, things have changed subtly, through shifts in judicial interpretation and occasional spurts of amendments (the Civil War, the Progressive Era, and Civil Rights amendments). But Sabato points out that the Constitution was written for a nation of farmers (and a substantial number of textile factories in the North) at a time when the difference in population between Virginia and Connecticut was much lower, and you courier your messages to the capital.

Sabato promises to start with what's wrong with our current constitution, so let me throw out a few ways in which the country is has changed since the time of the Founders. Some of this is ground Professor Sabato has already covered, but here we go. Add yours in the comments:

• The ratio of small-state to large-state populations has increased. In 1790, Virginia had 12.5 times the population of Delaware. Today, California has 70 times the population of Wyoming. In 1790, Senators representing 14.7% of the population could sustain a filibuster under today's rules; today, that figure is 9.9%. I'm fine with the somewhat countermajoritarian nature of the Senate, but it's clear that things have gotten a little bit out of hand.
  
• Judges are appointed earlier and retiring later. Since 1980, turnover on the Supreme Court has ground to a near standstill. The situation on the lower courts, especially the DC circuit, is almost as bad. The Founders intended for the Courts to change slowly, but not this slowly.
• Travel is much faster, but the country is much larger. As recently as the 1960s, DC airports didn't have direct flights to much of the country. The common practice of Congress was to stay in the District for seven months, then stay in their home state or district and meet with constituents for five months. Today, most members fly home every weekend, even during session. This puts tremendous strain on Western members, who must endure six hour flights while their colleagues in New York can catch an hourly shuttle that gets them home in 45 minutes. At this point, it seems fair to consider moving the capitol, or at least having an auxiliary capitol that might be used every other year. The population center of the US is currently in central Missouri and continues to march West, so either moving the capitol to Kansas City, or putting a secondary capitol in Denver should do the trick.
  
  Somewhat separately, there is now tremendous pressure to be in one's home district all the time. When combined with the crush of fundraising, this limits the time that members have to collaborate with one another. We ought to make Constitutional provisions to ensure that members have the time and space to meet, rather than rely on staff at all times.
• The population has grown-a lot. The House has not kept up. The constitution mandates a state can have no more than one member of the House for each 30,000 residents. In the initial apportionment of the House, Pennsylvania received one for each 55,000 residents. Today each member represents about 700,000 residents. With a district sized to 1790 standards, a candidate could canvass the entire population in one Friedman Unit, meaning that every member would theoretically be vulnerable to a low-cost challenger. In addition, the effectiveness of TV advertising would drop to zero in most urban areas. Though, a figure that low would have other problems. California alone would have 650 members; Wyoming would have 9; the House as a whole would have 5454 members, which is clearly unworkable. In general, European countries have around one member per 100,000 residents; Japan, one per 265,000 residents; Russia, one per 320,000 residents. We ought to think about whether it's possible to have a much larger House with smaller congressional districts, with the hope that members will be more responsive to a smaller population and unable to win elections merely by blanketing the airwaves.
• Communication speed has increased dramatically. You no longer have to send messages to DC by horseback. You don't even have to telegraph them. I don't know what changes this implies to the structure of government, but clearly things have changed.
• Fundraising consumes too much time. Money will always be a part of politics, but at this point, the cost of campaigns has spiraled out of control. In order to win a Senate seat, you must either (a) self-fund, (b) know a lot of rich people with an inclination to give money to politicians, and/or (c) rely on a cadre of unelected fundraising consultants. We ought to admit that money is part of the political process, and decide just how much we want to allow individuals to curry favor through campaign contributions.
• Presidents keep going to "war" without, you know, asking Congress to declare war. See Korea; Vietnam; Iraq I; Iraq II. I've mentioned this before, and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one whose noticed.
  
  Also the natures of both conventional warfare and guerrilla warfare have changed. And while we're at it, the United States has a very large standing Army, Navy, and Air Force. The Constitution does not envision any sort of permanent ground force (though it does envision a permanent Navy), and while President's since Jefferson have authorized military operations without declaring war, the Framers intended for the balance of power to favor isolationism. It seems the proper response ought to be to set up a system that allows for a simple majority authorization for small-scale or low-intensity actions such as the re-installation of Aristede in Haiti or the invasion of Grenada, while requiring a 2/3s majority for something like the invasion of Iraq, or even the air campaign in Kosovo.

It's true, as some have pointed out in comments, that the Lieberman/Kyl resolution does not authorize war with Iran. In that respect, it is not analogous to the Iraq War Resolution. What it does do, however, is give Bush enormous cover if he ever decides to launch an attack on Iran. When he says, "My fellow Americans, last September, a bipartisan vote in the United States Senate designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers. At 4am this morning, I asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare a bombing raid of their suspected safehouses and ammunition dumps..."

Democrats can complain and yell and scream, but their opposition will be terrifically compromised by having designated the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group in the first place. What will the say: That they're a terrorist group killing American soldiers, but nonetheless, nothing should be done? It's ludicrous. And it eerily echoes the excuse many Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, give for their authorization of the Iraq War in 2002: They thought Bush would use the legislation to increase diplomatic pressure and intensify actions, not resort to military force. On this, Democrats were fooled -- or said they were fooled -- once. That more Democrats voted for the Iran resolution shows that they are decidedly willing to get fooled again.

I always mean to exhort you guys to donate money early in the cycle to good, if longshot, candidates. Money donated early has a multiplier effect; candidates, slightly tautologically, have to demonstrate fundraising prowess in order to convince donors that they're worth giving money to. So early donations spur later donations. It's the theory behind EMILY's list (Early Money Is Like Yeast -- it helps raise the dough), and it's quite correct. Plus, since this site is moving over to the American Prospect, I really won't be able to push you to donate to candidates any more.

So: Since the quarter ends on September 30th, which is this weekend, here's my pitch: Donate to Dan Grant. I've met Grant a couple of times now and have come away continually impressed. His background is in the foreign service, and he's spent time reconstructing civil society in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It's a background which would not only be good for his votes, but good for the Democratic Caucus, which desperately needs credible foreign policy voices whose personal expertise will enable them to stiffen spines in Congress and convince their colleagues that all national defense thinking needn't be outsourced to DC's permanent foreign policy establishment.

Grant's race, in an oddly gerrymandered district that includes Austin, Texas, is a longshot, but a winnable one. And Grant's a more interesting -- and useful -- candidate than most. If his race picks up buzz, it will focus national attention on a credible Democrat just back from Iraq whose able to loudly argue that Republicans have been deeply incompetent in conducting American foreign policy. So if you're looking for a race to pump some early cash into, Grant's a good choice.

Hey, it's Friday. Chris Orr writes:

The obvious question such examples raise is, don't these people have friends of average or above-average social intelligence to help them with such elementary lessons? In some cases, perhaps not. But for most of the people in the article I suspect a different dynamic is at work, specifically they're not hiring these dating coaches despite their exorbitant fees but rather because of them.

When the co-worker you hang out with tells you you're shy, it's easy to ignore or downplay the advice. But when the "expert" you've just paid $5,000 tells you the same thing, you're going to treat it like the shrewdest insight you've ever heard because, hey, it cost $5,000 dollars.

Right: There's certainly a hefty amount of signaling going on. If someone says their opinion is worth $5,000, and other people have heard their pitch and agreed, that opinion seems worth much more than your friend's musings. And because you've invested so much in it, you're more likely to follow the advice.

So far as having friends do the job goes, these individuals seeking dating advice may well have buddies who, in theory, could help. But a friend may not be willing to honestly lay out the situation. They're more likely to comfort, to dwell on what's unfair, rather than to harshly critique mutable behaviors. Conversely, a professional, who's being hired to tell you what's going wrong, will have no such compunctions, and you're less likely feel less defensive accepting the advice from an expert rather than from a peer.

A New York Times article on the recent rise of dating coaches offers this rejoinder to critics of the practice:

“We have business coaches, dietitians, accountants, but we don’t have an expert for our love life?” said Lisa Clampitt, a dating coach and a founder of the Matchmaking Institute, which trains matchmakers in Manhattan. “It doesn’t make sense. It is really the single most important aspect in our life.”

Once a week, I go to some guy's house and pay him a fairly significant sum of money so he can tell me in which order I should pluck strings on my guitar. I would like to learn to play guitar well. But it's nowhere near as central to my happiness as my lovelife. Yet I'm allowed -- even praised -- for seeking expert guidance there, but would be roundly shamed if I sought a dating coach.

The idea that folks who need a bit of coaching or advice on these matters are painted as pathetic and weird has always struck me as deeply unfair. This idea that our romantic lives should be organic and spontaneous is rather nice, but for some folks, quite unlikely, and for others, quite self-deceptive. Most of us, after all, have had dating coaches: An older sibling, or a charismatic friend, or an honest lover. That society suggests those who haven't had free guides or good luck should be too ashamed to seek outside help is pretty cruel.

Here's the video. Keep in mind I have a pretty bad cold, so my voice is a bit off. Also, it's way weirder to do these shows remotely -- where you're in a dark room with a camera and disembodied voices in your ear -- than in the studio. Makes it much harder to time facial expressions, or know when the camera is on you for a reaction shot.

It's worth pointing out that Lieberman and Kyl's amendment designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group, and thus putting us on the path to war with Iran, got more Democratic votes than the 2002 resolution authorizing George W. Bush to invade Iraq. Five years after the start of the Iraq War, after seeing all of George W. Bush's deceptions and mismanagement, after seeing our forces chewed up and our prestige shredded, you might imagine Democrats would be reticent to allow any steps towards a confrontation with Iran, particularly under this president. But quite the opposite: 29 Democrats voted to go to war with Iraq. Five years later, 30 voted to push us towards war with Iran. They are still cowards, and they have still learned nothing.

You know, David Brooks is right: It is a bit sneaky to fund an expansion in S-CHIP by raising taxes on smokers. It should come out of general revenues, and if a tax raise is necessary, so be it. But the causal mechanism Brooks offers for this political cowardice is general in the extreme: "[Raising taxes] is honest and direct, and therefore impermissible."

No. Brooks' political movement, the Republican Party, has spent the last thirty years engaged in such ceaseless, anti-tax demagoguery, has spent so much time convincing Americans that they can pay for new programs by cutting taxes, has been so effective at ripping apart politicians who voted for tax increases, has been so disingenuous about relying on the deficit to avoid cutting spending, that politicians can't be honest about raising revenues, because they will be defeated by demagogues the moment they try.

If Brooks wants to write a column calling for more honesty in tax arguments, that's a column -- hell, that's a book -- about the sublime fiscal ad political irresponsibility of the Republican Party in recent decades. And having that column or book written by David Brooks would actually be quite meaningful. But this column, in which some vague allergy to honesty afflicts Washington, is not meaningful at all. It is not even an attempt to spread blame. It's an attack on the Democrats for playing by the rules the Republicans have set-up, rules that Brooks and many others have helped abet.

Over at TAP, I have a column evaluating the Clinton Global Initiative, and what it says about the differing approaches both men have taken to social justice in their post-presidential years. An excerpt:

In their post-presidential careers, Gore and Clinton have pioneered almost precisely opposite methods of affecting social change. Clinton has made remarkable strides activating and orienting the private sector towards good works. Gore, who has emerged as a cross between an atmospheric scientist and a folk hero, has sought to lead a post-millennial social movement capable of exerting the intense pressure required to move the government towards collective, even coercive, action to stop climate change.

The difference in approach was sharply apparent at the panel. Preceding Gore was Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott, Jr., whom Clinton lauded for his company's plans to move from incandescent light bulbs to compact, fluorescent bulbs. Then came Gore: "There should be no mistake that this crisis, the climate crisis, is not going to be solved only by personal action and business action," he said. "We need changes in laws, we need changes in policies, we need leadership, and we need a new treaty, we need a mandate at Bali, during the first 14 days of December this year, to complete a treaty -- not by 2012, but by 2009, and put it completely into force by 2010. We can do it and we must do it."

The mere fact that Gore was on the stage, saying such things to the gathered world leaders and business titans, was, in its way, radical. But it wasn't sustained. Clinton didn't follow up by turning to the assemblage and driving home Gore's point, saying that all of today's rhetoric and good intentions are for naught if they are unable to transcend acts of personal virtue and make the public sacrifice required for a cap-and-trade program or a carbon tax. Instead, he launched into a question on a Merrill Lynch initiative to encourage companies to voluntarily report their carbon usage.

Read the rest...

Edwards' decision to accept matching funds makes sense for his campaign. If he doesn't get the infusion of public money that the funds will give him in January, hell have a lot more trouble competing financially through the primaries (though the fact that he's going this route at all means he'll have a lot more trouble competing through the primaries).

But it's genuinely opportunistic -- and yeah, it's a campaign, whatever -- for him to make this into some sort of principled stand that Clinton and Obama must follow. The downside of the matching funds strategy is that you're basically broke until you're convention, as you hit the $50 million primary spending cap during the primaries. That gives the Republican months and months during which they can bury you at their leisure. It's a good thing to decry the system and make public financing a plank in your platform -- but his decision to take public funds is actually a significant blow to his general election chances, and it would be a really bad thing if his demand that the other Democrats followed his lead somehow gained traction. We need real public financing. But to get it, we need to win.

I'll be on MSNBC's Hardball around 5:40 Eastern today. Topics include last night's debate, Iran, and (sigh) Larry Craig.

The Senate's adoption of the Lieberman/Kyl amendment designating Iran's Revolutionary Guard a "terrorist group" isn't merely embarrassing, it's counterproductive. Designating the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group -- which in contemporary American terms means they're a target -- makes it all the more important for Iran to keep us tied up and weakened in Iraq. The more we telegraph that we'd like to devote forces to regime change or strikes in Tehran, the stronger Iran's incentive to keep Iraq an unstable morass trapping ever-greater numbers of American troops who can't be easily diverted from a chaotic mission and are geographically vulnerable to Iranian counter-attack.

Additionally, it further ensures Iran's incentive is to keep Iran from becoming stable under American protection and thus a platform from which we can safely launch attacks on the Iranian state. Iran will never allow Iraq to stabilize so long as Iraqi stability degrades the safety of the Iranian regime. And given that Iraq is Shi'ite, Iran is Shi'ite, and America is not, Tehran's got a whole lot more pull there than we do. So not only is the Lieberman/Kyl amendment bad policy vis-a-vis Iran, but it's terrible policy for stabilizing Iraq -- which Lieberman professes to care about. "Professes" being the key word there.

I'm really much better at absorbing information through reading rather than listening. This becomes truer as the event becomes larger. It becomes staggeringly true if the event is taking place in a wirelessly equipped conference hall.

"Let's make this Constructive" Update: In comments, Megan suggests knitting through long meetings. Keeping your hands busy with rote work focuses the mind. I've known others who employed that strategy and it always seemed to work for them. But I'm pathetically heteronormative and am not willing to start knitting my way through press conferences. I generally try to take notes by hand, as that helps, and I can't refresh Tapped during it. Any other ideas?

So Obama's NYC mega-rally tonight may prove a meat-market. Sweet! Events like that, along with similarly sexy possibilities in groups like Drinking Liberally, leave me confident in the future of the Left. At the end of the day, the strength of a movement is highly correlated with its capacity to get you laid.

Noam Scheiber suggests that "the thinking in the Obama camp seems to rest on two assumptions. The first is that the press will do the work of deciphering his overly-subtle jabs at Clinton. The second is that Edwards, in moving aggressively to take on Clinton, will drive up his own negatives in addition to hers."

This sounds a bit weird, but it's basically what the Kerry campaign did in 2004. I'm pretty sure the strategy was explained in Shrum's book (though I don't have the cite in front of me), but the Kerry camaign basically held its fire all through the fall, letting Gephardt and Dena maul each other in Iowa. Supporters and strategists attacked them for their apparent lethargy even in the face of a seeming electoral deficit. But Shrum's thinking was that they were everyone's second choice, would lose that distinction if they went strongly negative, and so the only way they could win was to bide their time and let the other's destroy each other. When asked, internally, what would happen if Gephardt and Dean didn't cooperate Shrum's reported answer was that the Kerry campaign would lose. That seems to be the thinking of the Obama campaign, too.

General John Abizaid, the longest serving CentCom commander in history, says we can live with a nuclear Iran. "I believe that we have the power to deter Iran, should it become nuclear...Let's face it, we lived with a nuclear Soviet Union, we've lived with a nuclear China, and we're living with (other) nuclear powers as well." He continued: "War, in the state-to-state sense, in that part of the region would be devastating for everybody, and we should avoid it — in my mind — to every extent that we can."

Abizaid's remarks are pretty clearly meant to blunt chatter coming out of the White House on the need for war with Iran. And they're important. One of the pernicious dynamics in the rhetoric around Iran is that the Bush administration's hawkishness has merged with the Democratic candidates' cowardice ("all options are on the table," when most mean "no, I won't bomb Iran, as I'm not an idiot") to create an impression, well-expressed by Ken Baer here, that no serious experts believe we should rule out war with Iran. As Abizaid, and many others, show, that's simply not true.

Been a while since I watched Blair at any length, but he's on this morning's opening panel at the Clinton Global Initiative, and it's almost impossible to overstate how damn charming the guy is. It helps that I don't really disagree with anything he's said, but the power of an English accent, a roguish grin, and a quick wit are really rather impressive. I'm terrified by how neutralized I'd be if he said something I did disagree with. For instance: What if, in his English accent, he advocated conservative health care policies? His lilt crashing into my collectivism would be like the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object. I'd probably pop out of existence.

Via Dave Roberts, this timeline of Bush's various lies, obfuscations, stalls, and positions on climate change is rather interesting. At this point, he appears to be trying to run out the clock on his term, gumming any initiatives up in bureaucratic negotiations that will surely drag on past January of 2009. But it's worth noting what his more sophisticated dodges have been, namely, that the answer is technological innovation, and that we can't do anything till China and India do.

In reply, the innovation will accelerate when it needs to accelerate, which is when carbon-intensive technologies grow economically unfeasible. That's why we need some sort of cap or tax: Because that's the only policy capable of sufficiently supercharging and incentivizing innovation. And China and India aren't going to take any action till we do, and will need our help, and the technology we produce, to wean themselves off coal.

The viciously RightWing Center For Union Facts is currently advertising on my sidebar. As always, I don't screen my advertisers for opinion because I don't endorse any of them. But though I'm happy to take the Center's cash, it's worth pointing out that they're a business front group that exists for no purpose save to smear and attack workers trying to organize for better wages, benefits, and treatment. Pretty loathsome folks. More on them here
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David Plotz on James Kugel's How to Read the Bible:

God himself has an equally murky personal history. At the start of the Bible, God is often viewed as just one of many gods. Only later in the book does he become the sole deity. More confusingly, he doesn’t even seem to be the same god throughout the book. Mostly, God is called YHWH, but sometimes, especially in the earlier books, he’s known as El. According to Kugel, these are probably two different deities fused into one: El may have been a god in the Canaanite pantheon, while YHWH may have been a Midianite god imported, via nomads, to the early Israelites, who made him their only god.

One purpose of “How to Read the Bible” is to recapture the Bible from literalists, and Kugel certainly succeeds. His tour through the scholarship demonstrates why it makes no sense to believe that every word of the Bible is true history. Piling on, he also contends that modern Bible literalism, that brand of six-day-creationism favored by fundamentalists, is wildly out of step with traditional Christian interpretation. Such monomaniacal focus on the Bible’s literal truth is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s not so much that readers of yore didn’t believe the Bible’s truth; they just didn’t waste a lot of time trying to prove impossible events like the Flood.

But vanquishing the literalists is only half of Kugel’s project. He also seeks a safe haven for rationalist believers. In other words, having broken all the windows, trashed the bedroom, stripped the wires for copper, sold the plumbing for scrap, and jackhammered into the foundation, Kugel proposes to move back into his Bible house.

Tyler Cowen also loves it.

Matt writes:

Bill Clinton, at the opening ceremony for his meeting, defined the purpose of the Clinton global initiative as to tackle problems that "government won't solve, or that government alone can't solve." A worthy purpose, indeed, for a charity. And I really think there are things that fit that category. Direct government sponsorship of the arts, for example, is a great way to preserve classic works and make them available to a broad audience. But if you want to encourage new, innovative works of art it makes much more sense to rely on a vigorous philanthropic sector that won't face political pressure to avoid anything that offends the sensibilities of anyone.

That, though, isn't what this event is about. Instead, it's really about political issues: education, poverty alleviation, global public health, and climate change.

This is exactly right. Charity, of course, is good. We like it. It makes us feel virtuous. But just as there are public and private goods (i.e, water and banisters, respectively), and just as there are goods that are better delivered by the public sector and goods that are better delivered by the private sector (national defense and Q-tips), there are causes that are better addressed by the public or private sectors. It makes a lot of sense for the private sector to spearhead limited initiatives that a) address localized, contained problems or b) create models that can be scaled up by government action. So it's great when businesses institute green policies and it's great when individuals and foundations provide funding for drug treatment centers, or maternal health clinics.

But the private sector really can't address global warming, really can't guarantee broad access to health care. In part, it's a question of money: Everyone was very impressed when, at last year's Clinton Global Initiative, Richard Branson pledged $3 billion to fund renewable energy respurce. That's great! And to us mortals, who are used to thinking in sums of a couple hundred, or thousand, it's an almost inconceivable sum. But on the scale of creating new sources of energy, it's actually rather small. Very useful, but small. And it's certainly not a substitute for collective action that caps the total carbon output. The private donations can drive some technology, but they really can't do the job. Only collective action can, and the virtuous momentum of the CGI and various corporate press releases can't be allowed to serve as a substitute for public action.

The Washington Times, reporting on Bush's speech at the UN, dryly reports:

At the United Nations, Mr. Bush avoided talk of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, bringing up Iran only as one of several briefly listed countries that squelch freedoms.

Outside, about a dozen people were arrested during a peaceful demonstration of about 400 opposed to the Iraq war and the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

Well then.

I don't have a whole lot of cunning commentary to add, but I'm of the basic opinion that Salon's Rebecca Traister is the best general essayist writing today, and her latest, an exploration of confessionals by otherwise serious figures, is wonderfully done.

This makes me worry for my future mental health.

Nony writes:

the leaders in Iran don't look any crazier to me than the Soviet leadership did back in the day.

In fact, Iran looks a heckuva lot less crazy in a lot of ways. Their society seems to be a bit more open, for one thing, and their citizens seem to know what's going on in the world. The citizens there are also fairly well off, unlike the average Soviet citizen, and therefore have much more to lose. Soviet society was much more geared towards militarization than Iranian society seems to be - heck, the Iranians still allow their students and university professors to somewhat openly criticize their government policies - something that would have been unheard of from anyone living in the USSR.

All true. The common rejoinder here is that the leadership of Iran are a bunch of eschatological nutters who can't be trusted to employ such things as "rationality," or "sense." This flies in the face of recent Iranian actions, most of which have been rational, none of which have involved triggering a nuclear, or even conventional, counterattack from stronger nations, but whatever.

Remember here that the Soviet Union wasn't just a mean country. It was the epicenter of an expansionistic ideology that believed its historical triumph to be pre-assured. It was as religious as any religion. And it actually had a basis for this belief, as communism was a superficially attractive ideology that was attracting adherents in major countries -- the US included. And yet we not only dealt with the Soviets, but spoke to their leaders and welcomed them on our soil. Because we were the superpower, and we believed in our country.

Presumably, things will happen at the Clinton GLobal Initiative that will be interesting, and I will blog about them. None of them have happened yet, however. On the bright side, the press room is equipped with really awesome, space-age phones:

In real life, though, the text points in the correct direction!

The Atlantic Community surveyed some European foreign policy thinkers on how America should approach Iraq, and the results were interesting:

Many of those interviewed focused on military strategy as a means to political reconstruction in Iraq, rather than an end in itself. “Winning” and “losing” the war, a theme in the American discourse, was not discussed. The US focus on military progress was, in fact, largely viewed as damaging to priorities in rebuilding the country. Dr. Reidar Visser, a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs who also runs the Iraq website Historiae, observed that the “main problem [with the current strategy] is the heavy emphasis on security instead of creative political initiatives to encourage national reconciliation.”

The surge sort of dramatized this effect by coinciding with a complete loss of faith in the Maliki government's ability to pursue consolidation: The security situation and the political situation really aren't linked, at least not in that direction. The idea that stability would accelerate reconciliation was always backwards. There's a lack of stability because there's an absence of reconciliation* -- and the relationship there is causal. The surge was like trying to stop someone with a cold from sneezing by pinching their nose really hard. It didn't cure the cold, and it sort of created a mess.

*And because there are jihadists targeting American forces.

Or at least more Rick Perlsteins. I've been spending a lot of time saying that I think America is acting uncharacteristically tremulous before the specter of Iran's leading civil servant being allowed to have public conversations in our country. Others have suggested that that's not true, and America is simply being strong. Perlstein went to the tape:

[W]hat is the American character? Hard to say, of course. But I daresay we know it when we see it. Let me put before you an illustrative example: one week in September of 1959, when, much like one week in September of 2007, American soil supported a visit by what many, if not most Americans agreed was the most evil and dangerous man on the planet.

Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people—then was ushered upstairs to the East Wing for a leisurely gander at the Eisenhowers' family quarters. Visited the Agriculture Department's 12,000 acre research station ("If you didn't give a turkey a passport you couldn't tell the difference between a Communist and capitalist turkey"), spoke to the National Press Club, toured Manhattan, San Francisco (where he debated Walter Reuther on Stalin's crimes before a retinue of AFL-CIO leaders, or in K's words, "capitalist lackeys"), and Los Angeles (there he supped at the 20th Century Fox commissary, visited the set of the Frank Sinatra picture Can Can but to his great disappointment did not get to visit Disneyland), and sat down one more with the president, at Camp David. Mrs. K did the ladies-who-lunch circuit, with Pat Nixon as guide. Eleanor Roosevelt toured them through Hyde Park. It's not like it was all hearts and flowers. He bellowed that America, as Time magazine reported, "must close down its worldwide deterrent bases and disarm." Reporters asked him what he'd been doing during Stalin's blood purges, and the 1956 invasion of Hungary. A banquet of 27 industrialists tried to impress upon him the merits of capitalism. Nelson Rockefeller rapped with him about the Bible.

Had America suddenly succumbed to a fever of weak-kneed appeasement? Had the general running the country—the man who had faced down Hitler!—proven himself what the John Birch Society claimed he was: a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy?

No. Nikita Khrushchev simply visited a nation that had character. That was mature, well-adjusted. A nation confident we were great.

And it's worth saying that the Soviet Union really was murderously evil. It didn't merely deny the existence of massacres, but did its level best to perpetrate a couple. It didn't merely say threatening things about America, but actually possessed the weaponry to destroy us thousands of times over. And we may have been scared. But we didn't run, and we didn't back down from the challenge.

I don't know how to prove this, but my sense is that the dawning realization that we're globally unpopular is having profound effects on the American psyche. There's a lot of talk about how we don't care about what other countries think, but like the kid repeating mantras of self-esteem in the corner of the playground, saying it doesn't make it true. If we felt more secure that the rest of the world had some faith in our intentions, would Ahmadinejad be anything but an annoyance? Is the reason we fear to negotiate with Iran because we believe that, when it comes down to it and we ask for an end to their nuclear program, they'll refuse, and the world will agree with them and not us? Is America growing afraid of rejection?

I can't figure out if this Bill Richardson ad featuring bloggers talking about his withdrawal plan is actually aimed at bolstering flagging support in the netroots or is something rather more interesting: The first ad based off the assumption that bloggers have gained enough credibility that liberals everywhere trust their assessments as unvarnished truth they don't get in the media. The fact that Richardson is airing the spot in New Hampshire suggests the latter. If so, that's an interesting premise, and it'll be more interesting to see if it works. Anyway, here's the ad, and the bloggers:

Update: Sources e-mail to say that Richardson's ad buy is an ad buy in name only. It's a $6,000 purchase that will air the spot for one day on New Hampshire's WMUR. So basically nobody will see it. The buy, rather, is having its intended effect of serving as the peg with which bloggers and netroots types can post the YouTube and talk about the content.

It's the way of blogging that you sort of wish some ill-considered and poorly-worded posts would be forgotten rather than linked a lot, but since my late night musings on Portland, Seattle, and DC seem to be taking the latter route, best to clarify. My point was not that "black people don't like coffee shops," but that compared to a lot of other cities that are considered attractive destinations for techie white folks, DC's residential districts have a distinct lack of coffee shops (and other fun stuff). Matt's argument about Mocha Hut actually hurts his case, because Mocha Hut, along with Busboys and Poets and 14U, are new businesses that have only entered the U Street corridor as it became...whiter. Indeed, as people like Matt, who now hangs out at those coffee shops, moved there. In this case, white is actually standing in for affluent, because the sort of people who spend $4 on a latte and demand wireless internet for their laptops tend to have money in the bank, whatever their race.

Meanwhile, I think DC is awesome, too. But what struck me when I went to Seattle was how much more livable Seattle was. What makes DC awesome is the collection of people pulled their for work (and no, the existence of the suburbs doesn't change the fact that most of us, Matt and myself included, moved to DC for a job). Defense wonks and political journalists and Hill staffers and health policy types. It's a city filled with folks I want to talk to. But it's not a city that puts much special effort into being really livable, or pleasant, for said folks. Seattle and Portland really do seem to put a lot of affirmative thought into building a city their residents will enjoy, and that's in part because "enjoyability" -- as opposed to "Congress is there" -- is a big part of the reason people move to Seattle and Seattle needs to keep it that way. DC, meanwhile, is much less homogenous, and so trying to shift the character to aid any particular group requires a lot more in the way of tradeoffs.

But all in all, it's a post I rather wish I hadn't written, and had instead just said at a bar, so people could take apart the point privately. Ah well.

Watch Ahmadinejad's face here.

He's not being feared. He's being laughed at. Imagine how the Iranian people feel seeing these clips (and they're seeing them). Imagine how the rest of the Iranian government feels being made to look so foolish -- and all for this jester's dreams of personal aggrandizement.

The Bush administration has long upheld that our best weapons against Iran are our unwillingness to speak with them and the threat of bombing. They've failed. But our willingness to expose Ahmadinejad to the risks of free ands public speech, combined with YouTube, may prove to be far more potent.

Maybe there's more to this interview that Matt Stoller conducted with Wes Clark, but I'd really like to see the follow-up to Clark's (somewhat surprising) contention that we can't live with a nuclear Iran. Most are in agreement that, all things considered, it would be better to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, and that public diplomacy and direct engagement are the optimal methods of keeping them from weapons. The question is what if diplomacy fails? It may well, after all. Given America's apparent desire to overthrow Iran -- down to Bush having a prominent bomb Iran maniac over for tea in the Oval Office -- it's not crazy for Tehran to decide their regime's survival is only assured by nuclear capabilities. And in that situation, the question is simple: Is this worth going to war over?

The Democratic campaigns, particularly Hillary's, keep rhetorically implying that it is worth war with the "all options on the table" formulation. Simultaneously, they're relying on liberal activists to either know or assume that they don't really mean that and are simply trying to look tough. But this is one of the most dangerous foreign policy eventualities on the next president's plate, and it's crazy that voters are being asked to cast a ballot without any firm information on what the candidates think.

Folks are having some fun with Barack Obama's reported belief that "the very act of Americans choosing to elect him would amount to the biggest foreign policy advance of the past 20 years, would immediately change the way, say, a young boy in Lahore views this country, would crush the propaganda gains of radical Islam since the end of the first Gulf War, would heal the scar that serves as a reminder of America’s original sin (slavery), would directly engage the mass Muslim world in a way that no one who voted for oil or empire could," and so forth.

This isn't out of Obama's mouth, but rather the unsourced ruminations of "some of his friends," so take it with a grain of salt. That said, it seems plausible enough to comment on. Which Zeitlin the Youthful does, saying "if he really thinks that, I’m worried. What pisses off Muslims and allows for radical Islam’s propaganda gains is not that our president is a hawkish buffoon, per se, it’s the policies he enacts. It (was) troops in Saudi Arabia, support for various Arab dictators, support for Israel, invading Iraq, occupying Iraq etc. The mere act of electing Barack won’t magically make all that go away."

There is, first, a world of difference between Obama's ascension being a propaganda coup that enhances our image in the eyes of Muslims, and his election being a magical vacuum that sucks away all hatred. Obama's election may buy us some time and goodwill, not end our problems -- and I don't think he's suggesting differently (if he's suggesting any of this at all). In any case, I wouldn't get too literal about Why They Hate Us. My Arabist friends don't seem to think Arabs are any more policy-conscious than any other electorate. Like American voters, they evaluate America through a complex set of heuristics and gut judgments, and Obama, whose Indonesian connections will surely be hyped up in the Islamic world, will probably play quite a bit better in their guts.

More to the point, it's rather important that Obama conceives of himself as someone whose upside will be improving America's image in the world: It suggests a genuine commitment to, well, improving America's image in the world, which will subtly push him towards all sorts of image-enhancing policies on Arab dictators and Israel/Palestine and the rest. If Obama believes that his election will enhance American standing, it will become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as he engages in the sort of rhetoric and actions that would retain and build upon that initial boost. And that would be a very good thing.

Sounds like Portland is a rather nice place to live -- a fact backed up by everybody I know who has ever lived there, despite what Cato says. This has actually puzzled me since I went to Seattle and noticed all the awesome coffee shops and bookstores and generally nice features. Why can't DC have all that. There are, after all, lots of young, computer savvy white people in Mt. Pleasant, but nary a coffee shop to serve them. It's barbaric!

But it actually makes sense: Cities like Portland and Seattle are trying to create a livable city to retain and attract a certain type of resident. Namely, educated, young, white people. Portland's 78% white, Seattle's a bit under 70%. So you structure the city thus that there's lots of educated white people bait, including cafes, bookstores, wireless internet spots, bike trails, etc.

DC, by contrast, has a lot of white people working in it, but is actually only 39% white, and has a city government that does not derive primary political support from transient white voters. So the character of the city actually does more to represent its inhabitants. Which seems rational. Moreover, the white people there basically have to be there. You don't move to DC because it's awesome, you move because it's where your work is. So there's little need to construct an affirmative agenda to attract residents.

Read the comments: As they make a fairly good case that this post is wildly off-base.

See update. Sometimes things come out wrong.

Not only do I lack the relevant campaign experience to evaluate whether the Obama campaign's radical theory of how to win the Iowa caucus will prove effective, but I don't think people with lots of campaign experience have any way to tell, either. Caucuses are unpredictable. But the campaign's reliance on enthusiasm doesn't have a particularly heady history: You have to go back to Carter to find a Democratic primary in which the early frontrunner -- not necessarily the leader in the national polls, but the guy most political observers thought would win -- failed to capture the nomination. Despite enthusiasm-powered insurgencies from Dean, Bradley, Tsongas, Jackson, Hart, and Kennedy, enthusiasm tends to lose out to traditional models of political strength. One really enthusiastic vote is the same as one apathetic vote cast by a hectored AARP member. But we'll see. 9/11 changed everything, after all.

Over at UN Dispatch, Mark Leon Goldberg explains why the meeting mattered. He also says that, "in a body composed of 192 member states, it is very difficult--practically speaking--for a tiny group of nations to hold out against the will of the rest. It is a basic negotiating tenet here at the UN that countries try to avoid being 'isolated.'...No country feels comfortable being a 'spoiler' by positioning itself against the will of an overwhelming majority of UN member states."

It's not clear to me that that's true. Rather, it seems that if George W. Bush stays in office, or is succeeded by Fred Thompson, we won't address global warming, while if he's replaced by, say, Christopher Dodd, we will. One thing the Bush administration has shown is that these traditional norms are rather toothless, and if an American leader is willing to be widely reviled, he can basically tell the world community to go fuck itself. There's no real method of enforcement here, The UN offers a powerful platform through which the world's other inhabitants can seek to pressure the US, but our sensitivity to their opinions appears to depend on how much our president actually cares what they think. If the answer is that he doesn't, they don't really have another option.

That said, it was interesting to see the unanimity of the rest of the world, and particularly Sarkozy, who was speaking on behalf of the entire EU. Given that it's unlikely Republicans will remain in power forever, we really are likely to some action on global warming, and the UN is effectively laying the groundwork to be the institution in which that action takes place -- an outcome that wasn't clear even a few years ago, but which could do much to underscore the relevance of the UN and help define its mission in the new millennia.

Jim writes:

Ahmedinejad has a constitutionally weak role in the Iranian government. He has no control over the Army/Navy and nuclear development. There is an ongoing conflict between the religious moderates and conservatives in the Islamic hierarchy which actually controls the levers of power. Ahmedinejad appears to be losing actual power in Iran, not gaining it. But we seem intent on unifying the government and people by our constant attacks and threats on Ahmedinejad and Iran. This is not in our interest.

I have no brief for Ahmedinejad or Iran, but I do have a brief for rational, national interest (without ideological blinders), US policy.

It is in our interest to reduce tensions in the mideast and south asia, not increase them.

This is worth repeating: There's a very substantial case to be made that we are the only force propping Ahmadinejad up. There is an almost ironclad case to be made that our overt hostility to Iran is leading to retrenchment among their political elite, crackdowns on moderates, and problems for reformers. There is very little of a case to be made that our actions towards Iran are in any way weakening Ahmadinejad, save insofar as our sanctions are making the Iranians miserable enough to hate everybody, us included. This is a very stupid way to make policy.

I think McMegan's take on the recent spate of articles about women dating men who earn less than they do is basically right. It's not exactly new for income to be a relevant characteristic in dating choices, and I can't recall the spate of articles decrying women who choose men who make a lot more money than they do. Moreover, it's actually rather telling that one of the recent articles was about how women lose respect for guys who earn less than them, and the other is about how guys can't handle the state of affairs. There are lots of relationships. There are lots of things that end them. More than enough to fill endless trend pieces in affluent outlets that pay a pretty good per-word rate. And so that's what we get -- because writers, both men and women, like to earn money.

To state what's implicit in my earlier commentary on the Amedinejad interview a bit more clearly, we're letting Ahmadinejad win this game. America's dodging his invitations to talk, growing hysterical over his requests to lay a wreath at Ground Zero, and interviewing him in a way that makes our press look like White House puppets. This makes us look bad, not him.

It's not often mentioned, but the rest of the world does not evaluate all international interactions from a starting premise that America is right and its motivations pure. We actually have to convince them of that, particularly in the post-Iraq era. And we're failing. We're abetting Ahmadinejad's attempts to project a hugely disingenuous version of himself through our megaphone. Without us, he's in trouble: He's domestically unpopular, and fundamentally without a platform. With our opposition and apparent hatred for Tehran, he's Iran's champion against America, and he's outwitting us in the court of world opinion.

The fight, after all, is over who here is actually interested in peace. Ahmadinejad's argument is that Iran doesn't want nuclear weapons, doesn't want war, doesn't want international friction. Our argument is that we don't want Iran to have nukes, and won't talk to them. Most of the world -- and in particular, his people -- don't have a very good way of evaluating who's sincere. One good way for them to make a judgment would be to watch a high-level summit between America and Iran, wherein we offer all manner of inducements and security guarantees in return for a verifiable end to their atomic ambitions.

But we're not forcing him to refuse that offer. Indeed, we're not upping the stakes at all. Instead, we're letting him project the most basic and meaningless levels of "good faith" and refusing to set up any traps to expose its absence. Presumably, this is because we actually don't care about a weaponized Iran, as if we did, we'd do the things that would make such a future less likely, like talking to them, and offering incentives for behavior we'd prefer. But whatever our ultimate goals here, whatever the explanation for our odd stubborness on the nuclear issue even as we hold meetings with Iran on the future of Iraq (meetings we stomach despite our belief that they're killing our soldiers), we're letting Ahmadinejad easily lope past us in the propaganda war which strengthens his hand and weakens ours.

If you really love health care talk, check out Paul Starr on how Hillary Clinton's health care plan differs from the proposal her husband offered in 1994. Starr helped construct the original plan, so he knows of what he speaks.

This exchange is fairly funny:

PELLEY: President Bush has pledged that you will not be allowed to possess a nuclear weapon and will use military force if necessary.

AHMADEINEJAD: I think Mr. Bush, if he wants his party to win the next election, there are cheaper ways and ways to go about this. I can very well give him a few ideas so that the people vote for him. He should respect the American people. They should not bug the telephone conversations of their citizens. They should not kill the sons and daughters of the American nation. They should not squander the taxpayers' money and give them to weapons companies. And also help the people, the victims of Katrina. People will vote for them if they do these things....I'm a Muslim. I cannot tell a lie. I am supposed to tell the truth. What I'm saying is that President Bush's conduct in Iraq is wrong. And his wrong conduct is behind his party losing the previous elections. This is very clear. The American people are very much dismayed with the behavior and the conduct of the present administration. They are not dismayed with Iran. In fact, the two nations are very close to one another.

Say what you will about Ahmadinejad's intentions, but that's a fairly good read of contemporary American politics.

From Pelley's interview with Ahmadinejad:

PELLEY: I asked President Bush what he would say to you if he were sitting in this chair. And he told me, quote, speaking to you, that you've made terrible choices for your people. You've isolated your nation. You've taken a nation of proud and honorable people and made your country the pariah of the world. These are President Bush's words to you. What's your reply to the president?

Wow. Pot, meet kettle.

It's sort of a shame that CBS's Scott Pelley declined to interview Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and instead popped off aggressive statements as if he were a White House press release with a cardiovascular system. I'm for the hostile interview here, but go stupidly overboard and you lose your credibility. And Pelley went so hostile that he let Ahmadinejad easily dance away. Plus: Did we really need to have this exchange?

PELLEY: What trait do you admire in President Bush?

AHMADINEJAD: Again, I have a very frank tone. I think that President Bush needs to correct his ways.

PELLEY: What do you admire about him?

AHMADEINEJAD: He should respect the American people.

PELLEY: Is there anything? Any trait?

AHMADINEJAD: As an American citizen, tell me what trait do you admire?

PELLEY: Well, Mr. Bush is, without question, a very religious man, for example, as you are. I wonder if there's anything that you've seen in President Bush that you admire.

AHMADEINEJAD: Well, is Mr. Bush a religious man?

PELLEY: Very much so. As you are.

AHMADEINEJAD: What religion, please tell me, tells you as a follower of that religion to occupy another country and kill its people? Please tell me. Does Christianity tell its followers to do that? Judaism, for that matter? Islam, for that matter? What prophet tells you to send 160,000 troops to another country, kill men, women, and children? You just can't wear your religion on your sleeve or just go to church. You should be truthfully religious. Religion tells us all that you should respect the property, the life of different people. Respect human rights. Love your fellow man. And once you hear that a person has been killed, you should be saddened. You shouldn't sit in a room, a dark room, and hatch plots. And because of your plots, many thousands of people are killed. Having said that, we respect the American people. And because of our respect for the American people, we respectfully talk with President Bush. We have a respectful tone. But having said that, I don't think that that is a good definition of religion. Religion is love for your fellow man, brotherhood, telling the truth.

PELLEY: I take it you can't think of anything you like about President Bush.

AHMADEINEJAD: Well, I'm not familiar with the gentleman's private life. Maybe in his private life he is very kind or a determined man. I'm not aware of that. I base my judgment on what I see in his public life. Having said that, I think that President Bush can behave much better. There were golden opportunities for President Bush. He should have used them better.

What the hell sort of question is that? And Pelley's answer is that Bush believes in God? This is the best we can do?

Sheesh.

I genuinely don't understand the quaking fear over Ahmadinejad's interview at Columbia. When did America become so weak, so insecure, that we mistrust our capacity to converse with potentially hostile world leaders? Do we really believe the president of Columbia is so doltish as to be outsmarted by a former traffic engineer from Tehran? Do we really see no utility in publicly grilling prominent liars in such a way that their denials lose credibility? What do we have to lose from a foreign leader, even a hostile one, somberly laying a wreath at the site of a tragedy? When did we become so afraid? And for all the conservative talk that a loss in Iraq will diminish our reputation for strength and thus harm our security, how must it look when some three-foot tall Iranian firebrand keeps trying to dialogue with us and we keep dodging his calls?

Read Kevin on Daniel Brook's The Trap. Kevin points out another thing that bugged me abut the book, namely, Brook's apparent belief that anyone in the corporate world trudged there, death march style, after being priced out of working for a rewarding non-profit.

I know lots of people in the for-profit world. They like their jobs pretty well -- just as well as Hill staffers and non-profiteers. And a lot of them like having money! Brook paints for-profit work as a loathed fallback to every young person's natural ambition to work for Amnesty International, but not only does that fail to track with my experience, it's sort of insulting to folks who have chosen a different career path than I have, and thus probably not the way to build political support for a program that will reduce their salaries.

I'm in New York for a week of multilateralism and do-goodery. Multilateralism in the form of a UN meeting on climate change today, and do-goodery as demonstrated by the Clinton Global Initiative. Night One was a dinner with some UN Climate Change folks who wanted to Meet The Bloggers.

Sadly, meeting the bloggers involved a lot of asking what a blog is and isn't, and whether we check facts, and how we differ from an op-ed page, and a lot of other conversational avenues that I thought were exhausted in early-2005. Dinner sort of hummed along in this agreeable-but-dull fashion till one of the UN types shattered the comity by angrily saying that none of us had asked passionate questions about climate change yet, and didn't we understand this would kill us all and it mattered!? And we did! What we hadn't been convinced of was that anything going on here mattered.

Here's the problem: When it comes to pressuring major nations to undertake policy initiatives they're not favorably disposed towards, the UN is rather toothless. It can quietly persuade or publicly shame. Up till now, it has sought quiet persuasion, with little to no effect on the behavior of America, China, or India. It has not sent Secretary Moon to forthrightly blast our apparent indifference, and the consequences our shortsighted sluggishness will have on the rest of the world. This is not something the UN feels able to do.

There is value, of course, in the UN's role as a neutral platform for the hashing out of international affairs, but the value in amassing that credibility is also that it can occasionally be used. It is often used, of course, against smaller, weaker nations. It is not used against the institution's more powerful patrons, like the US. And without a radical change on that front, there is little the UN can do on climate change, save signal its willingness to serve as a procedural host when the day comes that the relevant countries decide to take action.

In that respect, laying groundwork with other nations may indeed serve as a useful accelerant on the day when President Clinton/Obama/Edwards/Dodd/Richardson takes office and decides to reverse American policy on climate change. As an official sitting near Matt explained, smaller countries don't have the technical capacity to move rapidly forward with action plans and carbon analyses. Getting that work underway during this lull is actually quite useful. But it relies entirely on an internal transformation in American politics -- it doesn't really hold hope for hastening such an evolution.

But the UN is not alone in this slightly bizarre unwillingness to exert real leverage. Western Europe says it believes the science on global warming. The science on global warming suggests that the effects of global warming will be nothing less than catastrophic for Western Europe. Given that, it's genuinely surprising to me that countries like France, the UK, Germany, and so forth haven't banded together to exert real pressure on America, China, and India.

You'd think this would be an area in which the EU both could, but more importantly should, act with a singularity of purpose and flex its aggregate might. If it doesn't, the consequences will be devastating. And yet there's no real evidence that the EU is ready to rely on anything save rhetoric -- no sanctions, no threats of sanctions, no preferred trading deal to countries willing to moderate carbon output....nothing. Meanwhile, Sarkozy's threatening to bomb Iran if it goes nuclear, despite the fact that a nuclear Iran is, whatever else you think about it, of relatively little danger to France, while warming poses a tremendous threat. The whole thing is weird, and demonstrates a rather worrying distance between the emphasis various countries and institutions say they're putting on climate change, and how much political capital they're really willing to risk to arrest the planet's carbon output.

Brian has further thoughts here. And I'll be blogging all through the meetings today.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

SurveyUSA has more state polling showing Edwards as the strongest candidate, this time in Iowa. This lends further support to the conjecture that Edwards has the best chance at putting the Midwest into play, while Clinton runs strongest in Florida (at least against Giuliani) and Virginia.

Many of the attacks against Walt and Mearsheimer's Israel Lobby thesis have been ad hominem, shoddy, and/or unconcerned with the book's actual arguments. The same cannot be said for Leslie Gelb's rejoinder, which disagrees with Walt and Mearsheimer, but takes the remarkable step of actually addressing their central claims and attempting to respond with plausible counterarguments. Well worth a read.

(Posted by John.)

So, we're going to eventually stop pretending that something like an actual, functioning Iraqi government exists, right?

BAGHDAD -- An Iraqi official conceded Sunday that Blackwater USA's exit would create a "security vacuum" in Baghdad and said U.S. and Iraqi officials were instead working on revamping regulations governing private security companies after a deadly shooting of civilians.

The killing of at least 11 civilians allegedly involving Blackwater guards near a square in central Baghdad has thrown a spotlight on the practices of foreign security contractors who have long angered Iraqis by their aggressive behavior in protecting Western diplomats and other dignitaries.

The North Carolina-based company has insisted that its guards came under fire and shot back only to defend themselves.

Let's sidestep the whole issue of whether the Blackwater guys are a) Angels of Mercy or b) the SS reincarnated, and look at the obvious here:  the bunch of guys calling themselves the government of Iraq are, uh, none too fond of the Blackwater crew, and yet cannot bring themselves to actually get rid of them, because the "government" lacks one of the basic, defining attributes of those institutions:  a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.  (And even if the Iraqis could dare to do without armed mercenaries in the streets, it's improbable the occupying power would let them.)

This is kind of an important thing to come to terms with, if the justification for staying in Iraq ad infinitum is supposed to be supporting the Korean, er, Iraqi government.  We're chaining ourselves to a sinking ship.  This puts me in a cynical mood.

Clearly the media isn't going to start calling Maliki "the impotent Vichy figure in Baghdad" or anything that apt.  But we need to recognize that the clique we've been calling the Iraqi government has -- charitably -- a lifetime that can be measured in days once the Americans leave.  That isn't a government, and it never will be.  There will be no orderly succession from the current institutions.  They will be destroyed, the people who ran them will be killed if they resist, and whoever replaces them will be sure to leave no ties to the previous, hated regime. 

When the North Vietnamese Army entered Saigon and took the Presidential palace in April of 1975, they refused to accept the surrender of the South Vietnamese President, because they didn't recognize his right to surrender anything in the first place.  He was worse than defeated, he was irrelevant.  That's the kind of collapse we're heading for in Iraq when the US leaves.

But like I said, I'm in a cynical mood.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Newt Gingrich has announced he'll enter the race in November if supporters pledge $30 million, and that doesn't seem like the kind of thing you say unless you're thinking you'll get the money.  You don't want people to look at you afterwards and think, 'Hey, there's that schmoe who wanted to run for president but couldn't raise the money... remember when he was a big deal?'  Before, Newt said that he'd only run if Fred Thompson flopped.  And now James Dobson has announced that he won't support Fred -- let's roll tape:

"Isn't Thompson the candidate who is opposed to a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage, believes there should be 50 different definitions of marriage in the U.S., favors McCain-Feingold, won't talk at all about what he believes, and can't speak his way out of a paper bag on the campaign trail?" Dobson wrote. "He has no passion, no zeal and no apparent 'want to.' And yet he is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians? Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me!"

Apparently Dobson doesn't regard his sisters as worth discussing politics with.  Anyway, the raison d'etre of a Thompson candidacy was to unite GOP base voters who didn't feel comfortable with the heterodoxies of McCain, Giuliani, and various stages of Romney.  If Dobson's not on the team, it's hard for me to see how that's going to go forward.  Which sets the stage for Newt Gingrich, cutter of Medicare and divorcer of bedridden wives.

This is surprising. Does Reihan really not believe the effort to change California's apportionment of electoral votes in order to advantage the GOP is "devious?" There are a lot of arguments one can make as to how to reform the electoral system, but single-state ballot initiatives funded by wealthy partisans that will clearly throw the election to one or another party is fairly clearly not it. I can respect that some folks will say that cutting taxes on the rich is such an inviolable principle that it easily trumps some electoral chicanery, but please, let's not pretend a naked power grab is anything but a naked power grab.

In my review of Mark Penn's new book Microtrends, I got a bit of flack from pollsters who otherwise loved the piece because I widened the conclusion from Penn to polling. I wrote:

Pollsters occupy a uniquely powerful space in American political discourse: They bring science to elections. Armed with heaps of raw data, they elevate their opinions into something altogether weightier: Conclusions. When an organization sends out a press release saying the organization is right, it’s ignored. When a pollster sends out a poll showing the electorate agrees, ears in Washington perk up.

The enterprise has always been dodgy. Populist pollsters reliably discover that the electorate thirsts for more populism. Conservative pollsters routinely discover a small government consensus pulsing at the heart of the body politic. When the libertarian Cato Institute commissioned a poll of the electorate, they found—shockingly—that the essential swing vote was made of libertarians. Remarkably, whenever a politician or self-interested institution releases a poll, the results show a symmetry between the attitudes of the pollster’s employer and those of the voters. But Penn’s book shines light on this phenomenon: If he is the pinnacle of his profession, then the profession uses numbers as a ruse—a superficial empiricism that obscures garden-variety hackery. And that’s a trend worth worrying about.

Lots of pollsters protested that, sure, Mark Penn weights his numbers and doesn't show his work and has a bit of a bad reputation, but he's an isolated case. But take Celinda Lake's push-polling. Celinda Lake is not, so far as I know, a pollster with a bad reputation. Rather the opposite, in fact. Yet she's pushing out a "sobering" poll that shows support for Democratic congressional candidates drops after respondents are told, "Some people say [your Democratic incumbent] is a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama and will support her/his liberal agenda of big government and higher taxes if she becomes president." And this poll is being reported a problem for those candidates.

But that's moronic. If the Democrat is defined as being a candidate of high taxes and an amorphous, evil-sounding "liberal agenda," they will do poorly. If they're defined in more positive ways, they'll do better. If the question was, "Some people say [your Democratic incumbent] is a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama and will support her/his attempts to withdraw troops from Iraq and ensure every American has health care if he/she becomes president," support would increase.

This poll wanted a result. It got it. It also could have gotten the opposite result. This happens all the time. It just depends on who's paying, and what they want to show. It's certainly true that good polling can be and often is, conducted, but far too much of it is of this type, and nether the polling industry nor the media polices these practices.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Aaron Swartz has a nice article about how chemical companies looking to sell their product and conservatives who want to smear environmentalists have been spreading the myth that banning DDT caused millions of deaths from malaria.  As it turns out, the reason that people stopped using DDT a lot in poor countries wasn't because of Rachel Carson's baneful influence -- it was because mosquitos started becoming DDT-resistant:

DDT use has decreased enormously, but not because of a ban. The real reason is simple, although not one conservatives are particularly fond of: evolution. Mosquito populations rapidly develop resistance to DDT, creating enzymes to detoxify it, modifying their nervous systems to avoid its effects, and avoiding areas where DDT is sprayed — and recent research finds that that resistance continues to spread even after DDT spraying has stopped, lowering the effectiveness not only of DDT but also other pesticides.

An article from Current Biology describes how flies with DDT resistance not only become able to resist other insecticides, but also gain unexpected super powers:

Mutations that confer pesticide resistance are predicted to carry a cost in the absence of pesticide and consequently not to spread to fixation [1 and 2]. However, DDT resistance in Drosophila melanogaster (DDT-R) is approaching fixation globally, long after withdrawl of DDT [3]. There are two possible explanations for this. First, other insecticides, to which DDT-R confers cross-resistance [4], may be continuing selection. Second, DDT-R may not carry the expected fitness cost. Here we look at the fitness of DDT-R in the absence of insecticide. Surprisingly, when inherited via the female, the DDT-R locus actually increases both adult fecundity and the viability of eggs and larvae, as well as speeding both larval and pupal development.

I'm guessing that flies were used in that experiment because they're easier to study in the lab, and I don't know how well the results carry over to their blood-sucking brethren.  But if DDT resistance has the same effects in mosquitoes as flies, we can see very good reasons not to use it anymore.  What doesn't kill every last mosquito only makes them stronger. 

So what do we do about malaria?  Our best bet, it appears, is artemisinin.  It doesn't kill mosquitos -- it's a drug that kills off the malaria parasite once it gets into the human body.  It costs between $1 and $2.50 per dose.  There's also the old-fashioned but apparently effective solution -- mosquito nets treated with insecticide.  Either way, we'll have to spend a lot of money if we're going to eradicate the disease that may have killed more humans than anything else.  (Apparently Bill Gates is opening his wallet, and surprising partnerships between pharmaceutical companies and relief groups are being formed.)

And what do we do about right-wing think tanks, funded by oil companies and other groups with an interest in discrediting environmentalists, who set up pro-DDT web sites?  I don't know. 

By Ankush

Joe Nocera's weekly, reported columns for the Times Business section are usually quite good.  But every once in while, things go weirdly awry, and the normally sensible Nocera reveals an odd penchant for contrarianism. 

A few months ago, it was his column on Jeffrey Sachs, whose impressive efforts to eradicate malaria and reduce global poverty Nocera referred to as "laudable" but unable to achieve their goals "in any serious way." To demonstrate this, he quoted and channeled Tyler Cowen at great length, without offering Sachs or one of his supporters any space to respond to Cowen's specific criticisms, which mainly boiled down to claims about the difficulties Sachs would have scaling up his small and successful projects to a grander scale. Nocera concluded by noting that Sachs was engaged in "a worthy effort but probably not as profoundly transformative as he likes to portray it."  The reader could have been forgiven for wondering why Nocera blew prime real estate and his own time in order to mildly deflate efforts he seemed to actually find worthwhile.

Nocera's column this week is of a similar variety. Regardless of one's views on whether it's a good idea to require companies to disclose the risk global warming poses to their businesses, I think it's safe to say that Gregg Easterbrook -- who only recently acknowledged the widespread view in the scientific community that warming is, you know, happening -- is not someone you should be relying upon particularly heavily.  And yet, there Easterbook is, peddling his new, more-reasonable-sounding-but-still-minority view that global warming may not actually be so bad after all!

Nocera was on sturdier ground with the Sachs column, since there is a fairly serious debate within economics about the effectiveness of foreign aid, but in both columns, skeptics on high-profile issues were given far more favorable treatment than their opponents, who, in turn, weren't offered an opportunity to respond directly to the claims of their detractors.  It's a fairly transparent way for Nocera to emerge as a cool-headed realist among crazed, unthinking partisans.

The method is embarrassing and silly, and while it's unfortunately quite common in journalism, I have higher expectations for someone with Nocera's talent.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Am I reading this chart correctly? Vermont has the highest death rate of any state, and by a sizeable margin?

Via Joan McCarter at Daily Kos.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

I've got 'rents visiting, and therefore not enough time to put together a table, so me follow Brother Neil's observations re: Missouri polling. Via TPM Election Central, SurveyUSA's Ohio polling again shows John Edwards as the best general election candidate in the state. Edwards and Clinton both trail Giuliani by one percentage point, but Edwards fares much better against Romney and Thompson than Clinton does. Since Ohio will have a number of competitive House races, the bigger the margin in the Buckeye State at the top of the ticket, the better.

In fairness, general election matchups in Virginia and Florida have shown Clinton with a lead in Virginia [though without comparison to Edwards or Obama], and tied with Giuliani in Florida, so at present it appears that the two candidates both expand the map, just in different directions.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Matt notes that the Jena 6 protests have made him more aware of the situation.  While I share his general skepticism about mass protest as an effective political tool, I think this is one of the cases in which it can be particularly effective.  When thousands of people are going somewhere and making a lot of noise, the cameras follow.  In this case, you have a situation where an injustice occurred, and without a bunch of people going to Louisiana and making noise, there wouldn't be enough media attention on what happened in Jena and on the larger issue of systemic racism. 

Mass protest is a less effective tool when you're dealing with a situation that has already attracted lots of media coverage, like the Iraq War.  It wasn't that Iraq was ever undercovered -- it was just that early coverage of the war was massively skewed by administration propaganda.  Partly because of the massive investment Republicans have made in making the public dismiss protestors as dirty hippies whom right-thinking people shouldn't take seriously, it's hard for mass protests to change the nature of already existing media coverage for the better. 

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

A new batch of state-by-state general election polls is trickling out of SurveyUSA.  Since SUSA doesn't have all this stuff on one page, I've linked to a really pretty MyDD diary charting the way that Edwards, Obama, and Hillary run against Thompson, Giuliani, and Romney in Ohio, Kansas, Kentucky, and Alabama.  To summarize, John Edwards runs better than any other Democrat against every Republican in every state sampled (except that he and Clinton both trail Giuliani in Ohio by 1).  And while lots of those states aren't ones that we'll need in a general election, most of them have Senate races where it might help to be strong at the top of the ticket. Now Missouri numbers have come out, and I've posted them below.  Democratic victory is blue, Republican victory is red. 

So there he goes again, outperforming all other Democrats and blowing Romney away.  Is it the accent?  The policy positions?  The fact that low-information voters think he's a moderate?  The fact that he'll be the first candidate interviewed on MTV this cycle?  (Well, probably not that.) 

"Should I Stay Or Should I Go?" edition, over at Tapped.

Speaking about the panel with James Dobbins that I mentioned earlier, Marc Lynch writes:

I found James Dobbins the most interesting speaker (including myself). Drawing on his own long experience as a diplomat and as a student of interventions, he argued forcefully for a version of the Iraq Study Group's 'diplomatic surge' which would bring all of Iraq's neighbors into a Dayton-like (or Bonn-like) conference. The US brought Milosevic and Tudjman to Dayton knowing perfectly well the amount of blood on their hands and the boost it would give to their domestic political fortunes, because that was the only way to end the violence - and it worked. He argued that no civil war can ever be resolved if the country's neighbors don't want it to be resolved; the US can either contain Iran or stabilize Iraq, but it can't have both.

At the end, I elaborated on Dobbins' Dayton example by suggesting an alternative lesson of the Anbar model which is rarely discussed. After years of failed warfare against the Sunni insurgency, the US decided to talk with and then cooperate with "former" insurgents with a lot of American blood on their hands. They discovered that it worked (at least for the short term). It's ironic that the same people who currently most vigorously defend the "Anbar Model" of working with these "former insurgents" usually strongly oppose any serious dialogue with Syria or Iran.

The way the developments in Anbar have been sold -- as a step towards a reconciled Iraq, an effect of the surge, and a vindication of our strategy -- are really rather remarkable. Makes for a damn weird conversation, too:

"We're going to send tens of thousands more American troops to increase security so the Maliki government can pursue political reconciliation!"

[Months go by.]

"It worked!"

"So there's political reconciliation!? That's great!"

"Well, uh, no, not quite."

"Oh. So what do you mean it worked?"

"Well, we started arming Sunni tribes who in turn killed some members of a jihadist group dedicated to attacking us!"

"Is this group in the government?"

"No."

"Are they now helping with reconciliation?"

"No."

"Isn't the fact that they're now heavily armed and perceive themselves to be allied with America going to embolden their fight against the Shia?"

"Uhm...'

"Well, is the Maliki government at least doing better?"

"No, we sort of want to depose and replace them."

"So there's no movement towards political reconciliation at all."

"No, not as such."

"But you're saying the surge apparently worked?"

"Absolutely. There's no 'apparently' about it."

Reflecting on the 1994 health reform battles, Newt Gingrich says:

In a Wednesday interview, Newt Gingrich said many moderate Republicans would have bolted from conservatives to back compromise. But many Democrats, believing they were losing a historic opportunity for more ambitious reform, would have revolted. “Her natural base on the left would not let her,” Gingrich said. “I think that is a huge continuing challenge” for her and for health reform efforts generally.

That's quite right. But I don't think it'll be the case again. 1994 still looms large, and though liberal self-confidence is much-improved from 2003, this is still a largely chastened and uncertain movement that hates itself for not cutting a deal earlier in 1994. There's pressure not to compromise preemptively, but it's not clear there will be resistance to compromise fairly early on in the process.

Additionally, one really wonders if a compromise was available in 1994. What happened, after all, isn't that a consensus bill was on the table and rejected by perfidious Democrats. Rather, as the Clinton effort weakened, and the administration moved to support what were compromise bills, the Republicans moved away from their own legislation. Dole himself voted against two separate bills that had his name on them. You can't compromise if your partners aren't operating in good faith.

I'm getting some concern trolling on this, so let's say it clearly: That the Democratic senators allowed a vote to condemn the MoveOn ad was the absolute height of spineless cowardice. More than that, it's stupid: They have nothing to gain and everything to lose from such a vote. Those who vote for the resolution will see no political benefit. Those who voted against may suffer some harm. Matt's right to say that Washington liberals were bizarrely outraged over the ad, but it's worth pointing out that those same establishment types think vote was a stupid and inexplicable legislative mistake. My understanding is that the Dems basically got rolled by some members of their conservative flank and some smart parliamentary maneuvering by the Republicans, but it's not terribly clear how that happened.

As a general point, I think MoveOn was right to point out that the Senate moved to this vote directly after failing to pass Webb's legislation to guarantee soldiers as much time at home with their family as they spent deployed in Iraq. It's shameful stuff.

Ilan Goldenberg reports from Cato, where former Special Envoy to Places You'd Be Afraid to Visit James Dobbins made this point:

Dobbins argued that in every case of trying to fix a failed state the neighbors play a critical role. They have serious national interests because they are the ones who have to deal with the refugees, violence, crime, economic shocks and all the other wonderful things that happen as a result of a total meltdown on your border. They simply are not going to sit on the sidelines.

All of the neighbors have an interest in maintaining stability. To do this they search for proxies who will carry out their agenda. Paradoxically, this proxy strategy only ends up exacerbating the situation by strengthening various warring parties and creating greater potential for broader regional conflict. The only way around this, is to create a regional dialogue that forces all the neighbors to come together and coordinate their strategies. Instead of a zero sum game they should be working towards the same greater goal of keeping Iraq from totally falling apart.

I think this is missing a piece, however. Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the rest surely recognize that they need to coordinate in order to achieve stability in Iraq. They don't need America to explain that to them. At the moment, however, none of the regional partners actually want a stable, functioning Iraq -- because currently, a stable, functioning Iraq would be occupied and effectively controlled by America. And Iran doesn't want an American vessel next door.

So their incentives work basically like this: Amass proxies who they can use to keep some sort of control over the nation and, if necessary, drive us out. Once that's done, begin working to use those proxies to stabilize the nation. So long as we're occupying the place, however, it's decidedly not in Iran or Syria's interest to stabilize the country -- from their perspective, they'd be stabilizing a military platform that Washington can eventually use for its long-stated goals of regime change. So their proxy strategy is not, I'd suggest, accidentally working against stabilization, but rather, working to ensure Iranian influence after we leave and stabilization becomes a non-threatening goal for them.

Over at Tapped, Kate does some interesting work collecting the statements of presidential candidates on the Jena 6, and evaluating how they differ from Obama's. As she concludes, "words that Obama can't use include, but are not limited to: segregation, black, white, racism, criminal justice system, racial tension, and intolerance. He has to temper his statement as an inclusive, all-humanity call to action against injustice, rather than a call to action against a criminal justice system that is inherently racist and a white-dominated society where cases like Jena are still too-common."

I remember being in New Orleans for John Edwards' presidential announcement. He stood in a muddy backyard in New Orleans' 9th Ward, before a tableau of African-American children bussed in by the NAACP. One reporter wondered whether Obama could have announced his campaign in such an overtly racialized setting. "No," agreed the assemblage. That's the fun thing about running for President as a black man: You have to convince the electorate that you never really noticed you were a black man.

I rather like Chris Dodd's view on the President's threat to veto S-CHIP funding:

"While he reportedly plans to call for up to $200 billion to continue a war that his top general can't even say is making the country safer, George Bush is rejecting the idea that we would spend less than one third of that amount for the health of America's children.

"That says all that needs to be said about this President's priorities."

Of course, that's a bit unfair: Bush is vetoing this bill not because it's too costly, but because giving uninsured children health coverage will make them dependent on the teat of the state, and we don't want the little parasites nursing at the Department of Health and Human Services forever.

But a point of clarification: Though Bush is constantly complaining that "Congress has made a decision to expand [SCHIP] eligibility up to $80,000," and that children whose parents make that much shouldn't get health insurance, or should have to pay for it out of their allowance, or something. But as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found, "at least 85 percent of the otherwise-uninsured children who would gain coverage under the bill have incomes below states’ current SCHIP eligibility limits." In other words, the new funding isn't going to expand the program's cutoffs so much as allow it to fulfill it's current obligations, which, for now, it lacks the money to actually do. If the compromise S-CHIP bill passes, the states will be able to reorient the program to covering all children beneath the cut-off, rather than keeping quiet to effectively ration -- yes, ration -- the coverage.

But that's the reality of Bush's position. It's not so much his funding preferences that are at work. Rather, his ideology called for the government to pursue a hopeless war that's killed thousands and triggered a sectarian civil war, but is outraged by the idea of the government helping children attain health coverage.

Ah, compassionate conservatism.

I agree with Chris that the lack of blogospheric coverage of the Jena 6 is telling as to the tenuous relationship between the online left and what's more traditionally been the left. Indeed, I've been part of this problem. That's largely because I haven't known what to say, and kept trying to figure out how to link to this Courtney Martin article on the subject while still adding some valuable commentary. But I've got sadly little to add.

I will say that the bizarrely long prison sentences imposed on the Jena 6 are obviously racist retaliation, and should be beaten back as such. But the disproportionate sentences that millions of black men get everyday for reasons that aren't explicitly racist, but have to do with -- let's face it -- an institutionally racist criminal justice system, are in some ways a bigger problem, and if the plight of the Jena 6 could lead to a broader conversation as to what the fuck we're doing, that would be positive.

Garance has interesting things to say about Obama, the AARP, and transactional vs. transformational politics.

Okay, I've long repeated the New York Times' finding that Hillary Clinton was Congress's second-largest recipient of health industry money. According to Media Matters, that report was bullshit:

the number includes donations from individual health care professionals, such as nurses and doctors, and neither Thrush nor the Times noted that if only health care political action committee (PAC) donations were considered -- that is, donations from the actual health care "industry" -- Clinton drops off the list of top 25 congressional recipients of health care industry money entirely.[...]

According to an updated Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) analysis of Clinton's campaign contributions -- which includes the contributions Clinton received for the entire 2006 cycle -- if contributions from individuals who are employed in the health care sector are excluded, Clinton would not even make the list of the top 25 congressional recipients of contributions from the health care industry for the 2006 election cycle. It is only when contributions from individuals are included that Clinton jumps to second place. This information and these rankings are updated on a quarterly basis by the CRP.

So it appears that that funding was an artifact of Clinton simply raising a lot more money than anyone else, and a certain number of rich people who donate to her are...doctors. The folks you'd worry about largely operate through PACs. Good to know.

I don't quite agree with the DLC's contention that the three Democrats' healthcare plans "closely track the architecture for universal health coverage long advocated by the Progressive Policy Institute and the DLC," (every plan has a public option: Where was yours, DLC?), but whatever. It's certainly true that:

these differences [between Democratic plans] pale in comparison to the vast gulf that seems to be opening up in the two parties' approach to health care. President Bush continues to advocate an erosion of existing public programs on budgetary grounds, while offering nothing positive other than a variety of shopworn conservative policy gimmicks that really add up to an attack on collective purchasing of health insurance and even on the basic idea of spreading health care risks through insurance. With one exception, the Republican presidential candidate field echoes the atavistic Bush vision of a health care system in which individuals are left on their own to buy medical services in expensive and unregulated markets, with or without access to insurance. And the one exception, Mitt Romney, appears to be trying to distance himself from his own state of Massachusetts' universal health care initiative, which resembles the Clinton, Edwards, and Obama plans much more than those of any Republican.

And we should be clear about what this means: The Republican vision is for a world in which the sick and dying get to deduct some of the cost of health insurance that they don't have -- and can't get -- on their taxes. The Democratic vision is for every American to have health insurance. We clear?

Matt makes a fair point on the varied coverage the press gives to Democratic and Republican electoral wins:

"I've heard conservatives complain about this too. When conservatives secure political power, it's all "holy shit: conservatives!" but when liberals secure political power, it's all "don't worry, they're centrists." There's truth to both perspectives here, but I think the right fundamentally has the better of this argument. It wouldn't have been helpful to liberals or to liberalism for Time to greet the 2006 elections with a photo of Nancy Pelosi flanked by Charlie Rangel, Henry Waxman, David Obey, and John Conyers under the headline "THE LIBERAL TAKEOVER."

That said, it does pound in some narratives that matter. To go back to my Heath Shuler article, it was the Right who sought to argue that he was a conservative. They did that because it was good for the press to report the election as a triumph for "conservatism," that reigning ideology that had been failed by perfidious Republicans. So rather than the collapse of years of unified conservative rule being seen as the failure of the ideology, which would in turn lead the press to paint future adherents as politically radioactive, it actually enhanced the superficial appeal of "pure conservatism."

Chris Hayes has some suggestions for how the press corps could improve campaign reportage. I particularly like this one:

Assign campaign coverage to beat reporters. When Obama released his tax plan. the article that ran in the TImes about the plan was authored by the Obama beat reporter Jeff Zeleny. Zeleny’s a perfectly good political reporter, and he’s been following Obama since ‘03, when he was writing for the Trib, but there’s no earthly reason to think he’s well-equipped to report on a tax plan. Meanwhile, the Times happens to have on staff the Pulizer-Prize-winning David Cay Johnston, who is unquestionably the single best tax reporter in the country. Why wouldn’t you assign him to write the piece about Obama’s tax plan? The same goes for every substantive area of policy. The Post and the Times have reporters who know a lot about environmental policy, health policy, fiscal policy, etc.. Why not have them cover those aspects of the campaign?

The biggest problem, though, is one that he identifies earlier: There's just not that much to say. The papers have been printing daily stories about the 2008 election for the last year. Not all of those stories had to be written, or had anything to say. But if the paper doesn't have continual 2008 coverage, they'll lose their political readers to an outlet that does. This is the big problem for outlets that want to be substantive: To survive, you need to retain readers. To retain readers, you need to focus on what they're interested in. Sometimes, what they're interested in is not "news," at least not in the quantities you demand. So instead you're stuck coming up with all sorts of workarounds and side stories and fluff pieces that make it look like you're reporting when you're really just stalling

Ron Rosenbaum's essay on the possibility of a "Second Holocaust" is a profoundly weird piece of work. He loathes Walt and Mearsheimer, of course, and accomplishes the remarkable feat of arguing against Leon Wieseltier from the Right, as he apparently considers Wieseltier unacceptably leftwing on Israel/Palestine issues.

But the bulk of the essay is dedicated to exploring the possibility and dangers of what Rosenbaum calls "the Second Holocaust." "I am not the only one who has written about the potential for a second Holocaust," he says. "It has gone from a marginalized to a virtually mainstream concern among those in touch with the grim reality of the situation. The Israeli historian Benny Morris...recently published an essay in the Jerusalem Post titled "The Second Holocaust Will Be Different." ("Different" in that it will take six seconds or six minutes for a bomb or bombs detonated in Tel Aviv to kill millions of Jews, while it took Hitler six years to kill that many.)"

That's scary stuff, to be sure. Indeed, I agree that a bomb in Tel Aviv is the eminent contemporary threat to worldwide Jewry. But Rosenbaum never says what should be done here. Israel, after all, already has the maximal in retaliatory weaponry: Nuclear capabilities. They already have the protection of America and our unbelievably precise and powerful atomic arsenal. They're building a wall. If that's not security enough, if you still believe that a terrorist will sneak in with a suitcase of uranium and a detonating device, then there's really no answer save to throw up your hands on the Israel thing, conclude that concentrating Jews in a small sliver of land surrounded by hostile nations wasn't a good idea, and begin another diaspora. Or you could possibly try and ratchet down anti-Israeli sentiment in the region, dismantling the settlements, creating a viable and contiguous Arab state, really working to end the root causes of the hatred that would underlie such an attack (my preferred solution).

But Rosenbaum suggests neither of these. Indeed, he doesn't suggest much of anything at all, but given his opinions on Walt and Mearsheimer (and thus American foreign policy), appears to believe we should keep antagonizing the Arab (and Persian) world, keeping them disarmed and semi-colonialized. This will...what? It won't keep terrorists from a nuclear device, nor end the longing for Israel's destruction. It's the worst of all worlds. Yet it's Rosenbaum's apparent conclusion: The greatest danger to global Jewry is an attack on the concentrated Jewish population in Israel that's motivated by Arab hatred for the state, its policies, and its people. In defense, we will continue to make them hate us, continue to live in Israel, and continue to pursue the offending policies.

Paul Krugman hits on a favored hobbyhorse of mine, the media's tendency to report Republican wins as conservative triumphs while Democratic wins show centrism on the march.

it’s quite strange how the magnitude of the Democratic victory has been downplayed. After the 1994 election, the cover of Time showed a charging elephant, and the headline read “GOP stampede.” Indeed, the GOP had won an impressive victory: in House races, Republicans had a 7 percentage point lead in the two-party vote.

In 2006, Time’s cover was much more subdued; two overlapping circles, and the headline “The center is the new place to be.” You might assume that this was because the Democrats barely eked out a victory. In fact, Democrats had an 8.5 percentage point lead, substantially bigger than the GOP win in 1994.

Of course, there's a formidable corps of media-savvy Democrats whose careers are based off spinning every Democratic victory as an uprising of moderate, swing voters. Mark Penn, the DLC, Third Way, and all the rest are always available for a quote or some post-election insta-analysis. Meanwhile, Grover Norquist will happily expound on the import of the most recent Republican wins. So Republican wins get the Norquist spin, while Democratic wins are interpreted, at least in part, through the lens of professional moderates. This led to the bizarre post-2006 analysis in which Democrats like Heath Shuler, who wanted to repeal NAFTA, were suddenly centrists. It's silly, but it serves various folks agendas, and the rest of the party is so scared of being called liberal that they think it's a good thing to be spun this way.

But it's really weird that the primary life experience of the governor of the largest state in the nation was...being a bodybuilder. Ah well. At least he's not using football metaphors.

Hillary Clinton's healthcare plan may be a worthy piece of legislation that preserves a primary role for the private market and takes the preservation and expansion of choice as its main imperative, but that doesn't mean it won't be smeared on exactly those grounds. Here, for instance, is Fred Thompson, doing some lying:

Charming! It worries me a bit that Democrats spend so little time attacking the Right on healthcare. Given that we're the ones with the plans and the polling advantage, there can be a tendency to be constructive without being aggressive. But Romney, Giuliani, and Thompson have all gone for the throat on her plan -- and that will, over time, impact public perceptions of Democratic efforts, even as it does nothing for Republican ratings on the issue. But they don't need to build, only destroy.

Better by far would be for Democrats to affirmatively strike at the Right's incoherence on the issue. Thompson can attack Clinton on choice all he wants, but Hillary can point out that she's letting Americans choose any type of full coverage they want, while Thompson is offering the uninsured mother with breast cancer her choice of tax deduction. If Thompson wants to argue that Democrats are allergic to choice, there's no reason Democrats can't wonder why Republicans have such trouble with compassion -- and why they think every American shouldn't have health insurance.

I had a bit of an allergic reaction to Daniel Brook's much-hyped book, The Trap. Far too often, it seemed to be begging public policy to orient itself more towards helping Ezra Klein -- and other white, educated, ambitious do-gooder-types -- who don't need the help. Indeed, there's a whole chapter on how you can no longer be an underemployed intellectual living in a single bedroom in New York, and how that's bad. And maybe it is. But in the list of problems public policy should ameliorate, this didn't seem like one of them:

The catch-22 for today's aspiring intellectuals [in New York] is that you can have the time to do creative work or the money that affords a place to do it, but not both. The only way to make $1,000 monthly rent payments is to have a day job (translating Rimbaud won't cut it); the only way to spend less than $1,000 is to have roommates. The prerequisite for the writing life, what Virginia Woolf famously named "a room of one's own," is now hopelessly out of reach for young writers.

I've got a lot of sympathy in me, but I definitely run out long before I get to unemployed, wannabe writers who need a solo studio in New York from which to pen their first novel. And hell: Does anyone think there's really a paucity of people doing that in New York even as we speak!

That said, the book has some decent policy ideas, and does hook into a serious problem: That do-goodery really doesn't pay enough to support an adult lifestyle, and so we lose talented people from professions we want to keep well-stocked with impressive types. At the very least, college debt and healthcare shouldn't be holding anyone back (on the other hand, the answer to law school debt is for fewer people to go to law school, not for the rest of us to subsidize the indecision of social science majors). For a more generous read of the book's better arguments, see Doron Taussig's review in the latest Washington Monthly.

It's worth reading Cass Sunstein's article on how far the Court's swing to the right has been:

In 1980, when I clerked at the Court, the justices were, roughly from left to right, Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Byron White, John Paul Stevens, Lewis Powell, Potter Stewart, Warren Burger, and William Rehnquist. Believe it or not, this Court was widely thought to be conservative. But think, just for a moment, about how much would have to change in order for the Court of 2007 to look like the supposedly conservative Court of 1980.

First we would have to chop off the Court's right wing, removing Scalia and Thomas and replacing them with Marshall and Brennan. Far to the left of anyone on the Court today, Marshall and Brennan believed that the Constitution banned the death penalty in all circumstances, created a right to education, and required the government not merely to protect the right to choose but actually to fund abortions for poor women.

Next we would have to replace Kennedy with Blackmun. Blackmun was also to the left of anyone on the current Court. Fiercely protective of the right to privacy and opposed to the death penalty on constitutional grounds, Blackmun believed that the social-services agencies were constitutionally obliged to protect vulnerable children from domestic violence and that affirmative-action requirements were broadly acceptable.

Then we would have to leave Breyer, Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg essentially as they are. All of a sudden, the four would be perceived as the Court's moderates rather than its liberals, operating as a group much like White, Stevens, Powell, and Stewart....The upshot of all these shifts is that what was once on the extreme right is now merely conservative. What was once conservative is now centrist. What was centrist is now left wing. What was once on the left no longer exists.

And though it seems a bit silly to actually write this, these differences matter:

The consequences are huge, both for constitutional law and for public debate. When Kennedy, rather than Stevens, looks like the moderate, people's sense of constitutional possibilities, and of what counts as sensible or, instead, extreme and unthinkable, shift dramatically. Not long ago, Marshall and Brennan served as the Court's visionaries, offering a large-scale sense of where constitutional law should move. They thought it preposterous that affirmative action should be treated the same as old-fashioned racial discrimination, and their views on that question put real pressure on the Court's center. They wrote in clear, bold strokes against decisions to invalidate campaign-finance restrictions and to restrict access to federal court; their opinions pressed the Court toward moderation on those subjects.

Read the whole thing, get depressed, etc.

If I were going to not like Hillary Clinton's health care plan, this would be the case I'd make. As it is, I think the areas in which she's vague are not areas in which she'll fail: No politician will create an individual mandate plan and then not offer adequate subsidies. The resulting outrage from families who couldn't afford healthcare but were legally obligated to buy it would destroy their career, doom their reelection, and kill the plan.

Given all the domestic dispute over whether the Surge is working, and whether the measurements are honest, and what "working" really means anyway, it's interesting to actually find out what the Iraqis think. So the BBC and ABC News polled them:

So the overwhelming majority thought the surge made things worse. Then came those who thought it made no difference. And then, hovering around 10 percent, were those who thought they detected some improvements. Given that the Surge is in theory, about Iraqi security rather than American politics, these are disheartening numbers.

Also: Could someone please inform the BBC that blue should fill the bar for things going well and red should should be the color for all that's gone awry? I find this pleasing, powder-blue denoting increases in deadly violence to be a bit confusing.

Was wandering around the Gallup website and came across this graph tracking public opinions on the war's trajectory. Living in it, it's easy to forget how long the occupation has actually been going on, and how utterly constant the bad news has been:

The American people have not been comfortable with the trajectory of the occupation since July of 2003 -- more than four years ago. And that time period includes multiple elections, the constitutional convention, the capture of Saddam, the killing of Zarquawi, and on, and on, and on. It included the "stay the course" strategy, as well as "clear, hold, and build," "stand up, stand down," and the surge. Nothing we've done has made a difference. Nothing we've done has changed the dynamics. But withdrawal is, of course, unthinkable...

The demise of TIme Select also marks the birth of the new Paul Krugman blog, The Conscience of a Liberal. I would've preferred "Krog," but still: Exciting! Krugman starts things off with a graph of the top 10 percent's share of the country's income over the past century or so, and sections it off into four key periods in American economic life:

We're in the Great Divergence now, a period when the incomes of the rich are rocketing away from those of the rest of us. As Krugman writes:

Most people assume that this rise in inequality was the result of impersonal forces, like technological change and globalization. But the great reduction of inequality that created middle-class America between 1935 and 1945 was driven by political change; I believe that politics has also played an important role in rising inequality since the 1970s. It’s important to know that no other advanced economy has seen a comparable surge in inequality – even the rising inequality of Thatcherite Britain was a faint echo of trends here.

In some ways, the conversation over whether inequality is being driven by impersonal, technical forces or government policy is neither here nor there (at least on a policy level -- politically, people use it to justify inequality as something organic, inevitable, and even beautiful -- like the tides). We live in a regulated economy governed by both public and private institutions, so there's no such thing as "natural" forces. Even if superstar CEOs are taking home billions, they're still reliant on our system of contracts, and limited liability, and stock market regulation. In other words, what public policy giveth, public policy can taketh away. Few doubt that we have the tools -- using something called "the tax code" -- to engage in some redistribution. The question is whether we have the will.

I agree with Walter Shapiro, this is pretty brilliant ad-writing. Hillary's new advertisement, currently on the air in New Hampshire, focuses on her health care plan, and summarizes 1994 by saying, "she changed our thinking when she introduced universal health care to America.."

Right, she made us hate her. But this is quite smart: It contextualizes her plan as the culmination of years of work, coming within an unbroken arc of Clinton fighting for health reform. At the least, it tries to define her narrative before anyone else can do it for her, and rather run from 1994, or admit to mistakes, attempts to recast that battle as a positive experience, even a character strength Anyway, heres the ad:

Moral hazard is a pretty simple idea: The less you bear the consequences of your actions, the more reckless you'll be. And it's often applied to health care: The less it costs, the more you'll consume. That's why conservatives tend to want you to pay for everything out of pocket, and see universal coverage plans as surefire ways to send costs skyrocketing. If you're paying more for care, you'll be able to afford less of it. But it's a bit bizarre of a theory.

Currently, if I want a bar of precious, precious gold, I have to pay a lot of money for it. If someone let me into Fort Knox and said the gold was on them, however, I'd take as much as I could possibly carry. I like gold! The more the better. That's not really the case with colonoscopies, or triple-bypasses. Now, you could make it so I can't afford colonoscopies, in which case I can't get them, but making it so I can have an unlimited number won't compel me to make them a weekly event.

Indeed, the reason people get medical care -- in particular expensive medical care -- is because their doctors tell them to. I have never in my life sat up in bed and thought, "huh, I should really get some laparoscopic surgery." If I get a surgery, it's because my doctor told me to. And if I can't afford it, I have to ignore his diagnosis.

For that reason, if you want to safely cut back on care patients buy, you need to get doctors to stop recommending so much wasted care. You can do that in a few ways: Put them on salary rather than on fee-for-service deals, so they don't make more money when they recommend treatment. Create new research institutions that test the cost effectiveness of care so they have a better idea of which treatments are worth recommending. Offer bonuses for using proven therapies. Etc, etc. But this idea that the way to better run medical care is to rejigger the financial incentives so patients have to ignore their doctor's advice is really quite bizarre.

Been watching Heroes, and what's up with the cheerleader? I'm only five episodes in (so please refrain from spoiling the season in the comments), but did her healing power also make her body totally elastic and brittle? A shrimpy high school quarterback type accidentally runs into her at low speed and we're supposed to believe it broke her neck and turned her head 180 degrees!? She falls down -- not off a ledge, but from standing -- and a large, blunt stick punctures eight inches into her skull? I mean, it's a good thing that she's got this healing power, because a particularly strong gust of wing may well decapitate her.

The glimpse of Hiro-from-the-future, however, was awesome. And the paintings are great. Indeed, they sort of give the show a video game feel, wherein you keep returning to the portal screen to figure out the next step in the adventure...

The new Kanye album is very, very good. Better, I'd say, than his sophomore effort, though still not quite the transcendent work that was his debut. West has a very clear idea of what makes his music enjoyable and he doesn't try and screw with it. Indeed, the farthest he strays is to cover a Daft Punk song, which works so well you begin to wonder if the real diversion from True Kanye comes in songs when he tries to offer more traditional rap (i.e, "Can't Tell Me Nothing). In any case, for your consideration, "Stronger":

EzraKlein.com: Covering cost control, health care, and hip-hop.

All in all, I'm very positive on the plan. But there's a substantial distance between Clinton's proposal and my perfect plan. If I wore the crown, I wouldn't allow the fragmentation it leaves in place: Medicare, Medicaid, and S-CHIP would be dissolved. Private and public insurance would be offered from within a single, coherent structure -- like FEHBP. The Clinton plan, in contrast, goes to great lengths to preserve every existent program and insurance option so as to minimize disruption for those currently pleased by their coverage choices.

This is, sadly, the smarter way to go. One of the lessons Clinton clearly took from 1994 is that you don't touch the care that millions of Americans already rely on and trust -- not in a country where 80-some percent profess satisfaction with their personal coverage. So though I'd prefer something more integrated, I wouldn't advise any politician to cater to my instincts. That's why I'm positive on Clinton's plan: I think this is damn close to the best policy you can get while retaining something politically sellable.

But since I'm not a politician, the reason I'd fight for such system-wide integration is simple: Costs. It's very hard to impose any sort of coherent cost control -- either on the supply or the demand side -- when you're simultaneously trying to change the behavior of Medicare, Aetna, Blue Cross, the VA, Metlife, the VA, the Indian Health Service, etc, etc. Put it in one place, and you can try out a lot of cost control mechanisms, from smart cost-sharing (wherein more cost-effective treatments have no copay, while less proven therapies require a substantial out-of-pocket contribution) to HMO-style care reviews to government bargaining. You can do much more to popularize better treatments, best practices, preventive care, and healthy living incentives.

Indeed, a plan that detonates and then reintegrates the healthcare system is better in every way save the most important one: You can't pass the damn thing. That is one of the lessons of 1994, in which the Clintons' sought to reconstruct the entire health care system and got mauled for it. For a really good explanation of the political difficulties inherent in healthcare reform, read this post of Mark Schmitt's. I don't agree with all of it, but I think everyone interested in the debate should be required to commit it to heart.

My latest column is up at Tapped, arguing that John Edwards is to Hillary Clinton's plan as Harris Wofford was to Bill Clinton's plan. Who was Wofford? What does it all mean? Well, read on, dear internet people...

T.A Frank writes:

In a sea of plugged-in, powerful pundits, Herbert is the lone unplugged spokesman for America's little guy. He's the delegate of the deprived. I could not admire his efforts more.

But, honestly, I don't read him either. I'll devour a Maureen Dowd column in which David Geffen trash-talks the Clintons. But I'll skip the next day's Herbert column counseling me to pay less attention to Anna Nicole Smith and more to, for instance, rebuilding New Orleans.

I feel lousy about saying this. Bob Herbert's on my team. By contrast, I could easily name ten other columnists who seem to make it their mission to find new, untested forms of destruction to bring upon us. If you told me that, say, Charles Krauthammer's articles were ghostwritten by Skeletor, I doubt I'd blink.

Franks goes on to explore a couple explanations for why Herbert is relatively less-read than other liberal columnists: It's his fault, it's our fault, it's the media's fault, it's our brain's fault, etc. All have some explanatory power. None are quite sufficient. My hunch, though, is that speaking about the marginalized doesn't have much of an audience. Frank notes that "Herbert's column in August decrying conservative attempts to block the expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program as 'cruel' was read less than Paul Krugman's column one day earlier on the same topic." In general, Herbert is likely to write that column with an eye towards the children who'll be hurt, while Krugman will write that column with an eye towards the Republicans who need to be flayed. And flaying your enemies is always more popular than shining light on the invisible.

It's a bit hard for candidates not named Bill Richardson to break through with gaffes these days. He's just so much better at them than everyone else! But Tom Schaller reminds us of a better, simpler time, when Joe Biden was talking, and the rest of us were laughing:

In the current primary season, only Delaware Sen. Joe Biden has bothered to make so much as a feint toward the Bubba vote, with an absurd analogy between his home state and the South. In January, when pressed by "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace on how a "Northeastern liberal like Joe Biden" hoped to compete in South Carolina, the senator responded: "You don't know my state. My state was a slave state ... My state is anything [but] a Northeast liberal state." Biden's comment left Southern politics expert Merle Black scratching his head. "That's just really quite bizarre," the Emory professor told the Wilmington News Journal. "That's not how you appeal to Southern voters."

Delaware: The Alabama of the Northeast.

The LA Times' Ron Brownstein has long been my favorite reporter, so I'm glad to hear he's moving to the National Journal group, where he'll be able to once again do some reporting. Earlier this year, Brownstein was taken out of the news pages because his wife works for John mcCain. As consolation prize, they gave him an op-ed column, but in true media fashion, decided that they'd have to excise their best liberal to make the space, and so yanked Jon Chait's column. Brownstein, of course, had no interest in becoming a liberal bomb-thrower, so he kept doing the same smart, reported, and basically non-ideological work he'd always done, leaving the op-ed page without a distinctly liberal voice. So the Times news pages became worse and their op-ed page more unbalanced. Assuming Brownstein is replaced by good folks, this will be better all around.

At some point, you have to respect the strength of Richard Cohen's determined commitment to triviality. Having failed to write a post-testimony column on Petraeus, he instead writes one on the MoveOn.org ad, and how Hillary Clinton's relative silence on it illuminates her "character problem." And on the day after she releases an important and detailed health plan, he glides over it in order to write:

Yesterday, Clinton announced her health-care plan. Good for her. But you never had any doubt, did you, that she was going to have one -- and a plan for everything else. The issue with Hillary Clinton is not whether she's smart or experienced but whether she has -- how do we say this? -- the character to be president. Behind her, after all, trails the lingering vapor of all those gates: Travel, File, Whitewater and other scandals to which she was a party only through marriage. In a hatless society, she is always wearing a question mark.

Yep, three scandals where she was exonerated of all wrongdoing. But that's okay, because Cohen isn't accusing her of wrongdoing, just suggesting that there are "vapors" of wrongdoing around her. Vapors that leave him too lightheaded to actually care about the policy documents she's offered. Vapors of wrongdoing that would, Cohen implies, have lifted had she forthrightly attacked MoveOn.org for their ad. Indeed, her unwillingness to do so makes one "wonder...about what makes Hillary run."

Well, maybe. I'm much more interested in what makes Richard Cohen write such superficial, stupid things. What would his grandfather say?

With Clinton's health care plan released, and only a shade different than Edwards, the argument on health care moves over to who can git 'er done. Which is, theoretically, Clinton's stronger ground. But Edwards and Obama are hoping that memories of 1993 to will undermine that claim to competency.

Obama released a press statement that ended, "I was able to pass health care reform in Illinois that covered an additional 150,000 children and their parents, and that's how we'll prevent the drug and insurance industry from defeating our reform efforts like they did in 1994." Edwards gave a speech telling Clinton -- who he called "the architect of the 1993 reforms" -- that "the cost of failure 14 years ago isn't anybody's scars or political fortune, it's the millions of Americans who have now gone without health care for more than 14 years and the millions more still crushed by the costs." But according to a new poll, the voters may not be receptive to this line of attack:

“Registered voters see Clinton's experience with a failed health care proposal as an asset rather than a liability. Sixty-six percent of all voters, and 77 percent on Democratic primary voters, say her past experience will help her to reform health care if she becomes president. … Just 25 percent of all voters, and 15 percent of Democratic primary voters, say that experience will hurt her. Fifty-two percent of registered voters say the lack of health care reform in the 1990s was beyond Clinton's control. Only 5 percent say she was ‘mostly responsible’ for the lack of reform, while 39 percent say they do not know enough to have an opinion. In a CBS poll in 1994, 43 percent said Clinton's involvement was one reason health care reform did not pass, while 49 percent disagreed.”

As one smart observer e-mailed, "There's not enough difference on the substance among the Dems to matter, which is deliberate. I thought HRC did a good job on avoiding the 94 landmines. Now this is no longer an argument over who has the best plan, but rather who is the one who could get it done." If you buy that the Democratic primary is a tug-of-war between whether "change" -- benefitting Obama/Edwards -- or "experience" -- benefitting Hillary -- will triumph, Hillary's plan, which offers more change than Obama's and is barely distinguishable from Edwards, does quite a bit to ensure the conversation remains focused on practical experience. Edwards may be able to get some traction by detailing the lavish amounts of money Clinton has taken from the medical industry -- including insurance companies -- but that's about all her opponents have left, and it's not an attack that's gained much purchase in the last month or two.

Let me try and give a quick sketch of the Clinton proposal before I have to run for a meeting. Here's the thumbnail: Clinton's plan is of the "individual mandate" variety, in which universal coverage is achieved by mandating that every American purchase health care. In order to ensure that that's both possible and affordable, the Clinton plan creates a few new coverage options, reform the insurance industry, limits coverage costs to a percentage of income, and washes your car.

Okay, it doesn't wash your car. It does open the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program to everybody, ensuring that anyone can access the same menu of regulated private options that federal employees get. FEHBP is the program that already insures millions of current government employees, including the members of Congress, by offering a variety of regulated private options to choose from. Throwing the doors to that program wide open is the most basic and ubiquitous of coverage solutions.

More importantly, the plan also creates a new public insurance option, modeled off, but distinct from, Medicare. That's a big deal: The public insurer offers full coverage and is open to all Americans without restriction. Public insurance is what I feared her plan would avoid, and instead, she embraced it wholeheartedly. The concern with a plan like this (as with the Edwards plan), is that insurers will market coverage to the young and healthy and subtly tilt the public plan's risk pool towards the old and sick (the check is that governmental plans are, for reasons related to administration costs and care incentives, cheaper). At the end of the day, there's not much that can be done about that, unless you want to tax insurers with overly healthy pools, as they do in Germany. Come to think of it, that's exactly what they should do -- it was even in the 1994 bill.

And if you don't go through the newly expanded FEHBP or the public option, preferring to keep your current insurance, you'll still be dealing with a heavily-regulated and reformed insurance industry, which can no longer price discriminate based on preexisting conditions or demographic characteristics, refuse you coverage, or deny renewal of your policy -- including if you change your job. So if you like your current insurance but quit your cubicled existence at MegaCorp, your insurer can't drop you. All this matters because it keeps the private programs from having too much capacity to undercut the risk pools of the other options. It also destroys the elements of the insurance industry's business model that rely too explicitly on screwing you over.

There are a variety of affordability measures, the most important of which, by far, is a refundable tax credit limiting the cost of insurance to a certain percentage of family income. The plan doesn't yet define what that percentage of income is, but it'll presumably be reasonable. In this, the plan differs from Edwards' plan, which uses sliding scales of subsidy up to a certain level of income. On the other side, the employer tax deduction will now be limited to standard plans for middle-income folk, while gold-plated health care for wealthy individuals at will be subject to taxation.

So the policy is very, very sound, and includes other sundry goodies like a Best Practices Institute that will vastly accelerate the amount of research done and distributed on the cost-effectiveness of treatments, better chronic care incentives, and so forth. The rhetoric is interesting too, being entirely about "choice." It's called the "American Health Choices Plan." The first section, on the opening of FEHBP and the creation of a new public insurer, is titled, "Providing a Choice of Insurance Plans." The first bullet point assures readers that every American will be able to keep their current coverage if they so desire. Etc, etc. This is very distinctly aimed at the criticisms of the 1994 plan, which is that it would reduce choice and constrain medical freedom. This plan won't, and its ability to expand options is laced through the document, and through the statements her advisors have made.

The plan is more ambitious than her 1994 effort in some ways, less in others. The 1994 plan fully integrated the health care system into a whole new structure. It was probably a better structure -- particularly in its global budgets and growth caps, which would forcibly arrested the absurd growth in health costs -- but it would've caused far more disruption for most families, and was thus easier to attack. This plan leaves intact most every current program, including Medicaid and SCHIP (which come in for expansion), and offers a public option, which the 1994 plan didn't.

The only question is how serious of a proposal it is, i.e, whether it's what she plans to fight for from her first day in office, or whether it's to keep Edwards and Obama from opening up an advantage on her left flank. For now, there's no way to know. But given how smart she's been about neutralizing the other candidates' potential advantages -- including, with this plan, cutting their legs out on health care -- we're likely to find out.

James Fallows asks:

Non-rhetorical question: Who will come out looking better by virtue of his or her service in the G.W. Bush Administration. Will anyone?

Mainly the whistleblowers. Paul O'Neill looks pretty good. And lately, John Aschroft's reputation has seen something of a renaissance based mainly off this episode, and his deputy, James D. Comey, also came out a hero of sorts. Are there others?

Also, this might be stretching the meaning of Bush administration, but David Petraeus has sure seen his reputation enhanced.

New BloggingHeads with James Joyner. I really enjoyed doing this one, as James is a smart and thoughtful guy. Folks with too much time on their hands can watch it here.

The short answer: Her plan is very, very good. Indeed, it's very similar to Edwards' plan. I'll have more as I'm able to process its chunks and get clarification on certain points, but here's the campaign's official rundown:

1. Offer New Coverage Choices for the Insured and Uninsured: The American Health Choices Plan gives Americans the choice to preserve their existing coverage, while offering new choices to those with insurance, to the 47 million people in the United States without insurance, and the tens of millions more at risk of losing coverage.

· The Same Choice of Health Plan Options that Members of Congress Receive: Americans can keep their existing coverage or access the same menu of quality private insurance options that their Members of Congress receive through a new Health Choices Menu, established without any new bureaucracy as part of the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program (FEHBP). In addition to the broad array of private options that Americans can choose from, they will be offered the choice of a public plan option similar to Medicare.

· A Guarantee of Quality Coverage: The new array of choices offered in the Menu will provide benefits at least as good as the typical plan offered to Members of Congress, which includes mental health parity and usually dental coverage.

2. Lower Premiums and Increase Security: Americans who are satisfied with the coverage they have today can keep it, while benefiting from lower premiums and higher quality.

· Reducing Costs: By removing hidden taxes, stressing prevention and a focus on efficiency and modernization, the plan will improve quality and lower costs.

· Strengthening Security: The plan ensures that job loss or family illnesses will never lead to a loss of coverage or exorbitant costs.

· End to Unfair Health Insurance Discrimination: By creating a level-playing field of insurance rules across states and markets, the plan ensures that no American is denied coverage, refused renewal, unfairly priced out of the market, or forced to pay excessive insurance company premiums.

3. Promote Shared Responsibility: Relying on consumers or the government alone to fix the system has unintended consequences, like scaled-back coverage or limited choices. This plan ensures that all who benefit from the system share in the responsibility to fix its shortcomings.

· Insurance and Drug Companies: insurance companies will end discrimination based on pre-existing conditions or expectations of illness and ensure high value for every premium dollar; while drug companies will offer fair prices and accurate information.

· Individuals: will be responsible for getting and keeping insurance in a system where insurance is affordable and accessible.

· Providers: will work collaboratively with patients and businesses to deliver high-quality, affordable care.

· Employers: will help finance the system; large employers will be expected to provide health insurance or contribute to the cost of coverage; small businesses will receive a tax credit to continue or begin to offer coverage.

· Government: will ensure that health insurance is always affordable and never a crushing burden on any family and will implement reforms to improve quality and lower cost.

4. Ensure Affordable Health Coverage for All: Senator Clinton's plan will:

· Provide Tax Relief to Ensure Affordability: Working families will receive a refundable tax credit to help them afford high-quality health coverage.

· Limit Premium Payments to a Percentage of Income: The refundable tax credit will be designed to prevent premiums from exceeding a percentage of family income, while maintaining consumer price consciousness in choosing health plans.

· Create a New Small Business Tax Credit: To make it easier--not harder--for small businesses to create new jobs with health coverage, a new health care tax credit for small businesses will provide an incentive for job-based coverage.

· Strengthen Medicaid and SCHIP: The Plan will fix the holes in the safety net to ensure that the most vulnerable populations receive affordable, quality care.

· Launch a Retiree Health Legacy Initiative: A new tax credit for qualifying private and public retiree health plans will offset a significant portion of catastrophic expenditures, so long as savings are dedicated to workers and competitiveness.

5. A Fiscally Responsible Plan that Honors our Priorities:

· Most Savings Come Through Lowering Spending Due to Quality and Modernization: Over half the savings come from the public savings generated from Hillary Clinton's broader agenda to modernize the heath systems and reduce wasteful health spending.

· A Net Tax Cut for American Taxpayers: The plan offers tens of millions of Americans a new tax credit to make premiums affordable--which more than offsets the increased revenues from the Plan's provisions to limit the employer tax exclusion for healthcare and discontinue portions of the Bush tax cuts for those making over $250,000. Thus, the plan provides a net tax cut for American taxpayers.

· Making the Employer Tax Exclusion for Healthcare Fairer: The plan protects the current exclusion from taxes of employer-provided health premiums, but limits the exclusion for the high-end portion of very generous plans for those making over $250,000.

Edwards' proposal to terminate Congress's health care coverage if they fail to pass comprehensive reform is a good campaign strategy and a bad legislative strategy. On the one hand, there's no way such a bill would pass, and you don't want to start the battle for health reform with a legislative defeat on a symbolic measure. That said, as a rhetorical device, it allows Edwards to credibly ram home the point that Congress exists in a rarified realm where health coverage isn't an issue and attempts at reform can be weighed as mere abstractions, and it allows the public to get pissed at Congress for it.

There are two ways (which can, of course, be shaded and mixed) to construct a political strategy for passing health care reform. The first is to create a legislative strategy. Here, you identify congressional leaders and swing votes, think hard about what legislation could attract a coalition given the body's current makeup, bring the stakeholders in to pressure the representatives who listen to them, and try to wiggle and worm your way through the legislative process. This can be done with a certain amount of brute force, as Tom DeLay proved with Medicare Part D, or it can be a friendlier process,

The second way is to construct a popular strategy for for health care reform. In this conception, you don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about where Congress is, but instead thinking about where you can move it. You take your case to the people, engaging in a mix of hard-edged populism and grassroots organizing to ratchet up public pressure on members of Congress, such that they eventually grow afraid of opposing your bill and let it pass to save their seats. This is, for instance, how the Iraq War was sold.

Edwards is probably looking for something close to the second strategy. You can't pass a bill like the one he just proposed, but you can use it to make recalcitrant members of Congress look really, really bad. And if you can keep control of that conversation -- a big if -- you can run their poll numbers deep enough into the ground that they'll come to the table for a compromise. In this vision, the bill's importance isn't in passage, but in its utility as a cudgel with which to whack the other side. It acts much like the unionbusting provisions of the Homeland Security Bill, creating legislation that Republicans cant support, but don't want to be seen opposing.

Hillary, to some extent, is on the other end of this divide, and is promising a much smarter and more aggressive congressional strategy than we saw in 1993. And Obama is somewhere, though it's not exactly clear where, in the middle. I'm really not sure which of these strategies will work, though Edwards is undoubtedly the riskiest. But this is the strategic choice being offered.

I'm having trouble getting it to work, but you can watch Edwards' speech is being carried live here. He's taking strong aim at Clinton, referring to her as the "architect of the 1993 reforms." And his plan to end coverage for Congress if they don't pass health care just got a huge, 20- or 30-second ovation. "It's time for our government, for our Congress, to feel the pressure...to understand that health care isn't a political, but a moral, issue."

Update: Now he's talking about immigration reform, actually, and taking a bit of a hard line. "If you want citizenship, and you came here illegally, you need to pay a fine, It's gotta be a fine you can pay, but we can't pretend it didn't happen. I also believe, and this'll be a bit more controversial, tat if you want citizenship, you need to learn English."

My ace reporting reveals that one element of the health reform strategy Edwards will announce today is a bill, to be submitted on his first day in office, ending health care coverage for the president, the Congress, and all political appointees on July 20th, 2009, unless they've passed health reform that accords with four non-negotiable principles Edwards will detail in the speech. If they don't pass comprehensive health reform, they lose their coverage until they do.

Update: Okay, turns out everybody else's ace reporting uncovered this too. Nuts.

Today, Hillary Clinton will release her plan for universal health care. I haven't seen it yet, but rumor is that it will be a pleasant surprise. The Edwards camp, cognizant of the dangers of losing their edge on health care, sent out this advisory:

***MEDIA ADVISORY***

EDWARDS TO MAKE MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT DEFINING HIS STRATEGY TO PASS UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

Will discuss bold strategy to move America towards universal coverage

Chicago, Illinois – On Monday, Senator John Edwards will make a major announcement that will define his strategy to pass real health care reform. During his address at the Laborers Leadership Convention in Chicago, Edwards will discuss what must happen to move America towards true universal health care. Edwards was the first presidential candidate – Democratic or Republican – to take on the big insurance and drug companies and propose a plan for quality, affordable health care for every man, woman and child in America. Edwards has also built on his plan, which he unveiled last March, with specific proposals for bringing down health care costs, improving the quality of care, fighting cancer, HIV/AIDS and strengthening the nursing workforce.

With no knowledge of what he'll say, I can't speak to how this will work. But for Edwards to respond to Clinton's plan by pushing the ball forward and staking ground on strategic aggression is a very smart way of keeping at the cutting edge of the conversation. More on both his comments and Hillary's plan as the day progresses.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

I wanted to elevate this essay by Robert Dreyfuss on the consequences of a redeployment from Iraq that Ezra has in his bookmarks. Money paragraph:

Even if post-occupation efforts to create a new political compact among Iraqis fail, the most likely outcome is, again, a bloody Sunni-Shiite stalemate, accompanied by continued ethnic cleansing in mixed areas. But that, of course, is no worse than the path Iraq is already on under U.S. occupation.

Very Serious People take it as a given that we cannot withdraw from Iraq because of some combination of genocide and foreign or terrorist presence. This question deserves deeper analysis. The situation is already very bad in Iraq right now; it's not clear just how much worse it could get without militias acquiring heavy artillery. And that's something that's simply unlikely to happen under any circumstances.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

The early word is that Bush will nominate Michael Mukasey for Attorney General.  You can read Jeralyn Merritt's post on his history of rulings, Steve Benen's post on how he's regarded by groups on the left and right, or look at his Wikipedia page.  Unfortunately, much of the information out there now is of the strange hall-of-mirrors form where you want to like him because right-wing bloggers are disappointed with him because Chuck Schumer and Nan Aron like him. 

Putting everything together, he looks like a staunch conservative, but one who will be independent enough to not let Bush get away with Gonzales-era politicization of the judicial system.  In a best-case scenario, he might pull a Paul O'Neill and rebel if he gets fed up with Bush Administration malfeasance.  And going into 2008, I want to be confident that the AG's office isn't going to be used for nefarious election-year partisan plots.  Mukasey doesn't set off any obvious alarms there. 

As a sidenote, I'm a lot less impressed with Harry Reid this year than I was in 2005-2006, when he got Bush to nominate Harriet Miers, and did his best to promote a filibuster of Alito.  This year, he should've been forcing Republicans to filibuster a lot more than they've had to.  But apparently he's been able to force Bush into nominating a principled Attorney General instead of a mindless partisan.  From Thursday's New York Times:

"Ted Olson will not be confirmed," Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said in a statement. "I intend to do everything I can to prevent him from being confirmed as the next attorney general.

Olson was the lawyer who argued Bush's side in Bush v. Gore.  During the 1990s, he worked on the Arkansas Project -- a Republican effort to dig up dirt on Bill Clinton, funded by $1.8 million from Richard Mellon Scaife.  That's the sort of record where I start worrying about election-year mischief of the sort Gonzales was helping Heather Wilson and Pete Domenici run against the US Attorney from New Mexico.  And I really can't imagine the words "we can't do that, it wouldn't be constitutional" being spoken by Olson to Bush.  Pending further information, I don't have those concerns about Mukasey.

Update: Word from the wolf community is that Glenn Greenwald has more. 

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Brother Nicholas has been arguing that Democrats should feel confident about their ability to win a lot of Senate seats in 2008, and he's entirely right.  At this early point, we're favored to take at least three seats from the Republicans (CO, NH, VA) and maybe a fourth (NE).  The silver lining behind Democratic capitulation on Iraq, to talk like a mathematician,  is that it reduces the 2008 election to a problem previously solved.  2006 showed us that we can destroy the GOP in an election where public anger about the continuing Iraq War is the big issue, and in 2008 we'll be replaying that scenario with 7 more GOP Senators up for re-election than last time. 

Zooming out a little bit, the leadership situation looks promising.  After leading the effort that won us six seats in 2006, Chuck Schumer is coming back with his top-notch recruitment, fundraising, and cash allocation skills.  The first two of those have already been on display -- the DSCC is winning the fundraising battle by a lot, and we've got our dream candidates in Virginia and New Hampshire.  (I hear that before Schumer, powerful but safe incumbents would often wrangle funds out of DSCC chairmen, and it's good to see the end of that.)  On the other hand, I don't know if I'm allowed to hope that Karl Rove will be advising the GOP on last-minute spending again.  It's the one area in which he's an absolute idiot.  He had the GOP throw money into their big losses in New Jersey, Maryland, and Michigan, even as they lost Montana and Virginia by the slimmest margins. 

While we obviously don't have the calendar advantages in the House that we have in the Senate, there's reason for optimism there too.  The Iraq-related devastation of the Republican brand will help us at the House level, and it's great to see that DCCC chairman Chris Van Hollen has vowed to take advantage of that by expanding the field and helping in more races.  In keeping with that strategy, he's replaced the weakest link in our 2006 effort -- executive director John Lapp.  Lapp's narrow focus on battleground districts was a major factor in our losing 13 out of 19 races that were decided by 5000 votes or less.  Many of our candidates in the tightest races -- Larry Kissell, Gary Trauner, and Victoria Wulsin, for example -- got no support from Lapp, who was in charge of DCCC independent expenditures.  I don't know Lapp's replacement, Brian Wolff, but Van Hollen's openness to casting a wider net makes me hopeful that Wolff will play it smarter.   

In any election, there are good reasons to cast a fairly wide net.  (Obviously, I don't mean that you should spend millions on a Senate race where you're losing by double digits in the final weeks.)  Resources of all kinds are faced by the problem of diminishing marginal returns, and the two-millionth dollar spent on a race will probably move fewer votes than the hundred-thousandth.  Dumping late money into a district already saturated with TV ads can't be as effective as early ad buys to define the candidates and shape the media coverage. 

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

David Freddoso lets us know that Bob Casey, the anti-abortion Pennsylvania senator who defeated Rick Santorum in 2006, voted to permit taxpayer funding for international family planning organizations that perform abortions.  I don't know if this represents a change of position for Casey, who still says that he doesn't want to spend taxpayer money on funding abortions, and takes the very reasonable position that funding other forms of family planning assistance will decrease the need for abortion. 

Matt, from 2006:

It's hard to believe that so recently, the American mainstream's enthusiasm for the "successes" of Bush's democracy-promotion endeavor was so intense that liberals were overwhelmingly cowed into silence. What the successes were, exactly, was always hard to say. Iraq was, at the time, already being torn asunder by violent sectarian divisions that were merely re-inscribed by an election in which everyone voted for a sectarian party. Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution," meanwhile, didn't actually change the country's electoral system at all. Reforms in the pro-American Arab states proved to be chimerical -- Kuwait let women as well as men vote in elections for powerless offices, Saudi Arabia let people vote for powerless offices, and Mubarak promised to hold a fair election but then didn't, you know, hold one. Cruelest of all, however, was the treatment of the long-suffering Palestinians. For years, Bush had informed them that no pressure would be brought to bear on their Israeli occupiers to settle the territorial issue until the Palestinian Authority reformed its internal procedures and ended the corrupt and authoritarian rule of the Fatah Movement. Eventually, Yasser Arafat died, elections were held, and the main Palestinian opposition movement, Hamas, won. Palestinians were then informed that there would be no negotiations. Having been ordered to vote, you see, they voted for the wrong party.

Three cheers for democracy!

By Deborah Newell Tornello
aka litbrit

Lawmakers, including the tenacious Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill), grill Nancy Nord (of the Consumer Product Safety Commission), demanding to know why lead-laden children's toys and jewelry are still arriving in the United States.

Sen. Dick. Durbin (D-Ill.) charged that the CPSC was not aggressive enough in stopping unsafe toys and children's jewelry manufactured in China from entering the U.S.

He said the agency never obtained information on shipments of the Chinese products so that it could inspect to see whether many of the products had lead paint in them.

Weboy was none too impressed; the background information he provides about Nancy Nord neatly replicates what has become an all-too-common story arc (hell, for many Bush appointees, it's a career template):

Well, Nancy Nord is the Acting Head of the CPSC because the head of the CPSC resigned rather abruptly (last) summer, and Bush has done nothing to replace him (the CPSC has a three person directorate; with the party of the President essentially controlling the majority) since March, when he tried to appoint the former head of The National Association of Manufacturers (you know, people who might not like the CPSC) in his place. And why did the last guy resign, you ask?  Oh, you know... to go work for a law firm that advises clients on how to... you know, avoid having to deal with the CPSC.

 

Yes, it would seem that Consumer Product Safety is yet another area like... oh, I don't know, let's say FEMA... where the Bush Administration has allowed benign neglect to substitute for policy.  Bush has appointed, er, cronies, to this commission (see #9 of the last link), good Republican doo-bees, and now here's Nancy Nord to tell us, Gosh, the CPSC is underfunded. Now there's a surprise.

During testimony Nord admits, disturbingly, that despite harsh criticisms of Chinese toy manufacturers and calls for crackdowns in 2004, a "significant amount" of children's jewelry the agency tested still contains lead, amending that, shortly thereafter, to "almost all of it". She also describes the testing facility as a 1950's-era missile testing site in Gaithersburg, Maryland, some of the buildings of which do not even meet code. Nord goes on to report how their lone product tester, a man named Bob, is overwhelmed (imagine that!) and can't reasonably be expected to test the countless thousands of toys and other products coming into the country every day.

This is a still shot of the toy testing facility, the place where Bob ("Our small parts guy") decides if toys--the ones he gets to that day, anyway--are safe enough for Americas consumers and children. Yes, this is really the toy lab, as presented to the Senate Wednesday:

The United States of America's Consumer Product Safety Commission,
Toy Testing Division
(as shown behind the senators' chairs)

Honestly, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Certainly, this is nothing new, this underfunding and undermining of a United States government agency tasked with protecting the public.  As I wrote about extensively this year, the FDA has been similarly hamstrung by the Bush administration, and despite the shocking revelation that less than 1% of food imports arriving Stateside are even being inspected at all, the agency is quietly closing labs around the country and cutting staff. Furthermore, in a classic Bushian hand-off of henhouse keys to Big Pharma fox, the FDA has shifted much of its drug-testing function (in exchange for drug-testing funding) to the drug companies themselves.

Perhaps Grover Norquist wouldn't have been so quick to fill his bathtub if he'd known it was coated with lead.

Published in part Thursday at my place.

(H/T the priceless petulant)

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

I became a dyed-in-the-wool John Edwards supporter shortly after he published this essay on poverty at TPM Cafe immediately following hurricane Katrina. Of course, he's been talking about poverty since 2003, but this was his chance to remind us all that "poverty is everywhere", even if we try to ignore it by living in the right neighborhoods and shopping and the right stores. He also talks about  poverty using the language of right and wrong, something we don't hear enough of.

Last month the WSJ ran a story (Tribune version) that Fortress Investments, the publicly traded private equity firm (?) where Edwards worked in 2005 and part of 2006, held investments in firms that were threatening Louisiana residents with foreclosure. It would be nigh impossible for Edwards to follow every individual investment the company made, but when informed of the SNAFU, he promised to correct the problem and move on. This Friday, Edwards announced that in addition to divesting from investments in subprime lenders, he helped set up a non-profit to aid Louisiana homeowners. Score one for the little guy.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Ted Stevens (R-AK) gets bogged down in the muck. I'll say it again: folks need to start from the premise the Dems have a shot at really running the table. Sure, Andrew Rice isn't really likely to win in Oklahoma, but at this point really any Republican with any question marks is within reach, and the various second and third tier candidates (Rice, Slattery, Noriega, Figures, Larocco, Allen, Merkley/Novick, Franken) need to be able to run credible campaigns in the event that their opponents implode. With Shaheen running  in NH, and perhaps Bob Kerrey in NE, there are already three seats where Democrats are favored (VA, CO, NH) and four more where they have at least an even chance (NE, OR, ME, MN).  I'm pretty sure if you were to go back to Labor Day 2005, you wouldn't see anyone nearly this optimistic.

So if Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich wants a seat on the Appropriations commitee and a promise to build the North Slope natural gas pipeline (something that's different from ANWR drilling, and that Gore and Kerry both supported), and he's got a puncher's chance at taking out a muck-covered Stevens, this is really the cycle to promise him whatever he wants.

Footnote: why isn't there an A-list challenger  to Liddy Dole? Are North Carolina Dems assuming that Hillary Clinton will be on the ticket and destroy the chances of downticket Southernors?

(Posted by John.)

Sure, Australia may be in their tenth year of drought, but Greenland's got a bumper crop!

"I could buy broccoli in the shops for the first time this year," says Buuti Pedersen, a 52-year-old artist who was born and lives in the southern town of Qaqortoq. "And the potatoes are big, fresh and tasty - much better than the ones that come from Denmark." Potatoes have been grown in southern Greenland for several years, but because of global warming they can be planted earlier, which means better yields. Local farmers are now selling a surplus to the rest of the country.

But wait, there's more:

In addition to achieving more self-sufficiency in food products, she wants to develop hydroelectric power, oil and gas exploration, and the mining of Greenland's rich mineral deposits. All of this could become technically easier as the ice melts.

Greenland has signed a memorandum of understanding with the US company Alcoa to build a huge aluminium smelter using the country's plentiful water reserves.

"All of this can help us to reduce our economic dependence on Denmark," says Ms Hammond, "and could eventually lead to political independence."

It seems to me that if Greenland went from being a cost to an asset for Denmark, they'd be far less likely to get independence, but then I'm cynical.  Maybe the Danes are more rational than the rest of us.

Of course, this just brings us one step closer to the Great War for the Arctic between Denmark and Canada -- which of these collossi will win unchallenged supremacy over that jewel in the crown, Greenland?  First Hans Island, next the world!

Do folks remember the "Arab Spring?" The babes of democracy? The "Was Bush Right?" articles?

My how far we've fallen...

By Ezra

As an endorsement, it may not mean much. Clark doesn't control a broad constituency, and his presence is not, I fear, sufficient evidence of influence within the Clinton camp. The Clinton campaign is very good at racking up endorsements and making people feel listened to. But its fairly clear that not all the people who're feeling listened to are actually being listened to.

That said, their prominent touting of Clark suggests they take seriously his potential political value. It would certainly make me feel better if, in the debates, Hillary Clinton could respond to Rudy Giuliani's assertions of national security knowledge by saying something like, "well Mayor, that may indeed be true, but you see, I was talking to my vice-president, four-star general and former Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark, and he said..."

On the other hand, given recent speculation that the Republicans will choose Anthony Zinni as their VP, we could be in for a race in which each side elevates a friendly general for national security credibility. That would be a bit unsettling, I think.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Wesley Clark has endorsed the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, which isn't that much of a surprise given their common Arkansas roots. What's interesting is that this comes a couple days after Mark Warner, often mentioned as a possible Clinton VP pick, announced that he'll run for the open Senate seat in Virginia. It'd be pretty nice if these phenomena are connected, and Warner's decision to pursue the Senate caused the Clinton campaign to put Clark on the VP list. I was worrying that Clinton might offer the vice presidency to one of our red-state Senators -- Warner or perhaps Evan Bayh -- who aren't easy to replace. If there's some kind of Clinton/Clark deal going on, that problem is eliminated.

by Stephen of the Thinkery

When I was in college - waaay back in the day, before camera phones and Web 1.0, let alone 2.0 - the right wing assault on America's media industry had already been in full swing for some time, long enough for the concept of "The Liberal Media" to have been accepted by pretty much everyone. All conservatives believed it, of course, because that explained why their philosophies didn't always square with the way the world was working. Liberals tended to believe it back then as well, based partly on the idea that "facts have a liberal bias" and the impression that journalists, being well-read and traveled, would naturally be liberals.

We know better now, of course. While it may be true that most journalists are registered as and give to Democrats, Update: as per comments, it's not true that a majority of journalists are Democrats or that most journalists give to the Democratic party.  However, even if these claims were true, the US media has for a long time been controlled by large corporations that are reliably conservative, at least in fiscal policy, and The Boss's opinions tend to get in print whatever the underlings might think. Conservatives haven't let up with their critique, or with their desire to control the media. Talk radio is of course dominated by conservatives, newspaper editorial pages publish more conservatives than progressives, and in response to Rupert Murdoch's growing wingnut media empire, other cable news outlets have stocked their rosters with what appears to be anyone willing to shill for the right.

But these are all editorial in nature - with the exception of Fox News, of course, which still tries to pass itself off as a "straight news" operation. Even Fox News, though, is being exposed as a mouthpiece for the right, with conservatives taking the attitude that liberals once enjoyed about the media.

What's truly fascinating and frightening about the right's assault on the media is how they targeted not only editorial venues or established their own networks, but also actual journalists from other media outlets. Certainly the Bush Administration has been quite adept at granting/removing "access" in order to convince journalists to run White House spin as either fact or as if it were coming from sources outside the White House itself.

Nothing, however, comes close the the ways in which journalists have been duped by Alexis Debat. From fake interviews of Obama, Bill Clinton, Pelosi, Kofi Annan and others to fabricated reports coming from "sources" in Iraq and Iran, Alexis Debat has steadily and successfully pushed the neo-con agenda of his colleagues of the Nixon Center and The National Interest.  Closely connected to the Debat saga is the story of Amir Taheri, an Iranian exile who has worked for Rupert Murdoch publications and, notably, was the editor of Politique Internationale, which published the fake interviews. Taheri was the source of the bogus story about Iran forcing its Jewish citizens and other religious minorities to wear armbands identifying them as non-Muslims, which was immediately debunked, though that didn't get in the way of Taheri going to the White House just days after the fabricated story was published to advise President Bush on Iran.

Clearly Alexis Debat and Amir Teheri are brilliant manipulators of the rules and culture of journalism - that they have been exposed doesn't take away from that at all. But they are only two of what appears to be a fairly large cohort on the right who have discovered at different times and ways that once the rules of the journalistic world are accepted and internalized, they can be turned into powerful methods for undermining the very purpose that journalism is supposed to serve.

The lesson for liberals, of course, is not that we need to adopt these methods, but that we need to be as skeptical of straight news stories as we are of the Journal's editorial page. As important as it is to have progressive politicians in Congress and the White House, the political battlefield has always been in the nation's media, and the other side, as it were, has established fronts in the media's every iteration.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Can I just point out that if Hillary Clinton—or really, anyone—wins the Presidency and then tries to "end the war and bring our troops home" without, you know, completely ending the war or bringing all of our troops home (or at least reducing US casualties to zero), The Left isn't going to take it any more. As Kevin Drum points out, Clinton leads Democrats on the question of who is "best at ending the Iraq war", which means that if she doesn't, she will disappoint a lot of her fans by the time 2010 or 2012 rolls around.

The Dirty Fucking Hippies—and I'm not talking about Code Pink, but the 25% of the public that's always been against the Iraq War without marching in the streets about it, plus the 30-35% of us who have become convinced there's nothing more that the US military presence can accomplish in Iraq—will have put up with a Kerry/Edwards ticket that sold itself as "Bush with better management" on Iraq, sat patiently as a Congress caved after the withdrawal veto, and endured serious dissembling from Clinton on the question of the US mission in Iraq. If Iraq continues to be a quagmire with no signs of progress or intent to withdraw, anti-war voters (and again, not just scruffy college kids but Midwesterners who don't see what we're accomplishing) will stay home in 2010 and find a primary challenger in 2012. Hell, I'd get on the Russ Feingold bandwagon at that point.

Paul Starr was in the balcony, sitting with Hillary Clinton, when Bill Clinton addressed Congress on his new health care bill. So when he says the story of that campaign has been distorted and mis-reported, listen to him. But in some ways, the most interesting part of his remembrances come not in his exoneration of Hillary Clinton -- who didn't, according to Paul, have much input into the basic shape of the reforms -- but in his retelling of Bill Clinton's approach:

During the 1992 campaign, Clinton had not given health-care reform top billing -- his primary issue was the economy, and he probably talked more about welfare reform than about health care. But higher deficit forecasts that fall led him to change his priorities soon after the election. Abandoning his promise of a middle-class tax cut and retrenching on other measures, Clinton opted for deficit reduction in the hope that it would lead to lower interest rates and higher economic growth. The deficit forecasts also highlighted how critical it was to control the cost of health care. If health costs kept gobbling up revenue, they would make long-term deficit reduction impossible and sharply circumscribe what the new administration could accomplish in other areas. Comprehensive health-care reform therefore held more than one attraction. If reform contained health costs, it would contribute to the success of Clinton's economic program.

Clinton's interest in health care was secondary to, and in many ways subsumed beneath, his economic agenda That explains why deficit reduction and NAFTA both went first. It explains, in part, why the plan he settled on made little political sense but a lot of economic sense. It explains why health care happened so late, and wasn't pushed first when Clinton had maximal media attention and political capital.

Indeed, that, I think, is one of the prime lesson's of 1994: Health care has to be the first priority for an incoming president. It has to be an extension of a presidential campaign that the candidate uses to build momentum for health reform, not an isolated initiative that comes two years in, and shortly before the midterms.

I'm with Ross on Sarah Silverman. I like her actual act, but her award show schtick -- at least as directed against the easy targets of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton -- has been deeply cruel. It's fun watching the powerful get skewered, which is what Silverman's act does: It skewers the blithe self-absorption of the privileged. Watching the pathetic get publicly humiliated is substantially less enjoyable.

I may, of course, simply be helping this backlash along so I have one less competitor in my quest to succeed Alan Dershowitz as Spokesperson For The Jews.

I'm not a huge fan of David Sirota, but his first column for the Creator's Syndicate, on the real lessons of the DMV, is quite good. Nice to have this sort of lefty-ism hitting the papers.

By the time I posed for my license photo, I had spent three total hours in a DMV office, as had at least 200 other people.

While I smiled for the camera, I considered this mundane encounter with state government in economic terms. Between all the people I waited with, about 600 combined hours of economic output was extracted from the state and thrown away. Multiply that over an entire year throughout any given state, and you see how poorly run public services take a severe — and hidden — toll on a state's economy.

Services, of course, do not fail in a vacuum. They fail because budget cuts leave them lacking adequate resources to succeed. While Republican economics teaches that less government spending means a stronger, more efficient economy, my experience at the DMV suggests otherwise, as does this state's overall experience as a test tube for conservatives' budget and tax doctrine.

Conservatives have a good thing going on: They spend their campaigns convincing the country that government can't work, win on the argument, cut the government's budget so it doesn't work, then spend the next campaign arguing that you should put them in charge of the government, because, don'cha know, government doesn't work.

Also, the main DC DMV is a pit of despair. The one in Georgetown, however, that's funded well enough to rent space in a nice mall and mainly caters to upper class white people, is a dream to go to.

There was a great line at this morning's Business and Health Care forum, attributed to Newt Gingrich, which went something like, "one man's $200 billion in waste is another man's $200 billion profit stream." That's about the most essential fact in health care politics there is.

Some other thought-provoking comments:

• "In this country, our biggest source of health costs are preventable, chronic diseases. 25 years ago, they were acute conditions." In other words, the bulk of our spending isn't in cardiac arrest, but in managing cardiac disease. That suggests a prevention and wellness directed approach to cost control, not to mention significantly more research into how to cost effectively manage chronic conditions.

• "We need plan designs that incentivize the right patient behaviors and disincentivize wrong behaviors. At Pitney-Bowes, we eliminated the costs of 'tier one' drugs for chronic conditions. The result was reductions in the rate of cost increase for diabetes, cardiovascular health, etc -- all because we made those drugs free!" This goes to my progressive cost-sharing argument, but there are quite a few treatments we know to be effective and cheap if followed. If we made it effective and cheap to follow them, it would lower costs and improve health.

• "Commodities that are very bad for you are heavily subsidized. Poor people thinking very rationally about how to maximize their food purchasing are purchasing foods that contribute to chronic conditions." Our subsidies go into corn, not organic fruit. So those most likely to take advantage of subsidized foods load up on corn. And then they get sick. And then we pay. On the bright side, this is very good for a very small number of very politically powerful corn farmers.

• "In the past, folks have asked if we really should have wellness plans, because well be spending money on employees who leave for other companies. The hope, now, is that enough other companies will do this that we'll benefit from their programs and they'll benefit from ours." This is what you'd call a collective action problem: If every company will invest in wellness, they'll all save money. But on your own, it doesn't make sense to pump money ensuring a healthy middle age for young workers who will leave your firm.

I've been biting my tongue on Mark Penn's new book Microtrends, as In These Times had asked me to review it for them. Today, the review went live, which is a relief. In short: The book is utterly fascinating. Not for how good it is, but for how bad. And not bad in that I disagree with it . Bad in that it is, methodologically, almost astonishingly sloppy. If this is how Mark Penn normally evaluates data, his clients are in real trouble.

I first flipped through Microtrends while at the YearlyKos convention, and Penn, astonishingly, seemed to comprehend the importance of the loosely connected, grassroots-driven, progressive movement’s flowering. “I suspect the lefty boom will bring a surge in the promotion of sheer creative energy,” Penn writes, “driven by an idea that is at the heart of this book—that small groups of people, sharing common experiences, can increasingly be drawn together to rally for their interests.” I was shocked—Penn was speaking admirably of “lefties,” not trying to recast them as moderates, not trying to write them out of the party? He was endorsing open-source politics, rather than a top-down structure? I had misjudged the man!

I read on. Penn was talking about actual lefties—people who are born left-handed. Increasingly grim, I absorbed the first hard blows of Penn’s interpretative technique: “More lefties,” he enthuses, “could mean more military innovation: Famous military leaders from Charlemagne to Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar to Napoleon—as well as Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf—were left-handed.” He uses the same thunderingly awful logic to argue that we’ll see more art and music greats, more famous criminals, more great comedians, more “executive greatness,” and better tennis and basketball players.

This is what statisticians—or anyone who has taken a statistics class—call a “correlation/causation error.” It is not enough to cherrypick a couple famed military leaders, notice that they’re lefties and assume that something intrinsic to their handedness caused their tactical genius. It is not enough to say that past cultures discouraged left-handedness and use that as a stand-in for discouraging creativity of all sorts. To say that Bill Gates is right-handed does not suggest that a greater proportion of right-handed people would mean more Bill Gateses. For a professional pollster to imply that correlation equals causation is like a firefighter trying to put out flames by tossing a toaster into the blaze—it bespeaks a complete unfamiliarity with the relevant techniques.

Read on...

Sorry for the late start to posting today, was at a health care event. But while I think up fresh new "viewquakes" for you all, here's some Hardballing goodness:

Folks often talk about the propaganda victory the insurgents will get if we withdraw from Iraq. Marc Lynch wonders why they talk in the future tense:

Much of the conventional wisdom about the Sunni areas now seems to come from the impressions formed by politicians and journalists on stage-managed visits to Iraq, or by carefully crafted press interviews with "former insurgents" hand-picked by American military handlers. But we don't need such a mediated view. Leaders of the major Iraqi Sunni groups actually speak quite often and quite candidly to their own people, though: in open letters, in official statements posted on internet forums, in the Arab and Iraqi press, and in statements released on al-Jazeera and other satellite television stations. What they say in such statements, in Arabic, when addressing their own constituencies, might be considered a more reliable guide to their strategy and thinking. So what are the major Iraqi Sunni leaders saying?

In their literature and public rhetoric, the Sunni insurgency has already defeated the American occupation -- which is why the Americans stopped fighting them and came to them for help in fighting al-Qaeda. One discovers virtually nothing in this literature of the American conceit that our forces wore them out or forced them to come to the table. During his meeting with President Bush in Anbar last week, Abu Risha, reportedly joked that his people had achieved in four months what the American military could not achieve in four years.

Additionally, the recruitment propaganda is is more effective so long as we remain in Iraq to be fought. We give insurgents and jihadists something to recruits towards. If the line were just that we'd been incapable of occupying Iraq, that's no PR triumph, but at least it ended. This way, there's still a failing, vulnerable enemy to fight. Additionally, our presence there gives the recruited jihadists training in terrorism and urban warfare. We're turning angry young men into skilled bomb makers by letting them practice on us. It's always worth reminding people that al Qaeda began in Afghanistan fighting the Soviets...

Catching an Alan Dershowitz line I missed, Matthew Duss examines what the Dersh meant when he attributed Obama's association with Brzezinski to "naivete":

By "naivete," Dershowitz doesn't mean Obama's relative inexperience in foreign affairs, which is precisely what Brzezinski was brought in to meliorate. The "naivete" to which Dershowitz is refers involves Obama's apparent unawareness of the unacceptability of certain foreign policy ideas in American politics, the impermissibility of associating with people who espouse those ideas, and the price exacted if these strictures are ignored. Hillary Clinton learned that lesson after she embraced Suha Arafat in 1999. We'll see how Obama does.

Those foreign policy ideas: That this Israel Lobby which is currently planting stories to attack and embarrass Obama doesn't exist; that all Israeli policies, including the indefensible settlements, must be ceaselessly supported; that the man who, as Matt notes, "[helped] to negotiate the single most significant and long-lasting peace treaty in Israel's history, in which the preeminent Arab state recognized Israel, and removed the threat of a united Arab front against the Jewish state," is to be rendered untouchable for calmly defending and contextualizing a book by two leading international relations scholars.

Strange town.

Further Reading: Here, by the way, is Brzezinski on Walt and Mearsheimer in Foreign Policy. Spot the anti-semitism!

I'll be on Hardball round 5:35 Eastern. There will be topics, I will have opinions.

The Wall Street Journal has a searing report on a particularly bizarre loophole in Medicaid law: States can, if they so choose, cover only conditions diagnosed at federal cancer-detection centers. That means if the cancer is diagnosed elsewhere, it's not eligible for treatment under Medicaid, even if the individual is. Shirley Loewe, for instance, we diagnosed with a large, deadly tumor in her breast, but diagnosed at the wrong facility. So the coverage she would have qualified for was denied. Instead, she had to fight for charity coverage, which means cutting back her working hours till her income fell below $8,000 -- which meant, in turn, moving from her apartment to a small trailer. The cancer eventually metastasized to her brain, and Loewe moved back in with her daughter who, while trying to seek care from her mother, was told by a social worker, "People die every day waiting for the system to catch up. Why is your mother any different?"

She wasn't, as it turned out. Loewe died earlier this year. She was just another person without insurance, waiting for the system to catch up.

Zbigniew Brzezinski is a former National Security Advisor, a current professor of foreign policy at John Hopkins University, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a frequent contributor to Foreign Affairs. He is one of the few national security specialists to have loudly and presciently argued against the invasion of Iraq, and predicted the chaotic aftermath. He is also, if you believe The Politico's reporting, a possible bigot. And because he's one of Barack Obama's foreign policy advisors, Obama may be a bigot too!

Last year, Brzezinski published a qualified defense of Walt and Mearsheimer in a Foreign Affairs article. That was enough to unsettle AIPAC, whose displeasure was made known to reporters, which got the Politico to run a story on Obama's "controversial" choice, which included quotes from Alan Dershowitz sighing, "It is a tremendous mistake for Barack Obama to select as a foreign policy adviser the one person in public life who has chosen to support a bigoted book." The Politico, presumably, would argue that they're just reporting out the controversy, and Dershowitz is merely being quoted. But in general, there's a strategy reporters have when someone lets loose with a batshit crazy smear during an interview: Don't print it.

It is, of course, proof positive of the Israel Lobby's clout, and thus Walt and Mearsheimer's point, that this article exists and these quotes have been printed. That members of the Israel Lobby are attacking the character and positions of Brzezinski in the context of denying his (and Walt and Mearsheimer's) claim that there is a politically influential Israel Lobby that wields great influence and punishes those who diverge from their orthodoxy is almost too bizarre to be believed. It's like telling someone to keep their voice down then having them roar back, "I'M NOT LOUD!"

I didn't watch this part, but Joe Klein saw Joe Lieberman trying to bait General Petraeus into saying we should attack Iran.

Joe Lieberman was again notable yesterday for moving to the right of most of the Republicans on the panel, asking General Petraeus if it might be a good idea to invade Iran and take out the Revolutionary Brigade facilities allegedly supporting the Shi'ite militias. Petraeus said he had no authority outside Iraq. But you can see where Lieberman is heading now--and it's atrocious.

There was a period when the anger between Lieberman and the Democratic Party really did seem to center around a limited disagreement on the path forward in Iraq. At this point, though, Lieberman's hawkishness seems more of an unthinking positioning device. But it's very serious, and will undoubtedly receive a warm reception on the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Or, as the goy says, Happy New Year. I particularly liked Peace Now's method of marking the holiday:

Jon Cohn writes:

Ramesh also invokes an argument that I've always found a bit unfair: the suggestion that those of us who champion Medicare as a model of successful government-run health insurance ignore its huge cost. Nothing could be further from the truth. We're well aware of the huge costs Medicare imposes on our society. It's just that we're also aware of the even huger cost private insurance imposes.

And let me go a step further and mention the huge cost private insurance imposes on Medicare. Medicare is a Very Expensive Program for the same reasons that American health care is Very Expensive. So long as it operates within a fragmented, patchwork system that largely exists to amp up insurance industry profits, Medicare will largely act as a private insurers whose costs are borne by taxpayers. It will suffer from most all the inefficiencies endemic to the system, save the few where Medicare can act in a self-contained manner (i.e, administrative costs, where they pay 3% compared to the 14% of your average private insurer).

The idea of expanding into Medicare for All is laced with arguments about the cost savings a move towards a nationalized, integrated health system will bring. Lower administration, of course, but also better chronic disease management, and savings from lower prices extracted through government bargaining, and comparative pharmaceutical trials that direct treatment regimens more cost-effectively. Medicare is currently expensive, but less so than private insurance. In a Medicare-for-All structure, in which our health system more closely mimics that of other countries (who pay much less, as Ramesh admits), the savings could well be substantial. The fact of Medicare's cost is an argument for reform, not against, because what's so costly is our health care system, and that's what's being targeted.

Alright, so long as people are actually linking to the Wall Street Journal article on DC's new blogging elite, I should probably explain what I meant by the term. My point, which got a bit lost, is that it's a bad thing. I talk, later in the piece, about how blogging has had a positive impact on journalism, making things a bit more meritocratic rather than a mere Ivy League cabal. The problem, I then said, was that the social network could become just another set of elites -- a "new blogging elite," if you will -- where success was determined, in part, by the same old cocktail of connections, social ties, friendships, etc. That would substantially harm the medium's capacity for enhancing meritocracy.

In part, that's already happening. The hope is that it's counterbalanced by many of these relationship being borne from professional -- or inter-blog -- respect, rather than being preexisting relationships, so it's at least got a meritocractic element at the outset. I knew Matt Yglesias, for instance, as a writer for years before we ever met. On the other hand, I knew Brian Beutler long before he ever had a blog, but my first exposure to him was still as a writer. In any case, my point wasn't that this development was cool and we're all awesome, just that it was happening.

And it's true, Yglesias totally is a ringleader.

I grew up on the UC Irvine campus, so it's not only an outrage, but a personal disappointment, that the chancellor flew to North Carolina to personally fire Erwin Chemerinsky, the Duke Constitutional Law scholar recruited to head the university's new law school, because his liberal views were "too politically controversial." Brian Leiter adds:

Some colleagues speculate that Irvine hoped to get more donations from Donald Bren, the real estate developer who endowed the Law School and who is also a major donor to the Republican Party . Whether Mr. Bren played any role in this is something that perhaps the newspapers which investigate this story may unearth. Even if financial gain was the motive, the University, I suspect, has miscalculated the costs and benefits of its misconduct, since the reputational damage the school will now incur is likely to be quite substantial.

Chemerinsky, incidentally, helped write the charter of the city of Los Angeles and was named "one of the top 20 legal thinkers in America" by Legal Affairs. Loyola Laurie Levenson, who UCI was trying to recruit as a professor, said, "For a new law school to start infringing on academic freedom even before it opens its door does not bode well for this institution. I have talked to Erwin quite a bit about his plans for the new law school. He did not have a political agenda. He had an excellence agenda."

This was a very bad move.

Update: Dilan Esper, a former student of Chemerinsky's, has some illuminating thoughts in the comments section. Read them.

Josh Patashnik is probably looking at the wrong metric when he examines self-described liberals and conservatives -- party affiliation is probably a more accurate determinant of which columnists you agree with.

But his post reminded me that one possible explanation for the apparent overrepresentation of conservative columnists is that liberals are disproportionately found in big cities, where a paper like the New York Times will serve a few million of them, while conservatives are disproportionately found in rural communities, giving them more papers even as those papers don't serve many readers each. It's sort of like those maps where Bush won 98% of the country's square feet while getting only 51% of the actual vote. So it would be natural for papers in conservative communities to run more conservatives, just as The New York Times runs mostly liberals. There's no way of running this study, but in some ways the correct metric would be how well-read columnists are rather than how many papers they appear in.

Update: Whoops, the report addresses this by totaling up newspaper circulation. They find that “in a given week, nationally syndicated progressive columnists are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of 125 million. Conservative columnists, on the other hand, are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of more than 152 million.”

Doug Holtz-Eakin:

Who can forget (admittedly tax economists have a limited reservoir of thrills) the first time they saw the Hall-Rabushka postcard tax return?

As per usual, Robin Hanson's claims that we should cut the provision of medicine in half are, shall we say, a bit strong, but it is true that we've got enormous amounts of waste, and it's undoubtedly true that we should vastly enhance the amount of money we spend studying the effectiveness of treatments.

David Cutler's riposte, by contrast, seems quite on-point. Policy should focus on separating good care from bad care. There's no reason to go at this with a meat cleaver (unless you're Robin Hanson, and have made a career out of, um, "viewquakes," which sort of require you to make Shocking! Claims!) Also, if you are going to cut care, you'll want to do it on the supply side (i.e, with trained professionals helping decide where to slash spending), because all the available evidence shows that patients do not, themselves, know which care to cut, and when faced with higher medical bills, will just cut care indiscriminately.

Lastly, Hanson mentions that medicine is often used to "show that we care," which does not actually increase anyone's health. But medicine is also used to comfort. Take a patient with heart palpitations. Odds are they're just benign skipped beats. A doctor may even know those odds. But when your heart jumps, it's scary. So the doctor runs the set of tests that distinguish them from deadly arrhythmias. These tests are, in Hanson's telling, wasted medicine, as they do nothing to improve biological function and are very costly. But the assurances they offer do much to improve quality of life, which is, along with extending the length of life, rather the point of medicine.

There will always be some level of "wasted" medicine that isn't, at the moment of prescription, sure to be waste (i.e, a diagnostic that could find a deadly disease, but doesn't), and some amount of medicine that's used to calm fearful patients. Neither of those show up on yearly physicals, but nor are they necessarily wasted dollars if your metric is improving patients' quality of life.

Given my intention to work in the fantastically low-paying field of not-for-profit liberal journalism, I've always harbored the secret hope that my eventual mate will be much, much richer than I am. Maybe a sexy i-banker looking to salve her social conscience? In any case, I've no real way to relate to guys who collapse in terror at the idea of their spouse out-earning them. As Rebecca Traister explains, this may mean I have to give up on watching television for the near future.

Update: Via Matt, this article on relationships where the wife out-earns the husband is chilling. On the bright side, apparently your wife won't start seeing you as an emasculated child if you're a published writer with bylines to your name, so I'm golden.

My take on Petraeus, at TAP.

I'm a little uncomfortable with the framing that we need to leave Iraq in order to spend more time competing against China, but in general, Tom Friedman's column today is pretty sound. And this really is a well-chosen closer:

I heard a U.S. officer in Baghdad tell this story:

His unit was on a patrol in a Sunni neighborhood when it got hit by an I.E.D. Fortunately, the bomb exploded too soon and no one was hurt. His men jumped out and followed the detonation wire, which led 1,500 feet into the neighborhood. A U.S. Black Hawk helicopter was in the area and alerted the U.S. soldiers that a man was fleeing the scene on a bicycle. The soldiers asked the Black Hawk for help, and it swooped down and used its rotor blades to blow the insurgent off his bicycle, with a giant “whoosh,” and the U.S. soldiers captured him.

That image of a $6 million high-tech U.S. helicopter with a highly trained pilot blowing an insurgent off his bicycle captures the absurdity of our situation in Iraq. The great Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi said it best: “Great powers should never get involved in the politics of small tribes.”

On the other hand, it really shouldn't worry us that the Chinese are expanding the number of students doing advanced graduate work in renewable energy development. The formation of affordable alternatives to fossil fuels is a positive sum endeavor, in which Chinese innovation will be saving the same world as American innovation. The better they do, the better we'll do. Indeed, this is the gigantic upside of Chinese development and education -- it enables that many more people to develop awesome, fun, and/or important stuff that we can all use.

James Joyner worries that the stats showing an overepresentation of conservative columnists are poorly coded. "Personally," he writes, "I would score Broder and the Roberts family as progressive; still, while they’re clearly left-of-center, they’re hardly fire breathing liberal activists." But this gets to one of the problems. While I wouldn't call any of them liberals, even if they were liberals, they're not writing liberal columns.

Broder, Cokie Roberts, Ron Brownstein (a genuine liberal), and others of that sort pen reported, informational columns about American politics. They are not engaged in the work of George Will or EJ Dionne, who write argumentative columns advancing a particular ideology. So whether they support gay marriage is a bit beside the point: When The LA Times replaced Jon Chait with Ron Brownstein, they lost their liberal counterweight. Before, Jonah Goldberg's ceaseless advocacy for conservatism was balanced by Chait's liberalism. Now, it's balanced by very smart reported columns about this moment in American politics. And that's not balance at all.

Another contributing factor in the puzzling overrepresentation of conservative columnists is that how "interesting" an opinion is largely depends on how much it diverges from yours. So a liberal op-ed editor may be quite hard on other liberals, who don't sound, to him, like they're saying anything new. Conversely, he could be quite easy on conservatives, because even their basic arguments are, to him, analytically fresh and innovative. This is also why you get a lot of "liberal" columnists who spend their time attacking liberal orthodoxes, because attacks on things you believe in, like Social Security, are also "interesting" insofar as they challenge your biases. It's worth remembering that Paul Krugman, peace be upon him, actually began his public intellectual life as a neoliberal economics commentator who spent a lot of time berating the left for clinging to outdated nostrums. He later became a hard-edged liberal commentator, but it's doubtful the New York Times would have hired him had he begun that way.

More from Ponnuru's piece:

The tax code, as noted above, has shaped the private health-care market. Restrictions on who can perform medical services also keep their prices higher than they otherwise would be. And states have imposed an ever-larger number of mandates on insurers. Arkansas is one of thirteen states, for example, that require health insurance to cover in vitro fertilization. Add up such mandates, and the effect can be to price a lot of people out of the market. Duke University professor Christopher Conover estimates that the number of uninsured Americans would drop by a quarter if these mandates disappeared.

This idea that states force insurers to offer overly-comprehensive coverage is a common one. Sebastian Mallaby put it slightly differently when he snarked that Minnesota covers wigs and massage therapy, and what sort of health care system was that? So let's take a look at what these mandates are.

The Council for Affordable Health Insurance -- an industry front group -- puts out a yearly report on the mandates, and repeats this figure that one-quarter of the uninsured are uninsured because the mandates are so onerous. I picked a state at random -- Arizona, who's not too red nor blue, and who has an average number of mandates -- and collected all the conditions and treatments the state is forcing them to cover. Tell me which ones you'd want insurers to drop: Alcoholism, ambulatory surgery, breast reconstruction, colorectal cancer screening, contraceptives, diabetes care and supplies, emergency services, home health care, mammograms, maternity stays, maternity health parity, off-label drug use, infant formula, chiropodists, chiropractors, nurse anesthetists, nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, optometrists, occupational therapists, podiatrists, psychologists, and speech and hearing specialists. Additionally, they mandate that insurers offer coverage for adopted children, dependents, handicapped dependents, and newborns.

Certainly, you can pick a couple things to carve off. Maybe you'll take off chiropractors, though that may actually cost you money as patients opt for covered (and ineffective) lumbar surgeries over manual readjustments. You could take out midwives, but they're saving you money, too. And this stuff just doesn't cost that much: The benefit mandates (your wigs and in-viutro fertilizations and diabetes care), according to Conover, cost only $13 billion. The money comes in access mandates ($81.4 billion), which force insurers to cover the disabled, pregnant women, and let you go to psychologists, chiropractors, etc. And the calculated benefits of those mandates come to a bit over $70 billion. So here's my question for Ponnuru and others: Which of these services shouldn't be protected? And how will its absence improve the cost-effectivieness -- to be distinguished from the mere cost -- of medical care?

It's sort of a shame that Ramesh Ponnuru's article on health care is behind The National Review's* subscription wall, as it's a very serious exploration of the issue that's fairly notable in its stubborn refusal to engage in the usual demagoguery (When's the last time you heard a conservative say, "Even the single-payer proposal is less radical than it may sound. It would make explicit the current system’s prepayment and socialization of costs, while reducing its administrative costs and its penalization of people with pre-existing conditions."). I'll probably do a few posts on it, but for now, this is an important graf:

The very fact that the tax code encourages employers’ provision of insurance introduces another distortion. If workers were buying a policy themselves, with no tax break to affect their decision, they might prefer a cheap policy that covers only catastrophic medical expenses while leaving them to pay for routine care out of pocket. But the playing field isn’t level: Your incentive is to have as many of your health expenses as possible qualify for the tax break, which means you want your employer-provided insurance to cover even routine expenses. Health “insurance” is no longer primarily a matter of insuring against remote but predictable risks, but of prepaying for health expenses. Instead of hedging risks, it socializes costs.

For the moment, I'll leave out the likely policy outcomes of the first few sentences, which would see a deterioration in coverage among the young and healthy, leading to rocketing prices among the old and sick, leading to a huge class of individuals being priced out of health insurance.

But in that last line, Ponnuru gets to the heart of the debate: Liberals really do craft health care policy with the intent of broadly sharing costs. The idea is that everyone should be able to afford care and coverage. Conservatives are trying to move towards a system where we pay basically what we owe, with insurance acting -- for those who can afford it -- as a check against ruin. Both systems create winners: In the conservative vision, it's those who are healthy and/or young and/or lucky and/or conscientious. In the liberal vision, it's rather the opposite. A liberal will tell you that, eventually, we're all going to be part of that opposite group, and that's the moment when policy should protect us. A conservative would say that sets up incentives to ignore your health and overuse care. But that, on a policy level, is the debate.

*Incidentally, I subscribed to The National Review a few weeks ago under the rationale that I need to follow conservative commentary, rather than just liberal commentary about conservative commentary. I haven't regretted it.

The Republicans are testing out some sort of "Greatest Generation" argument for why we need to stay in Iraq. It may be semi-new as relates to Iraq, but as this great essay by Chris Hayes argues, it's always been the subtext of the War on Terror. My hunch, though, is that the Iraq War doesn't provide the morally clear backdrop for a winnable, "epic struggle" of the type that Greatest Generation yearnings need. Iraq is not where my generation wants to define itself.

The reason the Republicans have jumped on this ad isn't merely the "Betrayus" bullshit -- watching Republicans turn white because someone's patriotism was questioned is, after all, is like watching Lindsey Lohan sob with sadness when someone breaks their DARE pledge. The Republicans have leapt atop this because it fits their strategy (and yes, it's their strategy, not ours): It allows them to make the personal characteristics, integrity, patriotism, and chiseled cheekbones of David Petraeus the issue. So long as we're arguing about him, we lose. So long as we're arguing about the situation on the ground, we can win. That's the fight during these hearings: Will they be about whether Petraeus is great, or about Iraq?

Which is why I think the line of attack on this is obvious: It's the media's fault. This was a small buy conducted by a leftwing pressure group during one of the most substantively crucial political moments in recent years. That it's getting any attention at all isn't evidence of MoveOn's stupidity, but the press's utter absence of judgment and responsibility. It's time to let the grown-ups talk. And I think most Americans are pretty receptive to the argument that this MoveOn crud is a diverting triviality, and it's the press's responsibility to not be wasting our time with it.

Gary Kamiya's analysis of the "real lessons of 9/11" makes some powerful points about the barely subsumed anti-Arab (and, for that matter, Persian) sentiment that the war exposed. It also includes an analysis of the last six years, and our post-9/11 comportment, that I fully agree with:

Sept. 11 was a hinge in history, a fork in the road. It presented us with a choice. We could find out who attacked us, surgically defeat them, address the underlying problems in the Middle East, and make use of the outpouring of global sympathy to pull the rest of the world closer to us. Or we could lash out blindly and self-righteously, insist that the only problems in the Middle East were created by "extremists," demonize an entire culture and make millions of new enemies.

Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation's defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character. Many more Americans have now died in a needless war in Iraq than were killed in the terror attacks, and tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Billions of dollars have been wasted. America's moral authority, more precious than gold, has been tarnished by torture and lies and the erosion of our liberties. The world despises us to an unprecedented degree. An entire country has been wrecked. The Middle East is ready to explode. And the threat of terrorism, which the war was intended to remove, is much greater than it was.

All of this flowed from our response to 9/11. And so, six years later, we need to do more than mourn the dead. We need to acknowledge the blindness and bigotry that drove our response. Until we do, not only will the stalemate over Iraq persist, but our entire Middle Eastern policy will continue down the road to ruin.

A few more quotes:

Cretinous rabble-rousers like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage play to this crowd, demanding that we nuke the evil ragheads. For the establishment, "they" is not quite so explicitly racist. "They" refers not to all Arabs and Muslims, but only to the "bad" ones. The "bad" guys include al-Qaida, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and the militant Palestinians. And, of course, it used to include Iraq (and may again). Anyone who makes this list is eligible for attack by the U.S.

What makes these wildly disparate entities so evil and so threatening that we're prepared to attack them without cause? Simply that they reject the U.S.-Israeli writ in the Middle East -- and that they're Arabs or Muslims. They are clearly not on our side, but they pose no significant military or economic threat to the U.S. In realpolitik terms, they are no more beyond the pale than many other dubious countries we do business with, from Venezuela to Nigeria to Russia to Saudi Arabia. No one would dream of suggesting that if Cuba attacked the U.S., we should respond by invading Venezuela. But we play by different rules in the Middle East.

This is rather unambiguously true. The left-field substitution of Iraq as the focal point for our post-9/11rage could never have happened in another region. In American politics, there's an "Arab street," a "Middle East," in which the countries are, at least in theory, of secondary importance to the area's ethno-religious solidarity.

One of the neocons' main goals in invading Iraq was to "remake the Middle East" -- a weirdly grandiose, imperialist concept of the sort that doesn't apply anywhere except with Muslims. Only in the Middle East do lofty historical generalizations about why a world culture went wrong -- like those of the right-wing Arabist and White House favorite Bernard Lewis -- provide the intellectual underpinnings for unprovoked wars. Yes, the Arab-Muslim world has some serious problems, and yes, only a politically correct pedant would forbid all cultural generalizations. But when you go to war on the basis of those generalizations, you cross the line into colonialist prejudice.

The most lofty, abstract generalization of all is the insistence that this is a war of good vs. evil. "They" attacked us not because they had grievances or for any reasons that exist in the sublunary realm: They attacked simply because they were evil. Saddam would do the same because he, too, like Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, was evil. The "war on terror" is a crusade, a Holy War, whose essentially theological nature was summed up by the title of Richard Perle and David Frum's book, "An End to Evil." And once you're dealing with "evil," niggling distinctions -- between Sunni and Shiite, or secular and religious, or whether the country you want to invade had anything to do with attacking you -- can be dispensed with.

It's no accident that the leading neo-con intellectual of the period has been Bernard Lewis, of "What Went Wrong?" fame. The only analogue to our treatment of the Middle East is Africa, but where we've grouped the "Arab world" into a category that we fear and attend to, we group the African nations into a category that we pity and ignore. It's hard to decide which is worse.

How do I use target mode to fully restore my hard drive? In other words, how can I make the wiped hard drive of my new computer identical to the full hard drive of my current one?

I don't know much about any of this, but read Daniel Levy's hypotheses on Israel's recent military actions in Syria, the nature of which neither Israel nor Syria have seen fit to disclose, save that israel dropped live ammunition. No Israeli politicians or military leaders have been allowed to speak to the press, and Syria hasn't divulged the target of the bombings. Weird, and possibly quite dangerous.

The National Security Network is fact-checking the Petraeus speech. The facts are losing. Also: A video!

Read Kevin Drum on the chaos hawks. As he says, first we were to believe that we needed war to take out Saddam, then more war to fix what we had broken, and now more war to keep what we couldn't fix from exploding all over the Middle East. The hawks have become the supply siders of foreign affairs -- no matter what Iraq's problem is, the answer is more military deployment. That the continued military deployments haven't made anything better does nothing to change the prescription, just the rationale. But as Jon Chait smartly said about the supply siders, the only way to evaluate a theory is to see if it fulfills the predictions of its proponents, and you need barely glance at Iraq to know that that's not been true.

Meanwhile, Joe Lieberman and John McCain continue setting new records for wank. Check them out in the Wall Street Journal saying "The president had the courage to change course on Iraq. Does Congress?" It's an interesting definition a "changing course": If I'm in a car at 85 miles per hour on an iced over road and angrily insisting to my terrified passengers that "no, i won't slow down, I'm the $@&$% decider," McCain and Lieberman would not define changing course as pulling off onto the shoulder till the de-icer comes, but instead speeding up to 110 mph.

Proposals like Stuart Baker's thoughtful-but-inadequate answer to our health care woes strike me as a bit less dangerous than some progressives assume. What Butler has is the sort of non-progressive policy that makes sense as an incremental measure to progressives. Given our biases, it's plausible that a political system oriented towards the status quo will falter in pursuit of real change and adopt this milder alternative. But the problem with something like the Butler plan -- at least unless industry adopts it -- is that it lacks an affirmative constituency. It's 30 percent of a progressive proposal rather than 65% of a conservative proposal. And it's complicated, not easy to explain, and not a particularly good policy with which to bludgeon liberals. It would have to be a policy compromise, rather than a political gambit.

So it's hard to see where it's support will come from. I tend to be more worried about the thoughtless proposals from Giuliani types which are created to a) attract industry money, b) facilitate attacks on Democratic proposals, and c) make it sound like the politician has an answer even if they've got nothing at all. A world where Butler's proposal could get enacted is a world where a better proposal will get enacted. A world where Giuliani's BS gets a respectful hearing is much more worrisome.

Some of the rhetoric's a bit rough, but The Atlantic does know how to report out some good stories. From their post-death profile of Arafat:

Al-Masri remembers sitting with Arafat one night in 1988 as the Palestinian leader negotiated a formula that would allow the United States to recognize the PLO. "They gave him the formula, and he said it in a speech in Geneva, but he put in extra words, so no one could figure out what he was saying," al-Masri remembers. "The Americans said, 'No way.' So I stayed up all night with him and Dick Murphy, the assistant secretary of state, to work out what he must say. The formula was 'We totally and absolutely renounce all forms of terrorism.' So they called a press conference, and he said everything right, except instead of 'terrorism' he said, 'We announce tourism! We announce all forms of tourism!'"

Mario Loyola writes:

We are organizing and regularizing what amounts to a Sunni militia. If we could do with the Shiite militias what we are now doing with the Sunnis (who already have plenty of weapons) the war would essentially be over now.

It's interesting to watch conservative thinking from other areas -- in this case, gun control -- bleed over to things like civil reconstruction. In the conservative narrative of crime policy, if both the criminals and the civilians had Frank Castle style armories in their basements, society would enter some sort of lethal-force equilibrium, in which the fear of being shot would diminish the incentives to provoke a shooting. Thus: no crime! Others look at this strategy and see a recipe for more shoot-outs. It's hard to understand how a little internal warning bell doesn't go off when you transpose that optimistic view of America's inner cities into a chaotic country where one ethnic group is, far, far, far bigger than the other and both are struggling for power, but it's sort of interesting to watch.

Less so if you're an Iraqi, I imagine.

It's probably worth noting that economists are also familiar with something called "collective action" problems; have probably noticed that individuals cannot, themselves, end global warming by purchasing a moderately large quantity of carbon offsets; and so would find it perfectly rational and utility-maximizing that individuals concerned with stopping global warming spend their time creating political pressure for a collective -- and thus effective -- solution, rather than ineffectually lowering their personal output.

One could argue, incidentally, that every time Al Gore is called a hypocrite, is efficacy is marginally reduced, and so he should indeed spend every spare penny buying offsets that won't actually solve any problems because they are useful for his political image which is in turn useful for his advocacy which in turn helps speed legislative action. But buying individual offsets is more an innovation in personal political validation than carbon reduction -- it lets you say something about who you are, but it doesn't solve any problems, nor even come close.

I've been reading The Israel Lobby over the weekend and trying to figure out the chronology of the Second Intifada and the significance of Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount. This led to some fuzzily directed googling, which led to this Atlantic article heaping opprobrium -- much of it deserved -- on Yassir Arafat.

One of the peculiarities of the nation that Arafat created was that it was founded on a festering grievance rather than any positive imagination of the future; the worse things were in the present, the stronger the Palestinian case became.

For the diplomats of the European Union, whose dream of creating a new kind of political organization that would rival the United States for global influence was burdened by the historical guilt of colonialism and the Holocaust, the image of the Jew as oppressor that Arafat offered the world was both novel and liberating; the State of Israel would become the Other of a utopian new world order that would be cleansed of destructive national, religious, and particularistic passions.

That's quite a charge. Luckily it's backed up with heaps of supporting ev--wait, what's that? No evidence at all? Oh.

For all the hysterical denunciations of the calm, methodical argument presented by Walt and Mearsheimer, this sort of thing passes unnoticed all the time. Here we've got The Atlantic Monthly, one of the most prestigious and respected magazines in America, charging that the European Union has declared Israel "the Other," and believes they singularly impede our future as laid-back, bisexual cosmopolitans drinking fair trade espresso. And yet, it appears no editor even raised an eyebrow, much less asked for a quotation of some sort.

Which is lucky, because if you go to the EU's official web site on the conflict, you get positions like "It is the EU’s position of principle that Israel should live in peace within internationally-recognised borders, accepted by all its neighbours, and free from threats to its security." Or if you look at the EU's action plan with Israel, you get "[The EU's] Enlargement offers the opportunity for the EU and Israel to develop an increasingly close relationship, going beyond co-operation, to involve a significant measure of economic integration and a deepening of political co-operation." And for that matter, former British prime minister (and thus EU member) Tony Blair is the new envoy to the Middle East. So all in all it's probably good the editors didn't press for quotes or evidence, as they really wouldn't have fit with the article.

Meanwhile, Walt and Mearsheimer construct a book entirely from footnotes and direct quotations, and they're branded anti-semites -- not because they hate the Jews, but because they tilted against Israel's chosen policies rather than towards them. Healthy.

"Can we now finally stop referring to this kabuki nonsense report as 'The Petraeus Report'?" Asks Brian Beutler. "It's wholly the work of people in the White House whose names are not David Petraeus. Back when I was in school, if you claimed as your own ideas and writing that belonged to somebody else, it was called plagiarism." Good point. It's alarming that the White House has been this effective at disassociating themselves from a report released by one of their political appointees, written within the administration, and sold by the White House communications staff.

Liberals still suck at this stuff.

TAP reprints my Sunday LA Times op-ed on the conflation between the stock market and the broader economy, and the ways in which that creates economic reportage tilted towards the rich. An excerpt:

People say that economics is complicated. But it sure looks simple to me. After all, what's so complicated about a sector that can be represented in a single arrow? Up for good, down for bad. And if that weren't easy enough, we've got green for good, and red for bad. It's child's play. It even looks like a toy I played with as a child. The green arrow made a cow moo, as I remember.

Looks, however, can be deceiving. And so it is with the ubiquitous stock ticker arrow that increasingly serves as a stand-in for broad economic data. More and more, the arrow is all that's discussed -- did stocks rise or did they fall? -- as if the movement of the market were synonymous with the fortunes of the economy.

This approach is perhaps best demonstrated by CNBC commentator Larry Kudlow, who routinely writes and says things like, "The stock market actually rose in August, and opened higher in the first day of September trading earlier this morning. If stocks are optimistic, then so am I."

But Wall Street is not Main Street. Its fluctuations may demonstrate economic health and distress, but they may not.

Read on...

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

For a long time I really didn't know what to think about trade policy.  That's still mostly the case.  The trouble is that I don't really trust the ideological assumptions of either of the two groups that speak the loudest in the public debate about trade and its impact on global poverty.  On one side, you have the sort of economists who apply suspiciously simple models to incredibly complex problems.  On the other side, you have activists whose negative attitude towards multinational corporations far exceeds my own.  (I tend to see corporations like elephants -- uncontrolled, they'll smash everything with their immense bargaining power and leave big smelly externalities all over the place. But properly tamed, you can get them to do a lot of useful work.)  In the middle, there are a whole bunch of different views that I really have no clue how to sort out. 

These days I'm thinking that the best way to make up my mind on these issues is just to go to Oxfam's Make Trade Fair campaign and let them tell me what to think.  Oxfam is a venerable famine relief organization, and I trust them to make their decisions in a way that's motivated by concern for the poorest people in the world.  They seem to be fairly supportive of free trade in terms of preventing rich countries from imposing tariffs on imported goods, but they're opposed to farm subsidies that hurt poor farmers and intellectual property laws that keep people in poor nations from getting the medicines they need.  In the flavor of their rhetoric, I think they're marketing themselves mainly to the people who are likely to be on the side of the anticorporate activists.  It's probably a good strategy for an organization in their position, and in any case I don't think the underlying analysis is any worse for it.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

On Friday, John Edwards gave the big speech about his anti-terrorism strategy in New York. It's a head-on challenge to the Bush Administration's strategy for the war on terror -- as Edwards says, Bush's response to 9/11 has been to fool around in ways that range from the ineffective to the disastrous, and it's time to get a new strategy in place that actually addresses the problem.

President Bush, like the Republicans following him today and even some Democrats, was stuck in the past, and he still is. He had no grasp of the new threats we faced, so he failed to offer a vision to keep us safe in a world that had changed. Saddam Hussein was the threat he knew, so Iraq was the war he waged.

We needed new thinking and a bold vision to protect the world for our children; instead, George Bush literally gave us his father's war—but without his father's allies or his father's sense of decency. What's more and what's worse, the so-called "war on terror" he used as his excuse for war in Iraq became his excuse for trampling our Constitution and, most perversely, for ignoring the demands of the actual struggle against terrorism.

The centerpiece of Edwards' plan is a new Counterterrorism and Intelligence Treaty Organization (CITO), which would help countries coordinate police work and share anti-terror intelligence:

CITO will allow members to voluntarily share financial, police, customs and immigration intelligence. Together, nations will be able to track the way terrorists travel, communicate, recruit, train, and finance their operations. And they will be able to take action, through international teams of intelligence and national security professionals who will launch targeted missions to root out and shut down terrorist cells.

The new organization will also create a historic new coalition. Those nations who join will, by working together, show the world the power of cooperation. Those nations who join will also be required to commit to tough criteria about the steps they will take to root out extremists, particularly those who cross borders. Those nations who refuse to join will be called out before the world.

Edwards also emphasizes strengthening nonproliferation policy, protecting chemical plants, moving towards energy independence, and building better relations with the American Muslim community:

We must also work hard here at home to ensure that extremist ideologies do not take hold in our own Muslim communities—and we must do so in a way that respects diversity and civil liberties and avoids practices like racial profiling against both Arabs and Muslims. We must encourage American Muslim participation in public life. I will put new resources toward engaging American Muslims, empowering local mosques to counter extremist ideas, and working hand-in-hand with Muslim communities to identify and isolate threats.

We can't ignore extremism among Muslims here, and we absolutely can't treat them like we're at war with them. Making them understand that they're regarded as Americans in good standing, and that we're relying on them for assistance, is essential in preventing things like the London bombings.

My favorite part of the speech -- and of most of Edwards' speeches -- is the part where he launches into his support for global humanitarian efforts. As always, he ties it to our goals in the struggle against Islamic extremism:

Yet we also should have a broader, deeper goal—to prevent terrorism from taking root in the first place. Millions of people around the world are sitting on the fence. On the one side are bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and on the other side is America. The question is which way they will go. If they perceive America as a bully, it will drive them in the other direction. If, on the other hand, they see us as the light, the country they want to be like, the country that's creating hope and opportunity, it will pull them to us like a magnet.

We have to be that light again. We need to do everything we can to prevent this generation of potential friends from becoming a generation of enemies.

Several months ago, I proposed a sweeping effort to eliminate the poverty and instability that create the conditions for extremism, including increasing our funding for global primary education to $3 billion a year, expanded microfinance programs, ramping up our support for sanitation and preventive health care in developing nations, and dramatically increasing our promotion of constitutional democracies and the rule of law across the developing world.

And during my first year in office, I will establish a "Marshall Corps," patterned after the military reserves, that will include at least 10,000 civilian experts. Its members will be deployed abroad to serve on reconstruction, stabilization, and humanitarian missions.

I love the way these things are named -- "CITO", which recalls NATO, and the "Marshall Corps". However terrible our policies in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa were during the Cold War, we did a very good job in dealing with the USSR and the Eastern Bloc countries, with the Marshall Plan being our best strategic move of the entire Cold War. We knew that direct military action would lead to catastrophe, so we contained them and engaged them culturally for decades.

And that's how we won. When the Berlin Wall fell, it wasn't crushed by American tanks, but picked apart by young East Germans who wanted to live as we did. That's how our struggle against Islamic extremism will end as well -- not with invasions and military conquest, but with new generations turning away from extremist views. It's good to see Democrats alluding to the wisdom of that strategy, and it's great to see them proposing a similarly wise strategy that meets the challenges of our era.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

I was impressed earlier when I heard about Mike Huckabee's surprisingly compassionate views on prison reform, and how the Club for Growth hated him for raising taxes in Arkansas.  But it wasn't until this week that I gazed upon the full horror of his social issue positions -- total opposition to abortion and to any government support for contraception.  And the FairTax nuttery is sufficient to cancel out whatever points I'm going to give him for his history of raising taxes in Arkansas. 

I'm back to seeing Romney as the least poisonous president in the GOP field, simply because he's unprincipled enough to not try anything ambitious. 

By Deborah Newell Tornello aka litbrit

In the early 1970's, flight attendants (then referred to as "stewardesses") who worked for Southwest Airlines dressed like this:

Meanwhile, Continental Airlines' girls flight attendants skipped around teevee screens, singing:

And at Singapore Airlines, the message was even less subtle--Singapore Girl—You're a great way to fly! The iconic Singapore Girl, also known as "Asia's Barbie", has held on despite pesky feminist complaints lo these many years, though changes, apparently, are in the works:

Despite her success, critics complain the Singapore Girl concept is sexist, outmoded and largely intended to serve male passengers' fantasies of desirable, subservient Oriental women.

The Straits Times once quoted a Qantas Airways chairman referring to the campaign as "massage parlour in the sky ads".[...]

Advertising industry experts do not expect her to be canned but merely refreshed.

"It's been incredibly successful and you don't just give up such a truly iconic symbol having spent 30 years to build it," one executive at a large international agency said.

It's interesting that so much sex gets invoked to peddle what amounts to little more than the privilege to wedge oneself into a seat--one that was miserably uncomfortable twenty years ago, and is all the more so now--in an admittedly phallic-looking sardine can; strap oneself down, and forfeit one's rights to self-determination for an indefinite length of time; and then feel oddly grateful for the half-defrosted bagel and scrambled rubber one is expected to eat with a plastic spork. The experience of air travel ceased being sexy in any way, shape, or form the moment someone realized there was money to be made by stripping the upholstery from passengers' seats, stacking them on top of alongside each other like so many tin folding chairs at a low-budget shotgun wedding, and spacing the rows with an eye toward pretending that adult humans rarely exceed four feet in height.

No, these days, the sounds, smells, and images associated with flying commercial are the very antitheses of sexiness.

This didn't stop Southwest Airlines from trying, though.  In fact, as recently as 2004, the airline marketed itself as the Match.com of the clouds:

But hark, what's that in the air? Pheromones? Cupid? No, just Southwest Airlines, which is trying to bill itself as a flying matchmaker. Is it working? At the very least, Southwest says so. With its open-seating policy, it claims, people can check each other out at the terminal and then choose to sit next to each other during the flight. It's really playing the angle up -- in-flight snacks are called "love bites," in-flight drinks are "love potions," and its stock ticker symbol is LUV.

But--oh dear--it looks like some odd changes have taken place at Southwest Airlines since those days of screw-top wine and imagined roses. Love bites have been replaced by packets of dessicated pretzel crumbs, and every bit of fun associated with (if not actually provided by) the airline has been drained in favor of...something. A bow to the fashion police? This fashionphile isn't impressed. A nod to feminists? Well, I'm one of those, too, and I think the way the airline treated miniskirt-wearing passenger Kyla Ebbert earlier this summer was insulting at best, actionable at worst.

First, they escorted her off the plane; then, after allegedly subjecting her to some sort of "we're a family airline" talk, permitted her--permitted her! A paying customer who clearly wasn't hiding any boxcutters or bottles of hair-gel on her summer-outfitted person, headed as she was for the 100+ degree heat of Tuscon--to re-board, after which humiliating experience Ms. Ebbert hid under a lovely germ-ridden polyester airline blanket for the duration of the flight. Jessica has video, as well as some truly excellent points appearing in the comment section.  A sample:

"God damn it. I am so, so, sick of women's bodies being pathologized like this. Yes, women have breasts and legs. Yes, in many cases you can tell we have them. GET THE FUCK OVER IT. It just makes me so irate that on the one hand, we're expected to flaunt our bodies, but then when we do we're punished. Was anybody else really disturbed by the part where she said she covered herself with a blanket? Because you know, since she's not "fat" or "ugly" she has to be made to feel ashamed of her body in some way."

-----

"This is a feminist issue, IMO, because it's a reflection of the damned if you do, damned if you don't standards in our society for women. Women are expected to be sexy, but not too sexy. Our society simultaneously sends the message to women that how attractive they are is the measure of their worth and also that if they actually want/enjoy sex (or "make" people have "sinful" thoughts) they are horrible people who deserve to be shamed. Does this woman participate in a sexist culture by working at Hooters? Definitely, IMO. But don't we all in some way or another? I really don't think it's that radical of a position to say that even women who participate in perpetuating sexism can also be the victim of sexism."

-----

"Public drunkenness can be dangerous on a flight. Fatness? I'm assuming they wanted them to buy two tickets? A separate and more complicated issue. Strong body odor? I wish I'd been on the flight that banned the BO men. I always seem to be right in the midst of an unshowered soccer team flying between matches.

 

The point isn't that private businesses can't set basic standards for their customers, it's that this standard is absurd. Subjective and absurd."

I suppose it's back to the drawing boards, then, for airline companies' advertisers, standards-setters, and passengers alike. Me, I'm still fuming that Southwest charged me an Overweight Luggage fee--my suitcase was barely three pounds above the limit!--en route to Yearly Kos; meanwhile it wound up being so bloody hot in Chicago, all I really needed was a couple of tank tops, a sarong, and a pair of shorts. Yet another airline makes my personal No Fly list.

Do you suppose Aeroflot is at all passenger-friendly?

(Posted by John.)

Architecture 2030 has a new ad (PDF) out in the New Yorker (via Gristmill) that nicely illustrates how difficult it will be to halt carbon emissions with voluntary, incremental steps.  Some of the points:

• "If every household in the US  changed a 60-watt incandescent light bulb to a compact fluorescent ...   The CO2 emissions from just two medium-sized coal-fired power plants each year  would negate this entire effort."
• " Wal-Mart is investing a half billion dollars to reduce the energy consumption  and CO2 emissions of their existing buildings by 20% over the next seven years. If every Wal-Mart Supercenter  met this target ... The CO2 emissions from only one medium-sized  coal-fired power plant, in just one month of operation each year, would negate this entire effort."

So not only are individual efforts not going to be enough, but not even something as massive as Wal-Mart will be able to make subtantial progress if we don't make the obvious choice:  stop building coals plants, and start shutting down the ones we have.  In Canada, we've got a similar issue of it being politically impossible to consider shutting down the tar sands industry, even though tar sands oil emits way more CO2 than regular oil.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

I've written before on the need to avoid getting too excited about the current polls, but the fact that Dems are favored in three or maybe four Senate seats fourteen months before election day means Chuck Schumer and Chris Van Hollen really need to go for the jugular. At this point in the 2006 cycle, Dems were favored to win only the Casey-Santorum matchup in Pennsylvania, though they had strong challengers lined up in Missouri, Montana, and Ohio. It really does seem like there's a scenario in which every GOP Senate seat could be competitive, except Graham, Chambliss (sadly, that #*((%!&%(*!#&ing *(#&$(!*%&#*er), Lamar!, Cochran and Enzi. Obviously Dems aren't going to win 15 Senate seats, or even put that many in play, but widening the playing field so that there's an outside possibility of getting sixty seats this cycle would be fantastic.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

It's a happy day to look back at John Judis' piece on Democratic Senate prospects for 2008.  With John Warner having decided to resign from the Senate, Mark Warner is in position to give Virginia a second Democratic Senator.  And it looks like Chuck Hagel will be retiring in Nebraska, paving the way for the locally beloved Bob Kerrey to return to the Senate.  (Nebraska votes solidly Republican on the presidential level, but it's actually quite good to Democrats in the Senate -- Hagel is the only Republican to win a Nebraska Senate race in the last 35 years.)  Along with Colorado and New Hampshire, this makes 4 seats in which we'll be favored to win.  A 60-seat Senate majority by 2011, while still unlikely, is not out of reach. 

I think it's pretty clear that, in another life, Osama bin Laden would've been a political blogger. It's really a shame he went the mass murderer route instead. Meanwhile, his lengthy critique of American foreign policy combined with his encouraging suggestion that "There are no taxes in Islam, but rather there is a limited Zakaat [alms] totaling 2.5 percent," makes for a pretty strange amalgam of supply-sider and anti-imperialist. Maybe he could start a third-party?

Update: Or what about a Ron Paul/bin Laden ticket?

In a perfect world, we'd all evaluate candidates based on their health care plans and performance in The Social Policy Thunderdome, wherein a panel of leftwing bloggers would pepper politicians with substantial questions about weighty public issues, and those who proved incapable of the task would gracefully accept their inadequacy and drop out. Barring that, Matt's right to say that "things like appearances on Oprah's show are in some ways an improvement over the alternative...they're at least being swayed by the candidate's actual charisma or lack thereof (I, for instance, saw Hillary Clinton on Ellen last week and found her charming) whereas the main alternative isn't careful evaluation of the issues, but instead a seemingly arbitrary media filter wherein a prickly egomaniacal recovering alcoholic becomes the kind of guy you'd like to get a beer with."

That said, I'm still willing to help promote the Thunderdome concept.

Megan (Not McArdle...calm down) writes:

My policy professor taught me that policy beliefs originate from a model of the individual. The rational economic actor is one model of the individual. The policies that you trust are aggregations of your model of the individual:

For health care, my model of the individual:

People live in denial, do not do good risk analysis (as evidenced by my erratic use of bike helmets.) They do not conscientiously save against medical emergencies, even though they could. They do not have the capacity to compare fancy-dancy medical treatments (I should figure out what chemo regimen is best for me? I DO NOT WANT TO, because that is outside my expertise and BORING. I want to trust an expert, if it comes to that.), especially if the pain has already started. They do not have any interest in comparing not-fancy treatments. (When I broke my arm, I realized I had no information whatsoever on which of the four local emergency rooms had good reputations. None. I had never cared until it was too late.) I derive zero utility from comparison shopping for health care; I want someone else to handle it.

I figure people are roughly like me, non-savers, bad risk assessment, more than willing to delegate their health care. (I am not willing to delegate my fitness or nutrition, but that is different from disease or injury.) You know what makes good sense for that model of the individual? Government based health care that does a decent job by me. You know what doesn't make sense? For profit insurance agencies who do not have my best interests at heart.

For what it's worth, this is exactly my model of how individuals relate to health care too. When I bring this up with conservatives, they often protest that individuals simply haven't been properly trained to be mega-rational health care consumers. This sometimes makes me think they've never met any individuals. When i ask what will happen to all those individuals who falter between now and when we've trained people to be perfectly rational, they sort of shrug and say that people have to take responsibility for their own actions.

Generally speaking, the rerelease of Walt and Mearsheimer's argument on the Israel Lobby has produced a lot of insensible, uninteresting commentary. MJ Rosenberg's take, by contrast, strikes me as quite sensible, and the sort of thing that people like David Remnick agree with, but for unclear reasons, are very reticent to actually say:

I spent almost 20 years as a Congressional aide and can testify from repeated personal experience that Senators and House Members are under constant pressure to support status quo policies on Israel. It is no accident that Members of Congress compete over who can place more conditions on aid to the Palestinians, who will be first to denounce the Saudi peace plan, and who will win the right to be the primary sponsor of the next pointless Palestinian-bashing resolution. Nor is it an accident that there is never a serious Congressional debate about policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. Moreover, every President knows that any serious effort to push for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement based on compromise by both sides will produce loud (sometimes hysterical) opposition from the Hill.

Walt and Mearsheimer mostly limit themselves to exploring whether all this is good for the United States (and to a lesser extent, Israel). The question I ask today, and not for the first time, is whether this type of behavior is good for Israel. Forty years after the Six Day War, the occupation continues, the resistance to it intensifies, and Israelis in increasing numbers question whether they have a future in the Jewish state.

Has "pro-Israel" advocacy consistently produced "pro-Israel" ends? At several critical moments, it most certainly has not.

You should read the rest of MJ's take. I'm pretty sure David Remnick would echo every sentiment in that excerpt save for the claim that he worked on the Hill for 20 years. But when faced with the possibility of actually writing something on the Israel Lobby, Remnick engaged in more of what Tony Karon rightly characterized as "a kvetch, designed to discredit M&W in the eyes of New Yorker readers, [rather] than a serious engagement with their argument." It's strange.

I'm trying to figure out what conservatives like about Fred Thompson aside from the fact that he's really, really tall. But as far as I can tell, that's enough. Indeed, so much as I wish EJ Dionne were right to theorize that the GOP is swinging towards a more pragmatic posture, I think he's got the causality mixed up.

The reason Giuliani won applause for deflecting questions over his personal life by saying "any issues in my private life do not affect my public performance," is because he's Rudy Giuliani, and the right wants to support him. They've decided they like the guy, so they'll buy into his panders, rationalizations, and barely concealed heterodoxies. If they didn't like the guy, they wouldn't. See Romney, Mitt. If Bill Clinton had another affair, they'd foam at the mouth and begin wondering about Vince Foster and all the rest.

Awhile back, ur-conservative commentator Peggy Noonan wrote a hagiography of Reagan call When Character Was King. So long as I can tell, it still is, and not in the sense that character means personal qualities, but in the sense that it denotes a part someone is playing. Play it well enough, and effectively enough, and all else seems forgiven. Thompson may lack ideas and experience, but he's damn good at playing a character -- that's literally his job, the one he left politics and public service to pursue. Various polls show him near the lead based on that ability alone. Well that, I guess, and the fact that he's really tall.

Echidne of the Snakes has spent the week examining the nexus between social science research and its popularization, trying to figure out where it's all going so horribly wrong. It's great work that's not getting enough attention, and folks should go scroll around it at her place.

To make one more point on this argument that conservatives want tax cuts because they think the rich give all their money to charity, if this were actually a big part of anti-tax attitudes, then conservatives wouldn't be advocating the end of the estate tax, which supercharges charitable giving among the wealthy (the government can't confiscate what you've already given away). Repeal it, and you sacrifice about $10 billion in philanthropic bequests and contributions yearly. Conservatives -- and libertarians -- don't seem very worried about that, but then, I don't think they're signing anti-tax pledges to make a triple bank shot for charity.

Tim Lee says "we have to remember that many rich people give a significant fraction of their wealth to charity...some of us simply suspect that, on the margin, leaving a dollar in the pockets of a rich guy is more likely to lead to that dollar being used for a worthwhile purpose than giving that dollar to Congress to spend...it’s an important part of what drives anti-tax attitudes in broader electorate." Yep: They're not saying "don't tax me," they're saying "I believe these dollars would be better spent by wealthy individuals who really, really, really care about ballet."

But Tim's a stand-up guy, so if he says he believes this, then I believe him. But it seems bizarre. I know of a lot of right wingers who think a dollar left in a rich person's pocket will be more productively used than a dollar given to the government, but I don't know of any who say that that dollar is more likely to travel down the income ladder and guarantee health coverage to the poor, or pensions to the impoverished elderly.

Indeed, if you're searching for a substitute for the social safety net, much of the philanthropy that the rich engage in seems poorly targeted, to say the least. The Center on Philanthropy conducted a study on how much charitable giving was directed to helping the poor. They found that giving to help meet the basic needs of the poor is a mere 7.5% of total giving, while "other" donations that directly or indirectly help the poor are around 23%. The rest goes to alumni associations (a surprisingly huge money suck), arts and culture, and so forth.

I'm no economist, but this doesn't look good:

Some might say that the unemployment rate hasn't dipped -- it's still at a fairly low 4.6 percent -- but even that's not necessarily a comfort. EPI says: "The reason August's unemployment rate was unchanged was due to a large monthly fall off—down 340,000—in the labor force (those who leave the labor force are not counted among the unemployed). In other words, the unemployment rate was unchanged due to fewer job seekers, not more jobs."

Cranky writes:

I have what I think is a pretty good idea for a small business that would probably employ 5-10 people. There is no way I can pursue that and take the risk of leaving my family without medical care during the typical 2-3 unprofitable startup years, so I stay in the corporate cube.

Did you say stifling of innovation? Perhaps this effect is not undesired by the large corps that have reasonably good heath plans?

My hunch is that the corporations don't much care, and quite a few of them are groaning beneath the weight of their medical coverage obligations anyway. But is there any compelling reason that our public policy and social welfare system should be set up to encourage Cranky to remain in his cube, rather than go make a better ice cream cone?

Libertarian health wonk Michael Cannon writes that "it should come as no surprise that health insurance premiums have risen 87% since 2000. Doctors and insurance companies can get away with charging high prices because their customers don't bear the costs directly...This isn't some inevitable result of market forces, but of government programs and tax preferences for employer-controlled insurance."

But then you'd assumedly expect the individual insurance market -- where employers have no role, government programs aren't involved, and thus both distortions are minimized -- to exhibit much healthier characteristics. Instead, it's far more perverse.

Between 8 and 18 percent of applicants are denied health coverage outright due to preexisting conditions. Additionally, the pool of individuals seeking coverage is quite healthy -- the opposite of what you'd expect, given that the sick are disproportionately likely to be unemployed, and are more acutely in need of care. They're simply being priced out. Meanwhile, individual coverage is becoming less and less popular -- and that's across-the-board, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, the sick and the healthy. Why? Well, it turns out their premiums are going up too -- even without the distortions of employers or governments.

My guess is Cannon will say that this proves consumers still don't have enough power, and they should just be paying for their care directly. But the world of individual insurance is still much closer to his perfect world than, say, Medicare, is, and yet it's a comparative dystopia, in which substantial fractions of the population simply can't get insurance, costs continue going up, and more and more individuals are giving up on coverage altogether.

An American in France tells of his experiences with the French system. As you may imagine, it's ghastly, unsettling, stuff, full of prompt appointments and helpful specialists. Conservatives, it's worth saying, have much the same reaction when faced with the horrors of high-quality, socialized care.

The Onion asks whether the rich are falling behind the super-rich:

There's not much good in the release of a new bin-Laden tape, but boy, the guy has a sense of timing and theatre Fred Thompson can only dream of, eh? Indeed, the only bright spot is that it lets me link to John Judis's article on research political scientists have done into the "death anxiety," and how it relates to elections.

In October 2003, the three scholars, together with five colleagues, assembled 97 undergraduates at Rutgers to participate in what the students thought was a study of the relationship between personality and politics. One group was given the mortality exercises. The other wasn't. They then read an essay expressing a "highly favorable opinion of the measures taken by President Bush with regards to 9/11 and the Iraqi conflict."...on average, members of the control group rated it unfavorably. But those who did the mortality exercises on balance favored the statement. In February 2004, the psychologists repeated the experiment, but this time they used September 11 cues. They had one group of students write down the emotions that September 11 aroused in them and describe what happened on that day. They got the same results as before: On average, those in the September 11 group approved of the statement, while those who didn't do the exercises disapproved. Based on political questionnaires they had the students fill out, they also found that the September 11 and mortality exercises "increased both conservatives' and liberals' liking for Bush."

Then, in late September 2004, the psychologists, along with two colleagues from Rutgers, tested whether mortality exercises influenced whom voters would support in the upcoming presidential election. They conducted the study among 131 Rutgers undergraduates who said they were registered and planned to vote in November. The control group that completed a personality survey, but did not do the mortality exercises, predictably favored Kerry by four to one. But the students who did the mortality exercises favored Bush by more than two to one. This strongly suggested that Bush's popularity was sustained by mortality reminders. The psychologists concluded in a paper published after the election that the government terror warnings, the release of Osama bin Laden's video on October 29, and the Bush campaign's reiteration of the terrorist threat (Cheney on election eve: "If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again") were integral to Bush's victory over Kerry.

The whole article is worth reading, but the main finding is that reminders of mortality or threat provoke a sort of psychological retrenchment into tribe, culture, country, etc. They do more than demand a strong leader: They create a yearning for a traditional one. And that advantages not only certain Republican heuristics, but a broad set of conservative policy positions. Bin Laden, of course, wasn't present at Rutgers for the experiments, but certainly has an intuitive grasp of this concept, which is why he times his video releases for elections, anniversaries, etc. He's a pavlovian terrorist, and it's been working out pretty damn well for him.

I'll be on Hardball at 5:35 Eastern talking about Iraq, Fred Thompson, and Larry Craig. I have opinions on two of these three topics. Tune in to find out which!

In context of the supply side argument, James Joyner writes, "With incredibly rare exceptions, presidents are not policy wonks."

This isn't meant to be a partisan post, so I hope it doesn't come out that way. But the exceptions, so far as I can tell, are called Democrats. Clinton was a policy wonk. Carter was a policy wonk. And to keep the pattern going, Al Gore was a policy wonk. Michael Dukakis was a policy wonk. Walter Mondale was a policy wonk. Hillary Clinton is a policy wonk. Wonk wonk wonk. Democrats nominate wonks.

George W. Bush, of course, is not a policy wonk. Bob Dole was, but he didn't win. George Bush senior wasn't a policy wonk*. Reagan wasn't a policy wonk. This isn't a value-laden judgment -- an argument can be made that non-policy wonks are actually more effective presidents, as they're less likely to micromanage the process. But it's nevertheless a significant difference. And it may help explain why some of us liberals are so incredulous that the conservatives accept their president pushing policies that don't make sense based on arguments that don't track. We Democrats don't need our presidents to get things done, but we damn well expect to see some graphs while they fail!

*I think it's fair to say that George H.W Bush was a wonkish -- or at least deeply involved -- on foreign policy. It's also worth saying that he's the least popular of the crew with the right. I, again, don't think it's necessarily a good thing that the Democratic primary is tilted so towards the preferences of educated elites within the party, but it is, and it produces and champions wonky candidates. Just look at the detail being demanded on health care and Iraq on the Democratic side, versus the vaguer statements of principle that seem to suffice among the Republicans.

Brendan Nyhan tallies up exactly how many prominent, national Republicans believe in the economics of unicorns.

I think Matt makes the wrong comparison here:

If Hillary Clinton got up at the next presidential debate and said "I believe a policy of 'Medicare for all' could save enough money to pay for a universal preschool program and more generous Social Security benefits," Barack Obama would say she was out of her mind, major liberal commentators would agree, and if she started angrily defending the claim against all comers it would be big trouble for her campaign. By contrast, were Mitt Romney to attack John McCain's embrace of supply-side dogma, that would swiftly destroy Romney's campaign as all the major institutions of the right moved to expel him from the movement.

If Clinton said that, heads would nod. A very strong argument could be made that administrative and bargaining savings -- i.e, the government saying they're going to pay 20 percent less for Lipitor, and Pfizer will just have to deal -- from a Medicare-for-All system would save enormous amounts of money. Obama wouldn't dare attack it, he'd just argue that he doesn't think it politically possible, and the sort of policies required for those savings have tradeoffs Americans may not want to make. (Incidentally, I don't think Medicare-for-All would create those savings, but not because it couldn't, only because we wouldn't want to implement the necessary regulations.)

Supply-siderism, by contrast, is a proven failure. Unlike how we can look to Canada's single-payer system and notice that they pay 50 cents on ever dollar we spend, you can look at the 90s, when the supply-siders promised gloom-and-doom if Clinton increased taxes, and say that their theories are definitively discredited. I'm trying to think of a policy as thoroughly whack, but as thoroughly adopted, on the left, but I'm not coming up with much. The correct political comparison to a Republican decrying supply siderism is if a Democrat said we needed to cut Social Security benefits -- he'd be destroyed by the party. Problem is, that's a bad idea Democrats would be rightly flayed for adopting, while sane economic concepts are good ideas Republicans would be wrong marginalized for admitting.

Writing about Norm Ornstein and AEI, Matt says, "having good people at bad institutions just makes it harder to marginalize the lunatics in the way they ought to be marginalized." This is basically my point on economists and The Wall Street Journal, or Mankiw and Mitt Romney. It's also the subject of my column today.

Reihan writes:

As a concrete matter, what really matters is ... how do you feel about Wal-Mart? After all, Wal-Mart embodies the impact of free trade and of the transformation of the service economy. That part of the left that bitterly opposes Wal-Mart is in effect defending the balkanized, decentralized service economy of the past that delivered low-quality products at high prices. Now, they believe that they are in fact defending a "high-road economy," but mom-and-pops hardly represent "the high-road economy": quite the contrary.

That is, in part, right. Wal-Mart is the concrete expression of globalization, the transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, and a competitive strategy that relies on constantly slashing labor costs up and down the production chain. Where the specter of globalization lurks ominously and abstractly beneath your bed, Wal-Mart probably sold you your bed, your sheets, and your pillows, not to mention got you laid off from your job at Vlasic pickles. It's real, yo.

But Reihan's wrong to set up a dichotomy between the mom-and-pops and Wal-Mart. Here he's conflating two separate and unequal arguments about Wal-Mart. There's one, dealing with mom-and-pops, that's a cultural qualm. It laments the homogenization of the retail economy and the destruction of individualized, decidedly local, outlets. It's not an economic argument.

The second is an economic argument, perhaps best made by Barry Lynn, that frets over Wal-Mart's obsessive search for low prices, and the ripple effects that quest has on labor standards. If Wal-Mart won't let Crest raise prices a penny on toothpaste, how will they gives raises to their workers? If Wal-Mart will continually slash health benefits and rig the system to purge those who need health care, how can their competitors continue to spend the money on benefits for their employees? And on, and on. Wal-Mart is, far and away, the largest retailer in the world. Their size allows them to dictate what producers will charge and create rock-bottom prices that other retailers have to compete against, which essentially enforces Wal-Mart's low wage, low price vision on the rest of the economy.

The question, in all of this, is never "Wal-Mart or mom-and-pops," or "Wal-Mart: Yes or no?" It's whether Wal-Mart can be better. Whether their efficiencies and focus on low prices can merge with a business ethos that doesn't kneecap the middle class, screw their workers, and and create a ceaseless race to the bottom in product quality and worker standards.

Will Wilkinson takes unsurprising issue with my characterization of The Wall Street Journal editorial page as "mendacious, extremist, and intellectually sloppy." So let's look into it: On August 24th, they published an editorial entitled "How To Raise Revenue." In it, they promised to defend further tax cuts on grounds of equity. They did so by arguing that "The supply-side revenue effects on the rich are remarkable: Tax rates on higher incomes have been halved, but the federal tax share of the top 1% has nearly doubled." They even produced a helpful graphic:

Can't argue with a graphic. But you can mention what it leaves out. According to the Pikkety and Saez data, in 1980, the income share of the Top 1% was 8.18% of the national total. In 2004, it was 16.08%. For those playing along at home, that's a 96% increase.

During the same period, their share of federal income taxes went from 19% to 36% -- a 89% increase. So controlling for the increase in income, the tax burden on the rich fell. That's some remarkable supply side effect: As the incomes of the rich go up, their tax liability goes down. And it didn't just drop a few percentile points: Because we have progressive tax rates, as more income pooled at the top, their tax liability should have increased substantially, as they'd pay more on that income than less wealthy families would.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page either couldn't figure this out -- in which case they're innumerate -- or they didn't want to tell their readers, in which case they're mendacious. Either way, why does Will believe this is an institution worth supporting?

Not to be too snarky here, but shouldn't the aging Thompson choose something a bit less risky than "I can't remember" as an excuse to avoid talking about policy? 2005, after all, was only two years ago.

And Fred, you may not remember whether you support Social Security privatization, but the internets do. The answer is yes.

From kth:

Believing in supply-side economics is perhaps like believing in the Rapture. In polite circles, conservatives either don't believe in it or won't admit to believing. But among the conservative unwashed, you can't not believe in it. A talk radio host who denied that tax cuts increase tax revenues would be about as successful as a televangelist who preached that the Rapture was just an allegory.

Sadly, I don't think that's true for "polite circles." Serious academic types may not profess belief in supply side economics, but the conservative pundit elite -- folks like Novak, and Tony Blankley -- certainly do, and they're joined by the conservative think tanks which make up the movement's ideological core. In some ways. a better example of this phenomenon is immigration, where the elites really are repulsed by the base, but seem to have largely given up on getting sensible legislation passed, and are now on-board for short-term political advantage.

I was trying to think what issues on the left divide the base from the elite in the way that kth suggests. Maybe trade, but the elites fight with the base on trade, they don't look on indulgently as Democratic politicians legislate in ways they disagree with. For some time, withdrawal from Iraq was grassroots dogma that was viciously opposed by Democratic elites, but that's no longer the case. Indeed, I can't think of any realms where the elites disagree, but don't battle, the base. Am I missing something?

One of the shell games used to justify the surge is to compare the summer months to their immediate predecessors. But in the summer, temperatures reach 120 degrees, and it's too hot to leave the house, much less engage in strenuous, sweaty urban warfare. So the relevant comparison wouldn't be summer against spring, but summer against summer. Over at The Angry bear, Frank de Libero created a graph comparing just that:

GI fatalities are, to be sure, only one metric, and one might expect them to increase during the surge in any case. But the pattern is clear: There's been more violence every month this year than in the corresponding month the year before. This holds true for civilians outside Baghdad, too. So here's what the surge can claim: No political reconciliation, and an increase in violence over the year before. That's one impressively turned corner.

At last night's debate, McCain unveiled his next strategy for winning the Republican nomination. No longer will he be the straight-talking independent, no longer will he be the careful, critical hawk. Instead: Lying:

McCain was ready and eager to stress his muscular position in favor of the "surge" in Iraq, and he had plenty of opportunity to do so. The key moment came after Romney said the surge was "apparently working," and McCain challenged him. "No, not apparently, it's working," McCain responded sharply.

Romney, the ex-governor of Massachusetts, said he wants to wait to hear from General David Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq who will testify before Congress next week, before rendering a less equivocal verdict. McCain took exception to that, too. There's no reason to wait, he indicated. The success of the surge--involving more troops and a new counterinsurgency strategy--"is more than apparent. It's working."

That, of course, isn't true. Its primary objective -- political reconciliation -- has failed to the point that we're thinking of jettisoning the whole Maliki government. It may have increased security in certain regions, but different government agencies disagree on whether that's true. It certainly hasn't stopped the violence, and there's no reason to think any downtick -- if indeed one exists -- will survive after the surge ends.

So yeah, pack of lies. According to Fred Barnes, though, this "helped" McCain, and Romney's whispered caution harmed Romney. Which is why McCain is calling his latest political swing the "no surrender" tour. His campaign may not surrender, but even McCain has to know this pandering is humiliating.

Some folks say they write blogs for their own personal enjoyment. I don't. Not that I don't enjoy this immensely, as I do, but it's not a side project anymore. And it occurred to me tonight that I never really ask you, the audience, what you guys want more/less of. Which is strange, given that I write it for you folks. So given the general outlines of what I do (lots of wonkery, fairly little scandal tracking, deep commentary about Judd Apatow movies), what would make this blog more useful reading for you?

Shorter McMegan: If the supply siders didn't believe what they say they believe, and instead believed what I say they should believe, this would be an easier argument.

James Fallows:

If you are right-handed, pick up a ball with your left hand and throw it. Unless you are ambidextrous or have some other odd advantage, you will throw it "like a girl." The problem is not that your left shoulder is hinged strangely or that you don't know what a good throw looks like. It is that you have not spent time training your leg, hip, shoulder, and arm muscles on that side to work together as required for a throw.[...]

What Goodman discovered is what most men have forgotten: that if they know how to throw now, it is because they spent time learning at some point long ago...This brings us back to the roots of the "throwing like a girl" phenomenon. The crucial factor is not that males and females are put together differently but that they typically spend their early years in different ways. Little boys often learn to throw without noticing that they are throwing. Little girls are more rarely in environments that encourage them in the same way. A boy who wonders why a girl throws the way she does is like a Frenchman who wonders why so many Americans speak French "with an accent."

I would think the other benefit of holding lots of cash would be that it would encourage you to save. The credit card's interaction with your bank account is a bit abstract -- it protects you from the actual scarcity of your funds. The amount of cash left in your wallet doesn't. Handing over eight $20 bills is a worse feeling than signing a credit receipt for the same sum. Loss aversion and all that.

McMegan writes, "The Bush administration was not cutting taxes out of crackpot supply-sidism; it was cutting taxes because it wanted to cut taxes, and making extravagently exaggerated claims about the benefits of its policies." Well that makes me feel better. So they're liars who just pretend to be crackpots.

But to say they acted like supply siders to get their tax cuts doesn't explain why they so thirsted for them in the first place. The Bush administration offered at least four, occasionally self-contradictory, rationales for their tax cuts. The first was the basic "the people of America have been overcharged, and I'm here to ask for a refund" appeal. That's a fairness argument. Then there was the policy side of that appeal, which was that "we had a tax surplus," and there was no reason for the government to keep that money. Then, in 2002, the good times ended, and they moved to a stimulus argument, as when Fleischer said "cutting taxes is the best way to spur growth and therefore have a return of bigger surpluses." Then the recession ended, we were told "the tax cuts have worked," and we needed more to keep the growth steady.

These contradictory claims actually fit with magical supply siderism, in which tax cuts are a cure-all, even when the ills are contradictory. So one explanation is that these guys are committed supply-siders of the worst sort. Another is that their rich funders wanted the cuts, and the administration was indiscriminate in choosing rationales with which to sell them.

Unlike Bush, I can't see into souls, so their motivations remain hidden to me. But whether the administration wanted the cuts because they were actual supply-siders or they just pretended to be actual supply-siders in order to please plutocrats seems a bit immaterial. The tax cuts were indeed crackpot supply-siderism, and so were the "extravagently exaggerated claims" made in their favor. The administration's "true" motivations are unknowable, but then, they don't really matter anyway. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc.

Fred Thompson is announcing for president today (and I, am, like so excited! Squeal!). He's not, however, attending the Republican debate, hosted by Fox News and held in New Hampshire. Instead, he'll run this ad on Fox during the debate:

So is this what the Republican base is looking for? Granted, the guy's got a solid, authoritative air presence that lets the ad scan like something you'd see in the last five minutes of a West Wing episode -- but not an exciting, or inspiring, episode. And Thompson's thumbing of his nose at Fox, New Hampshire, and the millions of Republican voters that would like to hear his views makes him seem a tad insecure, no? This is a guy running largely on the theory that he's tall and tough. But he's too scared to explain his views while standing behind a lectern?

No one will confuse the US with a very popular country. But new surveys from the global attitudes project suggest that, in some regions, we're not quite as loathed as we once were:

In 2003, 98% of Palestinians didn't like us. Now, a mere 86% think we blow. Meanwhile, what's up with Turkey? That's a huge jump in anti-American sentiment. PIPA writes:

A 2005 poll by Infakto found that 71 percent of Turkish respondents agreed with the argument that “the West has helped separatist groups in Turkey”—such as the Kurdish PKK—“gain strength.” Sixty-six percent think that “Western countries want to divide and break Turkey like they divided and broke the Ottoman Empire in the past.”

The declining support among Turks for the EU and NATO is consistent with such convictions. The ratio of Turks who see membership in the EU as a “good thing” fell from 73 percent in 2004 to 54 percent in 2006, according to the German Marshall Fund. And the numbers saying NATO is essential for Turkey’s security fell from a bare majority in 2004 (53%) to 44 percent in 2006, though this remains the largest percentage of respondents.

These attitudes seem to be reflected in Turkey’s growing opposition to American counter-terrorism policies. A majority of Turks (58%) already said that they opposed “the US-led efforts to fight terrorism,” in Pew’s 2002 survey. That jumped to 79 percent in 2007.

That's not the direction we should be moving in. Turkey is one of the few Muslim countries controlled by those religious moderates we're always trying to embolden. And yet the nation's citizenry thinks US policy is directly hostile to them, and is increasingly turning away from integration with the West. Way to snuff out those few remaining bright spots, guys.

August Pollak explains how to be a professional libertarian.

I largely agree with Steven Tele's critique of Michael Lind's tax plan: Big thinking on liberal tax reform should substantially change the tax code, and more to the point, simplify it. Extending credits to payroll taxes may be good for equity, but it's making the system ever more byzantine. This alternative proposal from Mike Graetz, however, is rather interesting:

a) Eliminate the income tax entirely for families earning up to $100,000, indexed for inflation.

b) Impose a flat rate tax on income above that level, at a rate of 20-25% (I lean strongly toward the upper end of the range).

c) Impose a VAT tax at a 10-14% rate.

d) Lower the corporate tax, aligning it closely to the new, lower income tax rates (while also forcing corporations to use the same accounting standards when they deal with the IRS and the SEC).

e) Mike would deal with the EITC's elimination by providing a refundable offset to the payroll tax. I think that my suggestions above could do roughly the same thing, or we could establish some compromise between what I want and what Mike wants.

I'd alter this substantially, noting that taxes would be done automatically for those making up to $100,000 (April 15th will be just another spring day, as the righties like to say), making the rates above $100,000 substantially more progressive, not lowering the corporate tax, and keeping the EITC as is. So maybe I don't much like Graetz's idea. But I do like VAT's, particularly of the sort that exempt the goods the poor buy the most (i.e, food). And more generally, Democrats need to get better at making the case for dedicated taxes, like a 4% VAT that pays for health care. Taxes shouldn't be giving money to the government for unspecified purposes. They should buy things.

In stark contradiction to Bryan Caplan's thesis that we should all slowly back away from our government and let trained economists take over, a new paper by Anil Hira examines leaders from across the world and admits that "we cannot conclude that leadership training in economics leads to better economic outcomes." I chalk it up to the fifth and most deadly type of anti-market bias: Anti-economist-bias...

Update: Speaking of anti-economist bias, Matt suggests I have some. I don't! Honest! Some of my best friends are economists! Rather, I appropriate the Rick Perlstein line on conservatism and say: Economics cannot fail. It is only failed. A lot. For instance: Matt writes:

The ideas the Bush administration, The Wall Street Journal, and all the rest are working with are marginal, crackpot notions that are being mainstreamed through relentless message discipline. There isn't some army of orthodox neoclassical economists out there who think that returning to Clinton-era levels of taxation would wreck the economy, that retirement security can best be provided to all by expanding tax breaks for rich people, that health care can best be improved by expanding tax breaks for rich people, that sound education policy requires expended tax breaks for rich people etc.

That's correct. But nor is there some army of orthodox economists out there saying that. Indeed, highly respected orthodox economists like Greg Mankiw, who knows the supply siders are peddling quackery and said so in his textbook, happily contributed his voice and legitimacy to the quackery in 2003.

Jon Chait is right that the supply siders are maniacs, but they aren't marginalized maniacs, and that's in part because that economics profession hasn't seen fit to marginalize them. Mankiw may say, in his textbooks, that they're charlatans, but when push came to shove he joined their cause, disagreeing, he says, with some of their nuttier claims, but nevertheless lending them and their claims -- which included, in the Bush administration, such ideas as "returning to Clinton-era levels of taxation would wreck the economy, that retirement security can best be provided to all by expanding tax breaks for rich people, that health care can best be improved by expanding tax breaks for rich people," etc -- his name and credibility. And it wasn't a one-off: Mankiw is now a prominent advisor to Mitt Romney, who says discredited things like "“If you lower taxes enough, you create more growth."

Meanwhile, there's no outlet in the world that publishes as many economists -- and good ones, too, Nobel Prize winners -- as The Wall Street Journal editorial page. We know, and many of those economists know, that that editorial page is mendacious, extremist, and intellectually sloppy. But they nevertheless publish there, lending their titles and credibility to an outlet that continually promotes a fundamentally poisonous and empirically laughable ideology. This is, in large part, how supply-siderism survives. Not because economists believe it. But because the Right is very good at setting up incentives so it's good for the careers of otherwise credible individuals to seem like they're promoting it. And it's a shell game many economist happily participate in, and that grievously harms the country.

This isn't the most shocking data in the world, but in this period of stock market hysteria, it's worth remembering that the majority of the country doesn't own any stock. Indeed, the bottom 90 percent of us only own 20 percent of the market. The top 10 percent, by contrast, control 80 percent, with the top one percent of Americans controlling an astounding 36.9%. What's that you say? You want to see this represented graphically?

See those tiny slivers of checkered pink, blue, grey, and red? That's where most of the country is.

Read Ross.

Chris Rose:

Being a first-time author and going on Oprah but being told you can't mention your book is pretty much akin to having Charlize Theron walk up real close to you, take off all her clothes, look you in the eye -- lean so close you can feel her warm breath -- and whisper in your ear: You may not touch me.

Economic arguments -- like this one, over CEO pay -- often remind me of John Kenneth Galbraith's brilliant essay on the chief failing of economics: Its inability, or unwillingness, to model power. "In eliding power," he wrote, " in making economics a nonpolitical project, neoclassical theory destroys the relation of economics to the real world. In that world, power is decisive in what happens...In consequence, neoclassical and neo-Keynesian economics relegates its players to the social sidelines. They either call no plays or urge the wrong ones. To change the metaphor, they manipulate levers to which no machinery is attached."

How else do you respond to economists who, innocent as babes, claim that rocketing CEO pay is just a factor of a better stock market, larger firms, and more competition for CEOs? You might wonder, as other economists have, why such effects failed to develop prior to the 1970s. An observer might suggest that prior to the 1970s, the corporate class held less power, and were constrained by a political culture -- not to mention confiscatory marginal tax rates -- that would have done more than merely bemoan their inexplicably expanding pay. That's, uh, not the case today. But since such politico-cultural realities can't easily be modeled, they can't much be discussed, either, and so we pretend that there must be some graphable, comprehensible, economically rational explanation for the exponential increases in CEO pay, even as it's pretty clear that the only rational event were the CEOs realizing they could get more, and then working the system until they did.

Related: Fun with CEO pay!

Haggai:

In Israel, it was usually referred to as "the fence." During the late 2002/early 2003 Israeli election campaign of Likud/Sharon vs. Labor/Mitzna, one joke making the rounds in political circ