JUST POSTED ON TAP: THE POLITICS OF DEFINITION.* For those of you looking for some weekend reading, all four parts of “The Politics of Definition” by John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira are now available. The article draws some similar conclusions to those made by our fearless leader, Mike Tomasky, in our current cover article.

*Okay, okay, fixed.

--The Editors

BILLIONS SQUANDERED IN IRAQ AREN'T JUST AN ABSTRACTION. A commenter to this post below takes issue with the argument that Dems should oppose Iran by pointing out that Bush's wars could cost more than Vietnam. M.J. writes: "arguing that we shouldn't take military action in Iran because it's too expensive" won't "resonate with the American people," adding, "the rest of us are worried about a madman with nuclear weapons." Obviously financial cost alone doesn't add up to enough of an argument. Human toll is the most important consideration, needless to say; also critical is the potential impact on the United States' already-tattered global relationships.

But look -- the billions of dollars that are swirling down the Iraq sinkhole matter. They're not some abstraction. Those wasted billions will have a human toll, with countless long-term effects on the state of this country, and its people. But the main irony is that those squandered billions may end up mattering precisely because there are madmen with nuke ambitions out there. Americans have a tough time swallowing the idea that their resources -- financial or military -- are limited. But it's true nonetheless. That's why true leadership consists not of rushing headlong into a conflict, but of deciding whether it's actually worth its costs. More resources squandered on an unnecessary war means less is available when it really matters. As Atrios observes, Dems should point out that Bush and his policies are hideously unpopular whenever they can. Similarly, when an illustration as vivid as this one comes along of just how wasteful those policies have been, Dems should hammer away at it for all it’s worth. I think it would resonate with the American people.

--Greg Sargent

OUT OF THE RED, AND INTO THE BLUE. In the current issue of Rolling Stone, Neil Strauss writes that Bruce Springsteen gets a “Neil Young pass” for Springsteen’s quirky homage to classic folk, We Shall Overcome: The Pete Seeger Session. Now, I consider myself a huge Neil Young fan. To me, albums do not get much better than Zuma or On the Beach. As I see it the man can do no wrong, but I presume Strauss’ dig was in reference to some of Young’s, er, “concept albums” like Re-act-tor and Everybody’s Rockin’.

Having just listened to Living With War, I can say with all the authority of a Neil Young fan who was born in the 1980s that he needs no pass. This is no quirky concept album. It is at once gritty, scathing, and wonderfully sonorous. Dig in.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

RIGHTS-BASED LIBERALISM RUN AMOK. Some serious and trenchant criticisms of Mike's "common good" essay are starting to stream in, and are worth a look. Somewhat less seriously, but in the spirit of pushing back against the Bossman's critique of identity politics and group-rights liberalism -- and maybe even of pushing the envelope of rights-based liberalism a bit -- I wanted to tout thespian and PETA activist Pam Anderson's Wall Street Journal op-ed today about ape abuse and exploitation in the entertainment industry. This, of course, dovetails with the news that the Spanish Socialist Party is signing up for the Great Ape Project and extending human rights to simians. As Matt said, all joking aside, the case for a full set of ape (particularly chimpanzee) rights is actually strong. As for another rights-based front where the affirmative case is easily sneered at but is, in fact, shockingly compelling, take voting rights for children. As is the case with ape rights, forward-thinking Europeans have already been pushing to extend the franchise to children, and as far as I'm concerned the case for doing so is close to air-tight. Since a five-year-old human has cognitive abilities that exceed those of a fully mature chimpanzee, the case for chimp citizenship and voting rights is considerably weaker, but I'm willing to contemplate it. There's your common good, Mike!

--Sam Rosenfeld

THIRD PARTY WOES. As Dave Weigel smartly notes, the Rasmussen poll showing a xenophobic, border-enforcing third party would nearly win the 2006 elections should only be served with a heapin' helping of salt. "Americans," Dave writes, "have had the chance to vote for a candidate for wanted to build a border wall and make immigration crackdowns his #1 priority. He was a nationally-known figure who'd nearly won the Republican nomination in 1996 before leaving the party. He won $12.6 million in federal campaign funds and used them to run striking campaign ads. He was Pat Buchanan and he got less than half of one percent of the vote." Quite a showing.

But we can be much more current than Buchanan. About a year ago, a border-enforcing third-party candidate did run in a primary. His name was Jim Gilchrist, he was the founder of the Minutemen, and he benefited from a storm of free media. Luckier yet, he ran in my home district, California 48, quite possibly the most xenophobic patch of land in the nation. In the end, he got 25% of the vote, fewer than the Democrat(!), and barely half of the Republican's winning 44%. The votes he did steal appeared to have come from the right, as John Campbell took home 20% less than Chris Cox before him. And Gilchrist, remember, was probably the highest profile xenophobe around, running in the most ideologically compatible district in the nation for an open seat. It's an impressive showing, but it's far from a transformative one, and it wasn't successful.

--Ezra Klein

BUSH'S WARS: MORE EXPENSIVE THAN VIETNAM. Now here's a way Dems can argue against a possible war with Iran. Not long ago, during this site's informal debate about how Dems should handle the Iran question, Ezra rightly suggested that Dems level with Americans about the cost -- human and monetary -- of Iraq and potentially of Iran. Now we have new info that helps us make that case -- on the financial end, anyway -- in a devastatingly simple and convincing way.

Check out the Washington Post article about a new Congressional Research Service study of war costs that Matt flagged below. From the piece:

When factoring in costs of the war in Afghanistan, the $811 billion total for both wars would have far exceeded the inflation-adjusted $549 billion cost of the Vietnam War. (Emphasis added.)

Bush is set to spend more on his wars than the cost of the entire Vietnam War. Yes, yes, I know, adjusted for inflation. Still, that was clearly the news in the CRS report. The Post buried the lede. Here's how the Independent, which analyzed the report slightly differently, presented the report -- its headline read, "Iraq war set to be more expensive than Vietnam."

In a sane world, this would be an absolutely devastating story. It evokes the desperation, the bottomless futility, and the unconscionable squandering of resources associated with America's last major foreign policy disaster -- and reminds us that Bush has brought us his own, potentially more wasteful misadventure. Now he's preparing for yet another one. I know that the "Bush is the wrong guy to launch another war" message is flawed in that it suggests that the executioner of the likely Iran war is the problem, rather than the idea itself. Nonetheless, the fact that Bush's wars are on track to cost more than Vietnam is an extraordinarily vivid illustration of the devastation that the commander in chief has wrought. When the White House starts seriously beating the drums on Iran, it's a reality that Americans deserve to be reminded of as often as possible.

--Greg Sargent

FAKES, FRAUDS, AND SO FORTH. This is brilliant. Dennis Hastert and a couple other Republican politicians held a press conference at a local gas station to protest, or pander, or otherwise mention the rise in gas prices. As part of the optics, they drove away in hydrogen powered cars -- conservation is king! A few blocks later, some enterprising photographer snapped a picture of Hastert disembarking his greenmobile for a gas-burning, black SUV that drove him the few blocks back to the Capitol.

--Ezra Klein

BIG TROUBLE IN PUERTO RICO. Has anyone noticed that Puerto Rico is going out of business? I haven’t been following this very closely, but apparently the Puerto Rican government has been unable to agree on a budget since 2004, so they’ve been using the 2004 budget while the debt keeps increasing. On Monday, the commonwealth will simply run out of money, leaving the 1.6 million people who are on public health insurance without coverage. Worse, the commonwealth’s public employees, who make up 30% of the island’s total workforce, will go unpaid. This is crazy. If you are a Puerto Rican government employee, be that a clerk for the Supreme Court or a bus driver, you will not earn a salary for months.

I don’t follow this issue closely enough to have an informed opinion, but I wonder if it would be prudent or wise for the United States federal government to bail out Puerto Rico? On the one hand, such a move might foster an unhealthy dependency on Uncle Sam. On the other, a bailout would guarantee that Puerto Rico has a functioning government, and that its public employees could pay their mortgages, fill their prescriptions, and put food on the table.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE $4 BILLION? This article on revised Congressional Research Service estimates of spending on the Iraq War is pretty dull until the end, but then it starts to get interesting. The report apparently contains such phrases as "These factors, however, are not enough to explain a 50-percent increase of over $20 billion in operating costs" and "These reasons are not sufficient, however, to explain the level of increases." Relatedly, the Post reports that "Of the total war spending, the CRS analysis found $4 billion that could not be tracked. It did identify $2.5 billion diverted from other spending authorizations in 2001 and 2002 to prepare for the invasion." I'm fairly sure you're not allowed to "divert" money from other spending authorizations, and you're certainly not supposed to lose $4 billion in untrackable spending. Nor does it sound entirely appropriate for the Pentagon to be running its operation in such a way that the CRS can't discern the causes of 50 percent spending increases. All the sort of thing a real congress would hold some hearings on, and, once again, I won't be holding my breath.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHOSE ECONOMY? There are reports out this morning of some high-powered economic numbers this quarter, including a 4.8% rise in the GDP. It's just so awesome! I'm always a bit impressed -- or maybe depressed -- by the superficiality of economic reporting though. To hear the Washington Post tell it, the economic numbers this quarter are made of sugar and spice, and everything nice. But macro data tells you very little about the economic experience of most folks, which accounts for the massive disconnect between how the Bush administration and the media seem to think the economy is doing (tubularly!) and the 63% of the public who think the situation fair or poor. For some more indicative numbers, head over to the Wall Street Journal, where you learn that wages and salaries grew only 0.7% over this period, while prices for U.S. consumers rose 2.7%. The labor market, which has tightened up, is seeing a weird combination of low unemployment without corresponding wage growth. The WSJ seems pleased, as this'll keep inflation down, but workers may feel otherwise.

--Ezra Klein

"AUTHENTICITY" ACT PROVIDES COVER FOR PANDERING TO THE RIGHT. Kevin Drum aptly observes that the press corps shouldn't allow itself to be snookered by George Allen's authenticity schtick the way it got snowed by John McCain's rendition of the same act back in 2000. Let me add another point about this. The key to this game, as practiced by Allen, McCain and George Bush, is that it has a pernicious underside: The "regular-guy" schtick is crucial partly because it provides cover for the politician in question to pander relentlessly to the right.

Here is some of what Crooks and Liars offers as a transcript of Allen speaking on Hardball:

The thing that's good about Tony Snow is that being on talk radio ... he bring[s] the pulse of people in the real world to the White House, understanding how people react to it and whether they are on Rush Limbaugh's show or Hugh Hewitt's show or Laura Ingraham's show or who knows who, the Sean Hannity's or any other radio show -- the fact that he understands the language, the sentiments, the spirit of the American people who want to see action here in Washington..." (Emphasis added.)

The point is, this sort of pandering wouldn't be sustainable for mainstream pols without the regular-guy shtick that suckers many in the press into overlooking it. Why does this shell game work so well? I'd argue it's because many in the media are easily persuaded to conflate demeanor with ideology -- that a "regular guy" is for some reason automatically a "moderate." But as we now know from Ryan Lizza's much-discussed piece -- and Allen's apparent belief that Limbaugh and Ingraham embody the "spirit of the American people" -- Allen is anything but moderate. The question now is whether the press will call him out on it -- or instead dub him "regular," and hence agree to politely ignore who he really is and what he believes.

--Greg Sargent

REBOUND. In a last minute turnaround, House GOP leaders struck a deal with rebelling appropriators late yesterday and narrowly revived their lobbying reform package. A vote is set for next week. Leaders won over the Appropriations Committee members by assuring them that an extension of earmark reforms to the authorizing and tax committees would be added in conference negotiations with the Senate. (That is to say, they promised ahead of time that the final legislation would differ in specific ways from the version the House is actually going to vote on next week.) A Republican amendment to establish an independent Office of Public Integrity was prevented from getting a floor vote, while several of the most significant disclosure requirements passed by the Judiciary Committee were stripped out; this left as perhaps the key pillar of the legislation the new requirement that lobbyists file reports four times a year instead of just twice. Thus will Congress exorcise the specter of corruption from its hallowed halls, once and for all. And at any rate, even if the bill does come across as a bit thin, Republicans have already said they don't care because they don't think anybody's paying attention.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE FULL TANK. Err . . . I've been having some trouble dreaming up things to write about lately, but does my morning Washington Post really need not one, not two, but three columns on gas prices? Turns out there's a lot of political posturing going on. Who knew? But in case you missed the message, there's also an unsigned editorial making the point. The Times manages to restrain itself by offering one column and an editorial.

I've had enough.

--Matthew Yglesias

STILL DOING NOTHIN'. Faux lobbying reform bogs down in the House. The total collapse of the Republicans' legislative capacity is quite remarkable. John Boehner really needs to trot out some of those awesome Famous People quotes he included in his goofball "For a Majority that Matters" manifesto and get his caucus in line. Perhaps Walt Disney's would work: "Of all the things I've done, the most vital is coordinating the talents of those who work for us and pointing them towards a certain goal."

--Sam Rosenfeld

NOW THERE'S A BOLD PLAN. It seems almost too obvious to point out, but if the White House press secretary's job is to build favorable coverage for an administration too often seen as opaque and insular, it's probably a bad idea to ban all television cameras from the press room, thereby infuriating reporters and further closing off the administration's public accessibility. Now, to be fair, doing so would certainly fit in with Fred Barnes' second piece of advice to Tony Snow, "be willing to be disliked," but I had no idea Barnes was searching for such self-fulfilling pieces of advice.

--Ezra Klein

THE DEATH OF MULTICULTURALISM. Ensconced in TimesSelect's fortress, David Brooks weighs in today on Mike's essay. Brooks sees Tomasky's call for supplanting rights-based liberalism with a new(-old) common good liberalism as reflective of a sea change among Democrats and activists -- "over the past few years," he writes, "multiculturalism has faded away" as a pillar of the Democratic Party and American liberalism. I think there's some real truth to that -- indeed, one criticism I would make of Mike's piece is precisely that the sort of identity politics he's calling on Democrats to jettison already seems a good deal less salient and significant than it was, say, fifteen years ago. An interesting question is why that happened. There was real debate about this stuff in the eighties and nineties -- books by Mike, Arthur Schlesinger, Todd Gitlin, and Jim Sleeper all came out around the same time and offered similar criticisms of the rights-based identity politics cul de sac the left had marched into. There was a parallel -- if much more highfalutin and abstract -- debate between philosophical liberals and communitarians that was often portrayed as relevant to the intra-left political dispute. Then the debate just sort of … died out. And though the anti-multiculturalists seem to have won, it's not really clear if the dispute was actually resolved in a way that people can draw lessons from.

Brooks attributes the decline of the identity politics model for liberalism to the ossification of the identity group outfits themselves, Democrats' understanding that they need to reengage white working-class support, and lasting sentiments of national solidarity provoked by 9-11. I'd attribute something a bit different and more prosaic to 9-11 -- it radically elevated foreign policy and security concerns in American politics and rendered a lot of the domestic issues that had roiled post-Cold War debates less salient. Along similar lines, one thing that seems central to the decline of identity politics is the declining relevancy of issues that were specifically (if often only subtextually) about African Americans and white sentiments concerning them. It's easy for younguns such as myself to overlook how much larger law and order, urban policy, crime control, and "underclass" debates loomed in American politics in the eighties and early nineties. Objective conditions changed that as much as anything else -- the crime decline that began in the mid-nineties was massive and has largely sustained itself, for example. Moreover, popular notions about the conditions of American cities finally turned around and grew more positive. And welfare reform, whatever its policy merits, defanged and, to a real extent, deracialized the right's rhetorical and political approach to poverty issues.

Indeed, the broad decline in salience of urban and racial social policy issues in American politics was underscored by the shock most Americans felt in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when these issues arose again suddenly and some of the vintage language of the old debates ("urban rioters," "George Bush doesn't care about black people, " etc.) returned for a short period. I think it's possible that these changes have had a larger effect than is usually recognized. Then there's the more obvious development of sustained political failure forcing Democrats to take a more pragmatic look at what works and doesn't work as a majoritarian political appeal; the white maleness characterizing the new netroots critics of the Democrats' old interest group model, of course, only contributes to the shifting sentiment.

I'm of mixed (leaning toward positive) feelings about how much to celebrate all this. At any rate, as Ezra has noted, there are real questions as to what liberals were supposed to have done in the past to prevent the New Left fissures and group-rights "overreach" or how a common good paradigm can actually be forged now without this or that coalition member getting screwed over.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHEN I WAS YOUNG AND RACIST, I WAS YOUNG AND RACIST. Ryan Lizza's new profile of George Allen is the sort of article that can sink a candidacy. Lizza reaches deep into Allen's past and, like a magician pulling endless amount of ropes from a tiny hat, emerges with decorative nooses, a string of confederate flags (one from Allen's car, another from his living room, another from the pin on his lapel in his high school yearbook photo), and a long pattern of racist votes and dog whistle appeals. Potentially worse, Allen comes off as a garden variety of sadist, a high school bully and vandal who hurled his brother through a glass door when he wanted to stay up past his bedtime, cracked another brother's collarbone for the same offense, and so tormented his youngest sister that she wrote a memoir packed with instances of his cruelty and thuggishness. It's grotesque stuff, and considering the perpetrator is being seriously considered as the chief executive and primary symbol of our country, Lizza's article is a definite must-read.

--Ezra Klein

A QUESTION ABOUT KARL ROVE'S SELF-DEFENSE. Can anyone explain this? Here's how today's Washington Post described part of the testimony that Karl Rove offered yesterday:

Rove's testimony focused almost exclusively on his conversation about Plame with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in 2003 and whether the top aide later tried to conceal it, the source said. Rove testified, in essence, that "it would have been a suicide mission" to "deliberately lie" about his conversation with Cooper because he knew beforehand that it eventually would be revealed, the source said. (Emphasis added.)

But wait. At the time of his earlier testimony -- the testimony being examined by Patrick Fitzgerald -- Rove is supposed to have forgotten about his conversation with Cooper. In other words, he was then supposedly unaware that it had happened. So how could he have at that time worried that it would eventually be revealed, as he reportedly said yesterday? If he didn't remember it having occurred at all, how could he fear that it would come out later?

Is this merely sloppy writing on the Post's part? Or is it unwittingly revealing? Or am I missing something?

--Greg Sargent

WHO YOU CALLIN' STUPID? Methinks a lot of folks out there are too quick to underestimate the intelligence of highly trained professional politicians. The basic dilemma facing Democrats at the moment regarding gasoline goes as follows:

High gas prices are very unpopular with the public. This presents an opportunity for the opposition party to score gains against a genuinely pernicious incumbent party by presenting itself as prepared to "do something" about the situation. But, simultaneously, the correct liberal point of view is that high gasoline prices are actually a good thing for environmental and foreign policy reasons. Ergo, Democrats propose "legislation that would put a moratorium on the Federal gasoline tax for at least 60-days to provide consumers immediate relief at the pump,” but would also "chop oil company tax benefits and burden refineries with unwarranted reporting requirements, making it unable to win enough support in Congress to have even a remote chance of passing." This accomplishes the political goal of making the Republicans unpopular -- siding with their corporate masters to defeat a plan to lower the price of gasoline -- while also accomplishing the policy goal of not making gasoline prices lower. That, to me, deserves the label "smart."

Instead, John Whitehead, at the Environmental Economics blog, calls it "silly plus stupid (i.e., "inefficient" to an economist)" and Brad DeLong chimes in labeling the initiative an example of "stupidity." But it's not silly, it's not stupid, and it's a very efficient way of combining the Democratic Party's two primary goals under circumstances where they seem to be deeply in tension. If you want to call it "dishonest political theater" or "posturing," then that's your right. But it's very smart posturing. The substantive drawbacks of the proposal are no downside at all because it clearly can't pass and, what's more, it's clearly been deliberately designed to be unable to pass. This is the savvy leadership Amy Sullivan's been talking about.

--Matthew Yglesias

TELEPHONE AND SADDAM'S TERRORISM. Based on a whole bunch of captured Iraqi documents, the Pentagon has assembled an Iraq Perspective Project report (PDF) on Saddam Hussein's regime which serves as the basis for this long article in Foreign Affairs on which Andrew Sullivan based this blog post concluding that "Those who sincerely marched against war in London in 2002 and 2003 were unwittingly marching to keep in power a regime planning to bomb and terrorize them."

It's hard to be 100 percent sure about this because I don't have the root document, but looking at the full IPP report, it seems to me that the section of the Foreign Affairs article Andrew's quoting is about the Fedayeen planning to mount terrorist operations in Europe if Iraq got attacked by Western forces, rather than Iraq planning to launch unprovoked terrorist attacks against European targets. The "planning to bomb and terrorize them" account, after all, doesn't make very much sense. Saddam, it's clear, didn't want the United States to invade Iraq and topple his regime. Stockpiling potential countermeasures, including trying to assemble a force capable of mounting retaliatory terrorist attacks, served that end. Launching an attack out of the blue would accomplish the precise reverse. Unfortunately, the IPP doesn't really discuss this ambiguity. That, in and of itself, tends to make me suspicious. It wouldn't, after all, be wildly out of character for the administration to declassify information in a selective manner to bolster its case for war while suppressing important details that cut in the other direction.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE DELAYING TACTICS ON IRAQ INTEL PROBE FROM PAT ROBERTS. Senator Pat Roberts is so determined to delay a real probe into the Bush administration's prewar deceptions that he's breaking the promises he makes in his own press releases. On March 14, Roberts, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, put out a press release that purported to lay out a timetable for the committee's ongoing probe.

One of Roberts' key promises in the release was that on April 5 -- over three weeks ago -- a preliminary draft of the probe into the "public statements" section of the investigation would be delivered to committee members. This would be a very important step. That's because the "statements" section is the most critical and controversial part of the ongoing "Phase II" of this probe -- it's supposed to investigate White House conduct, i.e., whether prewar public statements were supported by intelligence. From Roberts' release:

April 5, 2006 - Preliminary draft on “statements” section of Phase II ready for members/liaison to review during the two week recess.

You'll no doubt be surprised to hear this, but guess what: It didn't happen. Wendy Morigi, a spokesperson for Senator Jay Rockefeller, the committee's ranking Democrat, acknowledged in an interview with me that committee members hadn't yet received the draft of the "statements" section.

Roberts has managed repeatedly to prevent a serious probe into this area -- the line of inquiry potentially most damaging to Bush -- instead focusing on the conduct of the intelligence agencies themselves. First he successfully delayed it until past the 2004 election. Now, according to a report yesterday in The Hill, Roberts is looking to put it off yet again. Thus the failure to deliver the draft.

The irony here is that Roberts' timetable was created specifically to push back against Democratic critics who had shut down the Senate to protest Roberts' refusal to finish this section of the probe. Also from the release:

“This schedule provides a reasonable time frame for member input as we complete the inquiry and move to schedule a public release date for each element,” Roberts said. “If people are serious about finishing Phase II, they don’t need to shut down the Senate or hold press conferences decrying the process, they just need to come do the work."

The Dems, of course, would very much like to do the work. Roberts just won't let them. His M.O. is simple: First he issues press releases promising action to blunt Democratic criticism; then he blithely doesn't bother coming through on his own promises.

--Greg Sargent

WORST. PROGRAM. EVER. Via Tyler Cowen, Human Events lists the "ten most harmful government programs," two of which -- income tax withholding and earmarking -- aren't programs at all. The super-popular pillars of the social insurance state -- Social Security (#1), Medicare (#2), and Medicaid (#7) -- all make the list, along with genuinely harmful farm subsidies at number five in a tie with "contraceptive funding." Rounding things out are affirmative action and the obscure-until-last-fall Davis-Bacon Act. Liberals need, I think, to do a better job of generating public understanding that irregardless of what any given politician has to say on any given day, this stuff represents the real goals of the conservative movement.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP: THE OPTIONS FOR DARFUR. Mark “Fast Leon” Goldberg asks liberal hawks to not make the same mistakes with Darfur as they did with Iraq.

--The Editors

THE SUNLIGHT FOUNDATION AND CONGRESSPEDIA. Today Jeff Birnbaum reports on the activities of the interesting new Sunlight Foundation, financed by securities bigwig Michael Klein and headed up by goo-goo veteran Ellen Miller. I was briefed on some of Sunlight's activities a few weeks ago; certainly one of their most compelling visions, looking forward, would be the expansion and perhaps integration of the valuable campaign finance information currently available in disparate databases like OpenSecrets.org (which is run by Miller's old shop, the Center for Responsive Politics). In conjunction with the Center for Media and Democracy, Sunlight has also launched a project called Congresspedia, which will use wiki open-source technology to provide comprehensive information on all members of Congress, with an emphasis on campaign finance and reform issues but not exclusively concerned with that. The hope is for this to take off like Wikipedia did through user contributions, and those involved have long-term dreams of this mobilizing the netroots and citizen researchers and having a real effect on politics. One doesn't have to be too starry-eyed to be impressed by the site as it's currently executed. If the enterprise catches on, it may prove very interesting to watch what happens on the site as oppo researchers on both sides kick into high gear this election season.

--Sam Rosenfeld

DO-NOTHIN'. The collapse of the Republicans' once-formidable legislative machine in Congress is fairly bracing to behold. While immigration reform remains bogged down, intra-GOP squabbling over earmarking and appropriations are hampering the prospects for passing a budget resolution, an emergency supplemental bill, and lobbying reform. The fight over the emergency Iraq supplemental is amusing: the President's veto threat presumably provides some theater meant to help revive some of his popularity and conservative bona fides -- but it's a fight he's picking with congressional Republicans, at a time when it's their fates that are actually hanging in the balance. And the continued delays on the lobbying reform bill -- already a cartoonishly weak brew (PDF), particularly in the House version -- are even funnier. The dynamic is similar to what I said earlier about the dilution of transparency requirements in the House bill: "Earmark reform" was always both something of a non sequitur response to congressional ethics problems and a phony way of addressing Republicans' abandonment of small government principles -- but Republicans can't even come close to accomplishing their own pet faux reform anyway.

In other ethics-related news, Democrat Allan Mollohan's fall from the House ethics committee in the wake of murky but damning conflict-of-interest revelations is certainly worth noting. Unfortunately, I don't have too much novel analysis to offer up: It's a black eye for Democrats working to wave the "culture of corruption" flag this election. Were the ethics committee not still moribund (even with Howard Berman stepping in as ranking member and the staffing stalemate now resolved) due to the continuation of a totally retrograde and, for Democrats, politically timid ethics truce, I'd certainly support Mollohan being investigated. For Democrats, he'd be collateral damage worth the wave of investigations into Republican abuse the committee could initiate.

--Sam Rosenfeld

CHIMP RIGHTS. Andrew Stuttaford notes that Spain's Socialist Party is pushing a bill to give great apes legal rights in part on the grounds that "humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans." Jonah Goldberg objects to the whole DNA-sharing methodology, and I think there are some good reasons for doing so. That said, I think the eye-opening genetic fact, apes-wise, is that chimpanzees and bonobos are more closely related to humans than they are to gorillas or any other animal. Indeed, the percentage method tends to obscure the closeness of the relationship and seems to bolster the intuitive view that chimps are closer to gorillas. Genetics aside, chimps can, famously, learn human sign languages and communicate with people, though they lack the requisite vocal apparatus to speak our languages. I sort of prefer not to say it, because it seems like one of those goofy things "those people" would say, but the case for granting "human rights" to, at a minimum, chimpanzees strikes me as much stronger than your average homo sapien is aware. Of course, here in the USA, where a substantial minority doesn't believe in evolution, I think this'll be a non-starter, but good for Spain.

--Matthew Yglesias

BRAVE, NEW ECONOMY. This post of Andrew Sullivan's reminds me of a point I've been meaning to make for awhile now. Memory jogged by a book on world opinions towards America, he rhapsodizes, "twenty-one years ago, six weeks after arriving here, I wrote to tell my parents: no offense, but I've found a home. Two key characteristics that distinguish Americans are religious belief and the notion that the individual is responsible for his own destiny." True enough. Though, it's worth saying that the Middle East is pretty heavy on religious belief, and Andy never seems too sold on that. In any case, this is going to be sort of wonky, but bear with me, it's important stuff.

The Center for American Progress just released a comprehensive study of economic mobility and income volatility. And, according to its data, Andy's right about the American lack of fatalism, the belief in opportunity and mobility. When asked if people get rewarded for their effort, 61 percent of Americans agreed, versus 49 percent of Canadians, 33 percent of the British, and 23 percent of the French (weirdly, the Philippines wins this one, with 63 percent agreeing). But of all these societies (save the Philippines), America is one of the least mobile, which is to say the least dependent on hard work rather than social station. In Denmark, the relationship between your parent's income and yours is 15% percent or so. In Canada, it's 19% percent. In France, it's 41 percent. And in America, it's 47 percent. The only country more hidebound and hierarchal is Andy's native England (50 percent), also the country most closely approximating the American economic model.

As it is, if you're born in the lowest income quintile, you have a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent. If you're born rich, you've a 22 percent shot at remaining there. For the middle class, hard work and productivity have begun to count far less. In 2003 and 2004, years when the GDP saw strong growth, the median household was no more upwardly mobile than in 1990-91, during a deep recession. Think about that for a second: Inequality has reached such a height that the average household is actually worse off during today's expansion than yesterday's recession.

There's been a serious increase in downward mobility, too, with only 13 percent of families seeing a $20,000 (in real terms) loss during the 1990-91 recession, while nearly 17 percent experienced such a drop during the 2003-04 expansion. By contrast, households in the top 10 percent have seen a reduction in downward mobility during the same period. And while it used to be the case that you could combat stagnation through hard work, even that's dying out. Households where the adults worked more than 40 hours a week were able, during 1990-91 and 1997-98, to translate their labor into upward mobility. Now, the correlation has disappeared. Americans may believe that hard work ends up offering great rewards, but the data shows that that's simply not the case. Remember that next time you hear some conservative flack -- maybe one named Tony Snow? -- trumpeting the economy's underreported strength. Why should folks appreciate a muscle-bound economy if it's using those biceps to pummel the working class?

--Ezra Klein

THE GOOD SPIN. Notwithstanding earlier positive remarks about the Post opinion page, they've chosen to run another David Ignatius column in which he simply repeats, utterly uncritically, whatever Zalmay Khalilzad told him yesterday afternoon. Spencer Ackerman gets at some of the issues, but I don't even understand why it's a good thing that new boss Jawad Maliki doesn't enjoy Ibrahim Jafari's close relationship with Iran. Unless you believe a priori that it's always better to ratchet-up tensions with Iran, isn't a deteriorating Iraq-Iran relationship merely going to further destabilize Iraq and further reduce the chances of finding a diplomatic resolution to the controversy over the Iranian nuclear program?

--Matthew Yglesias

WHO IS THE BLOGOSPHERE? Chris Bowers's analysis of the demographics of the progressive blogosphere is well worth a read. In sum, "Active readers of Democratic political blogs are very highly educated, highly politically active, quite well-to-do, voracious consumers of media, not very young, and skew male." Bowers thinks this runs contrary to stereotype, but to me the only surprising thing about this was the median age (46.4 years) which was quite a bit higher than I would have expected. This is, interestingly, more or less the demographic profile of professional journalists, which perhaps accounts for the mutual antagonism (narcissism of small differences and all that).

--Matthew Yglesias

CROOKS AND LEAKERS. The Post editorial page often disappoints, but yesterday's missive on Porter Goss's zealous pursuit of CIA employees who blow the whistle on illegal torture and detentions is a good one. The only thing I would say is that it's past the time to drop the pretense that the administration's problem is, say, an objectionable nonchalance about torture or an unwillingness to take the problem seriously. They're just for torture and secret, illegal detentions. That said, things are getting so bad for the administration that even Robert Samuelson is making good points, observing, in regard to the White House personnel shakeup, that "if you're driving in the wrong direction, or not driving at all, changing chauffeurs doesn't help."

--Matthew Yglesias

THE TROUBLE WITH JAY. Regarding Greg's apt calling-out of Jay Rockefeller for once again indulging Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts' partisan shell games, it's worth revisiting Laura Rozen's reported piece on the Rockefeller-Roberts dynamic from our November issue. Rozen paints a complicated picture of both the real constraints Rockefeller faces and the ways in which he constrains himself unduly in his capacity as the opposition leader on the Intel committee. The description of Rockefeller offered by one source -- “a wimp … not confident of his own judgments” -- certainly seems significant.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BUSINESS INTERESTS OVER NATIONAL SECURITY, PART 84. The top story in this morning’s CongressDailyAM (subscription only) began:

A coalition of industry groups is mounting an aggressive lobbying campaign to persuade House Homeland Security Committee Republicans to oppose an amendment that would require all cargo to be scanned at foreign ports before being shipped to the United States.

Then, just a few hours later, in this afternoon’s CongressDailyPM:

Senior Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee said today that they did not believe it would be practical to require all U.S.-bound cargo to be inspected at foreign ports…

Told to jump, and you can practically hear them ask “How high?” Democrats ought to take full advantage of this and exploit it for all it’s worth.

--Alec Oveis

HOW MASS IS YOU DESTRUCTION? Jonah Goldberg replies apropos our earlier disagreement. There seem to be two points of contention. On the question of chemical and biological weapons, I'd say this: There's no doubt that you can kill a lot of people through aerial bombardment with toxic chemicals (see the case of Saddam Hussein and "special envoy" Don Rumsfeld versus Iraqi Kurdistan), but by the same token you can kill a lot of people through aerial bombardment with conventional explosives (everything from the United States bombing Dresden to the Serb forces shelling Sarajevo). A single nuclear weapon, by contrast, can destroy a substantial chunk of a big city -- or maybe more. Poison gas and most biological weapons (things like anthrax) are much closer to conventional weapons in their destructive force than they are to nuclear weapons. Lumping them together with nuclear weapons is, per se, a seriously misleading way of talking about the situation. (It should also be added that there's plenty of evidence, though not drawn from the specific 60 Minutes story we were talking about, of egregious shenanigans on the chem/bio front)

The other point is that it's easy to lose sight of the ideological tug-o-war over George Tenet. Jonah's point of view seems to me that insofar as we can attribute this all to some giant, Tenet-centric screw-up, this tends to exonerate George W. Bush. As I see it, Bush chose to reappoint Tenet when he took office. He never fired Tenet at any point and has never expressed the view that he was displeased with Tenet's service. After Tenet stepped down as CIA director, Bush gave him the Congressional Medal of Freedom. Tenet should, I think, be treated like any other high-ranking member of the administration -- his misdeeds, like Don Rumsfeld's or whoever else's -- are Bush's misdeeds, too. We're probably never going to know who, exactly, was responsible for exactly which aspects of the whole sorry situation (people's stories will differ, etc., etc., etc.), but one holds a president responsible for the overall actions of his administration.

--Matthew Yglesias

IMPORTANT COJONES FOLLOW-UP. I’m going to lower the level of discourse here for a moment, but following up on Ezra’s mention of cojones earlier in the day, I thought it only appropriate to offer up this Reuters piece.

--Alec Oveis

PRICE GOUGING FOR FUN AND POLITICAL PROFIT. Let's get something straight: the President's proposed investigation into gasoline price gouging is straight theatre. Not just because, as Matt noted, the Bush White House and the Republican Congress are funded by (and composed of) oilmen, but because gouging simply isn't the issue. At best, an investigation into unfair pricing practices will turn up a handful of malicious station owners jacking up the price. That, however, isn't what's driving high oil costs. Fears about peak oil, about Iraq, about Iran, about Venezuela, and all the rest are doing most of the work forcing prices upwards (if we so much as touch Iran, pump prices will shoot skyward). In addition, India, China, and others are requiring more and more crude, further inflating prices.

Worse yet, the light, sweet crude -- the easily-pumped, low-sulphur, cheaply-refined oil the industry prefers (see this for more) -- is becoming harder to find and trickier to extract. Take a look at this chart tracking the cost. Notice the trend line? That, not price gouging, is raising pump prices. Less light, sweet crude means the shortfall must be made up with heavy, sour crude, which is more expensive and inefficient to refine.

This isn't about price gouging, it's about increased instability in and demand for a finite product. Bush and the Republican Congress want credit for doing something, so they'll hold some show hearings. But as the days get longer and the summer months, with their high gas prices, arrive, a couple photo-ops won't do much to distract voters from pump prices nearing $4.

--Ezra Klein

YET ANOTHER DELAY IN PROBING BUSH'S PREWAR DECEPTIONS. Can this be true? From The Hill:

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he wants to divide his panel’s inquiry into the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq-related intelligence into two parts, a move that would push off its most politically controversial elements to a later time....

An aide to Sen. Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.), the panel’s ranking Democrat, said that Democrats are aware Roberts is mulling a decision on whether to divide the inquiry and that Rockefeller is unlikely to oppose such a move if Roberts goes through with it. But one Democrat who has followed the probe said separating the controversial elements would relieve pressure on Roberts to complete the entire inquiry soon...

Roberts would like to wrap up work quickly on three relatively less controversial topics of the second phase of the inquiry...Left unfinished would be a report on whether public statements and testimony about Iraq by senior U.S. government officials were substantiated by available intelligence information. (Emphasis added.)

Someone correct me if I'm wrong. It seems that Roberts -- who successfully delayed the probe of whether the White House manipulated intel in the runup to the Iraq war before the 2004 election -- is on the verge of delaying, yet again, a look at this most important and most politically controversial aspect of this whole story. And at a time when Bush's poll numbers are at rock bottom, the situation in Iraq is more disastrous than ever, and the midterm elections approaching, Rockefeller appears poised to...let him get away with it.

From the perspective of partisan politics, this makes exactly zero sense. But put aside politics for a moment. The American people deserve to know what really happened in the runup to the war. But even Democrats apparently lack the spine to demand a real investigation. Why would this be? Is there anything we can do to get Rockefeller -- not to mention other Dems -- to kick up a fuss about it?

--Greg Sargent

LESS COMMON, MORE GOODS. Ed Kilgore's remarks on the Supreme Leader's "common good" article inspires some thoughts of my own. I certainly agree that the interest-group model of party and movement organization is ill-serving progressive politics. I'm not 100 percent sure how that insight translates into Kilgore's contention that "there is tangibly a deep craving in the electorate for leadership that appeals to something other than naked self-interest and the competing claims of groups." I see a tangibly deep craving in the electorate not to have one's kids killed either in terrorist attacks or in misguided invasions, and a tangibly deep craving for more disposable income after the costs of housing, energy, education, and health care. Basically, people would like to have more stuff and be safe so they can enjoy it, and they worry about pop culture screwing up their kids. No doubt they also would like to feel more altruistic, but if you could convince 60 percent of the population that your party would clearly serve their self-interest better than the other guys, I'm pretty sure you would win.

This isn't incompatible with the concept of the common good, but it highlights a certain ambiguity within it. As E.J. Dionne writes today with regard to the same article, "Progressive ideas do best when a majority of citizens believe their own self-interest is implicated in a common project" rather than merely offering a vision of sacrifice. One problem I think liberals tend to have, is that people who are "professionally liberal" -- working as pundits, congressional staffers, think tankers, whatever -- tend to have a rather different demographic profile from our main constituents. This promotes a view of liberalism as something that nice people do on behalf of others, rather than something smart people do on behalf of themselves. Ultimately, though, I don't think a politics of altruism can get you very far. Indeed, if I had a really strong belief in the power of altruism, I wouldn't be a liberal; like conservatives, I'd trust private charity to take care of social needs.

If this sounds a little too crass, I think it's helpful to think in terms of justice. We have a very rich society here and insofar as the bottom 85 percent or so of the population might be interested in acquiring more stuff, this is less greed on their part than a wholly justifiable sentiment that they're entitled to a fair share of America's collective prosperity, which all of us who are reasonably law-abiding played integral parts in creating.

--Matthew Yglesias

HEADING TO THE SOURCE. It's a rare day when I give George W. Bush credit for political courage, but traveling to my hometown of Irvine, California, and forthrightly saying that "massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic. It's just not going to work," takes some cojones. Orange County is second only to San Diego in its xenophobic sentiment, so it's a meaningful place for Bush to take a stand. Or at least kinda take a stand, because he refused to actually endorse any legislation, lay down any principles (save an opposition to deportation), or explain what he wants a compromise to look like. As the situation stands, Bush is resisting the most xenophobic elements of his party, but refraining from supporting anything more specific than "progress." It's like political courage, only smaller!

Orange County, by the way, is responsible for most everything that's gone wrong in this country for the last couple of decades. So much as I love the beaches, and Pacific Coast Highway, and Taco Loco, and Laguna, we were the center of the John Birch movement, we gave you Nixon and Reagan, we funded Barry Goldwater's rise to power, and on, and on. I guess what I'm trying to say here is, "I'm sorry."

--Ezra Klein

WHO TO BELIEVE? I read with interest today's Washington Post report on the growing (if still limited) presence of Shiite militias -- Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, SCIRI's Badr Brigade -- in the oil-rich northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. With Kurdish forces digging in and insisting on solidifying Kurdish control of the city, the potential for a genuinely disastrous conflict is obvious. But over at The Corner this morning, Kathryn Jean Lopez assures us that "there's good news in Iraq," citing Bill Crawford's latest good-news-in-Iraq round-up. Crawford touts the promising news in Kirkuk as "Iraqis [take] the lead in security operations and intelligence gathering" there, linking to dispatches released by the U.S. State Department and … the U.S. Defense Department.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MORE ON SABRI. Jonah Goldberg links to this earlier NBC news report on the Naji Sabri issue. Jonah and his readers seem to have two points to make. One is that the NBC account allegedly contradicts the CBS account. The other is to mock CBS for being "a month behind" on the story. Both claims are false and, indeed, somewhat contradictory. The NBC story is different from the CBS story. This, however, is exactly why CBS wasn't "late" with their account. Rather, building on previously reported information, they added new information to the story. NBC reported that Sabri told the CIA that they were all wrong about Iraq's WMD programs. What CBS added is that this didn't just vanish into some CIA black hole but, according to Tyler Drumheller, the administration's top officials were apprised of Sabri's information and chose to ignore it.

Jonah's readers also want to make a big deal out of the fact that Sabri apparently did say that Iraq had stocks of chemical weapons. Thus, in a semantic sense, Sabri's account supported the contention that Iraq "had WMD programs." But, of course, as has always been the case, chemical weapons are a red herring here. They don't cause "mass destruction" and are nothing to worry about. The serious debate about Iraq always concerned the nuclear program. Sabri provided apparently accurate information about this to the CIA, and the CIA apparently provided it not just to George Tenet, but also to the President, the vice president, the secretary of Defense, and the national security advisor, all of whom ignored it. If this was the only thing they ignored, of course, that would be one thing. But it entirely fits a pattern -- information that contradicted the line they wanted to deliver just never penetrated into their consciousness, and the classification process was used to ensure that pieces of evidence bolstering their case were prominently displayed in the media, while pieces of evidence undermining it were left to fester in secrecy.

--Matthew Yglesias

FAKE CONSERVATISM. Can there be anything more silly looking than the oil industry's bought-and-paid-for GOP servants in Congress and the White House pretending to crack down on alleged price-fixing in the oil industry? No doubt some of this is going on (probably at the level of retail gas stations rather than the big business end of the deal), but the whole thing is obviously a red herring to avoid the real questions in energy policy. Why, to take one, does the government dole out generous subsidies to an industry that's both profitable, bad for the environment, and increasingly bad for our foreign policy? Why not a windfall profits tax? For that matter, why not a real energy policy aimed at increasing fuel efficiency, decreasing reliance on oil as a fuel, and, for the long-run, decreasing overall dependence on cars? National Review at least has the courage of its convictions and says the government should do nothing, but the GOP doesn't really want to do anything; they're just playing make believe.

--Matthew Yglesias

WASHINGTON POST PUBLISHES AN OPINION PIECE BY AN OPERATIVE FOR RIGHT-WING HATE GROUPS. Did anyone else notice this? Over the weekend, Fred Hiatt and other Washington Post editors allowed their paper to be used as a platform for an "opinion" piece written by a GOP operative who gets paid to help right-wing hate groups spread their messages and advance their agendas. On Saturday, it published an Op-ed by Craig Shirley, in which he argued that the GOP's pro-immigration "elites" would do well to listen to "Reagan populists," who were key to the right's ascendance and are now "concerned about lawlessness on our border."

At the end of the piece came this rather odd disclaimer about Shirley: "His firm has clients concerned with immigration issues."

But that disclaimer is so understated and benign as to be almost misleading. According to the Web site of Shirley's PR firm, Shirley and Banister Public Affairs, the company counts among its clients groups who think the US should be able to kick out any foreigner at will and who think that immigration is to blame for terrorism. For instance, there's the "Freedom Alliance," which was founded by Oliver North and holds the position that America should imitate Mexico and adopt laws that allow for immigrants -- and not just illegal ones -- to be "expelled for any reason and without due process." Shirley's firm also represents a group called "Let Freedom Ring, Inc.," which recently pushed for a security fence along the Mexican border and ran a TV ad showing the 9-11 attacks while arguing that "illegal immigration from Mexico provides easy cover for terrorists."

Incidentally, the hate-spewing of Shirley's clients isn't confined to immigration; they despise homosexuality as well. Another of his firm's clients is the "Traditional Values Coalition," an organization whose web site offers lists of "counseling services" for "individuals who are struggling with homosexual attractions or related Gender Identity Disorders," because "there is hope for individuals who wish to break free from unwanted same-sex attractions" and other "mental conditions."

Now the Washington Post's editors are free to publish who they want -- it's their paper. And Shirley has plenty of perfectly acceptable clients. But still, that disclaimer was inadequate, to say the least. And you'd think the last thing Post editors would want to do is provide a forum for a guy who makes a profession of pushing the views and agendas of paying clients, especially when some of them are such vicious bigots.

--Greg Sargent

KEEP THE SUNLIGHT OUT. House Republicans' latest bout of watering down the already-anemic lobbying ethics bill is genuinely funny. As subscription-only Roll Call reports, "Republican leaders have stripped out language forcing lobbyists to provide detailed disclosure of fundraising activities and contacts with lawmakers." What's funny here is that the standard, baseline position of all anti-reformers and defenders of lobbying practices is precisely a devotion to better disclosure -- to "letting the sunlight in" and arming voters with information rather than directly curbing any actual activities of lobbyists or officials. Given the limited degree to which voters actually do avail themselves of the public finance and lobbying data already existing, serious reformers consider that kind of focus on sunlight to be basically a cheap dodge. And yet even that has proved a bridge too far for House Republicans. Some readers may know that I'm generally a skeptic of reform and more than a bit cavalier about political corruption as such (it depends on the ends the corruption serves), and in fact I've argued against one commonly touted reform proposal concerning travel. But more thorough disclosure of lobbyist-lawmaker contacts and fundraising efforts seems like a no-brainer even to me. The establishment of a new ethics enforcement office also seems to have some merits -- and it's a proposal that predictably didn't make it onto the bill and that will now be brought up by Democrats as an amendment destined for defeat on the floor.

Meanwhile, the other provision the was just stripped from the legislation -- the crackdown on 527s that has little to do with lobbying or ethics and everything to do with screwing Democrats by extending the tentacles of an already-dubious campaign finance regime -- can expect a conference committee resurrection in keeping with the noble traditions of modern Republican legislative tactics. As Roll Call puts it, the House leadership "expects that the provision -- which is strongly opposed by most Democrats -- will be added to the package when the bill heads to conference with the Senate." Sweet, sweet reform!

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP: THE POLITICS OF DEFINITION, PART II. John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira discuss progressive weaknesses in the latest installment of our series on closing the “identity gap.”

--The Editors

BUSH LIED, THOUSANDS DIED. It's almost banal to keep harping on the lying point, but this 60 Minutes story about pre-war intelligence really deserves blockbuster status. Tyler Drumheller was the CIA's top covert man in Europe. He turned Naji Sabri, Iraq's Foreign Minister, and got him working as a CIA asset. Drumheller told George Tenet who told George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice. They were excited, naturally, and wanted to know what Sabri had to say. Sabri, they were told, said that Iraq did not, in fact, have an active WMD program. They chose to . . . just ignore this. Then, as Josh Marshall points out, there was a big post-war effort to blame the whole thing on the intelligence community. Commissions were appointed. They interviewed Drumheller. He relayed all this to them. And they chose to . . . just ignore it. Can't have too many inconvenient facts in your assessments, I guess.

--Matthew Yglesias

MONEY, MEET MOUTH. It doesn't involve invading anyone, or kicking any ass that's evolved beyond the microbe stage, but if we could spur the pharmaceutical companies or the NIH to put a bit of money into the anti-HIV microbicides currently nearing breakthrough status, we'd save a lot of lives. As Kate Steadman points out, the primary driver of HIV infection in the third-world are patriarchal sexual arrangements where a lone male, with his many wives, mistresses, and prostitutes, can contract HIV from one source and spread it far and wide.

Sadly, condom use is taboo under the best of circumstances and, thanks to funding and support from the Christian Right, officially discouraged in many countries (like Uganda). An anti-HIV microbicide would give women a discreet way to protect themselves, one whose application and use they could largely control. Unfortunately, poor women in third world countries command neither financial power nor international attention, so there's been precious little economic investment designed to bring these microbicides to fruition and distribution. If we were nearly as serious about humanitarian projects and women's rights as we claim, that wouldn't be the case.

--Ezra Klein

LISTEN TO ZBIG. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who people should have listened to before the Iraq War, had a great column on Iran in yesterday's LA Times. Brzezinski was one of a relatively small minority of recognized Democratic Party foreign policy experts who opposed the Iraq War in a clear and forceful manner, and I can't help but notice that, today, younger national security experts types who might be hoping for jobs in the next Democratic administration have been curiously silent on the leading issue of the day. This is really kind of unfortunate, since it obviously doesn't do progressives very much good to have a progressive foreign policy establishment if that establishment is too timid to address the big, controversial questions.

--Matthew Yglesias

A DARFUR JIHAD? As a rule, when Osama bin Laden speaks, it is best that we listen. Back in October 2003, Bin laden called for attacks on specific European countries supplying troops for the American lead coalition in Iraq, including Great Britain, Italy, and Spain. Since then, radicals have attacked Italian barracks in Iraq, killing 17; the Madrid rail station, killing nearly 190; and the tube and busses in London, killing 52. So following OBL’s directive that militants use Darfur’s rainy season “to prepare all that is needed for a long-term war against the Crusaders and thieves in western Sudan,” including “stocking a large amount of landmines and anti-armor grenades such as RPGs,” it’s fair to say that any future intervention force in Darfur will quite likely experience a number of casualties. And when you combine bin Laden’s call with the fact that many Sudanese radicals will rotate out of the Iraqi theatre well trained in the black arts of terrorism, the result for any future UN force could be catastrophic.

That said, bin Laden seems convinced that a UN peace-keeping force will, in fact, be dispatched to Darfur sometime in the near future. I wish I were that optimistic. As of now, there are zero crusaders UN peacekeepers on the ground in Darfur. And there is little chance that any will arrive soon. So for now, bin Laden’s Darfur jihad -- to which he claims common cause with the regime in Khartoum -- will have to wait.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

WHAT GUARANTEE? Now this is weird. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial blasting Mitt Romney's health care plan for sidestepping the big problems, namely "Guaranteed Issue," a Massachusetts law that forces insurers to offer coverage to everyone, even -- get this! -- the sick. The Journal rightly notes that this creates some strange incentives, including the possibility that folks will wait until they're ill to seek coverage, a sort of peculiar strategy considering how high premiums will then be, but whatever.

What's weird about the Journals' line is that Romney's plan specifically addresses Guaranteed Issue through the individual mandate, which demands that nearly all citizens get health insurance right this minute. If insurers don't want to offer insurance (unlikely, considering that Blue Cross/Blue Shield deserves heaps of credit for formulating and passing the plan), they can pack up and leave. Now, the Journal may not like Massachusetts’s strategy, but it'd look a bit better if they displayed at least a basic familiarity with what the Bay State did.

--Ezra Klein

DEMOCRAT V. DEMOCRAT. Last week, I mused over the difference between the Democratic Party's internal disagreements -- which are broadcast at maximum volume, countless times -- and the Republican Party's internal rifts, which go basically ignored. That, I suggested, and not any substantive incoherence or lack of focus, explained why Americans think Democrats don't stand for anything. But what accounts for the differing coverage? Why are Democratic disagreements so loud, and Republican arguments so silent?

Here's one, slightly counterintuitive, hypothesis: the media actually is liberal. And that's bad for Democrats. A University of Connecticut survey found that 68 percent of journalists polled voted for Kerry, 25 percent for Bush, and the rest either refrained or went with a third-party candidate. Let's be clear, I'm not saying the media's coverage is biased, just that those who end up in journalism, particularly newspaper journalism, tend to slant leftward in their personal opinions. Given the constraints of "objective" journalism, I don't think party affiliation much matters for coverage of events. But it does matter for which events get covered, because where you fall on the ideological spectrum has some bearing on what you'll be attuned to politically.

Journalists, being both liberal and politically attentive, are keyed in to the internal disagreements and contradictions of the Democratic Party in a way they're simply not able to replicate across the aisle. These debates -- interest group politics vs. common good; hawks vs. doves; etc -- thus get covered with an enthusiasm that the right doesn't have to face. As example, The Weekly Standard, considered the most influential conservative magazine around (John McCain is a reader and Dick Cheney sends a staffer to pick up 30 copies every Monday), published a feature this week on the next steps for compassionate conservatism. Those steps? Increased progressivity in the tax code, an acceptance of the Republican responsibility to entitlement programs, a gasoline tax, renewed vigor in antitrust enforcement, a pathway for immigrants to attain citizenship, etc. It's a list a liberal could love, and a straightforward condemnation of the plutocratic tilt of the modern Republican Party. Moreover, they recently ran a cover story blasting Republicans for focusing on business interests rather than working families ("Sam's Club Republicans"). Meanwhile, on foreign policy, the magazine takes an all-invasion-all-the-time stance, a stark contrast to the position taken by William F. Buckley, who's turned against the Iraq War and seems to be edging towards the isolationism that once undergirded the Republican Party. But these aren't debates you hear about because they're not debates the press corps is largely attuned to, or interested in.

I mention all these Weekly Standard articles because it's not, as some would say, that the right never uncorks their disagreements, it's that nobody pays attention when they do. Across the aisle, when Peter Beinart called for a purge of the "softs" in the Democratic Party -- the party out of power, mind you, not the one ruling the country -- he received a rush of publicity and a monstrous book deal. Democrats v. Democrats is a tale the media is interested in, invested in -- a wonder given the dog-bites-man quality of the narrative -- and it's to the party's detriment that their every disagreement and trouble is broadcast by journalists who lack similar investment and interest in the fundamental inconsistencies and incoherencies of the dominant power. Good ol' liberal media.

--Ezra Klein

SECRETS AND LIES. Mark Kleiman has a great rundown of the hawkosphere's lunacy on Mary McCarthy spilling the beans on the secret illegal torture prisons business. Less crazed figures on the right are mostly restricting themselves to throwing around hypocrisy charges. But, of course, if you think that leaking classified information in order to expose illegal conduct by high government officials is the same thing as high government officials selectively releasing classified information in order to bamboozle the public into supporting a strategically daft invasion, then you're out of your mind. The issue, though, is that a certain number of people think that bamboozling the public into supporting the Iraq War was a good and noble thing to do, and a largely overlapping group of people think that arbitrary detention and torture are so vital to American national security that a little lawbreaking and secrecy is a small price to pay to ensure that the job gets done. Others of us hue to an anti-bamboozlement, anti-torture line and, naturally, don't think the president should be able to cover up his illegal conduct by slapping a "classified" label on all the evidence.

--Matthew Yglesias

KARL ROVE'S IMMINENT FROG-MARCH? Atrios and Think Progress have both noted that the Plame grand jury met this morning, and a frisson of excitement has rippled through the liberal blogosphere at the prospect that Karl Rove might be indicted. In that regard, a few things are worth keeping in mind:

1) Rove had motive to mislead the grand jury. In the summer of 2003, Rove was petrified that the truth about President Bush's pre-Iraq war deceptions would come to light, and thought that evidence of them could destroy Bush's reelection prospects-- or so Murray Waas has told us. If true, that's a critical piece of this puzzle. As I argued here, it provides a possible motive for misleading the grand jury about Plame. Before, it never quite made sense -- why risk perjury charges to cover up what may not have been a crime to begin with? But now it seems perfectly plausible that Rove worried that if the truth about the administration's role in outing Plame came out, the resulting firestorm would force Congress to undertake a real investigation, rather than the sham overseen by Pat Roberts -- thus unearthing the evidence Rove feared would surface to kill his boss's reelection hopes.

2) Rove had every reason to assume the Plame investigation would fizzle. Leak investigations are notoriously problematic to begin with, and few expected that Fitzgerald would have the cojones to subpoena reporters. Fitzgerald was appointed in December 2003, and Rove testified only a couple months later -- well before anyone, probably Rove included, had a full sense of just how aggressive Fitzgerald would be.

Like everyone else, I don't have a clue as to whether Rove will be indicted. But little by little, the whole story is being woven together into a grand narrative, one strand at a time. Unfortunately, there are only three ways we'll ever hear something approaching the whole story -- a full-bore investigation by the major news orgs; a real probe by Congress; or more indictments from Fitzgerald. For my part, I'm not comfortable with the ongoing deification of Fitzgerald, but right now, at least, it seems our best hope for learning what really happened lie with him -- a fact which doesn't reflect particularly well on the institutions that are supposed to safeguard our discourse and our democracy.

--Greg Sargent

HOLY IMPATIENCE. Yesterday, we buried Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr. One year ago, I read his biography, Holy Impatience, and it gave me what I haven’t gotten from the left in my lifetime -- in the words of Johnny Cash, “gravel in your gut and spit in your eye.” Rev. Coffin challenged those who misused power and that got him into a lot of fights. But they were a lot of fights he relished. As Yale Chaplin, he was one of the first whites to be arrested in the freedom rides during the civil rights movement. Later, he would be a major force in the peace movement during the Vietnam conflict and, later still, a proponent of decreasing our nuclear arms supply. People of all faiths, and those who do not profess one, can all acknowledge that the houses of worship had a huge impact on most of the social movements of the 20th century. For the better.

Friend and mentor Rev. Bert Campbell said in response to Rev. Coffin’s passing: “The world is a little less now and the void waits for someone to step forward and speak truth to power lest the dark side dressed in religion’s finery prevails.” I couldn’t agree more.

Almost two weeks ago, Christians celebrated Palm Sunday. We often consider this something akin to a parade, Jesus entering Jerusalem as a hero. This is partly true. What we fail to remember is that Palm Sunday was more of a revolutionary political event -- a demonstration -- than anything else. “Hosanna” is the imperative demand to “Save us, now!” Politics and religion have always gone hand in hand. It is high time the Democrats got a little holy impatience of their own. With leaders like Coffin and Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg gone, who will pick up their standard? Will a voice emerge from the progressive wilderness? And will we have enough sense to listen?

--DJ Francis

KLEIN V. KLEIN. You've really got to read Digby's excerpts from Hugh Hewitt's interview with Joe Klein. Klein desires -- aches really -- for Hewitt's approval, and it leaves him a quivering mass of eager-to-please. The interview primarily consists of Klein parading all his points of agreement with George W. Bush and proudly bragging about his White House nickname -- Mr. Faith-Based, in case you were wondering -- which he hastens to add is just "one of Bush's nicknames for me." It's pathetic.

Klein, you'll remember, is supposed to be Time's in-house liberal, so maybe he feels the need to keep his identification slippery (in which case, speaking as a liberal, I assure him it's worked). I wonder, however, why you never see Charles Krauthammer on the Rhandi Rhodes show prostrating himself for her approval and slamming his party. He seems perfectly comfortable in his political identity. Klein , meanwhile, is prancing about, saying Bush is an "an honorable man," who "I really like" and Newt Gingrich is a "man of honor" who "I've always really respected", while Michael Moore is a "disgraceful", "reprehensible" being who "I don't want to be associated with" and the Democratic Party needs to distance itself from bloggers.

But it's hard to get to mad at Joe. I've a soft spot for folks who achieve their dreams. Come the interview's end, Hewitt, the sort of respectful, sober guy who writes books entitled "If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It," promised Joe that "I would love to continue this on. In fact, as often as you want, you've got the open invitation to be our responsible Democrat on the show, because they're hard to find."

What an honor. Maybe next year, Hewitt will invite him to prom.

--Ezra Klein

COMPARE AND CONTRAST. Joe Klein thinks the "left wing of the Democratic Party" doesn't "respect the military sufficiently." Meanwhile, in recent weeks a lot of generals have put forward the idea that America's current military policies are serving the country poorly. Uber-hawk columnist Charles Krauthammer accuses them of laying the groundwork for a coup d'état and/or opening the United States to foreign subversion in the course of comparing George W. Bush to Abraham Lincoln. In the real world, of course, the Lincoln-McClellan point cuts in the other direction. Lincoln had some policies. General McClellan disagreed with them.

Eventually, McClellan got fired. He expressed his disagreements with Lincoln vocally, eventually becoming Lincoln's opponent in an election. The Republic survived this outbreak of elected leaders being subject to criticism, and by adopting an un-Bush-like strategy of implementing successful policies, Lincoln won the election. No coup, nothing bad happened, and we all learned that adult politicians can survive the arduous ordeal of being criticized by people who disagree with them without the wheels falling off of American democracy.

--Matthew Yglesias

FEAR THIS DEFICIENCY WE HAVE CREATED. Like Matt, I haven't finished John Halpin and Ruy Teixera's article. And like Matt, I'm going to comment anyway. And like Matt, I think progressives disagree on a bunch of stuff, and it's tough to achieve clarity of message when you're tangled in disagreement. Or at least it should be.

But here's the thing: conservatives disagree on as much stuff as liberals. Large swaths of the rightwing think we shouldn't run up massive deficits, yet they've fallen into line behind a leader doing just that. Serious sectors of the Republican movement are essentially isolationist, but they've thrown up their hands and ceded foreign policy to the neocons. Matt notes the tension between our own Harold Meyerson and the Clinton establishment's new Hamilton Project, but those disagreements are no more fundamental or fierce than those between big-spending conservatives like David Brooks and Karl Rove and the Club for Growth. Immigration slices the Gordian knot linking the party's elites and its base, hostility to major social programs is rampant among ideologues but absent among elderly white folks, and how happy do you think traditional Republicans are with the largest expansion of Medicare since its inception? Yet they're not in disarray, or lacking a sense of self. The question, really, is why.

In their piece, Ruy and John write that "progressives have been consumed with finding the strategies, tactics, messages, policies, media outlets, language and messengers to overcome their problems at the ballot box...Unfortunately, while each of these approaches offers important insights, the totality of the advice simply misses the mark and obscures the underlying problem driving progressives’ on-going woes nationally: a majority of Americans do not believe progressives or Democrats stand for anything." Fair enough -- that's a bad rep to have. But does it survive because Democrats lack principles, or because Democrats never tire of writing books, papers, reports and articles about their party’s incoherence and how to fix it?

Somehow, Republicans have sidestepped the reputation for internal disarray. Somehow, Americans apparently know what they stand for, and it's not deficits, ill-planned military adventurism, messy expansions of entitlement programs, increased federal control over the American education system, and environmental belligerence. Yet that, put shortly, is their record. So here's the question: Are the Democrats truly without core and in need of righting, or do Americans just think they are because leading progressives keep saying so? And, if so, aren't the aforementioned progressives right, and this is largely just a messaging problem?

--Ezra Klein

BUT DO WE KNOW? My first thought was that I shouldn't comment on "The Politics of Definition" until it was, you know, fully published so that I could actually read the whole thing. But on second thought, this is a blog so who needs due diligence. I have concerns about the idea that the essay's soi disant straightforward thesis: "Progressives need to fight for what they believe in -- and put the common good at the center of a new progressive vision -- as an essential strategy for political growth and majority building," is actually all that straightforward. I wouldn't want to deny that progressives ought to fight for what they believe in, and the evidence that a failure to be perceived as driven by a strong core of basic beliefs is an electoral problem seems strong to me.

That said, the metaphysics of the claim seem off-base to me. There's an implicit assumption here that there's something ("what we believe in") that needs to be handled differently -- fought for, communicated clearly, etc. An alternative construal of the situation is that the voters don't know what we believe in because the phrase "what we believe in" lacks a reference. Conservatives have had an enormous amount of success in convincing voters that, for each progressive candidate, that candidate doesn't know what he believes in, is a flip-flopper, will "say anything to win," etc. That's largely a smear. But there's a difference between saying that progressive politics is a collection of people -- Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Russ Feingold, Mike Tomasky, Ruy Teixeira, you the gentle reader, etc. -- each of whom knows what each of us believes in and saying that progressive politics is a collection of people who, together, know what we all believe in.

Which is a long way of saying that progressives disagree. The formidable Atrios thinks that opposition to "network neutrality" legislation is an effort to kill off the Internet. Chris Bowers agrees with Atrios on the issue, and is not only upset to learn that Mike McCurry is working for the other side, but is absolutely sure that McCurry is acting in bad faith, selling out for telecom industry money. It seems to me, however, that there are reasonable arguments on both sides of this issue, along with corporate cash on both sides. Or, to take a less obscure example, on the always-controversial trade issue, one faction of progressive politics is sure the other faction is selling the country down the river for corporate money, and the other faction is sure their opponents are peddling mumbo-jumbo for fear of trade union political power. My colleague Harold Meyerson has all kinds of beef with Bob Rubin and his new Hamilton initiative.

And then there's foreign policy! Nancy Pelosi's op-ed from yesterday on China is going into my "dangerous warmongering" file along with recent remarks I've heard from Joe Lieberman and Steve Israel about Iran. Someone looking around to see what progressives believe in, in other words, is likely to become uncertain. And this is a real problem for progressive politics. But it's not a failure to stand up for "what we believe in" or to communicate "what we believe in" or to define "what we believe in" -- rather it's a reflection of genuine disagreement along a variety of fronts. I have no solutions to offer about this. Or, rather, my ideal solution would be for everyone to agree to put our differences aside and adopt all the policy positions I think are correct, but I'm not optimistic about that one.

--Matthew Yglesias

TIMING IS EVERYTHING. Buried deep in some bureaucratic catacomb, some pencil pusher has a smile on his face today. Yesterday, the FDA rejected claims of marijuana's medicinal usefulness, courageously contradicting a major study by the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, the highest scientific body in the nation. You show those pointy-heads, FDA! The ruling was even bolder considering that the FDA actively discourages research into marijuana's biochemical effects, routinely rejecting proposals by researchers to conduct gold-standard studies on the subject. As Dr. Craker, a University of Massachusetts professor who applied for permission to grow and study pot but was repeatedly rejected, said, "the reason there's no good evidence is that they don't want an honest trial."

So why, exactly, amidst this tawdry story of politics putting its foot on science's throat, do I think some bureaucrat somewhere is having a good chuckle? Well, the ruling came out on April 20th, also known as 4/20, the international day of pot smoking. Whether or not my imagined bureaucrat was smiling, quite a few folks were laughing uproariously at herb-related happenings.

--Ezra Klein

WHEN CROOKS GO DOWN. This hasn't gotten much attention, but Silvio Berlusconi is refusing to admit defeat in the Italian election. In this, he has the support of seemingly none of the relevant legal institutions in Italy. What's more, all of the democratic world's left-of-center governments have already congratulated Romani Prodi on his victory. Then again, all of the democratic world's right-of-center governments have done so as well. All, that is, except for George W. Bush's here in the United States of America. This aligns Bush with Vladimir Putin's Russia and, well, nobody.

The subtext here, naturally, is Berlusconi's distinctive blend of public sector corruption, misgovernment, and low-grade gangsterism that puts his political machine somewhere between Putin's and Bush's on the spectrum of undermining democratic governance. During the 2000 election cycle, naturally, Al Gore didn't want to lose the election. Thus, he pushed his legal claims. But when the courts ruled against him, he stepped aside. After all, Gore wasn't relying on control of the state apparatus to keep a vast and probably illegal business empire intact. Nor was Gore relying on control of the state apparatus to keep himself out of jail. Berlusconi is doing both -- if he can't command Italian regulators and keep fiddling with statutes of limitations and public corruption laws, he's likely sunk. In this, of course, you see a resemblance to the modern day Republican Party. Subpoena power in the hands of the Democrats is likely to do, at a minimum, massive damage to the personal financial interests and ability to stay out of jail of a range of current and former officeholders and movers and shakers. Under the circumstances, the Bush-Berlusconi solidarity is no surprise.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE COMMON GOOD! Over at TAP Online, we’ve posted the first portion of a major study by John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress Action Fund (and other affiliations, in Ruy’s case) called “The Politics of Definition.”

The authors have written this paper as a sort of 2006 version of the famous “The Politics of Evasion” by Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck, the 1989 study that helped lay the groundwork for the Clintonian centrism of 1992. Except that Halpin’s and Teixeira’s goals for progressives and Democrats are a little different. Their conclusions -- totally by coincidence, really! -- are very similar to Tomasky’s in the current cover essay.

The paper is 18,000 words long, so we’re going to be rolling it out in four parts over the next few days. Part I gives a general lay-of-the-land discussion, and presents a close parsing of electoral and demographic data showing progressive electoral strengths. Part II will come next Monday, and the rest over the course of next week. Be sure to check out what will surely become a much-discussed study that, along with our piece, attempts to chart a new course that goes deeper than “framing.”

--The Editors

WAR IS PEACE! Whoah . . . there's some crazy stuff lurking behind that TimesSelect subscription wall, notably Paul Kane's notion that "President Bush and Congress should reinstitute selective service under a lottery without any deferments." Why? Well, because if we do, "Iran's leaders and public will see that the United States is serious about ensuring that they never possess a nuclear weapon." This sounds to me like an excellent way to reduce the level of TAPPED content as Garance and Greg need to hold down the fort while Sam, Mark, Ezra and I go off to get killed, but it seems to lack other merits. Kane, however, says it "may be our last best chance to avoid war with Iran." To me, though, the last best chance to avoid war with Iran would be to not start a war with Iran. This thing about responding to Iranian peace overtures would be nice, but I think it's impossible to overstate the role that not starting a war with Iran plays in the Yglesias War-Avoidance Plan. Basically, if we don't start a war with Iran there . . . won't be a war with Iran.

Conversely, noted international relations scholars Outkast have observed that, in one's dealings with rogue states, it's unwise to make threats unless you're actually prepared to follow through (i.e., "Don't pull the thang out, unless you plan to bang / Bombs over Baghdad! Don't even bang unless you plan to hit somethang /Bombs over Baghdad!") on your threats. This is really the issue. Threats of force can be a useful element in diplomacy, and making the threat can avoid the need to follow through, but it's deeply, deeply unwise to go down that road unless you actually think it's a good idea to go to war if the threats fail to intimidate. Sending a giant conscript army to occupy Iran is a terrible idea. If you think our current troops lack the appropriate training for the occupation of Iraq, just wait until I'm the one doing it. Think about it.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHEN LEGISLATIVE ASSISTANTS GO BAD. Representative Jo Ann Emerson experiments with a bolder, "straight-talk" approach to constituent correspondence. (Thanks to reader S.M..)

--Sam Rosenfeld

MAYBE WE NEED A DRAFT. Props to TNR's editors for calling bullshit on "The Mommy Wars." Whatever pitched warfare is raging between mothers who choose to stay home and raise their children and those who decide to work is a minor skirmish, important only because it distracts attention from the real fight -- the one being quietly waged against middle-income families where both parents must work. This is where Republicans show that business profits trump all family values. Bill Clinton's accomplishment, the Family and Medical Leave Act, allows a mere 12 weeks of unpaid leave for the birth of a child or the wreckage of illness. It, too, barely benefits the poor, who often can't afford three months without paychecks. Stronger bills exist, notably from Lynn Woolsey and Steny Hoyer, but they're ignored by the Republican majority, trapped in committee and barred from the floor. And so those mothers -- and fathers, for that matter -- who lack the luxury of choosing their employment status lack any serious protection or compensation for concentrating on the families Republicans claims to value so much. This is the real "Mommy war," and in it, the mommies are losing.

--Ezra Klein

ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE ON MCCAIN. Daniel McKivergan offers his view on the John McCain issue:

Since Jonathan Chait and others have turned their focus to Sen. McCain the last few days I'd like to add one point -- for now at least -- going back to 2001. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I was his legislative director back then.) Yes, McCain voted against the 2001 tax cut. But his collective reasons for doing so were far different than those of the Democratic caucus. Based on the "surplus" projection, he wanted to enact a smaller tax cut primarily targeting the lower- and middle class (including a child tax credit, a cut in the marriage tax penalty, payroll tax reform, and an estate tax cut capped at five million to reduce any negative impact on charitable giving), ramp up defense spending to substantially enlarge our air, land and naval forces (this was pre 9/11 I may add), fund the transition costs associated with moving toward some form of Social Security personal accounts to ensure its long-term solvency, shore up Medicare's solvency (which, I believe, is one reason why he recently voted against the prescription drug bill), and enact stiff spending reforms (pork-barrel projects, etc) because they were long overdue and would also act as a partial hedge against faulty "surplus" projection numbers.

I think this supports, um, my view of the matter. This is significantly different from George W. Bush's view of how the country should be run. What a liberal thinks of this agenda is going to have more to do with what that liberal thinks about the world than it will with McCain, per se. If I recall correctly, back in 2001 The New Republic also thought we should have a big increase in military spending and the DLC thought we should use the budget surplus to finance the transition to some form of Social Security private accounts. At the time, I thought both that we should increase military spending and that we should use the budget surplus to finance the transition to some form of Social Security privatization (when I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible), so I was reasonably enthusiastic about McCain.

With the wisdom of age, I don't think we should do either of those things so McCain doesn't look nearly as progressive to me as he once did. That however, is much more a question of my own shifting notions of what progressive politics should look like in the 21st century than it is a question of McCain's shifting views on this or that.

--Matthew Yglesias

TENN DOESN'T CARE. It can rarely be said enough, but Tennessee governor and occasional media darling Phil Bredesen is a pretty loathsome sort of Democrat. Having dismantled and tossed 225,000 people off of TennCare -- which provided serious health insurance for the poor, sick, and young -- he's replacing the laudable progam with a cheap rip-off. Cover Tennessee, Bredesen's new idea, will offer insurance to 185,000 folks (I'm still waiting on an explanation for the missing 40,000), but not the ones covered by TennCare. These will be richer, healthier applicants; people who could buy into private insurance but want a cheaper, barebones option. Explaining it, Bredesen boasted that "we have not set up an entitlement program, we can set limits on the number of people who can enroll, we can modify the benefits if we need to, we can change the eligibility requirements, we can change the law.” What a relief, the last thing this country needs its Democratic governors to support are entitlement health insurance programs that offer the needy defined benefits and open rolls.

To give you an idea who this program will cover, last year's cuts to TennCare added up to $1.7 billion; Cover Tennessee, in total, will cost $100 million. That's not to say it's a bad initiative -- indeed, it sounds like it's got some merit. But only as an addition to TennCare or something similar, not as a replacement. Bredesen, here, has thrown those in need onto the street but sought to win plaudits and redemption by extending coverage to less desperate, costly segments of society. Given a patient with pneumonia, he's opted instead to treat a kid with a cold. It's a coward's maneuver, and it will not solve his state's problems. The sick and the poor, once crossed, don't go away. They just vote for your opponent come the primaries.

--Ezra Klein

THE GLOBALIZATION OF ICK. After my own mind was blown by this "reproductive tourism" business, I got down to some serious thinking. The main engine of globalization is exploiting gaps between average productivity in a given nation (which drives its wage rates) and industry-specific productivity, which drives the potential for employer profits. Countries like India and Pakistan have very large, very unproductive rural economies that keep overall wages quite low. Consequently, you can build a pretty half-assed shoe factory somewhere in Asia where the specific productivity is much less than at a comprable factory in America, offer wages higher than what you can make as a subsistence farmer, and still make a much bigger profit than you could by locating the factory in America. But generally speaking, the ideal thing to do, globalization-wise, is to find economic activity where bringing the productivity of your third world labor force up to something resembling first world standards doesn't require much in the way of new capital investment. The truly best cases for this, however, tend to be things we're ethically unconfortable with -- womb-outsourcing being just one of several possible examples.

A friend living in Cambodia was complaining to me yesterday about how many western men in Pnom Penh use the services of "taxi girls", i.e., prostitutes. Economically, this is very similar to the surrogacy situation. Prostitues, everywhere, earn a substantial premium over the prevailing wage rates for unskilled female labor for reasons that seem obvious to me, but that can apparently be the subject of technical economics papers. Since American productivity is much higher than Cambodian productivity, Americans -- including prostitutes -- make much more money than do Cambodians. But the productivity of American hookers isn't any higher than the productivity of Cambodian ones, and the commercial sex industry doesn't really involve any capital goods. Consequently, a Cambodian hooker can earn way more than your average Cambodian non-hooker while still earning way less than an American one, without compromising quality of service at all. Basically, you're looking at something close to the ideal outsourceable industry, with the illegality of the enterprise being the only real fly in the ointment.

Even better, in some ways, is Robin Hanson's cringe-inducing point that we could just buy organs from people living in the third world. A Nigerian kidney is every bit as good as an American one (a lot of Nigerian livers are likely better thanks to the Islam factor), but way cheaper. You could save a substantial amount of money by buying fertile eggs from the third world rather than from American college students. The package deal where you just buy an authentic Chinese baby should be even cheaper than buying Chinese eggs or a Chinese kidney or renting a Chinese womb, since it doesn't involve invasive surgeries and, thanks to the "one child" policy, there's relatively little crowding out by pregnancies aimed at domestic production.

This is definitely where the economic logic points. These are the ultimate labor-intensive "industries," where the human body is the means of production.

Nevertheless, I seriously doubt anyone's going to be enthusiastic about a big WTO conference aimed at legalizing and standardizing laws governing the international sale of sex, gametes, childbearing services, organs, and babies. It should be recognized, however, that just such a global conference on icky commerce would probably be the fastest way to boost third world economic development and would arguably do a great deal to empower women around the world.

Nevertheless, the conclusion seems clearly repugnant. Perhaps I need to read my Bible. Michael Walzer would probably also have some things to say about this and at least one of this magazine's editors is on record as saying that an Everything for Sale world would be a bad place, indeed.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE PROBLEM WITH HILLARY. She has done precious little to convince me that Timothy Garton Ash’s nightmare vision isn't, in fact, rather plausible.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE SHIFTING BUSH C.W. Peggy Noonan has a very interesting column up on The Wall Street Journal website offering her take on George W. Bush's approach to the presidency. It's interesting, primarily, because it's exactly the sort of thing you heard all the time from liberals about two or three years ago -- Bush doesn't listen to dissent, combines disengagement and dogmatism in an unproductive way, doesn't talk to a sufficiently wide range of people, etc. Since the Bush administration, long a giant substantive failure, is now looking destined to be a political failure as well, I think we can expect this kind of narrative to spread more in conservative circles. But as this bit of CW entrenches itself on the center and the right, I think it's important for liberals to start trying to transcend it.

Not that there's no truth to Noonan's account. But, in addition, it's worth saying and reiterating that, to a substantial extent, we're just seeing failures of conservative ideology here, not failures of public sector management. If you adopt the ideas of big-time tax cutting on the domestic front and rogue state rollback on the foreign policy front, this severely constrains your possible options for thinking creatively about public concerns. There's genuinely not much point in listening to a wide circle of innovative thinkers or being prepared to tack this way and that as things do or don't work out.

--Matthew Yglesias

GLOBALIZING THE WOMB. Thanks to an eye-opening Los Angeles Times article yesterday, you can add "reproductive tourism" to the list of words you never thought you'd hear yoked together. It's not just call centers going to India -- now American couples are apparently turning to Indian women to act as surrogate mothers, and at a cost that's a fraction of what they'd pay in the U.S.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP: DON’T DO IT. Matt makes the case against war with Iran.

--The Editors

THE POLARIZATION PROBLEM. Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin's new book Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives is the subject of TPMCafe's book club this week. The thesis is pretty much there in the title. Looking at the book itself and the first round of comments yesterday, from Mark Schmitt and various commenters, I wrote up a little web piece making the case that there is much that liberals might embrace about ruthless DeLay-style partisanship and legislative discipline in Congress. Now Thomas Mann has weighed in with a really valuable post.

Now, there's a part of Eilperin's argument that's easy to challenge and there's a part that's tougher to challenge. The easy part is the notion that members of Congress being mean to one another and Allen Boyd getting hassled by his colleagues for being a terrible Democrat somehow constitute a serious crisis in American politics. The more compelling arguments she makes have to do with gerrymandering and its long-lasting effects both on partisan and ideological polarization in Congress and on the declining responsiveness of the body to the actual wishes of the American electorate. Few can deny that modern redistricting is a problematic practice. But Mann's brief post offers a useful corrective to the notion that all, or even most, of the modern political dynamics that Eilperin laments can actually be attributed to the effects of partisan redistricting. After describing the broader demographic and political realignments in the US in the last several decades that undergird the modern condition of polarization, Mann argues that redistricting "accounts for very little of the decline in competitiveness and the increase in partisan polarization in the 1980s and 1990s. Gerrymandering is more a consequence than a cause of partisan polarization." Redistricting reform is probably desirable and would have some beneficial effects, but it's no panacea for the various ailments that so many commenters seem to think are destroying Congress.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MORE GLOBAL WARMING PESSIMISM. I wish I shared Matt's optimism. John Quiggin's post, and Matt's, largely focuses on the ease of heavily reducing CO2 emissions within America. And on that point, Quiggin's right: to paraphrase Rob Schneider's character in nearly every Adam Sandler movie ever made, we could do it!

But we won't. The quick sketch looks like this (go here for the long version). Climatologists tend to think that we're rapidly approaching, or have already passed, a crucial tipping point at which the feedback loops and energy patterns driving global warming are simply not reversible enough, fast enough, to forestall the catastrophic climatological impact folks fear. Matt and John mention that changing patterns merely in the U.S. would kill off a couple percentage of GDP growth -- given the way conservatives fret and fear over slight increases in taxation-as-percentage-of-GDP, the likelihood that we'll institute such cuts while global warming remains a journal paper abstraction strikes me as near nil.

Worse yet is the situation of the developing world. Matt mentions that they don't already have the wasteful energy usage patterns we do. True enough. But we adopted those patterns for a reason: they're cheaper. Current predictions see 1 billion autos on the road by 2020, with growth increasing almost exponentially beyond that. Take China, which now has 24 million vehicles on the road, but by 2020 is slated to have 90-140 million. They're now the world's second largest petroleum user, with imports increasing by 75 percent between 2002 and 2004. And you try telling China, or India, or any other country that their citizens can't have access to cheap auto fleets like we do.

And the worries don't stop with the automobiles. Even now, we're learning that China's coal use was much, much larger than they let on over the past decade or so. The imperative for economic growth tends to wield more urgency than the need for responsible environmental policies. Shifting their growth patterns is going to rob them of much more than a mere percentage point in GDP, and it's going to be rather tricky for rich, developed countries to impose such caps from on high. So the basic problem is one of time: were global warming already nailing us, you might see the constituency you need for change. Given the crunch, though, my guess is you just don't have the domestic, much less international, political will to forestall climate change. And believe me, I deeply, deeply hope to be wrong about this.

--Ezra Klein

CUTTING CARBON EMISSIONS -- FUN AND EASY. I don't think Ezra should be so quick to concede the infeasibility of big reductions in carbon emissions. The notion that this would require earth-shattering economic sacrifices is the product of an unfortunate conspiracy between regulation-averse right-wingers who don't want us to do anything about the problem, and the modernity-averse faction of environmentalism that wants us to overreact. See this post by John Quiggin for the long form of the argument. He concludes that the requisite changes would cost "between 1.5 per cent and 3 per cent of GDP. That’s about one year’s worth of economic growth [over a period of decades]. Remember that this estimate is not for the modest first steps required under Kyoto, but for a reduction in emissions on the scale required to stabilise climate." Along those lines, it's worth recalling that our current economic policies are not perfectly optimized to maximize growth anyway (just consider the loss associated with our unwillingness to adopt the metric system, to say nothing of serious problems), and we could change other things to make up the (relatively small) cost.

For the United States, this not-so-painful transition could be rendered much less painful by comprehensively reforming zoning and other regulatory restrictions on high-density land use. Settlement patterns have a giant impact on energy use, most obviously in the realm of transportation but also in terms of heating. There's plentiful evidence from America's hot, hot coastal housing markets that sprawl-loving Americans want to adopt less-sprawling living habits even absent carbon emissions considerations and that we're being dissuaded from shifting as rapidly in this direction as we'd like by the high cost of living near a vibrant urban core which, in turn, is mostly driven by zoning rules.

Somewhere in Ross's initial post, he concedes that the British have been able to combine robust economic growth with significant carbon reductions, but doubts this is possible for poor countries. It should actually be easier. Since China doesn't already have people living in highly energy-intensive settlement patterns, the price associated with adopting policies that discourage them from adopting such patterns will be very low. There won't be any dislocation at all. It just means that average Chinese citizen in 2050 will live more like typical residents of New York City or Brussels than like typical residents of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metropolis. Getting Texans to embrace that switch will be, at a minimum, a bit tricky psychologically. But since either choice is clearly preferable to being a dirt-poor peasant farmer or sweatshop laborer, I think the Chinese wouldn't really mind this vision of their future.

--Matthew Yglesias

PARTY IN SEARCH OF A NOTION. Our fearless leader Mike Tomasky wrote the new cover story for the May print issue of the Prospect, a piece that offers a lengthy rumination on the lingering "philosophy gap" between the left and the right and a prescription for closing it. Mike delineates the two basic liberal traditions -- one emphasizing individual rights, the other emphasizing collective obligations and the common good -- and argues forcefully for a revival of the latter strand as a means by which Democrats can win the country back. The essay is likely to provoke a lot of discussion and debate, and is highly worth a read.

--Sam Rosenfeld

A REAL WHITE HOUSE SNOW JOB. Unless President Bush wants to face headlines cracking jokes about "snow jobs" and "getting snowed" for the next three years, selecting FOX News' Tony Snow to be the new White House spokesman doesn't seem like the best idea. I don't particularly think the identity of the White House spokesman matters all that much given how the job is constructed under Bush, but I do think Snow would be flash-point for controversy, given his roots on FOX and his rather vehement, self-confident style. If he acted in as self-satisfied and sneering a matter in the White House post as he does on television, he'd be certain to exacerbate the administration's problems, and especially the perception that it is arrogant and uncaring and untrustworthy -- and I somehow suspect that's not what the administration is going for with this staff change. Snow might appeal to a certain segment of the Republican base, but that's not the constituency he'd have to serve as White House spokesman.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

COOL TO GLOBAL WARMING. I'm fairly puzzled by the emerging conservative line on global warming. Realizing they've lost the debate on whether it will happen, they've begun turning to the difficulties of stopping it. Pushing that line today is Ross Douthat, who's frustrated by Al Gore's insistence on energizing the issue and adamant that "the kind of economic reforms necessary to do anything significant about the accumulation of carbon dioxide would be immediately and decisively disastrous."

Well, maybe so. They certainly wouldn't do much good for our economy or developing economies. But if there's a sick patient on your table and you decide surgery might kill 'em, that doesn't erase the fact that there's a sick patient on your table. If Douthat and others think that massive reductions in CO2 emissions -- reductions I judge fairly impossible -- are a bridge too far, where's the counterplan? After all, he's very concerned about the economic prospects of the poor under Gore's plan, but how does he think things will go when Calcutta floods over? When hurricanes get worse? When sea levels rise and all manner of coastal, urban megacenters become either uninhabitable or profoundly vulnerable to natural disaster, the problems of the poor will become existential, not economic. Gore, for his part, is fighting to raise awareness, demanding that the world begins preparing. Douthat may disagree with his solutions, but it's long past time to stop ignoring his issue.

--Ezra Klein

VOTER TARGETING VS. MOVEMENT BUILDING. One of the peculiarities of this moment in progressive movement building is the way progressive interest groups are being asked to put aside their interests in favor of building a smooth, unified political party that can win elections at the very moment that some rather compelling evidence has begun to emerge arguing for the enduring political utility of defending those interests. For example, Jonathan Singer argued over the weekend, the Republican assault on choice may well have begun to backfire in a way that opens up new opportunities for Democrats to win by defending it. He notes a "whopping 30-point gender gap" in last week's Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll (PDF) "on the generic congressional ballot question, with women overwhelmingly preferring to see a Democratic Congress by a 58 percent to 30 margin while men narrowly prefer a GOP Congress by a 41 percent to 39 percent margin." The Cook Political Report poll for RT Strategies (PDF), he notes, also "showed the Democrats holding a 10-point generic congressional ballot lead, 46 percent to 36 percent" and "an 11-point gender gap, with women favoring the Democrats by 15 points while men favor the Dems by only 4." So to the extent that Republicans have won in recent years in part due to superior voter targeting and turnout operations, it would seem politically advisable for Democrats interested in winning elections to examine the causes of this gender gap in voter preferences and figure out a targeting strategy that maximizes whatever advantages it can confer. Asks Singer:

One cannot be certain about the cause of this returned gender gap without conducting some specific polling on the subject, but I don't see the conclusion that the issue of choice was a major cause as being off-the-wall. And if it is indeed the case that the Republican Party's aggressive anti-choice agenda, which has been in full force over the past year and a half, is at least partially at the root of this shift, is it so wise for the Democrats to back off of the issue of choice? Certainly, attempting to reframe the debate to incorporate terms more amenable to voters -- I wouldn't say softening the message, but perhaps tweaking a few key words here and there -- can't hurt the Democrats, but should the party really give up on the issue of choice, particularly at a time when women appear to be coming back to the party in droves? I personally think not. And if the Democrats fail to tap into these sentiments, they run the very real risk of passing up their greatest opportunity for fundamentally altering the balance of power in Congress in more than a decade. (emphases added)

Or, as one smart female Democratic strategist said to me earlier in the year, “The idea that ‘let’s throw the girls over the side and we’ll be able to row better’ is not a winning strategy.”

--Garance Franke-Ruta

FIRE EVERYONE, HIRE LA TIMES COLUMNISTS INSTEAD. Max Boot offers up the right-wing version of the incompetence dodge -- Don Rumsfeld should be fired for his mismanagement of the war, and the professionals in the officers' corps should be slammed for their own mismanagement of the war. Apparently, the only people fit to run the U.S. foreign policy are neoconservative journalists. Boot repeats the canard that "the president and his top aides blundered by not sending enough troops," though, in fact, we sent all the troops that we could send consistent with a long-term deployment. In response to General Anthony Zinni's observation that "containment worked remarkably well," Boot offers the stirring rebuttal that Zinni's "is a highly questionable judgment, and one that is not for generals to make."

Everything's "questionable" if you live in fantasyland, but since the goals of containment were to stop Saddam Hussein from building WMD, stop him from rebuilding his conventional military forces, and stop him from invading other countries -- all of which it succeeded in accomplishing -- then it seems to me to have been a policy that worked remarkably well. Boot's right that generals "are experts in how to wage war, not when to wage it," but of course there's no special cadre of "when to wage war" experts who we can call on instead. Generals obviously have relevant expertise to these kinds of strategic judgments. And for the record, the bulk of America's professional diplomats, professional intelligence analysts, professional international relations scholars, and professional Arabists also thought this was a bad idea. Admittedly, Boot did have on his side the bulk of American political pundits. The pundits got their way, and the result was a disaster. But all too many journalists are inclined to agree with Boot that this can't possibly prove that he was wrong and everyone with relevant knowledge was right. No, it shows that everyone except Boot was inept. Sure, it does.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHICH MCCAIN IS WHICH? Jon Chait has responded to my criticisms of his liberal McCain meme. As befits two folks who disagree, he found my rebuttal unconvincing, and I found his defense similarly so. Reading Chait, it seems that his case rests on two primary pieces of evidence: 1) McCain felt out a party switch in 2001-2002. 2) McCain was notably liberal during those years. And that's true enough. Since Chait doesn't like ACU rankings (and he accuses me of cherry-picking Bush's liberalism, which, in the context of McCain's "progressivism," was precisely my point), we can look at The National Journal's scores, which shows a post-2000 election tumble for McCain, who goes from around 70 percent conservative in the years preceding (and 80 percent a few years before that), to 60 percent or so in the years after. Which may prove that Garance is onto something here...

To me, this tells a story of pique and opportunism: the Republican Party rejected John McCain, smeared him, humiliated him. In the years immediately following, McCain rebelled against his attackers, even testing out a switch to the Democratic Party. All the better to build his emerging media rep as a courageous maverick and to take vengeance on those who beat him. During that period, he supported various Democratic measures, most of them tepid offerings that a party with only one branch of government thought broadly appealing enough that they might pass the House and compel Bush's signature. McCain eventually decided against that strategy and began determinedly rebuilding his bridges. Now that he's back in the fold, accepted again, he's promising to sponsor the codification of tax cuts he once voted against, voicing support for the reprehensible South Dakota abortion ban, slavishly praising George W. Bush, seeking rapprochement with the Christian Right, etc, etc. I can only wonder what will happen if they actually elect him president.

To me, McCain's record shows a guy largely free of core ideology. When that cuts in a liberal direction, as it did after 2000, it's bracing. When it darts to the right, as it often has, it's somewhat less so. McCain may muse that his daughter should be able to decide her reproductive future, but he endorsed South Dakota's law ensuring that no other women would enjoy the same freedom. (Chait didn't address the abortion issue, but it's really rather key. Scott Lemieux has the definitive post on it, and I'd love to see a rebuttal.) McCain will drift toward the path of popularity and success. Were this the 1980s, and he were facing a Democratic Congress, he might be a safe bet on the strength of his lets-make-a-deal instincts. But there is no Democratic Congress. No Democratic House, no Democratic Senate. So McCain will be hemmed in by his right flank, a position he's currently proving himself perfectly comfortable in. In that context, there is no promise of his liberalism, and no check against his conservatism. And that's not a state of affairs I feel comfortable giving one ounce of support to.

--Ezra Klein

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. If you're interested in getting a taste of the burgeoning grass-roots support for a quasi-fascist understanding of American politics, take a gander at this email sent to Jonah Goldberg. It starts with the sentiment that "Analyzing a war, especially publicly, right in the middle of the fight is a terrible thing to do," and continues from there. Can you imagine that -- analyzing a war, and not just analyzing it, but doing so in public not after the fight, but while the war is happening! Why, it's almost as if we're living in some kind of "democracy" wherein policy decisions are subject to criticism and debate. He'll have none of that; after all "Our enemies see our own pop culture criticize the war. Our enemies see Senators, Congressmen, and politicians question why we are still there and if it is still worth it." Yes, it's true, not only conservative pundits but cultural figures and even the people's elected representatives in Congress and aspirants to political office are commenting, sometimes critically, on the conduct of the incumbent administration.

In some ways more distressing than the email itself is Jonah's response in which he correctly stands up for his right to write columns about the war but feels compelled to include the qualification that "I think it's pretty clear I still support the effort in Iraq," as if to concede the point that the mere existence of actual detractors of current policies is an urgent threat to the Republic. We can expect this to get much, much worse when, inevitably, we do wind up leaving Iraq.

--Matthew Yglesias

HECKUVA JOB, SCOTTIE. One thing you can say in George Bush's favor is that he's exactly the sort of boss you'd like to use as a reference when you look for your next job. Scott McClellan's tenure as White House press secretary has been objectively disastrous -- a giant step down from the psychopathically smooth lying of Ari Fleischer who's turned the briefing room into a perennial train wreck. Liberals and conservatives really ought to be able to agree on this -- there's no policy implications whatsoever. So McClellan steps down today and Bush remarks, "I thought he handled his assignment with class, integrity. It's going to be hard to replace Scott, but nevertheless he made the decision and I accepted it. One of these days, he and I are going to be rocking in chairs in Texas and talking about the good old days."

Not bad at all. And I have to say that McClellan arguably did handle his assignment with class, once you control for the fact that the assignment was, basically, to stand up and dissemble on a daily basis. Integrity, though, not so much. We also learn today that Karl Rove will step down from pretending to care about policy in order to focus full time on caring about politics, and that he'll be replaced in the pretend-about-policy job by some dude from OMB who nobody's ever heard of. I suppose this means we can expect to see weird gimmicks -- phase-ins, fake phase-outs, etc. -- start popping up in even more areas of domestic policy.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE SHAKEUP! The hapless Scott McClellan resigned this morning as White House press secretary. The conventional rap on McClellan has long been that, in stark contrast to the near-sociopathic unflappability with which his predecessor Ari Fleischer could lie and stonewall on behalf of the president, he always showed the flop sweat and strain when doing the same. If that reflects a bit better on McClellan's personal humanity, I suppose we can all wish him well. The rogues' gallery of rumored possible replacements is genuinely frightening, however: former Pentagon flak and current CNN contributor Victoria Clarke, former CPA flak and current Fox News contributor Dan Senor, and longtime Fox News fixture and Rush Limbaugh pinch-hitter Tony Snow top the list. Really, if they wanted to install a Fox News anchor that could make me love the president, they'd appoint Steve Doocy.

It's a bit refreshing to have the ongoing "White House shakeup" story now shift focus to the inherently substance-free job of press secretary -- it makes explicit what had been slightly obscured in the previous staff changes, which is that this "shakeup" is about cosmetic shifts and has nothing to do with meaningful changes in directions on policy matters. Speaking of which, the AP reports that Karl Rove "is giving up oversight of policy development to focus more on politics," which is good because I was worried Rove was getting lost in the policy weeds and it'd be great to see what he does when he's in a more political frame of mind.

--Sam Rosenfeld

TODAY'S MUST READ ON IRAN. A great deal of ink has been spilled on Iran of late, but very little of it on proposing any kind of US action other than engagement through the United Nations or (futile and probably self-destructive) air strikes. Slate's Fred Kaplan has started to close that gap, arguing:

The military option is so manifestly impractical that the Iranians don't seem to believe it. Their top officials dismissed Hersh's article as "psychological war." Even Iran's former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—who has criticized the current regime's harsh anti-Western stance—said in Kuwait today, "We are certain the Americans will not attack Iran because the consequences would be too dangerous."

The one thing that Iran's leaders genuinely seem to fear is economic sanctions. They sprinted to the bargaining table, and opened more facilities to international inspectors, only after France, Britain, and Germany—which had always tolerated Iran's nuclear deceptions in order to protect their trade relations—joined in with the Bush administration's criticisms and pledged to support United Nations sanctions if Iran continued to enrich uranium.

Western Europe, Russia, and China may depend on Iran for oil, but Iran depends at least as much on them for capital investment. The United States isn't involved in either side of this equation—we've been boycotting Iranian imports and exports ever since Ayatollah Khomeini's "students" took our diplomats hostage—which is why our sudden engagement in face-to-face talks, after all these decades, would make quite an impact....

In other words, Bush should commence direct talks with Iran not because they offer a hopeful chance for peace and good will, but because they're a necessary prelude to an international campaign of economic pressure—and because more drastic military pressure would likely backfire. There are two likely outcomes from serious American efforts to negotiate, both good. First, if Iran cooperates with the talks, then it might suspend its nuclear program in exchange for economic benefits. Second, if Iran doesn't cooperate, then the Bush administration will have made its case to China, Russia, and Europe that the regime is dangerous and untrustworthy. At that point it will be much easier to impose the economic sanctions that will scare the Iranians into better behavior.

He makes a strong case.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE GREAT MCCAIN DIVIDE. Looking at the various defenses of John McCain coming from centrist and liberal writers over the past few weeks and discussed by Matt and Ezra below, I think what we're seeing is the emergence of a new opinion fault line that McCain will have trouble crossing in 2008: the divide between people who discovered him in 2000, and those who did not. Reporters who first got to know McCain in his election 2000 iteration will continue to adore him, and defend his moves to the right as mere tactical maneuvering, while those who have entered opinion or political journalism since then will be coming to him with a blanker slate, and a desire to define the story based on the world as it is today, and not as it was.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE POWER OF SOCIAL CAPITAL. I suspect most readers of this site are not regular readers of The Wall Street Journal's Weekend Edition -- I know I'm not -- so I want to highly recommend the paper's Saturday front-pager "Illegal at Princeton" if you can find a copy or subscribe online. The tale of Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a 21-year-old Princeton classics major whose parents illegally immigrated with him from the Dominican Republic in 1989 and who was discovered in a homeless shelter at the age of nine by volunteer Jeff Cowen, a descendent of the founder of the SG Cowen Wall Street brokerage, reading a biography of Napoleon in the corner, would put Horatio Alger himself to shame. Impressed by the boy's resilience and mind, Cowen eventually helped get Padilla into Collegiate, the Manhattan prep school he had himself attended; Padilla immediately became a class leader and went on to Princeton upon graduation. Having now been awarded a two-year scholarship to do graduate work at Oxford, Padilla is facing the possibility that if he leaves the US, where he is barred from working due to his legal status, he will be unable for the next 10 years to re-enter the country where he's lived since age four. It's an amazing tale, and the sort of thing that makes you really wonder about our present immigration system, and also how many other boys now living in squalor are full of a potential they'll never realize without the direct intervention of someone from a more powerful social milieu.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE ORIGINS OF THE ARTICLE. My first thought upon reading Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's article about "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" was that if they were going for maximal controversy, they'd missed the moment of greatest potential impact by several years. Their description of an expansionist Israel dominated by the Likud was completely out of date, and, overall, the article had the feeling of something written during the Netanyahu years -- or at the very latest, during those of the pre-Kadima Ariel Sharon -- which was then kicked around nervous university offices for some substantial length of time until finally being updated with a few nods to the present and published. Setting aside the rather significant way in which they took an interesting question -- How has U.S. support for Israel impacted its Middle East policy? -- and proceeded to run it right off the rails, the whole thing stunk of being past its sell-by date. Not once in an article published in March 2006 did the authors even mention the word Kadima, the November 2005 founding of which was a function of the most important transformation in Israel's thinking about its future in about two decades.

Indeed, the most interesting thing about the US-Israel relationship today is not the impact that Israel's lobbyists and defenders have on US policies in the Middle East, but the way in which Israelis have moved to the left of the United States politically and in which our president is now much more of a hard-liner than is Israel's prime minister. There's also the increasingly live question, ignored by the paper's authors, about whether or not US Middle East policy right now is actually leading to outcomes that are in the Israeli interest; I suspect many in Israel would say a destabilized Iraq gripped by intensifying civil war and a defiant, Israel-hating Iran whose nuclear ambitions are partly fueled by fear of the US is not what they might have hoped for.

In any event, the election of Ehud Olmert in March and the formation of Kadima by Sharon last fall represented a rejection of Likud's security strategy and territorial ambitions. Also, the surprising strength of the Labor Party in the recent election was, as E.J. Dionne has noted, a direct rejection of Likud's free-market reforms, which have resulted in a sharp rise in income inequality and poverty in a country whose socialist traditions make such inequality a greater scandal than it is in the US. The disengagement from the Gaza Strip and the coming disengagement from parts of the West Bank -- one of Olmert's top campaign pledges -- were almost totally ignored by Walt and Mearsheimer.

The professors' article has been met with the expected harsh criticisms in the expected publications, such as The New York Sun and The New Republic, and now is starting to face attack from publications that are open to a wider range of voices discussing Israel. Salon's Michelle Goldberg today rips into the article as something that is likely to silence future critics of Israeli policies. The authors' thesis, she writes, are "undermined by their own errors" and an "approach... too often clumsy and crude." And she confirms what I have suspected -- this article is a previously rejected relic of another moment in time:

Walt and Mearsheimer's paper began as an article commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly in 2002 on the subject of Israel and the U.S. National Interest. The magazine turned down the piece they submitted -- editor Cullen Murphy wrote them a letter explaining why, though none of them will comment on what it said. According to Mearsheimer, he and Walt thought the piece was dead, but then a scholar who'd read it put them in touch with the editor of the London Review of Books, who agreed to publish a rewritten version. They posted the expanded essay on the Harvard Web site to coincide with the London publication.

I'd rather like to know who that intermediary scholar was, wouldn't you?

--Garance Franke-Ruta

NO, MCCAIN REALLY IS THAT CONSERVATIVE. As my colleague Matt noticed, the good folks over at The New Republic are playing some full-court press in defense of John McCain. A couple days ago, editor-at-large Peter Beinart offered his plea to see McCain stick close to his populist, contrarian roots, even offering up a unity scenario in which McCain runs as an independent with a Democrat veep. Today, Jon Chait offers a more full-throated defense of McCain on the merits, arguing that:

In addition to shepherding campaign finance reform through Congress--against the administration's efforts to kill it quietly--he co-sponsored a patients' bill of rights with John Edwards and Ted Kennedy; co-sponsored with Charles Schumer a measure to allow the importation of generic prescription drugs; co-sponsored with John Kerry legislation to raise auto emissions standards; and co-sponsored legislation with Joe Lieberman to close the "gun-show loophole" and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in compliance with the Kyoto accords. On all these things he sided with Democrats against the White House and virtually every Republican.[...]

McCain also showed signs of abandoning his social conservative views. He came out in favor of government-financed stem cell research. During the 2000 presidential campaign, he declared "certainly in the short term or even in the long term, I would not support the repeal of Roe v. Wade." He said that if his daughter wanted an abortion, he would leave the decision up to her. (He did retreat from both these comments after conservatives recoiled in horror, but his real thinking on the subject seemed perfectly clear.)

Putting choice aside, Chait still has a host of evidence for McCain's liberalism. Or does he? Try this on for size: In addition to shepherding bipartisan education reform through Congress -- which he cosponsored with Ted Kennedy -- Bush supported and passed the largest entitlement program expansion in the last couple of decades, fulfilling the liberal goal of bringing prescription drug coverage to Medicare. He signed Sarbanes-Oxley, significantly toughening corporate oversight, and has been notably liberal on immigration reform, rejecting the Republican Party's xenophobic rightwing. In 2004, on the eve of the election, when he was banking on heavy evangelical turnout, he explicitly repudiated the Republican platform on gay rights, saying in a televised interview that he supported civil unions. So is Bush a liberal? Is his conservatism a front?

Maybe. But I think that's a tough sell. In the end, if you're looking for a liberal, go with a self-identified one, not the heir to Barry Goldwater's seat who's racked up an 83 percent from the American Conservative Union. Given McCain's monstrous popularity and undeniable personal appeal, it's tempting to make him an ideological Rorschach, blowing up his moments of progressivism and downplaying his conservatism. It's a temptation liberals should resist.

--Ezra Klein

HISTORY REPEATS. Can't have a war in Iran without Joe Lieberman's involvement, so that's taken care of. Which reminds me of something I wanted to say about the whole "how should Democrats handle Iran?" question, namely that the first step is to take this seriously as a party issue. More than one donkey was inclined to favor privatizing Social Security or to make off-message remarks on the subject, but they were largely dissuaded from doing so by a coordinated campaign of fear and intimidation involving party leaders, major interest groups, bloggers and pundits, and everyone else on hand. Liberal constituency groups are overwhelmingly organized around domestic concerns, but everyone from NOW and the Sierra Club to the AFL-CIO and the NAACP needs to understand that their agendas won't be well-served by another Democratic national security meltdown or another outbreak of war fever.

--Matthew Yglesias

CLINTON POLLSTER SAYS HILLARY HAS MORE THAN A "50-50 CHANCE" OF BECOMING PRESIDENT. In an appearance that's sure to get the wheels of will-she-or-won't-she-in-2008 speculation spinning, Clinton pollster Doug Schoen told a panel discussion last night that Hillary "undeniably" has "a 50-50 chance, at least" of becoming president, according to an account posted at the Daily Politics.

At the panel -- sponsored by New York magazine -- Schoen also threw a big chunk of meat to those who want a more confrontational Democratic Party. Schoen, whose firm works for Hillary, said he thinks that the "moderate" wing of the party is losing the struggle -- though that wouldn't stop Hillary from becoming the nominee. Indeed, as the Daily Politics noted, he was surprisingly forthright about her centrist positioning:

"She undeniably is a 50-50 chance, at least," to be elected president, [Schoen] said. "Senator Clinton...has the luxury of being able to position erself toward the center as time goes forward...[leaving the] opening and opportunity on the left wing of the [Democratic] party."

But while he said that his and Clinton's moderate wing of the party is "losing the struggle" in the long run, he didn't seem to think Clinton should be too worried about a primary challenge..."You need $50 million to run in the Democratic primary," he said. "That's going to be tough for anyone other than Senator Clinton to do." ...

Democrats will need "a clear alternative view that says Bush has failed" and clear alternatives on the issues of Iraq, Al Qaeda, and Iran.

We've seen the overwhelming fundraising lead that supposedly will allow Hillary's centrism to survive the primary. So...when do we get to see the "clear alternative" to Bush on foreign policy issues?

Anyway, more grist for the ever-whirling Hillary mill.

--Greg Sargent

FAKE DARFUR GRANDSTANDING. If you want to understand the how the Bush administration can score political points while taking a minimalist approach to the crisis in Darfur, observe how the press reacts to Ambassador John Bolton’s forthcoming disclosure of the names of four individuals slated for Security Council sanctions. The Security Council will meet in about a half an hour to discuss sanctioning four individuals for their role in the Darfur crisis. By disclosing these names and calling for an open vote on whether they should be sanctioned, Bolton is trying to force Russia and China into going public with their objection to these names. Said Bolton, "These are people who are involved in atrocities and killing people and turning people into refugees."

What Bolton will likely not say is that of those four, only one is a Sudanese government official, and a mid-level official at that. Bolton will likely also not advertise that this list of four was whittled down from a list of eight generated by the UK -- at the institence of the Americans. When the US saw the UK list two weeks ago, they objected to targeting any Sudanese government official for a travel ban or asset freeze. Obviously frustrated by Bolton’s behavior, someone (most likely from the UK mission) leaked this to the press, so Bolton was forced back to the negotiating table. But it seems that the US remained resistant to including any senior Sudanese officials for sanctions, so they settled on one mid-level apparatchik.

To great fanfare this afternoon, Bolton will paint the Chinese and Russians as the real obstructionists here, which to a certain degree they are. But in doing so, he will cover up the shameful reluctance by the Bush administration to hold any senior member of the Sudanese regime accountable for their role in the genocide.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE PASSIONS OF THE OVERCLASS. Allow me to agree with Reihan Salam on this:

Daniel Gross's crusade against the AMT is taking a new shape. Now it's not just a war on affluent Democrats -- it is a a war on "a good chunk of the national Republican base." In that case, though, isn't keeping the AMT an example of the need for revenue trumping politics? The AMT is flawed. Still, I can't help but find the obsession of the upper-middle-left, and the upper-middle-right, with the AMT more than slightly amusing. This is not unlike racial preferences. Somehow the color composition of the Ivy League becomes the central moral challenge of our time. Who says? The Ivy League!!!

UPDATE: Reader B.A. points out that I can't have meant the AMT is "really not the least regressive tax out there." Indeed, I didn't. I meant either it's really not the most regressive tax out there, or else I meant it's really not the least progressive tax out there, or else I shouldn't use negation so much in my writing. Just another reason why reference can't be reduced to intention.

--Matthew Yglesias

DEFINING JOHN MCCAIN. In yesterday's LA Times, Jonathan Chait offers up a more convincing and sober-minded version of Jacob Weisberg's recent argument that John McCain really isn't a conservative and he's just doing a little necessary pandering.

My Big Correct Debate-Changing Observation about this is that the disagreements here are less about McCain than they are about liberalism. For people who were fairly satisfied with the policy outputs of the late Clinton era -- balanced budgets, strong GDP growth, reality-based environmental policies, etc. -- McCain's views on economics are going to look a lot better than standard Republicanism. If, on the other hand, you want to see dramatic health care reform, big improvements in public services, and a serious effort to curb economic inequality, then Bush's differences with McCain look relatively trivial. Again, some liberals think the problem with Bush's foreign policy has been bad management which McCain, perhaps, is well-suited to address. Others think the problem with Bush's foreign policy has been the fundamenal unsoundness of the "rogue state rollback" concept that, since it was stolen from McCain in the first place, McCain is unlikely to improve.

Now, even if you share the leftier views on both of those questions, I think you ought to concede that McCain really is less pernicious than the median Republican. But on the other hand, we have a strong interest in not conceding that. One important thing in American politics is the always-contested definition of the "center." A political dynamic where "right" means "giant tax cuts" (Bush), while "center" means "smaller tax cuts and bigger spending cuts" (McCain), is a country where no progress is ever going to be made on implementing my policy preferences. Similarly, if one lets the foreign policy "center" be defined as "invade lots of countries that haven't attacked the United States but make sure to do it with a giant invading army" then we're never going to have a decent foreign policy in this country.

But while it's bad for McCain to be widely praised as a "moderate," it would be good for McCain to win the Republican nomination. The former steps gives a conservative cast to the definition of "center," but the latter would give a relatively moderate cast to the definition of "right."

--Matthew Yglesias

THE "OVERHAUL" CONTINUES. The president's effort to shake up the White House staff without actually changing anything took another step forward today. When Andy Card resigned, he was replaced by Office of Management and Budget Director Josh Bolten which, in turn, created an opening. That opening, we learn, will be filled by US Trade Representative Rob Portman. And just to make sure there's absolutely no new blood introduced to the system, Portman will be replaced by his deputy. This all serves as a reminder that even if the current campaign to shove Don Rumsfeld out of office were to somehow succeed, the actual results would be minimal.

--Matthew Yglesias

PSA. TAPPED will be offline today in celebration of Patriots Day.

--Alec Oveis

DINING WITH DEAN. From Tuesday’s American Prospect breakfast with Howard Dean:

Walter Shapiro: Governor, from where you sit, is the fact that there will be two caucuses between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary a done deal, or is this still open for negotiation, as to whether there will be caucuses and/or whether New Hampshire will have its traditional unmolested Iowa/New Hampshire role in American history?

Howard Dean: We don’t molest anybody. We leave that to the deputy press secretary of the Homeland Security agency.

For this and more, listen to this recording of the event.

--The Editors

JUST POSTED ON TAP: THE OUTRAGE GAP. The last thing Democrats need is an electorate on the fence, says Terence Samuel.

--The Editors

THE TRUTH ABOUT IRAN MIGHT WORK -- BUT WILL DEMS TELL IT? Matt, Ezra, and Garance all give very thoughtful answers to my question below about Iran -- no question, arguments about cost and effectiveness should certainly prove more effective this time around. My concern, however, is that some Dems -- primarily the presidential contenders and their advisers, and we all know who I'm talking about here -- won't see it our way. It's hard to imagine Dems supporting a full-scale military adventure, but if Bush talks up limited strikes, some ambitious Dems might conclude that backing Bush's plan is the safest way to go -- that their presidential hopes will go up in flames if they don't appear prepared to use limited force against a regime with nuclear ambitions. I don't at all agree with that argument, but it isn't hard to imagine certain Dems thinking it. They might calculate that if anything goes wrong with the Iran adventure -- if it proves more costly or less effective than advertised -- Bush will be blamed, while they simply demonstrated that they were prepared to support the "Commander in Chief."

One wants to believe, of course, that the president's hideously low poll numbers would lead Dems to conclude that they can take on Bush and win -- even (gasp!) on a national security question. But recent history isn't all that encouraging. One also wants to hope that Democratic primary politics will make life very uncomfortable for any Dem who backs Bush. My worry is that some Dems will try to have it both ways and offer qualified support for Bush's adventure of choice -- you know, something along the lines of, "Well, I'll support my Commander in Chief, but by golly, he'd better get it right this time!" They might imagine that if they make enough loud anti-Bush noises while offering limited support for Bush they'll manage to muddle through. This would be terrible for Dems as a whole, because anything short of rock-solid unity works against them.

As Ezra, Garance, and Matt argue persuasively, telling the truth actually could work this time -- and besides, it's really our only option here. My question, though, is: How do we persuade Dems with presidential ambitions to agree that telling the truth can work? The only answer I can come up with is developing a series of core messages that are so strong that even skittish Dems (or "hawkish" ones, take your pick) will take a flyer and unify around them. That seems to me the central tactical challenge on the table right now. How do we persuade Dems with presidential ambitions to tell the truth about Iran along with the rest of us?

--Greg Sargent

MITT ROMNEY CHANNELS JOHN EDWARDS. This is a bit of an old story already, but I think it's still worth noting for the historical record, since I haven't seen it noted elsewhere, that John Edwards, not Mitt Romney, was the first presidential candidate to propose making health insurance mandatory. Romney's just the first to get that approach to health care policy enacted into law -- an outcome attributable to the difference between being a senator from a conservative state and the governor of a liberal one.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHITE REPUBLICANS' BLACK REPUBLICAN PROBLEM. Here's an interesting preview of a forthcoming article by a Yale economist demonstrating that "white Republicans nationally are 25 percentage points more likely on average to vote for the Democratic senatorial candidate when the GOP hopeful is black," and that there is no noticeable boost in black voter turnout when the Republican candidate is black. Similar findings also apply to House and gubernatorial races. The sample size for black GOP senatorial candidates is, needless to say, limited -- the economist, Ebonya Washington, identified and analyzed five such races between 1982 and 2000. I know Alan Keyes's senatorial bids in Maryland account for two of them; anyone know what the other three races were?

The study is obviously relevant to both Michael Steele's Senate bid in Maryland and Ken Blackwell's gubernatorial race in Ohio this year. But of course, as Alec showed in our last print issue, Steele's campaign currently has plenty of other problems that go beyond white Republicans' difficulties with black candidates. It's never good to violate the time-honored "don't make off-the-wall Holocaust comparisons in front of a bunch of Jews" rule of American politics, for example.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BUT WHY? The Urban Institute's C. Eugene Stuerle writes:

a postwar boom in the U.S. labor force is just now ending. Since around 1950, the percentage of adults who worked rose almost every year except in recessions. But now the great swell of working boomers is starting to retire, and most of the gain in female labor force participation is over. If Americans keep retiring at the same ages they do today, the share of adults who are working will fall markedly. The effect on the economy will be roughly equivalent to increasing the unemployment rate by 3/10 of 1 percent every year for 20 years straight starting in 2008.

--Ezra Klein

PLAYING POLITICS ISN'T A POLICY. I'm going to dissent, with Ezra, from the emerging TAPPED line on Iran here and say that any Democrat who comes out and argues that we can't deal with Iran until Bush is out of office will do nothing more than reaffirm to the nth degree the perception that Democrats cannot handle national security matters. Iran is not just an American problem and is not going to go away as an issue if Democrats choose to punt on it. The U.S. did not precipitate this conflict. The entire world, through the United Nations National Security Council, is concerned about Iran becoming the ninth state to acquire nuclear weapons. The Europeans were taking the lead on exerting pressure on Iran until quite recently, and Russia attempted to broker a deal that would prevent the present intensification of tensions. A nuclear Iran governed by a madman is of far graver concern to Europe and Israel than it would be to the more distant U.S. The issue for us right now is that the U.S. is the only nation with the military power to credibly insure that negotiations are backed by the threat of force, as some believe they must be to succeed. So some of the present U.S. saber-rattling, as disturbing as it may be, has to be understood as part of the international negotiating process, rather than an effort to ignore it.

Meanwhile, the single most important question from the perspective of American interests -- which is what I'd like to see Democratic (and Republican) leaders talking about, rather than whether or not the president is a bozo -- is how our presence in Iraq is going to help or hurt whatever it is we intend to do about Iran, and what the impact of any action against Iran will be on our troops. It's not at all clear to me whether, as some analysts believe, the presence of 150,000 U.S. troops across the border in Iraq is acting as a kind of niggling on-the-ground reminder that the U.S. threat of force is real and capable of being launched now as at no other time (what with the military having such a strong presence in the region already), or whether, as Iranians and a number of observers of the region have warned, any actions taken while U.S. troops remains so heavily involved but thinly spread in Iraq will amount to walking into a noose.

Abdel Bari Atwan, editor in chief of London's Al-Quds Al Arabi, is one of many who have articulated that latter perspective:

If they impose economic sanctions against Iran, it means 150,000 American soldiers will be hostages to the Iranian militia or Iranian supporters inside Iraq. Now the Sunni are against them, in the future the Shia will be against them, they will have extremely serious difficulties.

Iraq is already, by all accounts, in the midst of an intensifying civil war. What would be the impact of bombing Iran now on that conflict? Can the U.S. military option most likely to be used -- air power -- really be considered a discrete intervention when neighboring ground forces may face retaliation? Even those who argue most credibly for the eventual necessity of air strikes if Iran continues to flout the international bodies attempting to convince it into to give up its nuclear ambitions cannot answer this question.

Further, there is a very real question about what impact air strikes might have on the Iranian opposition movement and the pro-democracy forces we say we support. Even in the U.S., we know that dissidents are most unpopular when a nation faces external threats. It is possible that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would use U.S. or coalition air strikes to unify his humiliated nation against the West and crack down on internal opposition in a way that undermines hopes for democracy in the region and destroys the possibility of liberalization within Iran for years to come. Indeed, air strikes might even make it more likely that Iran ultimately acquires nuclear weapons, by rallying the Iranian public behind the goal and making the need to prevent further attack by the U.S. more urgent.

Given that most credible intelligence analysts believe Iran is five to 10 years away from building a bomb, and given the incredible risks air strikes might pose to both U.S. troops in the region and to Iranian dissidents, the strongest argument that can be made right now is that the United Nations process that was short-circuited in the lead up to the Iraq War ought to be scrupulously adhered to in this instance, and that negotiations be given a real possibility of working. A strong Democratic response to Iran's nuclear ambitions that begins with taking Iranian nuclear ambitions seriously -- I find a disturbing number of people on the left are now telling me that there's nothing to worry about if Iran goes nuclear -- and then forcefully demands from the administration a decent respect to the opinions of mankind and international law, as well as a level of evidence it failed to provide with regard to Iraq, is about as much as can be hoped for. I also believe it would be respected.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE RETURN OF POTTERY BARN. I'll second Matt's comments below; so much as George Bush's staggering incompetence should have a prime part in the Democratic production of "No Sequel: Why We Shouldn't Fight Iran," to build the whole argument around Bush himself would be a profoundly unstable edifice for the anti-war camp. Indeed, it would take little more than Bush replacing Don Rumsfeld with some media-recognized vessel of establishment gravitas and hardheaded competence to short-circuit the argument. Imagine if noted warmonger John McCain were ushered into the cabinet, or if some retired general were brought in to replace Dick Cheney. No, the aura of competence is something the Bush administration can reclaim, what Democrats need to do is discredit this war as a concept.

Luckily, I don't reckon that'll be so tough. The great gift of the Iraq War, for Republicans, was its apparent ease. During the selling period, word on the street was we were going to invade, occupy, and rebuild the country with four bearded men and a terrier, all for the price of a venti Frappucino. Those who dissented from that view, like Erik Shinseki and Larry Lindsay, were summarily dismissed. But war is hard, and the crushing regularity of calamity and terrorism in Iraq has brought that home to the American people. A war in Iran would be harder, and given the screaming strain our military is now under, a draft would be inevitable.

And that, I think, is how you discredit this war: you're honest about its costs. Already, 60 percent of Americans think the Iran confrontation will end not through diplomacy, not through attack, but when Iran simply gets the bomb. They're making peace with the prospect. If you explain to the parents of America that the only way to stop a small Middle Eastern country from obtaining a low-yield nuclear weapon is to send their children -- not other people's children, but their children -- to go through a grinder far worse than Iraq, support, already soft, will bottom out. Americans accepted the invasion of Iraq because it seemed easy, it seemed cheap, it seemed clean. It was none of those things. Now they know. So just tell them the truth: compared to Iran, Iraq was a piece of cake.

--Ezra Klein

AS LONG AS YOU LIKE. David Ignatius, aiming to make me love Don Rumsfeld by arguing that he should resign in order to increase public support for the indefinite continuation of the Iraq War, observes that "As bad as things are in Baghdad, America won't be defeated there militarily. But it may be forced into a hasty and chaotic retreat by mounting domestic opposition to its policy." This is one of the truthiest of all elements of the elite conventional wisdom on Iraq. Yes, it's true, insurgents aren't going to inflict some kind of decisive battlefield loss on the US Army. Insofar as the American government wants to continue the occupation of Iraq, we will be able to do so forever. But it's worth recalling that forever is a long time. For example, in Chechnya, "the current resistance to Russian rule began during the late 18th century (1785-1791) as a result of Russian expansion into territories formerly under the dominion of Turkey and Persia." For comparison's sake, note that the American Revolutionary War ended in 1783.

There's a kind of funny notion in American circles that it's somehow cheating for states or organizations that lack the $11 trillion economy and 300 million strong population of the United States to refuse to stand up and fight honorably against American tanks and airplanes capable of slaughtering them from long range, or that somehow a defeat doesn't count unless it's inflicted by somebody breaking all our tanks. But nothing in the world works like this. No nationalist insurgency has ever inflicted a "military defeat" on the foreign power it's trying to expel (American Revolutionary War, again) and they invariably win anyway.

--Matthew Yglesias

FIRST THINGS FIRST. Greg asks a good question below about the politics of Iran, and I don't have a super-good answer. I would say that the beginning of political wisdom on this topic, however, is a little dose of the old moral clarity. There are two different questions Democratic officeholders can be asking themselves, their staffers, and their consultants. One question is "How should I handle the Iran issue?" The other is "How should I handle the Iran issue given that supporting a war with Iran is a non-starter?" If you think of the Social Security campaign as the model of effective opposition, the crucial first step there was when Democrats decided that privatizing Social Security was a bad idea and that they were committed to opposing it. Once you reach the conclusion that backing the needless deaths of tens of thousands of people isn't going to be on the table as a tactical option for 2006, you can start working on the question of how to be against the needless deaths of tens of thousands of people without appearing "too weak."

I certainly think John Aravosis's "wrong man" line should be in the mix, but I wouldn't want to see people rely too heavily on it. It kinda sorta seems to imply that launching a war with Iran is, in fact, a good idea and that the only problem with the idea is that George W. Bush is a bad president. Doubts about Bush's leadership abilities and honesty definitely need to be on the table here, but you don't want to concede too much. After all, faced with a genuinely necessary war, you've got to back the war no matter how inept the current president is. But there's nothing necessary, or even remotely useful or appealing, about the war with Iran idea and that needs to be said frequently and effectively. Ironically, Condoleezza Rice is responsible for perhaps the pithiest formulation of the right way to think about countries like Iran: "These regimes are living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them. Rather, the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence -- if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration."

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE ON DEMS AND IRAN. I see that in last night's post on Iran I inadvertently wrote that Dems should be figuring out how to respond after strikes come. Since the post was meant to make the opposite point -- that Dems should be thinking through how politically to approach Iran now -- a quick clarification is in order. A lot will of course happen between now and any move on Iran. The point is, the more specific war plans start surfacing, and the more Bush officials leak the lie that Iran can build a nuke faster than you can say "Kenneth Pollack," the greater the pressure will be on Dems to stake out positions. There are many ways the politics of this could unfold, of course, but Dems -- and the rest of us -- need to start thinking through how to deal with the various scenarios now, rather than after this reaches full boil.

In addition to the long-term heavy lifting of attacking the ideas that brought us Iraq and possibly Iran, the key will be figuring out some core messages on Iran that Dems can unify around -- hopefully minimizing Dem division, which of course will be anything but easy. As Digby has observed, it's a heck of a lot easier to say Dems should come up with effective strategies than it is to actually do it, but some specifics are already emerging. For instance, John Aravosis's suggestions seem like a decent stab. Make no mistake: The usual pundits who get paid six-figure salaries to be wrong on a regular basis will solemnly intone that Dems face political annihilation unless they mindlessly rubberstamp whatever the War President suggests. But various polls suggest that the electorate no longer reflexively gives Republicans the benefit of the doubt on national security issues, and maybe -- just maybe -- Dems will realize that they can shift the ground and even win an argument on national security if they're smart and stick together.

--Greg Sargent

HOW SHOULD DEMS HANDLE IRAN? As depressing as this is, it's never too early for liberals and Dem thinkers to start figuring out how to prevent Dems from dividing if Bush orders, say, limited strikes on Iran. Al Gore and Howard Dean might oppose them, as perhaps will the new and improved John Edwards. But what about other presidential contenders -- Mark Warner, Evan Bayh and Hillary Clinton? (Then there's always Joe Lieberman, who will probably volunteer to sit astride the first falling bomb, Dr. Strangelove style.)

Seriously, this is a real question: What are the prospects (assuming they exist at all) for anything approaching Democratic unity on Iran? And how might it be achieved? On Social Security, Dems stayed in line -- partly because defeat would have been catastrophic, and partly because they were persuaded that they could win. And it worked. Can Dems be persuaded that a debate over Iran can be won, too? Matt smartly suggests a broad, longer-term approach to winning this and other future arguments -- attack the "network of ideas" that brought us Iraq and threaten to bring us war with Iran. In a shorter-term, more tactical sense, it's never too early to come up with a core message on Iran that Dems might see as a winner -- and hence might be willing to unify around.

So: Is there such a message? My first nomination would be one of John Avarosis's suggestions: "George Bush is the wrong man to be launching yet another war." His whole list is worth a read, but that one seems particularly potent. It dovetails with the incompetence argument, reminds voters of the Iraq fiasco and Bush's central role in creating it and promising easy victory, and raises the specter of Bush as reflexive warmonger, which could make voters less willing to listen to the White House's pro-war rationale. And recent polls -- including this eye-opening one -- suggest the electorate may be ready to question the wisdom of GOP militarism and the arguments undergirding it. Yes, yes, I know, Dems can't possibly win an argument about national security, right? But things change -- sometimes even for the better. Maybe GOP hegemony on these issues is coming to an end. And not a moment too soon.

--Greg Sargent

MR. DONKEY SIR. Commenting on Noam Scheiber's story on Howard Dean, MyDD's Matt Stoller writes:

While Reid and Pelosi and Rahm and Chuck might bitch about Dean 'not playing the traditional party chairman's role', where were they in February of 2005 when the elections were held? Why did they let uber-local pol Donnie Fowler become a near kingmaker? Why didn't they endorse or get involved in a serious way? There was an election for this position, a position that was clearly going to control hundreds of millions of dollars and party resources in the next few years. Was this election below them? Apparently. Well Dean was elected and he is doing what he promised.

As for Scheiber's article on Dean, the piece's thesis, once you cut through the weird overuse of messianic language, is that Dean is hostile to big donors, overly-focused on a 50-state strategy, and certain portions of the party are nervous about this. No real surprise. I'd work up some concern, but given that the Democratic Party easily survived the constraints of McCain-Feingold, if Dean ends up raising a bit less than Terry McAuliffe did, I've trouble believing that the difference won't be made up elsewhere. Add in that online and small-donor fundraising will likely be far more advanced come 2008 Democrats should have little trouble reaching the relatively low saturation point (above which additional cash hardly matters). Folks will remember that John Kerry, now whining about how little he had to spend, finished the election with $15 million in the bank.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see Dean do a bit better with the large donors -- his 50-state strategy could only benefit from more money -- but Scheiber's article strikes me as a frustrated bellow from sources put out by Dean's new methods. Had McAuliffe's tenure gone better, I might give them more credence, but given the fortunes of the Democrats under his direction, I'm more than willing to give Dean's new ideas a chance. Indeed, the interesting article here would be the inverse of Scheber's: what does the 50-state strategy look like? How's it progressing? And what sort of chance does it stand at success? I've already heard that Dean's doing the old things wrong, now I'm interested in knowing if he's doing the new ones right.

--Ezra Klein

OFF INTO THE SUNSET. Budget negotiations within the House GOP conference stalled last week over disputes between moderates, who wanted some boosts in spending, and the Republican Study Committee (RSC) folks, who were pushing for some of their usual litany of draconian caps and budget process changes. John Boehner and Dennis Hastert have pledged to keep working on the budget following the end of the recess, and there is indication that the RSC might win from the House leadership (as well as the White House) a provision setting up a so-called "sunset commission." That's an appointed body to which every single discretionary program would need to appeal for renewed funding every ten years; Congress would then have to vote affirmatively to keep the program, or it would be eliminated. (The president proposed such a commission in his budget this year, as he had last year.) Given the collapse of the GOP's unity and legislative capabilities this year, as the midterms approach and the party's popularity sinks, it seems unlikely that such a provision could pass -- but evil conservative budget process gambits are always kicking around, and are always worth keeping an eye on. See more on sunset commissions from OMBWatch here.

--Sam Rosenfeld

DRAWING KNIVES? The Washington Post surveys veteran congressional handicappers and concludes that the Democrats' chances of taking back the House in November remain very slim. I'll let the Midterm Madness folks judge whether the piece is trustworthy or persuasive on the merits; needless to say, it remains the case that structural barriers still do render a takeover a long-shot proposition, even with Democrats enjoying such a politically favorable climate nationwide. One thing I've been hearing more recently from Hill people is the prospect of the following dynamic happening: momentum and expectations for a Democratic takeover build up so much that, when, as is still likely, in November the Democrats fall short of the 15-seat gain they need, the disappointment will serve as a pretext for caucus members to attempt to push Nancy Pelosi from her leadership position. This I hear from Democrats who, like many bloggers and activists, are dissatisfied with Pelosi for various reasons that, from my perspective, range from the reasonable but small-bore to the inexplicable to the very wrongheaded.

Liberals are going to want to have a sober assessment of what the real odds are for various outcomes in November and not get seduced into false expectations; moreover, I'd suggest people think a bit harder about the Democrats' leadership in the House and what the alternatives are. At the risk of repeating myself regarding the whole Dems-aren't-so-lame discussion, let me bear down on Pelosi's performance specifically. Recall that this week saw the fruits of a deft parliamentary jujitsu move administered by Pelosi regarding the House immigration bill. Also recall that the Republicans left for recess last week having failed, under the new leadership of John Boehner, to pass a budget bill for this year; the context for that failure was set by Pelosi ensuring a unanimous and united Democratic front of opposition, just as she had in 2003, 2004, and 2005. (Yes, budget bills have always been major party-line votes, but the minority under Pelosi has also held ranks for other budget and appropriations bills that were scuttled due to GOP divisions.)

If liberals would rather cast their lot with a Minority Leader Hoyer, that's their prerogative, though I'd love to have the rationale for such thinking spelled out for me sometime.

--Sam Rosenfeld

DEMS ARE EITHER PHONIES OR THEY'RE RADICALS. One of the more devious verbal tricks commentators use on Democrats is to rhetorically box them in: Either Dems are too cautious and scripted, or they're too radical and hate America. Atrios is right when he says of Joe Klein's new book:

I've got nothing against insiders dishing on the Kerry campaign, but the idea that they would dish to Klein to support whatever pernicious and destructive narrative he'll be concocting about how we all hate America demonstrates a tremendous lack of judgment.

How eager was Klein to tell the story this way? One Kerry campaign insider who refused to talk to Klein -- chief strategist Robert Shrum -- claims Klein was so eager that he cooked the facts to do it. Klein's chief piece of evidence for Kerry's inauthenticity in the excerpt is that Kerry didn't talk about the Abu Gharib torture scandal because his consultants told him not to. As I reported below, Shrum insisted in an interview with me that Klein's account was "misleading" and "inaccurate." Klein vigorously rejects the claim. Maybe once the book hits other Kerry insiders will come forward and say whether they think Klein's depiction is accurate.

Either way, Klein's new attack begs a question: If Kerry had made Abu Gharib a big issue, how would Klein have reacted? Klein routinely blasts liberal Dems who fault Bush on national security issues. He reportedly said that the message of the party's liberals is that they "hate America." Now he's hammering a Dem who didn't fault Bush sufficiently on torture as craven and inauthentic. If Kerry had taken up torture, would Klein have hailed Kerry's principled stand -- or hammered him as a weak-kneed liberal? We'll never know. Maybe Klein would have played against type and praised Kerry. Or maybe not. The point is, in a broad sense commentators like Klein routinely box Dems in: Either they're phonies who paper over their true beliefs or they're wild-eyed radicals who hate America. It's a pretty neat trick, really.

--Greg Sargent

THE IDEOLOGY'S THE THING. I'm not so high on this "Bush wants to bomb Iran to secure his legacy" concept. As we enter into the twighlight years of Bushism, it's important to avoid ascribing problematic elements of the past five years of American governance to Bush's personal idiosyncrasies when, in fact, the real source of the problems are deeper and wider ideological movements. Mark Steyn didn't publish this crazy article on Iran because Bush is looking for a legacy. Nor did Mark Helprin write this crazy op-ed on Iran because Bush is looking for a legacy. Nor did Fred Hiatt publish Helprin's op-ed because he's looking for a legacy. Nor are Frank Gaffney and Jon Kyl pushing crazy Iran policy ideas because Bush is looking for a legacy.

Rather, there's a widespread view on the American right that it's always a mistake to reach diplomatic agreements with "evil" regimes. There's also a widespread view on the American right that, contra the examples of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, nuclear deterrence won't work against "crazy" leaders. At the intersection of those two opinions is the conclusion that we ought to be very, very, very, very willing to use unilateral preventative military force against countries that have nuclear weapons programs or that we merely vaguely suspect of having nuclear weapons programs. Both of those ideas are foolish and dangerously wrong, but they're also widespread -- not private oddball notions of Bush's. If liberals want to push this country's foreign policy in a better direction over the next five-to-ten years, we need to attack the whole network of ideas (including a non-trivial number of ideas whose origins are inside the Democratic coalition) that gave us the Iraq War and that threaten to give us the Iran War.

Bush's poor leadership skills have made and continue to make things worse than they might otherwise be, but the basic problems here are much bigger than the man himself.

--Matthew Yglesias

IS WAL-MART THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS? I think I'll throw my lot in with Michelle Cottle and Wal-Mart (sigh) on this one. There aren't very many industries I'd wish the Beast of Bentonville on. I'd have preferred they kept out of the unionized, value-oriented grocery sector, for instance. But insofar as I would like to unleash Sam Walton's creation on anyone, the banking industry, which Cottle correctly characterized as operating off a "screw-the-consumer business model," is pretty high up there.

Not only are the current banking behemoths grossly ripping consumers off through transaction and ATM fees, but geographical inequities abound, with large swaths of the (poor) populace lacking access to any sort of accredited, serious financial institution, and turning instead to sharkish corner stores and money order merchants. Were Wal-Mart to enter the game, many of those inequities would instantly vanish, millions of poorer folks would have access to a serious banking alternative, and some of the more useless charges and inefficiencies retained by the sclerotic banking industry would rapidly prove unsustainable. Reflexively mistrustful of Wal-Mart though I am, I've a tough time opposing that.

--Ezra Klein

FRED HIATT REFUSES ACCOUNTABILITY; BILL KELLER ACCEPTS IT. The big news organizations need to come to terms with their role in spreading White House misinformation -- and their failure to dig out the truth -- in the run-up to the Iraq war. Because if they don't, they risk making the same catastrophic mistakes again in the run-up to the possible conflict with Iran -- and those mistakes could have even graver consequences. Bill Keller understands this. Fred Hiatt doesn't.

The fact that some powerful media figures still won't accept accountability for their pre-war blunders is awfully discouraging -- it suggests that they're fully prepared to commit those blunders all over again. Case in point: Today's Washington City Paper has an extraordinary interview with Hiatt, in which reporter Eric Wemple notes that the Post editorial board hasn't yet apologized for its role in spreading the Bush administration's pre-war deceptions, and asks Hiatt if they'll ever issue a mea culpa. Says the piece:

The Post's editorialists bought the White House line in full, yet they haven't gone the mea culpa route. They flirted with accountability in an October 2003 editorial, which reads in part: "Were we wrong? The honest answer is: We don't yet know."

Well, that was two and a half years ago. Do we know enough now to admit the mistake? When asked that question, Hiatt responded, "I'm not getting into that subject...I guess what we have to say about that I would say in an editorial."

In other words, take your demand for accountability and shove it deep into your posterior.

Over at The Times, meanwhile, Keller has shown himself to be far more responsible and professional than Hiatt. He's taking questions at nytimes.com this week, and this is part of what Keller said in response to queries about Judith Miller (scroll down):

[T]he best answer to bad reporting is good reporting...the experience last year has certainly raised our editorial vigilance and underscored the importance of the checks and balances that operate to assure fair and accurate news coverage, especially in sensitive areas such as national security, where reporters rely on sources who cannot speak for attribution. Newsrooms necessarily operate with a large degree of trust...But the operative principle is Ronald Reagan's: trust but verify.

Keller's answers are encouraging. As I noted below, he was far more churlish about the blogosphere than necessary, and The Times's handling of the Miller saga was anything but perfect. Still, the key point is that Keller appears prepared to learn from past mistakes, a refreshing trait which is oddly absent among his media establishment colleagues.

Keller, I'm sure, is well aware that his legacy may rest largely on how he handles the run-up to Iran -- just as his predecessor Howell Raines's legacy was tainted partly by the paper's handling of the run-up to Iraq. What's more, given America's degraded international relationships and all the talk about nukes, this time the stakes are arguably higher -- The Times and other big news orgs simply have to get it right, or the consequences could be dire. In a way, the lead-up to a possible war with Iran is really a big opportunity for the media -- a chance for the big news organizations to redeem themselves for their disastrous failings last time around.

Bill Keller seems to understand this. Fred Hiatt, sadly, doesn't -- or if he does, he couldn't care less.

--Greg Sargent

OF LEGACIES AND LEADERS. Mike Crowley notices Sy Hersh's ascribing Bush's enthusiasm for an attack on Iran to the "legacy thing": Bush wants to be remembered for saving Iran, not merely wrecking Iraq. Which reminds me, anybody else remember the press's obsession with Bill Clinton's second-term legacy-building? I can't recall Clinton ever mentioning it, but the media's spin on every single one of his late initiatives, no matter how innocuous or broadly supportable, was that that self-interested ego-hound was deploying American capital, treasure, and spirit to ensure himself some piece of political immortality. Meanwhile, Bush tried to restructure Social Security, is hinting at a grand bargain to fully rebuild our country's Big Three entitlement programs, and now seems to be hungrily eyeing Iran, and not a moment of consideration is ever given to the guy's motives.

--Ezra Klein

IRAN REALITY. One thing that makes the Iran issue difficult is that one side is led by a religious fanatic suffering delusions of grandeur with a taste for demagogic posturing and the other country has, well, about the same. Thus, it seems that American and Iranian officials alike are exaggerating the successes of the Iranian nuclear program, each for their own reasons, needlessly boiling the pot. The good news, as Andrew Sabl points out is that the American people are now -- rightfully -- disinclined to trust Bush on the question of war with Iran. That means effective political leadership from the opposition party ought to be able to put real constraints on the White House's freedom to mess things up.

But as TAP founder Bob Kuttner pointed out in his speech on "American Foreign Policy as Political Failure" earlier this weak, effective leadership from the opposition has been sadly lacking in recent years. With the surprising (but heartening) exception of Jane Harman, I haven't seen any congressional Democrats engaging with what's going on at the moment.

--Matthew Yglesias

BILL KELLER AND THE BLOGS. Bill Keller is answering questions at The New York Times's site this week, and at one point he offered a somewhat testy view of the blogosphere in responding to a couple of readers who wrote in asking about the Judith Miller affair. Keller responded:

Sigh. I can't imagine that there is anything to say about the Judy Miller episode that I have not already said, publicly and to The Times staff, over and over. At The Times, as in most of the media-watching world, we have registered the Miller saga as an important cautionary tale, and moved on. But the story has an afterlife in the impending trial of Scooter Libby, and, as our Q&A mailbag demonstrates, the subject has settled into some quarters of the blogosphere as a partisan obsession and an object of grassy-knoll conspiracy theories. The hard-core enthusiasts feed on blogs that have little to offer but harebrained speculation. (And they think Judy Miller was credulous!)...

[T]he experience last year has certainly raised our editorial vigilance and underscored the importance of the checks and balances that operate to assure fair and accurate news coverage, especially in sensitive areas such as national security, where reporters rely on sources who cannot speak for attribution. [emphasis added]

Now the administration is making agressive noises yet again, this time towards Iran -- and the grunts and chest-thumping sound startlingly similar to the ones we heard in 2002 and 2003. There's every reason to fear that the administration will fall back on the same tactic of spreading intelligence it knows to be false while suppressing intelligence that undercuts its case for war. Given the media's dreadful complicity with the administration's propagandizing last time around, there's simply no reason to assume that it will do a better job this time around. And this time -- because of all the talk about nukes, plus the tattered state of America's relations with the rest of the world -- the stakes are arguably greater. In other words, this is damn serious business.

So if people are obsessing about the Miller affair, maybe it's because they're thinking about the future, not the past. They're hoping -- praying, pleading -- that this time reporters will be far less willing to spread White House lies in exchange for the passing pleasure of getting a scoop, and that the press this time will be far more aggressive and skeptical when it counts, i.e., before the war, not after. It's good to hear Keller say that the Miller fiasco has raised the paper's "editorial vigilance," but come on -- the burden going forward is on The Times and other media to prove that this is so. In fact, one might see the leadup to a possible war with Iran as a chance for The Times and the other big news organizations to redeem themselves for their performance on Iraq. It's an opportunity, really. Let's hope the media will seize it.

Are blogs frustratingly awash in misinformation at times? Are they imperfect in many other ways? Yes, and yes. But I think Keller's irritability towards bloggers is misplaced. Blogs hammered The Times for Miller, yes, but not because the majority of left-liberal bloggers want to embarrass The Times for the fun of it or otherwise tear down big news organizations. Rather, they want The Times and the other big news orgs to be better than they've been. And they need to be better when it counts -- in other words, Bill, right now.

--Greg Sargent

SOME RECOVERY. Brad Plumer, wielding a fearsome EPI study, does a nice job debunking the claim that stagnating wages are merely the inevitable effect of rising health costs. As he notes, between 2004 and 2005 the bottom 20 percent saw their wages drop nearly 2%, but only 24% of this quintile receives employer-based health care. Had health costs leapt up 39%, they might be the explanation. Instead, they went up 9.2%, and likely less for these folks, who tend to receive substandard benefits.

So while my sympathies go out to all those Gilded Age apologists out there, you just can't explain away the central economic problem of our time -- accelerating, unchecked inequality so pervasive that we're seeing an economic "recovery" with continuing wage slippage and poverty increases -- by claiming that the poor receive too much health care.

--Ezra Klein

NOW THAT'S BRAND LOYALTY. Imagine if Coca-Cola, tired of seeing "New Coke" used as a universal signifier of a remarkably bad idea, blasted out a press release demanding that folks cease smearing the trademark of what was merely a sugared up soft drink concocted in accordance with a national survey of soda taste preferences. Oh the internets would laugh, and laugh, and laugh. So prepare to emit a chuckle in Grover Norquist's direction. Because Grover, finally fed up with all the unfair smears aimed at his innocuous project to browbeat lobbying firms into hiring more conservatives and fewer Democrats, is seeking to patent the name "K Street Project," rescue it from its association with Jack Abramoff, and make a quick buck along the way:

“Some people say Kleenex when they mean tissue,” Norquist said. “We will jealously guard the real phrasing the way Kleenex and Coca-Cola do. We will sue anyone who says it wrong and make lots of money.”

--Ezra Klein

HARDBALL. It's a bit Machiavellian, but what a move. Turns out that a hefty chunk of congressional Republicans wanted to delete James Sensenbrenner's provision turning all illegal immigrants into felons. Too explosive, they thought, to unite behind a bill that would render 1.6 million children serious criminals hiding on the lam. The Bush administration asked Sensenbrenner to soften the offense of lacking a visa to a misdemeanor and so he did, offering an amendment to that effect. The amendment failed, 164-257, with 191 Democrats voting to retain the harsh penalties:

"From a strategic point of view, Democrats were not going to help Republicans pass the bad Sensenbrenner bill," said Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). "With the felony provision in there, it is a poison pill, as we've seen from all the rallies around the country."

Crider said that Republicans were the majority party in the House, and if they truly wanted to change the House bill, they could have.

"The bottom line is that 65 Republicans voted for that provision, and the rest voted for that provision when they voted for the final bill," she said.

--Ezra Klein

PROFILES IN COURAGE. This is pretty disappointing stuff. A Senate bill, cosponsored by a variety of leading Democrats, to force call centers to identify their country of origin at the beginning of the call. Exactly why the United States Senate has to force the dude handling your tech support to mention that he's in New Delhi isn't really explained, but I assume it's just such a nice merging of protectionism and Clintonian incrementalism that opportunistic senators simply couldn't resist.

In the end, though, a bill like this doesn't penalize outsourcing, it doesn't help the unexpectedly unemployed, and it doesn't do anything about globalization -- it just whips up some resentment again foreigners. If Democrats want to seriously address the downsides of free trade, they should (it'd be damn well about time). Instead, they want to look like they're addressing the downsides of free trade, while not actually making any of the hard decisions or substantive trade offs a coherent policy response would require.

--Ezra Klein

WHERE DO YOU COME FROM, WHERE DO YA GO? After Monday's immigration marches, The National Review's Cliff May crept forth with a dark, ominous post wondering about the shadowy groups organizing these demonstrations and the nature of their true "agenda." Well May can take that extra layer of tin foil off his hat, because the answers are out, and they're pretty innocuous.

According to the AP, the story goes something like this: After James Sensenbrenner brought his endearingly medieval outlook to the issue, a hastily called confab of unions, civil rights groups, and religious organizations met in California. The consortium decided to sponsor some rallies with a simple purpose: against Sensenbrenner's legislation, for some undefined path to citizenship. Outreach was conducted primarily through Hispanic radio, e-mail, and churches, with the Service Employees International Union and the Catholic Church eventually taking the lead, particularly on funding. The rallies tapped into the Hispanic community's unexpectedly deep desire to find their voice, and so the protests became rallies, and the rallies emerged a movement. For May and others of his ilk, that authenticity and spontaneity may be the scariest explanation of all.

--Ezra Klein

DEAN CALLS FOR DECLASSIFICATION RE WASHPOST PIECE. DNC Chairman Howard Dean this morning called on the Bush administration to declassify a 2003 Defense Intelligence Agency-sponsored report that undercuts a key administration claim about Saddam Hussein-era Iraqi weapons.
As reported in this morning’s Washington Post, the DIA sent a team of experts to Iraq in May 2003 to examine trailers that were suspected of carrying equipment needed to make biological weapons. The team determined that the trailers did not contain such material, and reported that finding to Washington on May 27, 2003. Two days later, President Bush said, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”

Dean, at this morning’s Prospect breakfast meeting with roughly two dozen journalists, said, "We are going to call, probably today, for the declassification of the report.” He wouldn’t say whether he had already spoken to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi about this strategy, but one source said that such conversations would commence today, and that Dean would likely appear on television this afternoon to press the claim.
“If the [Post] story is accurate,” Dean said, “…then the onus is on the president to prove that he did not mislead the country.” He sharpened this point later, saying that if the Post was correct, then Bush did mislead the country, and it was either a case of “incompetence, or it was deliberate. And those are both very, very serious.”

The trailers, and their alleged ability to produce biological weapons, comprised a central administration claim on the urgency of the need to attack Iraq. The Post story does not make it explicitly clear that Bush would have known on May 29, when he claimed that the weapons of mass destruction had been found, that the DIA analysts had reached the conclusion that the trailers weren’t a threat. Dean wants to find out if Bush knew of their May 27 findings.

More breakfast tidbits throughout the day.

--Michael Tomasky

PSA. For the past few months, spammers have bombarded our comments section. It came to a point where, for a brief period yesterday morning, they had brought down all of TAP Online. We had to temporarily deactivate the comments section to look into this problem more carefully, but it should all be resolved later today. Sorry for the inconvenience.

--Alec Oveis

ABOUT THAT SCLEROSIS. The economic performance of the large continental European economies -- France, Italy, and Germany -- really does leave a great deal to be desired. That said, the American press seems dogmatically determined to vastly overstate the extent of the problems. This editorial in my morning paper argues that "European governments seem unable to summon the strength even to address the economic sclerosis eating away their prosperity -- much less challenge American power." Mixed metaphor aside, Europe isn't becoming less prosperous. Rather, it's becoming more prosperous at a slow rate. If Europeans were actually getting poorer, then I think you'd see much more electoral support for dramatic changes.

As things stand, it's always worth noting that European economic growth could be boosted rather easily if the European Central Bank would loosen monetary policy. My understanding is that they've been maintaining a tighter-than-necessary monetary policy in order to deliberately provoke economic pain in the hopes that this will inspire voters to agree to adopt additional labor market flexibility and cuts in social welfare expenditures. Europeans probably should make their labor market more flexible (I'm radically less convinced that Europe's big welfare states are a problem) but European elites should consider the possibility that this would be easier to accomplish under conditions of prosperity. Obviously, nobody's going to want to make it easier to fire people under conditions where nobody has a reasonable expectation of getting a new job after they're laid off.

--Matthew Yglesias

BOOING CHENEY. This is bizarre. Dick Cheney was selected to throw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals home opener yesterday and got booed as he took the mound because he's ridiculously unpopular. This, as Jane Hamsher notes, was reported by The Washington Post thusly:

The first pitch of the Washington Nationals’ second season at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium was low and away, bouncing in the dirt before being scooped up by catcher Brian Schneider. For that, Vice President Cheney received a round of boos from the home crowd this afternoon.

By all other accounts in the press and rather plainly on the Post's video, Cheney was getting booed from the beginning just as you would expect.

--Matthew Yglesias

ITALY'S STABLE INSTABILITY. Earlier today, Ezra linked to an article suggesting that Italy's history of unstable governments is a contributor to the difficulty of introducing economic reforms. A National Review editorial makes a similar claim:

Prodi's coalition is a gamut of nine parties — running from two Communist parties at one extreme to liberals and Catholics at another — all of them unable to agree either on political ends or on means. It should be child's play for Berlusconi or any opposition to bring down such a government and return to the routine of the last 50 years, in which Italian prime ministers have come and gone in rapid succession as though through revolving doors.

The famous fact is that during the immediate post-WWII era, Italy had something like fifty governments in fifty years (The Donnas beat that pace by a wide margin) which seems excessive. This "instability," however, masked a great deal of underlying sameness. A single political party was the dominant force in all the governing coalitions during that period. What you had was personnel turnover -- a lot of cabinet shuffles due to personal or factional in-fighting or the machinations of minor parties. But new cabinets tended to include many of the same people as the previous one (possibly in a new job) and someone who got booted out of cabinet stood an excellent chance of coming back during the new shuffle.

The main upshot of this wasn't a lot of chaos and back-and-forth policy churn. Rather, practical authority was concentrated to a large degree in the permanent bureacracy which made policy just beneath the high-level personnel turnover (the US, it's worth remembering, has an absurdly large number of political appointees in our cabinet agencies by European standards) and much of the country was basically run by very stable networks of bribery and extortion. Genuine instability is a phenomenon of the post-Tangentopoli era in which a huge wave of scandals destroyed all of the old system's major political parties and created the current dynamic where power alternates between a corrupt rightwing coalition and a hopelessly divided leftwing one.

--Matthew Yglesias

KNOW WHEN TO FOLD 'EM. One idea I've seen kicking around the past couple of days is that talk of military strikes against Iran may be part of some kind of clever gamesmanship designed to achieve a diplomatic resolution. I think people need to think harder about that. Airstrikes would, at best, delay Iranian acquisition of nukes. Giving in to the United States would, of course, entail abandoning the quest for them entirely. So the structure of Bush's offer, under this theory, would be "either give up your nukes or else I'll slightly delay the point at which you can get them." That, I think, isn't quite in "offer they can't refuse" territory. Indeed, they'd have no reason whatsoever to accept that offer. It's a pointless threat.

The only way to make this work would be to put carrots on the table. "Give up your nukes and we'll lift our sanctions and grant you diplomatic recognition, or else I'll use force to slightly delay the point at which you can go nuclear." This will work, of course, only if Iran would prefer diplomatic and trade relations with the US to having a nuclear bomb. But if that is their preference, then the threat of airstrikes adds nothing to the equation -- you could just put the straight-up nukes for sanctions trade on the table and you'd get the same result one way or another. Airstrikes would be pointless in any case, and precisely because they're pointless there's no point in threatening to use them.

Now, conservatives will say we shouldn't offer carrots because Teheran can't be trusted. Bush thinks it's wrong to offer concessions to "evil" regimes (it's appeasement, see) and that's why he won't put any on the table. If that's your mindset, there are only two options -- let the evildoers go nuclear (see North Korea) or launch a disastrous war (see Iraq). It'd be nice to find a middle ground, but there's really nothing there.

--Matthew Yglesias

ROBERT SHRUM DISPUTES JOE KLEIN'S ACCOUNT OF KERRY CAMPAIGN. Robert Shrum, the chief strategist for John Kerry's presidential campaign, is disputing some aspects of a forthcoming account by Joe Klein of the 2004 campaign, saying Klein's version is "inaccurate" and "misleading." In his latest Time magazine column, Klein published an excerpt of the book, one which offers a scathing look at the inner dynamics of Kerry's campaign.

In the piece, Klein asserts that Kerry allowed himself "to be smothered by his consultants," and cites as a key example the campaign's handling of the Abu Gharib scandal:

Perhaps the worst moment came with the Bush Administration torture scandal: How to respond to Abu Ghraib? Hold a focus group. But the civilians who volunteered for an Arkansas focus group were conflicted; ultimately, they believed the Bush Administration should do whatever was necessary to extract information from the "terrorists." The consultants were unanimous in their recommendation to the candidate: Don't talk about it. Kerry had entered American politics in the early 1970s, protesting the Vietnam War, including the atrocities committed by his fellow soldiers in Vietnam. But he followed his consultants' advice, never once mentioning Abu Ghraib -- or the Justice Department memo that "broadened" accepted interrogation techniques -- in his acceptance speech or, remarkably, in his three debates with Bush.

Shrum added: "[Kerry] never received any advice not to talk about Abu Gharib. I certainly never gave him that advice."

The dispute is noteworthy, because Klein's version of Kerry's focus-grouping appears to be a key piece of his indictment of the campaign, at least in the excerpt. The book, a broad indictment of the "pollster-consultant industrial complex," is called Politics Lost.

When we contacted Klein about Shrum's comments, he dismissed the accusation, saying that Shrum refused to speak to him for the book. Klein emailed us the following statement:

Everything in the Kerry section of the book was double and triple-sourced. I spoke directly to the person who conducted the focus groups. A Kerry pollster told me that the consultants' view of Abu Ghraib was unanimous, which was confirmed by Kerry staff members and other Kerry consultants. And, of course, the proof is on the record: Kerry did not mention Abu Ghraib -- or, equally important, the Bush Justice Department Torture Memo -- in either his acceptance speech or the three debates. I like and respect Bob, but I find it odd that he was willing to talk to you and not to me, despite repeated requests during the writing of this book.

--Greg Sargent

A SQUEAKER IN ITALY. It looks like Romani Prodi's center-left coalition will eke out a very narrow victory against hilarious crook-turned-politician Silvio Berlusconi. If so, Italian society may soon prove less divided than it seems. Even the narrowest of margins for Prodi's coalition would allow him to remedy the current situation where some television stations are owned by Berlusconi, and the other television stations are owned by Berlusconi's government. Everyone likes to complain about media bias, but the situation the Italian left's been dealing with is truly off the charts.

--Matthew Yglesias

OVERTHROW ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU... Over at The Times, Floyd Norris makes an interesting point on France's surprisingly rapid abandonment of their proposed economic reforms:

One reason for the reluctance of the French and the Italians to stick by what the politicians see as needed changes is the longtime insecurity of governments, in contrast to relatively stable political situations in countries like the United States and Britain.

In Italy, there has been a history of short-lived governments in much of the time since the end of World War II, albeit many of these governments were populated by the same politicians. Mr. Berlusconi has been an exception, managing to last a full parliamentary term.

In France, change has been much slower in one way — Mr. Chirac has been in office for more than a decade — but French governments seem to be less confident in their mandate. French history is full of violent changes in government, not least the French Revolution, and current politicians can remember 1968, when some thought that student protests in Paris and other cities were about to force President Charles de Gaulle to resign.

--Ezra Klein

K STREET GIVETH... Two amusing K Street-related notes regarding Tom DeLay's imminent retirement: First, see Jesse Lee for the latest on lobbyists getting a wee bit testy about DeLay converting the re-election campaign contributions they raised for him into funds for his legal expenses. “If I wanted to give to a legal fund, I would’ve done it directly,” Roll Call quotes one lobbyist; says another, "That all this money will go to the legal defense fund, it sickens me."

Meanwhile, former DeLay (and Dennis Hastert) aide John Feehery's Sunday Washington Post op-ed is worth a read for the dirt it dishes on DeLay's rogue minions, Ed Buckham, Mike Scanlon, and Tony Rudy. Do be wary of the good-man-wronged-by-perfidious-underlings narrative Feehery is aiming for, however.

Given the prominence of the K Street Project in discussions of DeLay's legacy (see Michael Barone's delightfully forthright defense of the gambit from last week), it's worth noting that Feehery himself is a direct and emblematic beneficiary of the Project. When, in 2004, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) hired a Democrat as its new president, furious congressional Republicans retaliated by excising tax credits to movie studios from an international tax bill. The MPAA got the message and promised to hire several Republicans for top positions. One of those hires: John Feehery, now the MPAA’s executive vice-president.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP: A MASSACHUSETTS MIRACLE. Robert Kuttner explains how advocates of universal health care should respond to the new legislation out of Massachusetts.

Now onto a different matter: Does anyone else miss those desperate pleas for more subscribers? I certainly do.

--Alec Oveis

MEANWHILE IN CRAZY LAND. I have no idea what the provenance of the documents Bill Kristol is quoting here is exactly supposed to be, but they definitely don't show what he seems to think they show. What's going on here, plainly, is that Saddam Hussein was making plans for irregular warfare, possibly including terrorism, as contingency plans to be used in response to an American invasion, not that Saddam was plotting unprovoked terrorist attacks on the United States.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE VIRTUES OF OBSTRUCTION. Over e-mail, Midterm Madness contributor Ben Adler has a smart response to my earlier post on Sebastian Mallaby:

In addition to Ezra’s sharp fact-check on the A-Pox-on-Both-Their-Houses section of Sebastian Mallaby’s column, it’s worth noting the common, but silly, assumption underlying Mallaby’s analysis. He accuses the congressional Democratic leadership of “hav[ing] mastered the art of obstructionism but [being] light on policy proposals.” That assumes that Democrats and Republicans share broad agreement about what problems the nation faces in most areas. But, on many issues, the parties disagree not merely about means but about ends. Republicans think the tax code is too progressive, Democrats think it’s too regressive. So yes, Democrats attempt to “obstruct” efforts to make the estate tax repeal permanent and offer no “alternative.” But what’s wrong with that? The Dems are simply holding their principles.

Anyway, obstructionism or lack of ideas is not a fair accusation to throw at a minority party particularly under this ruthless brand of majority leadership. It is not as if the Republicans, particularly in the House, will give the Democrats’ bills a fair vote. So, even if Mallaby’s assertion, were factually solid (it is not), it would be an illogical point anyway.

--Ezra Klein

SO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. There's little more annoying in modern punditry than on-the-other-handism, that irksome little quirk that causes professional pundits to sully perfectly sound columns by ending their focused critiques with indiscriminate, incoherent sprays of blame. Today's example? Sebastian Mallaby, who concisely dismantles the modern GOP's contempt for governance and then, out of nowhere, ruins it with a meaningless, inaccurate shot at the Democrats.

The Republicans' dismal performance could shake their grip on power -- much as the gold-ingot episode upset Japan's politics. But the top congressional Democrats seem barely more attractive than the Republicans; they have mastered the art of obstructionism but are light on policy proposals. In Japan in the 1990s, the collapse of the cronyistic ruling party was expected to usher in economic change that would pull the country out of its financial swamp. Instead, reform proceeded at a glacial pace, and it took a full decade for the economy to get going again.

The paradox of politics is that government is at once essential and dysfunctional. Globalization, demographic change, the sheer fact of economic growth: All these shifts create demands for government to step in, as a provider of safety nets for workers; retirement security for seniors; and public goods such as environmental quality and food safety, which become priorities as societies grow richer.

As for environmental regulations, thanks, but I don't think they require new thinking so much as the application of old thinking. Same with the underfunded FDA, which is perfectly capable of inspecting food, if only they had the bank account to hire enough employees. Mallaby may be frustrated with the country's worrying direction and its sclerotic policy discourse, but he's proving himself the problem, not the solution. As someone who regularly wades through the work of progressive wonks, I assure him that the Democratic Party wouldn't look nearly so intellectually bereft if Washington Post columnists like Mallaby would use their megaphones to broadcast some of the fresh, resonant ideas swirling quietly about rather than simply sniffing at an intellectual landscape that seems barren because smug, lazy pundits refuse to populate it.

--Ezra Klein

SILVIO, HE GOTTA GO.
If these exit polls prove correct, it looks like Romano Prodi’s center-left coalition has defeated Silvio Berlusconi in Italy’s general election. On the one hand, this election could be considered a setback for the xenophobic right to whom Berlusconi pandered in the campaign’s waning days. But as far as I can tell, the biggest loser of this election might well be the editors of The Economist, who look like they are about to lose their favo(u)rite whipping boy of the last decade or so. To be sure, Berlusconi is an easy target, but Bill Emmett and co. elevated their Berlusconi coverage to an art form. For the sake of sarcasm and wit in political reporting, here’s hoping Berlusconi doesn’t fade from the political scene. Sure, he might be a pernicious influence on Italian democracy, but he is just so irrepressibly entertaining for foreign observers like me, that it would be sad to see him go.

Well, almost.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

LIFE DECLINES TO IMITATE ART. Reading the West Wing piece Mike linked to, I stumbled across this tidbit I'd not known:

On that score, Mr. Sheen was offered an opportunity to see how his character's appeal would play in a real-life campaign. Not long ago, he said, he was approached by Democratic Party representatives from his native state, Ohio, to see if he would be interested in running for the United States Senate after he left the show. Though he would have had little trouble drafting a campaign platform — he is a fierce opponent of nuclear power and the war in Iraq, and a champion of human rights — he turned them down.

--Ezra Klein

THE EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION RACKET. Direct compensation for top CEO's went up by "only" 16 percent in 2005 after a more robust 41 percent in 2004. By comparison, median wages increased 3.2 percent in 2005 and somewhat less than that in 2004. Obviously, this is due to a dramatic acceleration in CEO productivity, catapulting the value of the top suits to ever-higher multiples of the value of the rest of us. Maybe. Well, actually, definitely not. Check out Gretchen Morgensen's fantastic New York Times article on the executive compensation racket and the not-so-independent independent consultants and compensation boards who make it happen.

--Matthew Yglesias

HALFWAY HOME. As I had predicted, Matt Santos won the presidency last night on The West Wing, eking out a surprise win in Nevada. Now the stage is set for the completion of my prediction, the more interesting second part: Santos, in the wake of Leo McGarry’s death, names Arnold Vinick as his national unity vice-president.

Is there any question about this now? Indeed, the only question is that it seems so ludicrously obvious that they might not do it just to throw us a curve. Incredibly, Jacques Steinberg’s piece in today’s Times about how the writers flipped from a Vinick win to a Santos victory after the real-life John Spencer died didn’t even go into the veepstakes scenarios.

The episode, by the way, was great. And even though Santos won South Carolina and Vinick Vermont, it otherwise was rich in verisimilitude, with no hint that the fate of the nation was hanging on the results from Berkshire County.

--Michael Tomasky

TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES. We learn in today's Washington Post that the military is running a covert propaganda campaign aimed at exaggerating the importance of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in particular and al Qaeda in general in Iraq. In theory this is supposed to be aimed at Iraqis (which is legal), but in practice it seems to have been partially aimed at Americans (which is illegal), and as we saw with the last covert propaganda story, the distinction is pretty meaningless in the contemporary world.

There's a lot that could be said about this issue, but how about this one for starters -- information operations are always a part of war, but it should give you some pause when your main information operations are aimed at misleading people as to the fundamental nature of the conflict you're dealing with. Basically, the administration is trying to create an entirely fictional war in which the USA has over 100,000 troops stationed in Iraq because they're fighting al Qaeda. That simply isn't what they're doing. A policy that's only publicly justifiable in the context of massive deception is almost certainly going to be a bad policy.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE NERD PATROL GETS RICH. This isn't necessarily surprising, but it's nice nonetheless. A recent study analyzing government funding for scientific research found higher returns than previously thought, with grateful scientists filing patents and founding start-ups at a surprisingly rapid clip. That's instructive, as the primary driver of this bit of economic growth is the National Institute of Heath, which has seen its funding stagnate during the Bush era, in stark contrast to the 250 percent increase of the Clinton years.

But funding for scientific research really shouldn't be a partisan issue. These grants don't interfere with the market so much as kickstart it: 70 percent of scientists filed their patents through their university's technology transfer office (the arm that commercializes university research). The rest went the entrepreneurial route, resulting in a full quarter of scientists who've received patents reporting that they've founded businesses. The taxpayer dollars fund basic research that may or may not have commercial application, but it turns out that the scientists themselves are making sure their findings leap from dry journal to the marketplace -- and a good thing, too. For all the noise Bush made about training young scientists during his State of the Union address, you'd think supporting the eggheads we've already got would be a bit more of a priority for his administration.

--Ezra Klein

THE BOMBTHROWERS' LEARNING CURVE. One more brief thing on Amy Sullivan's piece. On the question of Gingrich-style bomb-throwing and oppositional PR tactics, Amy emphasizes the degree to which Democrats have improved in the last year without getting much credit for it. While I'm on record calling out the Democrats for some residual lameness on the ethics fight specifically, there's no question that this improvement is real, and is hardly ever remarked upon. Major scandal stories erupt without anyone crediting Democratic bomb-throwers for instigating them. The Dubai ports deal was a genuinely debilitating blow to Republicans; it was a story because Chuck Schumer decided to make a media stunt out of it. Nobody seems aware that he's responsible.

Now, needless to say, as effective as the Democrats might get at this kind of stuff, they'll never hold a candle to the sweet, sweet scandal-mongering that TAP regularly deploys through its investigative pieces. (Recall that Joe Conason is the magazine's investigative editor.) Apologies for breaking the editors' promise, but here's one last request (really!): Subscribe to the Prospect, and/or help us out a bit. You'll be better for it.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE BIG STORY: STILL WAITING TO BE TOLD. Before this point gets lost in the din of the latest leak disclosures, it needs to be said, as loudly as possible, that the big story has yet to be told, and in that regard, Murray Waas's previous scoop about Karl Rove is even more important -- and more deserving of mainstream media attention -- in light of the new revelations.

In that piece, Waas reported that a classified one-page summary of the now-notorious National Intelligence Estimate was given to Bush, which says that some intelligence officials had serious doubts about the claim that Saddam wanted aluminum tubes for nukes -- and that Bush was given this summary before repeating the tubes claim in his speech.

Let's state this as clearly as we can: Wass says there is a piece of paper out there which constitutes hard evidence that Bush withheld critical info from the American public as he made the most critical decision a president can make -- the decision whether to go to war. Jaded DC hands will say, "Old news -- everyone knew there was dissent within the bureaucracy." Fine. But Wass's story says more than that -- he says there's proof of the extent to which Bush knew of that dissent, that he deliberately concealed it from the public, and that Rove thought this fact could "severely damage" Bush's reelection prospects if it surfaced.

The latest Libby revelations suggest, yet again, just how spooked Bush and his advisers were about the possibility that the truth about the runup to the war would come out. They suggest, yet again, that there's a great deal we don't know about the biggest story of this presidency. Waas's piece gives us a key chapter in that story. His piece finally did get attention from a big news org today: The Times cited it in an editorial, demanding a "thorough accounting" of the selling of the war. But it hasn't yet been mentioned in The Times's news pages -- or, for that matter, by the Washington Post, L.A. Times, Boston Globe or many others.

Memo to the nation's premiere investigative reporters: When are you going to get your hands on that piece of paper?

--Greg Sargent

JUST POSTED ON TAP: IF THEY HAD A HAMMER. Terence Samuel thinks the Democrats could stand to learn a thing or two from Tom DeLay.

So now’s that moment, at the end of the fund-drive, where the hosts say you only have five more minutes to join. That’s not entirely true in our case, but still, please subscribe. This is the last you’ll hear about subscriptions for at least a few months.

--The Editors

PODHORETZ FLOATS FLIMSY RIGHT-WING PUSHBACK ON LEAK STORY -- AND PUNTS. The emerging right-wing spin about the leak revelations was perfectly captured in John Podhoretz's column today in the New York Post. Since these arguments are certain to be aired again and again in coming days, they need to be debunked, and quickly. And it's remarkably easy to do.

The Pod makes three points, all of which are soon to be chanted in unison by countless winger commentators. He says:

1) The leak wasn't really a leak because it was authorized by the president, and a "leak" is the "unauthorized release of government information."

This one's easy to knock down. First, a leak doesn't suddenly become a non-leak because it was secretly "authorized" by a higher-up. Plenty of info is leaked with tacit authorization from above, and we all agree to call that "leaking." This info certainly was leaked, in the sense that it was passed on confidentially by Libby to a reporter who wasn't supposed to reveal the source of it. In other words, the info was supposed to get out -- without anyone knowing where it came from or who authorized it. By contrast, if the info had been "released," to use Pod's preferred word, the administration would publicly own up to being the source for it. So yes, it was a leak.

As for Pod's argument that the president "can't leak" -- another pushback rapidly gaining currency -- keep in mind that the president isn't the one who is accused of doing the leaking. Rather, Bush is accused of authorizing the leak. Libby carried it out.

2) Pod also argues essentially that Bush was pushing back against Joe Wilson's slander, so it was OK.

Pod appears to be saying that this isn't a leak because the motive behind it was defensible. This is just silly -- and indeed, it undermines his own case. Even if you agree that the administration's rebuttal of Wilson was correct, that doesn't change the simple fact that Bush's authorization of the leak was political in nature. Indeed, if the argument is that Bush had to protect himself against a political attack with some sort of pushback, that reinforces, rather than undercuts, the idea that the leak was political. So Libby revealed that Bush authorized the leaking of classified info to achieve a political goal -- and that's a no-no.

3) Pod's final argument is that much or all of the National Intelligence Estimate was public already, so it couldn't have been leaked. Pod says:

On Oct. 7, 2002, nine months before Bush's supposed "leak," the administration released an unclassified version of the very same NIE at the urging of Senate Democrats.

This is startlingly flimsy. Pod is talking about the fact that in October 2002, then Senator Bob Graham demanded the declassification of parts of the CIA's NIE before the congressional vote on the war. Graham subsequently said some parts had been declassified -- but by no means was the whole NIE, or even much of it, declassified. How do we know this? Because on July 18, 2003 -- after Bush authorized the leak -- a senior administration official held a press briefing in which he declassified key portions of the NIE. Pod can read the briefing itself right here. It was also covered the next day in The Times, Washington Post and elsewhere. So why would this senior official have held this declassification briefing if, as Pod says, an "unclassified version" of the NIE had been declassified "nine months" earlier? Answer: He wouldn't have.

What's more, it's obvious that whatever was declassified in October 2002 wasn't the portion that Libby says Bush authorized for leaking. Why, if Pod were right, would Libby have needed to ask Cheney lawyer David Addington if leaking the info was kosher, as he had testified? Answer: He wouldn't have. And why would Addington have opined that the president's authorization effectively declassified the info if, as Pod says, it was already declassified? He wouldn't have.

So to recap: Libby has revealed that Bush authorized a leak of classified info for political purposes. End of story.

--Greg Sargent

THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS. If you ask me, the real problem with the Anna Nicole Smith nipple cover is that it doesn't show enough skin. If you look at Eugene Delacroix's original, Liberty Leading the People, the entire right breast is exposed along with a considerable portion of the left.

--Matthew Yglesias

A FEATURE, NOT A BUG. Michael Tanner, Cato's health policy director, is not happy (PDF) about the Massachusetts plan:

Individual mandates cross an important practical and philosophical line: once we accept the principle that it is the government’s responsibility to ensure that every American has health insurance, we guarantee even more government involvement with and control over large portions of our health care system. Compulsory, government-defined insurance opens the door to even more widespread regulation of the health care industry and political interference in personal health care decisions. The result will be a slow but steady spiral downward toward a government-run national health care system.

--Ezra Klein

DEMOCRATIC "DISARRAY" -- COMPARED TO WHAT? I'll join with others in strongly recommending Amy Sullivan's bracingly counter-intuitive argument that the Democrats don't actually suck. Amy is very right here. Much of her focus is on the mainstream media narratives that continue to portray Democrats as invariably weak, divided, and feckless. But MSM cluelessness is an old story -- what's frankly more troubling and frustrating is the unyielding scorn and hostility that Democratic activists and netroots folks heap on the Democratic congressional leadership.

Take the question of caucus discipline. The lack of comparative context underlying liberal critics' incessant carping on this front is glaring -- compared to both recent and much more longstanding historical precedent, the current Democratic opposition has not only been disciplined and unified, but effective. Improvements can always be made, but it's simple ignorance to portray the state of the congressional caucuses under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi as indistinguishable from what we saw under Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt in the early Bush years or, for that matter, what we saw from Democrats during the 1990s, when first Democratic congressional majorities confirmed Clarence Thomas and completely flubbed a major opportunity for universal healthcare legislation, then later Democratic congressional minorities joined ranks with Republicans on any number of illiberal, corporate-friendly initiatives. The current Democratic caucus is more ideologically unified, more disciplined in their votes, and on most scores more liberal than it has been in recent history.

Many factors have led to that, including long-range ones like the dwindling ranks of the last conservative (mainly southern) Dem hold-outs as well as the effects of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay's brand of GOP hyper-partisanship, which deliberately shuts out traditional Democratic collaborators from participating in legislation and attempts to cut off K Street funding for Democratic lawmakers. But it's also the result of important shifts in both personnel and strategic outlook within the Democratic leadership. Enforcing party ranks is extremely difficult in the American political system; on both sides of the aisle, it is done to a greater extent than we've seen in a long time, perhaps ever. And to the extent that we're now seeing cleavages and disarray growing among the GOP on things like budget bills, that's in part a credit to unified opposition by Democrats, which sets a context in which all Republicans must hang together or nothing passes.

The pervasive scorn for Pelosi is particularly odd, because on issues where there really remain intra-Democratic divisions, she's on the same side as liberals. When 72 Democrats voted for the bankruptcy bill last year, outraged bloggers cast it as still more evidence of Democratic cravenness and disarray. But that same faction of Democrats -- generally, K Street-friendly members aligned with Steny Hoyer -- had been quietly voting in favor of that same bankruptcy bill since the late 1990s. It was only under Pelosi that, for the first time, an actual intra-party fight broke out, with Pelosi leading the liberal faction, arguing that it's bad policy and bad politics for the caucus not to maintain united opposition to such bills.

Obviously more can always be done, pressure should always be maintained, and complacency should always be avoided. (TAP subcribers, of all people, know that.) But it remains the case that the actual state of the Democratic congressional caucuses, from the perspective of ideological liberals seeking disciplined and effective opposition, is better than it has been in awhile. That's worth acknowledging from time to time.

--Sam Rosenfeld

CHANGES AT THE NEW REPUBLIC. Can I just say, as a twenty-something male, that I'm quite pleased with TNR's transformation under the leadership of Frank Foer? Last week, not only did I have a piece in the magazine, but the cover featured an Anna Nicole Smith nipple slip. This week, we get a stylized Paris Hilton look alike. Counterintuitive wonkery never looked so good. Except at The American Prospect, of course, which you should subscribe to lest you miss our upcoming "Men Of The Economic Left" cheesecake calendar. I hear we're going to make Fast Leon don a thong...

--Ezra Klein

DING-DONG, THE BILL IS DEAD. Looks like the immigration "compromise" is dead in the water. Good. Democrats and a handful of Republicans blocked the GOP's efforts to amend the legislation into an unrecognizable mess by a 60-38 vote, and now the whole thing's off the table. Just more evidence for Amy Sullivan's contention that the post-2004 Democratic minority is an effective opposition force that has seen far more victories than defeats. Standing firm against an already mediocre bill that James Sensenbrenner would've made reprehensible during the House-Senate conference may not seem like a major triumph, but four years ago, Democratic unity would have rapidly collapsed and the GOP would have rammed through whatever dystopic enforcement scheme their most nativist members could dream up. This week, Democrats blocked that attempt, and the country will be better for it.

--Ezra Klein

SUCH SUBTLETY, SUCH NUANCE. As Greg Sargent notices, a leak is a leak is a leak, except when the leaker is the president. But in some ways, the more interesting wrinkle of this little saga is the ways a lie isn't a lie when the administration utters it. As others have noticed in the past, this crew deceives, misleads, and insinuates, but they rarely, rarely, lie. Take Bush's famous statement from the investigation's early days:

"If there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is," Bush told reporters at an impromptu news conference during a fund-raising stop in Chicago, Illinois. "If the person has violated law, that person will be taken care of.

Update As Al notes in comments, the leak in question was from the National Intelligence Estimate, not Plame. My mistake.

--Ezra Klein

PHILOSOPHICAL CLEAN-UP. Tom Friedman says the Bush administration "tried to make history on the cheap. But you can't will the ends without willing the means. That is Strategic Theory 101, and ignoring it is not just some 'tactical error.'" It's not Strategic Theory 101, it's Philosophy 101 (or, in my case, Philosophy 168) -- Friedman's quoting Immanuel Kant here, not a military strategist.

Moreover, the upshot of that doctrine is to cut against Friedman, not Rumsfeld. The point is that if you will an end -- the liberation of Iraq by force of American arms -- you're committed to taking responsibility, morally, for the means your end necessarily entails. Meaning, in this case, the unilateral invasion of Iraq overseen by the actual government of the United States deploying the resources that were actually at its disposal. Subscribers will recall Harold Meyerson's Friedman section in his war pundits article spelling how far off this mark Friedman's been.

--Matthew Yglesias

A LEAK ISN'T REALLY A LEAK. GOT THAT? The White House appears to have adopted a novel approach to spinning their way out of yesterday's explosive revelations about Scooter Libby's testimony that President Bush authorized the leaking of classified intelligence. From today's Washington Post:

A senior administration official, speaking on background because White House policy prohibits comment on an active investigation, said Bush sees a distinction between leaks and what he is alleged to have done. The official said Bush authorized the release of the classified information to assure the public of his rationale for war as it was coming under increasing scrutiny. (Emphasis added.)

In other words, a leak isn't really a leak. Or it isn't really a leak when President Bush authorizes it. Or it isn't really a leak when President Bush is caught authorizing it. Or something.

--Greg Sargent

CAN'T WIN IF YOU DON'T DISAGREE. I'm sensitive to concerns that there are some districts out there where a robust anti-war stance would create problems for Democrats in the fall. On the other hand, as this story indicates there are some GOP incumbents -- like Chris Shays -- for whom the war is their major vulnerability. But you can't take full advantage of that weakness unless you're really prepared to differentiate yourself with an anti-war message.

For more on fake moderate Shays, visit Midterm Madness. Also, be sure to see the incomparable "Fraud Caucus" article I co-wrote with Mark "Fast Leon" Goldberg. And, of course, subscribe so you can read this sort of awesome print content when it actually comes out.

--Matthew Yglesias

MAN...They're biting my style, yo. Show 'em what's what and subscribe here, instead.

--Ezra Klein

MOVING THE DEBATE LEFTWARD. And this, via Jon Cohn, is why I'm enthusiastic about Mitt Romney's presidential candidacy:

Still, Mitt Romney will say this law makes him a worthy candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. And he's right. Politics should reward officials who accomplish something in office. And while it will undoubtedly annoy some progressives who don't love the plan or think he's taking credit for an idea (and favorable circumstances) that fell into his lap, they should be thankful for this development.

Thankful, because nationally the most important impact of this new law may be on politics, not policy. Once Romney starts boasting about how he achieved universal health coverage in Massachusetts, it will become that much harder for conservatives to demonize the very concept as "big government." Oh, they'll try--and they'll have at least some success. But now Democrats will have this retort: If a Republican governor and leading presidential contender with strong conservative credentials thinks universal health care is a good idea, how radical an idea can it be?

--Ezra Klein

GENOCIDE APPEASEMENT WATCH. In mid-February, I obtained a confidential annex to a United Nations report on Sudan’s progress -- or