MORE MANDATES. Mark makes strong points on possible policy reasons for eschewing a mandate, but is wrong to say that "[t]raditionally, as Ezra well knows, the objection to mandates has come from the left, and it has come in primaries." First, mandates aren't terribly traditional -- their inclusion in high-profile, Democratic universal health care programs is actually rather recent. Next, Mark is largely talking about the Bradley campaign here -- a campaign he was deeply involved in -- and he's certainly right that they got mauled by the Gore camp on a variety of issues, including mandates. But it's not 2000 anymore, the party isn't coming off a president who declared the "era of big government is over," and every one of the major candidates, Obama included, has pledged themselves to a universal plan. The ground has changed. But even as that's happened, it's not changed enough that you're seeing viable proposals using a government mandate. So if you want universality -- and the base certainly does -- you're sort of stuck with the individual mandate.

Further, when evaluating the politics of the situation, it's probably more illuminative to look at how the Left is reacting now, rather than how it reacted in 2000. Indeed, Edwards has received little but praise for his plan -- which includes a mandate and has been offered during the primary. Wyden's been widely lauded for his and it includes a mandate. So whatever the Left's "traditional" take on mandates may have been, it's hard to find evidence that they remain seriously controversial. And I'm quite sure that Obama intuited all this because, merely a year ago, when he was still but a hyper-popular liberal Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama channeled this conventional wisdom and called for...a mandate. Now that he's running for president, that approach has been jettisoned -- and not in favor of a government mandate (more liberal), but in favor of nothing at all. We can speculate about why that may be (and I think Mark gives the most compelling and generous interpretation from a policy standpoint), but it's hard to believe, particularly looking at the rest of his plan, that it came as part of a shift left.

--Ezra Klein

BROWNBACK'S PATHETIC ATTEMPT AT MODERATION. Poor Sam Brownback. Like so many conservative leaders, he has to struggle with appeasing the flat-earth wing of his base while attempting to maintain some intellectual credibility. And for anyone in that position, there is no right answer to the question of whether you believe in evolution. Apparently realizing that denying outright the overwhelming scientific consensus might get him branded as a marginal candidate, Brownback took to the pages of the New York Times op-ed page today to clarify an answer he offered during the Republican presidential debate that he does not believe in evolution.

To someone who doesn't follow the debate closely, Brownback's explanation that he accepts micro-evolution (changes within species) and that he doesn't necessarily believe God created humans in their present form in six days a few thousand years ago, might make it sound like he isn't too crazy on the subject. Don't be fooled, his hair spltiting is the standard among intelligent design advocates. As it's nearly impossible to deny micro-evolution (since within even one person's lifetime you can see some species adapt to their changing climate), they focus instead on denying macro-evolution -- that new species emerge over time. In other words, they deny our common ancestry with apes. And they bring the philosophical question of How-it-all-got-started-and-why into the science classroom, where it doesn't belong.

Having surveyed a bunch of conservative leaders on their beliefs on the topic myself, I'd say Brownback falls somewhere between Tucker Carlson and Pat Buchanan on the question, which is about what you'd expect from someone like Brownback who has one foot planted firmly in the oligarch wing of his party and one just as firmly in the fundamentalist camp.

--Ben Adler

EVERYBODY LOVES MANDATES ... THIS WEEK. It's true, as Ezra says, that there is now a consensus among health care experts that some kind of mandate, ideally an individual mandate to participate in the health insurance pool, is a key to making any kind of health reform work. He's also right that this consensus is a somewhat recent development.

Ezra attributes Obama's decision to avoid a mandate for now to fear of "the political consequences of mandates (albeit in a general election rather than primary)."

What's wrong is that final parenthesis. Traditionally, as Ezra well knows, the objection to mandates has come from the left, and it has come in primaries. Al Gore objected to Bill Bradley's children-only mandate in 2000, from the left. My colleagues at the New America Foundation, which has been pushing an individual mandate since 2002, have been criticized mostly from people on the left who complained -- correctly -- that the "auto insurance" analogy is entirely inappropriate to health insurance, because unless all the other pieces are in place (community rating, guaranteed issue, and adequate subsidies) the individual mandate alone is a trap. (New America's plan has become much more robust in recent years, putting the individual mandate in the context of a complete system.) As recently as January, Schwarzenegger's proposed mandate was being attacked from the left as "criminalizing the uninsured."

What Gore warned about in 2000 -- that Bradley "would have a mandate for parents to buy insurance in the private market with a subsidy. Will hard-pressed parents purchase benefits anywhere nearly as generous as those Medicaid provides? Will they feel like they can? Or will they be forced by circumstances to use the subsidy to get more limited care?" -- was also a legitimate practical concern. If you put a mandate in first, but don't have the subsidies and structure right, people will be trapped.

I'd prefer to have the mandate built in up front, but Obama's wariness of it could be more than just general-election cautiousness. It could, and I'm speculating here, reflect a healthy understanding that we are wandering into the unknown -- anyone who tells you they know exactly how something like the Edwards or Wyden plans would operate in practice is lying -- and there will be all sorts of unintended consequences. If the combination of a generous public plan and a national health insurance exchange to create private sector options doesn't do enough to expand coverage to almost everyone, then there are two variables to play with: One could increase the subsidies or impose a mandate, or both. I would assume that in the end a mandate will be necessary, but I think there's a case to be made for avoiding the technocratic hyper-certainty that has been the Achilles Heel of liberalism.

--Mark Schmitt.

MRAP REVISITED. This is not surprising.

New military vehicles that are supposed to better protect troops from roadside explosions in Iraq aren't strong enough to withstand the latest type of bombs used by insurgents, according to Pentagon documents and military officials.

As a result, the vehicles need more armor added to them, according to a January Marine Corps document provided to USA TODAY. The Pentagon faced the same problem with its Humvees at the beginning of the war.

--Robert Farley

NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. More support for the view that President Bush will not be withdrawing troops from Iraq during his time in office comes in the form of this disturbing anecdote in The Dallas Morning News this morning, which was forwarded to me by a liberal writer. Syndicated columnist Georgie Ann Geyer writes:

[T]here is not much real give in the administration's policies. True, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other American diplomats met Memorial Day weekend with the Iranians in Baghdad (a good first move but limited, since the Iranians have most of the power because of our incredible stupidity in Iraq). But by all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

B-H B.S. Recall that David Ignatius wrote an op-ed last week championing the Bush administration's trial-balloon interest in resuscitating some of the Baker-Hamilton Commission's recommendations for Iraq, and wagging his finger at "partisans" like Nancy Pelosi and the president himself for standing in the way of a bipartisan solution to the Iraq "impasse." Now that Bush has made explicit his intention to follow a few of the commission's recommendations (as he said Thursday, "Actually, I would call that a plan recommended by Baker-Hamilton, so that would be a Plan B-H."), Ignatius is back at it.

What drove the White House discussion of post-surge strategy was a sense that the political timeline in Washington was out of sync with the military one in Baghdad. The U.S. clock needed to be slowed down, while the one in Iraq needed to be speeded up. The best way to synchronize clocks, officials concluded, was a less ambitious but more sustainable policy -- one that emphasized the training of the Iraqi army, U.S. Special Forces missions against al-Qaeda, a diplomatic opening to Iran and a reduction in U.S. troops. The shorthand name for this policy was Baker-Hamilton.

On the domestic political front, White House officials realized that last week's victory in passing a war-funding bill could be short-lived. Funding would run out again at the end of September, and there were growing signs that Republicans would join Democrats in calling for a troop withdrawal. Before that September vote, Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, would be making a crucial progress report. It was unlikely that Petraeus would be able to proclaim such glowing success that congressional criticism would disappear, and in any event officials were wary of putting all their eggs in that basket. Political reality required a reduction in U.S. troops during 2008, rather than an open-ended surge.

And thus it's clear what the actual motive for the administration is in talking B.H. up as we head into the fall: As Ignatius puts it, "While the Democratic leadership isn't likely to join Bush in a top-down push for consensus, White House officials hope that by embracing Baker-Hamilton, they can begin to build out from a new center. The goal is a policy that has broad enough support that it could last into the next administration." [emphasis added] B.H. is going to offer not a cover for a bipartisan coalition to support Bush's policy, but rather the pretext for Republicans in Congress to continue to support the war rather than join Dems in pushing for withdrawal. As for Bush's policy aim in Iraq, it's merely to keep kicking the can down the road, attempting the same goals -- "reconciliation," "training," etc. -- the U.S. has attempted to achieve for four years now. More of the same, and war without end.

People keep wondering "how" Republicans are going to be able to sustain their support for the occupation (and many people seem to be convinced that that support will end in September); this is exactly how it's going to happen, and with commentators like Ignatius and David Broder nodding in approval, it'll be relatively easy to do.

--Sam Rosenfeld

FROM DISSING THE SYSTEM TO FIXING IT. John Harris interviewed Al Gore before his lecture and book signing last night at GWU, sponsored by bookstore Politics & Prose. As we've noted repeatedly on this site, Gore doesn't seem likely to be running again. Harris reports:

When the inevitable question came -- his intentions about 2008 -- he said politics "rewards a tolerance for artifice, repetition, triviality that I don't have in as great supply as I might have had when I was younger."

Gore these days sounds more like a social commentator than a politician, and he says that is not an accident. From a liberal perspective, Gore has been prescient on large questions -- global warming, the role of technology, and the Iraq war -- but he said it does not necessarily follow from that that he should seek the presidency.

"I think there are lot of things about politics as it has evolved that I'm not really that good at," he said. "Some people find out earlier in their lives, that they're not good at what they've chosen to do." He interjected a self-deprecating laugh. Then he turned serious again. "And I'm not being falsely humble. I think there are some things I do quite well ... There are a lot of things about the political system that I don't enjoy and I think those are mostly the same things that I don't think I'm necessarily good at."

That sounds plausible. For the first 25 years of his public career, Gore was a restless and unconventional mind disguised by one of the most painfully conventional public images in politics. It is too late in this election cycle -- and perhaps in any future one -- for Gore to run a conventional campaign. The media advisers and fundraisers and strategists have all moved on to others.

But Gore finished the conversation with the hint -- not stated, just implied -- that he still might be tempted by the prospect of an unconventional campaign, one that uses the Web and ideas to create a new political order.

"The solutions to what ails American democracy will take some time and will have to come from a broad engagement by people who do use the new opportunities and tools that are becoming available," he said.

"And I think that out of that evolutionary process there may emerge opportunities for new kinds of candidates in both parties."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

OBAMA AND MANDATES. Great catch by Ben Smith over at The Politico, who finds Obama telling an audience last year, "It's time to accept that we must offer some form of basic health care to every American. Health care should be like auto insurance - mandatory for all Americans. A larger pool of subscribers would drive down health care costs." He's right! So what changed?

Well, he's running for president. And mandates make some folks uncomfortable. They're somewhat controversial, and they can force health care purchasing on individuals who would prefer to remain outside the system, or covered by barebones plans (at least until they get in an accident, and we all pay for their care). For that reason, I'm unconvinced that by Smith's interpretation of this, that "it's interesting to see that [Obama's] instinct was apparently toward individual mandates, before his wonky friends at the University of Chicago convinced him that there's a better -- if, perhaps, less easily sold -- way."

My hunch is that it's quite the opposite. I know nary a health policy expert who doesn't believe you need a mandate of some kind. But I know more than a few who are leery of the political consequences of mandates (albeit in a general election rather than primary). My guess isn't that anyone convinced the campaign that there's a better way than mandates -- Obama certainly didn't offer an alternative policy solution -- but that someone convinced the campaign that they'd be better off politically without a mandate. That's actually a very defensible approach, just not one I agree with.

I should add,that Obama's staff is firm in upholding that they'd happily revisit the mandate issue later on, and that Obama's commitment is to full coverage by the end of his first term. I'm skeptical, though, that after passing a universal health care bill that fails to deliver on its promises, Obama will have the capital to come back to Congress in three years and ask for a purely punitive measure to enhance coverage. Maybe I'm wrong.

--Ezra Klein

NOT "FREE MARKET." JUST PRO-(REPUBLICAN DONOR) BUSINESS. It's always useful when an issue comes along that causes a conflict between the GOP's nominal "free market" principles and its more frequently evident "pro business who give us lots of money" principles. Just as "pro-lifers" will virtually always choose the regulation of female sexuality over the protection of fetal life, such conflicts are almost always resolved in favor of the latter. Rick Perlstein provides a particularly striking example of this, noting that "The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease." In other words, in a case where market incentives are actually working to increase consumer safety, the administration wants to actively prevent small businesses from threatening the profits (and, horrors, increasing the safety records) of big business. Your modern Republican Party:as Rick sums it up, "state socialism in defense of Mad Cow." (See also the fact that a statist with a jones for arbitrary executive power can be called the GOP's "libertarian" candidate as long as they're nominally pro-choice.)

--Scott Lemieux

JUSTICE BRENNAN'S EVIL TWIN. The small band of people arguing that Sam Alito would be anything but a catastrophe for liberal constitutional values had very few arguments available to them, given the overwhelming evidence that he would be (including the extremely high esteem in which Alito is held by those who despise the achievements of the Warren and early Burger Courts.) One strategy, favored by Ann Althouse, was to assert that liberals "may discover that there are varieties of judicial conservatives, just as there are varieties of political conservatives, and that Samuel Alito is not Antonin Scalia" without citing a single area of law where Altio is likely to be more liberal than Scalia. (The reverse, conversely, is quite easy.) Obviously, this is not worth taking seriously. The other strategy -- favored by the likes of Akiba Covitz and Stuart Taylor -- was to claim that Alito would be to the left of Scalia because he was more "congenial" and less prone to the broad pronouncements and acerbic rhetoric of Scalia. This is both true and entirely beside the point. Yes, his strategy is to avoid Scalia's culture warrior posing and rather -- like a bizarro world William Brennan, gone over to the dark side -- to cobble together precedents while subtly pushing them towards his ideological preferences, with an extra soupcon of bad faith.

His opinion yesterday in Ledbetter is a classic case in point. Alito, before citing a precedent, blandly asserts that Ledbetter's "argument is squarely foreclosed by our precedents" and that "It would be difficult to speak to the point more directly." But the precedent cited -- which involves a case in which a woman resigned because if a discriminatory policy, and then sued for back pay after being hired several years later -- is hardly a "square" or "direct" analogy (or, as Alito claims, "basically the same" argument.) That case dealt with two discrete acts, with the potential discrimination of the first resignation more more transparent than relative pay discrimination between employees. The precedent is a point in the company's favor, but nothing more than that; it's hardly controlling. The Morgan case cited by the dissenters -- which involved non-discrete, ongoing discrimination -- is at least as relevant, and it seems to me much more so. Alito's bland rhetoric conceals characterizations of precedents that are tendentious in the extreme.

So, yes, Altio's measured tones don't have any of the quotable "Kulturkampf" rhetoric of a Scalia opinion; there's nothing about gender discrimination being a glorious American tradition or something. This doesn't make him better than Scalia to people oppose gender discrimination, however. It makes him even more dangerous.

--Scott Lemieux

OBAMA AND AUDACITY. Kevin Drum addresses Ezra's piece today on the Obama health plan and offers a choice excerpt:

His is a plan of almosts. It is almost universal, without quite having the mechanisms to ensure nationwide coverage. It almost offers a public insurance option capable of serving as the seed of single-payer, but it is unclear who can enroll in it, and talks with his advisors suggest little enthusiasm or expectation that it will serve as a shining alternative to private insurance. It almost takes on the insurance industry, but asks for, rather than compels, their participation.

....All the ingredients are in place for this to be a great plan -- a public insurance component, a commitment to universality, an understanding that coherence is better than fractiousness, a willingness to regulate the insurance industry -- but, in each case, at the last second, the policy is hedged before the fulfillment of its purpose. In this, Obama's plan is not dissimilar from Obama himself -- filled with obvious talent and undeniable appeal, sold with stunning rhetoric and grand hopes, but never quite delivering on the promises and potential.

--The Editors

NEW BLOG ON THE BLOCK. New America Foundation fellow Daniel Levy, also with The Century Foundation and an occasional Prospect contributor, has joined the foreign policy blogosphere with new blog on the block Prospects for Peace, which will cover Middle East issues and the Isreali-Palestinian conflict. Check it out.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

FROM RUSTIC TO RUSTY. Powerline's Paul Minrengoff was at a dinner with still-exploring, potential G.O.P. presidential contender Fred Thompson last night and pronounces him a bit rusty. His impressions:

First, Thompson exudes the same great presence and ease of manner in person that he does on television. He's likeable and quick with the good one-liner.

Second, Thompson's instincts are, with the notable exception of campaign finance reform, soundly conservative. This was certainly true on the issues he wanted most to talk about -- the war on terror, economic growth, entitlement reform, and immigration ...

Third, on the evidence of last night, Thompson needs to sharpen his message and his presentation skills. Some of his answers were crisp, but others were rambling and a bit unfocused. Moreover, he was better on generalities than on specifics. If I'm not mistaken, Thompson has only run twice for public office, and his last race was in 1996. In addition, he's not held public office for a while. He may be rusty.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

HIS WAY. The saga of the dueling Hillary Clinton books continues with a highly unusual mid-week "preview" publication of Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.'s New York Times Magazine cover story on Clinton's Iraq war vote and subsequent foreign policy moves. Oddly, the Times fails to disclose at the end of the adaptation from the duo's book Her Way that Gerth is married to a "top" foreign policy aide to one of Clinton's Democratic presidential primary opponents, Sen. Chris Dodd.

Now, in the world of punditry, such ties don't have to bind. People with skin in the game opine all the time. They are rightly called to account when they fail to fully disclose their ties, but otherwise it's not considered an insurmountable problem.

The world of straight news reporting operates by very different rules, however. The Los Angeles Times has deprived the nation of the wonderful news analysis and deep reporting of Ron Brownstein this presidential cycle because he is married to a staffer for John McCain, which could have created the appearance of a conflict-of-interest in his presidential coverage. Instead, he now writes for The Los Angeles Times opinion page, where he's made sure to disclose his wife's role. Granted, the Times Magazine is much more likely than the rest of the paper (Op-Ed page excepted) to publish essays and reports from opinion writers, academics, and others with a background in the political or policy arena. Still, one would think The New York Times' disclosure rules would, at the very least, require a writer married to a foreign policy adviser to a Clinton competitor to disclose this to readers of his critique of Clinton's foreign policy approach.

Gerth, to his credit, disclosed his wife's job at the end of Her Way, and even sat out reporting on the 1996 presidential campaign, during which Dodd chaired the Democratic National Commitee, because of it, according this 2001 Columbia Journalism Review story. Here's his disclosure from the book on Clinton, which Gerth dedicates to his wife, Janice O'Connell, and daughter Jessica:

Since the mid 1980s she has also served as a foreign policy adviser to Senator Christopher J. Dodd, who is a member of the committee.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THANK GOD FOR DIVIDED GOVERNMENT. As Scott noted yesterday, the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision on pay discrimination is disastrous. Employees must file complaints within 180 days of a salary being set, which is simply outside the bounds of common sense. We all know how much secrecy surrounds pay, even in otherwise congenial workplaces. But the Court has decreed that even when there is a pattern of lower raises for women or minority groups that develops over months or years, an individual employee has no legal recourse after 180 days.

The plaintiff in the suit, Lilly Ledbetter, worked for a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama, where she was the only woman out of 17 managers at her level. Although Ledbetter's starting salary was equal to that of her male colleagues, she was given smaller raises and eventually made less than even the lowest-paid man at her level, who started after her.

In a characteristically withering dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg invited Congress to overturn the ruling. According to Congressional Quarterly, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and George Miller immediately signified their intent to do so. As I've written before, Clinton has an excellent track record on workplace discrimination, and recent reporting about her time on the Wal-Mart board of directors suggests a long-running commitment to the intersection of labor and feminist issues. Clinton's proposed Paycheck Fairness Act strikes right at the heart of yesterday's decision, making it illegal to penalize employees for sharing salary information with one another and easier for workers to file complaints of long-term discrimination. And all this despite Mark Penn.

--Dana Goldstein

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Labor lawyer and writer Thomas Geoghegan today makes the case for requiring new citizens to register to vote.

Some of my liberal friends are in shock: "You can't require them to vote, can you?" Of course you can. Other countries, like Australia, make voting compulsory for everybody. And we require people to serve on juries, whether they like it or not, and to give their opinion as to whether one of their fellow citizens should be put to death. But this is not even the same requirement. It is a very proper consideration in a highly discretionary act, i.e., whether to let someone be a citizen. Why should we let in people who are not going to vote? (Recall the days of Tammany, when political machine ward-heelers would meet immigrants at the docks and sign people up to vote right there.) I would not even propose to "enforce" the requirement, or to expel new citizens who failed to live up to this promise: Let them live with the dishonor. But at least we should ask them for a commitment ...

As we become more of a plutocracy, we now tend to attract either (1.) hedge fund managers, high rollers, the super models, and other type A's who still want to keep their places in Majorca, or (2.) the meek and the humble willing to pick up after them and be their valets. OK, I overstate it. But we get more of the people who intuitively sense that they fit in to our plutocracy. We get more of the predators and more of the prey. Who we don't get in the same special way are those who come here because it is the one, last best place -- the only place back in Lincoln's time -- where they were free to cast a vote. Why should we get those people? People can vote anywhere. In that respect America is no longer unique.

No longer can we take it for granted that new citizens want to vote at all. Let's make them do so. Make them take a pledge, for now, even if non-binding, and see if we can't raise the turnout by a few million.

Also published today: Ezra explains the promise and shortcomings of Barack Obama's newly-unveiled health care plan, and how they resemble the promise and shortcomings of the candidate himself; Laura Rozen talks to a participant in a recent delegation of American Christian leaders who met with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and Robert Reich tells us what has been keeping the stock market bullish, and why it can't last.

--The Editors

DOBBS. David Leonhardt's article documenting Lou Dobbs' "somewhat flexible relationship with reality" is an important piece of work. It aptly proves the central, and deeply discomfiting, dynamic of the show, which is that it is governed by a nativist, vaguely supremacist, narrative, and facts, fears, and storylines are twisted and reworked until they fit neatly into Dobbs' ginned-up, anti-immigrant hysteria.

Leonhardt uses, as his example, a recent Dobbs report on the public health crisis that is leprosy. Dobbs suggested there had been 3,000 cases in the last three years. That's wrong: There were 3,000 in the last 30, and under 200 last year. Dobbs offered no correction. The story wasn't really about leprosy, of course. It was about Latin-American immigrants, who are more likely to contract the disease, and who Dobbs wanted to paint as a threat to our precious extremities. He's said that a third of criminals in our prisons are illegal immigrants, when the real number is six percent (lower than their total share of the population). He's brought on racists who explained that "Mexican immigrants had a habit of molesting children [because back] in their home villages...rape was not as serious a crime as cow stealing." As Leonhardt asks, "if Mr. Dobbs's arguments were really so good, don't you think he would be able to stick to the facts? And if CNN were serious about being "the most trusted name in news," as it claims to be, don't you think it would be big enough to issue an actual correction?" What naivete. CNN has found a splash of fear-mongering nativism helps their ratings. The most trusted name in news will happily sacrifice their honor to become the most watched news on cable.

--Ezra Klein

THE LAW OF WAR. Marine Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani is in court today to testify about what happened when a group of Marines went "out of control" in violating the law of war, killing 24 Iraqi civilians, "some of them children still in their pajamas." Chessani is under scrutiny because he didn't report the killings as anything different than the ordinary acts of war. Prosecutors in court are going to ask, how many civilian deaths would it take to raise alarm? In a place where a certain level of violence is expected every day, it will become harder and harder to determine which acts are intolerable. It's likely a question we will be struggling to answer for years to come.

-- Kay Steiger

DOMESTIC CONSUMPTION. Hilzoy points to another in the endless series of empirical studies and professional testimonials indicating that torture is useless for the purpose of intelligence-driven interrogation. There's no value trade-off here; torture is both bad and useless. So why do Republican presidential candidates have such a hard time condemning the practice?

Torture is domestic Green Lanternism. Foreign policy resolve is normally invoked as a value because a perception of strength changes the behavior of foreign countries. If the Chinese understand that we're tough, the story goes, then they won't mess with us. But torture doesn't really have that foreign policy effect. Nations that don't torture are appalled by the fact that we do, and nations that do torture aren't notably impressed that we've joined the club. Indeed, torture has only negative foreign policy effects. Domestically, however, torture conveys the appearance of will. Support of torture signals to a politician's base the will to do grievous harm to some random person in order to preserve a sense of security. Apparently, some significant portion of the U.S. electorate finds this willingness impressive. Until that changes, questions of effectiveness are simply moot.

-- Robert Farley

ELEPHANT HUNTING. I'm admittedly biased because I have written a couple of pieces (as has Ezra) for Ryan Sager's new online politics site at the New York Sun -- not to mention, Sager's book about Republicans' increasingly dicey status in the Interior West, The Elephant in the Room, is an obvious complement to arguments from my own book -- but if you want to find solid, daily coverage of the GOP presidential primary contest, Sager's Latest Politics beat at the Sun is pretty darn good.

I may be reading a bit too much into Sager's posts, but he seems to have an affinity for Fred Thompson, about whose potential entry into the GOP field Sager writes today. Worth checking out.

--Tom Schaller

ON THE ONE HAND-ISM. "The [immigration] compromise, which leaders of both parties struck almost two weeks ago, has met stiff resistance from the left and right of both parties," reports New York Times . "Liberals tend to oppose the section that would add emphasis on admitting immigrants with education and job skills and less on family reunification. Conservatives tend to dismiss the plan as an amnesty bill."

Show of hands: Has anyone seen serious liberal opposition to the education and skills components of the immigration compromise? Because I haven't. And I've been following this pretty closely. There's a fair amount of liberal opposition to the hoops required for citizenship (leaving and reentering the country, say) as opposed to mere legalization, and a ton of anger over the guest worker program, but so far as I can tell, scarcely more than a whisper of worry over moving to a skills-based regime. For the Times to elevate those quiet concerns to parity with the Right's fury over amnesty is a serious misrepresentation of the situation. It does, however, allow them to make both sides look obstructionist in equal measure.

Meanwhile, the article is, in fact, about the asymmetry of opposition -- an asymmetry so fierce that Bush has begun taking on the conservative coalition rather than arguing with the liberals. He knows, after all, who's most upset about this bill, and most prepared to kill it, even if the New York Times seems confused.

--Ezra Klein

WILD MISREPRESENTATION: Following up on Scott's incisive takedown of Reihan Salam's recent piece in Slate, I'd just like to point out that Salam egregiously misrepresents a great piece by Michael Kinsley. Salam writes:

Two years before Fletch infected movie theaters nationwide, Michael Kinsley boasted in Harper's that he was a reverse-snob: Not only did he self-consciously eschew the shmancy Lacoste alligator -- he and his friends sported decidedly down-market discount polo shirts emblazoned with the J.C. Penney fox.

In fact, Kinsley made the same argument about reverse snobbery more recently, also in Slate. Salam should at least try to understand an article before he tries to use it to make a larger point.

--Ben Adler

BETTER CHERRY-PICKED ANECDOTAL DATA PLEASE. I'm never inclined to buy arguments that make broad generalizations about the nature of (as opposed to specific arguments made by) "liberals" and "conservatives" in any case. But I had no doubt that Peter Berkowitz's argument was unserious when he said that "Democrats instinctively want to repeal the Bush tax cuts, establish government supervised universal healthcare, and impose greater regulation on trade." Really, given the opportunity to cherry pick three issues on which liberals march in lockstep you're going to pick trade? David Sirota and Bill Clinton have the same views about NAFTA? Really? As noted here, most of his other examples fare no better. In addition, on abortion he ignores the fact that the most powerful Democrat in Congress is pro-life, while no major Republican Congressional leader is pro-choice... despite the fact that the pro-choice position is the majority position. All Berkowitz proves is that it's easy to establish that liberals have no internal debates when you ignore all their internal debates irrespective of the evidence.

--Scott Lemieux

WOLFOWITZ REPLACED. In non-Barack Obama related news, Robert Zoellick has been appointed head of the World Bank in Wolfowitz's place. Zoellick has a good reputation as a manager and civil servant, and actually possesses some background in international finance and development. Imagine that! Plus, he's got certain less traditional advantages...

--Ezra Klein

HILLARY HATIN', PART 2. A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, which will be released publicly one week from today, has been lumped in with Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.'s nasty new volume Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton. I haven't yet had time to read the review copy of the 628-page Carl Bernstein volume, but my first impression of it based on reading the introductory pages and some key passages makes two things clear: 1) this book will be a much more enjoyable read than the Gerth/Van Natta book and 2) its tone is far more sympathetic than the one Gerth and Van Natta took, even as the reporting is more personal and seemingly invasive when it comes to Clinton's private life.

Another thing worth noting: the Washington Post story from Friday on the book says that the Bernstein book tells the following anecdote:

[O]ut of "anger and hurt" she considered running for governor in 1990, when he presumably would step down to prepare his 1992 presidential campaign. The idea ended after consultant Dick Morris conducted two polls showing she had no independent identity with Arkansas voters and compared her to George Wallace's wife, who ran to succeed him in Alabama -- an analogy that offended her.

At first, after their reconciliation, Bill decided tentatively not to run for reelection as governor, and to focus on his relationship with his family. It might also be advantageous not to be burdened with the governorship if he decided to seek the presidency in 1992. If he ran for governor and lost -- a possibility, since Dick Morris's preliminary polls were showing that 50 percent of Arkansas voters would prefer a new governor -- the presidency might never be attainable.

He and Hillary discussed the possibility of her running to become his successor. Morris conducted two polls to assess her chances. "The conclusion I came to in those polls was that she had not developed her image, and that she was seen as Ms. Clinton. She was not seen as Hillary. Which is hard to imagine, but it's true.["]

UPDATE: Greg Sargent smartly points out that the material on Clinton's electoral ambitions in the Bernstein book directly contradicts the contention in the Gerth/Van Natta volume that the Clintons had a 20-year plan for her to run for the presidency after he did. Says Greg: "It's also worth noting that Bernstein's source for Hillary's thinking is a firsthand one, while Gerth and Van Natta's account was based on a second-hand source. What's more, the Gerth-Van Natta allegation was directly challenged last week when the one person said by the authors to have first-hand knowledge of the alleged plot to make her President strenuously denied its existence to The Washington Post."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

A FINAL CLARIFICATION. The Obama folks called back to further clarify their position on the Health Insurance Exchange Markets. Larger businesses could, if they chose, put their employees into the exchange market, at which point the employees would be able to pick from the menu of private and public options offered therein. There wouldn't be incentives to do this, but if a company so chose, they could sign up with the exchange market on a risk-adjusted basis (risk-adjusted because you don't just want companies with older, sicker workforces taking advantage of the system). That's significantly better than barring larger companies from using the public options, though somewhat less audacious than the Edwards' plan, which actually encourages companies to switch over to the public option. To make this discussion somewhat more explicit, Obama's plan has a public option, but is not a backdoor approach to single-payer.

--Ezra Klein

HOMELESS VETS. Congress is already worried about veterans returning from conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan who simply don't readjust well, but obviously the situation can be more dire than just that. The Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee held a hearing last week to discuss how to prevent homelessness among veterans and the related problem of budget shortfalls faced by the VA. One thing Women's Policy, Inc. pointed out was that the increasing number of women veterans will cause unique challenges:

Vietnam Veterans of America Deputy Director for Policy and Government Affairs Bernard Edelman voiced his support for S. 1384, stating, "[A]s highlighted in the 2006 recommendations made by the [VA] Secretary's Advisory Committee on Women Veterans, a survey of homeless women veterans showed that fewer women veterans are seeking services in VA domiciliary settings and residential treatment facilities because of concerns about safety, privacy, and what is a male-dominated environment. Ideally, separate area/space designed for women veterans will support this need. Flexibility in design will allow appropriate utilization of space. We also advocate that all VA domiciliary settings be evaluated with regard to gender-specific needs related not only to safety and security, but also to positive therapeutic environments and successful treatment modalities."

--Kay Steiger

A DEFICIT OF UNDERSTANDING. The Boston Globe has an article today detailing just how either disingenuous or frighteningly clueless (or some of both) the Republican candidates are on the subject of Iraq and terrorism:

In defending the Iraq war, leading Republican presidential contenders are increasingly echoing words and phrases used by President Bush in the run-up to the war that reinforce the misleading impression that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In the May 15 Republican debate in South Carolina, Senator John McCain of Arizona suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would "follow us home" from Iraq -- a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not.

Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that "these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago. "

However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney identified numerous groups that he said have "come together" to try to bring down the United States, though specialists say few of the groups Romney cited have worked together and only some have threatened the United States.

"They want to bring down the West, particularly us," Romney declared. "And they've come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent."

These comments are all head-spinningly ignorant, as others have pointed out. But they are particularly notable in light of the fact that whenever Republicans criticize Democrats for having alternative suggestions on how to stop terrorism, what is it that they inevitably say? That the Democrats don't understand terrorism. It's the polite version of "you want the terrorists to win," perhaps, but it is quite alarming coming from a group of people that not only display ignorance about terrorism, but wallow in their ignorance, celebrate it, and cast ignorance as the only proper standpoint from which to approach the world. Remember how John Kerry was pilloried for his appreciation of "nuance"?

When John Edwards criticized the idea of the "war on terror," President Bush called him "naive," and others said much the same thing. Sean Hannity said Edwards isn't "up to the task of understanding the nature in the battle in the war that's being waged against us." For good measure, Hannity told an Edwards supporter, "The fact that you support him is frightening to me, because it tells me you don't understand the nature of the times we live in."

So what does it mean to "understand" terrorism? Does it mean that one knows something about the various terrorist groups, what motivates them, where they get their support, how they operate, where their strengths and weaknesses lie? Just the opposite, of course. "Understanding" seems to consist of knowing as little as possible about these things. Even discussing those kind of details means you don't understand. "Understanding" means viewing terrorism in the most simplistic, even childish way one can. Terrorists bad! We kill them! Bang, bang, yay America! Try to imagine what would have happened to Mitt Romney if he had actually said, "In fact, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al Qaeda are all very different groups with very different goals. We need to grasp those differences if we're going to combat all the threats that face us." His opponents would have questioned his terrorist-hatin' bona fides in about twelve seconds.

Why, then, would conservatives frame their criticism of Democrats so often in terms of what Democrats "understand"? For the same reason Fox calls itself "fair and balanced" -- because they know it drives liberals crazy?

-- Paul Waldman

OBAMA'S PLAN: CONCLUSIONS. Alright, finally tracked down the Health Insurance Exchange Markets piece of the puzzle. Obama's plan does force a type of community rating on all insurers -- they can't discriminate based on preexisting conditions, but can discriminate based on age. The markets are less of a regulatory agency and more of a purchasing collective: Think of them as a large company's HR department. Deductibility will still work the same way screwed up way, with employers getting to use pre-tax dollars and individuals and those going through the Exchange Market using post-tax dollars (and thus paying more for the same goods). Subsidies will be what attract individuals to the new markets, and thus what encourages insurers to participate. But they don't have to participate if they don't want to.

What you're basically seeing here is that the Obama campaign believes affordability and ease of access (where do you buy insurance?) problems account for most of the uninsured. If they can fix those issues, they don't need a mandate. If this proves incorrect, they believe they can implement a mandate, or some other coverage-enhancing policies, down the road.

In the end, Obama's plan sections off the health care market. Rather than going towards massive integration, in the way Wyden's plan does by channeling all health insurance through a single agency in each state, or the way Edwards' plan does by creating a Medicare option and then making it advantageous for folks to switch over from private insurance, Obama's plan seeks to correct the places in the market where we see folks having the most trouble getting insured. It builds on the current system much more than it transforms it.

--Ezra Klein

THE OBAMA HEALTH CARE PLAN CONT'D. Been working the phones and have a bit more detail. Here's where we are:

Mandates: I want to be very clear on this point. Obama's plan is not a universal plan. After it is implemented, it will not have 100 percent of the population covered. It will increase coverage by forcing some employers to begin offering insurance, but it is not particularly heavy-handed even there. This is a plan that makes universality possible -- that is budgeted for 100 percent coverage -- but does not use a government or individual mandate to force global buy-in.

The thinking goes like this: You need to get the system set up for universality before you actually demand it -- lest you find coverage remains too expensive, or too inaccessible, for some. So the hope is that by reforming the system, you'll be able to create universality softly, by just making coverage accessible and cheap. If not, the Obama campaign swears up and down that they're committed to 100 percent coverage, and if that means a second round of coverage-increasing policies in a few years, so be it. I don't particularly understand the thinking here, but the end result is this: The Obama plan will not bring us to 100 percent coverage in the short-term. It just won't. But it will take us much further along the road, ensure full coverage for all children, and create a system in which mandates could be more easily added later on.

The Public Option: Unlike in the Hacker or Edwards plans, the public option is not a general purpose insurer. Major companies cannot choose between insuring their employees on the private market and buying into the national program. Rather it is an insurer of specific groups, in the way Medicaid covers many of the poor, or SCHIP is targeted at children. In this case, it's looking at small businesses, the self-employed, the unemployed, and those employed by companies who don't offer insurance.

Employer Responsibilities. When large employers don't offer insurance, they'll have to pay into the national plan. But that's a penalty payment, not an alternate method of ensuring employees. Their workers will have to purchase their own insurance.

Insurance Markets. I'm still searching for an answer on whether the insurers will have to participate in the regulatory structure (the national health insurance exchange). In my opinion, this is key, as an optional program will just invite its own destruction as insurers work to undercut it from the outside, just as they did with the original Blue Cross, or the Washington state reforms in the 90s. Will let you know when I achieve clarity. Any other questions folks have?

--Ezra Klein

WYDEN ON OBAMA. Just got this press release from Wyden's office, which surprises me by making some fairly sharp criticisms of the Obama plan, at least in its current form:

There also are, however, some key differences between our plans: first, the Obama plan calls for a single, national health insurance exchange to monitor insurance companies offering coverage. While it's important to have minimum national standards, I'm not sure creating a new federal bureaucracy is the best approach. By contrast, the Wyden-Bennett legislation would allow each state the flexibility to innovate as long as minimum federal standards are met.

The Obama plan also relies heavily on the current employer-based system which leaves workers at risk of losing their health care if they lose or change their jobs. It also puts U.S. companies and workers at a disadvantage in the long-term when they have to compete in a global economy against overseas companies whose workers get their health care paid by their government.

Finally, it's not clear if the Obama plan does anything to change the current Federal tax code that gives the biggest tax breaks for health care to the affluent and subsidizes inefficiency.

--Ezra Klein

COURT PROTECTS GENDER DISCRIMINATION. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg notes, the evidence of gender discrimination in the case of Ledbetter v. Goodyear, decided today by the Supreme Court, is unambiguous:

Lilly Ledbetter was a supervisor at Goodyear Tire and Rubber’s plant in Gadsden, Alabama, from 1979 until her retirement in 1998. For most of those years, she worked as an area manager, a position largely occupied by men. Initially, Ledbetter’s salary was in line with the salaries of men performing substantially similar work. Over time, however, her pay slipped in comparison to the pay of male area managers with equal or less seniority. By the end of 1997, Ledbetter was the only woman working as an area manager and the pay discrepancy between Ledbetter and her 15 male counterparts was stark: Ledbetter was paid $3,727 per month; the lowest paid male area manager received $4,286 per month, the highest paid, $5,236.

The effect of Sandra Day O'Connor being replaced by Alito is particularly stark in this case. O'Connor -- who was offered only secretarial jobs after graduating third from her Stanford Law class -- had a good record on gender discrimination, while Altio's record on both gender issues and civil rights claims more broadly is atrocious. The useful idiots who claimed Alito was a moderate notwithstanding, his vote in this case was inevitable; I held out a shred of optimism that Thomas and Scalia might defer to the EEOC based on the former's opinion in the Morgan case, but this was apparently hopeless optimism. Although these kinds of cases flay under the radar, this is a major way the Alito-fied Court will work to advance bad outcomes. Republicans don't have to modify or repeal civil rights legislation, and the Court's needn't strike it down; the courts and/or the executive branch can just gut the legislation by making it difficult to enforce in ways that don't attract public attention.

To end on a slightly less defeatist note, as Ginsburg did, because this is a case of statutory interpretation Congress can respond to the Court by changing the language of the statute to override the Court's unduly narrow interpretation. They should start working to do so immediately.

--Scott Lemieux

THE OBAMA HEALTH CARE PLAN. The Obama health care plan is out, and I'm still working my way through it, partially because some of the details don't yet seem to exist. But here's the gist: The plan is centered around a new regulatory agency called the National Health Insurance Exchange, which is both responsible for regulating the insurance industry (more on this in a moment) and administering the new public insurance program Obama's plan creates. That's a big deal -- one of the real tests of seriousness for the new plans is whether they create a public insurance program, and Obama's does. Unlike Edwards' and Jacob Hacker's plans, he doesn't use Medicare as the basis for the program, but instead creates an entirely new public insurer.

Here's the catch: The Obama plan does not set the public and private plans in competition with each other, as the Edwards plan does. Rather, the best way to think of it is as a two-track plan. The first track extends the new public program to the self-employed, small businesses, and the uninsured. In other words, the public plan is open to those who are currently disadvantaged in the insurance market -- it is not a new insurance market unto itself. That said, if it proves popular and effective, it would be trivial to expand it in the future, letting all businesses, or all individuals, buy in.

The second track is a restructured insurance market. Participating insurers -- and as of yet, it's not clear to me whether insurers have to participate, or whether their participation would be optional -- will have to offer minimum benefits, spend a certain portion of their budget on patient care (rather than profits and advertising), be barred from discriminating on health history, and be forced to justify large premium increases. Employers will have to either pay into this market, or pay into the national plan.

From there, Obama has a lot of the normal additions of preventive health care, electronic medical records, chronic disease management, etc. A notable omission is any sort of mandate for adults: This is a plan that would make universal coverage affordable and feasible, but it is not a plan that create universal coverage. It will undoubtedly cut down on the number of uninsured, but without some sort of individual or government mandate, it won't create 100 percent coverage. The Obama campaign's decision to omit a mandate is a puzzling one, both from a policy perspective -- you want the largest possible risk pool -- and a political one. His plan, unlike others, is not truly universal, it's simply possibly universal.

But I'm actually less concerned about that then certain other features of the plan. All the information I've got is missing a few key details which will decide if it's a very good plan, or a very unrealistic one. Here, for now, are the unanswered questions:

1) Who can participate in the public option? It says small businesses at one point, then suggests that all businesses can buy in if they so choose. If the public insurer is confined to currently disadvantaged groups, it will be considerably less transformative than if it's an across-the-board option. And how it's funded, how much premiums are, and what percentage of payroll employers would pay in decides how likely it is to emerge a viable alternative option. But for now, this doesn't look like backdoor single-payer in quite the way the Edwards or Hacker plans do.

2) Is the insurance exchange mandatory? The plan is unclear on this, too, but it's the crucial point. If all insurers have to register and submit to the exchange's guidelines to remain in business, then it can actually reform the industry. If participation is optional, the plan will fail, just as a similar plan failed in Oregon in the early-90s. I have trouble believing the Obama team would leave this up to insurer goodwill, incentives, or even access to large markets, but it's possible, and no real evaluation of the plan's chances can be offered till we achieve clarity on that point.

3) How do we achieve universality through it? Why is the plan better off without provisions for universality from the start? And what are the subsidy levels? Until we know how much premiums will actually be, we can't even get the actuaries to estimate what take-up will be.

I'll try to get answers on all this and report back. The plan, I should be clear, has just about all the elements of a very good proposal. There are just some odd elements that lack clarity, but are crucial to its success. Props to the Obama team for coming out with a public option and serious insurer regulation, though.

--Ezra Klein

DENIAL OF SERVICE. Estonia has been under assault:

When Estonian authorities began removing a bronze statue of a World War II-era Soviet soldier from a park in this bustling Baltic seaport last month, they expected violent street protests by Estonians of Russian descent.

What followed was what some here describe as the first war in cyberspace, a monthlong campaign that has forced Estonian authorities to defend their pint-size Baltic nation from a data flood that they say was set off by orders from Russia or ethnic Russian sources in retaliation for the removal of the statue.

This has been interesting for a few reasons. On the geopolitical stage this seems to be yet another demonstration by Russia that it is still willing and capable to throw its weight around in the near abroad, without much apparent concern for international opinion. The Estonians and some neutral observers are convinced that the attacks are state-orchestrated, although it should be noted that especially in a situation as emotionally packed as this (the initial dispute regarded Russia and Estonia's roles in World War II), such orchestration might not be necessary.

Probably more important is the Russian method, which is opening up new avenues for inter-state bullying. The attacks by Russia have caused genuine property damage and economic loss in Estonia. Facing a denial of service attack is obviously preferable to fending off cruise missiles, but the disruptive effect can be quite similar. To the extent that economic activity becomes more and more embedded in electronic networks, the ability of attacks to disrupt or destroy these networks will become increasingly problematic, and politically relevant. NATO is already thinking along these lines:

For NATO, the attack may lead to a discussion of whether it needs to modify its commitment to collective defense, enshrined in Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty. Mr. [Hillar] Aarelaid said NATO’s Internet security experts said little but took copious notes during their visit.

Lots of work has been done on "cyber war," the promise and vulnerability of networked military organizations. Less attention has been paid to the economic prospects of cyber warfare, and to the ability of states to exert power and coercion through a new set of tools. When Russia tries to coerce its neighbors through threatening to destroy their economic and governmental activity, it becomes a problem for NATO and consequently the United States.

-- Robert Farley

ELSEWHERE IN THE MUSLIM WORLD. The major east coast dailies have been on a bit of a roll over the past week when it comes to covering the changing (for good and for ill) status of women in the Muslim world. In addition to today's awful news from Syria, there was Michael Slackman's front-pager from before the holiday on the Algerian women's educational revolution -- still worth a read -- in The New York Times and Faiza Saleh Ambah's excellent Washington Post front-page round-up on the new abayas of Saudi Arabia and the slow weakening of Wahhabism.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE NEOLIBERAL'S LAMENT. Richard Cohen spends some time this morning making the case that George W. Bush is not a traditional small government conservative, and is instead something closer to a historically incompetent neoliberal. Well, yeah. It's a bit of a banal point, but worth making occasionally. Indeed, both No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D have their problems, but they cemented liberal ideals into government policy -- tweaking them to be more efficient is a far easier task.

Cohen's other point is much weirder. "For years to come," he writes, "[Iraq] will be cited to smother any liberal impulse in American foreign policy -- to further discredit John F. Kennedy's vow to "pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty." We shall revert to this thing called "realism," which is heartless and cynical, no matter what its other virtues. The debacle of Iraq has cost us -- and others -- plenty in lives. But in the end, it will cost us our soul as well."

You see this lament on occasion, and it almost always suffers from the same internal dissonance exhibited in Cohen's column. Cohen "acknowledge[s] that the war is a catastrophic mistake and was incompetently managed," but he seems disturbed that future policy-makers will shy away from repetition of those mistakes. In other words, he grants the lessons of the war, but laments our willingness to learn them. It's baffling. Particularly so given the foreign policy visions on offer from the leading Democrats, none of which lack for soul. Indeed, to listen to the current crop of speeches, we can expect America to become far more attentive to humanitarian crises and deprivations worldwide, and begin a shift towards retaining our authority through aid and advice rather than military eminence alone. That's a far more liberal, and soulful, approach, but because it implicitly downplays the need for military force, you get all sorts of liberal intellectuals lamenting it. They say they fear realism, which they seem to define as a foreign policy defined by force and downplaying morality, but they're utterly without interest in its obverse, a post-Iraq foreign policy that plays up morality and soft power and approaches force with far more restraint.

--Ezra Klein

AND THE LAND WAS TROUBLED FOR FORTY YEARS. Gershom Gorenberg, visiting the largest Israeli settlement in the Etzion Bloc of the West Bank, gazes at the security barrier currently being constructed to divide the settlements from Palestinian villages.

The barrier will make it far more difficult for Palestinians, including both terrorists and day laborers, to enter Israel and the Etzion settlements. De facto, it will declare the annexation of the Etzion area. It will force Palestinians who live east of the barrier route, outside the Etzion area, to pass through Israeli gates to get to fields on the west -- if on any given day the gates are open. Some 20,000 Palestinians who live in villages within the Etzion area will find themselves inside an enclave, barred from entering Israel proper and only able to reach schools, jobs, or hospitals in Bethlehem, the nearest Palestinian city, through one Israeli-controlled gate. By building the barrier around the Etzion Bloc, rather than putting the fence on the Israel-West Bank border, the government has declared that the settlers' daily safety overrides any possibility of normal life for the area's Palestinians.

"This astonishing landscape that we always saw and thought of as the 'Land of Israel' -- the vineyards and the olive orchards -- will be replaced by the fence," says Dror Etkes, head of Peace Now's Settlement Watch, who brought me here. Etkes' voice is a mix of melancholy and sarcasm. He is mourning for the countryside, and he is mocking those who have settled the West Bank so that the entire biblical Land of Israel stays under Jewish rule even as they dress the land in asphalt and concertina. And I think he is weary from the work of trying to make Israelis notice the occupation -- unless I am only hearing my own weariness in his voice. The occupation has become a malaise, a chronic, degenerative disease. It is not news, but it is destroying us.

The occupation was colonial, and would produce rebellion. Exploitation of Palestinian labor was racist. Settlement would be illegal. Palestinian autonomy would resemble a Bantustan, a creation of grand apartheid. Israel would become an international pariah. These were not the arguments of distant campus radicals enamored of their megaphones; they were the all-too-accurate premonitions of Israeli patriots.

That, and much more, can be found in the new issue. But you can only read it if you subscribe, for just 20 bucks a year.

--The Editors

SICKENING. Let us never again listen to the administration's facile, self-congratulatory talk of liberating Iraqi women without raising also the question of the refugees. War always degrades women. Always. The liberation of woman during the 20th century was one of the greatest non-violent revolutions the world has ever known. But war has always operated on contrary principles, and with results as likely to harm them as free them. From The New York Times today comes this heartbreaking story:

Back home in Iraq, Umm Hiba's daughter was a devout schoolgirl, modest in her dress and serious about her studies. Hiba, who is now 16, wore the hijab, or Islamic head scarf, and rose early each day to say the dawn prayer before classes.

But that was before militias began threatening their Baghdad neighborhood and Umm Hiba and her daughter fled to Syria last spring. There were no jobs, and Umm Hiba's elderly father developed complications related to his diabetes.

Desperate, Umm Hiba followed the advice of an Iraqi acquaintance and took her daughter to work at a nightclub along a highway known for prostitution. "We Iraqis used to be a proud people," she said over the frantic blare of the club's speakers. She pointed out her daughter, dancing among about two dozen other girls on the stage, wearing a pink silk dress with spaghetti straps, her frail shoulders bathed in colored light.

As Umm Hiba watched, a middle-aged man climbed onto the platform and began to dance jerkily, arms flailing, among the girls.

"During the war we lost everything," she said. "We even lost our honor." ...

For anyone living in Damascus these days, the fact that some Iraqi refugees are selling sex or working in sex clubs is difficult to ignore ...

Many of these women and girls, including some barely in their teens, are recent refugees. Some are tricked or forced into prostitution, but most say they have no other means of supporting their families. As a group they represent one of the most visible symptoms of an Iraqi refugee crisis that has exploded in Syria in recent months ...

Inexpensive Iraqi prostitutes have helped to make Syria a popular destination for sex tourists from wealthier countries in the Middle East.

[F]or 25 million women and girls, liberation has a special significance. Some of these girls are attending school for the first time. It's hard for people in America to imagine. A lot of young girls now get to go to school....

The advance of freedom in the greater Middle East has given new rights and new hopes to women. And America will do its part to continue the spread of liberty.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

AND DON'T KID YOURSELF, GROUCHO MARX WOULD TOTALLY SUPPORT UPPER-CLASS TAX CUTS. Memorial Day used to be the unofficial start of the summer movie season, although these days the start day keeps getting pushed back. But for those of you whose Memorial Day weekends involve watching one of the six or seven movies in constant rotation on Turner-owned cable networks, via Roy does Slate has some aesthetic Stalinism for you! According to Reihan Salam Fletch apparently isn't funny not because it's not funny but because...it's too liberal. This is in contrast with Animal House, which is funny because it's conservative, or at least not-liberal. Now, if a Republican Party in which cultural reactionaries have a de facto veto over Supreme Court nominees doesn't immediately cause you to think of Delta Tau Chi, keep in mind that "the boys in Animal House aren't, say, fighting tooth and nail for a living-wage ordinance." Oh. Now, you might be tempted to reply that Fletch didn't really seem to be fighting for liberal policy objectives either, and that the fact that putting on fake teeth and using the name of a famous celebrity isn't terribly funny would seem to have little to do with politics, but keep in mind that the original Fletch had Chase reading several lengthy Aaron Sorkin-penned speeches passionately defending the Earned Income Tax Credit, which you haven't seen because they were ruthlessly suppressed by TBS, but have presumably now been restored in the Deluxe DVD edition. That, or it could be that Salam is putting forward a silly tautology in which every good comedy is "conservative" and every bad comedy is "liberal," as part of the dreary project to evaluate art with the assumption that you can't like it if it can't be reduced to politics you agree with. I report, you decide.

--Scott Lemieux

IF WE LEAVE IRAQ, THEN WHAT? It's a question I've been pondering a lot lately. I know that entertaining doubts about the wisdom of an unequivocal troop pull-out leaves me vulnerable to the ire of the left and the disdain of even some fellow liberals, but these doubts do gnaw at me, as doubts are wont to do.

As well-meaning people scream for an immediate withdrawal, I keep thinking of another Muslim country the U.S. helped break, and then turned away from, leaving behind nothing but a pile of rubble and portable military hardware in the hands of rival ethnic groups. The ethnic groups -- one predominately Shi'ite, and two from opposing schools of Sunni Islam -- turned the Stinger missiles, shells and automatic rifles on each other until the one with the most draconian view of the faith won (more or less) and installed a theocracy (with the support of many of the people, who just wanted order and an end to war). The vacuum left by the U.S. abandonment of the people of Afghanistan, after having armed its warlords to the teeth to serve as our proxies in their war against the Soviet Union, was ultimately filled by al Qaeda, which found the Taliban's Afghanistan a most accommodating landscape from which to launch a global insurgency of terror against the West.

I was against this war on Iraq from the beginning. So nauseated was I by former Secretary of State Colin Powell's "good soldier" act in the lead-up to this dreadful conflict that I am loath to quote with appreciation virtually anything that the man said, but I do think he got this right about Iraq: "You break it, you bought it." We've broken it. We have an obligation to try to fix it.

My comments here are spurred, in part, by this weekend's remarkable edition (starting Monday, available as free mp3 until June 4) of "This American Life," the Chicago Public Radio show hosted by Ira Glass, who asked whether or not some sort of moral obligation follows the U.S. invasion. I think, yes. Do I know how to fix it? No.

Tomorrow, Memorial Day, belongs to the warriors who died for the causes claimed by our leaders, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and elsewhere (including our own soil). Let the days that follow belong to the living -- the wars' survivors, soldier and civilian -- and a plan that equals our professed belief in ourselves as a just and noble people. Call it a matter of enlightened self-interest.

--Adele M. Stan

STOP SUCKING UP TO THE GENERALS: Back in November I argued in TAP that progressives would be well-advised to stop trumpeting every general who opposes the Iraq War, as it subverts civilian control of the military, and sets a precedent we may one day regret. In the new Washington Monthly, Iraq veteran Melissa Tryon makes a similar argument for a different reason. She says that Democrats fail to realize that the overwhelming majority of military members view the generals as out of touch. Seeing the errors so many of generals have made in this war only reinforces their disdain. And so the Democrats' fetishization of the generals' opinions does nothing to help them win converts in the enlisted corps. All the more reason that Democrats should show they can be tough by taking strong stands, not by surrounding themselves with high-ranking officers.

--Ben Adler

HILLARY HATIN'. The Washington Post has a big takeout on two new books on Hillary Clinton that's kicking up a bit of dust today. The Carl Bernstein book, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, which the Post devotes two-thirds of its story to, sounds like the more explosive and closely held one, which is probably why I was able to obtain a copy of Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta's Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, forthcoming from Little, Brown and Company in June, which I started poring through last night.

First things first: this book will not impress you with its narrative flair. Still, Her Way is a perfectly fine delivery system for what information it contains, most of which the Clinton camp is correct to point out to the Post has been reported previously, and whose most provocative allegation has already been denied directly by the source Gerth and Van Natta only quoted second-hand. Reports the Post:

The authors cite a former Bill Clinton girlfriend, Marla Crider, who said she saw a letter on his desk written by Hillary Clinton, outlining the couple's long-term ambitions, which they called their "twenty-year project."

Crider was first quoted about the letter in a book by a former National Enquirer reporter in 2000, at the time describing it as more about Bill Clinton's infidelities and the "little girls" he had. Gerth and Van Natta, however, report that they re-interviewed Crider and that she said the earlier book's account was "not totally accurate." In this telling, Crider described the note as being more about the couple's political plans, with little discussion of their personal relationship.

The authors report that the Clintons updated their plan after the 1992 election, determining that Hillary would run when Bill left office. They cite two people, Ann Crittenden and John Henry, who said Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and close Clinton friend, told them that the Clintons "still planned two terms in the White House for Bill and, later, two for Hillary." Contacted last night, Branch said that "the story is preposterous" and that "I never heard either Clinton talk about a 'plan' for them both to become president."

The Clinton campaign's attempt to "yawn" off the book doesn't give you much sense of its actual flavor, which is too bad, because its opening tone is surprisingly nasty. And yes, I know it's the Clintons we're talking about, so that nastiness should never come as a shock, but these are Timesmen, of whom I would expect better, even in their private efforts. The introductory chapters are jam-packed with the sort of dated '90s aspersions that have been mocked into the ground this decade, as just about every hoary anti-Clinton cliche you've ever heard -- and some you thought were anti-Gore cliches! -- is trotted out and applied to events across the span of Clinton's life. You almost feel bad for the authors for failing to follow the change in the media climate. These tropes are deployed at such regular intervals in the early parts of the book that the effect is ultimately somewhat comical, as in the below, from an early chapter:

Hillary's commitment to carefully selecting a persona that would suit her best is revealing partly because of the determined and calculating way that she went about it. She wanted to weigh every pro against every con, consider each possibility from every angle. Her letters...show...an almost scientific devotion to self-creation.

A comment on her decision to run for the Senate from New York? Her time in the White House? Or maybe her new quest for the presidency? Nope. None of the above. That's the authors' take on Clinton's sophomore year at Wellesley College. And the book goes on like that. It manages to cast a single, retrospective, cliched interpretation on diverse events across the course of her life. I guess that's how you sell books -- publishers are more likely than newspaper editors to encourage reporters to arrive at conclusions that exceed what their reporting reveals, and that cast a consistent frame on varied material that can be interpreted any number of ways. To be fair, the tone does get more objective and less editorial as the book goes on. There's less about how she "exaggerate[d] her past accomplishments," "said one thing and [did] another," or "left former friends and allies on the side of the road" -- and more about the details of her Whitewater transactions and time in the Senate.

WhiskeyFire has more on Gerth's history with the Clintons, Yglesias mocks the book with appropriate vigor, and non-partisan Marc Ambinder concludes: "It's hard to imagine we'll be talking about these books in August."

UPDATE: Actually, Jeff Gerth no longer works for The New York Times. The New York Observer reported in January 2006 that he "left the Washington bureau via buyout last month," making him a former Timesman.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TERM LIMITS AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION. Brad Plumer reads Tom Goldstein's astute analysis of pending changes to the court and proposes term limits: "The fact that, say, Mitt Romney could nudge out Hillary Clinton by a percentage point or two and then bring about a constitutional revolution seems fairly absurd, and a decent argument in favor of term limits for Justices, no?" One thing to add is that the revolution on the Court hasn't tracked changes in the electorate with nearly the precision that is often assumed. Since Roe was decided, there have been eight presidential elections and Democrats and Republicans have each won the popular vote four times. And at the Congressional level, Democrats have emerged with control of the House after eleven of those elections, Republicans in just six, while the Senate has been evenly split with each party winning control eight elections (counting 2000 as a tie because of Jeffords.) That doesn't sound like the basis for a massive conservative shift at the Supreme Court. Because of the randomness of the appointment process and some anachronistic anti-democratic features of the Constitution, however, Republicans have picked most of the justices. If we can't get rid of most of the latter, we can at least change the former to make the Supreme Court track political changes a little more closely.

Of course, as the cross-ideological support for term limits suggests, in the long run Supreme Court term limits won't systematically benefit either party. They're desirable because they make sense; most modern constitutional courts have some form of non-renewable fixed term because it's a better system. Appointments should be divided evenly between Presidents rather than distrusted randomly, and we shouldn't create incentives to appoint younger justices purely for political advantage.

--Scott Lemieux

WHAT MORE COULD BE DONE? Like most of us who oppose the war, I'm disappointed with how the vote turned out yesterday. But I'm not exactly sure what more folks would have had the Democrats do. The political invulnerability of President Bush is, I think, a reality that hasn't quite penetrated the punditocracy. Bush is never running for office ever again. He has no political heir to protect, and is clearly uninterested in the future fortunes of the Republican Party. He is massively unpopular, and his agenda is utterly stymied in the Democratic Congress. He can literally veto the spending bills forever -- Congress has absolutely no leverage against him. And the American people, at least as I read the polls, will not support the defunding of the troops. Maybe Congress could have forced a second veto, but the idea that they could continually force Bush's veto and that would result in an eventual win seems wrong.

Meanwhile, I'm wary of wrapping opposition to the war in the guise of the troops. I'm certainly in agreement with David Sirota's anger over the political handicapping that has not a word for "how many American troops will be killed or maimed between now and [September]," but it's also true that, as Spencer Ackerman explains, the troops have their own voice on this, and they're not clamoring for withdrawal. So far as continuing the war goes, that's neither here nor there: The war is a bad idea because it's a bad idea, and it must end. But tying that sentiment too closely to the perceived desires of the troops could be dangerous.

--Ezra Klein

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Linda Hirshman takes on the "on ramp" myth currently being peddled to women -- the idea that it's increasingly easy to opt back in to a high-powered career after taking years off to raise kids. Terry Samuel warns that if any of the domestic political elements that first led us to go into Iraq influence the fight over getting out of it, we're in trouble. And (posted late yesterday), Daniel Levy explains the substantive trouble with the "benchmarks" strategy on Iraq.

--The Editors

EDWARDS HATIN', PART II. Ezra's post below about parts of the DC establishment having it in for John Edwards is very interesting, and the second element to this is the very similar feelings that seem to be evident among the press corps. I can remember a conversation I had with one prominent old-line liberal columnist about Edwards back in 2003, when he explained that the general sentiment among the cognoscenti, one he obviously shared, was that Edwards was just too big for his britches.

That feeling doesn't seem to have gone away. I don't think it's an accident that the guy with the populist campaign is the one getting pummeled relentlessly over every little thing that could possibly indicate he isn't a real reg'lar guy. I did a Nexis search on "John Edwards and haircut" for the last month and got 488 hits. Reporters are obviously finding any excuse they can to throw that into every story, the little dig meant to undermine whatever argument Edwards is making at a particular moment. He's probably starting to feel like Al Gore circa 1999 -- reporters just think he's a phony, and they aren't going to let it go. The $400 haircut is the "Al Gore said he invented the internet" of 2008.

What's odd about this is how the press is always so indifferent to evidence that Republicans are posing as ordinary folk; indeed, it seems like the more transparently fake a Republican's average joe credentials, the more likely they are to praise his "authenticity" (see Bush, George W.). Back in April, Noam Scheiber offered a compelling explanation for the electoral appeal of phony average joe-ness: voters aren't turned off when they find out that Fred Thompson is not a down-home fella but someone who was a high-priced Washington lobbyist for a couple of decades, because if they ever got rich, they'd like to think they'd still be driving a pickup truck and eating peanut butter sandwiches instead of mixing with the snobs on Martha's Vineyard. So it's OK if it's fake.

The difference with someone like Edwards, though, is that he actually has a substantive populism to go along with whatever symbolic efforts at populism he may make. That may be what really sticks in the craw of the chattering class. They're completely down with red pickup trucks, praise of country music and NASCAR, etc. -- they may not partake of those particular things themselves, but they nonetheless believe that they constitute the accoutrements of "real" America. But start talking about poverty or say you have no problem with single-payer health care? Then you obviously can't be trusted.

--Paul Waldman

BIRTH CONTROL "IS A PESTICIDE." More reasoned discourse from America's profoundly serious and morally superior pro-life movement, this time from National Abstinence Clearinghouse Sweepstakes spokesperson Leslee Unruh. You will not be surprised to learn that Unruh and her spouse were featured "experts" of the uber-crackpot South Dakota Forced Pregnancy Task Force. More on Unruh here.

[Via Feministing.]

--Scott Lemieux

SPEECHES. Random thought from the Edwards' speech the other day: It's no secret that these things are theater, but isn't it time we did away with speeches? Not the televised sort, of course, as they bring the pol's ideas to a broad audience. But when you appear at the Council on Foreign Relations and distribute a text, there's really no value added by mouthing the words for the next 40 minutes. Better by far would be to give out the pages, let everyone read for a spell, then sit down for a Q&A on the policy. This would seem particularly true for politicians like Hillary Clinton, who aren't terribly good at giving canned speeches, but are ferociously knowledgeable and capable in give-and-take situations. Barack Obama may want to press his advantage with oratory, but HRC would probably be better served -- particularly given the preexisting narratives about her -- by going off-the-cuff and drilling in her fluidity with the material.

--Ezra Klein

DON'T IMPEACH BUSH. These days, it's begun to seem that the only check on Dick Cheney's plans to destroy the earth is...George W. Bush. As Joe Klein reports, "last December, as Rumsfeld was leaving, President Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in "The Tank," the secure room in the Pentagon where the Joint Chiefs discuss classified matters of national security. Bush asked the Chiefs about the wisdom of a troop "surge" in Iraq. They were unanimously opposed. Then Bush asked about the possibility of a successful attack on Iran's nuclear capability. He was told that the U.S. could launch a devastating air attack on Iran's government and military, wiping out the Iranian air force, the command and control structure and some of the more obvious nuclear facilities. But the Chiefs were--once again--unanimously opposed to taking that course of action."

Cheney, however, has been ceaselessly pushing for a military option. Awhile back, I was in a conversation with two Iran experts, one of whom was arguing that the facts on the ground clearly suggested that the Bush administration was inching towards negotiations and compromise with Tehran. The other expert, who had much more experience inside the administration, only laughed bitterly. "You don't understand," he said. "Dick Cheney will physically kill anyone who so much as mentions a compromise." And now, according to Steve Clemons, Cheney is going a step further and actually trying to create a military conflagaration.

--Ezra Klein

EDWARDS HATIN'. From Mike Crowley's excerpts, it really does look like Shrum's got the long knives out for Edwards, which may or may not be a point in Edwards' favor. Shrum isn't alone, though. Despite the recent affection for Edwards among young, social democrat policy wonk types, there's a deep animus towards him in more mainstream Washington circles. When I did my profile of the guy, Chuck Todd, who's got a pretty good sense for these sorts of things, marveled to me, "for some reason he's pissed off half of DC. I can't tell you why, I don't know. But half of the Democratic elite here in DC just hate John Edwards. It's amazing, some of it's irrational, and the Edwards people know it and see it as a badge of honor, somewhat. Maybe they feel like it's because he didn't play ball, maybe they feel like he forced himself onto the ticket, that he was too brazen in how he campaigned for that second slot. There's no one rational reason, but there's a not insignificant clique of elites in DC who are not Edwards fans, and who are borderline irrational about it. It's not unlike that sort of clique of Republicans and John McCain."

Whether the distaste for Edwards among some establishment types amounts to anything serious or impactful is, for now, an open question. But given Edwards' recent tendencies to run against the Senate, it's only going to get worse.

--Ezra Klein

PUNDIT PROJECTION. To follow up on Sam and Matt, I too find the focus on the short-term reactions to individual votes baffling. As long-term readers will be (all too) aware, one of my hobbyhorses is the tendency of law professors to assume that public reaction to Supreme Court decisions is based on the craftsmanship of the Court's jufiscatory reasoning, although the evidence is overwhelming that public reaction is based on outcomes. I think this is something similar -- political pundits seem to assume that since they pay close attention to particular votes that this also matters a great deal to the public. (My favorite recent example was the hand-wringing over the allegedly devastating consequences of Russ Feingold's censure resolution, which if you recall played no role whatsoever in the '06 elections that his party won.) When it comes to the war, it's the big picture that matters, and for people who agree with withdrawal on the merits it will also be good politics in the long run no matter what pundits have to say about it on the Memorial Day weekend of an off-year.

--Scott Lemieux

MITT ROMNEY, CYBORG. This, from Bruce Reed, made me laugh out loud multiple times.

--Sam Rosenfeld

REPUBLICAN MEMORY LOSS SYNDROME. Via AMERICABlog, comes this hilarious spoof:

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THURSDAY THINK TANK ROUND-UP: THE SECOND COMING: Told you this would be a recurring feature.

• An Economy That Puts Families First: "In only a few decades," writes Heidi Hartmann, Ariane Hegewisch, and Vicky Lovell, "we have experienced a revolution in how we raise our children." But public policy has not kept up. The paper is part of the Economic Policy Institute's Shared Prosperity program, and so it's heavy on solutions and international comparisons. Particularly interesting is the section on reducing the number of hours Americans have to work, which is a topic that's rather important, but generally considered outside the bounds of respectable discussion.

• Al Qaeda Strikes Back: Bruce Riedl is a 29-year veteran of the CIA specializing in counter-terrorism and, as of last year, a senior fellow at Brookings. In other words, he's exactly the kind of guy you wish wasn't saying, "Al Qaeda is a more dangerous enemy today than it has ever been before...thanks largely to Washington's eagerness to go into Iraq rather than concentrate on hunting down al Qaeda's leaders, the organization now has a solid base of operations in the badlands of Pakistan and an effective franchise in western Iraq. Its reach has spread throughout the Muslim world, where it has developed a large cadre of operatives, and in Europe, where it can claim the support of some disenfranchised Muslim locals and members of the Arab and Asian diasporas." And that's only from the first paragraph. Of particular note here is Riedl's contention that al Qaeda views American and Iran as something akin to Russia and Germany, and will try to kill two birds with one stone by triggering a war between us.

• Feasible Globalizations (pdf): This is actually an academic paper rather than a think tank report, but when you write the round-up, you can make the rules. Feasible Globalizations is a 2002 paper from heterodox Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, and it's particularly notable in this context for Rodrik's defense -- from the left! -- of temporary guest worker programs, and his very incisive discussion explaining why the politics of immigration favor importing goods rather than labor.

• Back to Muzak?: As a quick warning, I'm going to use this feature to link to rightwing think tank reports as well. Know thy enemy and all that. In this paper, James Gattuso and Thomas Roe from The Heritage Institute argue against the return of the Fairness Doctrine. "Arguments that the Fairness Doctrine is needed because certain types of media are too conservative, too negative, too partisan, or too anything actually strengthen the case against the regulation," the write. "Any law that is targeted at media based on the content of what is being said raises greater constitutional concerns and is much less likely to pass constitutional muster."

• China: Rebalancing Economic Growth (pdf): Writing at the Institute for Internal Economics, Nicholas Lardy examines the gap between the Chinese government's promises to move the country towards consumption-driven growth and their actual efforts to pursue such a path. Currently, China relies on an export model, which is far more problematic for the rest of the world's workforce than a development strategy that relies on the creation and strengthening of larger internal markets. According to Lardy's survey of the evidence, it's likely to remain that way, government rhetoric notwithstanding.

--Ezra Klein

MAUREEN DOWD DOESN'T WRITE FOR IN STYLE. In light of Maureen Dowd's latest idiotic "Al Gore is Fat" column, I think Atrios makes an important point. It's not that there's anything wrong with writing about fashion or gossip per se. The problem is when major news organizations (and their would-be internet equivalents) think fashion writing and gossip constitute political writing. In the 2000 campaign it was the lead reporters and columnists of America's elite newspapers, not just gossip columnists, who were writing about Gore's suits, his sighing, the salaries of (only his female) consultants, and so on. One would think that two terms of George Bush would remind our newspapers that making elections turn on junior-high-school trivia has consequences that are anything but trivial, but given Maureen Dowd's disgraceful ongoing presence on the NYT's op-ed pages sharing her insights about John Edwards's haircuts, Judith Steinberg's troubling lack of makeup, and Al Gore's waistline, one can hardly be optimistic.

--Scott Lemieux

WHO DESERVES TO LEARN? Last week we heard about high school students coloring in class. Today The New York Times reports on New York City's decision to close its four "P-schools," second-rate high schools opened in the 1960s with the intention of hiding pregnant teenagers from the eyes of their peers:

The decision to close the schools came after a six-month study commissioned by the Education Department essentially concluded that the girls, eager to earn high school diplomas despite their pregnancies, had been relegated to a second-class tier of schools that treat them more like mothers-to-be than curious students.

--Dana Goldstein

DISTINCTION WITHOUT A DIFFERENCE. I think Christopher Orr has the goods here regarding Joe Klein and John Kerry.

--Sam Rosenfeld

DEFENDING MY HONOR. The old saying goes that one should never get in a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel. One might say the same about a man whose radio show is carried on 600 stations. But this will not stand:

Limbaugh then attacked Media Matters Senior Fellow Paul Waldman, who appeared on the Today and Scarborough segments: "The hack is presented as an expert. The Media Matters guy is an all-knowing expert. Nobody's ever heard of him; he's never accomplished anything. He's just a hack working for a front group for the Democrat [sic] Party, and they know this, yet they continue to do this." He asserted: "They know, Dan Abrams knows, and so does everybody else at NBC and CNN, that Media Matters is a [Sen.] Hillary Clinton [D-NY], George Soros, DNC front group." As noted repeatedly, Media Matters -- which is not affiliated with any political party or candidate -- has never received funding from Soros, either directly or indirectly. Limbaugh also falsely claimed that Waldman characterized him as him as a "pig" in his comments on Scarborough Country about the song parody. In fact, Waldman made no such comments about Limbaugh.

Allow me to list some of my recent accomplishments:

• Last weekend I disposed of a dead possum I found rotting in my back yard, without retching.
  
• Just last night, I removed and lubricated the rear hub of my son's bike. After reassembly, the bike was intact, with all parts accounted for and, apparently, still operating.
  
• Not long ago, I successfully completed the 621 steps necessary to obtain the rebate on my cell phone.

Ball's in your court, Rush.

--Paul Waldman

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Alex Rossmiller opines that we need a liberal Dick Cheney -- a Democratic vice president who will assiduously and effectively implement the agenda of today's progressivism.

But imagine a vice president with similar abilities, a comparable profile, and the same inclination to exercise maximal influence in office, but who is progressive and honest rather than reactionary and malevolent. Imagine a vice president more liberal than the president, someone who can reach out to the party's core constituencies, who has credibility to both lead liberals and sell tough administration compromises to the base when warranted. Imagine a vice president who is a pit bull both in the campaign and the administration, but all in service of progressive policies.

Plus, Harold Meyerson calls for a global version of the FDA to ensure worldwide food safety, and Robert Reich suggests we revoke the citizenship of uber-wealthy Americans who use off-shore tax havens.

--The Editors

MAKING RANK. The Chronicle of Higher Education had an excellent article this week about the controversy over U.S. News and World Report's annual college and university rankings. As the WaPo reported this weekend, universities are as usual less than pleased with the power these listings have. The Chronicle fleshes out some of the methodological problems with the rankings: "In 1997 U.S. News hired a consultant, the National Opinion Research Center, to evaluate its methodology. 'The principal weakness of the current approach is that the weights used to combine the various measures into an overall rating lack any defensible empirical or theoretical basis,' the analysis concluded." The article further points out that the survey highly favors private institutions over public ones and that it hasn't adjusted faculty salaries for the disproportionate cost of living across the country. There are, of course, more sound ways to assess the quality of higher education.

--Kay Steiger

ON THE SUPPLEMENTAL. Some folks have asked, why the silence on TAPPED (and TAP Online) regarding the grim endgame to the Iraq supplemental fight in Congress? Fair enough! It's been a travel week for a lot of us and I, for one, am trying to catch up; we do have a piece going up hopefully as early as this afternoon about the problems with the bill; etc. etc. But enough with the explanations and onto some shrillness:

I think Matt Stoller's exactly right here. If you don't have the votes for a withdrawal timeline you don't have the votes, but the lipstick-on-a-pig rationalizations we're hearing from some Democrats (see the excerpts from Stoller) are truly crazy. To be blunt, even if the political calculations offered in defense of voting for the bill were correct (and that's dubious), it's not even an election year. Democrats are discussing all the mean things Republicans might say about them "during the upcoming recess week" as if voters go to the polls on Memorial Day -- and as if the GOP and the president were in the shape they were in, say, five years ago. The instinctiveness of the crouched, defensive posture you see from some of these folks is just sorry (and a contrast with the real sense of momentum that had been notable this year up until now).

At any rate, it's certainly a fundamental problem that the debate over war policy, given our political structure and system, plays out as a fight over troop funding. That being said, Democrats put themselves on the record for the position that funding for this war must be predicated on the implementation of a withdrawal process that a majority of Americans support. With that stipulation removed, it doesn't make any sense to vote for the bill. Let Republicans be the ones to continue funding the president's fiasco.

--Sam Rosenfeld

GPS TRACKING? The body of one of the three missing U.S. soldiers was found south of Baghdad in the Euphrates River yesterday. The soldier has been identified as 20-year-old Pfc. Joseph Anzack Jr. "Hassan al-Jibouri, 32, said he saw the body with head wounds and whip marks on its back floating on the river Wednesday morning."

If these "head wounds" are drill holes from a power tool, a form of torture common to ethnic kidnappings, this could mean that Anzack was tortured to death with a power drill and a whip. This is a common approach among the Iraqi death squads, as this piece from U.S. News & World Report details:

Jaish al-Mahdi [was the] battalion commander who led a 'punishment cell' set up to detain, torture, and kill Iraqis for alleged infractions of Islamic law. Their armed band…is accused of some of the most gruesome crimes in Baghdad, including the kidnapping of 14 Iraqi soldiers in May. When the soldiers' bodies were found, their skulls had been burned with a hot iron, then punctured repeatedly with a power drill. Residents say this group has killed over two dozen people, including a young, pregnant wife whose fetus was cut from her womb.

--Tom Schaller

A MINOR VICTORY: An important, but oft-neglected, frontier in the fight for civil rights is disability issues. But as the New York Times reported yesterday, Monday's Supreme Court decision to allow the families of students with disabilities to represent themselves when challenging their school district's plan for educating their child is a major step forward. In the past courts have often held that parents cannot challenge a school district's plan without a lawyer. Naturally this has the effect of preventing poor families, or sometimes families in remote rural areas, from being able to mount a challenge at all, since they cannot access legal representation. The Court, by a 7-2 margin, interpreted the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act as allowing parents to attempt to ensure that their child's education meets his or her needs. Who could possibly oppose that? Scalia and Thomas, natch. At least "Scalito" isn't proving to be as bad as his namesake thus far.

--Ben Adler

NO IOWA FOR HILLARY? Oh, the intrigue! The New York Times' Adam Nagourney reports that Hillary Clinton's number 2 campaign aide, Mike Henry, authored a memo advising Clinton to skip the Iowa caucuses entirely and focus on states she is more likely to win, such as New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and Florida. How did Nagourney get his paws on the memo? From an unnamed "rival campaign," of course.

The Clinton camp rushed to distance itself from the document, saying it reflected Henry's personal opinion and that the Senator would definitely be participating in the Iowa caucuses.

Any bets on who the rival camp was? Edwards seems the more obvious beneficiary of Clinton skipping Iowa, as it would reaffirm his front-runner status there. But the Obama campaign strikes me as the one more likely to have pulled off this kind of PR stunt.

--Dana Goldstein

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. If you haven't already, check out today's stories on the site: As another preview from the June print issue (free to non-subscribers), Garance discusses the fast journey of a new pop-culture morality tale -- "star says something biased and is forced to prostrate himself in apology and leave the public stage" -- from Hollywood across the country to New York and Washington (a.k.a. Hollywood For Ugly People):

After radio shock jock Don Imus was forced off the air for comments no worse than many he'd made over the past 35 years, his longtime sidekick, Bernard McGuirk, wondered where along the way the rules had changed. The answer was probably Malibu, California, where Mel Gibson was pulled over last July for driving erratically after a night out with some buxom blondes, setting in motion a chain of events that would permanently change the contours of the public debate in America and ultimately lead to Imus' ouster.

--The Editors

BOLDLY GOING WHERE NO CANDIDATE HAS GONE BEFORE. A little late on this, but I hadn't seen it mentioned on TAPPED and I think it's important. Gov. Bill Richardson has put out the most aggressive climate change policy of any presidential candidates so far. Stepping into the void left by Tom Vilsack dropping out (at least until Al Gore gets in), Richardson released an ambitious plan last week -- with higher increases in fuel efficiency and bigger cuts in oil use than any other proposal.

Grist has the details. But Matt zeroed in on what really distinguishes Richardson from the other candidates: his forthright admission that land-use planning and mass transit must play an important role. That is to say, Americans cannot continue to build sprawling suburbs and drive ever longer distances. To say this when you have to win in rural and suburban areas takes a lot of courage. Maybe Richardson figures he's such a long shot he needs to take risks, or maybe its a real stand on principle. Either way I'm glad to see someone finally taking it.

--Ben Adler

DEADLIEST "FRIEDMAN UNIT" YET. Sadly, it's official: With eight days still to go, May 2007 caps the deadliest six-month period for America of the entire Iraq war -- 540 dead, and counting. May also ends the first six-month period during which at least 80 American service personnel (never mind contractors) died every single month. It's been quite a Friedman Unit. Hopefully, there won't be another fatality the remainder of May; but if the pace continues at the present rate, April and May will also become the first back-to-back triple-digit fatality months.

One of the young men who died this month, last Friday to be exact, was Army Specialist Casey Nash of Essex, a blue-collar, working-class community east of Baltimore. He was, in many respects, the prototypical soldier: a young, working-class kid who joined the Army almost straight out of high school. After one extended, 15-month tour, he was recently sent back to Iraq a second time because the Army also extended his service contract beyond Nash's original, 4-year commitment. Nash was home just a few weeks ago, before his second deployment. He spent his leave fixing his sister's car and watching sports with his dad, who confirms that his son "didn't want to be [in Iraq] anymore." (Q: Where are all the war supporters who howled at the handful of conscientious objectors who refused to honor their military contracts when the Defense Department breaks its end of these same contracts?)

The surge is not working, and now President Bush wants to add even more troops? There was an appropriate time for more troops, Mr. Hand-My-Helmet-To-Some-Working-Class-Kid: It was March 2003. Closing the barn door after the horses are out only gets people like Casey Nash -- the age cohort of the president's daughters -- sent into the grinder.

--Tom Schaller

SECRET SPECIFICS. I'm not surprised to learn that Ezra disagrees with my view that candidates should not put forward detailed health policy plans. There is one particular part of Ezra's premise that I want to take on strongly.

Ezra writes, "I wouldn't be comfortable with candidates concealing their bottom line policy beliefs from me." And, "I need to know if a candidate thinks community rating is essential, if a public insurance option is something they'll fight for, if they'll step beyond universality and make cost control an issue."

Here's some news: Candidates don't have "bottom line policy beliefs." They just don't. And it's not because they are evil or deceptive. Very few people -- though Ezra may be one of them -- emerge from the womb with deeply embedded beliefs about community rating, cost control, etc. Sorry. I don't have "bottom line policy beliefs" about those things, so if that's what you want, please, don't vote for me. I understand all these issues, somewhat, but I see them as variables in the huge and complex mess of health care policy and politics, and interdependent with other variables, especially the political.

Let's be more concrete about it. Here's a reasonable point of view about health policy: Suppose Candidate X thinks that a single-payer system, perhaps one based on the VA system, makes the most sense as policy -- would be the most economically efficient, fairest, have the greatest ability to control costs, etc. She thinks that such an idea is probably not yet politically viable, and that if she put it forward in the campaign, she and the plan would be savaged by her opponents, and then she would be ripped apart by the Republicans as "the biggest tax increase in history," "you couldn't choose your doctor," etc. X thinks that 90% of the goals could be achieved by a well-structured system that combines an individual mandate with a structured insurance market and generous subsidies. X hopes that the opposition of the insurance industry and some of the business lobby will be muted by such an alternative, making it possible to win over a handful of Senate Republicans and get something passed.

So what to do, if you hold such a view? You could describe your preferences exactly -- your first choice and your fallback position -- which is pretty much what Jon Cohn suggests in his reply to my reply, where I think we are converging. Or, you could set some basic goals while leaving the details for later -- but identifying some specific health care models that would meet those goals. And not feel obligated to come up with something diffferent from, say, the Edwards proposal, just to be different on specifics. The fact is, as specific as Edwards is being now, he too will adapt to the politics of 2009 if elected.

-- Mark Schmitt

PRE-SUFFRAGETTE CITY. Jill Filipovic points us to this Times article about the new strategy to justify using state coercion to force women to carry pregnancies to term by claiming that women are too irrational to know what's good for them, and offers a modest proposal. I would also urge you to read Reva Siegel and Sarah Blustain (see also here.) Quite simply, these justifications are premised on 19th-century conceptions of women as not being rational agents. And such justifications evidently underpin a great deal of anti-choice discourse and policy (most obviously seen in the fact that the official Republican position that abortion is murder but women who obtain them should be entirely exempt from legal sanctions.) At least Kennedy was decent enough to give away the show, admitting that these assertions are backed by "no reliable data," leaving us with meaningless claims that some women may regret their decision to obtain abortions in retrospect. (If some women regret getting married, can we ban that too? How about anecdotal evidence about women who become depressed after becoming mothers, does this justify state-mandated abortions?) These arguments aren't about women's health; they're about assumptions that women are incapable of making moral judgments, period. That this view is not only part of our national discoruse but has been endorsed by five Supreme Court justices at this late date is dismaying.

--Scott Lemieux

IN PRAISE OF SPECIFICITY. I'm rather a big fan of ambitious preschool initiatives, so props to the Hillary team for coming out with one. There are few more cost-effective interventions than early childhood education, and it's got the added benefit of being a social program that's not opposed by massively powerful, invested interests.

Speaking of major policy proposals, I'm in predictable disagreement with Mark Schmitt's advice that candidates should keep big policy ideas to themselves. And I'm not only in disagreement with it as political advice -- there's no better time to construct public support, understanding, and momentum for a proposal than during a presidential campaign -- but I disagree with it procedurally.

Since I'm not one of those omniscient political strategist types, I don't know whether candidates should, as an instrumental issue, offer detailed policy plans. I have my opinions on the matter, but they're delivered from the safety of my armchair. What I do know is that the media and the voters should demand specificity of some sort or another. Mark writes that, "the key questions about candidates and health care are whether they are willing to pick a fight and who they are willing to fight with. Are they willing to challenge insurers? Are they willing to challenge those elements of the business lobby that will resist higher taxes or an employer mandate? Indeed, the key to health care is not designing the system, but figuring out what fights to pick and how to win them. But it is folly to pick those fights before one is in a position to win them.""

But from the perspective of a voter, it's folly to cast a ballot till I know which fights my candidate is willing to pick. Even if there was evidence that waiting on proposing a detailed health care plan would increase its chances of survival -- and I think the Clinton fight, where the bill came late and then was skewered before the administration had time to explain it, points to the contrary -- I wouldn't be comfortable with candidates concealing their bottom line policy beliefs from me. That isn't to say that I need 50 pages of white paper with an exact subsidy scale and thoughts on departmental reorganizations, but I need to know if a candidate thinks community rating is essential, if a public insurance option is something they'll fight for, if they'll step beyond universality and make cost control an issue. Without access to that knowledge and some sharp, publicly offered commitments, I'm voting blind.

--Ezra Klein

SO, WHO'S NEXT? With the passing of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, whose funeral will take place today, the inevitable question has begun to be asked: who is likely to lead the next generation of right-wing evangelicals? Falwell's colleagues in religious-right leadership -- James Dobson, Pat Robertson and D. James Kennedy -- are all elderly, ailing, or both. What the evolution (if I may) of the religious right over the next decade will look like will depend on the attributes of the next generation of leaders, and the right's intelligent designer may have a few surprises in store.

As gay rights leaders Hans Johnson and Bill Eskridge noted in their recent Washington Post op-ed, one of the unintended effects of Falwell's demonization of gay people was to encourage many religious people to embrace the queer folks in their families and congregations -- to hold them close for the sake of safety and righteousness.

If there's a change a-comin' in evangelical leadership, it may well be one with a very different take on non-heterosexuality. In his very interesting piece in today's Post, Allan Cooperman cites a February Pew poll of self-described evangelicals that show marked differences between the views of those over and under 30: "Acceptance of homosexuality is also greater among young evangelicals. One in three under 30 favors same-sex marriage, compared with one in 10 of their elders."

--Adele M. Stan

THE CHENEY BARRIER. Today in Salon, Gary Kamiya tries to come up with a theory for why Americans have not yet impeached President Bush. He argues:

there's a deeper reason why the popular impeachment movement has never taken off -- and it has to do not with Bush but with the American people. Bush's warmongering spoke to something deep in our national psyche. The emotional force behind America's support for the Iraq war, the molten core of an angry, resentful patriotism, is still too hot for Congress, the media and even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront directly. It's a national myth. It's John Wayne. To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness -- come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. And we're not ready to do that.

And here I thought the caution around impeaching Bush was just because Dick Cheney is vice president, next in the line of succession, and even worse than the president. The Democrats have so slim and recent a governing majority in the Congress that just getting their minimum wage hike through has become a stuggle, to say nothing of getting the president to sign on to an exit strategy from Iraq. Moving to impeach the president would result in a complete scuttling of their own agenda during times that require urgent action, as well as being the one thing Democrats could do to rally the G.O.P. base and build support for the president. The realpolitik case against impeaching Bush is strong enough that one needn't look any deeper into the American psyche for reasons it hasn't caught on.

A national movement to impeach Cheney...well, that might find itself getting a warmer political welcome.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST SHOOT ME. Today's Washington Post op-ed page self-parody comes from David Ignatius, who passes on the exciting new "post-surge" plan floated by White House officials:

President Bush and his senior military and foreign policy advisers are beginning to discuss a "post-surge" strategy for Iraq that they hope could gain bipartisan political support. The new policy would focus on training and advising Iraqi troops rather than the broader goal of achieving a political reconciliation in Iraq, which senior officials recognize may be unachievable within the time available.

Ignatius reports that the administration's hope for this hilariously empty non-plan is that it "would have sufficient bipartisan support so it could be sustained even after the Bush administration leaves office in early 2009." And what is Ignatius's conclusion from all this? Well, here's where the self-parody part comes:

The wild cards in this new effort to craft a bipartisan Iraq policy are the Republican and Democratic leaders, President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They both say they want a sustainable, effective Iraq policy, but each is deeply entrenched in a partisan version of what that policy should be. America is in a nosedive in Iraq. Can these two leaders share the controls enough that Iraq will become a U.S. project, rather than George Bush's war? There's a bipartisan path out of this impasse, but will America's leaders be wise enough to take it?

In this op-ed genre, there is always -- always -- "a bipartisan path out of this impasse," no matter what that "impasse" may be, no matter how many years it has remained, and no matter how many thousands of people have been killed as a result of it.

--Sam Rosenfeld

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. We feature two pieces on Iran policy today: As a preview from the June print issue, free to non-subscribers, Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations explains why, for the United States, "normalization of relations as a means of regulating Iranian power is not the most viable option; it is the only realistic one."

What's needed now are negotiations on how to proceed with normalizing diplomatic and economic relations. As part of such a dialogue, an entire range of U.S.-Iranian disputes can be considered. From the American perspective, Iran's nuclear infractions, its support for terrorism, and its behavior in Iraq would be the most salient issues. The Iranian regime has its own set of grievances over economic sanctions and attempts to marginalize its regional influence ...

One of the thorniest issues would be to divest Iran from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its attachment to Hezbollah. Iran's commitment to militant groups opposing Israel may seem immutable. However, Iran has never been provided with an opportunity to mend ties with the United States. That possibility may just offer Iran important incentives to temper its pernicious behavior toward Israel -- behavior that has never served its core national interests anyway.

In the end, the best manner of extracting Iran from the Arab-Israeli arena is for the United States and the key Arab states to launch a concerted diplomatic effort to resolve the remaining differences between Israel and both its Palestinian and Syrian neighbors. Should there be an accord that satisfies Israel's security imperatives, Palestinian nationalist mandates, and Syria's territorial desires, Iran would have no choice but to divest itself from its radical brethren. A peace treaty negotiated by the United States, embraced by the Palestinians, and buttressed by a regional consensus would finally press Iran to terminate its self-defeating belligerence toward the Jewish state. If Iran's opposition to Israel and its penchant for terrorism become moot issues, then normalization has a better prospect of success in both Tehran and Washington.

Also in TAP Online today, Addie Stan discusses the Christian newswire service that counts the White House as one of its clients, while Mark Leon Goldberg reports on the looming UN peacekeeping crunch, as the personnel and costs of operations grow dramatically while America's arrearages do the same.

--The Editors

STRAINED RESERVES. The Center for American Progress released a report today about the overstretched nature of the National Guard and Reserves, a follow-up to their report in March that stated the under-prepared nature of the United States to deal with natural and terrorist disasters domestically.

The report today counted that in 2005, 46 percent of troops in Iraq were from the reserves. Since 2001, every single one of the 16 Army National Guard Enhanced Brigades (troops trained to act as reserves for active duty soldiers) has been deployed at least once to Iraq, Afghanistan, or the Balkans. Two have been deployed twice, totaling an average of 18 months overseas. This is nearly half of the total enlistment time. It's standard practice in the military to limit deployments to once every five years. If the DOD followed standard practice, it wouldn't be able to redeploy any more reserve troops until 2010, "at the earliest." The report says, "Nearly nine out of every 10 Amery National Guard units that are not in Iraq and Afghanistan have less than half the equipment needed to respond to a domestic crisis and less than 45 percent of the Air National Guard's units have the equipment needed to deploy."

Ultimately, this means that our troops are unprepared to respond to any kind of national emergency. Katrina is a prime example of this, but Gov. Kathleen Sebelius complained of the same thing earlier this month when devastating tornadoes ripped apart small Kansas towns.

--Kay Steiger

EMPLOYER'S CROCODILE TEARS. For what it's worth, I'm with Dean Baker on thinking the employer complaints about the immigration bill sound much more like an attempt to influence the legislation than scotch it. As Baker writes, "[t]he article asserts that employers complain that the bill will not 'cure the severe labor shortages they foresee in the coming decade.' Unless the reporter who wrote this story has ESP, he does not know what the employers actually foresee. He knows what they claim to foresee, which unfortunately (sorry kiddies) is not always the same thing." Indeed, the businesses quoted are all saying one of two things: Larger guest-worker program or less regulation. Color me shocked!

--Ezra Klein

SUPPORT FOR THE "STRONG-WILLED YOUNG LADY." I just want to echo Garance's point about the coverage of HRC's tenure as Wal-Mart board member. I'd also add that, overall, I had a strong gut reaction to the article. Especially this comment:

Mr. Walton appeared relieved to have a woman on the board to deflect criticism, telling shareholders during the annual meeting in 1987 that the company had a "strong-willed young lady on the board now who has already told the board it should do more to ensure the advancement of women."

She was a 39-year-old successful attorney who was described, patronizingly, as a "strong-willed young lady." Though I'm by no means a big Hillary Clinton backer, anecdotes like this make me really want to like her. I identify with her. And (as Garance has also pointed out), I'm guessing many other women in the all-important "single, under 35" bloc feel the same way. Whether that will translate to votes for Clinton, I'm not so sure. But it's noteworthy nonetheless.

-- Ann Friedman

PAGING WILLIAM SALETAN. Shockingly enough, the "pro-life case for contraception" continues to fail dismally among actual pro-lifers, as the Missouri legislature (with the strong support of Missouri pro-life, natch) voted down restoring funding for contraception because "it would have amounted to an endorsement of promiscuous lifestyles." Which will mean more unwanted pregnancies and -- as a comparison of abortion rates in the United States with countries that permit both access to abortion and birth control will demonstrate -- more abortions. But what matters is that somebody will be able send a message about how evil the banal sexual behavior of consenting adults that one doesn't approve of is!

I often talk about the flagrant inconsistency of American "pro-life" groups. But, in fairness, they are perfectly consistent about one thing: if they have a choice between reducing abortion rates and regulating female sexuality, they'll take the latter, as reliably as Carrot Top is unfunny. And to state the obvious, obstructing certain classes of women from obtaining abortions as part of a general campaign to say that single people having sex is icky is completely indefensible.

-- Scott Lemieux

"PERSONAL CAUSES"?! This paragraph in yesterday's New York Times article on Hillary Clinton's 1986-1992 tenure on the Wal-Mart board really brought me up short:

Fellow board members and company executives, who have not spoken publicly about her role at Wal-Mart, say Mrs. Clinton used her position to champion personal causes, like the need for more women in management and a comprehensive environmental program, despite being Wal-Mart's only female director, the youngest and arguably the least experienced in business. On other topics, like Wal-Mart's vehement anti-unionism, for example, she was largely silent, they said.

Wal-Mart, readers will recall, is the subject of the largest private civil rights case in U.S. history, the federally-certified class action case involving up to 1.5 million current and former female Wal-Mart employees that alleges they were denied pay and promotions on account of their gender. If you go to the Wal-Mart Class website, the top four questions they ask are:

Have you been denied career opportunities in management?

Have you been denied equal pay for equal work?

Have you been getting the run-around about promotions or raises?

Have you hit the glass ceiling?

The fact that Wal-Mart's one-time executives and board members would still describe concern for the equal treatment of women in the workplace as a "personal cause" despite the very public court battle current and former female Wal-Mart employees are waging against the firm, would seem to be a symptom of the attitude female employees are fighting against, and possibly even evidence for their suit. If the executives and board members are to be believed, Clinton tried to press the company to make progress on this issue years before the firm's employees felt the situation so intolerable they had no recourse other than to sue. The class action suit only covers the period from late 1998 through the present, but the board of directors appears to have known there was a problem years before this -- even Clinton's 1986 invitation to join the board was the result of pressure from female Walton family members to increase women in higher-level positions with the company -- and failed to take adequate action. Reports the Times:

Early in her tenure, she pressed for information about the number of women in Wal-Mart's management, worrying aloud that the company's hiring practices might be discriminatory.

Perhaps instead of seeing Clinton's interest in women in management as a "personal cause," the largely male, Southern, and conservative group of board members ought to have worked more expeditiously to improve their record of promoting female employees into management positions. Who knows -- they might thereby have avoided becoming the defendent in the landmark civil rights case that has helped galvanize a national movement against their company.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Who doesn't like a good vacation? Today, Courtney Martin tells us about the lamentable death of vacation in the United States:

As much as you may have resented it then, the family vacation is as quintessentially American as homemade apple pie. It is also just about as rare in this age of store-bought desserts and workaholism.

Last year, 25 percent of American workers got no paid vacation at all, while 43 percent didn't even take a solid week off. A third fewer American families take vacations together today than they did in 1970. American workers receive the least vacation time among wealthy industrial nations. And it is no thanks to the U.S. government --127 other countries in the world have a vacation law. We -- the crackberry denizens and Protestant ethic superstars -- do not ...

Dissatisfaction with work/life balance cuts across class boundaries, leaving too many Americans feeling estranged from the things they believe are most important -- family, friends, wellbeing, spiritual practice. In what journalist Keith H. Hammonds calls our "postbalance world," most Americans live their lives in unsatisfying feast or famine. Unfortunately, there is more famine when it comes to relaxation, exploration, and rejuvenation these days -- no thanks to federal policy. John Schmitt, senior economist and co-author of "No-Vacation Nation," a recent study by the Center for Economic Policy Research, says, "It's a national embarrassment that 28 million Americans don’t get any paid vacation or paid holidays."

Also, Sarah Goldstein reviews The Thumpin', a new book on Rahm Emanuel and the 2006 midterm elections; and Kay Steiger reports on the problems returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans face in accessing quality treatment for PTSD, and what could be done to improve the system.

--The Editors

THE INEVITABILITY INCREASING LIKELIHOOD OF ROMNEY. Last week, in the wake of Giuliani's decision to effectively end his candidacy, I speculated about who was going to replace him as the front runner. Given his fundraising and the fact that he would seem to be more appealing to both moderates and conservatives than the other remaining major candidate, Romney seemed to be far and away the favorite. This was particularly true since Romney's recent conversion to reactionary cultural positions was going to look better than Giuliani's outright repudiation of them. The problem with my theory was that his actual popularity among Republican primary voters wasn't strong. Well, that seems to be turning around in the crucial Iowa primary, and my guess continues to be that this trend will continue.

I also agree with Matt that this is not necessarily irrational. Primary voters, indeed, are smart not to commit the George Wallace fallacy by trying to figure out what politicians "really think." What matters is what they'll do, and Romney will functionally support the forced-pregnancy lobby (signing any legislation that passes, putting Federalist Society hacks in the federal courts, etc.) as president irrespective of his "real" personal feelings on the issue.

-- Scott Lemieux

IMMIGRATION AND THE GOP. David Frum thinks the immigration bill has "detonated the slow-motion trigger on a Republican debacle in 2008." Vague confusion over the imagery aside -- can you detonate a slow-motion trigger? Wouldn't that mean blowing it up? -- he makes a strong case. Indeed, I think he's exactly right on this: "As complicated as this immigration deal is, it rests on a simple compromise: The Democrats get the amnesty they want - in exchange for the Republicans getting the guest-worker program they want. By identifying the guestworker program as the GOP's highest immigration priority, the deal also identifies the GOP as a party that in the crunch puts employers' interests first."

But if the national GOP will lose luster in the eyes of its base, its supporters risk doing significant and enduring damage to their standing among the emergent Hispanic electorate. "Republicans have done so well," writes Frum, "because until now, the highly diverse Hispanic population has not voted as an ethnic bloc. Now we ourselves are forcing that to change. It's as if this Republican president and these Republican senators have said, 'Hmm. Can we invent an issue that will teach Cuban-American doctors, Honduran day laborers, and Mexican-American army officers to think of themselves as a unified ethnic group? Can we then provoke a fight that all of them (whatever their diverging practical interests) will treat as a symbol of acceptance in American society? And can we then stage-manage this fight to ensure that two-thirds of our party will have no choice but to fall on the wrong side of it?'"

--Ezra Klein

DOES IT GIVE THEM MASSAGES, TOO? "Little more than a year ago, Al Qaeda's core command was thought to be in a financial crunch," reports the LA Times. Thankfully, we've solved that. "U.S. officials said that Al Qaeda's command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network's operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity. The influx of money has bolstered Al Qaeda's leadership ranks at a time when the core command is regrouping and reasserting influence over its far-flung network. The trend also signals a reversal in the traditional flow of Al Qaeda funds, with the network's leadership surviving to a large extent on money coming in from its most profitable franchise, rather than distributing funds from headquarters to distant cells."

Let's be clear: Not only has the Iraq War offered immense recruitment, PR, and training benefits to al-Qaeda, but it has emerged as a primary funding source for the leadership. At what point do we give up and admit George W. Bush is a jihadist plant?

--Ezra Klein

RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION. This is something Newt Gingrich frets over. In his recent speech at Liberty University he complained about "anti-religious bias" and "radical secularism". Then he started on the horrors of religious discrimination:

"Basic fairness demands that religious beliefs deserve a chance to be heard," he said in the 26-minute speech. "It is wrong to single out those who believe in God for discrimination. Yet today, it is impossible to miss the discrimination against religious believers."

So nice of Gingrich to worry about the Wiccans and the Muslims, probably the two religions whose believers may face anti-religious discrimination in their daily lives in this country.

Of course Gingrich didn't mean that. He meant something quite different when using the word "discrimination", and it has very little to do with discrimination in education or employment or with the other common-parlance uses of the term. Indeed, it has very little to do with the idea that it is people who are the victims of discrimination. In the world of Gingrich, and probably of his audience at Liberty University, too, it is religion itself that can be the victim of discrimination. An odd interpretation, though a common one these days.

-- J. Goodrich

THE PORKBUSTERS PROBLEM. Jane Galt brings up a reasonable point with respect to the anti-"Porkbusters" position taken by a cross-ideological set of bloggers (including me) last week:

But seriously, while this is true on some level, isn't porkbusters still a good idea? There are other reasons to want to cut pork, besides being worried about the budget deficit. Pork may well have a big dragging effect on the economy by the distortions it introduces. And more than that, it's morally distasteful that senators and congressmen spend so much time -- time we pay them for -- trying to grab fistfuls of cash out of the public trough before the other pigs can get at it. The people pushing porkbusters may not succeed in paying for the Iraq war, but surely they're still doing God's work?

I would have a few points in response. First, I don't think that Galt really adequately addresses Ramseh Ponnuru's core point that the porkbuster folks use "enormous amount of political energy in the service of trivial goals." Given the amounts involved here, even if we grant Galt's highly contestable libertarian premises about government spending, the economic distortions involved here are negligible, particularly since some targeted funding is, for better or worse, an inevitable part of getting legislation passed in a Madisonian system. (If we're getting rid on distortions to the market, I say we work to get rid of the capital gains tax cut first.)

Second, I'm not convinced that the term "pork" is a terribly useful one. It's not, exactly, that I'm "pro" pork -- the term is ultimately a tautology -- but what gets defined as pork is not self-evident. I would guess that Galt would consider, say, funding to help cities with mass transit expenses would qualify, while in my mind these are an extremely valuable investment of public resources.

And, third, I insist that you have to consider the context -- we are discussing not merely opposition to unwise spending per se but a specific set of arguments. To the extent that the "Porkbusters" project is designed to distort the very real financial and opportunity costs of the Iraq war, it's pernicious rather than merely useless. And while this isn't necessarily true of everybody who's part of it, such distortions certainly are the type of argument embraced by its founder. But individual motivations are irrelevant; what matters is the effect of prioritizing this item as opposed to something else. And arguments that are designed to avoid the fact that we can't keep both Bush's upper class tax cuts and middle class entitlements favored by most Americans are part of the problem even if they might accomplish some (trivial) good on the side.

--Scott Lemieux

TAXES AND MIGRATION. Remember the old saying, "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail?" Well, as Mark Steyn shows, when all you know is tax cuts, every problem stems from high marginal rates. He genuinely appears to think that illegal immigrants enjoy their status: After all, no taxes! It's "the perfect arrangement for modern life ." That you have to hide in the bushes every time your employer decides payroll is too high and the INS should come by the plant for a look-see is, I'd guess, a small price to pay for the much-heralded grail of federal tax relief.

--Ezra Klein

AN APOLOGY. If I were some sort of genius math nerd cartoonist, I'm sure I'd be able to create an equation showing how the probability of sounding like an ass approaches 1 as the frequency of your posts increase. I hit the magic number yesterday in a post on the Third Way and polling.

From the beginning, the piece went awry. I was trying to make a point on the effects of majority-minority districts that came off as mere piling-on the Third Way report. Then I went into a bit of a half-baked theory on the deep affection my center-left friends seem to have for polling, which, judging from the reaction I got, implied that Third Way'ers and DLC-types are insincere in their beliefs and led around by polling. That wasn't the intent at all.

My point was meant to be different: I tend to think American politics is an inhospitable place for technocrats and reformist, managerial types. Voters tend to operate off strong passions and intense tribalism, neither of which are terribly friendly to certain beliefs that centrist Democrats hold dear, like the importance of free trade. Indeed, economists and moderate Democrats I know often express frustration at being caught between (what they see) as the reflexive unionists on the left, the understandably-but-empirically-misguided anger of downscale voters, and Republicans who use trade as an excuse for corporate welfare. If you're attempting to get your ideas translated into public policy through the political process, that's a tough spot to be in, and requires quite a lot of argument to reassure vote-oriented politicians.

So what I've noticed among friends of mine associated with the center-left orgs is an intense commitment to polling data, one that I don't see as often among the median partisan of the left or the right. My theory on that may not be very convincing. What it wasn't meant to be was an imputation of bad faith. My centrist friends are as committed to their policy preferences as anyone I know. I disagree with many of them, but I don't question their sincerity.

One last thing: my pieces on Mark Penn and Doug Schoen shouldn't be taken as attacks on the DLC writ large. I think Penn and Schoen are notably pernicious influences on the Democratic Party, and I think Penn's unionbusting and Schoen's shilling are genuine problems. I do not think those problems are endemic to the DLC or the Third Way, and I apologize for implying otherwise.

--Ezra Klein

THE STATE OF PLAY ON IMMIGRATION. Spent some time Picking Up The Damn Phone this afternoon, and got a much better sense of the political path the immigration bill still has to traverse. First, expect the temporary guest worker program to tumble from 400,000 to 200,000 workers, as Jeff Bingaman and Dianne Feinstein's amendment passes yet again. But this is a more complicated win than it appears at first glance: There's concern among certain liberal groups that if you drop the guest worker program too low, you simply amp up illegal immigration, which is actually worse.

Enter H.R 1645, the STRIVE Act. The House will spend June creating their own version of the immigration bill under the leadership of Zoe Lofgren, a Silicon Valley Democrat (so expect a much greater number of visas for high-skill workers in the final bill) and former immigration lawyer. She'll be under heavy pressure from unions and left-leaning groups to use Luis Guttierrez's STRIVE Act as the basis for her bill. STRIVE, which has a long list of cosponsors ranging from Rahm Emmanuel to Dennis Kuncinich to Silvestre Reyes to Jeff Flake, has a few advantages over the Senate bill, the most notable being its treatment of guest workers, who, after 5 years, $500, and evidence of English and US history classes, can apply for citizenship.

If such a bill is adopted in the House, the legislation will move to Conference with the Senate, which the Democrats control (liberals will remember the many times that Republicans used Conference in recent years to make compromise bills into conservative wish lists). Current thinking is that Bush will sign just about anything that emerges from the process, be it far to the left, or, as with the Sensenbrenner bill he approved last year, far to the right. He needs the accomplishment.

One last thing: The folks I talked to believe this is the year. Two years from now isn't an option. The particular political circumstances we're in are nearly unique: Bush has nothing left to lose but his involvement still provides cover for Republicans, Democrats can get an immigration bill without full ownership over it, the space is open for the subject because the President won't allow action on other liberal priorities and the Congress won't countenance any conservative agenda items, and so on. You have the RNC defending a bill that, were it offered under a Democratic president, they'd be tearing apart. Meanwhile, this just won't be a priority for the next president: President Democrat will want to do health care, not amnesty, and President Republican will want to get reelected someday. So this is the shot.

--Ezra Klein

YELLOW RIBBONS. They are a cheap way of supporting the troops. Just stick one on the back of your SUV and feel good. Matters become more complicated when the support must be real, when money must be spent to equip the troops, to pay for them and to take care of the war-wounded. That is the kind of support which that car magnet (made in China) will not cover. The Bush administration argues that a 3 percent wage hike for the military personnel is sufficient. The Democrats propose 3.5 percent. Given the high-risk nature of the job, I would have thought that the conservatives would see their way to funding that extra 0.5 percent. After all, we are a nation at war, as they so often remind us. But it isn't just that half-a-percent the administration grumbles over:

In addition to the pay raise, there are other personnel initiatives in the bill that the White House opposes.

A prohibition on converting medical jobs held by military members into civilian positions drew opposition. "This will eliminate the flexibility of the Secretary of Defense to use civilian medical personnel for jobs away from the battlefield and at the same time use the converted military billets to enhance the strength of operating units," the policy statement says.

A death gratuity for federal civilian employees who die in support of military operations, and new benefits for disabled retirees and the survivors of military retirees also drew complaints.

This includes the transfer of the GI Bill benefits program for reservists from the Department of Defense to the Department of Veterans Affairs, a step that GI Bill supporters said is needed to set the stage for increases in reserve benefits that have been kept low by the military because it views the program as a retention incentive rather than a post-service education program.

--J. Goodrich

AFTER WOLFOWITZ. "The World Bank's executive board has just announced that its new president will be selected using a competitive, merit-based process, paying no attention to the nationality of candidates. Breaking precedent, a White House spokesman said that the position as World Bank president is too important for parochial and political considerations to dominate," reports Dani Rodrik.

He continues: "Not!"

The White House is already gearing up to select a new World Bank president, actually, and they're showing all indications of employing the same foolish, opaque, haphazard process that worked so well the first time. I'm thinking Richard Perle, or possibly Bill Kristol. Or maybe Skeletor. Slightly more seriously, Tony Blair is being rumored, and he'd probably be a good choice.

--Ezra Klein

THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION BILLS. I think Matt is misusing the Daniel Davies dictum that "good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance." As Matt shows, the RNC is telling a lot of lies to make this bill seem more supportable to its members. Not to be too crude about this, but if the Republican base thinks this immigration bill is a bad idea, that seems like a fairly serious argument in its favor. After all, what they're trying to evade is the perception that it represents an amnesty. They're lying. It is an amnesty. And I think amnesty is the only realistic and humane way forward. So in this case, telling lies to make people with bad opinions think this is a good idea doesn't reflect poorly on its merits.

The real catch is the guest worker program. Greg Anrig has a strong and passionate denunciation of its inclusion, saying, "[There] are three basic traits that distinguish progressives from movement conservatives: our moral values derive from a fundamental belief that basic human rights should be respected for all individuals; if a public policy has failed over and over in the past, we learn from the experience and don't repeat the same mistake; and we consider the economic well-being of average workers to be far more important than the wish list of corporate lobbyists. The guest worker provisions of the Senate immigration deal clearly violate all three of those principles." He follows this up by detailing the sorry and even scary history of guest worker programs in the past.

But here's what I need to be convinced on: Putting aside the tweaks Reid and Pelosi can make through the legislative process, the choice looks to me like this bill or nothing. My hunch is that a solid Democratic government couldn't get this far out on immigration without potentially provoking a nativist backlash, and so they wouldn't. And nor does it look like any of the Republican contenders would be substantially more liberal or independent on this issue than Bush has proven himself. The 12 million undocumented immigrants are a pressing problem, and I would, if this were my only choice, bring them into the light of American society and labor laws even at the cost of a guest worker program.

So sketch me out a situation wherein we get an amnesty without a guest worker program. Matt thinks that "insofar as the political dynamic produces a polarized choice between pro- and anti-immigration positions, the business community -- i.e. the constituency for guest worker programs -- is going to need to side with the pro-immigration view. There's no reason to accept a giant guest worker program as part of a political compromise. Things should move in the other direction." Sadly, that looks at least as likely to cut the other way, as the business community doesn't mind illegals, and immigrant advocates need business support at least as much as the other way around.

--Ezra Klein

TAPPED WINS HILLMAN AWARD. Since 1950, the Sidney Hillman Foundation (named after the progressive hero and founding president of UNITE-HERE's precursor, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America) has given awards each year to "journalists, writers and public figures whose work promotes social and economic justice." As those who read the print New York Times may have noticed in an ad announcement in today's op-ed page, TAPPED was awarded the second-ever Hillman prize for blogs. (Josh Marshall won last year.) See more here. The folks listed in the announcement -- me, Ann, Ezra, Matt, and Garance -- are those Prospect staffers who've written for or worked on the blog since 2006, but of course the award goes to all of our contributors past and present. And it's a big honor. Given Playboy's ranking of us as one of the top political blogs last year, I should say that it's nice to be able to provide some kind of common ground at the nexus of Sidney Hillman and Hugh Hefner.

UPDATE: I should say, in case alert readers notice: Our boss Harold Meyerson is on Hillman's prize committee. In an outburst of ethical scruples that struck me as foolish at the time, Harold recused himself from judging the blog award. Happily, his vote was apparently not needed.

--Sam Rosenfeld

RE: WOLFOWITZ: Ding-dong, the neocon's gone, and all the rest. But does anyone else find it a sad commentary on politics that what drove him into well-deserved exile wasn't his role in the Iraq War, or his terrific mismanagement of the bank, but an overly-generous raise he procured for a girlfriend?

--Ezra Klein

PATHETICALLY LIKE A MARTYR. Hilzoy offers the best summary for Paul Wolfowitz's ignominious departure from the World Bank that I've seen so far:

A few suggestions for his successor:

(1) If you don't want to resign under a cloud, don't create one.

(2) If you think people are out to get you, don't hand them ammunition.

(3) If you are worried about your reputation, remember that it is not enhanced by clinging so tightly to your job that when you are finally dragged away, you leave claw marks.

(4) Insisting that the Bank "clear your name" is pointless. Everyone knows that the nice things people say in order to get rid of someone they despise mean nothing. If you insist that they say such things, all that will happen is that people will be reminded that adults should not throw temper tantrums in public. Moreover, your willingness to put something this petty and stupid above the needs of an institution whose aim is to eliminate poverty will destroy any tattered remnants of your reputation.

--Scott Lemieux

A BLUE-RIBBON DAY FOR THE WORLD BANK. Having managed to do what leaders of the world's great nations could or would not do, the World Bank Staff Association deserves a global day of thanksgiving for having managed to drive Bank president and Iraq War proponent Paul Wolfowitz from the helm of that mighty ship of multiple states. It was at the staff level that the revolt against Wolfowitz began, organized through the staff association, the closing thing to a union the Bank will allow. To think it all began with the distribution of blue ribbons. (Read Sridhar Pappu's delicious WaPo piece for the lowdown on the sartorial scheme to drive the neo-con to neo-gone.)

Before the new millennium dawned, I worked at the World Bank, as an "independent contractor" for a year-long stint, and later did an editorial job for one of its divisions. (For fuller disclosure, there's a riff on my blog about this.) Even though I did not qualify for membership for the staff association, I nonetheless found its leadership to be most helpful, especially when the Bank switched its operations software and couldn't figure out how to pay us "independent contractors" (otherwise known as perma-temps).

It's easy to demonize the Bank as a faceless representative of all that is wrong with globalization, and certainly the Bank has much to answer for in this regard, especially as it has enticed developing nations into selling off state-owned utilities to private interests (structural adjustment, in the Bank's lingo). But the Bank is also populated with many extremely gifted and earnest people who really set out to do good in the world, and I had the pleasure of working with some of the best. Given today's outcome,
I do bet that former Staff Association President John Alvey -- the British translator who got me paid during the software snafu -- wishes he hadn't retired before the Wolfowitz coup.

--Adele M. Stan

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Tracie McMillan reads novelist Barbara Kingsolver's new nonfiction book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. She likes it, but thinks it too often typifies the trouble with food politics:

Extolling the virtues of local food, cooking from scratch, and analyzing the food supply chain -- lessons at the heart of that cooking class -- don't seem so eccentric today, but they often retain a whiff of elitism. Many of the writers who've explored the American food system spin the higher cost of local and organic as a necessary inconvenience, and their calls for more careful food consumption are typically aimed at those with the resources to afford it. Little is said about the significant obstacles posed by cost and access for America's less-affluent families.

So when I heard that bestselling novelist Barbara Kingsolver (one of my favorites) was publishing a nonfiction account of a year of eating only local food, I was thrilled. Kingsolver's fiction draws its strength from her thoughtful, subtly political renderings of working-class and poor families. As such, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle seemed a natural candidate for bridging the gap between the lofty rhetoric of local, healthy food and the practical concerns of working people. Animal, like Kingsolver's fiction, is eminently readable. Nonetheless, it displays a regrettable lack of social context, doing much to reinforce -- and little to call into question -- the idea that sustainable food is an issue only the fit for the most privileged of tables.

Also, Dmitri Iglitzin maps out a comprehensive policy agenda for organized labor, one that goes beyond card check elections. And in his column this week, Terry Samuel ruminates on Bill Richardson's wily, buzzed-about new ads, and what they signify for both his campaign and the changing landscape of political advertising in general.

--The Editors

EVENT: GETTING REAL ABOUT FAMILIES. Next Thursday, TAP, along with the Economic Policy Institute, is sponsoring a forum, Getting Real About Families. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), a senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee and the sponsor of the Healthy Families Act, will be the keynote speaker. Heidi Hartmann will present a paper outlining a comprehensive work-family policy for the U.S. Janet Gornick will present a paper on the European, Japanese, and U.S. experience regulating work hours to allow a better work-family balance. The even will also feature a screening of the film The Motherhood Manifesto.

Getting Real About Families
An Agenda for Shared Prosperity forum
EPI, 1333 H Street, NW; East Tower, Suite 300, Washington, DC
Thursday, May 24, 2007, 7:30 am - 10:00 am
Free and open to the public

Today most parents with children work outside the home. Yet the pace of progress toward family-friendly national work policies has been glacial, leaving many parents struggling to cope, often without even such basics as paid sick leave to enable them to take care of a sick child. Despite its rhetoric about valuing both families and work, the United States has fallen far behind other advanced nations in giving family-friendly words real meaning in the world of work.

Please join with leading experts on the subject for a discussion about what the U.S. can do to get serious about giving working parents the help and support they need in their efforts to provide for their families.

Click here to register.

--The Editors

IMMIGRATION RESET. Like Ezra, my thinking so far is that the Senate-White House compromise on immigration reform is better than nothing, especially for the 12 million undocumented people already living, working, and paying taxes in the United States who can now become legitimate, open members of society. The strengthening of border security wasn't a surprise. And it's great news that the deal encompasses the DREAM Act, which would give children brought to the U.S. illegally a path toward citizenship and access to financial aid for college.

The bad news, though, is that there will still be a large population of undocumented workers in this country. The combination of amnesty for undocumented immigrants already here and the creation of a guest worker program is akin to hitting a "reset" button -- really only a temporary fix. Does anybody realistically think many of the proposed 400,000-600,000 "guests" won't stay on in the U.S. as undocumented laborers, recreating an underclass that brings down wages?

I also need to learn more about the process of turning the 4-year "Z visa" into a Green card and then citizenship. This morning's papers say the head of household must return to her or his country of origin to apply for citizenship. But for how long? Initial reports yesterday said a full year. That seems like an unfair burden on families that will dissuade many from attaining citizenship and thus deplete the number of immigrants on the voter rolls. And we know which party benefits from that.

--Dana Goldstein

NADER:GORE::DOBSON:GIULIANI. This, on James Dobson's vow never to support Rudy Giuliani, is why nominating him is still a big gamble for Republicans. The money wing of the party may like him; the security wing may like him, too. But for all the talk about how the GOP nominates the "next guy in line," the real precedent they would be breaking should they nominate Rudy is not starting the process by first shoring up their base before moving toward the general electorate.

This is a huge risk, as Al Gore learned the hard way in 2000 with the Ralph Nader defectors.* If Giuliani is nominated, Dobson becomes the "Republican Nader" next year. And, on a related note, though E.J. Dionne has a great column today summarizing the state of play for the Republicans -- which concludes with a nice line warning Democrats not to underestimate what a less orthodox, Giuliani-led GOP might be able to accomplish -- I find it unimaginable that Giuliani's nomination could be achieved at no expense to the base. Dobson's statements confirm that there will be a price, perhaps a big one.

Everybody knows the Republicans for far too long have gotten away with taking for granted the votes of people President Bush privately thinks are "goofy" and "nuts." All of which leads me to conclude that, while Giuliani's nomination is probably the best thing for the GOP in the long term, it's the best thing in the short term for Democrats. Those "goofy nutjobs" are not going to troop quietly to the polls for Rudy just to keep the White House. As I argued earlier this week, I think this will be a "statement candidate" year.

(* Sidebar puzzler for the Democratic centrists out there: Remember that in 2000, both parties nominated the more rightward of the two major contenders, which for the GOP meant going base-first, but for Democrats meant going center-first. Though Gore won the popular vote, I find it amazing that centrist Democrats say Gore failed to sufficiently move to the center when, in fact, had he locked down his base and decimated the Nader problem in the first place, well ... you know.)

--Tom Schaller

MELANIE MORGAN AND PBS. Melanie Morgan will not be invited back to PBS' News Hour because of complaints from viewers about her rudeness. Morgan is a right-wing radio talk show host who once said that she:

"would have no problem" with New York Times executive editor Bill Keller "being sent to the gas chamber" if he "were to be tried and convicted of treason" for the paper's reporting of a Treasury Department program that monitors international financial transactions for terrorist activity.

More seriously, Morgan's presence at the show probably had more to do with the conservative takeover of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as exemplified by the past reign of Kenneth Tomlinson. But the political winds might be changing.

--J. Goodrich

THE IMMIGRATION COMPROMISE. The value of the new bill hinges on whether you think an effective amnesty for the country's 12 million undocumented immigrants is worth a 400,000 to 600,000 person guest worker program. That's the trade-off: A guest-worker program progressives should find abhorrent set against a broader path-to-citizenship that's actually pretty good. My sense is that the system we've got right now is so bad, that even a regulated guest worker program is better than the de facto, fully unregulated guest worker program we're living with. And bringing the 12 million undocumented immigrants who currently live in this country into the light would be a huge boon. So my snap reaction is that this might be a deal worth making. The onus is now on Reid to better it through the legislative process.

Additionally, the legislation opens the way for far more high-skills immigration and converts the current family-based system -- in which relatives of immigrants have priority, which is how you get so many extended families -- to a merit-based system, wherein only immediate family members have preference, and you gain "points" for other metrics, such language ability, skills, education, sector, etc. The bill inexplicably lacks a significant increase in high-skills visas, but the movement towards a more rational prioritizing system makes a lot of sense. For instance: Under the proposed system, nurses, whom we need, would start with eight points, and workers in occupations the Bureau of Labor judges as likely to experience the most growth in the next decade get 15 points. That makes, at least, a kind of sense, which is rather more than you can say for the current set-up.

But I'm open to being convinced on all this. What do the other Tappers think?

--Ezra Klein

ROUND FOUR FOR THE THIRD WAY. Now that the folks at Third Way have weighed in to defend their recent report claiming that whites, males, and the affluent (and I suppose, by extension, affluent white men) catapulted the Democrats to power in the 2006 midterms, let me respond, and also add a few things.

First of all, I must repeat that the "normalization" technique they use is misleadingly wrong. If they don't like the baseball metaphor I employed last time, here's my response to their claim that they produced an apples-with-apples comparison of the two electorates by simply multiplying one to scale with the other: Take an apple, which is normally smaller than an orange, and multiply it by 125 percent and see if it looks and tastes like an orange. The normal turnout in an off-year is simply not the same in a presidential year, for a variety of reasons, of which Mark Schmitt's smart point about differential turnout in competitive v. non-competitive districts is just one. (Others are the lower number of political ads and contacting, less media coverage of politics that cycle, and so on.) This is why their results are artifactual, and it is also why I produced a very simplified example of two, back-to-back elections in which Democrats both do no better among whites and better among blacks in a congressional cycle and yet still draw a greater share of votes from whites during that cycle -- again, because of differential turnouts. Third Way offers no response to this demonstrated mathematical fact because, well, there is no counter-argument.

Notice, too, that in both their original report and their response here, Third Way makes a big fuss about Democrats improving their performance among "redder" groups, yet quite curiously ignores the performance among what they might call "bluer" subgroups. Indeed, given all the time they spent comparing the 2004 and 2006 cycles, it is curious that the Third Way folks failed to notice this damning fact: Democrats improved among their own, "bluer" Democratic-leaning subgroups! Based on CNN exit poll data, here is my quick math on some of those groups:

• Women: +3 in 2004 to +12 in 2006; difference = +9
• Non-whites: +45 to +50 = +5
• Income under $100K: +1 to +12 = +11
• Union households: +19 to +30 = +11
• Non-college educated: -6 to +13 = +19
• Non white/evangelicals: +13 to +22 = +9
• Church occasionally or never: +11 to +25 = +14
• Unmarried: +18 to +30 = +12

So how can Third Way state in its report that, "relative to the rest of the electorate, Democrats received fewer votes from among much of their traditional base -- African-Americans, unmarried people, and the poor"? Again, by conflating turnout with performance, that's how. Sure, there were fewer Democratically inclined voters, but Democrats didn't perform worse among such voters; in fact, they performed better.

This is why I predicted previously that, if performance levels among "bluer" groups were to be the same in the upcoming presidential election as it was in 2006, even if Democratic performance in 2008 among "redder" groups is like it was 2004, the Democrats could still win. In their reply they say my prediction is "in fact what happened in 2004. The Democratic base turned out in droves -- and Democrats lost." Yes, and thanks for making my point, folks: Democratic performance in 2004 among its base groups was not what it was in 2006, but if they get a normal demographic presidential turnout in 2008 and their base-group performance is like 2006, they will win. And they will also win even if -- here's the key point --their red-group performance turns back to 2004 rates. I'm not sure how much clearer or how many times I can state this prediction. And now that the folks at Third Way have done the higher performance data they so curiously overlooked in writing their report, are they prepared to concede the point?

Overall, as would be expected for any winning Democratic coalition, the Democrats' 2006 victories were primarily driven by a female, non-white, union household, unmarried, lower-income, non-regular-churchgoing coalition -- with an emphasis on "primarily." Sure, rich, rural, higher-income, white, and male voters (and combinations thereof) voted more Democratic in 2006 compared to 2004; I happily concede Third Way's point there. But heck, everybody in the country -- with the notable, within-the-margin-of-error exception of white evangelicals -- voted more Democratic in 2006 than two years earlier.

To therefore proclaim that affluent white voters were critical for Democrats in 2006 is very, very misleading.

--Tom Schaller

THE "PORKBUSTERS" DODGE. Ramesh Ponnuru has an excellent critique of the "Porkbusters" crusade, noting that it "places an enormous amount of political energy in the service of trivial goals." As he points out, even the modest reductions in federal spending actually being claimed are largely illusory:

...most of the time, getting rid of earmarks saves taxpayers no money. A lot of people who cheer on the porkbusters are under the impression that cutting a dollar of earmarks will yield a dollar of budget savings. In most cases, however, "earmarks" are congressional directives that federal agencies spend some of their allotted money in a specified way. If the money isn't earmarked, the agency is free to spend it as it sees fit. Federal spending stays at exactly the same level. Those porkbusters who understand this point have, alas, not gone out of their way to dispel popular confusion.

[...]

The third limit on how much the porkbusters can achieve is that earmarks are a small part of the federal budget. Citizens Against Government Waste estimates that in 2006 pork projects cost $29 billion. That's serious money, of course. But it's also only 1.1 percent of the $2.7 trillion that the federal government spent in total. Most of the porkbusters are conservatives who want to reduce federal spending and eliminate unnecessary programs. Earmarks are a small part of that problem.

--Scott Lemieux

CHOLESTER-OIL. Rina Palta, who wrote today's article about animal-fat biofuels, sent in the following update to her piece:

Rep. Lloyd Doggett's new piece of legislation preventing ConocoPhillips from claiming a renewable diesel tax credit has 50 cosponsors so far. At a press conference this afternoon, he introduced the bill -- which he's calling the "Responsible Renewable Energy Tax Credit Act of 2007" -- and also coined the term "cholester-oil" to refer to the part-animal-fat fuel.

As I suggested in my piece this morning, one major concern surrounding Conoco's "renewable diesel" is that the company bypassed an EPA fuel certification process by claiming the fuel is "chemically equivalent to diesel." "There are technical concerns," National Biodiesel Board Chairman Joe Jobe said at the conference, " You can't claim on one hand that the product is chemically equivalent to diesel to avoid the EPA on one hand and then claim [emissions] benefits beyond standard diesel on the other."

--The Editors

OUR MEDIA ... NOT SO BAD? Late last week, the media was abuzz with news of outsourcing on its own front -- two reporters in New Delhi would be reporting on local events in Pasadena, CA. The new issue of Columbia Journalism Review, however, has an article by Basharat Peer explaining why Indian journalism is not so great and serious Indian journalists need to look to the British and American media:

The typical cover story in an Indian news magazine does not exceed 2,000 words. When President Bush visited India in March 2006, op-ed and editorial writers celebrated the U.S.'s acceptance of of India's nuclear energy program. Stories of the "Indo-U.S. Nuclear Deal" dominated the print and broadcast media. But no one was writing, for example, about the unusually high rates of cancer and birth defects among the people working in and living near India's biggest uranium mine at Jadugoda ... It's no coincidence that foreign journalists produce much of the best journalism about the difficult issues facing India.

Indian writers who are serious about doing in-depth journalism also must look to foreign venues to find a home for their work ... The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, or the British literary magazine Granta.

... the American media was severely criticized for their failure to dig into [Abu Ghrab] earlier. The criticism was justified by American standards, but I had my own reasons for celebrating for what the U.S. press did, however flawed. ... During the last seventeen years of the conflict in Kashmir, I have read many Indian newspapers and magazines but have yet to see a single magazine piece or detailed newspaper report in the Indian Press examining the issue of torture.

So maybe our media -- imperfect though it is -- isn't so bad.

-- Kay Steiger

GUEST POST: THIRD WAY RESPONDS. As the authors of the Third Way election report Looking Red, Voting Blue, we write to respond to the criticisms of our report made by Tom Schaller and Mark Schmitt. (Ezra Klein also has attacked our report, but he offers nothing new.)

First, it's clear that we all agree that the 2006 electorate was redder than in 2004. It was wealthier and whiter, and more rural, male, religious, and married. We also all agree that is typical of off-year versus presidential year elections.

Where we disagree is the significance of this difference, and we take each of the major criticisms of our report in turn:

Presidential elections versus mid-terms. Schaller says it is a "major no-no" to compare a presidential to an off-year election. As we acknowledge in our paper and mentioned up above, turnout varies between off-years and presidential elections. And if we had written a paper looking at historical turnout trends, we would differentiate the two.

But we are writing in the realm of the practical, where the entire House and one-third of the Senate is at stake every two years, along with a few dozen state houses and state and local offices. Politicians don't have the luxury of choosing the cycle in which they will run. And if one's aim is to take over the House, the Senate or both – you can't rely only on presidential years to create your majority.

And that is really what the heart of Looking Red, Voting Blue is about. The significance is not that the electorate was redder in an off-year, but that Democrats won in spite of it. In 2004, it was a bluer electorate that voted red by re-electing George Bush and reaffirming the Republican majority in Congress. In 2006, a redder electorate turned the tables by voting blue, and our paper tried to determine where those new Democratic votes came from.

It turns out they came from predominantly red-looking voters -- mostly men, mostly from folks who are financially better off, mostly from people who felt good about the economy, and lots of religious and rural people. These new Democratic voters had turned on Bush, soured on the war, and were sickened by Republican corruption. The Democratic majority did not come from a massive turnout of the base, but defections from GOP-type voters.

Methodology. Schaller further argues that we derived "artifactual" results by using the normalization technique. Not only does he argue that normalizing the 2004 and 2006 elections is as misleading as "comparing a slugging centerfielder with a singles-hitting second baseman," he implies that without normalization, the 2006 gains would in large measure be due to better performance among base groups. We disagree on both points.

As to validity, normalization is a standard statistical procedure employed not just in baseball but by many election analysts as well. In the same way that it allows comparisons between pitchers who face unequal numbers of batters, it allows election analysts to compare elections with unequal vote totals (including mid-term to mid-term).

But even setting that aside, our results -- non-normalized -- would remain the same. We chose to normalize because it illustrates our results in a vivid and accessible way by translating percentages of voters (pretty dry) into numbers of actual people (much more illuminating). It's also the best way to simultaneously capture the effect of changes in both electoral composition and performance.

Take, for example, the following two facts from the exit polls:

• Democratic Congressional candidates won 28 percent of voters who rated the economy "good or excellent" in 2006, versus only 16 percent of these voters in 2004.
• The percentage of voters who thought the economy was "good or excellent" increased by two percentage points.

But to be absolutely fair, here are some non-normalized findings from the exit polls that restate our original results:

• Democrats won a larger share of higher-income voters in 2006 than in 2004. Democrats gained 6-points among voters making between $50,000 and $100,000 and 5-points among voters making more than $100,000. (They also gained 4 points among voters making less than $15,000, but that group was less than half the size of the upper-income group in 2004. As a share of the total votes received by Democrats, the under $15,000 group dropped by nearly 2-points).
• Democrats wooed more men and married people. Democrats won 52 percent of male voters in 2006, versus 46 percent in 2004, for a gain of 6 points. The gain among women was 3 points. Democrats won 48 percent of married voters in 2006, versus 43 percent in 2004 -- a gain of 5 points. The gain among single voters was also 5 points, but married voters outnumbered single voters by more than half again. And there was a much greater turnout among the married.
• Democrats won more whites and Latinos. Democrats made a 5-point gain among whites (47 versus 42 percent) and a 14-point gain among Latinos (70 percent versus 56 percent). The share of the African-American vote won by Democrats remained unchanged. In 2006, 77 percent of the total Democratic votes received came from whites, versus 66 percent in 2004. While the Latino gains were impressive, whites outnumbered Latinos nine-to-one in both 2004 and 2006.

2002 versus 2006. Both Schaller and Schmitt argue that we should have compared 2002 to 2006. We disagree, for the reasons stated above, but for the purposes of this response, we ran the calculations anyway.

In non-normalized terms, Democrats gained 8-points among men and 7-points among whites (versus 6-points among women and a net loss among blacks). They gained 9-points among voters with household incomes above $50,000 and 12-points among voters making over $100,000 (versus 3-points among voters making less than $15,000). They made a 10-point gain with suburbanites and a 6-point gain with rural voters -- both greater than the increase among urban voters.

In normalized terms, Democrats in 2006 picked up 5.3 million new votes over 2002 -- more than the 4.7 million new votes they picked up from 2004 to 2006.

Where did these new votes come from? 4.2 million, or 4 out of 5 were white. 5.1 million, or 96 out of 100, had incomes greater than $75,000. 820,000, or 1 out of 6 were regular church attendees. In other words -- it's a similar pattern to the one we showed between 2004 and 2006. Some of the gains -- like the 2.9 million men or the 2.3 million married voters -- were very impressive but not as spectacular as the gains of 2006 over 2004.

Turnout. We address a couple points here. First, Schaller seems to argue that performance is more important than turnout. The hypothetical he uses in his critique implies that a candidate is better off winning a larger percentage of a smaller base turnout than a smaller percentage of a larger turnout.

This is actually a false choice. What matters is the actual votes -- cast or not. Let's take two elections with 1,250,000 and 1,000,000 voters where the white performance remains constant (50 percent). In the first race, 150,000 African-Americans turn out, and 80 percent vote for the Democrat, thereby giving the Democrat a victory margin of 90,000 votes. In the second race, 100,000 African-Americans turn out, 90 percent of whom vote for the Democrat, thereby providing a margin of 80,000 votes.

Which Democratic candidate would you rather be? Schaller would argue that the second candidate is better off, despite losing 10,000 votes. But that 10,000 votes amounts to more than the difference in the Montana and Virginia Senate races, which were won by Democratic candidates Jim Webb and Jon Tester. That's the difference between Sen. Harry Reid and Sen. Mitch McConnell running the show. How many House races were decided by less than a few thousand votes? Enough to hand Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and now-Committee Chairmen Henry Waxman, Charlie Rangel, and David Obey their gavels.

Second, Schmitt argues that the principal reason the 2006 electorate was whiter and better off is because all of the most contested Congressional elections were in suburban, white, affluent districts. We have two responses to this. First, the number of contested districts was actually shockingly small. Stuart Rothenberg's last pre-election analysis, for example, rated only 62 races competitive (that's 14 percent of the House). And of these non-competitive races, many more were in white districts than in minority ones -- for every Chaka Fattah, there were at least two Randy Neugebauers. Second, Congressional races weren't the only thing driving turnout. There were at least a dozen competitive Senate races, plus at least that many gubernatorial races, thousands of local elections, ballot initiatives, etc. In fact, in five of the six states with hot Senate races for which exit polls were available (Arizona, Ohio, Maryland, Missouri, Connecticut), 2006 African-American turnout was the same or higher than in 2004.

And a final point on turnout: Schaller argues that "it would not matter if Democrats returned to 2004 performance levels among privileged whites, males and so forth because they could still win the White House" if Democrats "can simply reproduce in 2008 the performance rates among their traditionally favorable, non-privileged groups." That is in fact what happened in 2004. The Democratic base turned out in droves -- and Democrats lost.

"NASCAR men" and "office park dads." Schaller says that we used statistics to create a "pre-ordained outcome" and we are "intent on proving that 'NASCAR men' or 'office park dads' are key targets." Those are his words, not ours. In our report we did not counsel Democrats about what to do to keep these voters or get more of them. We didn't urge Democrats to be centrists or appeal to moderates. We simply made the calculations and let everyone draw their own conclusions. Someone from MoveOn or VoteVets could easily conclude that the answer is not to back down one inch on Iraq. A political consultant might conclude that they should tie every Republican to George Bush. The people at Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington might conclude that Democrats must push for, and adhere to, ethics reforms.

In conclusion, we feel that Looking Red, Voting Blue is an honest and straightforward analysis. When we have briefed several folks who are in the business of winning elections or running themselves, and when we explain the methodology -- they quickly get it and they see the value of the analysis. We hope other readers will take the time to read it as well.

--Jim Kessler, Anne Kim, and Scott Winship

THE ARGUMENT FROM TRADITION. Thers take on the first half of the Scalia quote approvingly cited by Ann Althouse. I'd like to deal with the second:

"What Shakespeare is to the high school English student," Scalia said, "the society's accepted constitutional traditions are to the prudent jurist.

"He does not judge them, but is judged by them. The very test of the validity of his analytic formulas -- his rules -- is whether, when applied to traditional situations, they yield the results that American society has traditionally accepted."

The real heart of Scalia's jurisprudence isn't "originalism" or "textualism" but his belief in "traditions" he attributes to (and often projects onto) "the people." As he argued in U.S. v. Virginia -- the case in which the Court, with Scalia as the lone dissenter, ruled that Virignia's exclusion of women from a particular form of education was unconstitutional -- "[w]hatever abstract tests we may choose to devise, they cannot supersede -- and indeed ought to be crafted so as to reflect -- those constant and unbroken national traditions that embody the people's understanding of ambiguous constitutional texts." In terms of intellectual merit, I think the illiberal claim that traditions are self-justifying has little. As a jurisprudence, it has many of the problems associated with originalism, most notably facilitating a judge's ability to switch between various levels of abstraction and ways of construing issues in order to reach the desired result. (Is the "tradition" at stake in U.S. v. Virgina that American tradition of discriminating against women, or the tradition of expanding rights to previously discriminated against individuals and treating people equally before the law? Everything turns on the answer, and invoking "the traditions of the American people" is unhelpful.)

Talking about the traditions of "the people" in an pluralistic society is not terribly useful, and will for obvious reasons tend to deny constitutional protection to classes of people who most need it. And like orginalism, it is a political as opposed to strictly legal choice (nothing about the nature of constitutionalism demands any method of interpretation) designed to produce reliably reactionary policy results. It is not surprising that the particular tradition adduced by Scalia in the VMI case happened to be the one consistent with the most conservative wing of the Republican Party.

But we should be clear about the implications of Scalia's theory. To the extent that it has any content at all -- that its conception of national traditions isn't so open-ended that it could justify any outcome in any interesting case -- Brown v. Board and Loving v. Virgina, for starters, are clearly incorrectly decided. The text of the equal protection clause is ambiguous, and there were long, deeply embedded national traditions of requiring segregated schools and prohibiting interracial marriages. Once we've decided that national traditions bind courts and preempt the critical assessment of institutional practices and their consistency with the requirements of the Constitution, one can't pick and choose which traditions count and which don't. Far from being an attractive method, Scalia's concept of unassailable traditions of injustice is at war with the best traditions of American constitutionalism.

--Scott Lemieux

A GREAT PIECE. ...from one of those American feminists who supposedly don't care about Islamic women.

--Ann Friedman

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Reporting from Iraqi Kurdistan, Jason Motlagh notes that the fight over Kirkuk -- and its oil -- threatens to derail the region's relative stability.

The Kurdish region may, however, be hostage to its own ambitions, and set on a collision course with troubles it has so far managed to avoid. The major issue is Kirkuk. Kurds want to absorb the oil-rich, ethnically combustible city, located less than a two-hour drive south of Irbil, by the end of the year in a local referendum. After a forced "Arabization" campaign under Saddam that imported tens of thousands of Shiite Arabs to displace the Kurdish population, an estimated 350,000 Kurds have moved back since April 2003. They are said to now hold a majority that would carry the vote.

This prospect has united Arab and Turkoman Iraqis against the Kurds and sparked a row in Baghdad, where a plan endorsed in late March by the central government to "voluntarily" relocate these groups prompted some officials to resign in protest. Two days later, a suicide truck bomber slammed into a police station in a Kurdish neighborhood of Kirkuk, killing 15 and wounding more than 200 people. A March 16 attack left three more dead.

Also, Rina Palta reports that Tyson Foods and ConocoPhillips are exploiting a nice bit of pork in the 2005 Energy Bill that gives tax breaks to manufacturers of certain "renewable fuels" by combining 20% rendered animal parts with 80% plain ol' diesel. The resulting biofuel takes more than 4.3 times the energy to produce than it yields, and has not been proven to have lower emissions that diesel fuel without chicken fat in it. But legislation introduced today aims to remove the tax credit for animal-fat fuel. As Palta told me, "It appears that I'm not the only one who's noticed that the circularity of using crunched up chickens to fuel the same trucks that carry their brethren to slaughter has a creepy utilitarian, progress-gone-awry feel to it."

Plus, Sarah Posner points out that, while Jerry Falwell got the connection between politics and religion, he never fully grasped the importance of media and pop culture. And Harold Meyerson opines that the Republican "voter fraud" myth is the real scandal behind the U.S. attorney purge.

--The Editors

THURSDAY THINK TANK ROUND-UP: INAUGURAL EDITION: This'll be a new feature here at Tapped, in which every Thursday I'll offer up links and summaries to five think tank papers that caught my eye. It's wonkery that works for you! Here are this week's five:

• No-Vacation Nation: The Center for Economic and Policy Research reviews the paid leave and holiday laws in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and finds we're the only advanced nation not to guarantee workers any paid vacation or holidays. American exceptionalism at its best. (More on this, including a colorful picture, here.)
• Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall: "Despite having the most costly health system in the world," finds the Commonwealth Fund, "the United States consistently underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries." The paper goes into great detail on the cross-national comparisons, and eventually concludes that "Among the six nations studied -- Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States -- the U.S. ranks last." For those who really want to dig deep, there's even a chartbook! You genuinely cannot know how excited that makes me.
• Iraqi Force Development and the Challenge of Civil War: CSIS's Anthony Cordesman writes that "the current combination of Sunni Neo-Salafi extremist insurgency, Sunni Arab versus Shi'ite Arab sectarian conflict, Shi'ite versus Shi'ite power struggles, and Arab versus Kurdish ethnic conflict could easily cause the collapse of the current political structure. In the best case, it could lead to a Shi'ite or Shi'ite-Kurdish dominated government, with strong local centers of power, and an ongoing fight with Iraq's Sunnis. In the worst case, it could escalate to the break up of the country, far more serious ethnic and sectarian conflict, or violent paralysis." Not an uplifting read, even though Cordesman does try and chart a path forward.
• Borrowing to Get Ahead, and Behind: Coming off the recent attention to sub-prime loans, Brookings researchers Matt Fellowes and Mia Mabanta dig into some new data to find that credit markets have exploded among low-income communities, about a third of lower income borrowers falls behind on bill payments in a typical year, and more than a quarter are devoting over 40 percent of their income to debt payments.
• How to Pay the Piper: AEI's Michael Greve and Russell Wheelerexamine the linkage between pay for congressmen, judges, and government executives. Congress tied all these groups together in an effort to depoliticize pay increases. In fact, quite the opposite has happened, and pay for judges and senior government appointees has stagnated as it got caught in arguments over congressional pay increases. That's bad for talent recruitment, and bad for good government.

--Ezra Klein

COULD RUDY FORCE G.O.P. CRACK-UP? If Religious Right founder and direct-mail kingpin Richard Viguerie has anything to say about it, a Giuliani nomination might do just that. Yesterday, I received a press release from Mr. Viguerie, who threatens, "It's Rudy or the G.O.P. We're in a political version of 'The Survivor,' and both cannot survive politically":

"If the Republican Party nominates Rudy Giuliani as its candidate for either president or vice president, I will personally work to defeat the GOP ticket in 2008," says Richard A. Viguerie, author of Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause.

"Rudy Giuliani is wrong on all of the social issues, is wrong on the Second Amendment, and is pretty much a blank slate on all other issues of importance to conservatives," Viguerie adds. "If the Republican Party nominates him, it is saying to the American people that it has lost all purpose except the raw political desire to hold power. It will be time to put the GOP out of its misery."

There are some other juicy bits as well, like where RV advises "conservatives" (read: wingers) to withhold support from any of the current batch of G.O.P. presidential candidates. The frontrunners are "unworthy of conservative support," Viguerie says, and the "truly conservative" contenders don't stand a chance of getting nominated.

Of course, Viguerie does have a book to sell, so he's been issuing statements rather freely these days. But in throwing down this gauntlet, Viguerie could find himself in the position of having called a referendum on the state of the religious right. If the G.O.P. nominates Giuliani, will they throw Viguerie a bone to keep him in the fold, as they did with Buchanan in 1996? (That bone: Buchanan campaign honcho Phyllis Schlafly got to write the Republican platform. Didn't really get Dole very far.)

--Adele M. Stan

HILLARY THE REALIGNER. My column for the Baltimore Sun this week is about unmarried women and how pivotal they will be to the Democrats' electoral prospects. I have taken to likening them to what evangelicals are to the GOP.

A couple months ago, Hillary Clinton's national campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, gave a speech at my university, and in a (public) event before the speech with a small group of students he said very frankly that they will be targeting women under 35. Some of these women are married, of course, but many are not; in any case, they tend to be undermobilized. And, given that significant mobilization of new voters is a necessary condition to any realignment, I am led to ask this question: Is Hillary -- despite the notion that she takes the Democrats backwards and keeps the country mired in generational culture wars -- actually the Democrat most likely to engender (yes, pun intended) a realignment?

If she were not Hillary, of course, as the most centrist candidate among the top three Democrats it would be easy to argue that Clinton is the least of the trio to truly expand the electorate; and, of course, there are "new mobilization" claims to be made on behalf of Barack Obama (minorities) and John Edwards (white working-class voters). I'm sure Garance has some strong opinions about the matter, but would be curious what TAPPED readers think.

--Tom Schaller

RE: CENTRISTS AND POLLS. Mark and Tom have both carried out elegant and effective demolition jobs on the Third Way's recent report. I'll echo something Mark said, though: Midterm elections aren't national elections. Votes accrue to competitive districts. And Charlie Rangel, for instance, isn't in a competitive district, but is in one where a lot of African-American voters live. The token competition Rangel receives isn't much incentive for his constituents to flood the ballot boxes. That's one of the downsides of redistricting minorities into segregated districts: It erases much of the motivation for off-year political participation. The Republicans don't vie for the seats and the Democrats don't have to fight to keep them. And because minority-majority districts are both largely un-competitive and include, by definition, a disproportionate share of minority voters, off-year participation among them will always be lower.

Beyond that, though, I'm vaguely fascinated by the obsession centrist groups like the DLC and Third Way have with polling data. In a way that simply isn't true for more liberal or more conservative groups, the centrist organizations are constantly justifying their existence and political efficacy off reams of carefully -- and sometimes, as in this case, poorly -- parsed public opinion data. This goes all the way back to the Galston-Kamarck "Politics of Evasion" paper (which was, to be sure, a seminal effort), continues on with Mark Penn's obsession with moderate, white swing groups, animates the latest Third Way reports, and so on.

I don't really have an answer for the phenomenon. My hunch is that both liberals and conservative intuitively understand that their philosophies have a certain instinctual resonance with the broader public, while the DLC-types are similarly aware that nobody-but-nobody wakes up in the morning yearning for a ruling class of reflexively cautious technocrats, and so they spend endless time trying to prove their support among voter's heads because they know they're not in sync with their guts. But that is, as I said, just a hunch. Maybe I should poll it.

--Ezra Klein

THE G.O.P. EDWARDS NARRATIVE EVOLVES. It's hard to pick out the most outrageous statement from last night's G.O.P. debate -- though Scott and Sam have pointed to some doozies -- but the most politically deadly one for Democrats is already clear. Mike Huckabee's quip that Congress has "spent money like Edwards at a beauty shop" was met with guffaws and rolling waves of applause from the Columbia, South Carolina audience. This morning, GOPUSA used "Spending Like John Edwards at a Beauty Shop" as their debate round-up title, and the phrase now appears poised to enter the G.O.P. lexicon as short-hand for alleged Democratic fiscal recklessness and cultural fecklessness, both.

This is awful for Edwards and bad for the Democrats more generally, in that Huckabee's joke conflates progressive tax policies -- Huckabee used the phrase to argue for his "active fair tax" proposal that would "put a "Going Out of Business" sign on the Internal Revenue Service and stop the $10 billion a year that it costs just for them to operate" -- with, to unpack the insult, the presumed vanity of a multi-millionaire. The phrase activates at least three anti-Democratic frames, to take a Lakoffian look at things, and does so very efficiently: the old saw about "tax and spend liberals" (evoked by "spends"); allusions to "limousine liberals" (evoked by the costs of the haircuts); and the ongoing and highly effective Republican effort to contest the masculinity of Democratic men who don't, say, drive tractors (evoked by the reference to the "beauty shop"). It's a perfect example of the classic G.O.P. tactic of turning an admittedly ridiculous, irrelevant cultural or personal attribute about a candidate into a metaphor for that person's policies, by slowly moving the mockery along from the personal to the political, until the candidate himself has become a joke. And once a candidate becomes a joke, the whole party, and what it stands for, begins to, too.

Indeed, the fiestiness on display last night should serve as a wake-up call for people who think the 2008 contest against the G.O.P. is going to be a cake-walk, thanks to the weakness of the president, the example of the 2006 victories, and the alleged weakness of the Republican field. The Republican contenders are going to fight the Democrats, hard, through-out the primary season and after, culminating in a general election contest that will doubtless be as nasty and involve as much ridicule and distortion as have those in perivious years.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

ELECTION ANALYSIS 101. There is an aphorism, which I think comes from Alexander Herzen but I've seen it attributed to Mark Twain, which is something like, "There's nothing harder than trying to get someone to understand something when he's being paid to not understand it." And I'm beginning to think that aphorism applies to the group Third Way. I'm going to let Tom Schaller own the rebuttal of Third Way's latest report "proving" that affluent, white voters won the election for Democrats in 2006 and thus Democrats have to pay attention to them and throw benefits at them, but I want to highlight a slightly different aspect of it.

Tom points out one basic and fatal error, which is that Third Way compared the 2004 (presidential-year) electorate with the 2006 (congressional) electorate. The presidential year electorate is not only much larger (which Third Way corrects for), but because it consists of infrequent voters, it is by its very nature blacker and poorer. Thus the electorate in an off-year election is always going to be whiter and richer than in the presidential election that preceded it, and any Democratic gains will inevitably appear to be gains of white and affluent voters. To avoid that mistake, the appropriate baseline would be 2002.

But there is another point to make: 2006, while in part a nationalized election, was not a national election. Some areas had contested congressional elections and some did not. You might have heard that many of the most closely contested congressional races were in suburban districts -- districts that happen to have a lot of white and affluent voters. A hot congressional race increases turnout. So -- surprise! -- you have a lot of hot races in white, affluent areas, you're going to get a lot more white, affluent voters.

So even if Third Way had done the proper comparison with 2002 (as they do, briefly, in the conclusion), it would be misleading because the contested races were in different places. Just as in the future, the contests will be in other places, and the results of congressional races heavily weighted toward the suburban don't show how to win presidential or statewide elections.

It would take someone with more letters at the end of their name and more time than I have to do a comprehensive analysis of comparative turnout, but after the jump, I'll show some examples of how hot races drove up suburban voter participation:

Take Chris Shays' affluent Connecticut district, CT-4: In 2002, when Shays had no serious competition, total vote in his race was 175,000. In 2006, with a challenge, 210,000 voters turned out for that race. Next door, in the poorer, uncontested New Haven district, the total vote went up from 185,000 in 2002 to 197,000 last year. (That's a 20% jump in the wealthier district, 6% in the poorer.)

In Pennsylvania's affluent and white seventh district, where Joe Sestak beat Curt Weldon, total vote went from 220,000 in 2002 to 262,000 last year. Nearby in the mostly black second district, where Chaka Fattah was unchallenged, 171,000 people voted in 2002, and 177,000 last year.

In Ohio, total vote in Deborah Pryce's white 15th district went from 162,000 in 2002 to 199,000 last year, while in Stephanie Tubbs-Jones' uncontested Cleveland district, the total went from 153,000 to 158,000.

That's all there is to say: the new votes were where the contests were, and the contests were suburban. Total vote went up everywhere, and the Democratic share of the vote went up everywhere and in every demographic category, but it was greater in those districts that had hotter congressional contests.

Some of those House seats will remain competitive, and it is correct to say that Democrats in those districts will need to understand their constituents, who in some cases will not be open to a hard populist message. (Darien, CT, is perhaps not ready for Sherrod Brown.) But Third Way presents its conclusions as a more generally applicable key to all future elections. They are not. In a statewide election or a presidential election, increasing turnout and the Democratic vote in an impoverished district is as valuable as increasing it in a suburban district, and there may be actually be more upside potential with poorer voters.

-- Mark Schmitt

CAVEMEN ARE WHITE. ABC announced its fall lineup, dumping George Lopez's sitcom in favor of a "spinoff" from the Geico cavemen television commercials. Reportedly Lopez said, "TV just became really, really white again." Not to mention that, similar to other sitcoms that pair dopey, overweight comedians with model-like girlfriends and wives, the hairy cavemen are accompanied by thin, blond girlfriends.

-- Kay Steiger

SPRINGTIME READING. There are always stories that don't get quite the attention they receive because something else takes the foreground in our public discussions. Right now it is the death of Jerry Falwell that is the focus of much attention, but I'd be remiss not to recommend for your attention this riveting story about the chauffeur-driven cars racing towards the hospital where John Ashcroft was lying, semi-conscious, and the events surrounding the car chases. Reading it is well worth the few minutes of your life it takes.

Meanwhile, if you like irony and laughing at the way we humans stumble through our lives, how about an article which starts like this:

A senior lobbyist at the National Association of Manufacturers nominated by President Bush to lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission will receive a $150,000 departing payment from the association when he takes his new government job, which involves enforcing consumer laws against members of the association.

Who needs fiction to stay entertained, these days?

--J. Goodrich

COSTS OF WAR. An American soldier's life: $250,000. An Iraqi civilian's life: $500. Crushing terrorism and building democracy: Priceless.

--Ann Friedman

PLANNED PARENTHOOD AND THE G.O.P. As I tip my hat to Ann Friedman, saying, "I feel ya, sister," I think it also important to examine Planned Parenthood's love note to Giuliani in the context of its larger strategy concerning reproductive rights.

While Ann's reaction to the e-mail she received from PPFA President Cecile Richards marks the missive as a less-than-prudent fundraising strategy, it's along the same tack taken by Gloria Feldt who, when she had Richards' job, began courting moderate Republicans.

In 2000, the Republican Pro-Choice Coalition tried to launch a floor fight at the Republican National Convention, and came within three votes of doing so. Planned Parenthood had a G.O.P. outreach contingent at that same convention, hoping to help the mayhem along.

While I agree with my TAPPED sister that Giuliani would probably sell us out in a heartbeat, I think it behooves Planned Parenthood to continue to push pro-choice Republicans to show some backbone and push the right further to the margins of the party. What Cecile Richards has done here, I think, is said to right-wing Republicans, yeah, look at your hero. By your standards, he ranks on the list of those whom the late Jerry Falwell said caused the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In seeking to alienate Giuliani's base, however, it seems that Richards did the same to her own.

--Adele M. Stan

PLANNED PARENTHOOD HEARTS GIULIANI. A disappointing email from Planned Parenthood hit my inbox this morning, lauding Rudy's position on abortion:

WASHINGTON, DC - In response to comments by Republican primary candidates during tonight's debate, Planned Parenthood Action Fund President Cecile Richards issued the following statement:

"Giuliani's pro-choice position proves that you don't have to check your convictions at the presidential primary door. It's increasingly clear that the days of the anti-choice stranglehold on the Republican Party are numbered.

"While other Republican candidates pander to and fight over the extreme right wing within their party, Rudy Giuliani is leading the pack and he recognizes that standing up for women's health is a winning position. Freedom of choice and personal responsibility are bedrock values of the Republican Party. Now is the time for mainstream Republicans to raise their voices in support of this important issue.

Right. Clearly Giuliani is staking his campaign on his deep, unwavering commitment to women's health... He repeats that he's personally opposed to abortion, that he would support further restrictions, that he would appoint an anti-choice Supreme Court justice, and that overturning Roe would "be OK."

Apparently $900 in donations buys a lifetime endorsement from Planned Parenthood, no matter how weak your position on choice.

--Ann Friedman

WHO'S PREPARED FOR COLLEGE? J. asks a good question about my comparison between French and American high schools. Do the French prepare fewer kids for college, and is that why their bac exam is more challenging and predictive of educational success?

Here's the answer: About half of French high school students, or 600,000 people, sit for the bac annually, and 70 percent earn a passing grade. In the American high school class of 2005, 1.2 million students took the ACT and 1.5 million took the SAT of about 2.7 million total high school graduates. So virtually every high school graduate endures one of these exams at least once. And 68 percent of American students complete at least the suggested four years of English and three each of social studies, science, and math to prepare for college.

What this all boils down to is that yes, a larger percentage of American students are "preparing for college." But that preparation is much less stringent and leaves only 25 percent of us fully prepared for college-level work across all four curriculum areas.

--Dana Goldstein

TORTURIN' RUDY. I'm not sure what's more depressing about yesterday's debate -- the current forerunner enthusiastically and unequivocally supporting torture, or how well it went over in the audience. Obviously, Giuliani's authoritarianism is going to become more and more manifest because it's his only possible route to victory. I still think that when Rudy goes to the GOP primary markets to realize his soul he'll find what he needs he just doesn't have--his competitors will be able to offer pointless wars and arbitrary executive power without being dragged down by a rational position on the abortion issue--but certainly the dynamic he's going to bring to the race is going to be bad for the country and (I hope) for the Republican Party.

On the other hand, I think the Sexiest Torturer Alive's proposal (already K-Lo -approved!) to "double Gitmo" has considerably more merit to it. Oh, he doesn't mean that it should be doubled to accommodate all the Bush administration officials and apologists who should be sent there? Never mind.

--Scott Lemieux

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Why do some poor neighborhoods cohere while others fall apart? Academics who've gone block by block through inner-city America have concluded that community organization is one key factor. From our May print issue (but free to non-subscribers), Eyal Press reports on the impact of "collective efficacy" in poor neighborhoods -- what one scholar calls "one of the most important criminological insights in the last 20 years."

Also, Audrey Dutton reports on a federal compensation plan for Cold War-era victims of nuclear contamination -- and evidence that the Bush administration and the Labor Department are trying to limit pay-outs. And Robert Reich proposes a reform of our college loan system that would prevent loans from becoming a straitjacket limiting graduates' career choices.

--The Editors

TWO, THREE, MANY GITMOS! I missed the GOP debate last night, though by most accounts what had been billed beforehand as a debate showcasing the candidates' differences on hot-button social and domestic issues in fact really came to life when the subject turned to chest-thumping war on terror stuff. See here to watch John McCain make a reasoned and stirring case against torture, followed later by Mitt Romney securing his position as People magazine's Sexiest Torturer Alive by strongly endorsing "enhanced interrogation techniques" like waterboarding and remarking that, far from closing Guantanamo Bay's detention center, we should "double" it. This was all in response to a scenario laid out by Brit Hume that borrows heavily from the "ticking time-bomb" tradition of torture justification -- a tradition of positing hypotheticals that basically never occur in such a way in real life.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE FECKLESSNESS OF CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS. Garance, Matt and zuzu have already amply demonstrated the bad faith, distortions, and selective evidence of the latest manifestation of Christina Hoff Sommers's feeble "American feminists don't care about the suppression of Islamic women" routine. And, of course, American feminists are in a no-win situation. One might have thought that Katha Pollitt -- who writes a great deal about the suppression of Islamic women and is a columnist for the largest-circulation liberal political magazine -- might have merited Sommers's attention, although of course she didn't. But you may recall Ana Marie Cox's regrettable review of Pollitt's latest book, in which Cox sighed that Pollitt was "fixated" on women's rights in the Middle East. You can't win. In addition, I thought J. Goodrich also made a good point in comments:

Sommers is a a very fascinating example of someone who has not herself written a long book about the situation of women in Islamic countries. She found it more important to write books intended at destroying feminism so that there would then be nobody at all to help those women.

--Scott Lemieux

NEWS YOU CAN USE. Eric Boehlert has just written a devastating column on the way The Washington Post has covered conservative bloggers at the expense of liberal ones. It's genuinely rather shocking.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

COLOR ME UNPREPARED. The poor state of our nation's high schools in the era of No Child Left Behind is almost overwhelming. A new report from ACT, the college-prep testing service that administers the popular alternative to the SAT, finds that even when students take the federally recommended college preparatory curriculum of four years of English and three years each of social studies, science, and math, only 25 percent of them are truly prepared for the higher order reading, writing, quantitative, and critical thinking skills needed to succeed in college. As The New York Times reports in an article on the study:

Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, another Washington-based group that advocates standard-setting, said that as she traveled around the country, she found many schools not offering challenging work.

"When you look at the assignments these kids get, it is just appalling," she said. "A course may be labeled college-preparatory English. But if the kids get more than three-paragraph-long assignments, it is unusual. Or they'll be asked to color a poster. We say 'How about doing analysis?' and they look at us like we are demented."

Of course, easier said than done. And there's your liberal French-loving New York Times-reading prognostication of the day.

--Dana Goldstein

THE WAR CZAR. ABC News reports that the new "war czar" is Pentagon's director of operations, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute. His military rank tells even the uninformed that the search took a long time and that people with higher ranks refused the honor.

Why would anybody refuse a title like "the czar"? Well, in a democracy one might feel uncomfortable about using the term for an autocrat to describe a post like this. Then there is the whole sad history of the last "misguided" czar of Russia to contemplate. But the main reason for the refusals is naturally the impossible job the appointed czar will face. Come to think of it, perhaps "czar" is the aptest word, after all, given that Russian history.

-- J. Goodrich

HAWKS STICKING THEIR HEADS IN THE SAND (OF IRAQ). Ezra reminds us of one of the more bizarre manifestations of pro-Bush's-war liberalism, Paul Berman's attempt to fit Islamic terrorism seamlessly into the WWII and/or Cold War models of conflict, as a fight waged against totalitarianism. A year later, sometime TAP contributor Stephen Holmes offered the definitive rebuttal of this argument in his elegy for "the 1990s liberal hawk, by no means destined to survive the blast furnace of Iraq." Particularly important, looking forward, is Holmes' point that conflating Islamic terrorism with Nazism and Stalinism is not merely a bad analogy (for one thing, these movements controlled actual states with powerful militaries, a rather crucial distinction). Such a framework does not reflect tough-mindedness but rather is a comforting narrative intended to make the problems faced by liberal democracies in the 21st century appear more tractable:

His analogies, first of all, are tendentious to an extreme. Islamist murderousness resembles Bolshevik and Nazi murderousness. The planetary battle against terrorism (World War IV) resembles the planetary battle against communism. Baath dictatorship resembles Islamic militancy. The problem with such comparisons is not only that they are strained. They are also transparently calculated to serve a partisan political program. Analogies that challenge the Bush Administration (such as Palestinian violence and anticolonial violence) are filtered out, not because they are unrevealing but because they introduce a dissonant note.

Take, for instance, Berman's peculiar claim that "on the plane of anti-American propaganda, the Iraqi Baath and Al Qaeda were already allied" because Saddam's press had celebrated the September 11 attacks. The nature of this purported alliance between religious insurgents and a secular oppressor is never explained. In other passages, moreover, Berman concedes that Islamic radicalism has arisen in opposition to authoritarian secular regimes. But he is much less interested in possible causal connections between the two than in their metaphysical identity. His false moral clarity rests entirely on his assertion that spiritually they are one and the same. The Administration's attempts to associate Iraq and Al Qaeda logistically came to naught. Berman's cultural and philosophical approach, by contrast, raises the identification of Saddam and Osama, the tyrant and the terrorist, to a level of blurry abstraction that no facts can possibly refute.

[...]

We are dealing, admittedly, with off-the-shelf categories, since neither the war paradigm nor the crime paradigm fits perfectly the battle against transnational Islamic terrorism, which involves political violence by nonstate actors. But Berman, like Bush, prefers the war model to the crime model, because the former seems to signal a more serious approach, a willingness to send young men to die in large numbers, for example.

But this suggestion of greater realism and seriousness is deceptive. The war paradigm, besides inflating all too conveniently the unsupervised powers of the executive branch, assumes that America's unrivaled military superiority guarantees its success in the current struggle. It suggests that our enemy will eventually surrender and that we will be able to put the nightmare behind us. The crime paradigm has less rosy implications. It assumes that our government can no more stop the importing of a nuclear weapon into a major urban center than it can stop the clandestine flow of contraband drugs. That is to say, the crime paradigm, when applied to terrorism, has chilling implications precisely because it denies that "the problem could be solved." To turn from the crime paradigm to the war paradigm, therefore, does not bespeak a greater willingness to face the enemy. On the contrary, it is a classic case of sticking one's head in the sand (of Iraq).

--Scott Lemieux

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE. Via Mike Allen's "Must Reads", I see that former bossman Mike Tomasky has a thoughtful round-up on three recent books on political language in the late May issue of The New York Review of Books. In the article, Mike previews Drew Westen's forthcoming The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation and gives it two thumbs up:

Westen's central insight is both obvious and simple: Democrats, he writes, have generally assumed that voters make their choices based on reason, and this leads to failure because "the political brain is an emotional brain." The Democrats' belief in "the dispassionate vision of the mind" has an honorable lineage going back to the Age of Reason and is useful for other purposes in life. But Westen suggests that electorally, it's a total loser:

Republicans understand what the philosopher David Hume recognized three centuries ago: that reason is a slave to emotion, not the other way around. With the exception of the Clinton era, Democratic strategists for the last three decades have instead clung tenaciously to the dispassionate view of the mind and to the campaign strategy that logically follows from it, namely one that focuses on facts, figures, policy statements, costs, and benefits, and appeals to intellect and expertise.

In his early chapters Westen discusses the physiology of the brain and the different ways in which we respond to rational and emotional stimuli. Whatever the views of other experts on these neurological matters may be, I can say that, for electoral politics, Westen's analyses almost always seem to me correct and something that Democrats need desperately to hear.

I'm eagerly awaiting the June 25 release of Westen's book, as I suspect, based on his approving inclusion of a long quote from this Prospect story of mine in an early chapter, that he is a congenial thinker. For now, though, check out the Tomasky summary, and, for the love of God, let us have no more talk of how Democratic candidate X's inadequately specific proposal on policy issue Y will doom him to electoral failure.

Editor's note: The Prospect will be publishing an excerpt of Westen's book in the forthcoming June print issue.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JERRY FALWELL HAS DIED. They call him the founder of the Moral Majority, but actually the idea was hatched between Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail king known by the nickname Reagan's Postmaster*, and Paul Weyrich, the founder of the Heritage Foundation. I'm waiting for Pat Robertson to find a way to blame his rival's death on either feminists or witchcraft.

*Note to literalists: I'm not saying he actually was the U.S. postmaster under Reagan. It's a nickname.

--Adele M. Stan

THIRD WAY OFF. Third Way has issued a new report (PDF) arguing that Democrats won in 2006 thanks to a surge in Democratic voting among white, higher-income, male and rural voters. Washingtonpost.com's Chris Cillizza's cited the report in his online column, The Fix, but with all due respect to Cillizza, some folks may need a refresher methods course to understand how Third Way's report uses statistics to create a pre-ordained outcome.

For starters, Third Way compares the 2004 and 2006 electorates, a major no-no. They should have compared midterm electorates (e.g, using 2002 as the comparative baseline), because everyone knows that the "drop-off" effect produces whiter and higher status electorate during lower-turnout midterms.

For a simplified example of this problem, consider a hypothetical presidential election with 125 voters, of whom 110 are white and 15 are black, in which Democrats split the white voters 55 each (50 percent) but won 12 of the 15 black voters (80 percent). This is then followed by a midterm election with only 100 voters (smaller turnout), 90 of whom are white, 10 are black, with Democrats again splitting the white voters 45 each (50 percent), but now winning 9 of the 10 non-whites (90 percent). Though Democratic performance among whites is identical in both cycles and slightly better among blacks in the midterm, in which election did whites account for a greater share of all Democratic votes received? You got it: The congressional cycle, where whites account for 83 percent (45 of 54) of all Democratic votes in the midterm, compared to just 82 percent in the presidential (55 of 67). The reason, obviously, is that there are a greater proportion of white voters in the midterm election.

Third Way employs misleading math to produce an artifactual result. In a methodological note they claim they "normalized" the results between the two elections by simply scaling up the total number of votes cast in 2006 to 2004 levels, arguing that this is akin to taking two batters, one who played in 125 games and another in 145 games, and comparing them by scaling up the 125-game performance to a 145-game projection. Doing so would be fine if they were comparing, say, two centerfielders. But using 2004 and 2006 is like comparing a slugging centerfielder with a singles-hitting second baseman and then, just to be fair, running the second baseman through the copier at 127 percent. To their credit, at the end of the report they finally concede that, "In 2008, all things being equal, turnout should benefit Democrats. The lower share of the electorate in 2006 among traditionally Democratic-leaning constituencies was not a failure of the Democratic turnout machine [but] because 2006 was a midterm election ... In 2008, more African-Americans, more young voters, more urbanites, and more low income voters will come out to vote. Theoretically, this should help Democrats retain their majority."

Theoretically? No, practically: If the Democrats, who lost the 2004 presidential race by 2.4 percent nationally, can simply reproduce in 2008 the performance rates among their traditionally favorable, non-privileged groups they enjoyed in 2006, and couple that with a normal turnout for a presidential cycle, it would not matter if Democrats returned to 2004 performance levels among privileged whites, males, and so forth because they could still win the White House. (I will be saying more about this soon, in a longer piece.) If groups like Third Way are intent on proving that "NASCAR men" or "office park dads" are key targets, that's fine. But they are not allowed to use methodological legerdemain.

--Tom Schaller

DoD: GET OFF THE INTERNET. First came the strict regulation of military bloggers, now U.S. troops are going to have to do without MySpace, YouTube, and a handful of other media and social networking sites because the DoD says their use is eating up too much bandwidth. Obviously, this cuts off an important way troops communicate with family and friends at home. DoD claims soldiers will still be able to access the sites on personal computers, but how many are toting their own laptops around Iraq?

The selection of banned sites seems somewhat random to me. Sure, it's easy to understand how streaming audio and video sites like Pandora and Live 365 use a lot of bandwidth. But why is the African American social networking site BlackPlanet banned, but not Facebook? And why is Photobucket off-limits, while Flickr is just fine?

The YouTube ban is a bit ironic, as Stars and Stripes pointed out on Sunday:

Ironically, the Defense Department this year had just begun expanding its own use of YouTube to reach a younger, broader audience and show clips of U.S. troops in action.

Multi-National Force -- Iraq, U.S. Army Civil Affairs Command in Afghanistan, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the Gulf Region have all launched new channels on the Web site to highlight recent successes overseas.

Of course, the military also uses MySpace as a recruitment tool -- the Marines have 48,000 "friends." From DoD's perspective, I suppose it's more important for kids to have access to these sites before they enlist. As Jossip quipped, "MySpace and YouTube Too Dangerous For Troops in Iraq, Unprotected Humvees Still A-OK."

--Ann Friedman

STRAW WOMEN. I see via Matt Yglesias that Christina Hoff Sommers has written a piece for The Weekly Standard on "The Subjection of Islamic Women And the fecklessness of American feminism." Sommers writes:

If you go to the websites of major women's groups, such as the National Organization for Women, the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the National Council for Research on Women, or to women's centers at our major colleges and universities, you'll find them caught up with entirely other issues, seldom mentioning women in Islam. During the 1980s, there were massive demonstrations on American campuses against racial apartheid in South Africa. There is no remotely comparable movement on today's campuses against the gender apartheid prevalent in large parts of the world.

Talk about your straw men (or women). The Ms. Foundation for Women is an explicitly domestic policy group that sponsors such feel-good feminism events as "Take Your Daughter to Work Day." It is hardly the only shop in town. If you go to the other, more famous Ms. -- the one Standard readers might erroneously think they were reading about -- you'll find a very different situation. On the website of Ms. Magazine this morning you'll find that the top three articles featured are:

The Talibanization of Iraq International reporter Bay Fang reveals how U.S. promises to liberate Iraq's women have not just fallen short, but how the war has virtually erased the rights Iraqi women fought for and won decades ago.

Ms. Magazine Forum on Afghanistan Video now available of Dr. Sima Samar, the highest ranking woman in the Afghan government; U.S. women's leaders, including Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority; and others speaking at the Ms. Forum on Afghanistan on March 28, 2007.

Are We Losing the Fight for Afghan Women and Girls? During a recent visit to the U.S., Dr. Sima Samar sat down with Ms. executive editor Katherine Spillar to discuss the current state of affairs in Afghanistan, particularly the escalation of violence, its repressive effect on women and girls, and what the U.S. Congress should do.

Sommers' contention is about as valid as complaining that the Children's Defense Fund is too focused on American children, or that the AFL-CIO is obsessed the labor standards. She name-checks a couple of famous feminist authors (nota bene: writers are not social policy groups), and cites articles as old as 1999 to bolster her case. I think she needs to get out more, and look at what's actually going on on the ground rather than in the rarified air academics breathe (and I agree that academic feminism is often so out-of-touch that it probably repells more women than it attracts).

Sommers could also go over to Women's E-News, for example, which maintains an entire Arabic-language newsservice on women's issues, and regularly covers issues of the status of women in Islamic communities in its English-language version. She could check out the way this video became a sensation in the feminist blogosphere. And Matt points to the Feminist Majority Foundation, which has conducted initiatives to Stand With Our Sisters in Iran. It also maintains a whole news channel devoted to its Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls. Their first demand? An expansion of peace-keeping forces -- i.e. the military presence -- in Afghanistan, because "Without security, women in Afghanistan will never be able to obtain their rights and the country will never have sustained peace and democracy." There are plenty of other examples, too. But to find them, you have to look beyond the explicitly domestic policy groups and the cultural theorists, and enter the world of women's foreign policy groups, not all of whom use the word "feminist" in their titles, even though that's what their approach is.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya was key to convincing many prominent liberal interventionists to support the war. Now the majority of them acknowledge that invading Iraq was a disastrous decision, but Makiya remains unchanged. "To apologize is to say the position one took in good faith is wrong. I refuse to engage in it," he told TAP senior editor Tara McKelvey.

Also, Aziz Huq reviews two new books that explore the changing nature of global conflict and how to create a useful national security strategy in response. And Laura Rozen talks with Armando Spataro, the Italian prosecutor in the trial of intelligence officials involved in the 2003 "extraordinary rendition" of Eqyptian cleric Abu Omar.

--The Editors

HONEY, I SHRUNK THE CHURCH. It seems as if Pope Benedict XVI is really out to prove his philosophy that he's willing to accept a smaller, but more loyal flock for the Roman Catholic Church. Among the loyalty tests -- aside from the traditionally misogynist stands against women in the priesthood and reproductive rights for women -- one rarely discussed appears to have roiled to the surface: acceptance of Western civilization and culture as superior to all others.

Yesterday, as his Brazilian sojourn drew to a close, Benedict described the forced conversions and massacres of Brazil's native peoples by European conquerors as their "purification." So reports Raymond Colitt of Reuters:

[Brazil's indigenous people] had welcomed the arrival of European priests at the time of the conquest as they were "silently longing" for Christianity, he said.

If a 21st-century religious leader can justify murder and enslavement in the name of Christ, there's no telling what else he may find justifiable. Particularly telling is reaction of Brazilian Indians who are Catholic, as well as the priests who minister to them. "The Pope doesn't understand the reality of the Indians here, his statement was wrong and indefensible," Father Paulo Suess, who runs the Brazilian church's advocacy group for the indigenous, told Colitt. "I too was upset."

As if, on their face, the pope's remarks weren't bad enough, they appear to be the answer he chose to give to the group of Indians who wrote to him, "asking for his support in defending their ancestral lands and culture. They said the Indians had suffered a 'process of genocide' since the first European colonizers had arrived," according to Reuters. Genocide? Wait -- no, says Benedict, make that "purification."

CLARIFICATION: The pope said Baptism "made them children of God by adoption... purifying (emphasis added) them and developing the numerous seeds that the incarnate Word had planted in them, thereby guiding them along the paths of the Gospel. In effect, the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture..."

My intention was to convey the pope's message as it was perceived by the Indians (and me), not to suggest that he had said verbatim that the genocide of the Indians amounted to their purification. In other words, when the pope said the Indians were purified by Baptism, and that the "proclamation of Jesus..did not... involve the alienation of pre-Columbus cultures," what he is saying in effect is that forced conversions of Indians by the violent means by which so many were done, resulted in the Indians' purification.

Any way you slice it, the pope appears to be condoning the enslavement, murder and forced conversions of Indians by European invaders.

--Adele M. Stan

HILLARY'S LIFE. Sorry I'm a bit absent round these parts, I'm in Chicago for the week doing Real Reporting. But since I'm genuinely quite hard on Hillary, I want to post her new campaign video, which features Bill narrating a five minute biopic about her life. It's often worth taking a step back fromn the campaign and remembering how damn impressive Hillary Clinton is, how sustained her dedication to public service has been and how many sacrifices she's made along the way. My question is always whether among her sacrifices have been the boldness and courage that animated her former self, whether the blows and the battles of the Clinton years have laced caution and incrementalism into her worldview. In any case, the video:

--Ezra Klein

IN IT TO WIN IT. The Washington Times reports that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has inched closer to a decision about running for president as an independent in 2008, putting together plans to devote one fifth of his very substantial assets to the quest. From the online teaser story:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is prepared to spend an unprecedented $1 billion of his own $5.8 billion personal fortune for a third-party presidential campaign, Ralph Z. Hallow will report Tuesday in The Washington Times.

"He has set aside $1 billion to go for it," a long-time business adviser to Mr. Bloomberg tells The Times. "The thinking about where it will come from and do we have it is over, and the answer is yes, we can do it."

The $1 billion would represent about one-fifth of Mr. Bloomberg's personal fortune....

the mayor's associates say they are fielding calls from staffers for Republican Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, which the Bloomberg adviser compared to "a biplane on fire and spiraling down."

Polls thus far have shown a third-party Bloomberg bid would draw more Republican votes than Democratic ones. A Bloomberg entry would raise the specter of an unprecedented all New Yorker race, if Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani win their primaries, as well as the effective obliteration of campaign finance laws as we know them.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

PROPS, YES, BUT... I share Paul's affection for the good old U.S. post office. But as an employee of what is, in part, still a small-circulation dead tree print magazine, I hasten to say that this particular rate hike is a big problem. More here.

--Sam Rosenfeld

PROPS TO THE P.O. As you may have heard, the post office has raised the rate for sending a first-class letter to 41 cents. This might be an opportune time to spend a moment thinking about our mail service.

For a lot of people, the post office is the symbol of inefficient government bureaucracy, the butt of jokes and scorn. When conservatives were fighting the Clinton health care plan in 1993, they used to say it would "combine the efficiency of the post office with the compassion of the IRS." Har, har! But let's step