This is America. There's children, there's women. There are a lot of black people,there are a lot of plain old redneck people like myself.

Those were the words this morning of Jerry Dreddy, a 61-year old white man from Liberty, North Carolina and an ardent Hillary Clinton supporter. No matter who wins the nomination, this truck parts salesman won't be voting for John McCain in November. But Dreddy isn't too impressed by Barack Obama, whom he described as inexperienced and too guarded about his personal life. Dreddy said he'd be looking closely at who Obama chooses as his running mate.

Dreddy drove with his wife to Washington, D.C. last night in order to participate in the "Count Every Vote" rally held by pro-Clinton groups outside of the Marriott Park Wardman. Inside the hotel, the Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws Committee is currently debating the fates of Florida and Michigan's delegates. Outside, several hundred Clinton supporters, with the largest contigents from Florida and New York, marched into Rock Creek Park. Far from being the homogenous group of angry, white, middle aged women cariacatured in many media reports, the event was just as diverse as many Barack Obama rallies I've attened this election season. There were plenty of men; men of every type you can imagine. There was a Spanish-speaking group from Nevada, LGBT people with pride buttons, teenagers participating in their first election, young professionals lounging on the grass, Asian Americans, and dozens of African Americans, mostly from Florida. In other words, activist Clinton supporters look a lot like any other gathering of Democrats.

That's not to say the rhetoric wasn't a tad overheated. Dozens of people said they wouldn't vote for Obama if he prevails. "Count me now, or don't count on my vote," read the sign carried by Cindy Malzan, a 51-year old from Buffalo, New York. "No," Malzan replied emphatically when asked if she'd vote for Obama. "And most everyone I know feels that way. In the United States, we don't have to vote forpeople we don't want, and I don't want him. I think he's naive in international politics and relations." She said she was considering voting for McCain, "even though that kind of turns my stomach."

Meanwhile, 44-year old John Clisham, a Clinton supporter and guidance counselor at a Virginia high school, was arguing on a street corner with 17-year old Christian Edlagan, who said he could never vote for Obama, since "I don't think the Party should give the nomination to someone who gamed the system." Clisham, a gay father of adopted children, reminded Edlagan of the kinds of judges McCain would appoint to the Supreme Court. "Just on gay rights and Roe alone, I can't support him," Clisham argued. Nevertheless, he's not yet ready to throw his support to Obama, and he's upset by the DNC's process. "Living in D.C., I know what it's like to have no representation in Congress, and this is just another example," Clisham said.

The open conversations among rally-attendees about the merits of Obama and McCain hardly reflected the tone of the official speakers, who mostly avoided mentioning Obama's name or the possiblity that Clinton won't be the nominee. Still, many audience members said they were upbeat about the general election, no matter what the outcome of today's RBC ruling. "People are hurting," said Janet Upton, 46, a African American Clinton supporter from Jackonsville, Florida. "But this is a very history-making event that we're experiencing, the first woman candidate and of course the first black candidate. I will support Obama if he's the nominee, but I just think the Clintons have a record of success."

--Dana Goldstein

Brian Beutler has the latest:

While Congress has launched sporadic inquiries into contracting fraud, one legislator, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., has made it his mission to investigate contractor corruption.

Dorgan chairs the Democratic Policy Committee, a Senate entity tasked with gathering and distributing policy, strategy, and oversight information to congressional staff and other Democratic officials. (There is also a Republican Policy Committee.) Since 2003, the DPC has held 14 hearings dedicated to exposing the corruption of the Iraq reconstruction effort, and last month the committee released an encyclopedic report detailing major examples of fraud.

When the war in Iraq began, says Dorgan, "no one really [decided] to say, 'All right, now we're going to be an investigative committee so there's accountability.'" In order to fill the void, Dorgan decided to use his committee for that purpose -- though its oversight authority is somewhat diminished by the fact that the panel, as a partisan committee, lacks subpoena power. In light of this, since 2005 Dorgan has attempted to establish a congressional committee with full oversight clout to oversee military contracting. Dubbed the Special Committee on War and Reconstruction Contracting, the proposed panel is modeled on the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program (commonly known as the Truman committee), which was charged with investigating the waste and corruption of billions of dollars of World War II-era defense contracts.

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--The Editors

Just got off the Clinton campaign conference call, where they laid out the arguments they'll be presenting to the Democratic National Committee Rules and Bylaws Committee tomorrow, asking them to seat 100 percent of Michigan and Florida's delegations -- as Clinton delegates, of course. I asked the gang how they felt about the women protesters who'll be rallying outside of the meeting making a feminist argument in support of Clinton. Some have said they won't support Obama if he's the nominee. Senior adviser Tina Flournoy responded:

I'm glad you asked that question, because I have been extremely disturbed by comments I've seen in the press coming from a number of people characterizing what these American citizens are doing tomorrow, which is exercising a basic right. They are coming to say that they stand in support of the people in Michigan and Florida...that they should be allowed to have a part in how this country moves forward. But what we are seeing is a constant refrain that this is chaotic. I've even seen the word "circus" used. ...These people are coming, they are going to speak. ...Why that is extraordinary, why that is troubling, why that elicits negative comments, I'm not sure. But I find that disturbing.

Flournoy is referring to comments from Obama campaign manager David Plouffe saying protests would lead to chaos and from former DNC chair David Wilhelm, who called them a "circus."

Harold Meyerson and I will be reporting from the meeting, so make sure to check TAPPED and the Prospect front page this weekend.

--Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein gears up:

But as I quickly learned, car ownership remains the norm in D.C. Although a full 12 percent of District residents walk to work—the second highest rate in the nation after Boston—over two-thirds of Washington households own a car. Car-ownership rates have even risen in low-income communities, in part because they are less served by public transportation and taxis. Entire D.C. neighborhoods, such as Georgetown, are inaccessible via Metro, an otherwise excellent subway system. As a result, chores ranging from food shopping to furniture buying are more difficult here for the carless.

So one sunny day, I stopped by the local bike shop after work and walked out with a 24-gear hybrid, perfect for both commuting and recreation. In the weeks since, I’ve saved over $100 on bus and Metro fares; in just a few months, I’ll recoup the entire cost of the bike. Even better, I’ve joined a tight-knit but growing group of bike-commuting enthusiasts. Fewer than half of 1 percent of American commuters bike to work; after all, many parents have to drop kids off at school, some folks have physical handicaps that make it impossible, and the explosion of outer-ring exurbs means many commutes are far too long to bike. But the average American commute remains just 25 minutes in length—bike-able for sure, given accessible streets.

Read the whole article here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Mori Dinauer explains how in the world we got into this Michigan and Florida mess:

In late January 2007, the Florida state legislature introduced a bill to move Florida's primary to Jan. 29, which would put it in violation of the window rule. In response, the Rules and Bylaws Committee fired a warning shot, threatening to strip Florida of its delegates if it proceeded with the legislation. The Florida legislature sailed on, passing the bill on May 21 with support from both parties and Gov. Charlie Christ, a Republican. The DNC and Florida Democratic Party argued over various compromises such as a state party-run caucus system to take place at the district level after Super Tuesday, but no resolution could be reached, and the state was threatened with the same punishment that had been proposed for Michigan in 2003 -- the loss of at least 50 and perhaps 100 percent of its delegates.

Meanwhile, the Michigan Legislature introduced a similar bill in June to move its state's primary to Jan. 29, 2008, also violating the window rule. The vote in the state Senate split along party lines, with all 21 Republicans voting to pass the bill and all 17 Democrats opposing it. (The bill passed the state house, and Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, signed it into law that September.) Meanwhile, the Rules Committee gave Florida 30 days to reschedule or face a loss of all of its delegates. The four early states also began applying pressure, joining DNC Chairman Howard Dean in asking all declared Democratic candidates for president to pledge not to campaign in any state that violated the DNC rules. Every candidate signed the pledge.

Read the whole article here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Matt Duss on Muqtada al-Sadr:

Senor and Martinez were engaged in what has now become a semi-annual ritual among pro-Iraq war cultists: Prematurely celebrating the demise of the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. (Last year, Crooked Timber blogger John Quiggin compiled a partial list of Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds' premature "Sadr is finished!" ejaculations.)

Senor and Martinez's blithe declaration of Sadr's decline, their presentation of him as a rogueish rabble-rouser, and their failure to acknowledge of the deep resonance of his message in Iraqi society was unsurprising. The article is emblematic of the pro-war community's enduring, simplistic view of Sadr as a crude bandit or, as Senor put it himself back in 2004, a "thug." Despite all that has occurred in the intervening years, their view of Muqtada and what he represents has not grown any more complex.

Read the whole article here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

I like a good horror movie as much as the next person, and I plan to catch The Strangers--an apparent re-make of the 2006 French film Ils (“Them”), itself supposedly if loosely based on a true story -- which opens today. The theatrical trailer is pretty darn good , and quite scary.

And that’s what bothers me: My sister Juli, whose two daughters are eight and four, have been exposed to the trailer during commercials for one of my nieces’ favorite shows, So You Think You Can Dance? I’m generally wary of media censoring, and expect parents to exercise control over the programs their kids watch. But when the commercials interspersed during an otherwise family-friendly program are themselves very child-unfriendly, how can parents exercise such judgments? And what in the hell are the executives at Fox, which broadcasts SYTYCD, thinking?

Fortunately for my nieces, my sister DVR’s the show and was able to fast-forward through the commercials. But not all families have DVR capacity, and the idea that other young kids are getting scared shitless by creepy, axe-wielding people in scary masks during early primetime hours so Fox can sell ads and Rogue Pictures (a Focus Feature subsidiary) can sell tickets is, well, a nightmare.

I fear I sound like Joe Lieberman or James Dobson here, and don’t mean to. But there is a difference between programming and commercial content, and one key difference is that viewers can make ex ante judgments about programming but they have little or no way to anticipate, and thus screen out in real time, the content of the advertisements that arrive during breaks in that programming.

I don’t watch Fox much, and especially not Fox News, but I’m guessing that none of the self-appointed “family values” blowhards from Sean Hannity on down are gonna start calling for standards for their own network. That would be a dream.

I'll admit it -- I'm one of the millions of women nationwide anxiously waiting to be disappointed/frustrated/angered/sartorially delighted by the new "Sex and the City" movie. In the meantime, Helena Andrews at The Root (spoiler alert) has a great piece on the hackneyed "best black friend" character played by Jennifer Hudson of "Dreamgirls" fame. Yes, "Louise" is Carrie's sassy young assistant, and yes, as a black woman she is portrayed, as Andrews writes, less as a full human being than as a "perfect pocket life coach."

On the upside, at least the SATC directors and producers chose a real-life African American to play the part of a black woman. Because in the new indie film "Stuck," Mena Suvari (yes, the blond cheerleader chick from "American Beauty") plays this lady. You know, because cornrows can make anybody black.

--Dana Goldstein

Because both John McCain and Barack Obama have been touring the Interior West, I’m getting a lot of calls this week about regional strategies for the Electoral College and reaching the magical 270 threshold. I’m relieved analysts are finally discovering that, among other things, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico combined have almost the same number of electors (19) as Ohio (20) and that adding those to John Kerry’s 252 total from 2004 would put Obama over the top, however narrowly.

Allow me three quick observations. First, the two most competitive regions during the past two elections are the (Upper) Midwest and the Southwest and we have a contest appropriately fought between a man hailing from the Midwest’s largest city and the Southwest’s largest city for the hearts and minds of voters from those two regions. Second, because the demography of these regions entails a battle for Independents and Hispanics (among others) in the Southwest, and white Catholics and suburban women (among others) in the Midwest, I continue to find all this fuss about working-class white males from rural Appalachia to be overwrought.

Finally, it was made clear to me by western state Democrats I interviewed in 2005 for my book, Whistling Past Dixie, that both Al Gore and Kerry fought hard in the Midwest (Kerry much harder than Gore in Ohio, however) but largely ignored the Southwest. So far, at least, Obama shows no signs of making this mistake again. He needs to do some work to reach out to Hispanic voters, and I’ve heard from some Hispanic leaders that they feel neglected by him and his campaign. (N.B.: Patty Solis Doyle, disposed and scapegoated campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, may end up helping Obama, and he’d be smart to give her whatever resources and authority she needs.) But, overall, his team is showing every sign of understanding where -- and among whom -- he needs to win if he wants to get to 270.

--Tom Schaller

Oh, this ought to go over well:

At the western entrance to the Iraqi city of Fallujah Tuesday, Muamar Anad handed his residence badge to the U.S. Marines guarding the city. They checked to be sure that he was a city resident, and when they were done, Anad said, a Marine slipped a coin out of his pocket and put it in his hand.

Out of fear, he accepted it, Anad said. When he was inside the city, the college student said, he looked at one side of the coin. "Where will you spend eternity?" it asked.

He flipped it over, and on the other side it read, "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16."

You know your foreign policy is in shambles when some of your soldiers start taking Ann Coulter literally.

--Mori Dinauer

Editors' Note: The Propsect has invited several conservative writers to respond to Mark Schmitt's cover story in our most recent issue. Our first contributor is Joshua Treviño, a co-founder of Redstate.com and the President of Treviño Strategies and Media, Inc., in Sacramento, California. He was a political appointee in the George W. Bush Administration from 2001 through 2004.

Mark Schmitt's May 27th TAP cover story ("Can Identity Politics Save the Right?") got a great deal right, and from this conservative's perspective, some key things wrong. There is a surfeit of "how the right went wrong" pieces of late, and it is to his credit that he produced an insightful addition to the genre from the perspective of someone interested in conservatism's destruction. There is nothing quite so enjoyable as documenting the fall of one's foes -- except, perhaps, plotting one's own redemption. The sad truth -- or joyous reality, for the TAP readership -- is that for conservatives and Republicans, this redemption is a long way off.

With media attention focused upon the bitter and increasingly strange Hillary Clinton candidacy, it is easy to forget that for a brief period, the Republican primary season was even more vitriolic and shrill than the Democratic campaign is now. From the rise of Mike Huckabee's candidacy in late December 2007 through the end of Mitt Romney's run on February 7th, 2008, the various factions within the GOP and the conservative movement fell upon one another like ravenous wolves upon a stripped carcass. Democrats now are upset because Hillary Clinton mentions RFK's assassination in what, to this outsider's ears, sounds like an innocent if clumsy comment. Republicans, by contrast, were treated to George Will denouncing Huckabee as the moral equal of blood-libel-spouting anti-Semites.

The fight was only superficially about the nomination: the major candidates were each proxies for some aspect of the Republican and conservative reaction to the events of the preceding decade -- and their concurrent visions of the futures of both party and movement. Huckabee was a more refined and, yes, more thoughtful version of 2000-era "compassionate conservatism"; Rudy Giuliani ran as a foreign-policy neoconservative; Fred Thompson was an embodied and inchoate wish for Reagan; and Mitt Romney sought to position himself as "all of the above," with an extra dash of functional competence.

John McCain won this field as a sort of default: "none of the above," though with a war policy more aggressive than the President's, and in doing so, his candidacy became a metonym for the tension between the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Schmitt writes, "conservatism and the Republican Party now rise and fall together and cannot easily be disentangled," but McCain's victory belies his assertion. Throughout the contested phase of the Republican primaries, McCain's march to the nomination followed a remarkably consistent pattern: self-described conservatives on nearly all issues broke decisively for Mitt Romney, or in the Deep South, for Huckabee.

"It remains to be seen whether the Republican Party can divorce itself from the failures of conservatism," writes Schmitt. Set against the ballot-box results, his analysis breaks down. The Republican Party can and does divorce itself from conservatism -- tendentious claims of the latter's failures aside -- and this separation is by no means complete. It is no sure thing whether a McCain presidency will delay or hasten this process, but it seems immensely unlikely to reverse it.

Schmitt's thesis of conservatism as intrinsic to Republicanism, and vice versa, is hardly absurd, and deserves more examination than he or I have space for here. But as he does not allow the relevant data to temper it, he takes it too far -- particularly in a decidedly odd passage that deserves reprinting in full:

[T]he downfall of both the [Republican] party and the [conservative] movement began on the very moment that Bush shed all the hedges and compromises -- such as "compassionate conservatism" and the Medicare prescription drug benefit -- and began to try to govern like a conservative. The Bush era ended two days after the 2004 re-election when Bush declared, "I earned ... political capital, and now I intend to spend it." Starting with the effort to privatize Social Security, everything went straight downhill. The rejection of the Republican Party came not because it failed conservatism but because conservatism failed.

This is a narrative that almost no one, left or right, agrees with. Democrats are doubtless deeply surprised to learn that George W. Bush before November 2004 was a hedging compromiser; and Republicans are certainly surprised to learn that he was, after that month (or even before it), a relentless conservative. Fans of Joe Lieberman and Harriet Miers are not representative of the mass of their respective parties.

From this we come to Schmitt's core contention that, conservatism per se having failed (though it hasn't), and with Republicans unable to disentangle themselves from conservatives (though they do), the only possible winning theme left for the GOP in 2008 is a sort of American identity politics, in which the thematic thrust of McCain's campaign is reduced to a mere affirmation of what Schmitt calls one's "identity as an American," accompanied by the implication that the Democrat does not share this identity. Schmitt is quite correct that this is a major theme of McCain's run, but he's quite wrong to conclude that this is a desperation tactic.

Modern Republican presidential campaigns nearly always revolve around some variation on this theme, most notably in 1972, 1984, 1988, and 2004. (In the latter two, it plausibly pulled Republican victory from the jaws of defeat.) Schmitt contends that the difference in 2008 is that this is McCain's only theme, and if you ignore the dozens of policy specifics and proposals that the candidate has repeatedly put forth throughout the campaign, that's completely true. Here Schmitt echoes Clinton supporters' complaints that Barack Obama is all style and no substance, with about as much justification.

Schmitt further argues that "[t]he politics of American-ness needs to be cloaked in policy, simply because it's unpalatable otherwise." Oh? Again, a reference to data would bolster his case immensely: here, one would love to see a candidate of either party who lost because he was just too darned patriotic.

The Republican Party and the conservative movement are on hard times, and the fault lies squarely within each institution. Mark Schmitt understands this well, even as he gets some particulars wrong. What he misses is that because the wounds are self-inflicted, the Democrats and the American left benefit from a circumstance they did little to create. Herein lie the seeds of a comeback: not in a last-ditch "politics of American-ness" that is as old as American politics itself, but in the resolution of the struggle between the two. The 2006 and 2008 Democrats run, and usually win, on the message that they are the not-Republicans. The problem with this, for them, is that it leaves Republicans in charge of the brand. When and if the GOP and the conservative movement resolve their differences, American politics will again be conducted on their terms.

--Joshua Treviño

Ezra comes right out and says it, so hear, hear! In other gender-in-politics commentary, Matt Stoller writes today that "tough, kick-ass, no-nonsense women are a new and fresh way to say 'progressive'." That may seem a bit simple-minded; after all, tough female politicians on the national stage are often expected to also demonstrate accessible femininity, a Catch 22 if there ever was one. But whatever your thoughts on Hillary Clinton and her candidacy, it's nice to see male writers dealing honestly and constructively with gender, and taking women politicians and the preferences of female voters seriously.

--Dana Goldstein

This story in today's Washington Post struck me as a bit disingenuous. Particularly this bit:

Obama has not emphasized any signature domestic issue, or signaled that he would take his party in a specific direction on policy, as Bill Clinton did with his "New Democrat" proposals in 1992 that emphasized welfare reform or as George W. Bush did with his "compassionate conservatism" in 2000, when he called on Republicans to focus more on issues such as education.

It's entirely true that Obama is selling himself on "change" and not policy. But it's also true that he hasn't really had to contrast his policy positions with a Republican thus far. But that is going to change, and change fast. Obama all but declared himself the nominee, pending the results of the final primaries on Tuesday, and according to Marc Ambinder, at a fundraiser in Denver, Obama discussed how his administration would use its first 100 days in office to push for a national health insurance plan. That sounds like an emphasis of a "signature domestic issue" to me, and the only reason we haven't heard more about it is because the primary has gone on for so long.

--Mori Dinauer

At The Plank, Josh Patashnik responds to my post yesterday on younger evangelicals being more rigidly anti-abortion than their parents and grandparents:

It's too early to say for certain, but gay marriage looks more and more like one of those social issues--like racial and gender equality, contraception, eugenics, Prohibition, and, more recently, perhaps gun control--that within a few decades gets answered definitively one way or the other and fades from the political scene thereafter. Abortion, on the other hand, seems to be that rare social issue in American politics on which a generation of intense public debate has brought us no closer to arriving at anything resembling a consensus.

I certainly hope that gay marriage, within our lifetimes, will become totally accepted. The trend lines certainly do show real progress. But we shouldn't be too optimistic; it's difficult to predict how ideologies will shift and re-shift over time. I have to take umbrage, for example, with Josh's suggestion that contraception is an issue that has "faded from the political scene." What we've actually seen in recent years is a re-politicization of contraception. In part, this is because of new scientific developments that have given us Plan B, which foes of abortion rights have construed as akin to terminating a pregnancy. Then there are the legal battles taking place across the country in which Christian fundamentalist pharmacists are claiming they have the right not to fill prescriptions for ordinary birth control, especially for unmarried women. And don't forget the health insurers whose customers have taken them to court because they covered Viagra, but not hormonal birth control.

I doubt our mothers would have predicted, back in the 70s, that "the pill" would be as controversial in 2008 as it actually is. Living in a major city, we're lucky to be relatively protected from these flair ups of anti-birth control sentiment. But that's not the case for many American women.

--Dana Goldstein

[Stone's] only prior dealing with John McCain was bumpy. “I was doing some lobbying for Trump’s airline in the eighties, and he was competing for landing slots at LaGuardia against America West Airlines, so I went to see McCain about it in his office at the Capitol,” Stone told me. “I made an offhand comment that it wasn’t surprising that he was backing America West, because they were based in Phoenix. He stood up and said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? Get the fuck out of my office!’ But I didn’t take it personally. I supported him in 2000, and I support him now.”

And then in the Washington Post's piece on McCain consigliere Charles Black, who had been a partner with Stone in the '80s in the lobbying firm then called Black, Manafort, Stone and Atwater, and now under another name is a subsidiary of Mark Penn's Burson-Marsteller, there's this:

But those bonds did not always lead to success, Black said. He acknowledged lobbying McCain in the late 1990s on behalf of Robert L. Crandall, then chairman of American Airlines. As Black recalled, he took Crandall to speak to McCain about the potential granting of landing slots at Reagan National Airport to new airlines, including America West, which was based in Phoenix, the senator's home town. Crandall was opposed to giving out new slots.

During the meeting, Black said, Crandall mentioned that McCain had a "parochial interest" in the matter, because of the home-state airline, but that he hoped the senator would listen to his viewpoint anyway. Upon the mention of parochial interest, however, McCain "stood up and politely said, 'This meeting is over,' " Black said.

"Crandall looked at me, and I said, 'Say goodbye, Bob, we're leaving,' " Black recalled.

Adjusted for the F-word-tolerance of the two publications, and the different airport, these are two versions of exactly the same anecdote. On balance, it's favorable to McCain -- it shows his anger, but it also shows him kicking slick lobbyists out of his office -- even a close friend.

But, you might ask, why is a senator so involved in the allocation of landing slots at a particular airport? Isn't that an administrative decision of the Federal Aviation Administration? Isn't meddling in that process a bit like earmarks?

Yes, it is. A Google search on McCain and America West reveals that getting more landing slots for the company was a major preoccupation of McCain's in the 1990s. And it was more than a parochial interest on behalf of a constituent: As the chapter on McCain in the book, The Buying of the President, 2000, published by the Center for Public Integrity shows (scroll down to last section, and I'll paste it in below the break), America West was a major financial backer of McCain, and one of his top aides, John W. Timmons, became America West's lobbyist. America West donated a charter plane to Cindy McCain's charity, American Voluntary Medical Team, for a trip to Kuwait, and this story in TheStreet.com says that Cindy McCain's Hensley Group holds a large stake in US Airways, the successor to America West. In return, McCain pushed through legislation to open landing slots at the four most crowded airports in the east.

In my column on McCain last month, I wrote that "It's easy to be a maverick standing up to one special interest while serving the interests of another." The useful story of McCain kicking the lobbyists -- Stone and Black -- out of his office is yet another example.

-- Mark Schmitt

(Here's the full text of the section on America West from The Buying of the President, 2000:

On February 11, 1999, members of the Senate Commerce Committee marked up a bill to loosen restrictions on flights to and from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, just outside the nation’s capital. “If we do not pass this legislation, it will be another clear victory for the major airlines and the special interests in Washington, which will not surprise me,” the bill’s sponsor, committee chairman John McCain, told his colleagues. “Nor will it be the first time or the last time. I intend to try to look out for the American consumer.”

Experts disagree on whether adding flights at the National Airport would result in lower airfares, but one thing is certain: If passed, the measure would boost the fortunes of America West Airlines, which is based in Phoenix. McCain has angrily denied he is shilling for America West, but for more than a decade his efforts to increase the number of flights at National Airport have gone hand in hand with those of the airline, which employs about 9,000 Arizona residents. Over the years, the airline’s executives and other employees have given McCain at least $17,150 in political contributions.

One of the few airlines to get off the ground after Congress deregulated the industry in 1978, America West grew to become the nation’s ninth-largest commercial carrier in part by aggressively acquiring landing and takeoff rights, commonly known as “slots,” at the nation’s four busiest airports: La Guardia and John F. Kennedy International in New York City, O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, and National. Since the 1960s, a “high density rule” has limited the number of flights the four airports can handle, and a “perimeter rule” has limited nonstop flights to and from National to 1,250 miles. The purpose of the rules is to control congestion and noise levels.

The rules, however, prevented America West from expanding service to the East Coast. And so, in 1987, the airline petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to force airlines to give up slots that they barely used.

McCain has been advancing America West’s agenda on Capitol Hill ever since. In 1988 he pushed through legislation that required the FAA to redo its slot regulations. The FAA complied, and by the end of 1993, thanks to a combination of the new rule, exemptions granted by the FAA, and slots wrested from other airlines, America West had secured takeoff and landing rights at the four busiest airports.

But the additional slots didn’t solve all of America West’s problems. After posting poor earnings in 1996, the airline launched a two-year campaign to expand its service. But the perimeter rule still prevented America West from offering nonstop service from Phoenix to Washington, a lucrative route that attracts high-paying business customers.

On May 21, 1998, William Franke, the chairman of America West Holdings Corporation (the holding company for the airline), told a reporter for The Arizona Republic, “Washington National would be really significant. We’ve been working hard at trying to get the perimeter rule amended.”

A few weeks later McCain pulled out all the stops to get a bill through the Senate to change the perimeter rule at National. He squashed opposition from the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority by threatening to hold up the Senate’s approval of three appointees to the panel. When his bill faced opposition in the House, McCain took funds for airport construction hostage. He refused to relinquish the funds even after the House version of his proposal died.

McCain’s hardball tactics paid off in October 1999, when the Senate approved his proposal to open up 24 new slots at National Airport and to lift perimeter restrictions for half of those flights.

Through it all, McCain, who’s made something of a name for himself as a “pork-buster,” has insisted that his only goal is to improve competition in the airline industry. But even executives of America West acknowledge that few other carriers would benefit from McCain’s bill.

“Other than America West and what we’re doing, there aren’t that many that qualify,” Michael Conway, a co-founder of America West who recently started National Airline out of Las Vegas, told a reporter in March 1999.

Under McCain’s proposal, America West could also keep exemptions to airport restrictions it already has — exemptions McCain won at the behest of John Timmons, America West’s chief lobbyist. “It’s hard for me to understand why McCain should get any more of a bum rap than Jim Moran or Connie Morella [two Washington-area lawmakers] should get,” Timmons later told a reporter, “because they’re shilling for their people as much as McCain’s shilling for his people.”

Timmons should know. Before he became a lobbyist in 1994, he worked for 11 years as McCain’s legislative director.

An outraged California populace has reacted to the Outrageous Judicial Activism of their unaccountable unelected state court. As you remember, the court, with only the support of other unrepresentative and undemocratic institutions such as the state legislature and governor but in the teeth of strong opposition from pundits who support social change in theory and always oppose it in practice struck down a ban on same-sex marriage. The response: California is showing if anything more support for same-sex marriage than ever. I have no idea if the initiative on the November ballot amending the state constitution to ban gay marriages will pass, but I certainly don't see much evidence of the predicted political firestorm here.

This reminds me about Jeffrey Rosen's latest claims about the backlash that will be created by the court's decision (via Matt Zeitlin.) My research into the subject has convinced me that claims about unique backlashes created by judicial interventions into social disputes are not supported by the relevant evidence. Admittedly, however, some claims are not easy to test empirically and are not obviously incorrect in theory, so any conclusion has to be tentative. The specific claim advanced by Rosen here, however, is just transparently wrong:

But legal reasoning isn't irrelevant, as the backlash against Roe v. Wade shows: Because Roe was so poorly reasoned, pro-life activists found it easier to rally undecided voters under the guise of attacking judicial usurpation. On that score, the California decision represents a huge opportunity for gay marriage opponents who are already trying to persuade undecided voters to overturn the decision by popular initiative.

And the specific claims about Roe are no more tenable. If anti-choice activists have used Roe to shift public opinion against abortion rights, this fails to actually show up in public opinion data. Moreover, Roe is at least as popular as the underlying right it protects, while Rosen's assertions require Roe being much less popular. And finally, I think to restate the assertion that anti-aboriton activists would have had no objection to Roe had the opinion been better crafted is to refute it. Seriously, does anybody think that had, say, the Supreme Court followed Ginsburg's retrospective advice and grounded abortion rights in gender equality that any significant number of Roe's opponents would have been mollified? Similarly, approximately 0% of the "Yes" vote in the upcoming referendum will be based on a strong opposition to the court's suspect classification analysis. (It also seems to me that the majority opinion is at least as plausible and well-crafted as the boilerplate, question-begging paeans to judicial restraint in the dissents; if Rosen disagrees he doesn't explain why.)

Finally I also note that Rosen does not substantiate his claim that Goodridge hurt Kerry in 2004 -- which is not nearly as self-evident as some people think -- and ignores the fact that overturning Goodridge could not get the support of even 25% of the legislature less than 5 years later. I very, very strongly doubt that the California court damaged the Democrats in California any more than they did in Massachusetts, where supporters of same-sex marriage have fared much better than opponents and support for same-sex marriage has increased.

--Scott Lemieux

Via Wonk Room: The Michigan Department of Community Health has banned most organic products from their food stamp program, claiming that organics just aren't cost effective. Is that true, or is this just another example of government giving corporate agribusiness a leg up? Diana Jancek, co-founder of Michigan's Sweetwater Local Foods Market, visited a supermarket and marshaled the evidence:

Allowed: Frosted Mini-Wheats (first three ingredients Whole Grain Wheat, Sugar, High Fructose Corn Syrup), 18 oz. — $3.63 Not Allowed: Meijer Organic Raisin Brain (all organic, no corn syrup), 17 oz. — $2

Allowed: Jif Peanut Butter (includes partially and fully hydrogenated vegetable fats), 18 oz. — $2.18
Not Allowed: Meijer Organic Peanut Butter, 18 oz. — $2.59

Allowed: Fresh Conventional Carrots, 1 pound — $1.30
Not Allowed: Fresh Organic Carrots, 1 pound — $.99

Allowed: Conventional White Eggs — $1.69
Not Allowed: Conventional Brown Eggs — $1.89

Allowed: V8 Tomato Juice, 46 oz. — $2.79
Not Allowed: Organic Tomato Juice, 46 oz. — $2.99

Of course, allowing consumers to purchase organic or just healthier products with food stamps doesn't mean they will do so. That's why nutritional education should be part of every school curriculum, to get people thinking about the impact of their diet from a young age.

--Dana Goldstein

Jon Chait makes the first obvious point about Rich Lowry's silly attempt to claim that there's some contradiction between Democratic arguments that ballots that indicated the intent of the voter should be counted in Florida 2000 and the position of many Democrats about current dispute over the Democratic nomination: the argument was that Gore was cheated of the presidency because in a fair contest in Florida he would have won the electoral college. Similarly, had 200,000 votes shifted in Ohio in 2004 Kerry would have been entitled to the presidency despite losing the popular vote. These results would (in my view) be good reasons to get rid of the electoral college, but not for changing the rules after the fact. Lowry tries to manufacture a contradiction by attributing Clinton's attempted ex post facto change in metrics to the Dems in 2000, but that won't fly.

In addition, however, the analogy is also null because (especially in Michigan) the Clinton campaign wants to count the results of a "primary" that obviously does not offer a meaningful recording of voter intent. To believe that the ballots cast in a multi-candidate election conducted according to agreed-upon rules should be interpreted when possible to count votes that make a voter's intent clear hardly requires the counting of ballots in an election with one major candidate on the ballot that every candidate and the authoritative decision-maker claimed wouldn't count. Elections in North Korea don't suddenly become legitimate even if every ballot for Kim Jong-il is, in fact, counted, and people who wanted to "count all the votes" in Florida in 2000 are not required to include online straw polls into presidential election counts in 2008. And, therefore, Lowry's argument makes no sense.

--Scott Lemieux

The Associated Press is reporting that Joe Lieberman (I-Hagee BFF) will speak at John Hagee's Christians United for Israel Summit in July. According to the AP, Lieberman "said Wednesday while Hagee's comments were unacceptable and hurtful, he will judge him on his life work fighting anti-Semitism and building bridges between Christians and Jews."

Fighting anti-Semitism by suggesting that God likes to see millions of Jews dead? Interesting theory. But not surprising, coming from Lieberman, part of a larger group of Jewish Hagee supporters who have long been aware of his theodicy, but have chosen to look the other way because of his supposed "love" of Israel and the Jews. I've been covering Hagee for a little over two years, and sadly I can't say I'm surprised by the refusal of Jewish leaders to forego this morally repugnant and politically dangerous marriage of convenience. It is deeply entrenched and won't be shaken easily.

J Street, People for the American Way, and other groups are trying.

--Sarah Posner

The Supreme Court yesterday, in 6-3 and 7-2 decisions, interpreted anti-discrimination statutes to include retaliation against employees as "discrimination" even when this was not explicit in the statutory text. The latter case, Crocs West, was a relatively easy case upholding long-standing precedent and the unanimous holdings of circuit courts. Roberts differed in the first case because of the availability of administrative procedures for government (as opposed to private) employees.

Dana and Josh Patashnik point out that Alito and (in one case) Roberts split from Thomas and Scalia in a more liberal direction. In isolation, this could be used as a data point supporting claims that Alito and Roberts are more moderate and unpredictable than Scalia and Thomas, as the more minimalist and less theoretical approach of the newer justices led to voting with the more liberal justices. However, for now I'm certainly sticking with my assumption that Alito is a doctrinaire conservative and the formal differences among the court's conservative will have little substantive impact.

Justices never have entirely consistent voting patterns -- even famously similar justice pairs such as Brennan/Marshall and Black/Douglas didnt't vote together 100% of the time -- but one exception is hardly cause for revision. This is particularly true because the votes of Roberts and Alito in this case weren't decisive -- if Alito and/or Roberts start breaking from Scalia and Thomas when it actually matters then there may be cause for revision. Scalia has actually cast decisive votes with more liberal justices and dissented in arguably more liberal directions that the majority; when Alito starts doing that I'll entertain claims that he's less predictably conservative. Until then, let's remember that last term "the Chief Justice voted for the more conservative result (by most observers' lights) in 24 out of the 24 cases decided by a 5-4 vote," and I believe in every one of these was joined by Alito.

--Scott Lemieux

Shocking, I know, but it appears that Barack Obama is not dividing the Democratic Party:

Barack Obama has done poorly in the Democratic primaries with women, Catholics and others who will be pivotal in this fall's presidential election. Yet early polling shows that with several of these groups, he's competitive when matched against Republican John McCain.

A look at voters who have been closely contested in recent presidential elections -- or veered from one party to the other, making them true swing groups -- shows a significant number have leaned toward Obama's rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the primaries. Besides women and Catholics, these include the elderly, the less educated and suburbanites, leading Clinton to argue that this makes her the Democrats' stronger candidate for the fall campaign.

Yet Obama's performance with these voters in the primaries doesn't necessarily mean he'd do poorly with them in the general election, assuming he nails down the last few convention delegates he needs to win the nomination.

Polls this month show the Illinois senator leading McCain among women, running even with him among Catholics and suburbanites and trailing him with people over age 65. Results vary by poll for those without college degrees. And though Obama trails decisively with a group that has shunned him against Clinton—whites who have not completed college—he's doing about the same with them as the past two Democratic presidential candidates.

That last bit, comparing Obama to Al Gore and John Kerry, caused Matt Yglesias to remark, "Gore and Kerry both lost narrowly, but they lost. On the other hand, though they both lost, they lost narrowly." Of course in the case of Gore, there's an enormous asterisk that needs to be attached to his loss, but I think the electoral maps of 2000 and 2004 reflect pretty accurately the state of each party's strength state-by-state in 2008. It is, in other words, a good baseline, and deviations from that baseline are wholly dependent on both large externalities and trends -- the GOP's decline, an unpopular war, a sour economy, a general bad mood in the country, etc. -- as well as the personality of the candidates and how they sell themselves to the public.

The latter factor could prove decisive. And in fact, the sheer pageantry of the presidential contest drowns out the bigger story of the Democratic electoral realignment, something Josh Marshall commented on over the weekend. He notes that Judis and Teixeira's The Emerging Democratic Majority is eerily prescient, and wonders whether what Democrats faced in the 2002 and 2004 elections wasn't merely the last gasp of conservative Republican dominance, just as the Democrats briefly capitalized on the fall of Nixon in the 1970s -- even as the country stood on the precipice of a conservative electoral realignment in 1980.

I think Marshall is on to something, and the numbers would seem to bear this out. The 2002 midterm elections were saturated with blood from 9/11 and the GOP exploited that national wound with little remorse. But looking at it in hindsight, all you see is a Senate that flipped from a 51-49 Democratic majority to a 51-49 Republican majority. In the House, the GOP expanded their majority by just eight seats. 2004 seems more realigning, with the GOP picking up four seats in the Senate. But virtually all of them were in the deep south, nothing more than the final purge of the old Southern Democrats from the Democratic party (including retirements). In the House, the GOP gained only 3 seats. The point of all this was that the GOP in the 21st century meagerly built upon their 1994 takeover of the House, narrowly held the presidency, while the Senate slowly realigned so its members were ideologically in sync with their states.

By contrast, 2006 saw Democrats pick up five Senate seats, and 31 in the House, reversing all GOP gains made over the previous decade. And for 2008, it's hardly irresponsible to predict a five seat gain in the Senate, and as many as twenty in the House. That's a realignment. But the presidential contests of 2000, 2004 and 2008 overshadowed this reality, briefly creating the illusion of long-term Republican dominance when really it was their apogee before the fall.

--Mori Dinauer

After mounting a dubious argument on Monday for allocating Clinton more FL and MI delegates than she actually won (and methodically taken apart brick-by-brick at fivethirtyeight.com and our own Mark Schmitt), Lanny Davis now complains that Obama is deliberately taking action on the campaign to ruin his general election chances (if he's the nominee, Davis cautions us -- if), citing "four things that the Obama campaign couldn't resist doing to anger Clinton supporters."

I hereby nominate this piece to replace Davis' classic August, 2006 tirade on the eve of the Connecticut primary -- when he complained about all the unhinged liberal bloggers who were out to destroy Joe Lieberman's re-election campaign -- as the Davis Award, given for editorial writing that demonstrates outstanding achievement in the field of whining about meanies without ever rising to the level of an argument. 

--Mori Dinauer

So much for the great wedge issue of aught-eight:

A majority of registered Californian voters oppose changing the constitution of the most populous U.S. state to bar gays from marrying, according to poll released on Wednesday.

The Field Poll survey found 51 percent against approving a possible November ballot measure to prohibit gay marriage, with 43 percent in favor. A slightly differently worded question on the same issue found 54 percent opposed and 40 percent in favor.

This confirms, for me, what Mark Schmitt argues in our June cover story, that the GOP will be campaigning less this year on specific wedge issues and more on the general wedge of being a "real" American. And at the presidential level, that neatly meshes with both John McCain's national greatness conservatism and the more sinister underground campaign of viral emails attacking Barack Obama with the muck of racism and xenophobia.

--Mori Dinauer

I agree with Sam that if a candidate is mentioned as a V.P. prospect for both parties, it's probably a pretty good bet he won't be picked as vice president. But Mike Bloomberg himself is a bad example of this so-called "Bloomberg law." Sam writes, "someone who has major policy areas attractive to both parties will also hold views each party finds repellent." The curious thing about Bloomberg's governing record, though, is that it contains no policy proposal outside the mainstream of the national Democratic party. Pro-choice? Check. Anti-poverty? Check. Prioritizes education? Check. Pro-gay rights? Check. Distributes cutely branded condoms? Check. Talks about the domestic HIV/AIDS crisis? Check.

Granted, the levers Bloomberg uses to enact reforms are often free-market ones, and he has been aggressively pro-development, often in ways New York progressives find distasteful. His West Side and Brooklyn Yards development proposals weren't a hit with the masses, and most agree Bloomie squandered precious time and money on his ill-fated bid to bring the Olympic Games to New York. Still, Bloomberg's neo-liberal politics fit squarely within a Democratic framework, which is why it's so weird he was ever a Republican in the first place, hosting the Republican National Convention in 2004 and supporting George W. Bush and his endless war in Iraq. But what really matters about Bloomberg is that he's a naked opportunist who also just happens to be a sorta wonky, good governance type. Outside of New York City, he never would have gotten away with calling himself a Republican, and without his personal fortune, he wouldn't be able to now bet his political future on "Independence." In any normal world, Bloomie would be a Democrat. It's just that New York isn't normal.

--Dana Goldstein

Apropos of this article, I'd like to propose a rule of thumb -- call it the Bloomberg law. If someone is mentioned as a potential candidate for a national office for both parties, he should be a candidate for neither. The differences between Democrats and Republicans are so huge these days that someone who has major policy areas attractive to both parties will also hold views each party finds repellent.

This isn't true, I should say, in the case of figures outside politics whose views are just unknown (though even in that case I'd be skeptical of them as candidates).

--Sam Boyd

Ezra thinks so:

After leaving the Marines, Webb could have taken any number of jobs in the military-industrial complex, but he became a writer and journalist in order to protect his autonomy. He resigned from his post as secretary of the Navy because he disagreed with proposed cuts in shipbuilding. Importantly, both decisions are presented as sacrifices in service of principle. "I valued my philosophical and political independence," says Webb, "and I did not want to trade away the credibility of any controversial position I might hold by having opponents claim I was merely trying to sell a product or to advance a client's point of view." Politicians often make this claim. But Webb's career, the jobs he left behind and the lucrative opportunities he passed up, give it force.

Regrettably, this outlook is the antithesis of the vice presidency, which often requires mortgaging your personal credibility and sacrificing your independence in order to further the president's point of view. Lyndon Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, said of the position, "Anyone who thinks that the vice president can take a position independent of the president of his administration simply has no knowledge of politics or government. You are his choice in a political marriage, and he expects your absolute loyalty." Humphrey gave his absolute loyalty and found himself silenced and sidelined. It is hard to imagine Webb enduring similar treatment, or proving similarly docile in the face of decisions with which he disagreed.

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Brian Beutler of the Media Consortium has the latest:

After trying for more than a year to secure Karl Rove's testimony as part of an ongoing investigation into the 2006 firings of nine US attorneys, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the former White House political adviser on Thursday, opening another front in its battle over executive power with the Bush administration.

The White House has claimed broad executive privilege over much of the information the committee has sought from Rove and other officials. Last July the administration blocked former White House counsel Harriet Miers and White House chief of staff Josh Bolten from complying with congressional subpoenas for testimony and internal documents. In February, the House voted to hold Miers and Bolten in contempt of Congress. After the Justice Department, acting on orders from the White House, refused to enforce the contempt citations, the House Judiciary Committee turned to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for redress. Rove, for his part, made his position on testifying clear last August, when he refused to comply with a subpoena from the Senate Judiciary Committee related to the attorney firings. The Senate panel stopped short of pursuing a contempt citation, but the House counterpart has been far less timid in this regard. If Rove refuses the House committee's subpoena, it's quite possible that he may wind up in court along with Miers and Bolten, according to a House Judiciary Committee aide.

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

On the other hand, Webb is singing a very different song today. He came from nowhere to narrowly beat George Allen, Jr., mainly because along the campaign trail, after listening to ordinary Virginians, he metamorphosed from a Reagan Democrat into a New Deal Democrat, and won the votes of lots of good old boys (and gals) who were suffering economically. He is now just one of six members of the Senate Progressive Caucus.

All of which puts me in mind of Michael Kinsley's astute observation that the right welcomes converts while the left considers them unreliable. Ronald Reagan, after all, used to be a New Deal Democrat. But this didn't scare off any of his conservative supporters. Rather, they grasped that his New Deal roots and ideological odyssey only enhanced Reagan's electability.

I, for one, believe in redemption. And I have to ask, how long is the statute of limitations for past sins of converts? Or to put it another way, what would Kathy have to say about the truly idiotic statements of a current hero of the left, Arianna Huffington, back when she was a rightwing nut? If we consider Arianna's conversion genuine, are we holding Webb to a higher standard? Is that reasonable, given that the man might be president someday, or are we just acting out Kinsley's stereotype?

If memory serves, after Reagan was elected he did not revert to Roosevelt Democrat, and he helped convert others to Reagan Democrats.

--Robert Kuttner

There's not much new in this Reuters run down of Obama and McCain's abortion platforms, but this statistic jumped out at me:

An analysis of surveys from 2001 to 2007 by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that young white evangelicals between the ages of 18 and 29 were even more conservative on the issue than their elders.

It found 70 percent said they were in favor of making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion compared with 55 percent of older white evangelicals and 39 percent of young Americans overall.

So younger evangelicals are more rigid on abortion than their parents and grandparents. Does that reflect the success of the movement's strategy of inoculating a radically anti-abortion rights ideology in children, telling them they are "abortion survivors," and likening Roe v. Wade to a Holocaust and abortion to slavery? (Think "Jesus Camp.") All that, of course, has grown alongside the abstinence movement, with the emergence of "purity balls," chastity rings, and the like. Or is it simply that with age and life experience comes moderation?

--Dana Goldstein

I'm certain that opportunism, rather than conscience, led Scott McClellan to publish his tell-all book now, rather than when it might have had more of an impact. But that does not necessarily mean, as Karl Rove seems to think, that McClellan is lying about what transpired in the Bush White House, particularly during the run-up to war. Rather, a first-hand account like this merely seems to confirm all the circumstantial evidence of a massive propaganda effort by the administration to sell this war to the public and the world using scare tactics.

This also explains why both Rove and Dana Perino have characterized McClellan's book as so implausible that it's almost as though he's taken a leave of his senses. Rove: "First of all, this doesn't sound like Scott. It really doesn't. Not the Scott McClellan I've known for a long time. Second of all, it sounds like somebody else. It sounds like a left-wing blogger." Perino: "For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad -- this is not the Scott we knew." I also love how ol' Turd Blossom, true to form, threw in the old chestnut of the unhinged liberal blogger -- priceless.

--Mori Dinauer

This editorial in National Review encouraging Congress to open currently off-limits locations to oil drilling puts in black and white the shortsightedness and unimaginative thinking going on in energy policy. What really gets me is the unwillingness to reach the logical conclusion that oil is a non-renewable resource -- a fact they admit to in the editorial! "But the simple fact of the matter is that solar power and wind can’t fulfill the vital role non-renewables play in the U.S. economy," they write. If you have a resource that plays a vital role in the economy and is non-renewable, then isn't it obvious that the solution is to find a replacement for that vital non-renewable resource? The real problem isn't Congress or environmentalists blocking access to "vast untapped supplies" that at best will be a temporary solution, but rather how the country and the world at large deals with the inevitable transition away from the carbon-based economy.

And it is inevitable. It certainly won't happen tomorrow, and it probably won't happen for decades. But it is going to happen. And managing this fundamental shift is going to require long-term thinking, innovation, risk-taking and political leadership. Increasing off-shore or wildlife preserve drilling accomplishes none of these things. But to the conservative populist, some liberal elite is always getting in the way of the market working its magic, leading the editorial to conclude, "Receiving no help from their leaders, Americans have taken it upon themselves to achieve savings in the face of skyrocketing fuel costs. Simply put, we are driving less. Now it’s time for Congress to meet us halfway." Expect much more of this carbon demagoguery in the future, because high oil prices, I'm afraid, are here to stay.

--Mori Dinauer

According to the U.K.'s Marketing magazine, the British public's top five most beloved celebrities are all men -- Paul McCartney, Lewis Hamilton, Gary Lineker, Simon Cowell and David Beckham. The top four most hated are all women -- Heather Mills, Amy Winehouse, Victoria Beckham and Kerry Katona. Do you think the same gender split would hold true in American public opinion? It's easy to imagine it might, with Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and others of their ilk being despised. '

Consider, for example, how Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are portrayed differently in the tabloid media, with Jolie primarily blamed for the break-up of Pitt's marriage to Jennifer Aniston. And does the same hold true in our political culture? It's difficult to say, because no female politician has ever risen to the prominence of a JFK or a FDR. Outside of the First Lady role, there's just no model for a truly beloved female national political figure. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Hat tip: Echidne.

--Dana Goldstein

In The Politico, Clinton ally Lanny Davis proposed a "compromise" on the Democratic delegations from Michigan and Florida, which he describes as "more generous to Obama than to Clinton."

Here's his deal: in Michigan, give Clinton the 73 pledged delegates she would have won if the primary were legal. Then, of the 55 delegates that are pledged to "uncommitted," "divide the remaining delegates approximately 50-50 between the two of them, 28-27 (giving Clinton the extra delegate since she led in all the latest statewide polls.)"

So she gets the delegates represented by everyone who voted for her when she was the only major candidate on the ballot, and then more than 50% of all the people who voted for anyone but her!

Brezhnev should have thought of this.

On Florida, what he describes as a "compromise" is simply to seat the delegates as if the primary were valid. Which is a perfectly reasonable case (I'm for it), but can't be called a compromise.

This actually goes beyond Harold Ickes' reported demand that the uncommitteds remain uncommitted and not be counted for Obama. But for months, the case that Clinton made for the legitimacy of the Michigan primary was that Obama was effectively on the ballot, and the votes for "uncommitted" represent his support.

(Davis argues that "some of those 50 delegates [that is, their supporters] might have been for Clinton as a second choice to candidates other than Obama, so it would be totally unfair to award all 50 delegates to Obama." True, but some of the 73 Clinton delegates might have been for Obama as a first choice but didn't see his name on the ballot.)

I've met Lanny Davis only once, when he was lobbying on behalf of Howard Stern in the 1990s. I always assumed that took a lot of chutzpah, but it was a mere warmup for this.

--Mark Schmitt.

Last year the Supreme Court severely limited workers' ability to file discrimination claims. But in two rulings today, SCOTUS actually stands up for workers, stating that neither public nor private sector employees can be fired in retaliation for making age-or-race-based claims of discrimination.

I hope Scott will chime in with some expert legal commentary, but notable to me is that Justice Samuel Alito -- who was oft-parodied as "Scalito" during his confirmation hearings -- split from Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas to side with workers in both cases. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the minority only on the age discrimination case.

--Dana Goldstein

Kathy makes a definitive case. The risk of giving up a red state Senate seat has to create a strong presumption against it, and it just isn’t the job for him. Under the circumstances, choosing someone with Webb’s history of sexism seems like an especially bad idea. I have been skeptical that Clinton’s supporters (as opposed to her staff) won’t get over it if she’s not on the ticket (which is good, because picking her has a lot of negatives), but surely many Clinton supporters wouldn’t find Webb acceptable, and they’d have a point. Webb’s past comments don’t make him unacceptable as a red-state Senator, but in the wider universe of good VP candidates this should rule him out.

—Scott Lemieux

The Washington Post's front page this morning features a story on increased use of public transportation and van pooling in D.C.'s outer suburbs due to rising gas prices. In some communities, bus ridership is up by more than 20 percent. But nowhere does the article tackle the continued exurbanization of the D.C. metro area, which will ultimately undermine attempts to grow mass transit. Thank goodness for Ryan Avent, the wonkosphere's most interesting urban planning writer, who has the stats on housing permits requested by various cities this year:

Dallas has authorized twice as many single family units as San Francisco has total housing units, and Houston has authorized nearly four times as many single family units as San Francisco has total units. In fact, the only metro areas with more total units than Houston has single family units are Dallas and New York.

Now, Dallas and Houston deserve credit for beginning to address the auto-centricity of their transportation networks. But transportation and land-use are intimately connected, and the construction of thousands of new single family homes at densities that are unlikely to make transit use all that attractive is likely to result in a surge of energy use and carbon emissions that overwhelms savings from new transit ridership.

The point is that it’s not enough to simply expand transit. We also need to expand the number of homes in places that are compatible with transit, and reduce the proportion of homes in places that aren’t. And we need to adopt national legislation that will ensure that the costs of carbon emissions are incorporated into land-use decisions across the nation, and not just in forward thinking metro areas.

Yes.

--Dana Goldstein

For those who missed it, there was a heartbreaking federal immigration raid in Iowa last week. Over 300 workers were arrested at a meat processing plant and, in a rushed, four-day process, 270 plead guilty and were sentenced to five months in prison followed by immediate deportation. They signed away their rights to appear in immigration court, and families were abruptly split. Many of the workers had used false IDs and social security numbers to secure employment at the plant, owned by Agriprocessors, the nation's largest produce of Kosher meats. Underage workers were also employed there. Remaining workers told the New York Times that managers were well aware of the many legal violations taking place. But it's the workers themselves who'll pay the price of dislocation, with all the economic and emotional trauma that entails.

Today, the Times follows up with a fascinating story about how increased fear of immigration raids is changing the agricultural industry. Some farmers in Western New York have sharply scaled back their output and switched to crops that they can harvest using machines, rather than increase wages to a level where native-born workers will take these jobs.Those technological changes are costly and thus will be difficult to reverse, even if a temporary guest worker program is created and the supply of farm workers comes back up.

--Dana Goldstein

Speaking of the Obama campaign's challenge to institutional feminism, Jessica Valenti has a great essay in The Nation urging feminists not to run away from "infighting" over the Clinton-Obama race, but rather to "own the conflict. ... Instead of the group hug approach, let's focus on tangible goals: fostering youth leadership, working from the margins in and using intersectionality as our lens -- instead of just a talking point." As Jessica points out, some Clinton supporters' disapproval of women who prefered other candidates can be traced to the very same critique that women of color, younger women, and LGBTQ women have been making of mainstream feminism for decades: That it fails to take into account how "isms" other than sexism and identities other than simple female-ness play into women's political and personal choices.

--Dana Goldstein

From our June issue: Mark Schmitt ponders Republicans' political problems and concludes that, in the short run at least, their only option is a curious kind of identity politics:

That leaves Republicans with a single alternative, one that's embodied in the slogan of McCain's first general-election advertisement: "The American President Americans Are Waiting For." It's the politics of identity--not necessarily racial or ethnic identity but identity as an American. The blog FiveThirtyEight.com, which has been gathering all sorts of data relevant to the Electoral College vote, recently noted a fascinating demographic fact: About 7 percent of people refuse to answer the Census questions about ethnic origin and instead write in "American." Those defiant Americans are overwhelmingly found in the states and counties that turned away from the Democratic Party in 2000 and 2004--the Appalachian belt running from West Virginia through Kentucky, Tennessee, and southern Ohio--which are also the counties where Barack Obama has done worst in the primaries.

David Frum calls explicitly for this brand of identity politics, declaring that while the Republican Party's issue positions have evolved over the years, "there is one thing that has never changed: Republicans have always been the party of American democratic nationhood," whereas Democrats "attract those who felt themselves in some way marginal to the American experience: ... intellectuals, Catholics, Jews, blacks, feminists, gays--people who identify with the ‘pluribus' in the nation's motto, ‘e pluribus unum.'" In case it's not clear, in Frum's Latin, "pluribus" means "parasites," and he tells us helpfully, "As the nation weakens, Democrats grow stronger."

In Frum's book, this ugly bit of identity politics is carefully nestled within thousands of words about policy. And this is how the code is supposed to work. The GOP's attack on "liberals" was always an attack on people not quite like "Americans"--secular, cosmopolitan, educated, egalitarian. When Republicans went after Michael Dukakis for his policies on crime, they weren't just saying his policies were bad. They were saying, he's not like us; he's a cold-blooded, academic mush-brain who wouldn't give his kids a whupping if they needed it.

Read the whole article here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

David Brooks' description of what to look for in a running mate, as well as his calculation of one of Obama's chief deficiencies, is right on:

...a sensible presidential candidate shouldn’t be selecting a mate on the basis of who can help him get elected. He should be thinking about who can help him govern successfully so he can get re-elected.

That means asking: What circumstances will I face when I take office? What tasks will I need my chief subordinate to perform to help me face those circumstances?

If Barack Obama is elected, his chief challenge will be that he hopes to usher in a new style of politics, but he has no real strategy for how to do that.

I recently traveled to Phoenix to interview Janet Napolitano for an upcoming print profile. What struck me was how instructive her tenure is to those wondering what Obama's compromise between "unity" and party-building would look like in practice. Napolitano has governed according to that exact model in Arizona, forming coalitions with business and moderate Republicans that have brought state Democrats to the point of possibly retaking the very conservative Arizona state legislature this November. She's done it by cultivating her law and order credibility and, yes, departing from the progressive line on some key issues, such as the death penalty.

Napolitano also chose to send National Guards to the Arizona-Mexico border, which was a highly controversial move among immigrants' rights activists, but later became a keystone of the Bush-McCain-Kennedy immigration reform compromise that the Senate killed last year. All three presidential candidates support that plan. So if there's one politician in the United States right now whose governing philosophy is a match for Obama's, but who augments his flourishes with real world executive experience, it's probably Napolitano. Brooks suggests either Tom Daschle or Sam Nunn as the running mate., emphasizing their ability to coax Congress. They'd also be sensible choices, although a bit old hat.

--Dana Goldstein

Over the weekend, Bob Barr won the Libertarian Party nomination in Denver after five ballots were cast. I'm not about to wade into what this means for libertarian politics, but it is worth looking at the question of whether Barr would actually have an impact on the general presidential election. In Georgia, which Barr represented in the U.S. House as a Republican, he already polls at eight percent -- not an insignificant level of support (McCain and Obama get 45 and 35 percent, respectively). If Barr were to peel away enough votes to put McCain in a statistical tie with Obama and there's record turnout for Obama (Georgia's population is 30 percent African American) then it's just possible that the state and its 15 electoral votes could be competitive for Democrats this Fall.

But that's a lot of big ifs. Big turnout for Obama seems plausible (his 700,000 votes in the Georgia primary alone account for half of what John Kerry received in the general election in 2004) but I remain skeptical that that will be enough, even with Barr's intervention, to flip the state blue. And that's assuming that Barr exclusively takes votes from McCain. There are other states where Barr could have an impact outside of the special case of Georgia, but that's a subject for a separate post.

--Mori Dinauer

Rebecca Walker coined the term “third wave,” but has been at times a thorn in the feminist movement’s side, questioning other women’s choices to remain childless and controversially writing that she loved her second son more than her first, who was not biologically her own. Now, in Huffington Post, Walker argues that Barack Obama’s successful appeal to young progressive women across lines of race and class has potentially killed institutional “Feminism” — not to be confused with “feminisms.”

The death metaphor seems like hyperbole, but it’s true that with Hillary Clinton’s probable exit from the race, organizations such as NOW and EMILY’s List, as well as the many second-wave leaders who’ve publicly questioned young women’s feminist credentials if they don’t support Clinton, will have to work to convince younger generations that they remain committed to their core missions more than they are committed to a specific candidate. The EMILY in EMILY’s List, for example, is actually an acronym meaning “Early Money is Like Yeast.” Supporting early and mid-career politicians has always been a better way to ensure we’ll someday have a female president than focusing solely on Hillary Clinton, who is in many ways an outlier as a female candidate. Ann Friedman will have much more on all this in TAP’s July print issue, so I’ll stop here. But I do think Walker is right to say that Obama’s candidacy has profoundly challenged the sensibilities of some of the major feminist organizations.

—Dana Goldstein

Late yesterday afternoon, John Hagee issued a statement asserting that in his now-notorious sermon clip, he was not blaming the Holocaust on the Jews and is not anti-Semitic. Charging that his "life's work -- the great passion of my life. ... Combatting anti-semitism and supporting the state of Israel" has been "mischaracterized and attacked," Hagee signaled that he's not going to let one sermon excerpt eclipse his career. Yesterday I reported on signs that his evangelical allies are going to rally behind him; now the question remains whether his Jewish allies will too.

Leaders in the Reform Movement have been first to condemn Hagee, but it is unclear whether others, who unlike Reform leaders, have a more intense commitment to Hagee, will follow suit. In the Washington Post's On Faith blog, Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, called for Jews to denounce Hagee's words, and to refuse to embrace his efforts in their communities:

[I]t had become common to find Jewish leaders joining in Pastor Hagee’s “Salute to Israel” events around the country and paying public tribute and homage to the pastor for his efforts. Two months ago, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, challenged Reform Jewish rabbis with the contradictions of participating in such events with someone who held views that were anathema to our commitment to tolerance, pluralism and intergroup respect. While I hope that Rev. Hagee continues his support for Israel, which I assume he gives for its own sake, we should refrain from allying with him in any manner that gives our stamp of approval to him generally or to the deeply troubling views he has expressed . . . .

I do not share Rev. Hagee’s belief that God controls every action here on Earth nor that God wishes for every Jew to move to Israel right now. But even if Rev. Hagee does so believe, that his God is one who could only accomplish that by killing 6 million innocent Jewish men, women and children, and 5 million innocent others is mind boggling. Ironically there are some anti-Zionist theological extremists in our community who argued exactly the opposite: that the Holocaust was God’s punishment for the Zionist movement. Both views are equally repugnant theologically, morally and politically. They deserve to be condemned by religious, civic, and political leaders in general, but most particularly by those who have chosen to align themselves with Rev. Hagee.

I made several attempts to get comment from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which featured an enthusiastically received speech from Hagee at its conference last year, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of his most prominent Jewish supporters, but did not receive a response from either.

In San Antonio, Hagee's Orthodox friend, Rabbi Arieh Scheinberg, issued a simultaneous statement through Hagee's ministry defending him, and quoting a Holocaust survivor as saying that “If during the Nazi era the world had leaders like Pastor John Hagee, 6 million Jews, among them one and a million children, wouldn’t have been brutally murdered.”

"To hear people who know nothing about me or my life's work claim that I somehow excuse the Holocaust is simply untrue and heartbreaking," Hagee continued, laying out his long-standing relationship with Jews and Israel, noting (and this is significant, of course) that "our ministry has given over $30 million for humanitarian causes in Israel" (and, notably, the occupied territories). Many of Hagee's Jewish friends I've talked to insist that Israel "needs all the friends it can get." These allies are deeply invested emotionally in Hagee and his Christians United for Israel project, and have consistently looked the other way when he spouts his prophecy about the end-times, when Christ will vanquish his enemies, everyone will convert to Christianity or die, and Christ will rule the world from the Temple Mount. The question now is whether the Holocaust sermon will change their perspective.

But if they refuse to condemn a man they've admired for so many years on the basis of five minutes of preaching dredged up for political advantage, they should take the opportunity for deeper reflection on what this man is about. As I've argued many times, Hagee thinks the Bible, which he believes is the literal word of God, provides an explanation for historical events and a roadmap for future events -- and American foreign policy. With or without the sermon on the Holocaust, it's a travesty that he has a following that believes the Bible is more informative than the newspaper, and that he's welcomed into politics and policymaking.

He should not be welcomed in politics and policymaking -- not because of the Hitler sermon in particular, but because his views that the Bible should dictate government and policy are contrary to a pluralistic democracy. His sermon on Hitler and what he thinks Jeremiah suggests about the Holocaust highlights how employing words written thousands of years ago -- which he believes are God's words directly -- to explain historical and current events is so twisted and dangerous. He has his evangelical followers believing that he's preaching God's anointed word, but the rest of us do not have to buy his excuses that his status as a preacher entitles him to cast the evil workings of human beings as central players in a divine plan.

Hagee claimed that the "words of the Hebrew prophets such as Jeremiah may help us understand the mind of God. But our search for an explanation for evil must never be confused with an effort to excuse evil." Many, many Americans share Hagee's penchant for biblical prophecy. Many, many other Americans are completely baffled by it. This sort of biblical worldview is a permanent feature of American culture, to be sure, and shouldn't be ignored or laughed off as insignificant. But if Hagee's going to throw himself into politics, as he has vigorously, he has got to understand that in a pluralistic democracy, prophecy does not provide any kind of political excuse, and the rest of us should not be compelled to interpret his comments through his fundamentalist prism. We do not live in the Christ-centered theocracy he believes will be the climax of his life's work.

--Sarah Posner

Mori Dinauer looks at the John McCain's most interesting potential VP pick:

On Feb. 8, a caller to The Rush Limbaugh Show asked the conservative host if there were any chance of McCain adding Newt Gingrich to the presidential ticket. Sighing audibly, Limbaugh regretfully described it as unlikely before rattling off the usual list of names of potential VPs. One stood out. "Bobby Jindal," the host declared, pausing for effect. "I did an interview with Bobby Jindal. He is the next Ronald Reagan, if he doesn't change. Bobby Jindal, the new governor of Louisiana, is the next Ronald Reagan."

To be sure, Jindal isn't the first Republican in the 2008 election season to be compared to the 40th president. Yet, the way prominent figures on the right like Limbaugh paint Jindal suggests comparison with a more contemporary transformative figure, Barack Obama. The conservative movement is running on fumes -- short on both ideas and new talent, falling behind in increasingly important demographics, and suffering historic lows in popularity. Many in the movement see Jindal as the fresh face it needs to compete for the hearts and minds of a new generation of voters -- a generation that is trending Democratic in overwhelming numbers.

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Matt Yglesias on appeasement:

That's all fine, but the premise of the appeasement frame is that we're dealing with hardcore irrational ideologues who'll stop at nothing to destroy us. Adolf Hitler actually was such a man and, not coincidentally, he wasn't particularly interested in acquiring the international prestige and legitimacy associated with a sit-down with English politicians -- he wanted a giant war. In general, the right wants us to believe that world history is littered with countries whose rulers, like Hitler, will stop at nothing short of world-domination but who also spend their evenings fondly dreaming of the chance at a White House photo-op. But that’s absurd. One shouldn’t, of course, strike a bad bargain with a foreign country just because you held a meeting, but to fear that the very act of holding a meeting is a blow to the national interest is silly. Genuine madmen aren’t going to care what “signal” we’re sending, and non-crazy people can be productively bargained with.

The truth, however, is that conservatives don't just make this mistake over and over again, they fundamentally don't understand the use of diplomacy. McCain describes Iran as "an implacable foe of the United States" but the truth is that the Iranian government made several post-September 11 overtures to the U.S. seeking to improve relations. The real implacable foe of our era is al-Qaeda, the same al-Qaeda that's recently been denouncing Iran Bush/McCain-style for an alleged plot to dominate the Middle East. But the Bush administration rejected those overtures out of hand, preferring to hold out for regime change. As Dick Cheney said of North Korea, "we don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it."

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Yes, it's come down to this. Hillary Clinton suggests, elliptically at the very least, that she's staying the presidential race in case Barack Obama is assassinated:

"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it," she said, dismissing calls to drop out

This makes about as much sense as butterscotch scallops. If she really is trying to convince us that she's staying in in case Obama is assassinated that's nuts -- if he were assassinated she'd be the nominee almost certainly, whether she'd dropped out or not. And if that's not what she meant, why mention Kennedy's assassination at all?

But really, this is just another example of throwing as much nonsense at the wall as possible and seeing what sticks. In order to stay in the race, Clinton needs to do whatever she can to hide the basic fact that there's virtually no way for her to win now. So distractions, like reminding voters that unexpected things like assassinations happen, are key. In this case, she went way way too far, but this is just an example of a continuing pattern of campaign through, to use a term coined by Josh Marshall, projectile nonsense.

The Clinton campaign, meanwhile, is insisting that she just meant that the nomination wasn't wrapped up early in 1968, but give that that campaign went on well past June it's hard to see why she brought up the assassination. Was it just a poorly thought out commment? Probably, but she should apologize and explain that more fully...

--Sam Boyd

This story is fascinating, both as a an account of how far the mortgage crisis has spread, and as an example how much politicians are willing to sacrifice to run for office:

A Long Beach congresswoman who fell behind in her payments on a $535,000 mortgage in Sacramento said in a written statement that she owns the home, but financial documents show the house was sold at public auction and has been in the possession of the buyer for weeks.

The auction for Rep. Laura Richardson's house, in Sacramento's Curtis Park neighborhood, took place on May 7. The transaction was detailed in public records filed with the county.

Richardson, a Democrat, a former Assembly member who was elected to the House last year, bought the 1,600-square-foot, three-bedroom house in January 2007, but soon fell behind in the payments.

Essentially, Richardson couldn't both support her campaign for the congressional seat of the late Juanita Millender-McDonald (she had loaned herself $60,000) and keep up two homes (the house in Sacramento that was foreclosed upon and her home in her congressional district in Long Beach.) This doesn't exactly seem to be the story of a struggling homeowner brought low by the foreclosure crisis and Richardson doesn't seem to have been entirely honest with the press, but it is a sobering example of how dire the housing crisis has become.

--Sam Boyd

I just got off the phone with Bishop Harry Jackson, a pastor and leading conservative evangelical political figure who is friends with both John Hagee and Rod Parsley and supports Hagee's Christians United for Israel.

Jackson says that McCain shot himself in the foot with conservative evangelicals by first seeking out Hagee and Parsley's endorsements and then ditching them when they became a political liability for him. "He reached out to Hagee and Parsley precisely to bolster his acceptance among evangelicals," said Jackson. "Now folks don’t know what he means. Is he for us or against us? I think other pastors and religious leaders would be hesitant to endorse McCain. How does he fill this credibility gap that goes back to 2000? . . . He sought them out in a pandering sort of way, and then he publicly ridiculed them."

Jackson added that McCain missed an opportunity similar to the one that Barack Obama seized in the wake of the Jeremiah Wright episode: to talk about his faith, and explain why his faith didn't line up with theirs. But he didn't do that, and evangelicals sympathetic to Hagee and Parsley view how he handled the situation as an affront. Evangelicals involved in Christians United for Israel, he added, will continue to support Hagee. (The question, though, as I discussed earlier today, is whether they will continue to have the same political clout.)

Of course, a lot of people would take serious issue with Jackson's assertion that Hagee and Parsley are "mainstream" and that there are a lot of people to the right of them. (Really?!) They do have very big followings, but a lot of evangelicals would object to them being characterized as "mainstream."

At the same time, Jackson said that McCain doesn't seem to have a strategy with the moderate evangelicals either, because he's not talking about issues near and dear to them (which Jackson says he and his co-author Tony Perkins also highlight in their new book), like solving poverty and global HIV/AIDS.

I asked Jackson what McCain could do to fix his evangelical problem and his answer was a resounding "Mike Huckabee." Bobby Jindal, who is reportedly on McCain's short list, "would be very wise to stay out of this. He’s young, and he has a wonderful future ahead of him. If he’s not sure he can overcome McCain’s negatives, he might want to wait this out," said Jackson. But Huckabee, he said, "would be a slam dunk. He could heal that breach." He added that "at least half of the evangelical leaders I’ve talked to think Huckabee would be great." Many think he could inject the kind of "zeal" into McCain's campaign that got evangelicals energized for Bush. (I would add that Huckabee is also a favorite of some other evangelicals who have distanced themselves from the religious right but remain probably conservative-moderate, even though Huckabee is, well, conservative. Huckabee himself has known Hagee for a long time, and preached at his church last December, to an adoring crowd.)

And Romney? Well, Jackson admitted that a some evangelicals still have an issue with his Mormonism, and would see McCain picking Romney as a further assault on them. See how much progress we've made in this faith in politics thing?

Obviously Jackson presented one person's view -- but he's a key figure in the religious right coalition, and provides a window into how they're reacting to all of this.

--Sarah Posner

Now that John McCain has made the only conceivable move he could in renouncing, rejecting, and otherwise repudiating the endorsements of John Hagee and Rod Parsley, the question remains: is Hagee suddenly toxic to all the other Republicans (and Democrats) who have cozied up to him for so many years?

As Paul points out, McCain is trying to distinguish between his seeking Hagee and Parsley's stamp of approval and Barack Obama's relationship with his personal pastor. McCain would like us to believe that he watched Hagee's Christians United for Israel and decided that this evangelical who "loved" the Jews so much (perhaps to death) would be a worthwhile political ally, but he did not realize that he could have any skeletons in his closet. (Imagine! A televangelist with skeletons in his closet!) He did not, McCain is saying, sit and listen to him for 20 years. In fact, he would have us believe, he didn't even listen to him at all, not when Hagee took to the airwaves in early 2006 with his book Jerusalem Countdown and fear- and rumor-mongered about impending nuclear war; not when he stood up in Jerry Falwell's church last year and predicted the Dome of the Rock would be swallowed in a great earthquake that God would use to awaken the "spiritually hard of hearing," among other things; not when he compared secular humanism to Nazism and feminism to witchcraft; not when he tells his followers every week to tithe to him before they pay the rent lest they steal God's money and live under God's curse, not when he was . . . well, being himself for about the past 35 years.

Hagee did not drop from the sky for McCain. The Republican Party has long been cozy with him, from George W. Bush, who got Hagee's endorsement in 2000 (in the form of a book called God's Candidate for America; he's subtle, isn't he?), to Texas Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, Sam Brownback, and others. Joe Lieberman is a strong ally who recently said that CUFI "changes the mood" when it visits Capitol Hill. (Lieberman's office has not yet responded to a couple of requests for comment on the recent Hagee revelations.)

An attempt at damage control is underway; a spokesperson for Hagee tells me this morning that he may well issue some kind of statement today. With Hagee's longstanding alliances with Jewish groups, both at the local and national level, he has no choice but to say something about his God-brought-Hitler-to-drive-the-Jews-to-the-promised land statements. Yesterday's statement, of course, blamed everything on political enemies with an anti-McCain agenda. But he's got to go further than that, as a spokesperson for Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who called on Hagee to explain himself, put it, "if the statement was taken out of context, we'd like to see the context. If it was made in honesty and truth, he needs to explain why he made it. But it's difficult to grasp why he would make such an analogy."

But what will all these other politicians do or say in response? What will Bill Kristol, slated to speak at the CUFI summit in July, say? McCain might have washed his hands of Hagee (and Parsley) -- although he'll still pander to their followers. But will a lot of other people, who've been closer to Hagee over the years than McCain was, say anything?

--Sarah Posner

With all the brouhaha surrounding McCain and Parsley, we think a little self-congratulation is in order. While other independent magazines like Mother Jones have called attention to this issue, no other publication has been as dedicated to this story as the Prospect and our reporter Sarah Posner. Way back in 2005 she wrote the definitive profile of Parsely and in 2006 she wrote about John Hagee.

In addition, Sarah writes a weekly column that has been highlighting McCain's connections with Hagee, Parsley, and more for months. Her book, God's Profits, grew out of the column and has yet more on the shadowy world of televangelism. Here on TAPPED, Sarah's been blogging about the Parsley-McCain connection since February.

--The Editors

In his current round of rejecting and denouncing his radical cleric supporters John Hagee and Rod Parsley, John McCain was careful to note, "I've never been to Pastor Hagee's church or Pastor Parsley's church. I didn't attend their church for 20 years. I'm not a member of their church." In other words, my relationship with them is much less important than Barack Obama's relationship with Jeremiah Wright.

But we should take careful note of what this means. McCain's argument, in essence, is: Hey, this was just cynical politics. Sure, I begged Hagee for his endorsement, and stood next to Parsley and called him a "moral compass" and a "spiritual guide," but I didn't actually mean any of that. I didn't know anything about these guys, and until it became a political problem, I didn't really care. You tell me some preacher can bring in a few votes, and I'll kiss his ring, no matter how repellent his ideas are.

The reason this matters is that for so long, McCain's amen corner in the press has been telling us that he's the one politician who doesn't do anything for political reasons. And McCain and his campaign have always said that, too. How many times did we hear them say, "He'd rather lose an election than lose a war"? So maybe it's time reporters stopped acting as though McCain is Mr. Principle, and treat him the way they do any other politician: as someone whose motives are always suspect, and whose actions should always be seen through the most cynical interpretation possible.

Of course, the McCain campaign could have avoided this whole mess if they had just read Sarah Posner's book.

-- Paul Waldman

Apropos of last week's controversial and speculative "the Southwest is key" post, Greg Sargent reports that Obama will be touring New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado next week in an effort to solidify support there.

I remain convinced that Colorado is a key state here (and I'm not the only one), and according to pollster.com, only one poll has shown McCain with a lead over Obama. New Mexico is more in flux, and in Nevada it would seem that McCain is on the rise. McCain is also set to meet with Govs. Crist (FL), Jindal (LA) and Romney this weekend at his ranch in Sedona, and the buzz is one of these men will be getting the VP nod. Obama's presence in these swing states next week could serve the dual purpose of blunting the impact of a McCain VP announcement, should it come.

--Mori Dinauer

New York Governor David Paterson is just one of many African American New York politicians who've stuck loyally by their home state senator. But on a radio show yesterday, Paterson used the past tense to describe his support for Clinton, saying, "I thought she was the best candidate. And I also thought she had the best chance of winning.” Even harsher, he said, "We’re starting to see a little, you know, desperation on the part of a woman who I supported, and woman who I’ll support until whatever time she makes a different determination.”

Desperation? Ouch.

--Dana Goldstein

This seems like kind of a big deal:

Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric has been quietly issuing religious edicts declaring that armed resistance against U.S.-led foreign troops is permissible -- a potentially significant shift by a key supporter of the Washington-backed government in Baghdad.

The edicts, or fatwas, by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani suggest he seeks to sharpen his long-held opposition to American troops and counter the populist appeal of his main rivals, firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.

But -- unlike al-Sadr's anti-American broadsides -- the Iranian-born al-Sistani has displayed extreme caution with anything that could imperil the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Duss analyzes:

It’s difficult to overstate how essential Sistani’s support has been for the task of rebuilding Iraq, or how quickly the U.S. would lose what little legitimacy it still has there if Sistani were to indicate that U.S. forces were no longer welcome. If this report is accurate, it clearly indicates that he is leaning in that direction.

This could also represent the final nail in the coffin of the neoconservative fantasy of establishing an enduring military presence in Iraq, from which to project U.S. power throughout the region. The article notes that the shift in Sistani’s position “underlines possible opposition to any agreement by Baghdad to allow a long-term U.S. military foothold in Iraq — part of a deal that is currently under negotiation and could be signed as early as July”

Stay tuned. See also Martin and Cernig.

--Robert Farley

John McCain just renounced John Hagee's endorsement, and moments later Hagee announced that he is withdrawing his endorsement of McCain.

Early in the day, in light of newly discovered audiotape of John Hagee preaching that God unleashed Hitler so that the Jews would establish the state of Israel in fulfillment of biblical prophecy, J Street had called on John McCain to completely disassociate himself from Hagee.

In the sermon, Hagee said, quoting from the Book of Jeremiah:

"And they the hunters should hunt them," that will be the Jews. "From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks." If that doesn't describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can't see that. . . . Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says -- Jeremiah writing -- "They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks," meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.

J Street responded today:

These latest remarks to come under scrutiny are offensive not just to Jewish people who suffered at the hands of Adolf Hitler but to all Americans, their parents and grandparents who fought and sacrificed to defeat Nazi Germany. We hope Senator McCain will use the occasion of Memorial Day to honor the memory of those who defeated Hitler by clearly separating himself from Hagee's outlandish views.

This morning, Hagee had issued a statement that read, in part:

The intentional mischaracterization of my statements by an Internet journalist seeking to use me as a political football in the upcoming presidential race is a gross example of bias at its worst. I will not stand idly by while my character is assassinated and my views on the Holocaust are grossly distorted.

To assert that I in any way condone the Holocaust or that monster Adolf Hitler is the biggest and ugliest of lies. I have always condemned the horrors of the Holocaust in the strongest of terms. But even more importantly, my abhorrence of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism has never stopped with mere words.

By this afternoon, though, Hagee had issued a statement withdrawing his endorsement:

Ever since I endorsed John McCain for president, people seeking to attack Senator McCain have combed my records for statements they can use for political gain. They have had no qualms about grossly misrepresenting my position on issues most near and dear to my heart if it serves their political ambitions. I am tired of these baseless attacks and fear that they have become a distraction in what should be a national debate about important issues. I have therefore decided to withdraw my endorsement of Senator McCain for President effective today, and to remove myself from any active role in the 2008 campaign. I hope that the Senator McCain will accept this withdrawal so that he may focus on the issues that are most important to America and the world.

Although this may relieve McCain of having to answer for Hagee's extremist views, the fact remains that McCain sought his endorsement and needs to explain why he did that. (He claimed not to know what Hagee really thought.) What's more, Hagee, as well as non-renounced Hagee endorser Rod Parsley, play an extremely influential role as the most visible leader of the American Christian Zionist movement, welcomed in the halls of Congress, the White House, and in foreign policy circles. The Republican Party -- and even some Democrats -- as well as many leading Jewish organizations, have embraced Hagee as a great friend of Israel and the Jews. Is this the start of a bigger break-up?

--Sarah Posner

Glenn Greenwald makes the obvious point about Ben Wittes' critique of the California gay marriage decision: for all intents and purposes, there's no argument in it. The shallow, bumper-sticker version of democracy Wittes invokes -- that the decision represents the "undermining of the right of people to govern themselves" -- prove too much unless you believe that liberal democracy means nothing but simple majoritarianism, which virtually nobody does and at any rate certainly isn't the constitutional logic of any government in the United States. If taken seriously, these claims are equally applicable against Brown and Loving.

Wittes builds his argument around the assertion that arbitrary discrimination on the basis of race is just different than arbitrary discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Maybe it is, but he just asserts it repeatedly without defending it. The fact that a majority of Californians may oppose gay marriage is irrelevant to this distinction. Citizens and public officials in most of the states where segregation was ruled unconstitutional were far more committed to apartheid than California is to bans on same-sex marriage. And yet, as Greenwald says, Wittes says nothing about the court's opinion at all; he doesn't even begin to make the case that it was poorly crafted or an implausible reading of the California constitution.

This brings us to another point, which is that even if the democratic support for provisions is relevant to construing ambiguous constitutional provisions, we also have to consider what constitutes democratic support. Shouldn't the fact that a majority of state legislators and the state's governor almost certainly support the court's ruling at least be considered when decrying "accretion of power to courts"? But Wittes ignores this, just as he suddenly decided that a supermajority in the Massachusetts legislature affirming Goodridge was not longer enough, but instead democratic legitimacy required not just representative majoritarianism but plebiscitarianism. We've seen similar shell games about democratic legitimacy from Wittes before: the incredibly shoddy and unprincipled Bush v. Gore is legitimate because it didn't affect public opinion about the court, but public support for Roe v. Wade is irrelevant to that decision's "legitimacy problem." Other than his remarkably consistent conviction that decisions that piss off conservatives are bad and decisions that piss off liberals are good, I frankly don't know what the content of his standards regarding the democratic legitimacy of judicial review is.

--Scott Lemieux

I saw a shorter version of this in the elevator this morning (via one of those "captivate" screens -- a name that's disturbingly close to "captive") and laughed so loud everyone in the elevator kinda looked at me funny.

When he escapes to his retreat outside Sedona for Memorial Day grilling this weekend, Arizona Sen. John McCain will have some high-profile company -- at least three Republican politicians widely viewed as potential running mates.

Among the guests invited to McCain's cabin are former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who campaigned with McCain recently in New Orleans.

McCain strategist Charlie Black insisted the gathering would be "purely social" and had "nothing whatsoever to do with the vice presidential selection process."

"Wouldn't it be difficult to interview people for vice president with the other competitors there?" he said.

Oh riiiiiiiiiiiiiight ... Next thing he'll be telling us he wasn't doing anything wrong by lobbying for Burma -- oh wait...

--Sam Boyd

Steven Pinker has a frightening piece in the today. He analyzes the President's Council on Bioethics report released earlier this spring, and notes the strong influence of (TNR contributor) Leon Kass on the panel. Pinker also digs up this often and justifiably mocked passage from one of Kass's essays:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

As Pinker sardonically notes, the freedom-hating Kass went on to become the president's adviser, from which perch he convinced Bush to ban federal funding of research using stem-cell lines. It makes one long for the day when Bush hacks were merely incompetent, not actually illiberal.

--Jordan Michael Smith

On Tuesday we heard from Hillary Clinton about the role she believes misogyny played in her probable loss to Barack Obama. Now, in an interview with Judy Woodruff, here's what first female Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has to say on the topic:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, just quickly. You're in a special place to make an observation on this. How much of a setback will it be for women in politics if she doesn't win?

REP. NANCY PELOSI: I don't think it's a setback at all. I think we have to look at how far women have come in this presidential election. A woman is down to the wire in contention for the presidential nominee.

I think that Senator Clinton's courage and -- you know, she still may win this, but, whatever the outcome, new ground has been broken, and it won't be left broken. It will be built upon.

--Dana Goldstein

RIA Novosti reports that the Russian Navy will increase its deployments in 2008. This comes on the heels of a major exercise involving the North Fleet and the Black Sea Fleet in 2007.

Russia's Northern Fleet will dispatch ships and submarines on tours of duty to various regions of the world's oceans in 2008, the fleet's commander said on Tuesday.

"There will be tours of duty this year, involving surface ships, submarines and aircraft," Vice-Admiral Nikolai Maksimov said. "We will visit the Atlantic, the Indian and the Pacific oceans, and the Mediterranean."

Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said last year that Russia's Navy had resumed and would build up its continual presence in different regions of the world's oceans.

Part of this, undoubtedly, is the same Cold War-esque posturing that has put Russian bombers in the North Sea and within range of American carrier battle groups. But there also seems to be some genuine interest in having the Russian Navy play a larger role in world affairs.

One thing we've learned since the end of the Cold War is that naval power isn't necessarily zero sum. Navies do a lot of things in terms of political influence, disaster relief, and general maritime maintenance (anti-piracy, anti-smuggling, and so forth) that can't be boiled down to competitive calculation of naval power. In other words, the more energetic deployment of Russian naval force has the potential to help everyone. Russia has already participated in NATO's Operation Active Endeavour, a project to maintain order in the Mediterranean, and it's not crazy to think of Russian ships playing a positive role off the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere. This is the motivating concept behind the "1000 Ship Navy" idea, and its more recent manifestation in the 2007 Maritime Strategy.

Via Information Dissemination.

--Robert Farley

I agree with Ezra and, more surprisingly, Ross: The New York magazine cover story on male adultery is a piece of infantile self-justification. Not only that, but it's full of casual classism, sexism, and historical revisionism. Author Philip Weiss idealizes Victorian prostitution and "ancient aristocracies" in which "rich men had courtesans for pleasure and concubines for quick sex." In actuality, both were sordid, disease-spreading systems reliant upon the exploitation of women without other economic options. Weiss then recounts a conversation with an equally lust-addled married male friend over dinner at a New York restaurant. Weiss suggests to him "that we could change sexual norms to, say, encourage New York waitresses to look on being mistresses as a cool option." Yeah! Because after all these millennia, it's still super fun to imagine that working class women are the sexual playthings of affluent men!

Weiss continues by admitting that he and his friend's wives, to whom they don't feel like being faithful, "make our homes" and "manage our social calendar." Have they considered that picking up a few chores around the house might improve their marriages and sex lives? Just a thought.

The article goes on to traffic in completely unproven insinuations that European women don't mind being cheated upon, because they're so evolved and sophisticated. No actual European woman is consulted on this theory. As Ezra said, "Bleh." I can't understand why a guy who normally writes thoughtfully about the Middle East and American Jews would have added this particular piece to his journalistic oeuvre.

--Dana Goldstein

From the late 1960s well into the 1980s, much of the Left's energies focused on increasing diversity in the workplace, in the media and in the political realm. The 1972 Democratic convention's mandating quotas for minorites and women among delegates is perhaps the most salient example of this. Beginning with the late 1980s, however, a reversal started to take place, as some groups and intellectuals argued that talking about diversity (misleadingly called "identity politics") instead of economic inequality was dooming the Left to political irrelevance.

But a new study shows how short-sighted de-emphasizing diversity is. The Families and Work Institute interviewed 1100 companies over a ten-year period, and found that family friendly polices and diversity are intertwined. Simply put, employers with more women and minorities in top positions are more likely to offer flexible workplaces and benefits. Caregiving leave benefits, child and elder care assistance, health care--in every area, diverse companies scored higher.

In other words, increasing diversity helps all workers, and ignoring the issue to zone in on inequality doesn't make much sense. In the end, diversity and equality are like Frank Sinatra's "Love and Marriage": You can't have one without the other.

--Jordan Michael Smith

So some guy named Obama beat somebody named Clinton in Oregon yesterday. Big deal. The real action was the Democratic primary to determine who attempts to topple Republican Senator Gordon Smith, a potential pickup for Dems this November. State House Speaker Jeff Merkley won 45-42 against Steve Novick, and it looks as though Merkley is polling decently against Smith (losing 42-45), according to a DSCC poll.

One should always be wary of partisan polls as a rule, and this one is a bit misleading. By conflating Smith's "fair" (35 percent) and "poor" (20 percent) ratings into one "total negative" rating of 55 percent, the DSCC can claim that "Gordon Smith’s negative attacks against Jeff Merkley clearly backfired, driving his own job approval down to 29%." Another way of putting it is that Smith's favorables are 64 percent (combined "excellent" "good" and "fair"). Still, polling under 50 percent usually sounds the alarm for an incumbent -- and this poll was taken before the primary Merkley won, which means he could experience a post-primary bump in his numbers. We'll have to keep an eye on this one.

--Mori Dinauer

Turns out that the Washington Post not only published an intellectually lazy opinion piece, but one that advocated something illegal. Commenter alkali points to US Code Title 18, section 599:

Whoever, being a candidate, directly or indirectly promises or pledges the appointment, or the use of his influence or support for the appointment of any person to any public or private position or employment, for the purpose of procuring support in his candidacy shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

One assumes that candidates promise appointments all the time, just not publicly. But I wonder how often candidates actually get punished for this sort of thing (and whether journalists are aware that their election-year musings are actually illegal) -- any lawyers out there have the goods?

--Mori Dinauer

In an article on John McCain, former TAP bigwig Michael Tomasky reminds us of uncomfortable facts from McCain's run for the presidency in 1999 and 2000.

[McCain's call for national sacrifice] was something that I think many journalists and liberals and especially young people found appealing. David Foster Wallace certainly loved it, and he points out in his essay that the idea was part-and-parcel of the whole McCain package—the straight talk and the POW years conferred upon McCain a legitimacy to demand sacrifice of citizens, and his credentials made the call real and not "just one more piece of the carefully scripted bullshit that presidential candidates hand us as they go about the self-interested business of trying to become" president...McCain says he believes in the "beautiful fatalism" of noble lost causes, and he confounded reporters in 2000 by exhibiting apprehension after his New Hampshire win and relief after his South Carolina defeat. Such responses captivated many people.

Indeed, there were many liberals who liked McCain. It was not just the press and independents who fell in love with the guy. So here's the question: did liberals change, or did McCain?

I think both are true. Foreign policy was not a big issue in the 2000 election, so McCain's calls for "rogue state rollback" didn't attract a lot of attention or seem worrisome. Since then, however, we've seen the consequences of McCain's ideas in Iraq. As a result, many liberals have become much more averse to the use of force abroad. On the other hand, McCain has just abandoned his once-cherished position on a host of issues: the danger of the religious right, campaign finance reform, tax cuts, even torture. So it's only natural that liberals see McCain as something worse than a genuine conservative: they see him as a sellout. There's no denying, however, that many of us really did once have a thing for the Arizona senator.

--Jordan Michael Smith

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Syria in April of 2007, President Bush attacked her. "They are state sponsors of terrorism, of both Hezbollah and Hamas, and they support Palestinian terrorism," the White House said. "People should take a stop back and think about the message it sends and the message it sends to our allies."

Israel, however, doesn't seem as bothered by Syria's support for Hamas and Hezbollah as America is. The two countries have been talking for months and report having made significant progress.

This begs the question: If Israel is okay talking with countries that support terrorism against Israel, why isn't America okay talking with countries that support terrorism against Israel? See Gershom Gorenberg's last piece for more. 

--Jordan Michael Smith

Mark Schmitt has some thoughts about last night's results:

The presidential primary process, over the years since Eugene McCarthy "won" New Hampshire by losing it in 1968, has evolved into such an elaborate analysis of expectations and sequence that, this year, it has finally imploded on itself. Every other Tuesday brings a new analysis of whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama has done better or worse than expected, is closing the gap or widening it. New measures are invented weekly -- this week, a version of the popular vote that excludes four states, but includes the invalid primaries in Michigan and Florida seems to have taken hold in the media, although it has no actual relevance to the nomination.

At a certain point, the constants of the underlying political alignment reassert themselves over the micro-trends of the artificial narrative. Consider the things that do not change from primary to primary:

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Is it too much to ask that the intellectual space given to political insiders be contingent on actually producing thoughtful and realistic speculation? James Andrew Miller argues that Obama could foster "party unity" by offering Clinton the first dibs on the next Supreme Court vacancy:

If Obama were to promise Clinton the first court vacancy, her supporters would actually have a stronger incentive to support him for president than they would if she were going to be vice president. Given the Supreme Court's delicate liberal-conservative balance, she would play a major role in charting the country's future; there is no guarantee that a Clinton vice presidency would achieve such importance. ...

Senate confirmation would be all but certain, even putting aside the gains that Democrats are likely to make in November. Clinton could be confirmed in the current alignment. Democrats would want to support their new president, and those who like Clinton would vote for her. Members of either party who aren't fans might also be happy enough about her leaving the Senate to vote to confirm her. ...

Bill Clinton has set the family bar high in terms of overcoming setbacks. It's not inconceivable that Hillary could rise again and one day be elected president -- but it couldn't happen for at least four years. An Obama promise to nominate Clinton to the Supreme Court would more than go a long way toward forging the unity Democrats want and need for November. It would preserve Clinton's role as a dedicated public servant and guarantee her the role of a lifetime.

This might be less absurd than the notion of Bill Clinton on the Supreme Court, but that doesn't mean it's plausible. "Party unity" is not going to hinge on placating Hillary Clinton unless she herself urges divisiveness amongst her supporters. And if the game is political blackmail, then is her confirmation really "all but certain?" And what's this nonsense about preserving her role as a dedicated public servant? Is this something the United States Senate lacks?

--Mori Dinauer

If Republican media strategist Mark McKinnon likes Barack Obama so much that he's stepping down from the McCain campaign, how can McKinnon credibly claim he won't be actually voting for the Democrat? CNN reports:

In a 2007 interview with Cox News, McKinnon said he would vote for McCain, but "I just don't want to work against an Obama candidacy." He added that if Obama were to reach the White House, it "would send a great message to the country and the world."

The McCain campaign says McKinnon will remain a “major supporter” of the McCain’s presidential bid

So, if I understand him correctly, McKinnon believes Obama's election would be such a positive step for the United States and the world that he won't work against it. But he also won't participate as a citizen in actually affecting the positive change in question. Either that or he's totally voting Obama and just doesn't want to spit in the face of the candidate who's been cutting him a paycheck. Slimy.

--Dana Goldstein

Over at Religion Dispatches, I have a new piece about GOD TV, a U.K.-based Christian network that has set up its headquarters in Jerusalem, because, you know, that's where all the Jesus action is. GOD TV broadcasts the programming of many of the usual suspects of the prosperity gospel movement, like John Hagee and Kenneth Copeland, as well as some of Hagee's "Night to Honor Israel" events and other programming that emphasizes Israel's role in the Second Coming.

While it features much of the same programming as the mammoth Trinity Broadcasting Network, however, GOD TV is more than a tiny imitator of the Christian broadcasting giant. With more of an emphasis on the role of self-appointed prophets and apostles bringing about worldwide revival, GOD TV offers a look inside new trends in the charismatic evangelical movement, where miracles, prophecy, self-flagellating repentance, and enforced sexual purity dictate the lives of a new generation.

--Sarah Posner

Three interesting, naval-gazing pieces this morning on the political media: First, Rupert Murdoch has chosen Robert Thomson, an actual veteran reporter-editor, to head the Wall Street Journal. Thomson most recently served as the Journal's a publisher and previously was an editor at News Corp.'s Times of London and at the Financial Times. He is expected to preside over an expansion of the Journal's political coverage.

Secondly, though top Washington Post editor Leonard Downie, Jr. hasn't (yet) accepted his buy-out offer, Post publisher Katharine Weymouth hasn't made a secret of her desire to replace him. Slate's Jack Shafer has some provocative suggestions for who the next editor should be. One of the Politico founders, for example, would be a sensible choice, as they were bred at the Post, yet understand the Web oh-so-much better. New York editor-in-chief Adam Moss, however, makes little sense. It's hard to imagine Moss' glossy sensibility jiving with the starchy Beltway ethic, and I doubt he'd be very happy in D.C.

Lastly, Huffington Post has hired Hilary Rosen, former head of the Recording Industry Association of America (the folks who sue you for downloading "Toxic"), as D.C.-based "political director." Huh? She has no journalism experience.

--Dana Goldstein

Sarah Posner on the religious right:

n the wake of the California Supreme Court's gay marriage ruling, religious right organizations from coast to coast are whipping out their "activist judges" talking points and launching campaigns to make gay marriage unconstitutional at the state and federal level. Even before the decision came down, the straight-talking John McCain was, as Jeffrey Toobin put it, blowing "a dog whistle for the right" -- employing carefully coded language in a speech about the evils of judges making decisions the right disagrees with.

The dogs started barking immediately. "The California Supreme Court has engaged in the worst kind of judicial activism today, abandoning its role as an objective interpreter of the law and, instead, legislating from the bench," complained the Concerned Women for America. "By bowing down to homosexual activists and the rebel city of San Francisco, the California Supreme Court has exchanged the rule of law for the rule of unbridled power to destroy all that is good and sacred," grumbled the Campaign for Children and Families, a California group that has helped collect the more than one million signatures needed to put a ballot initiative amending the state constitution to ban gay marriage before voters in November. Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice immediately spotted a fundraising opportunity.

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Lisa Graham Keegan, the voucher proponent and former Arizona schools chief, has quit her job working for Maricopa County in order to work full time for John McCain. Does this mean we can soon expect an actual education proposal from the McCain campaign? As I've written, although McCain's ambitious $5.5 billion private voucher proposal was a centerpiece of his 2000 presidential run, he has yet to release a detailed plan this year. Keegan will be a big part of crafting what that eventual plan will be. The Arizona Republic reviews her record of pushing school privatization and profiting from NCLB:

The former Arizona legislator and state schools chief helped push Arizona into the vanguard of school reforms in the 1990s and led national education changes favored by conservatives in recent years. But Keegan also has left behind a trail of unfinished programs, questionable management and limited results. ...

As President Bush entered office in 2001, Keegan was on his short list of candidates for secretary of Education.

She did not get the job, and that May, she quit as Arizona's schools chief to head the Education Leaders Council, a non-profit, school-reform group. Not long afterward, the ELC began piling up $23.4 million in federal education grants for its "Following the Leaders" program, which was designed to help states and school districts meet the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Keegan remembers the ELC's beginnings as a "golden moment in time," bringing together like-minded reformers. That moment faded, she said, as the program swelled beyond the capacity for a small organization and federal auditors began a protracted probe into the organization's finances. ...

In a pair of 2006 reports, the inspector general for the U.S. Education Department said the ELC had used money inappropriately during the time Keegan was its chief executive. The ELC also had a poor financial-management system and inadequate written procedures for subcontracting, the reports said.

Even before the report, The Arizona Republic reported that some ELC board members were alarmed about Keegan's $235,000 salary and six-figure deals for other executives. During a three-year span beginning in 2003, eight members of the ELC's board of directors quit, along with four of its top executives, including Keegan, the auditors wrote.

--Dana Goldstein

Is it harder for a female candidate to get elected in America than an African American male, or just harder for Hillary Clinton to get elected than Barack Obama? Jury's out, but Clinton, in an interview with the Washington Post, chalks her probable loss up in some part to misogyny. Here's Hillary in her own words, speaking to Post reporter Lois Romano, who is very sympathetic to the candidate.

LR: Do you think this has been a particularly racist campaign?

HRC: I do not. I think this has been a positive, civil campaign. I think that both gender and race have been obviously a part of it because of who we are and every poll I've seen show more people would be reluctant to vote for a woman than to vote for an African American, which rarely gets reported on either. The manifestation of some of the sexism that has gone on in this campaign is somehow more respectable or at least more accepted. And I think there should be equal rejection of the sexism and the racism when and if it ever raises its ugly head. But it does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by comments and reactions of people who are nothing but misogynists.

LR: Isn't that how it's always been, though?

HRC: Oppression of women and discrimination against women is universal. You can go to places in the world where there are no racial distinctions except everyone is joined together in their oppression of women. The treatment of women is the single biggest problem we have politically and socially in the world. If you look at the extremism and the fundamentalism, it is all about controlling women, at it's base. The idea that we would have a presidential campaign in which so much of what has occurred that has been very sexist would be just shrugged off I think is a very unfortunate commentary about the lack of seriousness that should be applied to any kind of discrimination or prejudice. I have spent my entire life trying to stand up for civil rights and women's rights and human rights and I abhor wherever it is discrimination is present.

Of course, the Clinton campaign's failure to organize in caucus states (and so on and so forth) was at least as influential as sexism in allowing the nomination to slip out of her hands. It's also frustrating that Clinton insists upon comparing sexism to racism instead of acknowledging that both continue to be major problems worldwide. But some of what she's saying here is quite important and, coming from the lips of a presidential candidate and U.S. Senator, almost unprecedented. To admit that sexism is at the core of religious fundamentalism and the ideology of terrorism is to begin to realize that feminism is a powerful solution -- not just to "women's issues," but to foreign policy problems, national security threats, and so much else. I think what we're hearing here is a candidate unbound, able to speak freely because she knows she's almost finished with the race.

--Dana Goldstein

This article by Conor Friedersdorf has gotten a lot of (well deserved) guff for its silly complaints about rent control, but I think people are missing a rather interesting point:

But a political movement cannot survive on commentary and analysis alone!

Were there only as talented a cadre of young right-leaning reporters dedicated to the journalistic project. The nation’s English departments, journalism schools, and mainstream publications teem with talented young liberal reporters who, for all their biases and blind spots, regularly produce stunning narrative writing. It certainly persuades me to embrace certain of their positions on occasion, or at least to modify my own. Will the next generation of left-leaning journalists continue to dominate the stories we tell ourselves as a society, as surely as their ideological cohorts dominate The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Newsweek today? Will liberals continue to produce the bulk of reportage in America, to pen the most ambitious literary non-fiction, and to miss relevant facts and narratives that a reporter more versed in right-leaning political philosophy would’ve caught?

Man, what a crazy idea! Journalists who practice journalism! Conservatives often complain that people can move from magazines like the Prospect to more mainstream publications like the New York Times, while it's much harder to do the same thing if you write for, for instance, The Weekly Standard. But it's important to point out that this isn't because of liberal bias or whatever, it's because, with a few exceptions, conservative publications are much more interested in polemics than reporting. As Friedersdorf says, they see themselves as fighting against the whole practice of journalism:

Put another way, the right must conclude that we’re better off joining the journalistic project than trying to discredit it. Making this judgment means exhibiting confidence that we are correct more often than not. It means believing that our arguments are not merely relevant, but true. It means trusting that, when examined, the facts and stories of the world will bear out our ideas. Fate has not declared that right-leaning publications shall never be read by liberals. Nor is there a decree that all unaffiliated publications are de facto liberal. Yet as long as the right continues to believe this -- and act accordingly -- it will, I fear, continue to be true.

I think Friedersdorf is right about all of this, but I doubt many in the conservative movement will agree. The problem for them is that conservatism has long survived by refusing to deal with the fact that many of their core positions on the issues are deeply unpopular. In the past, they've dealt with this by obscuring the real reasons they want to enact various policies. This is why, for instance, you see pieces like The Weekly Standard's famous article dishonestly linking Saddam Hussein to 9-11. But you can't really get away with that and be taken seriously as journalists at the same time.

In the long run though it would probably be better for the health of the Republican party at least if it honestly confronted the relative unpopularity of a lot of it's ideas (that's the central point of David Frum's Comeback). A more journalism-minded conservative media would help with that. What's more, Friedersdorf is right that the world would be a better place if conservative media was read by liberals and vice versa and each side didn't assume the mainstream media is irretrievably biased against it. Similarly, it'd be nice to have two reality-based parties instead of one.

In any event, the important point is that the nature of conservative media is an overlooked part of the larger debate over the future of conservatism that's suddenly omnipresent.

--Sam Boyd

An Atlantic essay by "Professor X," a pseudonymous community college English teacher, is an interesting and demoralizing read. The author writes that the vast majority of students he's taught over the years in "colleges of last resort" aren't able to read, write, or analyze at the college level, either because they haven't been adequately prepared by the K-12 education system, or because they simply don't have the ability. Sadder still, these students have often been sent back to school by their employers, who will not allow them to advance at work without a diploma and won't reimburse them for their classes if they get a failing grade.

There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need college—but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. ...

I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

I am the man who has to lower the hammer.

No Child Left Behind and most of the popular education reform proposals out there are based around the idea of pushing all students to meet higher academic standards. Indeed, it's depressing to see that in many low-income schools, children are learning elementary school math in ninth grade, reading middle-grades books senior year, and the like. Vocational education is profoundly out of style, which corresponds with the shrinkage of the manufacturing sector. But can't we do much more to realistically prepare people for the workplace, without assuming everyone should read Proust? I'm thinking about courses in personal finance, basic sentence structure and letter writing, and Internet research skills (not academic research, but how to find the answers to common questions, search for job listings, interact with local government via the Internet, and accomplish business tasks). Students who need them should be able to enroll in such practical courses in high school and beyond, while still being expected during the K-12 years to read literature, write essays, master basic math, and learn about the structures and history of their political system.

--Dana Goldstein

Paul Waldman argues that same-sex marriage will lack the political salience it had in recent elections:

last week when the Supreme Court of the largest state in the union issued a similar ruling, making California the second state with full marriage rights for all citizens, the political reaction was remarkably subdued. Yes, there will be a constitutional amendment on California's ballot this November, and the campaign there will be hard-fought. But on the national level, there were no raised voices, no cries of anguish, no calls to man the ramparts – at least none to which anyone paid much attention. All soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee John McCain could muster was a spokesperson reading from the old script, mumbling that the Arizona senator "doesn't believe judges should be making these decisions." ...

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Kevin Drum points out that hawks who pronounce today's Iran to be more irrational than the Soviet Union are conveniently forgetting their apocalyptic Cold War ideas. But it wasn't just the Soviets that hawks believed unstoppable. In the 1990s, they said that talking to China was leading to World War III.

"American policies these days are starting to look a lot like the kind of appeasement that eventually leads to disaster," Robert Kagan wrote in 1996. In a 2000 article titled "East Wind: The Threat That Blows From China," Mark Helprin said America's policy had been "capitulationist by action and by default. It has been cowardly, craven, and venal." When President George W. Bush apologized to China for an American plane landing without permission on an island in the South China Sea in April of 2001, the editors of the New Republic declared it a "sweet triumph for the philologists of appeasement ... one day we really will be sorry."

Since that day has not yet arrived, I think a little skepticism about a new unappeasable nation is in order.

--Jordan Michael Smith

As Vito Fossella ends his political career in disgrace, let us remember his belief that the Constitution of the United States should be amended to explicitly make gays and lesbians second-class citizens:

Vito Fossella built a career as a staunch "family values" pol, polishing his image in his predominantly Catholic district with a string of anti-gay votes.

He even shuns his gay sister, Victoria Fossella, refusing to go to family events if she and her partner attend, a source close to the family said.

As congressman, Fossella voted to prohibit any funding for joint adoptions by gay couples.

He has voted for the Marriage Protection Amendment, a federal prohibition on gay marriage.

He also demanded housing funds be held back from San Francisco unless it repealed its domestic partnership law.

I'm embarrassed that New York City was ever represented by this hateful clown, although admittedly in some way I suppose I respect his shunning of his sister more than Cheney-style wining on gay bashing while treating his sister cordially. At any rate, whether the prospect of some same-sex couples getting married is a greater threat to Traditional Family Values than maintaining multiple families while lying to each partner about the other's existence and relying on your mistress to bail you out when you risk other people's life by driving when stone drunk, I leave to the reader's judgment.

--Scott Lemieux

Today's Gallup numbers indicate that despite Obama's "Appalachia problem," the presumptive Democratic nominee, unsurprisingly, is hardly dividing the party. In addition to leading Clinton by 16 points as the preferred presidential nominee amongst Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, he also leads or ties with Clinton in most demographics and is improving rapidly among all groups. Between May 1-13, Clinton's share of men age 18-29 was 35 percent. That figure now stands at 26 percent. With men age 50 and older if fell from 43 to 39 percent. Women age 18-29, 45 to 41 percent. Women age 50 and older, 55 to 52 percent -- the only group above 50 percent. Even among voters with a high school or less education, Obama has eked out a 47-46 lead over Clinton. Hispanics prefer him 51 to 44 percent. He's actually tied with Clinton on non-hispanic whites, 47-47. But these trends do seem to indicate that Democrats are shifting from a mindset of primary voting to one of the general election. And there, in the end, most are going to prefer the Democrat to the Republican.

--Mori Dinauer

They both work for MSNBC (shame it also employs Chris Matthews). First off, Chuck Todd points out that, as we've written here, polls asking Clinton supporters if they'll support Obama in November are essentially meaningless. Second, as Ta-Nehisi Coates says, this video of Rachel Maddow interviewing Geraldine Ferraro is kinda sad, though it more renews my respect for Maddow than it makes me sorry for Ferraro. (I mean in what world did the "iron my shirt" dudes not get a vast amount of attention?)

--Sam Boyd

Yesterday Jordan flagged this George Packer retrospective on the conservative movement, and I thought this George Will observation stood out:

Once the principled levity had died down and it came time for questions, I asked whether the conservative movement was dead. “It would be a sign of maturity if conservatives would stop using the phrase ‘conservative movement,’ ” Will said. “This is now a center-right country, and conservatism is the default position for, I think, a stable Presidential majority.” Jay Nordlinger, an editor at National Review, added, “If it’s no longer a movement, and really is mainstream, we owe a lot to Bill Buckley and Reagan.” But Buckley himself had been more realistic than his eulogists. Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Times Book Review and the Week in Review section, who is working on a biography of Buckley, said that in his final years Buckley understood that his movement was cracking up. “He told me, ‘The conservative movement lost its raison d’être with the end of Communism and never got it back.’ ”

Will's consideration of the conservative movement -- that it resulted in a permanent electoral realignment in presidential politics -- is precisely why he was such a poor choice to review Rick Perlstein's Nixonland last week. Will believes a conservative movement came in with superior ideas about governance and those ideas realigned voters to conservatism, the "default position." Now it may be true that a majority of the public considers itself "conservative," but how many of those people actually understand conservative ideas and public policy outside of the context of conservative politics? Perlstein's book isn't about conservative ideas, it's about one politician's mastery of the cultural landscape (one assumes a forthcoming "Reaganland" would argue a similar point) for political advantage. Nixon wasn't a movement conservative; he just knew how to push their buttons.

The conservative movement began to die, as Packer notes, as soon as its major goals were accomplished, and without the Soviet Union or Reagan to rally around, the movement degenerated: "Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces." If there is a new conservative intelligentsia on the rise, it will first need to get around the anti-intellectual right-wing xenophobia of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin if it is to have any sort of serious electoral impact in the future.

--Mori Dinauer

Salon has an article up today that summarizes the transition of Karl Rove from disgraced Bush adviser to prized political analyst for Fox News. The article notes that in the three months since Rove went on the air to offer sage observations, the network has not acknowledged once the informal advisory role plays in the presidential campaign of John McCain, even though Rove has not only provided such advice but also maxed out on personal donations to the campaign.

I do believe the network should disclose Rove's real relationship to McCain, as other networks do for their pundit/consultants. But the Salon piece implicitly suggests that Rove's advice helps McCain, which seems pretty dubious at this point. MS-01 might have been a special election, but let's not forget that the local GOP ran their candidate on the Rove playbook of mobilizing the base around their fear of the other and that they lost badly. One hardly needs to mention that the 2006 midterm elections sounded the death knell for Rove-style electoral politics, which Salon itself described itself shortly before the 2006 elections as "Bush's Brain Found Lacking."

I for one hope that McCain follows Rove's advice. I hope McCain tries to replicate the 2004 campaign. And this isn't because I think Rove's politics are healthy for the country (they are not), but because I want them to visibly fail in a presidential election, and fail they will. I've was never been convinced by Obama's claims aoout "changing" our politics, but it certainly helps him as a candidate to appear calm, cool and above the fray -- especially if the opposition is running a dirty campaign -- only engaging to swat down absurdities like the notion of "appeasement." We all know the GOP is going to sink to new lows this Fall appealing to the darkest fears of their base, but it's not the base that matters. What matters are the voters who are likely to abandon the GOP this year. And the best way to help them jump ship is to give them a choice between the old GOP politics and a Democrat who appears unaffected by those politics. Letting Karl Rove whisper in McCain's ear seems to me the best way to make that happen.

--Mori Dinauer

Remember those experimental sex-segregated K-12 programs the New York Times Magazine profiled in March? You know, the ones that rely upon gender stereotypes to educate young public school students? Yesterday the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education and the Breckenridge County School District, accusing them of violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, Title IX, and other equity laws.

The Kentucky district's middle school randomly assigned students to sex segregated classes in subjects such as math, only later telling parents they could opt their kids out of the girls or boys-only classrooms. What's even more disturbing is how different the classes are: The most advanced math course offered is open only to girls, meaning that students who prefer co-education can't leave that classroom without relegating themselves to a lower level of instruction. High-achieving boys are not allowed to enroll at all in the highest-level math class.

Seems like an open and shut case.

In related news, a new study of 40 years of educational achievement data from elementary school through college found that the so-called "crisis" in boys' education is a myth. The study, for the first time, correlated students' gender with their class and race, concluding that the achievement gap is primarily a problem of poverty. Boys continue to do better than girls in math, and girls continue to do better in reading, although those sex-based disparities are widest among white children.

--Dana Goldstein

When Hillary Clinton drops out of the race, the disappointment her supporters will feel will not be not trivial. A campaign, like a romance, inspires fantasies of the future; it idealizes another person; it makes you feel that you're part of something larger than yourself. And when it's over, your heart breaks.

"What we're talking about here is the phenomenon of attachment," explains Dr. Alan Lipman, a clinical psychologist. "When you lose that, you experience a loss of hope. To put it in medical terms, it's a bereavement."

This Democratic primary may have been particularly -- even exquisitely -- positioned to break supporters' hearts. Hillary Clinton and Barck Obama are both candidates voters can pin their dreams on. What's more, just how close Clinton came only makes it worse for her supporters. As devoted as they may have been, Dennis Kucinich's followers probably did not ache with grief when their candidate dropped out.

But for Clinton supporters, the worst part is that they may not be allowed to express their disappointment. They will be pressured to unite behind the Democratic candidate and beat McCain in November. Clinton supporters will be called upon to bite their tongues and suffer gladly for a candidate they think does not speak to or for them.

Symbolically at least, Clinton helped women who are so often silenced, speak. Now many female Clinton voters will once again be asked to be seen but not heard. Lipman suggests there's going to be a quietly suffering minority mourning Clinton's withdrawal. "One of the famous descriptions of depression is anger turned inward," he says. "What you can picture among many women is a kind of anger that can't be dealt with. It's the classic Janus-face: outward smile and inward anger."

Mobilizing genuinely bereaved and possibly depressed voters in the fall may be more of a challenge than the Democratic Party realizes. Only Clinton herself has the power to encourage her base to move on. But as anyone who has had his or her heart broken knows, that's easier said than done. 

--Kelly Nuxoll

The problem with Bill Kristol is not just that he's shameless partisan hack, but that he is a profoundly unimaginative one. Take today's GOP strategy memo column, perhaps his worst to date, in which he argues that John McCain is an "exceptional" candidate who transcends the GOP brand. As evidence Kristol cites the fact that McCain is essentially tied with Obama in national polls. True enough, but doesn't that demonstrate that McCain has already reached his ceiling -- and that he can only go down from there -- while the Democrats have been in a primary battle for months that hasn't noticeably damaged them?

But suddenly Kristol takes an entirely new tack. He cites three developments that are "promising for McCain" -- as if to say McCain could use the help (so much for the exceptionalism argument). First Kristol recounts the GOP loss in MS-01 last week -- as if to prove that he is soberly facing reality -- and then turns to the old chestnut about "working-class, culturally conservative voters" in places like West Virginia being critical to Democratic prospects. Second, he looks with glee upon the California same-sex marriage ruling, rolling out the usual boilerplate about the American public not wanting judges "making social policy from the bench." Lost in his penetrating analysis is any evidence that the American public thinks of same-sex marriage as an important issue. In fact, according to a Pew poll conducted at the end of last year, it ranked dead last among voters' concerns. But hey, things could change!

Finally, Kristol digs up the Bush line about appeasement from his speech to Israel’s Knesset. Oddly, however, Kristol thinks this will damage Obama because "it can’t be in Obama’s interest to divert voters from a focus on gas prices or health care to the question of what he hopes to achieve by negotiating with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." Huh? What happened to gay marriage? It's obvious what Kristol's doing here. He's picking all of the things he believes or wishes to believe are true about the public's beliefs and then alternatively gives them preference, depending on what stage of his argument he's in.

And then he swerves into a different argument altogether. He notes that between 1968 and 1988, Republican presidents were elected five out of six times, even though Democrats consistently won Congress. The public prefers Republican presidents, Kristol is arguing, and the results from 40-20 years ago proves it. To Kristol, the American political and cultural landscape remains unchanged since 1968. The emerging Republican majority is always ... emerging.

So to review: 1) Republicans will win because McCain is an exceptional candidate. 2) Republicans will win because the American public is with them demographically, culturally, and on pocketbook issues. 3) Republicans will win because the political environment is the same as it was when Kristol was in college. To wit:

This year’s election could see a return to this cold-war model -- a strong-on-national-security and supporter-of-middle-American-values Republican presidential candidate prevailing, while at the same time voters choose a Democratic Congress. Last week’s developments -- in West Virginia, Sacramento and Jerusalem -- have increased the odds of such an outcome.

I know it's been asked a thousand times before, but why is William Kristol writing a column for the New York Times?

--Mori Dinauer

I know, I know. I should be neither shocked nor surprised by anything published in the New York Times. But when your Week in Review section has an article noting:

... Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American. ... In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. ... A more recent study by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that Americans generate roughly 30 million tons of food waste each year, which is about 12 percent of the total waste stream. All but about 2 percent of that food waste ends up in landfills; by comparison, 62 percent of yard waste is composted.

Then will someone please explain to me how you justify a six page glossy spread elsewhere in the paper featuring food chopped up and strewn about the floor:

Seriously people. Do you know what a crime it is to waste perfectly good greens? Cook those up with some salt pork!

--Phoebe Connelly

David Frum is confused by Todd Gitlin's patriotism:

Gitlin's book fails, second, because the patriotism he advocates is a patriotism without content and without qualities. In this again, he reminds me of Obama. The senator, remember, condemned the flag lapel pin as a substitute for "true patriotism." Not an indefensible point of view, in my opinion - provided that you actually mean something by the phrase "true patriotism." It becomes uncomfortably clear over Gitlin's few pages that his concept of a left-wing patriotism does not mean anything.

Gitlin's version of patriotism urges Americans to develop broader and more generous social programs to aid their fellow-citizens and to equalize their condition. But why call this "patriotism"? Why not "welfarism" or "collectivism" or "socialism"?

But if patriotism is about more than trying to make your country better, what exactly is it about? Frum doesn't quite explain, but consider this passage:

Indeed, the only energy you find in his writing comes when he lists the causes and motives that drove his sect away from patriotism. When he writes about that, suddenly enthusiasm grips him. If we were wrong, he wants to say, we were wrong for good cause, wrong for admirable motives, wrong because we were in some deeper sense right. In his telling, anti-Americanism may be a fault, yes, but only the sort of fault to which over-eager applicants confess in job interviews. "My faults? I just care too darn much!"

This then, is Frum's real problem. For Frum, it doesn't mater what America has actually done -- acknowledging America's faults makes you unpatriotic by definition. Unless you have a Panglossian view of America -- that it's the best possible country imaginable -- then you're not a patriot:

Gitlin tries to distinguish between the fearfully flawed United States as it is - and the reformed country into which the United States might evolve. It is the latter, hypothetical, country that deserves patriotic affection. But there is this one problem: that hypothetical country does not as yet exist. This is not patriotism - it is a wish fantasy.

But Frum's patriotism, helpful though it may be for beating up on people like Gitlin, is a sad, sallow little thing. How much can you love your brother if you don't try to help him with his destructive alcoholism? Why would Gitlin care so much if he was really unpatriotic? Is it really better to hand your brother a bottle of gin than to check him into rehab?

And really, Frum can't believe the line he's pushing. Surely he thinks there are many ways America could improve. Does that make him unpatriotic (even if he is from Canada)? I don't think so, but by his definition it does. Which should make it clear that, like the Right does with it's complaints about "activist judges," he's trying to make a political disagreement into a nonpartisan value that his opponent lacks. But just as conservatives really mean "liberal judges" when they say "activist judges" Frum means "policy ideas I disagree with" when he says "patriotism problem."

--Sam Boyd

William Kristol produces another fact-challenged column today. In this one he says that the California Supreme Court "made social policy from the bench" in its recent gay marriage ruling.

In 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court redefined marriage in that state, helping to highlight the issues of same-sex marriage and judicial activism for the 2004 presidential campaign. Now the California court has conveniently stepped up to the plate.

Except that, as Think Progress pointed out, California Supreme Court justices aren't activists at all. They're confirmed by the public at elections and also go before voters at the end of their 12-year terms. Each of the seven judges involved in the same-sex marriage ruling was confirmed by over 65% of the vote. Details, details... 

--Jordan Michael Smith

Terry Samuel writes that Harry Reid is experiencing an unusual emotion -- hope:

Harry Reid is optimistic, a rare state for the Democratic Senate majority leader and self-declared cynic ("It means I'm disappointed less often," he says). Given the current political mood it would be hard for him not to be.

This year, voters have taken every opportunity to punish Republican candidates at the polls, most recently in Mississippi where a Democrat easily won a special election last Tuesday for a House seat in a district President Bush carried in 2004 with 62 percent of the vote. This has sent congressional Republicans into a frenzy of panic and recriminations about their prospects this fall. Reid's upbeat mood suggests how deep the GOP's troubles are. This week, he declared that Democrats will defeat popular two-term incumbent Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who today is ahead in every poll. Collins, a moderate Republican with a reputation for working across the aisle (a reputation Reid feels is undeserved), currently leads her Democratic challenger, Rep. Tom Allen, by double digits and has a favorability rating in the 70 percent range.

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

George Packer has a long article in the current New Yorker examining the coming conservative crack-up. The GOP's success over the last 40 years is attributed to various issues and strategies: law and order, race, moral relativism, high taxation, etc. But I think Packer ignores perhaps the most crucial one: resentment. The Republicans perfected the art of portraying prominent liberals as representatives and causes of economic and social upheaval. Conservatism was in large part not hatred of hatred of liberalism as an ideology, but hatred of prominent liberals as people.

David Brooks, for instance, tells Packer that the conservative movement had lost steam by the mid-1990s: "The only thing that held the coalition together was hostility to government." No, the only thing that held the coalition together was hostility to the Clintons. There's a difference. After all, the impeachment, Whitewater, troopergate etc. had nothing to do with hostility to government. The Clintons were not Great Society liberals in the 1990s, but they were still portrayed by conservatives as immoral, America-hating, class-warring frauds. Likewise, John Kerry was a liar, a traitor and a fraud for his recollections about Vietnam, Al Gore was an out-of-touch hypocritical intellectual. From Ted Kennedy to George Clooney, simple liberal-hatred has played a crucial role in contemporary conservatism.

Christopher Hitchens points out that amidst making confusing, back-pedaling statements about Iraq, John McCain has endorsed an American version of "Question Time" -- the British Parliamentary grilling of prime ministers that is so riveting to watch. The idea of importing the practice to the United States dates back to the Civil War era and has been brought up periodically since. Hitchens reports:

Speaker Dick Gephardt, after an early and well-received State of the Union speech, had urged President Bill Clinton to stay around and take questions from members informally. Apparently, the president quite liked the idea, but his handlers had hastily whisked him back to the White House. (Again, picture the scene if it had gone the other way: Clinton might still be standing at that podium and asking to revise and extend his last reply.)

It has often been remarked that had he been subjected to regular confrontations with his congressional opponents, George W. Bush may not have been reelected. Indeed, a hallmark of his administration has been sheltering the President from any real critical thinking about the policies he supports. How do you think "Question Time" would change American politics? Would it increase public engagement? Could our politicians handle it?

--Dana Goldstein

In response to Eugene Volokh, I should say that I'm perhaps making a slightly different argument than the one he's addressing. My point about the vote in the legislature, as well as the support for same-sex marriage signaled by the governor urging the courts to resolve the issue and opposing a referendum to overturn it, is that claims of judicial usurpation of the prerogatives of the political branches are not in any way a useful description of this case, as a majority of legislators and the governor almost certainly agree with the court's ruling. As is often the case, the California Supreme Court's decision does not involve a zero-sum struggle for power, but rather is a case where the courts are resolving an issue because it cross-cuts existing party coalitions. This, in itself, doesn't mean that the court's decision was right; it's possible to disagree on the merits. In many cases, one can also argue that the courts should respond to evasion by the other branches by throwing the ball back, but in this case it's complicated by California's silly system allowing its constitution to be amended (and hence judicial decisions overridden) by a simple majority of the popular vote.

I am, however, somewhat puzzled by his implication of disagreement with the proposition that "California Supreme Court's same-sex marriage decision actually consistent with the democratic process." In the American system, for better or worse, it's part of the democratic process for the judiciary to scrutinize the actions of the other branches as well as (in California's case) popular initiatives and pass judgment about their constitutionality. Strong-from federal review is a well-established part of this process, making California's effectively very weak-form review certainly consistent with it (as Volokh somewhat concedes here.) I can imagine, in the abstract, an argument that the courts should always defer to other branches or the people unless the text of the constitution is clear. But, in practice, virtually nobody in the American system believes this or acts like this in practice, so these claims generally amount to arguments that progressives should unilaterally disarm. I don't know if this is true of Volokh specifically, but certainly most of the critics of the California decision have no objection to cases where the courts use ambiguous constitutional materials to override electorally accountable officials to reach more congenial policy results (cf. Parents Involved, Garrett, Morrison) and are also strongly critical of the court in some case where it does defer in the face of ambiguity (cf. Kelo, Raich, Grutter.)

The California court could, I suppose, be criticized for usurping the democratic process if its reading of the state constitution were simply unreasonable, but that's not the case. The majority's reading is not commanded by the constitution, but it's certainly defensible. And if we're going to have judicial review, protecting unpopular minorities from being arbitrarily excluded from fundamental privileges strikes me as being at the type of case where judicial intervention is most defensible. But even if one disagrees, I fail to see how the court's holding is in any way inconsistent with democracy as it is actually practiced in this country.

--Scott Lemieux

From 1:00-2:30 today the Prospect is hosting an event for Sarah Posner, author of the FundamentaList and the new book God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters. A brief description:

While the “old guard” of the Religious Right political movement faces challenges to its leadership and significant changes within the broader evangelical community, lesser-known conservative religious leaders continue to wield significant political influence. Journalist Sarah Posner covers religion and politics for The American Prospect. God’s Profits takes a close look at a group of religious leaders who aren’t household names nationally but who have strong followings in the “prosperity gospel” movement, and who have put their organizing muscle to work helping to elect Republicans to office. Among those she examines closely are John Hagee and Rod Parsley, who have drawn recent attention for their connections to Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid.

The event will be moderated by Jane Hamsher, founder of Firedoglake and features Posner as well as Prospect Executive Editor Harold Meyerson, Robert Marus, News Editor and Washington Bureau Chief of the Associated Baptist Press, and Peter Montgomery, Vice President for Communications of the People For the American Way Foundation. The event will run from 1:00 to 2:30 PM at the People For the American Way Foundation, 2000 M St, NW 4th floor Washington, DC.

George Packer writes:

If the fear of Baghdad and Falluja is what keeps foreign powers from saving huge numbers of Burmese from their own government’s callousness, that will be one more tragic consequence of the Iraq war.

On the other hand, if it’s going to be done, it should be done quickly. I know all the arguments why we shouldn’t. But there are at least a million counterarguments why we should.

Right.... Yglesias nails this; the appeal of invading Burma to hawks on the left and on the right is, primarily, that there is no chance that the invasion of Burma will ever happen. Packer stumbles into one reason that it won't happen when he writes that "it should be done quickly", or not at all. I noted last week some reasons why invasion as disaster relief is likely to prove, well, disastrous in Burma, but here's another one:

Remember the Mistral? That’s the French naval ship that Bernard Kouchner announced would deliver aid to Burma whether the Burmese junta liked it..or not! The Mistral was supposed to arrive in Burmese waters the middle of this week on its unilateral mission of mercy. But it’s not there.

The Mistral has been steaming around the Bay of Bengal in circles...because it didn’t have any rice in its hold...which it has to buy from India...and is only now completing loading at India’s port of Chennai...and it hopes to reach Burma Sunday...on the two-week anniversary of the cyclone.

That's not a spectacular improvement over the relief efforts of the Myanmar junta.

It is simply not within the capability of the international community to carry out an invasion as humanitarian operation within the time frame dictated by this crisis. Arguments like Packer's (or Kouchner's, for that matter) take on the aspect of fantasy in the face of the practical problems presented by the disaster. As such (and as Yglesias notes), the real curiosity is what hawks, both left and right, think they get out of making the argument for intervention.

--Robert Farley

Marines are not eradicating poppy cultivation in Helmand Province:

Last week, the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit moved into southern Helmand province, the world's largest opium poppy-growing region, and now find themselves surrounded by green fields of the illegal plants that produce the main ingredient of heroin.

The Taliban, whose fighters are exchanging daily fire with the Marines in Garmser, derives up to $100 million a year from the poppy harvest by taxing farmers and charging safe passage fees -- money that will buy weapons for use against U.S., NATO and Afghan troops.

Yet the Marines are not destroying the plants. In fact, they are reassuring villagers the poppies won't be touched. American commanders say the Marines would only alienate people and drive them to take up arms if they eliminated the impoverished Afghans' only source of income.

Barnett Rubin comments:

If the planners had included analysts who understood Afghan society a little and also understood the concept of human security, they might have learned that the most important component of security in rural Helmand is gaining a livelihood, and that the opium economy is above all an adaptation to insecurity. The time to wean farmers from the opium economy is before planting, with aid and incentives, not at the time of harvest, when they have already sold their crop on futures contracts and have no alternative. Given the impossible situation in which their commanders have put them, the Marines are doing the right thing by leaving the poppy crop alone. But when will the decision makers understand what this struggle is really about? Not before January 21, 2009, I guess.

This really doesn't seem to be a difficult call to me. Pressing Marines into poppy eradication alienates the local population and makes it insecure; as such, drug policy runs almost directly counter to counter-insurgency efforts. The "almost" is important here, because the Taliban makes money off heroin that it uses to buy weapons, but the way to solve that problem is NOT by destroying the primary cash crop of Afghanistan...

--Robert Farley

• Ted Kennedy was hospitalized on Saturday after suffering a seizure. He appears to be fine now, although will remain at the hospital for observation and testing.
• Nancy Pelosi took a surprise trip to Iraq on Saturday. Although she stated that the war "must end," it's clear that nothing is ending until at least Inauguration Day, 2009.
• Hans von Spakovsky, who has been battling Congressional Democrats since last year, finally withdraws his nomination to the FEC.
• Turns out John Edwards sought a guarantee from Barack Obama that the latter would go on a "poverty tour" in exchange for the former's endorsement.
• 75,000 show up for an Obama Rally in Portland, OR -- apparently his largest audience to date.
• Try going to the Project for a New American Century web site. You'll find something both humorous and indicative of neoconservatism's decline.
• McCain, Obama and Clinton will all speak at June's AIPAC conference.
• TAPPED contributer Scott Lemieux ponders what to do about Joe Lieberman.

--Mori Dinauer

Polls show Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will likely split Tuesday's primary states one-for-one once again, with Obama picking up Oregon and Clinton winning Kentucky. What was true last week, and the week before, and the week before that (etc.) remains true today: Clinton cannot win the nomination without a now totally unlikely superdelegate coup overturning both the popular vote and the pledged delegate count. So given all that, should Obama declare victory in Iowa on Tuesday night -- as he's expected to do -- regardless of Clinton's willingness to drop out of the race?

I'd argue the answer to that question is no: The Obama team should be pressuring, cajoling, and threatening the Clintons and their machine behind closed doors to drop out well before the convention. But until the voting ends on June 3, Obama should not publicly declare victory unless Clinton agrees to admit defeat. That's very unlikely to happen as long as she continues to win primaries; she's just too focused on finishing the process. And it's true that people in the late voting states are mobilized and excited. Why tamp down on their engagement?

As we saw with the outrage over NARAL's endorsement of Obama last week, many Clinton supporters, even if they've essentially accepted her loss, will not accept any appearance of her being pushed out of this long, exciting race before every Democrat has had the chance to vote. Now that we're just 15 days from the finish line, he should hold tight. After that, it will look much less unsightly for Obama to declare the race over and himself its winner, whatever Hillary Clinton thinks of the matter.

--Dana Goldstein

Over at HuffPo, I break down a pattern with which long-time Prospect readers, particularly followers of the Pastor Strangelove chronicles, already know: that Bush's speech smearing Obama as this century's Neville Chamberlain is straight out of John Hagee's playbook.

Who has a pastor problem now? McCain is trolling for votes by propping up the spiritual credentials of the pastor who equates diplomacy with coddling Nazis and thinks that war is a grand idea that God not only relishes, but requires. What would Jesus do, indeed.

--Sarah Posner

Andrew Sullivan asks "where's the fierce urgency of now?" with regards to Barack Obama and gay marriage, the movement towards which he describes as "The Civil Rights Movement of our time".

I think it's useful to remember that the Civil Rights Movement was not lead by elected officials, but actually by community leaders who engaged in very serious and prolonged arm-twisting of elected officials and pressure government institutions in their quest for equality under the law. I think criticism of Obama is warranted on this front, but I also think it's silly to expect politicians to play roles they've not historically been known to play. Obama is no MLK, and he's not even really a leader in the traditional civil rights mold. Those kinds of leaders need to not be able to care what voters think.

-- A. Serwer

Since I argued yesterday against Jim Webb for VP, I suppose I ought to argue in favor of someone else. And the best choice I see is Bill Richardson.

If Richardson were running for the U.S. Senate seat in New Mexico, I wouldn't want him in the VP slot for the same reason as Webb -- to have a strong Dem voice in a strong Senate majority. But Richardson is pretty much a free agent at this point (unless he desires to fulfill the rest of his second term as governor), so it makes sense to look at what he would bring to an Obama ticket. The answer, it seems to me, is that Richardson could bring the Southwest with him, and the electoral votes of New Mexico, and possibly, Nevada. Winning both of these states is not critical for Obama to win the general election but he needs to win one of them (each are worth five electoral votes).

The above map, which describes a 278-260 Obama win, is based on the current poll averages available at fivethirtyeight.com. Basically, it show Obama winning the states Kerry won in 2004 plus Iowa, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. Obama outpolls McCain consistently in Iowa, so I'm going put that in his win category for the time being. If Obama loses Colorado but wins the other three states, it's a 269-269 tie. But since there's no VP pick that could help him in Colorado, it only makes sense to see who could help him in the Southwest, where his current lead is thin.

Obviously, all this changes if Ohio or Florida suddenly comes into play. But that would be gaming a Hillary Clinton win, which wouldn't require the Southwest. As of today, the above map is how Obama wins. And unless that changes, Bill Richardson makes a lot of sense strictly from the point of view of electoral strategy.

--Mori Dinauer

I realize it plainly says "Senator John Edwards endorses Barack Obama" but doesn't this image on Obama's web site look like a pair of running mates? Discuss.

--Mori Dinauer

Jim Manzi, at the Corner:

This is pure emotionalism. Global warming doesn’t come close to threatening “a whole way of life”. Its expected impact is to make a much richer world 100 years from now ~3 percent poorer. Protecting ourselves against the outside risk of much worse effects mostly requires some prudent investments in fallback technologies as insurance. Crude oil production will reach a maximum at some point in the future. I don’t know when that will happen, and the record of those who have tried to forecast this not been very good over the past 70 years or so. When that happens, the price will probably rise. We will develop technological alternatives and find substitute fuels. (emphasis mine)

There's plenty to mock in this, but I wanted to look at the part in bold. As you probably know, in 1956 a geologist with Shell Oil named M. King Hubbert made a forecast that oil production in the United States would peak sometime in the late 1960s or early 70s. Oil production in the United States did peak in 1970, so it isn't really defensible to say that nobody knows when world oil production will peak. The only thing holding back a reasonable prediction, it would seem, is the reluctance of autocracies like Saudi Arabia to release accurate data about production, reserves and remaining supply.

Oh, and since oil now costs over $120 a barrel, does that mean oil has peaked, Jim? It never ceases to amaze me how willing people are to ignore the realities of simple arithmetic and lazily assume that technology will save us all. And no, I don't think the world is going to end because of high oil prices, but I don't think it can be denied either that the transition from the carbon-based economy is going to be a fundamental one.

--Mori Dinauer

Amidst all the excitement about yesterday's California ruling legalizing gay marriage, it's worth remembering that reactionary heteronormativity, while on the decline, isn't going away. The interim principal of an all-girls Catholic high school in Staten Island, New York has declared that junior girls may not attend their prom next week unless they are accompanied by a male escort. Watch a local TV news report here. I know. It's almost too 1950s to be believed. Parents are pissed, while students have been barred by the school from speaking to the media. Principal Florence Bricker, what are you thinking? Don't you want your students to grow up into assertive, independent young women capable of having a great, safe night without relying on men? Or don't you?

--Dana Goldstein

One of the more disconcerting aspects of the growth and use of immigrant detention centers is the enlisting of private prison corporation CCA to handle immigrant detainees. I was discussing Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein's recent immigration story with a friend of mine named Renee Feltz who told me has been doing her own extensive reporting on private rather than federal detention centers.

If you think the WaPo report on substandard medical care in federal immigration facilities is shocking, consider that the already strapped Department of Immigration Health Services was forced to take over health care in a San Diego CCA facility because they were trying to maximize profits by skimping on medical care for detainees. ICE cited CCA for failing to maintain their phone system so that detainees could communicate with legal counsel, when even ICE provides access to lawyers under circumstances described by the Post as less than what "convicted murderers in maximum security prisons" get. A Senate bill introduced in August designed to make private detention facilities more transparent hasn't made it out of committee (I'm also kind of shocked at the main sponsor, but good for him.)

I'm sure that there are "national security" and efficiency arguments that can be made for using detention centers to this degree. The government can argue that people who are detained are less likely to flee, and the usual post-9/11 boilerplate that is used to justify human rights violations of all kinds. There's probably a school of thought that says making these places hell makes immigrants less likely to come back. In the same vein, an immigrant trying to fight deportation might simply accept it if it means he's going to have to remain under such conditions. A typical conservative strategy is to starve government programs by underfunding them, but in this case underfunding immigrant prisons might be seen as a deterrent to immigration itself. Who wants to try to sneak back into the United States for whatever reason if you're just going to end up in one of these places again?

Obviously not all of this is exactly news, but since the Federal government clearly can't afford to do detainment properly or contract to someone who will, it should be considering other options other than throwing people into draconian facilities.

--A. Serwer

Let's see. First the Times ran an "op-classic" on Sunday, a 1990 think piece on the wisdom of invading places like Myanamar. On Wednesday, Robert Kaplan pondered the wisdom of such an intervention on humanitarian grounds, prompting Josh Marshall to remark, "But I have an even simpler idea. Why don't we not invade any more countries for a while?" George Packer took it up at his New Yorker blog, observing that "It seems that there’s no such thing as an uninvited humanitarian mission of foreign soldiers that doesn’t turn into something more -- something ugly." before noting in the very next paragraph that "And yet this might be what’s necessary in Burma." Lisa Schifffren provided the predicable right-wing response at the Corner: "On the speculation about a humanitarian invasion of Burma, it's clear that NRO readers are on to the fact that liberals will only use force when our own national interests are not at stake."

Correct me if I'm missing other conversations about the wisdom of invading foreign countries, but I think the take-home point is that few in the opinion-generating business are really serious about re-evaluating the wisdom of invading and occupying other countries. It's always going to be premised on either our national "interest" or security from the right, and always going to be premised on humanitarianism from the left. During the dark days of the run-up to the Iraq War it really became clear that the only daylight between a neocon hawk and a liberal interventionist was the labels. Now that that war has exposed the folly of using the blunt instrument of the military for whatever purpose suits our political zeitgeist, it's a race to differentiate the liberals from the neocons, without ever seriously taking stock of the unprecedented decline in American moral authority in the world, not to mention our increasing inability to actually carry out and fund these foreign policy adventures. Like it or not, idealism is dead in American foreign policy, and apparently only the pundits didn't get memo.

--Mori Dinauer

Spencer Ackerman is right that the complex version of Tony Stark in the comic book version of Iron Man can't lend itself to the big screen--Marvel's Civil War is an allegory of government overreaching that culminates in the symbolic death of American freedom with Captain America's assassination and that would still be a little heavy several films down the line.

Favreau's Iron Man is merely a critique of unregulated capitalism, a brief and shallow admission that just maybe America might kinda sorta bear some responsibility for some of it's current problems. But the film doesn't even come close to suggesting that we should stop sticking our nose into other countries' business, after all, superheroes need people to save.

Besides updating the Iron Man story for a contemporary audience, the Afghans in the film are only there to rationalize Stark's imperialist tendencies. Whether its Dr. Yinsen sacrificing his life so Stark can escape (a classic Magic Negro style moment), terrorists murdering and pillaging or innocents crying out for help, their only purpose in the film is to argue for Iron Man's (or in a broader sense) America's intervention. Even Obadiah Stane's trading Stark weapons to terrorists is an allegorical plea for further American involvement, an invocation of the Pottery Barn rule.

Ultimately the point of Favreau's Iron Man is that even though we may have screwed up, it's still our responsibility to save everyone from themselves. No where in comic book mythology has there been a hero who respects the free will of mortals enough to hang up his tights or titanium armor, and America's love affair with the genre probably has something to do with the fact that we feel something of the same way. Watching folks flip through the catalog of new countries we might invade this year, it's pretty clear that infectious desire for foreign policy "heroism" in the short term that Ackerman correctly identifies as "corrosive" is still pretty prevalent among some prominent foreign policy folks.

In any case, using my unimpeachable objective status as a guest blogger I'll cosign the editor's recommendation, Ackerman's "Iron Man Versus the Imperialists" is a good read.

--A. Serwer

When asked about his speech yesterday, John McCain says explicitly that he was not setting a timetable for withdrawal -- he was "talking about victory." McCain said "[S]aying you are withdrawing" is "setting a date for surrender."

This should come as news to the Wall Street Journal, whose headline is "McCain Names Drawdown Date."

--Jordan Michael Smith

Amanda Marcotte writes about today's multicultural music:

The urge to borrow and take inspiration from the music of other cultures is nothing new, of course. The Beatles famously helped introduce the sitar to American and British pop music after they gained an interest in India. The band Santana made a splash bringing Latin American rhythms to American rock music in the late 1960s. Musicians in the 1950s, mostly African American at first, borrowed some of the sounds from country-western music and injected them into R&B to create what became known as rock ?n' roll. R&B itself developed from two separate arms of black musical tradition, combining upbeat jazz riffs with blues rhythms. In the Caribbean, musicians were hearing R&B and rock ?n' roll and manipulating them into the local sounds that became ska, rocksteady, and reggae.

But the concept of blending the music of various cultures kicked into high gear in the 1970s. Punk musicians in the U.K. like The Clash, The Specials, and The Slits began to borrow not just a sound here or a sound there from Caribbean music but to lift entire genres like reggae and ska and put a punk spin on them. In the U.S., the jazz fusion band Mind Power decided it would rather be a punk band and ended up combining punk with reggae to create a distinctive and widely copied sound called hardcore. In the late 1970s, bands like the Talking Heads began to borrow heavily from traditional African music for their rhythms, creating hits like "Life During Wartime."

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

The massive turnout of black voters this year is a beautiful thing, especially in the South, where black folks are making it known that there will be consequences to using them as scapegoats:

Between an initial vote on April 22, when Mr. Childers fell just shy of getting the 50 percent he needed to win, and Tuesday’s runoff election, when he won with a decisive 54 percent, the Republican campaign to link Mr. Childers with Mr. Obama intensified, with a barrage of advertisements specifically on that theme. Perhaps not coincidentally, vote totals in counties with large black populations went up sharply between those two dates. In Marshall County, which is 48.8 percent black, the votes nearly doubled, to 5,083. In Clay County, 56.8 black, nearly 1,500 more people voted, pushing the total to 3,898.

The attacks on Mr. Obama clearly had a galvanizing effect, local officials said. “The people I talked to said, ‘Man, I don’t like that they’re trying to use Obama against him,’ ” said Eric Powell, a black state senator who helped in voter turnout efforts. “It actually helped Travis.”

--A. Serwer

Spencer Ackerman places the box-office hero in the context of an evolving critique of American militarism:

For years, Iron Man's lesson was just that simple: Stark's keen technological mind represented the secret of American vitality; Iron Man's contribution to the nation's defense was an obligation that his gifts bestowed. America, under this Cold War logic, is powerful because America is inquisitive because America is free because America is good. Doesn't America have the right to defend itself? And shouldn't America use its endowment to the benefit of mankind? If so, doesn't that mean that when Wong-Chu comes to take over a South Vietnamese village, America would be irresponsible not to vanquish him with a souped-up transistor? In that vein, Iron Man's adversaries were fiends like the Red Barbarian, a Soviet general and spymaster who lived up to his nickname by bludgeoning his doltish subordinates with a ham hock.

But before long, the lessons of Vietnam sunk in on the comics juggernaut. Perhaps the idea that all the United States had to do was build bigger gadgets of disaster to use on a complicated world was hopelessly flawed. Perhaps Iron Man was symptomatic of the rot. Perhaps, by holding up a mirror to U.S. policies, Iron Man could become a vehicle for cleansing the country of its Cold War hang-ups. Marvel set to work reworking the character and its themes.

Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

As Ben Smith notes, all three candidates have said the issue should be left up to the states, but only John McCain actively supported a gay marriage ban in his own state, Arizona. That initiative failed at the polls in 2006, making Arizona the first state in the nation to reject such a measure once it reached the ballot.

In any case, I was fascinated yesterday by the fact that the Obama campaign quickly sent out a press release in response to the California ruling, but the Clinton campaign did not. Here's what the Obama folks had to say:

Barack Obama has always believed that same-sex couples should enjoy equal rights under the law, and he will continue to fight for civil unions as President. He respects the decision of the California Supreme Court, and continues to believe that states should make their own decisions when it comes to the issue of marriage.

Still no word from Clinton, who's known as a longstanding ally of LGBT groups.

--Dana Goldstein

Update: Apologies -- although the Clinton campaign has not released a press release on the ruling, they have made the following statement to the Associated Press:

[Clinton] believes that gay and lesbian couples in committed relationships should have the same rights and responsibilities as all Americans and believes that civil unions are the best way to achieve this goal. As president, Hillary Clinton will work to ensure same-sex couples have access to these rights and responsibilities at the federal level. She has said and continues to believe that the issue of marriage should be left to the states.

As entertaining as it was to watch Chris Matthews light up Right Wing Radio host Kevin James (who was apparently drafted into the Republican Noise Machine straight out of the WWE), it wasn't really about the content of what James was saying. Matthews challenged James to explain his comparison of Barack Obama to Neville Chamberlain, and James had no idea what Chamberlain did. But Matthews didn't challenge James in the name of accuracy or clarity, he was simply pissed that James was on his show yelling his head off like a natural fool.

This wasn't a great journalistic moment, it was a David Broder moment; James came onto Hardball and trashed the place, and that wasn't his place. So Matthews got angry. It isn't the kind of thing that indicates a departure from embracing the kind of Right Wing themes that have made Matthews so infamous among some liberals, and if James had been polite, he would have gotten away with spewing as much bile as he wanted. It's too bad reporters can't seem to get as angry about their shows being used as an echo chamber by Pentagon propagandists posing as objective "military analysts".

--A.Serwer

Via Steve Clemons, the Council on Foreign Relations has released a new report on US policy towards Latin America. One highlight is a proposal to completely retool Cuba policy:

1. Permit freer travel to and facilitate trade with Cuba. The White House should repeal the 2004 restrictions placed on Cuban-American family travel and remittances.
2. Reinstate and liberalize the thirteen categories of licensed people-to-people "purposeful travel" for other Americans, instituted by the Clinton administration in preparation for the 1998 Papal Visit to Havana.
3. Hold talks on issues of mutual concern to both parties, such as migration, human smuggling, drug trafficking, public health, the future of the Guantanamo naval base, and on environmentally sustainable resource management, especially as Cuba, with a number of foreign oil companies, begins deep water exploration for potentially significant reserves.
4. Work more effectively with partners in the western hemisphere and in Europe to press Cuba on its human rights record and for more democratic reform.
5. Mindful of the last one hundred years of U.S.-Cuba relations, assure Cubans on the island that the United States will pursue a respectful arm's-length relationship with a democratic Cuba.
   
6. Repeal the 1996 Helms-Burton law, which removed most of the executive branch's authority to eliminate economic sanctions. While moving to repeal the law, the U.S. Congress should pass legislative measures, as it has with agricultural sales, designed to liberalize trade with and travel to Cuba, while supporting opportunities to strengthen democratic institutions there.

Hrm. We could do all of that, but wouldn't it be better to just keep the embargo in place and hope the Castro regime falls? It's only been 47 years and nine Presidents; clearly it's way too soon to try to evaluate the success of the policy...

--Robert Farley

The New York Times editorial board offers strong words today in support of Teach for America, pointing to an Urban Institute study that found in North Carolina, high school students taught by TFA members scored "slightly better" than those taught by much more experienced educators. The study's authors attribute this to the higher test scores of the TFA teachers themselves, and the fact that they mostly attended selective colleges.

But there's a catch -- the gap was observed only in math and science. Many TFA teachers also leave the classroom quickly; after three years, almost half are out of the profession. As such, TFA hasn't really cracked the code for system-wide reform of teacher recruitment, education, and retention. That would require so much more across the board, starting with higher pay, bonuses for teaching in low income communities, stronger state or even federal standards for teacher education, and training and testing to make sure that educators have real depth of knowledge in the subjects they teach. TFA, with its 6,000 young teachers nationwide -- most of whom will eventually go onto other careers -- is an interesting model that highlights the importance of attracting intelligent, motivated people to the profession. But ultimately, it is just a band-aid solution to our teaching crisis.

--Dana Goldstein

Grover Norquist gave a talk to a surprisingly small audience at the New America Foundation today, promoting his new book. As always, he is too funny to really dislike, and admirably plain-spoken in his hostility toward anti-immigration Republicans like Tom Tancredo. But today, beyond the aphorisms, I actually learned something.

Norquist's brilliant tactical insight as head of Americans for Tax Reform was to insist that tax politics be absolute, as in the No New Taxes pledge that he asked candidates to take. He would never let the debate be about which taxes to raise or by how much, but about whether to raise taxes, to which the answer always had to be no. Ever since the 1990 budget deal reached at Andrews Air Force base during the George H.W. Bush administration, the Republicans have held the line on abolutist tax politics. Today Norquist said that while he was tempted to ask politicians sign a similar pledge to cut government spending, he couldn't do it, because spending didn't lend itself to the same absolutist politics.

So I asked him how that brand of zero-tolerance politics would work out in 2010, when the Bush tax cuts expire and even under a best-case scenario -- McCain in the White House and the current numbers of Republicans in the House and Senate -- all the cuts could not be extended permanently. On the estate tax alone, the votes are not there for permanent repeal, and some agreement will need to be reached quickly, or the tax will drop to zero in 2010 then back up to the 2000 levels in 2011, making estate planning difficult. For that reason, and because of the sheer cost of extending the cuts, the debate in 2009 and 2010 is not going to be reduced to a simple raise taxes/don't raise taxes fight. It will be exactly what Norquist has been trying to avoid, a fight about how much to raise taxes.

Norquist's answer had two parts -- first, that all the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts should be extended without paying for them. But second, that anything that was not a change to the existing law would not count as a violation of the "No Tax" pledge. So even though Republicans are already attacking the expirations (which they wrote into law) as "the largest tax increase in history," for purposes of Norquist's pledge, it is not. The estate tax could go back to its previous level, taxes on capital gains and dividends could go back to the Clinton-era levels, etc., and Norquist's pledge would not be broken.

This is astonishing. There's a lot of room to regain some of the revenues necessary for health care and public investment just within the Bush tax cuts. The absolutist politics of no taxes has been by far the most powerful weapon in the conservative arsenal. It's era is officially over.

-- Mark Schmitt.

Next Monday, May 19th, the Prospect is hosting an event for Sarah Posner, author of the FundamentaList and the new book God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters. A brief description:

While the “old guard” of the Religious Right political movement faces challenges to its leadership and significant changes within the broader evangelical community, lesser-known conservative religious leaders continue to wield significant political influence. Journalist Sarah Posner covers religion and politics for The American Prospect. God’s Profits takes a close look at a group of religious leaders who aren’t household names nationally but who have strong followings in the “prosperity gospel” movement, and who have put their organizing muscle to work helping to elect Republicans to office. Among those she examines closely are John Hagee and Rod Parsley, who have drawn recent attention for their connections to Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid.

The event will be moderated by Jane Hamsher, founder of Firedoglake and features Posner as well as Prospect Executive Editor Harold Meyerson, Robert Marus, News Editor and Washington Bureau Chief of the Associated Baptist Press, and Peter Montgomery, Vice President for Communications of the People For the American Way Foundation. The event will run from 1:00 to 2:30 PM at the People For the American Way Foundation, 2000 M St, NW 4th floor Washington, DC.

David Weigel says that "Politically, I suppose this is bad news for the Democrats, but not nearly as much as in 2004. For one, it's not coming out of a candidate's home state." Tom Maguire, meanwhile, asserts that the California Supreme Court may have done the GOP "favor." As I've been through before, though, while I know I'm supposed to see 2004 results in which Bush underperformed structural models as proof of Karl Rove's strategic super-genius the allegedly large effects of gay and lesbian marriage on the 2004 election have been greatly overstated. And needless to say, predictions about how the New Jersey court's ruling were supposed to have a major impact on the 2006 elections will vanish down the memory hole.

I don't really find this surprising. People overstate the extent to which people vote on social issues, and people who get outraged by decisions permitting gays and lesbians in other states to get married are overwhelmingly likely to be Republican voters anyway. I don't think that the decision today will have any significant impact on the 2008 elections. It may increase turnout in California, but since the state isn't in play it doesn't really matter.

On a final point, Weigel over optimistically says that "John McCain voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment: He can't demagogue this, and he won't." Yeah, just like how his alleged "federalist" opposition to Roe stops him from supporting every piece of federal abortion legislation to come down the pike. I don't know what McCain will do but I am sure that an alleged commitment to "federalist" principles won't stop him from doing anything.

--Scott Lemieux

What makes the grass grow green? Blood, blood, and more blood, according to American drill sergeants responsible for training enlistees in Iraq.

Described by Iraq veteran Sgt. Kristofer Goldsmith, this snapshot of life as a soldier in Iraq was just one of the many that were presented to the Congressional Progressive Caucus -- co-chaired by California Representatives Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee-- earlier this morning. Nine members of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) convened to testify and provide eyewitness accounts of the U.S. army's occupation of Iraq. Today's Winter Soldier hearing, a continuation of the hearings that took place in March in Silver Spring, mark the first time since the war started that veterans have testified under oath before Congress, which has until now let itself be captivated instead by the opinions and so-called facts offered by politicians, generals, pundits, and celebrities. The testimonies were all verified by a review process, and they convey the true human cost of the war.

The hearing comes at a particularly crucial moment, as the House is debating today whether to pour another $170 billion into policing a civil war that seems to drag on indefinitely. The term "Winter Soldier" has its origins in the writings of Thomas Paine: "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves love and thanks of man and woman." The very first Winter Soldier hearings took place in 1971 when Vietnam veterans spoke out in Detroit about the war crimes and atrocities perpetrated by the U.S. Armed Forces and its allies.

Collectively, the veterans (two of whom have attempted suicide as a consequence of their combat experiences) painted a picture suggesting that American soldiers in Iraq have been placed in an environment so unbelievably dire, chaotic, and anarchic that they, as Sgt. Jason Lemieux put it, are no longer fighting for democracy, for the flag, or for America, but rather for "each others' safety at the expense of everything else." The situation was exacerbated by ambiguous and ever-changing rules of engagement.

The killing of innocent civilians, mishandling of the dead, utter disdain for Iraqis and their nation, gratuitous house raids, and random detainments were all the norm rather than the exception for these veterans and countless others. One veteran relayed an incident where three Iraqi men were detained simply for running in the streets, even after a house raid turned up no reason to believe any of them were engaging in hostile activities. Goldsmith spoke of how soldiers made no attempts to repair the country's sewage infrastructure, a task they were charged with, and Iraqi school children consequently had to excrete on bathroom floors.

Today, Iraq's sewage system is in an even worse state than it was under Saddam. Upon discovering decapitated bodies strewn on the streets, soldiers made it routine practice to run over the corpses with their vehicles and then take pictures of their work. Instead of transporting Iraqi detainees who were found innocent back to their hometowns, American soldiers opted to leave them in a desert in the middle of now where and threw soft-ball sized rocks at them as they fled.

Although it is impossible to fathom what war is really like without having experienced it, today's testimonies represent an important step toward enlightening the government and the public about the physical, emotional, and ethical toll this war exacts on both men and women in uniform and Iraqis on a day to day basis. They put a much needed human face on one of the biggest foreign policy debacles in recent history and understand the war not as an abstract concept, but as something that real people are forced to live and breathe.

The subtext of some of the calls for the Clintons to release their tax returns was that Hillary's political career was entirely based on Bill being President. While the public certainly had a right to see the Clintons' tax returns, the media has been noticeably less interested in Cindy McCain's financial information. Even if the news of her selling her investments in Sudanese businesses (a year after candidates from both parties did so) sparks renewed scrutiny, the coverage will likely never take the tone that coverage of Hillary took. John Kerry was similarly mocked for having a wealthy spouse in '04, the implication being that he rode to power on her money.

But despite the fact that John McCain's political career was essentially launched by the money and political connections of his wife's family, you aren't likely to see reporters making the same insinuations. In the novelization of McCain '08, presented by the mainstream press, there's no possible way he could be presented as anything but a self-made man.

--A. Serwer

Gershom Gorenberg explains:

The current crisis was set off last week by Cabinet decisions aimed at dismantling Hezbollah's private telephone network -- critical for its military communications -- and at removing Beirut airport's security chief, who has links to the Shi'ite group. If the Siniora government expected quiet acquiescence, it was wildly overconfident. Hezbollah quickly defeated pro-government Sunni fighters and took control of West Beirut. When Siniora let the army act as arbiter, the military took Hezbollah's side on both issues.

Fighting died down in Beirut but flared up first in northern Lebanon, then in the Chouf Mountains east of the capital. Pro-government Druse leader Walid Jumblatt had to turn to his opponents in the Druse community to gain a ceasefire in the mountains between his men and Hezbollah. That ceasefire unevenly went into effect a few minutes before I spoke with Khashan on Sunday evening.

Read the rest of the article here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Dean Baker has the latest on the economy in the meltdown lowdown:

A new bill sponsored by Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, directs the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) to buy up loans that are facing foreclosure. If the bill passes, the FHA will guarantee new mortgages at a price 15 percent below the current appraised value of the house. This would require the current lender to take a hit, since it will not get back the full value of the home, but even 85 percent of the full value of the home is likely more than the lender would get by foreclosing. In principle, homeowners will also benefit, since they get to stay in their home with a new lower-interest mortgage.

Read the rest of the article here. And subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they're published.

--The Editors

Desperate for campaign news, CNN is hyping John McCain's speech as a huge step for McCain on Iraq, as "for the first time it lays out benchmarks on which he could be judged." The LA Times agrees, saying that the senator "for the first time talk[s] about a specific date for when he envisions direct American military involvement to be over in Iraq."

But, as Robert pointed out, a cursory reading of the speech shows it has absolutely no substance. A single paragraph is devoted to Iraq and its just a fantasy of what the country will look like in five years. In McCain's world, five years from now most US troops will be home; Iraq will be stable and democratic; civil war will have been been averted; and violence will be down sharply.

There is no explanation of how McCain is going to magically transform the country. Also in the speech, McCain envisions the Taliban being nearly defeated, Osama bin Laden being captured or killed, Iran and North Korea giving up their nuclear weapons programs, Sudan allowing a multinational peacekeeping force to stop the genocide, improved public schools, "robust" economic growth in the US and a host of other dreams. It's not a speech, it's a wish list, but even Santa would have trouble delivering on it.

--Jordan Michael Smith

The California Supreme Court, six of whose seven members are Republicans, has ruled that the exclusion of same-sex couples from the legal benefits is unconstitutional (pdf). The opinion isn't lucidly formatted but if I count the votes correctly it was a 4-3 decision.

After finding that marriage is a fundamental right (a premise that should be uncontroversial), the majority holds that the policy cannot survive strict scrutiny: "the purpose underlying differential treatment of opposite-sex and same sex couples ... cannot properly be viewed as a compelling state interest for the purposes of the equal protection clause, or as necessary to serve such an interest." The narrow tailoring argument is I think where the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage benefits really runs into constitutional problems; it is hard to argue that there are state interests in marriage that cannot be advanced in any other way but to exclude same-sex couples. I will have more on the text later, but if I read it correctly the court seems to require, like the Massachusetts court ultimately did, that reserving the label "marriage" for different-sex marriages is unconstitutional.

I'll have more on the decision later, but a few points should be made at the outset:

• First, claims that the decision that the court "usurped" the legislature should be undermined by the fact that the legislature passed legislation recognizing same-sex marriage, but had the legislation vetoed by the governor, who urged the court to resolve the issue.
• Second, you will read claims that the decision will spark a massive backlash; keep in mind that the same people made the same argument about judicial decisions in Massachusetts and New Jersey and were mostly wrong.
• Finally, Kevin Drum notes that there will almost certainly be a vote in the issue in the November; hopefully a majority of citizens will not vote to repeal the rights of some California citizens.

--Scott Lemieux

According to TPM, David Brock has shelved the liberal 527 that was going to run ads against John McCain in the fall.

Barack Obama’s fundraising team has been quietly putting out word to major donors that they didn’t want any money to go to such third-party groups. Instead, they wanted the cash to go to the Obama campaign, so Obama advisers could be in sole control of the campaign’s message. It worked. Brock has quietly leaked a statement to The Washington Post saying that his group is, for all practical purposes, defunct.

This is the exact opposite of John McCain’s Very Honorable Response to those race-baiting ads in North Carolina. Instead of writing a letter and letting everyone know that he was against the ad while taking no action to keep it from airing, Obama just put his foot down. Obama hasn’t always been so consistent with third-party groups in the past, but given the stakes it looks like Obama is trying pretty hard to live up to the standards he’s set for himself.

It also might be a preview of what we’ll see from both candidates: McCain will very publicly condemn smear efforts on his behalf while doing virtually nothing to circumvent them, and Obama will actually do something about it without all the public handwringing.

—A. Serwer

Matt Yglesias has an essay on the main site based on his new book, Heads in the Sand which explains how Democrats have hurt themselves with incoherent foreign policy thinking and how they can improve in the future.

TAP has invited a group of foreign policy experts from across the ideological spectrum to respond to the essay. Click on each author's name to read their contribution or go here to read the whole article.

Matt Yglesias

David Rieff

Justin Logan

David Frum

Derek Chollet

Anne Marie Slaughter

--The Editors

The GOP would do well to listen to Ed Morrissey:

Did the House GOP caucus take a hard line on pork-barrel spending or adopt policies to cut federal spending? No. Republican voters and conservative pundits begged the House and Senate caucuses to make dramatic breaks with the previous six years and adopt real conservative policies of fiscal responsibility and federalism. What did they do? They offered to stop earmarking only if Democrats followed suit, a deal everyone knew would never take place. Instead of appointing one single anti-pork activist to the House Appropriations Committee in Jeff Flake, they appointed Joe Bonner, a good Congressman but a well-known earmarker, and mostly because Flake’s anti-pork crusade irritates his colleagues.

I agree this is a great idea for them. Making clear that upper-class tax cuts and perpetual trillion-dollar war mean serious cuts to programs that people like: definitely something the GOP should campaign on, and vigorously. Don't kid yourself, the public is just as concerned with earmarks as conservative bloggers, follows decisions about who should head the Appropriations Committee very closely and in particular you have to think that ensuring that members of Congress can't bring back any funding to their districts will help them enormously in re-election battles. I also have to strongly recommend that the GOP structure its appeal to the phone booth where all of the principled supporters of "federalism" are currently meeting. I suggest that they start by repealing the "Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act," which I'm sure will be strongly supported by the anti-choicers deeply committed to "returning abortion to the states." This is pure gold!

--Scott Lemieux

Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest report that the U.S. Government has been using a psychotropic drug called Haldol (among others), once used on political dissidents in the Soviet Union, to sedate immigrant detainees against their will during deportation. The problem is many of the detainees aren't being violent or threatening, it's just, you know, easier to deal with them if they're all doped up.

It looks as if Hezbollah has succeeded in getting the Lebanese government to back down. The government was attempting to bring Hezbollah to heel by firing a pro-Hezbollah airport official and breaking up the organization's phone network. These efforts led to violence and a near coup in Beirut, and demonstrated that Hezbollah is still the premier military player in Lebanon.

If only we'd allowed the 2006 war to go on a little bit longer, I'm sure that Hezbollah would have been completely crushed...

--Robert Farley

Somebody in the McCain campaign noticed that the whole 100 years thing isn't playing very well. The new plan is four and a half years. The catch is that the withdrawal of US troops in contingent on "victory", and, as Ilan Goldenberg points out, McCain hasn't had such a great predictive track record thus far:

But saying it does not make it so. This is the same man who said that we would be "welcomed as liberators." The same man who said the war would be "fairly easy." The same man who said "There's not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias." The same man who one year before Iraq was hitting it's worst level of violence of the war said: "a year from now, we will have made a fair amount of progress if we stay the course."

But then McCain is known as a "straight talkin' maverick", not as an "accurate prognosticator".

--Robert Farley

This isn't the first time Webb's name has come up, nor will it be the last. It's even been discussed on the pages of the Prospect recently. But I think the costs for Obama of picking Webb outweigh the benefits. Obviously Webb brings with him a certain authoritativeness on military affairs that is supposed to sit well with voters nervous about the Democrats' foreign policy philosophy. But doesn't that just underscore the notion that Obama is somehow weak on foreign policy? Webb would also, supposedly, make Obama more appealing to white working class voters. This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense but look what Dems could lose:

• A safe Senate seat, which in another Democrat's hands might not be the case
  
• An outstanding senator who has been a champion for veteran's affairs and revitalizing the military
• A strong voice of economic populism and a fighter for working Americans
  

The Democratic agenda for 2009, if it is to break clean of the Bush-Cheney years, isn't going to fail or succeed based solely on who wins the White House -- not that it isn't important. But the real action will be in Congress, and specifically the Senate, where countermajoritarian rules and procedures mean that Democrats will need sixty votes to get just about anything done. Jim Webb is one of those votes and an important voice in that body and losing him to a largely ceremonial office means it's just that much harder to get anything passed in a Senate where the Republicans who remain after 2008 will do their best to filibuster everything in sight (one assumes). Democrats already have the advantage on winning the White House, so I say let Webb do his job in the Senate, which he has done admirably. There's other people Obama can pick if he truly believes he needs a running mate that will appeal to white working class voters in order to win the presidency.

--Mori Dinauer

An interesting question raised at the Ed in '08 conference: The idea of universal pre-school (in other words, affordable for everyone) isn't very controversial, unlike the idea of universal health care. But should pre-school be mandated? In other words, should we be requiring that all three and four-year-olds be enrolled in some kind of education program, even if it's "home schooling?"

--Dana Goldstein

Like Marie Cocco, I could come up with my own list of Media Matters clips and offensive merchandise that I could use to argue definitively that racism is worse than sexism. But I'm not sure what that would prove, other than that I believe the prejudice I've faced is qualitatively worse than the prejudice I know nothing about. I see racism and sexism as intertwined if not interdependent, so I don't understand why for some people the Democratic primary has become a competition over who has it worse. Not to mention the fact that Cocco's approach basically excludes all women of color from the conversation.

Contrary to what I assumed earlier this morning, this story isn't going away. Local NARAL chapters are in open rebellion over the national organization's endorsement of Barack Obama. Karen Cooper, executive director of NARAL Washington State, made the following statement:

I wanted to let all of NARAL Pro-Choice Washington's supporters know the story behind the endorsement. None of us here, myself included, knew about it until a phone call this morning from D.C., and at that point it was a done deal. To be clear, we at NARAL Pro-Choice Washington remain neutral in the race between Senators Clinton and Obama. We strongly disagree with NARAL Pro-Choice America's decision to endorse at this time.

At WaPo, Prospect alumna Garance Franke-Ruta has more:

Since yesterday's announcement, NARAL groups in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Oregon, Washington, Texas and New York - Clinton's home state - have issued statements signaling their continued neutrality in the Democratic race and emphasizing that the national group did not speak for them on this matter. These groups represent nearly a quarter of NARAL's state chapters.

What's going on? Of course, many of the executives, employees, and supporters of these NARAL subsidiaries around the country are passionate Hillary Clinton supporters. But perhaps more importantly, NARAL's donor base --- which is heavily made up of committed second wave women -- has likely yet to fully grapple with the fact that despite winning recent primaries, Clinton is irretrievably behind in the pledged delegate count and the popular vote, and will not be able to win without overturning the will of the Democratic electorate.

--Dana Goldstein

Torture is all over the headlines--in other countries. In England, the Ministry of Defense announced an inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa, who died from asphyxiation while in a British detention center in Basra in September 2003. The inquiry will look into the death of Mousa---who had 93 identifiable injuries when he died--as well as other civilian abuses by the British.

Up north, meanwhile, it emerged that the US gave $500,000 to the Pakistani military to apprehend Al Qaeda-linked CanadianAbdullah Khadr in 2004. Khadr was held in custody for nearly a year by the Pakistanis, where he says he was tortured repeatedly. His son, 15-year-old Omar Khadr, is still being held in Guantanamo Bay.

All of this shows that where America leads, others follow. When the U.S. tortures, allied nations follow suit. When the U.S. is cavalier in its human rights standards, other western democracies are, too. Americans should know that the soiling of justice in the land of liberty has destructive effects far beyond the shores of this country.

--Jordan Michael Smith

Two weeks ago I wrote about John McCain's almost complete lack of an education platform, despite his support during his 2000 run for an aggressive federal experiment in private school vouchers. Today at the Ed in '08 Summit, we've heard that the McCain campaign has put off finalizing its education program until late summer or early fall. That's according to Richard Whitmire, an education writer on the USA Today editorial board and president of the Education Writers Association, who was supposed to meet with McCain's folks to learn more about his education plans, but had his meeting canceled.

--Dana Goldstein

Yesterday Ann pondered:

If NARAL truly believed Obama to be the superior candidate on choice, they could have made this endorsement months ago. Such a move would have been far more damaging to Clinton. I do wonder, though, why NARAL chose to endorse now rather than, say, in a few weeks when Clinton may well have dropped out.

I don't think NARAL did truly believe Obama was superior on their issue. Rather, they likely believed, just as they've said again and again, that cleaving space between the two candidates on reproductive health would only weaken both of their appeals. So why the endorsement now? My guess is that they wanted to:

1. Pressure Clinton, a longtime ally, to drop out. NARAL likely believes that a prolonged primary with two Democrats attacking each other hurts their issue and foremost priority -- electing a pro-choice president.

2. Do a favor, while they still could, for the highly likely Democratic nominee and possible future president.

--Dana Goldstein

I watched the John Edwards endorsement of Barack Obama last night during the cocktail hour of an education conference sponsored by ED in '08, an advocacy group founded by the Gates and Broad foundations. I agree with some of ED in '08's policy solutions on education, but I don't agree with their business-centric tone (what's good for business in terms of education isn't necessarily great for children). I especially don't like the way their three "pillars" for education reform -- standards, higher teacher pay, and more hours in the classroom -- overlook the fact that we have a system cleaved in two between rich and poor and black and white. Research shows that socioeconomic and racial integration within classrooms are some of the most effective ways to boost the performance of disadvantaged kids.

Running for president this past year, John Edwards really understood that. And that's one reason why I welcomed him back to the national stage last night with his endorsement speech, in which he spoke quite a bit about America's two education systems. In fact, until I was actually listening to him speak, I hadn't realized how much I'd been missing his presence. Edwards' impassioned delivery even made me reconsider my gut reaction against the Edwards for V.P. idea. He and Obama make an attractive, charismatic, policy-focused pair. They're youthful and energetic -- the ultimate contrast to John McCain. Of course, Edwards is open to the same "elitism" critique that Obama has to dodge, and he doesn't bolster Obama's lack of foreign policy or military experience. Nor has he really proven that he can win the votes of the working class whites Obama needs to pick up. In any case, what are other people thinking about Edwards making a second V.P. run?

--Dana Goldstein

One of the problems with discussions about Affirmative Action it never seems clear which AA we're talking about. Matthew Yglesias and Ta-Nehisi Coates both argue that Barack Obama should come out for a class-based approach while avoiding racial demagoguery. But while they seem to be talking about college admissions, in the public sphere such arguments often metastasize into arguments for abolishing AA in general (Ward Connerly's ballot initiatives would eliminate AA across the board), including in hiring and awarding government contracts to businesses owned by minorities and women. In the latter two circumstances, I can't see class playing as active a role as race or gender.