JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE. More on the Supreme Court massacre this week, from Simon Lazarus: Take a look.

--The Editors

YOU'VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY. Juan Williams has an op-ed piece in the New York Times on the recent Supreme Court decision about school integration programs. Williams' take can be summarized by this paragraph:

And today the argument that school reform should provide equal opportunity for children, or prepare them to live in a pluralistic society, is spent. The winning argument is that better schools are needed for all children — black, white, brown and every other hue — in order to foster a competitive workforce in a global economy.

Sigh.

-- J. Goodrich

REMITTANCES AND MIGRATION. The findings come too late to be relevant to the now-stalled immigration reform push here in the U.S., but the news is still important, particularly to some European countries that may have similar efforts on the horizon: Women, and especially girls, are the greatest beneficiaries of remittances sent home by some 200 million migrants worldwide, according to a massive new study. Via Le Monde, revenues that traverse borders are notoriously difficult to track, but a report (PDF) released yesterday by the World Bank has attempted to study their impact nonetheless. Investigating several global migration hotspots, including Southeast Asia, North Africa, and Latin America, the study finds overall that children from migrant families are more likely to attend school, stay in school, and earn higher grades; girls from migrant households complete almost two years more than girls from non-migrant households, whereas boys complete an average of one additional year. The authors of the study note that "resources allocated to daughters tend to be marginal resources, whereas those allocated to boys tend to be intramarginal and are therefore less sensitive to income fluctuations. Consequently, the positive income impact of migration and remittances on daughters' education and labor outcomes is typically much larger than that for boys."

Researchers point to a decrease in fertility rates that correlates along the same lines, particularly in migrant families in Middle Eastern and Asian countries, like Pakistan and Turkey, noting that "most recent migration has been from high-birth to low-birth countries" and that "migrants can affect their home countries' views ... because they typically adopt ideas and behaviors prevailing in the destination countries and transmit them to their countries of origin." Championing this increased gender equality and educational attainment, the correlation between lower birthrates and lower poverty rates, and the influence of developed country's values on those of the developing country, the report offers a revelatory glimpse at the profound effects that immigration reform, done right, could promote.

--Elisabeth Zerofsky

CHINA RULES. China's "sweeping" new labor law is yet one more surprising ingredient -- cardamom? -- in the globalization stir-fry. Since the text of the law hasn't been released yet, it's hard to tell how it will actually affect Chinese workers. China's government has made some highly visible steps in the right direction of late, including emancipating brick kiln slave laborers. Here's how foreign business reacted to the new legislation:

Companies argued that the rules would substantially increase labor costs and reduce flexibility, and some foreign businesses warned that they would have little choice but to move their operations out of China if the provisions were enacted unchanged.

--Matt Sledge

THINK TANK ROUND-UP. Because what you want on a Friday afternoon are graphs. And charts. And lots of pdf files.

• Strategic Reset: The Center for American Progress's Strategic Reset paper is the big news in think tank land this week. "The current Iraq strategy is exactly what Al Qaeda wants," it says. "The United States distracted and pinned down by Iraq’s internal conflicts and trapped in a quagmire that has become the perfect rallying cry and recruitment tool for Al Qaeda." This leads to a full call for withdrawal -- the first time CAP has made such a motion, and further evidence that withdrawal is increasingly the mainstream position on Iraq.

• Explaining the US-Europe Employment Gap: "Why is Europe's employment rate almost 10 percent lower than that of the United States?" Asks the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "This "jobs gap" has typically been blamed on the rigidity of European labor markets. But in Services and Employment, an international group of leading labor economists suggests quite a different explanation. Drawing on the findings of a two-year research project that examined data from France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, these economists argue that Europe's 25 million "missing" jobs can be attributed almost entirely to its relative lack of service jobs." If true, that's a rather big deal. And why Europeans consume services at so much lower a level is a serious question, too.

• Reviving Full Employment Policy: Whether the government should pursue full employment or a more inflation-focused economic policy is one of those 90s debates that got totally and entirely lost in the Bush era. But writing for EPI, Thomas Palley argues that "existing macroeconomic policy has paid inadequate attention to delivering full employment for the U.S. economy. In doing so, current policy has contributed to undermining the link between wages and productivity growth because full employment is an essential condition for workers to be able to bargain for a fair share of productivity." And then he says more things! You guys will love it. Also, there are cool graphs. Check this one in particular to see how ahistorical the divergent fortunes of the rich and poor are.

--Ezra Klein

THEY TRIED TO WARN US. Time's Scott Macleod has an excellent round-up on how pro-democracy activists in the U.S. and Iran tried to warn the U.S. State Department that its new funding for Iranian civil society groups was going to hurt their efforts:

The Bush Administration had trumpeted its $61.1 million democracy program, including Farsi-language broadcasts into Iran, education and cultural exchanges and $20 million worth of support for "civil society, human rights, democratic reform and related outreach" as an important effort. However, sources tell TIME that several key Iranian reformers had repeatedly warned U.S. officials through back channels that the pro-democracy program was bound to expose them as vulnerable targets for a government crackdown whether they took Washington's funds or not.

Iranian civil rights activists contacted by TIME say that the cases against the Iranian-Americans have fostered the most repressive atmosphere inside Iran in years, making democracy advocates terrified to work or even speak on the telephone....

TIME's sources, who do not want to be identified for fear of retribution, say that they repeatedly warned about the negative consequences in informal talks that have been taking place for several years between figures in the U.S. and Iran who are close to their respective governments. Similar warnings were delivered to U.S. officials by others, including Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council. "We had talks with the State Department and with lawmakers," Parsi told TIME. "We pointed out the dangers. Our advice was not taken into consideration. Things have turned out worse than we expected." Parsi says that, in the past, individual democracy activists have been arrested without a pretext, but that the Bush Administration's program gave the regime an opportunity to go after as many as 10,000 non-government organizations and their memberships.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

"FAUX RESTRAINT." Since I have an article critical of Antonin Scalia's flagrantly unprincipled affirmative action jurisprudence today, I should note that Scalia deserves credit for taking Roberts to task for his disingenuous "I'm not overturning the precedent, I'm just refusing to ever apply it" hair-splitting. (As a friend noted in email, with Alito it seems almost a neurosis -- what state will the Republicans lose in 2008 if Flast v. Cohen is overturned explicitly? He supposes that it's the counts of precedents overturned that matters; if relatively few precedents are explicitly overruled some people may be fooled into thinking that nothing is really changing even as major branches of doctrine are being significantly revised.)

Walter Dellinger wrote recently that "But it's neither minimalist nor restrained to overrule cases while pretending you are not." Admittedly, as a skeptic I'm inclined to think of this kind of behavior as exemplifying minimalism rather than betraying it. But leaving aside the semantic issue, the overall point he's making is absolutely correct. The Court owes it to the public and role of the courts in a democracy to be honest about what it's doing. If it wants to overrule Stenberg v. Carhart or McConnell or Flast v. Cohen, it should do so explicitly. In the meantime, however, it's important not to be fooled when the Court declines to formally overrule a precedent it's completely gutting.

--Scott Lemieux

THE PROS VERSUS THE MOB. The other day, the missus and I were watching the Daily Show, and Lewis Black did a very funny rant about things like Conservapedia (created to counter Wikipedia's liberal bias), Fox's "Half Hour Comedy Hour" (created to counter the Daily Show's liberal bias) and Qube TV (created to counter YouTube's liberal bias), and how comically awful they are. "Explain something to me," she said afterward. "Conservatives are so good at campaigns and politics -- they craft effective messages, they make brilliant TV ads, and so on -- so why is it that when they try to do stuff like this, the results are so ridiculously lame?"

It was an excellent question, and I think I know the answer. It's the Republican professionals who are really good at politics. They're smart, they're experienced, they're ruthless, and they usually don't let their views on how they'd like things to be distort their judgments about what will be politically effective. The conservative rank-and-file, however ... well, not so much. It would be too much of a stretch to say that the other side of the aisle is precisely the inverse -- there are many smart and skilled Democratic strategists, and plenty of rank-and-file liberals who are dumb as a bag of hammers ("Once Dick Cheney gets a load of this ten-foot puppet and my 'Free Mumia' sign, the walls of the overclass are going to crumble!") -- but not by much. When conservative professionals set out to do something, it is likely to be well-funded and professionally run (here's today's example). But when it's just a bunch of ordinary righties who get together to fight the liberals, you get ... well, you get Conservapedia and Qube TV. On the other hand, rank-and-file liberals will certainly create lots and lots of garbage, but they'll also create MoveOn, DailyKos, and other extremely successful enterprises.

So is this just something that has to do with technology and media? After all, the conservative movement of the last forty years was something of a bottom-up enterprise, and it's been pretty darn successful. And no, "We're smarter than they are" is not an acceptable answer. So what's going on here?

--Paul Waldman

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. If you weren't already skeptical about the doctrine, Scott explains why the Supreme Court's decision yesterday on school integration gives the lie to Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia's claimed adherence to "originalism." Meanwhile, Allison Stevens connects the decision to the fate of women's rights and gender discrimination. Elsewhere, Alexandra Poolos reports on two new plays that explore the impact on the home front of American casualties in Iraq; Terence Samuel assesses the growing cracks in congressional Republican unity on the war; and Harold catologues the ways in which globalization flips, reverses, scrambles, and perverts long-accepted notions about how the economy should work.

--The Editors

SCOTUS PUTS THE FIX IN ON PRICES (JARED BERNSTEIN). Yesterday, the free-marketeers on the Supreme Court signed off on a plan to fix prices. It's a strange thing when those who usually argue for an unfettered invisible hand reach for the handcuffs, so let's spend a few minutes unpacking this one.

First, the specifics: The Court voted 5-4 to overturn a ban that's been in place for almost a century. Back in 1911, the court found that so-called "resale price maintenance" (RPM) -- an agreement between a manufacturer and a distributor on a minimum sale price -- was in violation of antitrust law. Since then, producers of goods could suggest a minimum price to sellers, as in the "manufacture's suggested retail price," but they couldn't stop the seller from going lower.

In fact, today's ruling grew out of a case wherein a manufacturer of women's fashion goods refused to provide any more of their stuff to a Dallas retailer who was selling below their suggested minimum. The retailer said she needed to discount the merchandise to compete, and the lower courts agreed with her.

The Supremes, however, went the other way, arguing that the ban was archaic and no longer justified. From now on, cases in this area of antitrust will have to be tried on a case-by-case basis, meaning every time a retailer or consumer group thinks prices are unfairly fixed, they'll have to schlep into court, with the burden of proof on them.

You're probably wondering what the rationale is for allowing prices to be set like this. The argument is that if producers can't set a minimum price, they will be unable to recoup the profits they need to make it worth their while to innovate. In other words, the minimum price is needed to offset a market failure.

For example, suppose a manufacturer comes up with a cell phone that warrants an extensive, and costly, demonstration on the sales floor (forget for a moment, that such service is pretty much a thing of the past). What's to keep buyers from getting the demo in the store and then buying the product more cheaply off of the internet? Or, in the case the court decided, suppose a producer's marketing strategy is such that they want to send a signal to customers that "this ain't no discount handbag?"

The court heard arguments that in such cases, if firms can't set the minimum price, they'll stop making the stuff, and commerce will be harmed. I don't buy it, at any price. Neither did Justice Breyer and three other dissenters (usual suspects: Souter, Stevens, Ginsburg).

What you need to overturn such a well-established precedent, especially one involving basic market principles, is deep and compelling evidence that the ban is truly leading to market failures. The court heard arguments on both sides, and yes, there were some cases where the inability to set a minimum price hurt producers. But not enough to convince an objective observer that innovation or entrepreneurship has been diminished. Jeez, look around. Does it seem like we lack for product choices?

And the potential downsides to consumers are obvious. As Breyer argued, "The only safe predictions to make about today's decision are that it will likely raise the price of goods at retail …" He estimated that the change could lead to higher annual spending for a family of four of about $750 to $1,000. That's an older estimate inflated to today's dollars, and may be on the high side, but the direction is right.

In fact, this is a run at internet discounters. And, of course, it is tough for brick and mortar stores to compete on price. That means they need to develop other competitive advantages, which they've been doing. Where is it written, for example, that you must sell coffee and scones in bookstores? One can view this as a market innovation forced by the price competition on which the court just put the kibosh.

(BTW, as my colleague Josh Bivens points out, a better and fairer way to level this playing field is to apply retail sales taxes to internet purchases.)

From a broader perspective, this decision is another in a string of recent Supreme Court decisions that strengthen the hand of business. And, frankly, they don't need the extra clout. One clear benefit from globalization is lower prices. One clear cost is lower wages. Yesterday's decision, by giving producers the ability to set higher prices, blocks the price advantage without offsetting the wage disadvantage. Nice work, guys.

--Jared Bernstein

SLIVER OF AUTONOMY FOR D.C. I recently reported on the bill in Congress to give Washington, D.C. a voting representative in Congress. Advocates of D.C. voting rights note that, for the past nine years, Congress has prevented D.C. from having a needle-exchange program, and point to this as one of the biggest indignities that D.C. suffers at the hands of Congress. With one of the worst rates of HIV infection in the country, they desperately need a sensible public-health policy on the issue, but conservative ideologues in Congress foiled them.

But now that the Democrats have taken over Congress D.C. will be able to give it a try. The way the federal government has treated D.C. in recent years has been a disgrace (I think Jose Serrano was right to call it "colonial"), and hopefully this is a sign of a more improvement to come.

--Ben Adler

THE ALITO COURT. Emily Bazelon has an amusing article asking liberal and moderate legal scholars who claimed that Roberts would not preside over a rightward shift on the Court on the basis of... well, frankly I have no idea, if they have second thoughts. (Of course he said he valued stability and precedent at his confirmation hearings. Everybody does. Including Clarence Thomas.)

But while claims that Roberts "might even move the Court to the left" were frankly bizarre, as were the stories that took the possibility of lots of unanimous decisions in high-profile cases seriously, it's important not to attribute too much causal weight to the new Chief Justice per se. Roberts is essentially a dead match for Chief Justice (as opposed to Associate Justice) Rehnquist -- a standard-issue conservative with little interest in grand legal theory and a tendency to disingenuously gut precedents rather than explicitly overruling them (although Roberts has taken the latter tendency to ridiculous lengths.) In other words, what really facilitated the Court's rightward shift was replacing the moderate conservative O'Connor with the doctrinaire conservative Alito. If O'Connor had stayed on, the Roberts Court would look exactly like the end of the Rehnquist Court, and several major cases (including Carhart II, Ledbetter, and yesterday's desegregation decision) would almost certainly have come out the other way. Given a minimum (i.e. more than Burger) level of competence, the impact of the Chief Justice on the modern Court just isn't very great.

--Scott Lemieux

AN ISRAEL POST THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH AIPAC. In a pretty sordid story, the president of Israel is stepping down in return for the government dropping two rape charges currently levied against him. He will plead guilty to sexual harassment, committing indecent acts without consent, and harassing a witness. He will receive a suspended sentence and pay restitution. Serious stuff. But Moshe Negbi, a legal affairs commentator for Israel Radio, asks the salient question: "If the acts of which the president is charged are so serious —and I think they are — how is the case being closed with a suspended prison sentence?"

--Ezra Klein

LIBERTARIANS: STILL A TINY CONSTITUENCY. There are a couple implications for the data showing that "small government" conservatives are a small and shrinking minority while social conservatives remain the real core. First, if for some reason you still thought Giuliani was a serious candidate for the Republican nomination, this should disabuse you. Second, this should be another nail in the coffin of the silly "George Bush isn't an anti-staist and therefore he's a liberal or at least not a conservative" fallacy. Not only is statist conservatism banal, it's the only electorally viable form, even in the United States.

On a related note, my former advisor Mark Smithdid research and found that libertarian arguments for tax cuts were a failure; the argument only started working for Republicans when they rhetorically tied tax cuts to economic growth. His data is now available in convenient book format.

--Scott Lemieux

AFTER CHENEY. Don't miss, over at LGM, Rob's thoughts on Dick Cheney's power and bureaucratic effectiveness as documented so amply this week in The Washington Post's justly-praised series. "He's a bastard, but within the narrow confines of negotiating and navigating government bureaucracy, he's a magnificent bastard," writes Rob. "Perhaps inevitably, it occurs to me to wonder 'what if he were our bastard?'"

Rob ends up answering his own question with a "no," and does a good job distilling the basic unavoidable problems a Cheneyesque approach to governance and policy-making entails regardless of the person's substantive and ideological beliefs. From a slightly different angle -- not so much regarding Cheney's specific bureaucratic approach as regarding his unprecedentedly outsized and ideologically hard-edged role as a partner-in-power of the president -- Alex Rossmiller recently argued on our site that liberals should in fact want a Dick Cheney of their own as vice president.

Certainly a question that hasn't gotten enough attention is what Cheney's lasting effect on the the vice presidency will turn out to have been in the presidential administrations to come -- how transformative and paradigm-shifting his tenure really is, what factors might contribute to or mitigate the office's continued growth in power, etc.

--Sam Rosenfeld

TABLES TURNING. I've begun to find the John Edwards vs. Ann Coulter smackdown rather deliciously awesome. Coulter's genius has always been to provoke Democrats into selling her books. Her venom + the Left's outrage = profits. The Edwards campaign has reversed the equation. Her venom + their outrage = fundraising. Their Coulter-based appeals have raised $450,000 for the campaign -- cash that will be used to popularize ideas she loathes. They've taken the firestorm she creates and, instead of leaving the lucrative end of it to solely to Coulter, harnessed it for their own coffers. Others should take note: This is the correct karmic payback for Coulter. Not to be silenced, or condemned, but to help elevate everything she criticizes.

--Ezra Klein

"WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO FUNCTION." What should do you do when a renegade band of computer nerds brings the U.S. government to its knees? Option 1: call John McClane. Option 2: dump buckets of money into their bank account and hope nobody notices. As The Washington Post reports, the Department of Homeland Security chose the latter route in a situation that makes my above-mentioned scenario seem only slightly hyperbolic. Booz Allen Hamilton wound up with 60 times the original value of a no-bid contract it received in 2003 to set up the department's intelligence operation. There's a startling accompanying graphic of how the original $2 million ballooned into $124 million.

What's impressive about this sort of thing is that the deep grip contractors have on our defense and intelligence agencies is rarely viewed as a threat to national security. Consider scenarios like this:

The department had become so reliant on Booz Allen for support that contracting officials said the information analysis office "would not be able to function, let alone attempt to carry out their missions" without the firm's employees, a contracting official later wrote.

That support work included intelligence analysis, preparation of congressional reports, budget activities and other tasks crucial to the operation of the office, documents show.

--Matt Sledge

DEMS ARE MORE TRUSTED IN WORLD WAR AGAINST ISLAMOFASCISM. Greg Sargent is right, this is a truly egregious question in the latest FOX News poll but also a pretty telling result.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHEN MINUTEMEN ARE HAPPY...you know you ought to be dispirited, at the very least. And while the immigration bill required an onerous, anti-family "touch back" and agreed to construct an Orwellian "security fence" between the United States and Mexico, I can't help but feel disappointed today for the 12 million undocumented Americans who have just learned they're not going to get adequate medical care, college financial aid for their kids, or the right to report domestic violence without fear of deportation after all. I have little faith that Congress will return to immigration during Bush's term. And even less faith that a Democrat will risk political capital on such a divisive issue in 2009.

--Dana Goldstein

AIPAC HEARTS THE GOP. Daniel Levy notes an interesting example of AIPAC's increasing self-identification with the Republican Party and, more than that, though he doesn't go here, the Christian Right. The story goes like this: The Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill came up in the House last week. With the Democrats in control, language was inserted into the bill amending the "Mexico City policy" and restore funding for groups whose reproductive health policies promote, in part, contraception and even the option of abortion. 164 Republicans voted against it. And that meant 164 Republicans voted against the $2.4 billion in aid to Israel.

As Levy outs it, "what happened next is what really speaks volumes. Nothing. Silence from AIPAC. The GOP explained its position. AIPAC chose not to score the vote, nor to in any way publicize any issue it might have with opposition to a women’s right to choose being a higher principle than aid to Israel for the Republican Congressional minority." AIPAC, of course, will generally go after Congressmen for taking precious seconds to sneeze when they should be whipping support for this or that pro-Israel bill. They allow absolutely no distractions, or competing priorities, when the legislation is meaningless to Israel. They are absolutely singl-eminded when the question is aid. So their silence here was uncustomary, but, given their tilt in recent years, sadly predictable. As the JTA's Ron Kampeas reports, “AIPAC’s decisions to refrain from criticizing the GOP is likely to reinforce the view in some Democratic circles that the pro-Israel lobby has been favoring Republicans in recent years.” That's not the strange thing. The strange thing is that that view needs any reinforcement at all. And the question is whether Democrats will begin reacting to this shift.

--Ezra Klein

INITIAL THOUGHTS ON THE SCHOOL INTEGRATION CASES: Some initial observations based on a first reading of the Court's opinion striking down voluntary school integration programs in Louisville and Seattle:

• Nothing in the text of the Constitution compels these programs to be struck down. Essentially, Roberts's plurality opinion rests on the assertion that racial classifications intended to perpetuate a caste system should be considered the precise legal equivalent of racial classifications intended to remedy segregation. This is exceptionally unpersuasive, and also makes it almost impossible to actually remedy the ongoing de facto segregation of American school systems, much of which has roots in various forms of state discrimination (not just formal apartheid in the South, but the drawing of arbitrary school district lines to create segregated systems, local ordinances encouraging residential segregation, etc.) As Breyer says, "This context is not a context that involves the use of race to decide who will receive goods or services that are normally distributed on the basis of merit and which are in short supply. It is not one in which race-conscious limits stigmatize or exclude; the limits at issue do not pit the races against each other or otherwise significantly exacerbate racial tensions. They do not impose burdens unfairly upon members of one race alone but instead seek benefits for members of all races alike. The context here is one of racial limits that seek, not to keep the races apart, but to bring them together." To compare what these cities are doing to states that maintained apartheid is historically blinkered and morally untenable.
• Given the modesty of the Seattle program -- which used race only as a tiebreaker, making the potential injustices of the classification particularly dubious -- it is clear that no affirmative action program is going to survive an encounter with the Roberts Court in its current configuration. This is another area where replacing O'Connor with Alito makes a major difference.
• The opinion was predictably narrowed by Kennedy, who provided the swing vote but (exactly as Dahlia Lithwick predicted) holding out the dim possibility that a future program may theoretically take race into account. This probably won't be terribly meaningful in practice (particularly since the federal courts are rapidly abandoning the desegregation orders necessary for Kennedy's distinction to be relevant.)
• I strongly urge you to read Breyer's dissent, which among many virtues contains a detailed history of segregation in both cities, pointing out that federal court orders were necessary to compel desegregation in both cities and (contrary to the plurality) even Seattle had significant elements of de jure segregation. It also does a good job of pointing out the opinion's obvious inconsistency with past precedents the Court claims to be applying (I'll have more on that later.)
• I'll have an article about this coming out tomorrow, but you will be shocked to hear that Thomas's concurrence does not contain the long-awaited historical evidence that the Fourteenth Amendment was originally understood as prohibiting even remedial racial classifications. Strange; I'm sure he must have it somewhere and just hasn't gotten around to it! Obviously, in the wake of Bush v. Gore accusations by conservatives about liberals favoring "judicial activism" or "outcome-oriented" jurisprudence are risibly hypocritical, but here's another data point.
• I'll give the last word to Breyer:

  Today, almost 50 years later, attitudes toward race in this Nation have changed dramatically. Many parents, white and black alike, want their children to attend schools with children of different races. Indeed, the very school districts that once spurned integration now strive for it. The long history of their efforts reveals the complexities and difficulties they have faced. And in light of those challenges, they have asked us not to take from their hands the instruments they have used to rid their schools of racial segregation, instruments that they believe are needed to overcome the problems of cities divided by race and poverty. The plurality would decline their modest request.

  The plurality is wrong to do so. The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown. To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown. The plurality's position, I fear, would break that promise. This is a decision that the Court and the Nation will come to regret.

--Scott Lemieux

AND 1,774 MORE JUST LIKE THEM. Yesterday afternoon a bevy of child-bearing Republicans and their bewildered male companions convened at the Independent Women's Forum to lament the scientifically documented "patriotism gap" that is corrupting our nation's young people. The crowd laid waste to a hydrogenated red-white-and-blue cake while Myrna Blyth and Chriss Winston signed copies of their latest contribution to the conservative canon, How to Raise an American: 1776 Fun and Easy Tools, Tips, and Activities to Help Your Child Love This Country.

Winston and Blyth dismissed the preposterous claim circulated by our "Spin Sisters" -- a designation encompassing everyone from Rosie O'Donnell to Nancy Pelosi -- that American society is in fact stratified by gross structural and economic inequalities. Can you believe those freedom-haters? Myrna's most shocking revelation, gleaned from a FOX News poll: "Nearly a quarter of our young people -- the very Americans we're counting on to keep our country strong and safe, would prefer to live elsewhere." She quickly reassured us that her new book offers not one, but 1,776 ways to indoctrinate children with all the tools they need. For example, stop traffic patriotically with an Independence Day bicycle parade in your own neighborhood or brave the frontier on a covered wagon ride through one of our nation's cherished national parks.

--Mara Revkin

THE RIGHT TO DIE. Lord knows I'm no libertarian, but the state's apparent capacity to force life on those ready to leave it has always struck me as staggeringly unjust. The right to die, to declare to your cancer, or your age, or your frailty, "you can't fire me, I quit," seems fundamental. It is nothing less than the capavity to control your own life, and your legacy, and the remembrances of those around you. But it is control we deny:

My grandmother describes herself as "pro-choice." She believes she has the right to decide her own fate. She thinks that she has lived a full life and now -- when her world has narrowed such that she can no longer drive or even go to the bathroom by herself, when she is in pain from multiple vascular surgeries, when macular degeneration has left her eyesight so poor that she is unable to read a book or even watch TV, when she has fallen and broken her hip twice, her arm once, and her shoulder once -- her time has come. She believes she has the right to end her life at the precise point in time when she, as the author of her own narrative, sees it as over.

She is wrong -- and found this out the hard way.

A few years back, she wrote to Dr. Jack Kevorkian asking for help. He called her back. My mother, who happened to be at my grandmother's house that afternoon, answered the phone. Worried that this voice she didn't recognize was a sales call, she asked who it was. Dr. Kevorkian identified himself. Tears in her eyes, my mother wordlessly handed the phone to her mother, who lay in her darkened bedroom recovering from yet another surgery. By the end of the call, it was my grandmother who wept. Dr. Kevorkian would not help her; technically speaking, none of her ailments were fatal.

--Ezra Klein

EXPECTATIONS GAME. Perhaps in response to the buzz around Barack Obama's announcement that his campaign is close to the ground-breaking 250,000-donor mark for the second fundraising quarter, which ends this Saturday, Hillary Clinton's communications director Howard Wolfson has sent an e-mail to "friends" explicitly reminding folks that HRC is on track to meet her last-quarter numbers:

We expect to bring in about what we did in the First Quarter, or slightly more, which should put us in the range of $27 million. To put that figure in some perspective, it is more than any Democrat has ever raised in the second quarter of the “off” year. While that figure is record setting, we do expect Senator Obama to significantly outraise us this quarter.

I should say so. Let's do some back-of-the-envelope math here, shall we? Last quarter, Obama brought in $25.7 million from 104,000 donors. This time around, he is shooting for 250,000 donors (his campaign currently reports 245,272). Even assuming that all Obama's second-quarter growth was from low-dollar donors (an assumption that's almost certainly incorrect), I don't see how this adds up to less than $37 million. The average online political donation tends to be around $80 per person. Multiply that by 150,000 and you get $12 million, which can be added to a presumed mix of high and low-dollar donations from the other 100,000 equalling $25 million, as was the case for Obama last quarter. Even if the number of high-dollar donors among the first 100,000 was lower this time, reducing his per-donor average among the first 100,000 from close to $250 to, say, $200, his minimum total for the 250,000 would be $32 million. And a per-donor average of just $160 for all 250,000 donors would still add up to $37.5 million. His per-donor average would have to fall to $140 or below for him to raise less than $35 million; last quarter his per donor average was nearly $250.

CORRECTION: The number of donors is for the year to date, not for the second quarter, rendering the above irrelevant. The campaign was predicting 150,000 donors this quarter, not 250,000.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Reading Anne-Marie Slaughter's new book on American foreign policy (called The Idea That Is America), Ezra has an epiphany: "I'm fed up with values. Entirely. They've failed this country. As a lodestar, there is none worse." That is to say, putting gauzily abstract values at the heart of one's foreign policy vision has been, and continues to be, a recipe for trouble:

The problem with Slaughter's vision, which I generally found myself in enthusiastic agreement with, is that the only one I trust to carry it out is, well, Slaughter. And possibly me. It is not a durable framework that could withstand the ascension of another Bush administration. Indeed, while her interpretation of the values that guide America would lead to a very different foreign policy than that carried out by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, her focus on the ideals animating our foreign policy, rather than the consequences of our actions abroad, leaves a vessel that could easily be filled with noxious policies ...

To convince the country that we need a foreign policy that serves those concepts is to cede the ground to those with the most compellingly idealistic narrative. Those concepts do not, themselves, suggest a foreign policy. While Slaughter states that democratization by force is a "contradiction in terms," it is the acceptance of idealism as a viable rhetorical basis for foreign policy that will allow the next set of overconfident liberalizers to wrap their wars in an agreeably gauzy cloud of paeans to democracy and calls for liberty. When the conversation rests on who is more faithful to liberty, and democracy, and tolerance, those cautioning restraint will always be at a disadvantage to those dreamily promising utopias.

We have seen this before: The language of idealism enabled what my friend Chris Hayes refers to as the "moral blackmail" of the Iraq war: How could anyone who professes to believe in freedom and democracy refuse to devote a couple of tax dollars to freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny? And many of the after-the-fact apologetics for the disaster are no better. We get Roger Cohen explaining that "[t]otalitarian hell -- malign stability -- holds no hope. Violent instability is unacceptable but not hopeless." Hope may not be a plan, but it is a value. And are you really against hope for the oppressed?

What I want is not a foreign policy vision that builds from a foundation of values, but from one of consequences. Whether a policy is concordant with America's view of itself is less important than its likely outcomes.

The U.S. prison system is in the midst of a unique historical moment. Federal "Truth in Sentencing" laws and mandatory minimums have recently turned 20, and the stringent state laws which followed suit -- California's 1994 ‘three strikes' law, for instance -- are coming of age, such that the first generation of people who have served 10- and 20-year sentences under these laws are re-joining their communities in record numbers. They're arriving home at a time of increasing political consciousness about incarceration -- the term "prison-industrial complex" was coined only a decade ago, by activist and historian Mike Davis in a 1995 article in The Nation -- as well as a growing awareness on both sides of the political spectrum that the current system is not sustainable. More than 2 million people are incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons. If you include people on probation and parole, that number jumps to over 7 million, or 1 in every 32 adults, according to the Bureau for Justice Statistics. At least 95 percent of them will come back home: 1700 people a day are released from state and federal prison.

The staggering numbers of people being released are, at least in part, at the root of this new trend towards a larger role for formerly incarcerated people in the criminal justice policy discussion. In 1999, Jeremy Travis was director of the National Institute of Justice when then-Attorney General Janet Reno asked him what was happening to all the people coming out of prison. The answer was Travis's 2005 book, But They All Come Back, and a shift in the conversation from its previous focus, rehabilitation to the new buzz-word: re-entry.

--The Editors

LOCKERBIE. To follow up on Scott's post over at LGM, this article on the investigation into the Lockerbie bombing is really quite fascinating. Hugh Miles suggests that the verdict and investigation may have been heavily influenced by the United States, to the extent that evidence was stacked against the Libyan defendant. Miles puts forth an alternative suspect that the investigation looked at early on, a former Syrian army captain who heads a Damascus-based Palestinian terrorist organization.

It's entirely plausible that Gaddafi would give up one of his intelligence officers and the payment to the Lockerbie victims as the price of his reintegration into international society, even if he didn't believe that the officer was responsible for the bombing. One of the dangers of working with dictators is that they often lack a crisp sense of justice and the rule of law. I also have to wonder how this news will be greeted in certain hawkish foreign policy circles. Gaddafi is no longer the bugbear that he was in the 1980s and 1990s, and I have to imagine that some would welcome the opportunity to pin the bombing on a Palestinian terrorist organization with pro-Syrian sympathies.

--Robert Farley

SEATTLE AND LOUISVILLE. As expected, in another 5-4 decision the Supreme Court struck down two public school integration plans in Seattle and Louisville. We're going to be running extensive coverage of this today and tomorrow, but for now, see here (PDF) for the full decision.

Speaking of school integration, John Derbyshire offers some thoughtful comments here.

--Sam Rosenfeld

PROCESS OF ELIMINATION. Jonathan Chait's case for Fred Thompson as the odds-on favorite smartly starts by eliminating purportedly major candidates with no chance of winning the nomination. As I and several TAPPED colleagues have mentioned before, Chait is clearly right on two. Giuliani is a pro-choice and pro-gay-marriage candidate in a party whose base is dominated by social reactionaries, and also has enough baggage to sink a candidate without those virtually disqualifying characteristics. McCain, too, has obviously been a non-starter for a while. Chait mentions the fact that he's hated by the conservative base; when you combine that with the fact that he's the most right-wing major candidate and that his more-lunatic-than-Bush foreign policy has crushed him among the independents who were his former base, his campaign is obviously as DOA as Giuliani's.

On Mitt Romney, though, I don't really buy it. Chait says that "Romney has been defined as a flip-flopper in a way that just destroys his public persona, and his religion makes him utterly anathema to the very constituency he hopes will be his strongest supporters." I find this somewhat less of a death warrant. Being defined as a "flip-flopper" needn't be the end of a campaign -- cf. Democratic primary, 2004 -- and it's hardly unusual for an elite Republican to switch positions on social issues. The issue of his religion is more interesting, and I could be persuaded by an argument that it will rule him out. But there seems to be a lot of debate about it, and my guess is that it will only be a big deal if Christian conservatives latch onto another clear candidate. To me, this means that this opens the door for Thompson, but isn't a guarantee that he'll walk through. (For one thing, Thompson isn't exactly a staunch lifelong anti-choicer in his own right.)

Still, even if Romney remains a credible candidate that leaves Thompson with a very good chance. It is, at best, a two person field as things currently stand, and I wouldn't bet much against Thompson if forced to pick.

--Scott Lemieux

RUPERT MURDOCH AND THE MEDIA. One day those two terms might be used as synonyms for each other. That certainly seems to be Mr. Murdoch's dream. He already owns vast acres of the international media landscape, or his News Corporation does(Plug in News Corporation in the search box). But he yearns for more, and that "more" is the Wall Street Journal. It looks like he will have his way.

The New York Times has an interesting article on Murdoch's ways of doing business. What particularly stands out is his nimble use of the government:

One firm focuses almost exclusively on parts of the tax code that affect the News Corporation. By taking advantage of a provision in the law that allows expanding companies like Mr. Murdoch's to defer taxes to future years, the News Corporation paid no federal taxes in two of the last four years, and in the other two it paid only a fraction of what it otherwise would have owed. During that time, Securities and Exchange Commission records show, the News Corporation's domestic pretax profits topped $9.4 billion.

The News Corporation's outside lobbying team has been a veritable political Noah's ark. It has included Republicans like Ed Gillespie, former Republican Party chairman; former Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato of New York; and the firm headed by former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York. But it has also included former Democratic members of Congress, as well as several high-ranking Clinton administration officials, including Jack Quinn, former White House counsel.

The whole article is well worth reading. It is also an interesting tale of market behavior from oligopolistic markets, those with just a few large firms determining most policies. Oligopolistic markets are not the so-called free markets of conservative folklore. They tend to be pretty one-sided in how they allocate power to the sellers and the buyers.

Then there is the whole question of having one man own so many of our media channels. Won't they all reflect mostly his opinions? The current owners of the Wall Street Journal worry about this:

"It is hard to imagine Rupert Murdoch publishing The New York Post in Midtown Manhattan, with all of his personal and political biases and business interests reflected every day, while publishing The Wall Street Journal in Downtown Manhattan with no interference whatsoever," James Ottaway Jr., a 5 percent shareholder and former director of Dow Jones, said recently.

Members of the Bancroft family, which controls Dow Jones, have sought elaborate assurances from Mr. Murdoch that he will preserve the independence of The Journal's news coverage. Last night, advisers to both sides said they were close to reaching an agreement on editorial control, but it was unclear whether the Bancrofts would approve a deal. When he bought The Times of London in 1981 he gave similar assurances, but some former editors say he meddled with news operations anyway.

--J. Goodrich

REPORT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, RISK DEPORTATION? Salon's Broadsheet has the unfortunate news that an amendment may be tacked on to the immigration bill that would make women's immigration status known to federal authorities if they report domestic violence to local police.

Currently the Violence Against Women Act protects women who call the cops on their abusers by preventing local law enforcement from disclosing their immigration status to the feds. But this amendment would essentially junk that portion of VAWA in the name of facilitating "information sharing between federal and local law enforcement officials," as the amendment's authors, Republican Senators Norm Coleman and Pete Domenici, put it.

Immigrant women are more likely to face additional language and cultural barriers to reporting domestic violence and accessing services. They are more likely to be isolated and abused economically, and many of their abusers use deportation as a threat. So without the special protections in VAWA, it's a safe assumption that these women would be even less likely to report domestic violence

--Ann Friedman

TAKE OFF YOUR COAT AND STAY AWHILE. Way out here in the other Washington, it's not that often that we get to enjoy political activity of national merit. So when Alberto Gonzales rolls into town for the first time during his tenure as Attorney General, you'd expect something exciting to come of it. Except it didn't this morning, not in the least.

In a thoroughly unexciting 15-minute speech, Gonzales discussed the DOJ's prosecution of cyber crimes and intellectual property theft, which I'm sure is the issue Americans are most concerned with at this point in history. The most interesting components of the brief speech were his attempts to draw a link between software pirates and international terrorism and his profound observations on child pornography on the web: "When I look at the explosion of child pornography on the Internet, it's amazing. You have to wonder what kind of people are interested in this kind of behavior."

John McKay, our local fired U.S. Attorney, was not present for the event, and declined comment on the matter prior to the AG's visit. Nor was there any discussion of the antitrust complaint against local tech giant Microsoft that Google aired in federal court yesterday -- a complaint that the judge ruled should be filed with the Justice Department.

Also conspicuously not present? Members of the actual public (though the event was promoted as "free and open" for all, with an RSVP). The room itself was only set up to seat 80 people, including the press, which accounted for a nice chunk of that number, and even those few seats were not all occupied. Most of the people there were members of TechNet, the host of the engagement, and local Republican politicians. There was also a dismal number of protesters outside the hotel, which was surprising given that we are in Seattle, and you all know how we roll out here. There were more police than protesters, which is likely due to the fact that the event was barely publicized in local media.

Gonzales's scheduled speaking engagement in Boise, Idaho, yesterday was relocated after the presence of about 100 protesters at the original location prompted organizers to move the event to the U.S. Attorney's office and make it press-only. "The concern was, because of the other people that were there, they would become a distraction," Gonzales told reporters.

All of this just leaves me wondering how much of the public Gonzales, or for that matter, any of the Bush administration, ever sees or hears. If Gonzales' impression of Seattle is taken solely from this morning's appearance, it will be more than a bit skewed. And if this is what the administration sees of all of the rest of America, it's easy to see why they're so out of touch.

--Kate Sheppard

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. In his column today, Paul Waldman argues that the Bush years have shown us the dark side of a great virtue:

A year and a half before the Bush era comes to its merciful end, cataloging its failures and pathologies has become not merely a cottage industry but a kind of mass mobilization, a task so vast that it requires the combined efforts of thousands of writers, talkers, thinkers, activists, and ordinary citizens. Every new look at the last six and a half years yields new insight into how government should not operate, another object lesson for future administrations. And one of those lessons of the Bush years is surely that potential disaster lurks behind what we had previously assumed to be a grand virtue: loyalty.

--The Editors

CARD-CHECKED. The Employee Free Choice Act died in the Senate yesterday by a vote of 51-48 -- nine votes short of what would be needed for cloture. Today, New York Times economics writer David Leonhardt has a hand-wringy piece that both sides with card-check's opponents in their argument that the process is illegitimate because it doesn't involve a secret ballot, but also laments the longterm decline of organized labor in the United States and its impact on rising inequality. Dean Baker makes two points in response (also see his commenters). It would have been nice to see Leonhardt specify what other measures he'd like to see implemented that could curb antiunion attacks from business and boost unions' prospects for organizing workers who would, all things equal, like to be organized. Harold wrote about the Employee Free Choice Act last week here, while Dmitri Iglitzin laid out some other labor law reform proposals beyond card-check last month here.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT AEI NOT BEING HACK-TASTIC? From Defense News:

As the "baby boomer" generation nears retirement age, U.S. officials should overhaul Social Security and other entitlement programs to ensure Washington can afford a robust military capable of thwarting future threats, according to an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) panel.

Citing Bush administration data, the panel said the federal government now devotes twice as much federal funding each year to social insurance programs than to defense. The group, composed of two AEI scholars and a Wall Street executive, made clear their belief that domestic spending should decline so Washington can build a military capable of defeating any potential future foe.

The duo at no point in the two-hour session called for terminating or scaling back -- as many in Washington have in the past -- any of the Pentagon's multibillion-dollar weapon programs. Nor did the trio call for reforms to the Defense Department's cumbersome acquisition process, which is sometimes blamed for allowing the development of new platforms to last for decades and far exceed initial cost projections.

As far as I can tell, at no point did anyone consider the other plausible solution to having an enormously bloated defense budget and social spending, which is a tax rate comparable to other Western democracies. It should be staggering to watch Fred Kagan say, with a straight face, that the wealthiest country in the history of the world can't afford Social Security for its elderly and health care for its impoverished because it needs to maintain 50 percent or greater of the aggregate world defense spending. I'm forced, as I often am, to return to Arnold Wolfers's classic 1952 article "National Security" as an Ambiguous Symbol. Wolfers reminds us of three critical points:

1. National security can only be understood in the context of defense of national values.
2. Absolute national security is unachievable.
3. Efforts directed towards national security invariably involve trade-offs with other values, either in terms of the freedoms we enjoy or in terms of the material well-being that we'd like to achieve.

Something to remember when we're told that we need to slash Social Security in order to defend ourselves not just from "any potential future foe," but from every potential future foe at the same time.

--Robert Farley

LEAST. SURPRISING. REPORT. EVER. Here's some astonishing news: Corporations, it turns out, are relatively less enamored with legislation that advantages workers than workers are.

After soliciting 15,000 comments about the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Labor Department will issue a report today concluding that the public likes the law, but corporate America has big problems with it.

The 14-year-old law gave employees at workplaces with 50 or more workers the right to take up to 12 unpaid weeks a year to cope with their own serious health condition or to care for a newborn, a newly adopted child or a seriously ill spouse, parent or child.

If they had any criticism, many workers said, it was that the law does not allow for longer leaves and that it does not provide paid leave, the way many European countries do.

One parent wrote: “My daughter was mauled by a dog. I had to take two months of leave. Had F.M.L.A. not been in place, I would have lost my job for sure.”

Many businesses complained that the Labor Department’s definition of a serious health condition enabling workers to take leave was unclear and too generous. Many companies also said their operations were hurt when workers with chronic conditions, like asthma or migraine headaches, took frequent leaves.

Wait, what? NAM is saying that? Well I'll be damned.

--Ezra Klein

COULTER v. EDWARDS. Yesterday's confrontation between Elizabeth Edwards and Ann Coulter (which you can watch here) showed once again just what a poisonous figure Coulter is. "I want to use the opportunity," Edwards said, "to ask her politely, stop the personal attacks." To this, Coulter responded, "Okay, the wife of a presidential candidate is calling in asking me to stop speaking." She then repeated this a number of times; when Edwards challenged her on her use of "the language of hate" (of which Coulter is one of America's foremost purveyors), Coulter said sarcastically, "Okay, I'll stop writing books."

What's notable here is the way Coulter sees personal attacks and the language of hate as the sum total of what she does. As she sees it, asking her not to attack people personally is not just tantamount to asking her not to write and speak, it is asking her not to write and speak. This is not the first time she has made this argument; in her book "Godless" she complains about 9/11 widows criticizing the Bush administration's record on terrorism, writing, "These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." When asked about the passage, she said, "They were using their grief in order to make a political point while preventing anyone from responding."

But of course, no one was prevented from responding to the 9/11 widows, or anyone else, if they wanted to do so on the substance of their arguments. If Coulter wanted to argue that the criticism the 9/11 widows were making of the President was mistaken, no one would have raised an eyebrow. It was because she chose to attack them personally that people got angry. But as far as she's concerned, if you can't attack someone personally, you can't engage in debate.

But let me ask a different question. Now that Mitt Romney is showing such strength in the campaign, are any reporters going ask him about whether he regrets his own association with Coulter? Appearing at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference in March, Romney said, "I'm happy to learn also that after you hear me you're going to hear from Ann Coulter. That is a good thing." Beforehand, a camera caught the two backstage yukking it up - Here's the video, if you haven't seen it. One nice moment comes when Coulter says, "The photo of you and me together is going to become famous when you do something I don't like and I viciously attack you," to which Romney responds, "Never will happen, never will happen." It's safe to say that what Romney thinks "never will happen" is not her viciously attacking him, but him doing something she won't like.

Another fun exchange occurs when, after discussing the issue of Romney's Mormonism and its potential as a political liability, Coulter says, "They don't understand, we hate the atheists," to which Romney gives a hearty laugh. "You can't get these sectarian wars going with us. We're all Christians." Romney then chimes in with a smile, "We're not Sunni and Shia here!" Good times.

--Paul Waldman

WE NEED ANOTHER PLAN B. Richard Lugar's Monday night speech on the Senate floor coming out against the surge was far from courageous. Despite winning his most recent election with a margin slightly smaller than one of Saddam Hussein's, he has refrained from public criticism of the president. He didn't vote against the troop escalation.

The hubbub over his remarks, which earned a shout-out from Harry Reid, shows just how successful the surge has been -- in America. It may be feckless in Iraq, but in our country Bush's policy has pushed political discussion so far into the surreal that Dick Lugar gets accolades for echoing policies that a bipartisan commission proposed half a year ago:

Six months ago, the Iraq Study Group endorsed a gradual downsizing of American forces in Iraq and the evolution of their mission to a support role for the Iraqi army. I do not necessarily agree with every recommendation of the Iraq Study Group, and its analysis requires some updating given the passage of time. But the report provides a useful starting point for the development of a "Plan B" and a template for bipartisan cooperation on our Iraq strategy.

Lugar's speech also includes a proposal -- apparently delivered with tongue outside of cheek--for the literal home of a "consistent diplomatic forum related to Iraq" open to all interested parties:

Eventually, part of the massive U.S. embassy under construction in Baghdad might be a suitable location for the forum. It is likely that the embassy compound will exceed the evolving needs of the United States. If this is true, we should carefully consider how best to use this asset, which might be suitable for diplomatic, educational, or governmental activities in Iraq.

Why not? Lugar's idea for this bullseye-cum-"asset" is about as feasible as the rest of Baker-Hamilton. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad: future home of peace in the Middle East.

--Matt Sledge

OYEZ: NOT TRUSTWORTHY? I've discussed before the phenomenon of a textbook repeating the right-wing canard that Bush v. Gore was 7-2. And now I see that Oyez, normally a valuable resource, is printing a lie about the vote in the case:

the per curiam opinion held 7-2 that the Florida Supreme Court's scheme for recounting ballots was unconstitutional.

Anyway, the per curiam opinion had 5 votes, not 7, and it's dismaying that a resource so many students rely on is repeating right-wing spin in the immediate wake of the decision rather than the actual facts of the case. (Interestingly, the much-maligned Wikipedia actually gets it right.)

--Scott Lemieux

THEY'RE WATCHING... It's not paranoia if they're actually out to get you. And in the 60s and 70s, new CIA papers show the agency really was out to get the anti-war movement:

The C.I.A. undertook a domestic surveillance operation code-named Chaos that went on for almost seven years under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Mr. Helms created a Special Operations Group to conduct the spying. A squad of C.I.A. officers grew their hair long, learned the jargon of the New Left, and went off to infiltrate peace groups in the United States and Europe.

The agency compiled a computer index of 300,000 names of American people and organizations, and extensive files on 7,200 citizens. It began working in secret with police departments all over the United States.[...]

One document, entitled “Foreign Support for Activities Planned to Disrupt or Harass the Republican National Convention” in 1972, lists the Beatles singer John Lennon, “a British subject,” as someone who had given money to a protest group.

--Ezra Klein

PICK A THEORY, ANY THEORY. At this thread, some commenters tried to defend Scalia's credentials as a principled originalist who was never political. In response, I mentioned Bush v. Gore, which not only had no conceivable "originalist" justification but failed to conform even to basic standards of the rule of law in order to legitimize the presidency of Scalia's favorite candidate. A commenter then responded with an, ah, innovative defense:

True, the court didn't rely on originalist arguments in Bush v. Gore, but that route was arguably foreclosed to it. Otherwise, you would have it overturn precedent that forbids arbitrary and disparate treatment to a state's voters in its different counties -- a precedent established in 1963. Scalia recognizes the doctrine of stare decisis saying it is a compromise operating on all judicial philosophies, origninalism no less than any others.

The first reason "originalism" doesn't have a strong constraining effect is that even serious historians will disagree about historical evidence, and law office history generally falls well below these standards. Constitutions and statutes involve agreement among sufficiently diverse parties that originalists can often cherry pick evidence from some politically congenial source to resolve ambiguities. (If you want to, implausibly, justify Brown v. Board in originalist terms, for example, you can focus on some Radical Republicans, place less emphasis on other legislators, and ignore the state ratifiers altogether.) If that doesn't work, you can always climb Originalism's Ladder and define broad constitutional principles at whatever level of specificity happens to support your desired outcome. This can justify a wide range of outcomes, but a potentially inconvenient side effect is that once you permit principles to be defined at a sufficiently high level of abstraction William Brennan's jurisprudence can be just as plausibly be called "originalist" as Robert Bork's.

But sometimes -- as with, for example, federal affirmative action statutes, or Bush v. Gore -- even this won't fly. So then you can declare that originalism can be constrained by stare decisis, and, even if you're not hackish enough to claim that Bush v. Gore is supported by compelling precedents, a pretty wide range of additional outcomes can now be justified, and Supreme Court justices have wide discretion about when to apply precedent and when not to. And to borrow a point from Jeffrey Rosen, in Scalia's specific case you can also cite "textualism" and "traditionalism," which gives you even more discretion. The text of the Constitution says nothing about equal protection not applying to gender? No problem; you become a traditionalist, and without paying virtually any attention to the text of the Constitution simply note that the country has a long history of gender discrimination that you decide is therefore self-justifying. But the country also had a long tradition of banning interracial marriage? Look, it's Halley's Comet!

This is not to say that these principles have absolutely no content, especially in the case of Thomas. And as I've said before, even the sporadic commitment of Scalia and Thomas to "originalism" is preferable to Alito, who is similarly reactionary without much of an overaching grand theory. But the idea that "originalists" are engaged in entirely non-political or non-"outcome-oriented" judging is obviously untenable.

--Scott Lemieux

THEY BURN VILLAGES ABROAD, TOO. Ezra's post about the conservative view of how a single-payer program in health care would be like darkness just before the dawn of the free-market utopia is funny. But my first thought on reading about this view is that we are not limited to just imagination when we compare different types of health care systems. There are other countries out there, and they even have health care systems!

A place called Canada (slightly north of here) has had the single-wallet plan going on for some decades. So has an island country in Europe, called the United Kingdom. Other European countries have various mixes of markets and government provision in health care. And Australia (the place with the 'roos) has a fairly market-driven experiment in health care right now.

It is true that none of them are an exact match to the United States in demographics or income. But the people in those countries tend to have fairly similar illnesses and similar needs for treatment. Something could be learned from all those other countries, I think, even by American conservatives.

--J. Goodrich

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Glenn Hurowitz takes note of a vote cast last week by Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton that would have lavished subsidies on the dirty and inefficient process of coal liquefaction; Peter Teague and Jeff Navin argue for a shift in emphasis from regulation to investment in the political fight to address global warming; and Sarah Posner explains why conservative Christians concerned that yesterday's Supreme Court decision in the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case could limit anti-gay speech rights in schools likely have nothing to worry about.

--The Editors

BUSH'S DIARY. This is pretty funny.

I just found out about a secret program monitoring the activities of Americans. Snooping. Invading. Keeping files. It’s called the National Archives, and it allows for the looking over the shoulder of people just like you and me, who have done nothing wrong except to work in the Executive Branch of government. Worse, it tells them what documents they can and cannot destroy to protect their privacy. They want to go through my stuff!

There is no excuse for this invasion of privacy. It’s un-American. They say it’s in the ‘national interest’ but believe me, that is merely the rationale of people taking as much power for themselves as they can get away with.

Am I the only one who still believes in rights to privacy from the government?

Dismayed,
GWB

IRAN SPECIFICS WATCH. Brad Delong writes:

Our best shot is to have the world's great powers bind themselves to oppose any change of regime in Iran other than through peaceful, democratic, internal means, and then to argue that Iran should abandon its nuclear ambitions for the sake of its people. But our best shot is not a very good one.

Elsewhere in the post, DeLong says, "For a small country, the best way to get your capital city off that list [of cities that are nuclear targets], the best way to protect your people, is to not have nuclear weapons in the first place." I find that curious. What set of assumptions would lead to Tel Aviv being less vulnerable without a nuclear weapon, or Tripoli more vulnerable with one? The closest I can come is that an unarmed country would be less likely to suffer a retaliatory second strike because their nation couldn't initiatie the offending first-strike...

--Ezra Klein

IRAN SPECIFICS WATCH. Writing in USA Today, Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweizer lays out a clear program for dealing with Iran: First, establish a naval blockade. "[Iran] imports almost half of the gasoline it needs. These imports arrive by tanker, so a blockade enforced by the U.S. Navy Sixth Fleet would have a devastating and immediate effect on Iran's economy, which is already plagued by high unemployment. It is hard to imagine the hard-line government surviving such an economic catastrophe." Yes, just like it was hard to imagine Saddam Hussein surviving our sanctions. What is hard to imagine is Iran not retaliating by slaughtering our soldiers in Iraq. Butwaitthere'smore!

"Second," Schweizer writes, "the Bush administration should consider counterfeiting Iranian currency to further undermine the economy. This is not a weapon that should be used lightly, but in this case it is simply a tit-for-tat: Iran and its ally, Hezbollah, have been fingered for counterfeiting $100 bills. Counterfeiting Iranian currency would also provide a stern warning to other countries fond of counterfeiting U.S. currency."

This seems crazy in a self-evident way (does anyone really think that the country with the strongest, most recognizable currency has much to gain by popularizing counterfeiting as a tactic of war?), but it's at least specific. These are the things Peter Schweizer believes we should do to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Given that the first is an act of war, it's pretty clear that he's comfortable with this leading to conflict. Who wants to join -- or, better yet, renounce -- him?

--Ezra Klein

NOT JUST ACTS OF COMMISSION. The chief prosecutor in the DoD's Office of Military Commissions took to the New York Times op-ed page today to defend conditions in Guantanamo Bay and the integrity of the military commissions process for detainees there: "Guantánamo Bay is a clean, safe and humane place for enemy combatants," Morris D. David concludes, "and the Military Commissions Act provides a fair process to adjudicate the guilt or innocence of those alleged to have committed crimes."

I think others could do a more thorough job engaging Davis's substantive defense of the commissions, but one point made on our site recently by Jonathan Hafetz is, I think, crucial to keep in mind as we get tangled in arguments about the commissions process and what might possibly be done to improve them: Namely, most detainees are never going to face a military commission at all. As Hafetz wrote,

The president created military commissions two months after September 11 as part of his "new paradigm." The administration claimed that the commissions provided the necessary speed and flexibility to bring suspected terrorists to justice. These were attributes, the administration argued, that criminal trials in civilian courts lacked. The expectation was that most detainees taken to Guantanamo would be quickly charged and convicted.

But within months, the administration realized that it did not have the evidence to charge, let alone convict, most Guantanamo detainees of anything. As Lt. Col. Thomas S. Berg, a member of the original military prosecution team, told the press, "It became obvious to us as we reviewed the evidence that, in many cases, we had simply gotten the slowest guys on the battlefield. We literally found guys who had been shot in the butt."

So, the administration changed gears, turning Guantanamo into a permanent system of indefinite detention. In more than five years, only ten of the seven hundred individuals detained at Guantanamo have even been charged before military commissions, and no trial has taken place ...

Since the MCA's passage in October, only three detainees have been put before military commissions. The first, David Hicks, pled guilty in March, in a nakedly political deal widely denounced as a travesty. Hicks -- once described as a dangerous terrorist -- was returned to Australia, where he will serve an additional nine months before being freed. Trials for the other two detainees, Omar Khadr and Salim Hamdan, were halted by last week's rulings.

The open-ended and undefined nature of the "war on terror" also has significant practical implications for Guantanamo. It means that the administration has no incentive to try people, since its evidence -- in many cases weak or non-existent -- would be exposed to greater scrutiny. Instead, it can simply hold people forever by branding them "enemy combatants" through a sham CSRT process that relies on secret evidence, denies detainees lawyers, and relies on information gained through torture.

--Sam Rosenfeld

BURN THE NEXT TWO VILLAGES TO SAVE IT I did a Cato health panel the other day wherein a woman said that we'd need to let the current system collapse, then try single-payer and let that fail, and only then would we get to the market-driven utopia we needed. I call it "the burn the village and then burn the next village to save it" theory of health reform, and it seems like something we should try to convince all conservatives of stat. As Kevin Drum notes, it appears Arnold Kling already believes the same thing, and since we liberals actually think our ideas will work, convincing the right that Medicare-for-All is a necessary step on the path to HSAs-for-All would be a good thing indeed. Maybe we should run commercials?

--Ezra Klein

WHY I'M NOT WRITING ON THE IMMIGRATION BILL. The folks at The Corner seem pretty sure the immigration bill is going to pass cloture, largely through the pay-to-play (vote for cloture in order to offer your amendment) deal that Reid worked out. My strategy, however, is to ignore the bill. We need to see how these amendments play out, judge what the final product looks like, and then see how the final vote goes. Now that I've actually done some of it, I'm less and less enamored of pre-vote, predictive reportage. Soon enough, we'll know what the bill looks like, and that'll be the time to discuss its worth.

For now, it's useful to note that the bill is actually very unpopular, even as Americans continue to express support for the actual policies it contains. This happens every so often with major legislation -- both the Clinton health plan and Social Security privatization exhibited this disconnect -- wherein the people turn on the bill without actually disagreeing with its mechanisms or aims.

--Ezra Klein

LIBYA? We approached Libya about hosting AFRICOM?

Algeria and Libya separately ruled out hosting the Defense Department's planned Africa Command, known as AFRICOM, and said they were firmly against any of their neighbors doing so either. U.S. diplomats said they were disappointed by the depth of opposition, given that the Bush administration has bolstered ties with both countries on security matters in recent years.

I'm also kind of surprised that anyone is surprised that he'd turn us down.

--Robert Farley

WHO'S WINNING IN ANBAR? One can rarely peruse a right wing blog these days without reading about how "we're winning" in Anbar. The talking point stems from the decision, in September of last year, of a number of tribal elites in Anbar to focus on operations against Al Qaeda, instead of against the United States military. As Jim Henley notes, crafting an alliance with tribal elites is hardly without risk, and does not constitute "victory" in any meaningful sense for the United States. The U.S. is currently enrolling in Iraqi police and military units tribesmen who were, ten months ago, part of the insurgency. The loyalty of such individuals can hardly be taken for granted; the tribal elite may decide, six months from now, that they are no longer pleased with the U.S. and shift against us.

Even if the tribal elites remain loyal, the alliance poses a larger problem for basic U.S. war aims. The alliance with these tribes serves, necessarily, to strengthen them as political units. Strengthening the tribes invariably weakens the central government. As the tribes are also among the least progressive and least interested in democracy of any Iraqi political constituencies, strengthening them also helps undercut efforts towards democratization. So, to the extent that the U.S. goal remains the creation of a strong, democratic central government, the deal with the Sunni tribal leaders is almost completely at odds with the end that we'd like to see.

Of course, we've pretty much given up the idea that Iraq will have either a strong or a democratic central government. Having accepted defeat in the main aim of the war, collaboration with Sunni tribal elites is probably the next best option. The victory isn't ours, though; it's theirs. Al Qaeda wasn't in Anbar before the war, and it may be gone from Anbar someday, but the Sunni tribal leaders have maintained and perhaps even increased their autonomy. They've also made themselves targets, but that comes with the territory. Rather than create a shining example for the Middle East, U.S. policy is now directed towards enabling the most conservative elements of Iraqi society. The truly sad thing is that this does, compared with the execution of the first three years of the war, represent something of a victory.

--Robert Farley

SADDAM HUSSEIN AND 9/11. A Newsweek poll suggests that 41 percent of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein's government had a direct role in planning, financing or carrying out the massacres of 9/11. Surprisingly, this number has even inched up 5 percent in the last two years.

I want to pull out all my hair out of sheer frustration. It's one thing for the administration to try to connect two disparate events (the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq occupation) for propaganda purposes. It's quite another thing to realize that a sizeable portion of the American public is either not getting the correct information from their usual news sources or does not believe those news sources.

--J. Goodrich

FREE SPEECH AND SELECTIVE ORIGINALISM. The Supreme Court today issued a relatively narrow holding upholding a principal's suspension of a student for holding a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus." Clarence Thomas, meanwhile (and, interestingly, without a join from Scalia) wrote a concurrence arguing that the landmark student free speech case Tinker v. Des Moines should be overturned and schools be given the essentially unlimited power to censor student speech on (plausible, it must be said) originalist grounds.

Oddly, however, in joining Scalia's concurrence in another case today arguing that virtually all campaign finance laws are unconstitutional, neither of the Court's two "originalists" managed as far as I can tell to muster a shred of evidence that the First Amendment was understood in 1791 as creating an absolute prohibition on the regulation of campaign spending and donation. Nor did Thomas's dissent in McConnell contain a historical analysis of the original understanding of the First Amendment, although it does cite any number of libertarian 20th century precedents that would seem erroneous under a strictly originalist standard. Hmm, and the ability of wealthy people and corporations to give and spend money for political purposes is enormously important to the modern Republican Party, while protecting the free speech of students who if you squint really hard can be vaguely construed as encouraging drug use is not. What an amazing coinky-dink!

--Scott Lemieux

THOMPSON'S SPIRIT JOURNEY. Can we all agree that Fred Thompson's decision to blow off a bunch of major domestic political events to travel to Englad and kiss Margaret Thatcher's hand is pretty bizarre and, in fact, a bit ghoulish? The small government movement appears increasingly, if quietly, cognizant of the utter failure of their ideology, and is resorting to ancestor worship instead.

--Ezra Klein

STANDING FOR ME... The Court's 5-4 decision today in Hein v. FFRF makes it much more difficult to challenge programs -- in this case, the Bush administration's decision, through executive order, to funnel taxpayer money to religious organizations -- that raise serious Establishment Clause questions. I'm not at all persuaded by the Court's holding; in the words of William Douglas, I think the Court's opinion "reflects the British, not the American, tradition of constitutionalism. We have a written Constitution; and it is full of 'thou shalt nots' directed at Congress and the President as well as at the courts." Particularly given the modern Court's control over its docket, the constitutional merits of the issue should be what matters, and there's little reason for the Court to create standing rules that make it more difficult to challenge serious Constitutional violations. A couple other points:

• We can see in this case the difference between the otherwise similarly reactionary Alito and Scalia. The latter urges the Court to be honest about what it's doing: overruling Flast v. Cohen. Alito, conversely, prefers simply ignoring the precedent "minimalism." I can understand not going out of the way to overrule a precedent, as Scalia and Thomas will sometimes urge. But in this case Alito has adduced a distinction without a substantial difference. As Souter argues, "the controlling, plurality opinion declares that Flast does not apply, but a search of that opinion for a suggestion that these taxpayers have any less stake in the outcome than the taxpayers in Flast will come up empty: the plurality makes no such finding, nor could it." Essentially, the effect of Alito's approach is to produce the same outcomes while attracting less attention.
• The Court's conservatives, needless to say, are not always on the side of reducing standing; as Jack Balkin has pointed out, "the most unprincipled and arbitrary parts of American constitutional law." Compare this case with Northeastern Florida, in which Thomas wrote an opinion holding that a challenge to an affirmative action program could go forward even absent any evidence that the individuals challenging the program were denied a contract because of it. In fairness, Scalia and Thomas have created a clear, identifiable principle: standing rules should be liberal when they are likely to produce conservative outcomes and narrow when they are likely to produce liberal outcomes. Whether this is a defensible principle I leave to the reader.

--Scott Lemieux

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Marj Halperin writes about a monthly satirical newspaper called The New Orleans Levee.

Publisher Rudy Vorkapic says his goal is to give voice to residents' frustrations, "redirecting the inane back at those who spew it," as he wrote in a recent edition. Vorkapic fashions the paper as an unapologetic, broadside attack on area politicos. It's a local-news version of The Onion, but unlike that paper's mock news, The Levee tries to base most of its satire in fact, giving flood-weary locals more than the occasional laugh.

Read the whole thing here.

Also today, Anthony Kaufman sits down with Afghan politician and women's rights activist Malalai Joya She's the subject of the new documentary, Enemies of Happiness.

"Even with these risks that I face -- for example, I'm going outside wearing a burqa, I must have bodyguards, I'm changing houses, I can't live with my family -- but just because of that, I want to go back to this warlord-ism, druglord-ism Parliament to tear their masks off in front of them in their own house, because nobody dares to."

Read more from Joya here.

--The Editors

"THE ANGLER." There's almost too much in yesterday's portion of the Washington Post's four-part series on Dick Cheney to comment on. But it's striking how much of the post-9/11 intelligence operations appear to be entirely under his purview.

On Oct. 25, 2001, the chairmen and ranking minority members of the intelligence committees were summoned to the White House for their first briefing on the eavesdropping and were told that it was one of the government's most closely compartmented secrets. Under Presidents George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton, officials said, a conversation of that gravity would involve the commander in chief. But when the four lawmakers arrived in the West Wing lobby, an aide led them through the door on the right, away from the Oval Office.

"We met in the vice president's office," recalled former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.). Bush had told Graham already, when the senator assumed the intelligence panel chairmanship, that "the vice president should be your point of contact in the White House." Cheney, the president said, "has the portfolio for intelligence activities."

On Nov. 14, 2001, the day after Bush signed the commissions order, Cheney took the next big step. He told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that terrorists do not "deserve to be treated as prisoners of war."

The president had not yet made that decision. Ten weeks passed, and the Bush administration fought one of its fiercest internal brawls, before Bush ratified the policy that Cheney had declared: The Geneva Conventions would not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters captured on the battlefield.

This is Cheney's world, it seems. We just live in it.

--Ezra Klein

JUDICIAL ACTIVISM. The Roberts Court handed down a set of pro-big business, anti-free speech, anti-environment decisions today. The court ruled taxpayers can't challenge the federal government's funding of faith-based organizations. Businesses don't have to worry much about the Endangered Species Act. Schools can punish students for speech with a perceived "pro-drug" message. And interest groups can run TV and radio ads endorsing a candidate, right up until the election.

As Brad points out, four of the five majority opinions were penned by Alito or Roberts, with the four liberal-leaning justices dissenting. Might be a good time to re-read Simon Lazarus's piece on how disastrous the Robert court is -- and will continue to be.

--Ann Friedman

RE: HEY BABY. Ann's post on street harassment is important. My post on Ann's post on street harassment is frivolous. But this is too good not to point out:

"It depends on what she looks like," adds Daniel Smallwood, a 16-year-old in a red polo shirt and a visor turned backward. "If she's a slut, you have to treat her like a slut. If she's not, I say, 'How you doing young lady?' Everybody says 'baby' or 'shorty.' I say 'young lady.'"

All joking aside, isn't there something comforting in the fact that a douche like this guy got cursed with the name "Danny Smallwood?"

--Ezra Klein

WHY "HEY BABY!" IS A BIG DEAL. D.C.'s alt-weekly, the City Paper has a package of stories this week on street harassment. One, a catcall diary a woman kept for a year. Two, a very poorly-written essay by that same woman about how now she's a racist because of all the harassment she gets from Latino men. And three, a piece by some dude who was apparently totally unaware that your average woman experiences street harassment on a daily basis. It also has a companion video, in which exactly two people (a male harasser and a female harass-ee) are interviewed. Taken as a package, it's a real trainwreck. [Warning, massive post to follow.]

What I found most remarkable about the catcall diary is that she is careful to record what she's wearing when she's harassed on the street. While it's true that short skirts can sometimes bring a different type of harassment, I find that I get unwelcome attention even if I'm wearing dirty jeans and a bulky winter coat. But I suppose it's nice for those who don't regularly experience street harassment (i.e. men) to read and take note that a short skirt and low-cut top do not necessarily correlate with catcalls. (In fact, it seemed like the subtext of the diary was: Hey guys, this is what it's like to walk outside as a woman.) The male writer seems shocked by this. In his piece, he writes,

I am leaving the Chinatown Metro station when I see a blond woman standing well over 6 feet in platform heels. Her tight black dress hangs inches below her ass and drops deep in the front, exposing a good portion of breasts that are surprisingly large for her rail-thin body. Catcall bait for sure. I step in behind her as she walks.

Isn't his tone disgusting? It's as if he wants to find a slobbering harasser to channel what he wishes he could shout at this woman. And he's then astonished when no one -- not homeless men, not construction workers, not guys in power suits, not young men at the bus stop -- calls out to her.

The male-perspective piece actually begins like this,

It's early evening in Adams Morgan, and I'm tracking a nice ass in a pair of bluejeans as it glides down the Columbia Road sidewalk. I'm matching its pace, keeping my distance, 15 steps or so behind, so I can watch, so no one notices I'm watching.

Ew. Set aside for a moment Intrepid Reporter Joe Eaton's totally disgusting, sexist language. Turns out that nice, disembodied ass actually belongs to the woman who penned the other two pieces, Kimberly Klinger. He's following her to observe just how much shit women take for daring to walk down the street alone. And then he has some man-to-man chats with catcallers. The patronizing attitude of the guys he interviews is quite telling. A sampling:

"It depends on what she looks like," adds Daniel Smallwood, a 16-year-old in a red polo shirt and a visor turned backward. "If she's a slut, you have to treat her like a slut. If she's not, I say, ‘How you doing young lady?' Everybody says ‘baby' or ‘shorty.' I say ‘young lady.'"

And:

"Yeah, I always do it," says [Rudy] Contreras [a proud street harasser]. He is happy to explain the process. "What I do is I ask how is their day. I ask to help with their bags. I give a nice compliment to her. I say, ‘You are beautiful. Can I get to know you?'" [...]

I ask him about Klinger, the fastball he just whiffed. He's excited to talk about that, too. "It's tough in D.C.," he says. "Especially with white girls. They are stuck up, man. Bitches."

Contreras thinks it is bad form for women like Klinger to walk by without acknowledging a compliment, to just ignore you like you aren't even there. It pisses him off. "At least wink at me or wave back," he says. "Giggle or something. Don't walk past like you didn't hear me." He says it's different in Texas. He says white women there are crazy about Hispanic guys and yes, they do respond to catcalls.

(Back to the race thing in a second.) Intrepid Reporter Joe's next question is not, "Have you considered that most women, regardless of their race, do not enjoy being hit on as they walk from point A to point B?" Instead, he asks, rhetorically,

So why the hell do you take Columbia Road home and why live in Mount Pleasant, anyway, if you can't tolerate a few catcalls?

Maybe because it's the fastest route to my apartment, you asshole!? Intrepid Reporter Joe is not quite at the point yet where his reptilian brain can handle the idea that maybe it's men's responsibility to keep their traps shut; that they don't have a right to yell at every passing woman about her body.

Then he writes, "Klinger knows the argument about how catcalling is part of Hispanic culture and how she shouldn't impose her values on others." I'm sorry, but men of all cultures harass women. And women of all colors are on the receiving end of harassment. In her essay, Klinger writes,

White men don't do this to me with the same frequency, so when I pass a group of them on the street, I don't clench my jaw, tense up, and walk faster. But when I pass Latino men, I assume the worst. Black men, too, sometimes, since after Latino men, they harass me the most. Hell, if you're at all brown, I'm gonna get worried. So I have this conflict every damn day.

Wow. So is this just honest, or totally racist, or both? I can say that, while I've most definitely been harassed by men of all ages and races, I feel like I receive more harassment from men of color on the street, and more harassment from white men in bars. Is it racist of me to speak to my experience, that street harassment directed toward me is more likely to come from men of color? I don't think it is. (But I do think there's a discussion to be had here.) But I do think it's racist to make general statements that Latino and black men are harassers and white men are not. I like the statement from this site:

Different people may find themselves harassed more by different people, depending on where they live and specifics of their community. Sometimes some groups of people are outside and in the streets more often then other groups. Think before generalizing.

The folks at Hollaback are sensitive to the race issue, and have an antiracism statement on their site. The one time I submitted a cellphone photo of some guys who had harassed me on the street, they informed me that there might be a wait to see my incident appear on their blog, as they make a conscious effort to publish photos of street harassers of all races. And they explicitly ask that submissions not mention race unless it is somehow relevant to the incident of harassment.

A D.C. street harassment blogger writes,

I came home Saturday feeling hurt, frustrated and just plain angry at the mess I deal with on the streets. I went to the neighborhood I used to live in, Petworth, to check out Domku and Flip It (the former is a sleek restaurant and the latter a sweet bakery...check them out). I had my path blocked by these men, was followed, had men stopping in the middle of the road trying to talk to me, beeping their horns so loudly that I jumped, had men coming too daggone close on the sidewalk, and calling me names such as "shorty," "baby," and other stupid nonsense. The thing that bothers me the most about Saturday's ordeal with the men on the streets is that all of my harassers were black. It upsets me, makes no sense, and had me getting on the Internet to try to find answers. Why do so many Black men do this mess to me, a Black female, on the streets?

Klinger's piece doesn't even begin to do this issue justice. The intersection of race and harassment is a big and complicated issue -- not exactly manageable subject matter for just three paragraphs in a flip essay. Which is also why I'm not a huge fan of (recent addition to the Gawker empire) Jezebel's take on these three City Paper pieces:

Which is to say, it's what, at most five seconds of discomfort for a lifetime of funny stories? We have fucked dudes to achieve the same result!

Ok, I'll bite and play humorless feminist on this one. I, for one, don't particularly like it when a strange man on the street grabs my elbow and says, "There's a nice pussy." (True story. Shudder.) While I do sort of keep a mental catalog of, shall we say, most original cat-calls I've received ("I'd climb that tree!"), their cumulative effect is much greater than five seconds of discomfort a day. It's a reality of life that affects how I dress, where I walk, how safe I feel. Which is to say it's usually not very hilarious.

--Ann Friedman

RE: THE TIMES AND EDWARDS. To say a bit more on the New York Times' John Edwards story, shouldn't the question of ends enter in here? The piece uses a lot of ominous adjectives and innuendo to note that though Edwards' Poverty Center was a "a nonprofit organization with the stated mission of fighting poverty," the center raised funds that "paid Mr. Edwards's expenses while he walked picket lines and met with Wall Street executives. He gave speeches, hired consultants, attacked the Bush administration and developed an online following. He led minimum-wage initiatives in five states, went frequently to Iowa, and appeared on television programs. He traveled to China, India, Brussels, Uganda and Russia, and met with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and his likely successor, Gordon Brown, at 10 Downing Street."

Well, Brown and Blair have spearheaded the UK's remarkable efforts against child poverty, which Edwards has mentioned in speeches. So that hardly seems problematic. Indeed, this all seems like an extremely successful venture. Edwards raised some money to fight poverty. He used a certain amount of that money to finance his own pre-presidential campaigning, which was entirely focused on poverty reduction. During that campaigning, he spent an enormous amount of time...talking about poverty, and restoring its place in the national political discussion. Given that the sum of money we're talking about is $1.3 million, how has this not been an extraordinarily effective anti-poverty center? Granted, among its methods were to enable a national politician to continually raise the issue's profile through his personal advocacy, but isn't that what folks donating to a John Edwards poverty center were expecting? And hasn't Edwards -- who still brings up poverty in his speeches, just released a book on the subject, and whose efforts spurred Matt Bai to write a New York Times Magazine cover story on the reemergence of the issue in the national political discourse -- proven very, very effective? If you care about poverty, this seems like $1.3 million well spent.

--Ezra Klein

PLAN B FOR ISRAEL-PALESTINE. We have a new piece just up on the site, by Daniel Levy, concerning a new way forward to address the current crisis in the West Bank and Gaza:

The dust is beginning to settle on a new Palestinian reality. Official statements from Washington, Israel, and the new Palestinian government in Ramallah suggest a policy consensus: betting everything on the Mahmoud Abbas/Fatah option against Hamas, with goodies for the West Bank, while Gaza is kept on a strict diet. This is the proposed shortcut to a two-state solution. It may sound new, but it's really the old Plan A on steroids -- non-engagement with Hamas combined with the expectation of Abbas and Fatah delivering everything under these circumstances. Martin Indyk came out with a much smarter and more nuanced approach to "West Bank first," but it is the blunt and bludgeoning version that is likely to be adopted by the respective leaderships. I doubt whether even the sophisticated version can work. I have presented a lengthy critique of this approach elsewhere, as have others, notably Rob Malley and Aaron Miller in The Washington Post, and Jonathan Freedland in the Gaurdian. But here I want to begin to sketch out an alternative, Plan B, consisting of three phases: stabilize; build consensus; and re-launch a better grounded peace process ...

One guiding experience should be Israel's unilateral disengagement from the Gaza strip in August 2005. It was the right thing to do to get out of Gaza, but the framing -- unilateralism -- was all wrong, and the outcome did little to further the real goal of an end to occupation and a two-state arrangement providing security to both peoples. The way the next moves are framed and calibrated will be crucial. Realizing a sustainable two-state solution should be the driving vision, and not, as some have framed this, scoring points in a supposed clash of civilizations. The door must be left open to bringing Hamas into the process. The current approach strengthens hardliners within Hamas as well as salafist forces more radical than Hamas.

Perhaps this framing is considered to be such a non-starter that alternative policy options derived from it are not being articulated. They need to be. Here is a first draft for a Plan B:

--The Editors

THE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO IMPERIALIST ETIQUETTE. Friday pop quiz:

American success or failure in Iraq may well depend on whether the Iraqis (as the people are called) like American soldiers or not.

The preceding statement was excerpted from:

A) The Iraq Study Group Report (2006)
B) Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam's Iraq (1990)
C) A Short Guide To Iraq (1943)

If you guessed the correct answer (C), you're either spending too much time trolling Ebay or lurking around the National Archives on your lunch break. For those who haven't yet discovered the War and Navy Departments' World War II-era handbook (available in pdf format here), it reads like an Idiot's Guide to Imperialist Etiquette (forthcoming from the State Department this fall).

The handbook was originally distributed to American soldiers stationed in Iraq at a time when Hitler was still eying the region as a potential "land bridge" to Asia. It clarifies, among other things, the correct pronunciation of the country (i-RAHK) and offers cautionary anecdotes illustrating the graphic consequences of the country's "blazing heat," exposure to which will almost certainly result in an outbreak of "black blisters and possible fever."

As far as strategy goes, the U.S. military in 1943 was more conscious of the Iraqi population's capacity to wage unconventional, insurgency-style warfare than it was in 2003, when the Defense Department under the leadership of Donald Rumsfeld demonstrated its utter inability to gauge the intensity and duration of resistance to the American occupation. Sixty-four years ago, the prescient Guide to Iraq described the typical Iraqi civilian as "a first-class fighting man, highly skilled in guerilla warfare. Few fighters in any country, in fact, excel him in that kind of situation." It's too bad the handbook hasn't seen a printer (much less a policy-maker) in 64 years.

--Mara Revkin

LEDBETTER LEGISLATION. George Miller has introduced legislation today that would essentially overturn the Court's decision in Lilly Ledbetter's case. It spells out that discriminatory acts occur by extension "each time wages, benefits, or other compensation is paid." The legislation has more than a dozen bipartisan co-sponsors, and is expected to be introduced into the Senate next week. Additionally, it spells out that this act would extend to the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Age Discrimination Act of 1967.

--Kay Steiger

EZRALARK LEMON. For those who haven't seen it, you can watch Ezra delivering a first-class ass-whupping to Larry Kudlow and some anti-Michael Moore dude on TVEyes. But watching it, I couldn't help but question my own reaction. It seemed apparent that you have here a debate between 1) A blowhard wedded to his religious views about free markets, blissfully unmoored from evidence or consideration of counter-arguments; 2) An amateur plainly out of his depth, who knows virtually nothing about the topic being discussed; and 3) An appealing young man who -- and get a load of this -- actually knows what he's talking about. Every time Kudlow made an argument, Ezra told him why he was wrong in devastating fashion, marshaling facts and evidence that made clear why Kudlow was utterly deluded. He also displayed an admirable understanding of the medium in which he was operating, using concise summaries of his arguments and some clever debating tactics, as when he questioned the host (they never expect this) to trap him with his own stupidity. I could barely have been more impressed.

But that's me. Not only was I favorably disposed to Ezra's argument, I also know him to be a fine young man in every way. But what if I were someone who thinks the American health care system is exemplary and in need of no reform, and that the kind of pinko who writes for a magazine like The American Prospect couldn't possibly be right? How would I have reacted to this same program? Would I still think Ezra ran circles around them like the Globetrotters toying with the Washington Generals? I know there are some conservatives who read TAPPED, so please relate your reaction in the comments.

-- Paul Waldman

EDWARDS AND THE NYT. A rather provocative article in The New York Times today makes John Edwards seem fairly shady. Because Edwards did not have the benefits of, say, a senate seat to maintain his name recognition, NYTstaff writer Leslie Wayne declares:

Mr. Edwards, who reported this year that he had assets of nearly $30 million, came up with a novel solution, creating a nonprofit organization with the stated mission of fighting poverty. The organization, the Center for Promise and Opportunity, raised $1.3 million in 2005, and -- unlike a sister charity he created to raise scholarship money for poor students -- the main beneficiary of the center's fund-raising was Mr. Edwards himself, tax filings show.

The National Review crowd loves it, of course. But according to Greg Sargent, the article might be a little unfair. He writes that TPM "just learned something new and surprising about the story. The Edwards campaign has just told us on the record that The Times refused the chance to talk to any real, live beneficiaries of Edwards' programs. If this is so, this strikes us as highly suspect."

The NYT obviously deserves a chance to respond, but this makes me initially uneasy since it so comfortably fits into the common media narrative that because Edwards is rich, so he can't possibly really care about poverty. Considering he's the only major politician really talking about that issue, this is extremely troubling and makes me suspicious of articles like the one linked to above.

--Steven White

TAP DEBATE! The other day, Paul Waldman argued that "lots of southerners seem to be reluctant to vote for people who don't share their drawl. Of course, this is never characterized as pathological regional xenophobia -- it's just how regular folks think, and there's not supposed to be anything wrong with it." In response, a reader writes in:

Ezra, while I know you didn't write the bit on Tapped about southerners voting for southerners, I still have to take issue with the the theory and I was wondering if you could comment on it. If you look at the last Presidential elections since Kennedy (who won the South btw) you see seven elections in which a southerner faced a northerner. Of those seven races there are only four in which the South voted for a southerner over a non southerner.

Johnson over Goldwater
Carter over Ford
H.W. Bush over Dukakis
W. Bush over Kerry

BUT there are 3 elections in which Southerners voted for non southern canidates over southern canidates.

Nixon over Wallace (although he was a third party canidate he was the only southerner in the race)
Reagan over Carter
Dole over Clinton

I'd wager that this 4 to 3 split is no larger then for any other region in the country. Also, I think its a big stretch to call H.W. Bush- someone who was born in Massachusetts, and only lived his Adult life in Texas- a Southerner. If you take him out its a tie. This "southerners only vote for southerners" stuff is a myth.

--Ezra Klein

FRIDAY SEERSUCKING. Via The Capitolist, this is certainly the jollyist context in which I've ever seen Ted Stevens, though he looks pretty pissed even here.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE DESPISED CONGRESS. A recent Gallup poll tells us that the approval rate for Congress is at its all-time low of 14 percent. The Congress gets low approval rates in general, but this figure is indeed a record.

I girded my blogger loins and went out (in a cybersense) on two missions: To find out what various bloggers thought about this and to find out what the low approval rate means. Initially I thought that just one excursion would answer both questions. But I was wrong. It was easy to find the blogger opinions on these Gallup findings. To find what was behind the findings required an excavation at the Gallup website.

The short answer to the question about blogger opinions on the Gallup findings is that the conservative bloggers think this shows how horribly Democrats perform when in power. They see hope for a big change in 2008. Many of them linked to this post by Roger Simon:

I never thought I'd say this, but the US Congress led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid makes me yearn for the days of Dennis Hastert. And I gather the vast majority of my fellow citizens feel the same way since Congress' approval rating is at an all-time low of 14%! [You could get 14% approval for Attila.-ed. He gets 30%.]

This should give a little pause to those Democratic Party triumphalists who think their crowd is going to waltz into the White House in '08. But that's the least of it. The more important question is why our government is run by such dimwitted mediocrities on both sides of the aisle. I have written before that Silvestre Reyes is the poster child of our Congress - a man who, as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee [sic], couldn't tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite. And he's still in office! Think about that, those of you who run businesses large and small. As CEO of Pajamas Media, if one of our editors were that uniformed at this point in history I would have no choice but to show him or her the door (not that any of our editors are even remotely that ignorant).

The Gallup poll that all those conservative blogs discuss is fully analyzed on the Gallup website. It doesn't seem to ask questions which would help me in understanding why the approval rate has fallen in the recent past, for fallen it has, from 19% in June 2006 to 14% in June 2007. Still, what the analysis shows is that almost all other institutions have a similar drop in their approval ratings. Even the military saw a four percent point drop in its approval during that same time period. This suggests that the falling approval rates of American institutions are linked in some sense, and that the individuals surveyed have a sour view on almost everything, not just the Congress.

Two other articles on the Gallup site cast further light on the issue. One addresses a very similar recent poll on opinions and finds this:

Before the Democratic takeover earlier this year, congressional job approval ratings were much higher among Republicans than among independents or Democrats. After the Democrats assumed power, rank-and-file Democrats became more likely than independents or Republicans to approve of Congress. Democrats' ratings have gradually declined in the past few months, falling from 43% in April to 37% in May and to 29% this month. At the same time, Republicans' ratings have held fairly stable, in the mid-20% range. Independents' ratings have also declined over this period of time.

The major increase in public dissatisfaction with the country from January 2000 to today may have been initially linked to concerns about the economy, but since 2005 it appears that Iraq has taken over as the primary driver of discontent. Other issues may still matter, however. Mentions of Iraq have been fairly flat in 2007, while mentions of immigration and fuel prices have edged upward, possibly explaining why ratings of Congress, Bush, and public satisfaction with the country have declined further since April.

-- J. Goodrich

GIULIANI MYTHOLOGY: Dana's piece today on the second-tier Democrats policy proposals is very informative. In particular I think the section on drug and crime policy reform highlights a serious injustice that should be on the agenda of mainstream Democrats and, lamentably, is not. But I do have a nit to pick with this little bit of analysis:

Although large majorities of Americans would like to legalize marijuana for medical purposes, being 'tough on crime' and 'tough on drugs' are perennially winning stances in American elections. Just look at Rudy Giuliani.

As the resident Giuliani myth-debunker I think it's worth pointing out that he lost his first race for mayor, barely won his second, and dropped out of his Senate race because he was trailing carpet-bagger Hillary Clinton in the polls.

Nonetheless, I would readily concede that being tough on crime has been a winning stance for many candidates, and that Republican Giuliani owes his victory in heavily Democratic New York City to his focus on that issue. But that was in 1993, when crime was much higher than it is today. It was also before Bill Clinton largely neutralized the Republican advantage on crime by taking a tough-on-crime approach himself as president (and congressional Democrats called Republicans' bluff by pushing for stricter gun control.)

So the political scene today is quite different: crime is down, Democrats aren't perceived as weak on the issue, the prison population has swollen enormously, the crack epidemic is over, and acceptance of substance abuse as an illness rather than criminal act has become more widespread, (just look at Rush Limbaugh). If Democrats don't have the courage to come out with proposals to switch from prison to treatment for non-violent drug offenders now I fear they never will.

--Ben Adler

MOORE AND HMOS. Brian Beutler is right that Michael Moore's heaping of praise atop Hillarycare sort of -- oh, what's the word? -- shatters the argument that Moore is for undiluted single-payer. The Clinton plan was essentially a series of federally regulated and guaranteed HMOs, all of them privately administered. There was no new federal insurer at all. And yet Moore makes the plan's failure out to be a disaster, which, in fact, it was. The idea that Moore is some sort of single-payer absolutist is a bit off.

This segment, by the way, wasn't particularly untruthful, but it was substantively off-base. Not to get too deep into the weeds of it here, but HillaryCare was an HMO scheme. Moore spends the next segment talking about how terrible HMOs are, as they denied occasionally necessary treatments to their members. HillaryCare would've done the same, in much the same way. It was, remember, going to be run by the same insurers, exercising considerable autonomy, operating under HMO rules. It would've been much better, if for no other reason than it would've ended the plight of the uninsured, but there still would've been problems. Not only that, but there will be those problems in a straight single-payer system, too.

No matter how you slice it, this country can't afford utterly unlimited care. But when you start to make decisions about who gets what, people get angry, and mistakes are made. For that reason, we've found it easier to hide those decisions under the rubric of who can pay for what, which is a medically dumb method of rationing, but at least allows us to only screw those who lack the money to complain.

--Ezra Klein

SUDDENLY THE ABSTINENCE-ONLY MOVEMENT CARES ABOUT FACTS? Sometimes I give anti-choicers too much credit. This week, when articles started cropping up on pro-fetus websites about how a government study showed comprehensive sex ed programs disseminate false information, I was actually kind of concerned. After all, the whole "false information about condoms" thing is the abstinence-only folks' area of expertise -- not ours.

So I wasn't exactly surprised when the Washington Post reported yesterday that the research was conducted by two right-wing organizations -- the Sagamore Institute (which has close ties to Bush's faith-based initiatives office and the Hudson Institute) and the Medical Institute for Sexual Health (remember them? they "train" med students to promote abstinence-only). It's shocking, I know, that Republicans would ask pro-abstinence-only groups to evaluate the comprehensive sex-ed programs they oppose.

The analysis -- requested two years ago by Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.) and former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.), both conservative Republicans -- concluded that nine widely used curricula contained misleading statements about condom failure, focused too little on abstinence and were only marginally successful in persuading young people to use condoms or, better yet, to delay having sex.

Coburn and Santorum? No shocker there.

Let's say up front that, for all the anti-sex crowd's crowing over the findings, eight of the nine programs evaluated contained NO misinformation about condoms. So already we've got a better track record than the abstinence-only crowd. Doesn't mean the evaluated curricula were perfect, though. WaPo summarizes:

The HHS report said that eight of the curricula contained no inaccuracies about statistics related to condom effectiveness, but that the numbers sometimes lacked context. For example, programs that say latex condoms prevent pregnancy 97 percent of the time when used correctly (the figure actually is 98 percent, experts said) should also note that studies show that the probability of pregnancy during the first year of "typical" use is 15 percent. Not everyone uses condoms properly every time.

I think that most proponents of comprehensive sex ed would be very much in favor of correcting factual errors if these programs are going to be continued in schools. But wait, are these programs actually used in schools? Not necessarily. In the report's methodology section, it states that it chose the nine programs to evaluate not based on actual use, but on pro-comprehensive-sex-ed groups' recommendation of these curricula. Because federal funding for sex education can only be awarded to abstinence-only programs, it's safe to assume that these curricula are not supported by federal taxpayers. It's also worth noting that the HHS-contracted researchers acknowledge that many of these programs don't even claim to be "abstinence-plus" or "comprehensive". In other words, some are programs may in fact be primarily about protection and contraception, but they don't claim to be anything different.

As for programs that do advertise themselves as "comprehensive sex ed" or "abstinence-plus," the research also claims that they barely mention abstinence. How do they arrive at this conclusion? By searching for certain terms, of course. (This is a classic way to skew research to produce the desired result.) Reports the Washington Post,

One curriculum, Safer Choices Level 1, mentioned condoms 383 times and abstinence only five, the report said. But Douglas Kirby, a senior research scientist at ETR Associates, the California-based nonprofit organization that developed the curriculum, said the materials make the same point with different language, using phrases such as "choosing not to have sex" or "saying no to sex."

"It's all about abstinence; it's just different words," Kirby said. "There's twice as much material in this curriculum on abstinence than on condoms and contraception."

I get the feeling that this was supposed to be the Waxman report for the abstinence-only movement... debunking their opponents' curricula as inaccurate and destructive. But I'm with James Trussell of Princeton University, who told the Post,

"These examples of medical inaccuracies pale in comparison to those in abstinence-only curricula," he said in an e-mail. "Many errors cited in the Waxman report are egregious, whereas many errors cited in the [HHS] report are not."

So let's recap. Biased researchers found minor errors in only one comprehensive sex ed curriculum -- which may not actually be used in any schools, gets no federal funding, and may not even claim to be "comprehensive" or "abstinence-plus" sex ed. Those minor errors pale in comparison to the rampant misinformation and gender stereotypes that the Waxman report found in several federally funded abstinence-only programs.

If the abstinence-only proponents are really concerned with accuracy, they best take a hard look at their own materials.

--Ann Friedman

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Ezra reviews Michael Moore's Sicko:

Moore's movie is only superficially about health care. It uses the subject -- and also sick days, and vacations, and child care, and maternal support policies -- as a way to critique unthinking American exceptionalism, to challenge the tautology that states that the way we do things is the best way to do things because ... it's the way we do things. The particulars of the account all add up to the larger question: Is the America we live in the America we think we live in, and the America we want to live in?

Also on the site today, Sudhir Muralidhar reviews A Mighty Heart, starring Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl, wife of kidnapped and slain WSJ journalist Daniel Pearl; Dana Goldstein catalogues some of the issues that second-tier Democratic presidential candidates are championing, and that the frontrunners ought to; and Terence Samuel reports on Claire McCaskill's visit to Iraq and pending investigations into war contracting abuse.

--The Editors

PILING ON. My colleagues Ezra, Paul, and Bean have already given plenty of whacks to this unspeakably atrocious op-ed by Melinda Henneberger. Others have already noted the most obvious problem: her complete lack of evidence, apart from meaningless random anecdotes, for the claim that abortion "had been very good for Republicans." (As Paul says, it's odd that Republicans went out of their way to publicly obfuscate Alito's position on abortion if this position is so popular.) There's the familiar problem about counting women who leave the Democratic party over abortion but ignoring those who come to the party over abortion. She also, in the classic fashion of abortion "centrists", keeps talking about a moral "middle ground" without explaining how these moral ambiguities can actually be expressed in legislative enactments. And, certainly, like virtually everyone who favors states and the federal government forcing some women to carry pregnancies to term, she stays well away from looking at the actual effects of such regulation.

In addition, I note that Henneberger is as shaky on the law as she is on the politics. The Senators did not "overstate the impact" of Carhart II at all. Rather, because unlike Henneberger they understand the incrementalist strategies of anti-choicers, they were correctly noting the decision's impact on future cases as well as Kennedy's explicitly sexist assumptions (the latter of which, needless to say, Henneberger ignores entirely.) She then asserts that "most people differentiate between a fetus in the early weeks of development and at nearly full term," which is true, but since this distinction is also made by Roe v. Wade itself ("[i]f the State is interested in protecting fetal life after viability, it may go so far as to proscribe abortion during that period"), it is irrelevant to anything but her strawman-building. Despite her implications, "partial birth bans" apply to some pre-viability abortions and don't actually stop any post-viability abortions. And, finally, we get the tired trick of arguing from Daniel Patrick Moynihan's authority about why bans on a procedure given a scientifically meaningless, made-up name by cynical forced-pregnancy lobbyists trying to incrementally roll back reproductive rights are in fact rational. But, of course, the legal distinction between D&X and D&E abortions is completely irrational; which way a fetus's feet are pointing in the womb is of no serious moral import.

And this is what's most striking about Henneberger's silly op-ed. Not only does she draw a line in the sand on legislation that poses a risk to women's health while not protecting fetal life at all, she uses this transparently ridiculous position to preen about her superior moral principles and the deeply sincere commitments of "pro-lifers." To call this self-parody would be too kind.

--Scott Lemieux

LAUNDRY. This is really quite exciting:

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

Michael Hayden has certainly outperformed expectations as CIA Director. In the entrance foyer to the CIA, they have a book listing all of the agents killed in duty since the founding of the Agency, with a gold star next to each name. About a third of the stars, dating from 1965, have no names. It will be interesting to see if any of those names can finally be revealed. In any case, this should prove a boon to scholars of the CIA and of American foreign policy during and after the Cold War.

--Robert Farley

CHOICE AND THE DEMS. As a writer, I know full well that it sucks to have your piece held. Months go by, and you can feel its urgency, and relevance, slowly slip away. So my heart really goes out to Melinda Henneberger, whose op-ed in The New York Times today was, quite clearly, written in late-2004. "[O]ur enduring reluctance to acknowledge the complexity of the abortion issue has only prolonged and hardened the debate," she writes. "Most Americans fall somewhere between the extremes of "never" and "no problem" when it comes to abortion."

What stunning, fresh insight! What brave, bold truth-telling! And this, it seems, is what will kill the Democratic Party. It is too full of extremists on the issue, too deeply committed to ensuring that considerations for a woman's health and well-being have a place in legislation. This is why the Democrats lose swing voters. "What would it take to win them back? Respect, for starters -- and not only on the night of the candidate forum on faith. As it turns out, you cannot call people extremists and expect them to vote for you. But real respect would require an understanding that what supporters of abortion rights genuinely see as a hard-earned freedom, opponents genuinely see as a self-inflicted wound and -- though I can feel some of you tensing as you read this -- a human rights issue comparable to slavery."

Henneberger should read her own writing. If someone believes choice comparable to slavery, they will not be placated by a tacit acceptance of the partial-birth case Gonzalez v. Carhart. They will want to end abortion. Pro-choice Democrats -- a group that does not include, among others, the Senate Majority Leader -- are actually much more respectful of pro-lifers than Ms. Henneberger. They, at least, take seriously pro-life convictions, and don't pretend that pandering around the issue's margins will prove distraction enough to obscure such a fundamental difference as exists between those who believe a woman's autonomy is effectively destroyed if the state can force her to serve as a reproductive vessel against her will, and those who believe the right to an abortion is a contemporary form of genocide.

--Ezra Klein

YES, MELINDA, THERE IS A PRO-CHOICE MAJORITY. I'm sure others will have plenty to say about the abominable op-ed by Melinda Henneberger in today's New York Times. It's wrong in so many different ways that one blog post couldn't possibly cover it all, so I'm going to restrict myself to looking at the myths Henneberger propagates about public opinion and the political impact of abortion. This goes way beyond her -- the kind of fear she tries to get Democrats to feel about their beliefs on abortion is precisely what turns a winning issue into a losing one for them. Democrats' inability to stand up for their values on reproductive rights is what makes them sound apologetic and allows Republicans to put them on the defensive. But most importantly, she just doesn't have her facts straight when it comes to what the public thinks about abortion. Let's start here:

Democratic Party leaders should also stop pushing the perception that Republicans are natural defenders of the faithful. For years, they have done just that by tirelessly portraying our current president as this committed -- indeed, obsessed -- pro-lifer who would stop at nothing to see Roe overturned. Karl Rove couldn't have said it better himself; this was better advertising than hard money could buy.

First, don't worry that I've taken Henneberger out of context -- she doesn't explain why portraying George W. Bush as wanting to overturn Roe means Republicans are "natural defenders of the faithful." But her assertion that Bush being understood as wanting to overturn Roe is a political winner -- "better advertising than hard money could buy" -- is simply false. The fact of the matter is that in every poll that asks about Roe, only between 25 and 30 percent of the public says it should be overturned (see here for details). That's why in ten years on the national stage, including two presidential campaigns, George W. Bush has never actually come out and said he wants to see Roe overturned. I know that's hard to believe, but it's true. He talks about the "culture of life," he talks about being pro-life, he sends dog-whistle cues to his base (for instance, by mentioning Dred Scott, the decision upholding slavery, which pro-lifers equate with Roe), but whenever he's been asked the question directly, he dodges it, because he knows that two-thirds of the public disagrees with him.

But let's get to the heart of Henneberger's argument:

Even in the real world, a pro-choice Republican nominee would be a gift to the Democrats, because the Republican Party wins over so many swing voters on abortion alone. Which is why Fred Thompson, who is against abortion rights, is getting so much grateful attention from his party now. And why, despite wide opposition to the war in Iraq, Democrats must still win back such voters to take the White House next year....They convinced me that the conventional wisdom was wrong about the last presidential contest, that Democrats did not lose support among women because ''security moms'' saw President Bush as the better protector against terrorism. What first-time defectors mentioned most often was abortion.

So does the Republican party really "win over so many swing voters on abortion alone"? And was there such an exodus of swing voters away from John Kerry over the issue -- more so than in 2000 or in any year before? Henneberger's conversations with some voters are certainly useful, but if she's going to argue that they represent a larger group that determines the outcome of elections, she has to provide some evidence. And the fact is there simply isn't any. In fact, there is even evidence running in the other direction: As the authors of this study argued, "we find that gay marriage and abortion were far from the most important predictors of vote choice, and had no effect on voter decision making among independents, respondents in battleground states, or even among respondents in states with an anti-gay marriage initiative on the ballot."

The real question is not just how many voters there are who would vote Democratic but for abortion, but whether they are a larger or smaller group than those who would otherwise vote Republican but don't because of the GOP's stance on the issue. This is where Henneberger's piece falls into the same trap that all those scolding Democrats on their abortion stance always do: arguing that the Democrats have a position that turns people off because it is so doctrinaire and unyielding, while saying nothing about the Republican stance on abortion, which is if anything even more doctrinaire and unyielding.

Ultimately, what Henneberger, like many before her, is asking Democrats to do is to betray some of their most fundamental values in a cynical and doomed attempt to grab a few votes. Doing so would be politically stupid and morally repellent. The fact is that the Democrats are the party that favors reproductive rights, and the Republicans are the party that opposes those rights. On the fundamental question, two-thirds of the public agrees with the Democrats. They only lose on the issue when they listen to people like Henneberger, who tell them that they should act like they're ashamed of what they believe.

--Paul Waldman

WHAT WOULD ROMNEY SAY? The Bush administration is considering a plan to shutter Guantanamo Bay.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

DEMOCRACY IS IN THE SPEECH. One-year-old journal of ideas Democracy has taken some flack round these parts on account of co-editor Kenny Baer's disagreement with Young Ezra's views on Iran. The journal, however, ought not to therefore be considered some kind of anathema center-right organ. Certainly John Edwards wouldn't be giving a speech tonight adopting an idea laid out by Elizabeth Warren in the journal's Summer 2007 issue if it were. Warren's Democracy proposal is an idea whose time has come:

Just as the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) protects buyers of goods and supports a competitive market, we need the same for consumers of financial products -- a new regulatory regime, and even a new regulatory body, to protect consumers who use credit cards, home mortgages, car loans, and a host of other products.

As Elizabeth Warren has pointed out, you can't buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of burning your house down -- consumer protections prevent it. But you can easily get a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out into the street -- and the lender doesn't even have to disclose the risk ...

Right now, there's no sheriff in town. Interest rates were effectively deregulated 20 years ago. States cannot effectively regulate banks because most are based in other states. Federal regulators put bank "soundness" -- profitability -- far ahead of consumer protection.

My Family Savings and Credit Commission will change this. It will deal with all financial services -- credit cards, mortgages, car loans, check-cashers, payday loans, investment accounts, and more. It will ban the most abusive terms and make sure consumers understand the others.

P.S. Also worth noting is that communitarian former Clinton-advisor William Galston has a piece in the summer issue. People often forget this, but in 2002 Galston argued The Prospect's case against the invasion of Iraq in a public debate at Georgetown Law Center that pitted him and The Democracy Collaborative's Benjamin Barber against The New Republic, represented by Jon Chait and Kenneth Pollack. No journal that publishes one of the few people who publicly spoke out against the last war and wrote "The Perils of Preemptive War" in the summer of 2002 can fairly be lumped in withNational Review.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

UNINSURED VETERANS. Various news outlets are reporting that there are more than 1.8 million uninsured veterans, according to a study and recent testimony by Steffie Woolhandler of the Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. Technically, all veterans are eligible for enrollment in the Veterans Health Administration, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all veterans are covered.

In her illuminating testimony, Woolhandler explained that veterans are enrolled in the VA health care system on a priority basis. Top-level priorities are veterans with combat-related injuries, but "Veterans without service-connected illnesses or disabilities, and with incomes above 80 percent of the median income in their area are classified in the lowest priority group... In January 2003, President Bush's Secretary of Veterans Affairs halted enrollment of [these] veterans." Even veterans with combat-related injuries may live too far from a VA facility to receive adequate care, especially since armed services are drawing more and more heavily from rural areas that are often located far from VA facilities.

To be fair, this data was mainly taken from veterans of previous wars, and a large chunk of the data presented was from 2005 or earlier, but all the same, nearly 44 percent of the 18-44 age group are uninsured. This will be the primary age group that returns from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and if nothing changes under the current system, they will join in the ranks of these uninsured veterans from Vietnam and Gulf War I.

--Kay Steiger

SPEAKING LIKE A PREZDENT. The years of George Bush's presidency have changed our expectations about the way presidential candidates should speak. This is why I listened to the Democratic candidates' speeches in the Take Back America conference from a different place than the usual angle of taking down the points they covered and the points they decided not to cover. This time I listened from the heart, the way Chris Matthews so often seems to do in his attempts to find what makes a candidate truly "presidential". Sadly, I didn't get close enough to sniff at the candidates for the right kinds of smells (leather, cigar smoke, traces of ancient blood from duck hunting?) but I was able to judge both the visual and the aural impressions.

The visual impressions I'm going to save for a later piece I'm working on, but the candidates managed to achieve a great level of aural energy, those waves of intense emotion that connect to the great throbbing progressive heart! Never mind connecting to the brain. I was asking the important questions: Would I like to have a beer with this person? Does this person remind me of my mommy or my daddy or of the obnoxious teen next door? Is this person... (yes, here comes the frightening word) authentic?

In short, I let myself be carried away by the emotions in the room the candidate managed to evoke.

So how did the three top candidates fare in the struggle for my heart?

As Adele wrote earlier, Barack Obama spoke very well. He was not just a candidate for the presidency. He was the American conscience, the many ghosts from our history who ask for justice and fairness and a better country for all. He was a preacher, a man on fire, a man with a mission. I could imagine him running a country the way he ran the room. He raised the energy, reabsorbed it and then threw it back at the audience, magnified. He spoke as a statesman, not as a politician, and that is so rare these days that it was most refreshing. He invited us to enter into the world where ideals matter, where sacrifice is what political service requires. A grand world and an exciting one. It reminded me of the past eras when presidents actually spoke in this manner.

The only part of my heart that stayed cold and uninvolved during his speech was that bit where I feel that someone is talking just to me. I didn't get that shared moment where suddenly I'd feel that Obama was just like me, with similar concerns. He remained a statesman on the stage, albeit a most fascinating one.

John Edwards spoke right after Obama. A difficult position, because the Obama-energy was still flying around in the room. If Obama was the statesman of the past then Edwards was the Southern voice of authority, grace and concerns. He, too, was quite presidential but the energy he employed for this was of a different type. He began his speech in a modest way, like a good neighbor might, but he latched onto that essential emotional connection that Obama missed in the first paragraph by mentioning Elizabeth Edward's cancer. Because we all have been there, suffering with someone near us and we all can relate to his burden and the courage it must take to continue with this campaign.

This beginning used the energy in the room in a way which made it settle down and let Edwards start with smaller words and smaller topics without having them drowned by the recent memory of Obama's presentation. He then amplified his messages until by the end he, too, was using the energy in the room to his advantage, hammering home all those points that the progressives want to hear. (And no, I'm going to stay emotional in this article so you will not get the points here. But they are what needs to be packed into this sort of speech, and all the candidates did their packing well. See Ezra's post on some of the issues.)

When Edwards finished his speech I thought that both he and Obama spoke like presidents used to speak. This category would be unfair to use for Hillary Clinton's speech, because this country has never had a woman president. Most pundits solve the dilemma of how to judge Hillary's emotional appeals by substituting the traditional rules about how to judge women in general. The tricky thing about this is that it was only a few hundred years ago when a woman speaking in public was regarded as indecent. Even today "ambitious" is something quite dirty when applied to a presidential candidate, though only if she is female. Men, it seems, don't at all want to presidents; they just somehow happen to be pushed into the fight by higher concerns.

All this means that I had to open up my receptiveness to a greater degree when Clinton walked to the stage the morning after the Obama and Edwards presentations. Would she speak to me as to a sister? Would she sound like a woman in power? And how do women in power sound? See how difficult it was to just let the heart listen?

But my heart did listen. Clinton's speech started with an overlay of righteous anger. The anger was correct but it should have been more firmly bounced back to those who caused it. Too much of it trickled into the audience or at least to my sensitive heart. But she improved as the speech went on, lowering the level of anger, adding concern and insights and then, when speaking about the horror that is now New Orleans, she connected to me in a very direct way, a way which felt -- authentic! And this connection happened again, a few sentences later.

Now, remember that she spoke to a progressive audience. We were recalcitrant, suspicious, ready to boo. When the booing commenced, after her points about the Iraqi government failures, she did something quite presidential: She rode the energy of the boos and turned it into energy that helped her. She showed herself strong and in command of the room, able to laugh at what happened and able to take the negative responses as more energy for her speech. That, too, looked quite presidential to me.

The mainstream media appears to find value in stories like this one -- how the candidates fared in garnering a gut reaction. It's true that I didn't check if anything much could land on the shoulders of any of these candidates, the way Roger Simon checked the shoulders of Mitt Romney when he decided that a 747 could land on them. That might come in handy if we really ran short of airports in the future, true, but even in less extreme future scenarios the oration talents of a president are useful. I'd say that all the three top runners on the Democratic side can speak like a prezdent.

tba2007

-- J. Goodrich

BLOGGING THE FORGOTTEN WAR. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you crossed Wonkette with the website of the Council on Foreign Relations? Neither had I until this morning, when a friend alerted me to the blog Afghanistanica, which combines cheeky, Gawker-like prose with deep, on-the-ground knowledge about what is happening in America's forgotten war. How can you not love a blog that includes such items as "Malalai Joya Can Has Cheezburger?" and "Khareji Gone Wild! Drunk Americans Louts and Frisky British Tomcats Paint Kabul Red"? Or book-promoting efforts like this one?

Have you ever been involved in a conversation or debate about the role of Pakistan in Afghanistan and not been able to add anything beyond agreeing that Pakistan is a continuing source for extremism? Do you wish you could throw around terms like Lashkar-i-Taiba and Lashkar-i-Jangvi? Have you ever wanted to tell someone the difference between Jami'at-i-Ulema-i-Islam and Jami'at-i-Ulema-i-Pakistan?

Probably not. But if you have any desire to do the above mentioned things then a book titled Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection is for you....

After reading this book you can be the cool guy in the political conversation who says something esoteric like "No, you don't understand. Pakistan must reign in those aggressive elements in Muttahida Majlis-i Amal."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

RE: CIRCUMCISION. Dana writes, "since evidence clearly shows circumcision protects men and their partners from a variety of sexually transmitted infections, we should be promoting the practice, not among grown men who may see the procedure as an alternative to safe sex, but among expectant parents. Get 'em while they're young and you can give them the anatomical benefits of circumcision alongside the lessons about protection and contraception."

Sigh. Easy for her to say. Andrew Sullivan has actually been arguing against circumcision this week on his blog, and his points seem fairly sound to me, if a little overblown It's the sort of practice that, were we not already doing it and accustomed to it, we'd think a wacky and indefensible invasion of personal rights. And as for the public health argument, that's one thing in Africa, where AIDS is taking a genocidal turn. It's even another in New York, where it's still a problem. But does that really make sense in Arkansas, with .4 percent of the nation's AIDS cases? Maybe Garance, who used to do AIDS activism in NYC, could weigh in?

--Ezra Klein

RE: BLOOMBERG AS VEEP. Paul makes some good points on Bloomberg's potential attractiveness as a VP for Obama. On the other hand, the case for Bloomberg is actually a better case for somebody like Mark Warner. Both are rich technocrats with a record of executive competence. But while Bloomberg does nothing for any region save the solidly blue Northeast, Warner possibly puts Virginia in play, and probably appeals to Midwestern border states like Ohio. Additionally, Obama's unity message is better enhanced by a white Southerner than a liberal Jew. If I were actually worried about Giuliani stealing New York from the Democrats, I could see the appeal of Bloomberg, but in presidential elections, partisanship tends to overwhelm personal affection, and New Yorkers seem fairly solidly behind Hillary in match-ups with Giuliani. I have trouble imagining Obama would do worse, rather than better.

All that said, I am glad to see talk of a narrative-enhancing, rather than balancing, VP candidate. VP's don't seem to win their states very often, and picking someone who improves the tickets national appeal (Like Clinton-Gore), rather than highlights its regional weaknesses (Kerry-Edwards), seems wise.

--Ezra Klein

CUT OUT H.I.V.? From hippies reclaiming the body to immigrant groups who wouldn't even consider it, CNN reports that the circumcision rate in the United States has reached an all-time low of 57 percent. The American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends forgoing circumcision, calling it an unnecessary and painful surgery. Even so, the United States remains the Western nation with by far the least foreskins. In the U.K, for example, fewer than 20 percent of men are circumcised; in Denmark, the number is less than 2 percent.

But don't call off the bris just yet. As I reported for In These Times last month, the World Health Organization is now recommending the procedure, emboldened by studies that found adult circumcisions in Africa decreased men's likelihood of contracting HIV by as much as 60 percent. Following the WHO's lead, New York City is considering promoting adult circumcision as a preventative measure, which worries activists who've been struggling for decades to send the message that using condoms is the only surefire way to protect yourself.

Seems to me that since evidence clearly shows circumcision protects men and their partners from a variety of sexually transmitted infections, we should be promoting the practice, not among grown men who may see the procedure as an alternative to safe sex, but among expectant parents. Get 'em while they're young and you can give them the anatomical benefits of circumcision alongside the lessons about protection and contraception.

--Dana Goldstein

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Josh McDaniel reports on how sprawling McMansion developments are encroaching on forested areas, and making wildfires increasingly dangerous. But rather than step up funding to help the Forest Service keep these fires under control, the Bush administration has consistently slashed the agency's budget:

In recent years, firefighting costs have been taken to unprecedented heights that threaten to overwhelm the Forest Service's overall budget. Wildfire-related costs are expected to account for 44 percent of the agency's overall budget in 2007 -- up from 13 percent in 1991.

But the Forest Service budget hasn't kept pace. In fact, under the Bush administration, the agency's budget has been steadily reduced. So as firefighting costs have risen, the Forest Service has been forced to absorb the increases through a 35 percent reduction in other programs since 2000. The programs that have been hit by cutbacks include wildlife habitat restoration, recreation, invasive species control, state and community assistance, prescribed fire, and managed natural fire -- some of the very projects that could help restore forest health and reduce many of the factors that are creating the conditions for large, 'catastrophic' wildfires in the first place.

Read the whole thing here.

Also today, Harold Meyerson explains how passing card-check legislation would help to end the economic stagnation faced by all but the wealthiest Americans.

--The Editors

BAD NEWS FOR NEW MEXICO, GOOD NEWS FOR LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE. The Reliable Replacement Warhead program has been zeroed out in the House, replaced in part by a considerable increase in funds for non-proliferation. RRW, a project designed to replace existing U.S. nuclear warheads, is best described as a straight forward, nonsensical boondoggle that would have benefited no one apart from unreformed Cold Warriors and the major nuclear labs. We'll see if the cut sticks; Domenici is likely to fight hard to put the funds back in. Jason Sigger has more.

--Robert Farley

KENNEDY AND CARHART II. Jeffrey Rosen's assessment of Anthony Kennedy is, for the most part, good and very much worth reading. First of all, he collects some priceless anecdotes detailing Kennedy's legendary intellectual vanity. My personal favorite:

Kennedy moderated a discussion about American values after September 11 at a public high school in Washington, D.C. Sporting a natty gray suit and a pocket handkerchief, Kennedy asked the students which books and movies they would choose to educate the citizens of an imaginary nation called Quest about American values. As the students struggled to get a word in edgewise during the discussion, which was broadcast on C-SPAN, Kennedy kept answering his own questions and returning to his favorite themes. When one student timidly suggested a Dr. Seuss book called The Sneetches that "talks about racial acceptance," Kennedy gravely replied that "Dr. Seuss actually wrote in two different periods, kind of like Picasso. The first period was One Fish Two Fish Redfish Bluefish, but then he wrote about ethical themes, and it's very important for young people to have ethical themes, like Yertle the Turtle." This launched him into an extended riff about how the men and women of Quest, represented by two characters called M and W, should be asked to read Hamlet..

More substantively, Rosen also argues convincingly, based on recent political science data, that Kennedy is both more conservative and has a more consistent jurisprudence than is generally assumed. Although he seems more moderate than he is because 1) he's less doctrinaire than Scalia or Alito, and 2) the current Court doesn't have a liberal in the Douglas/Marshall/Brennan mode, a Court with Kennedy as the median vote will be significantly more conservative than the Court that had O'Connor as the median vote.

Not surprisingly, however, I continue to be somewhat puzzled by Rosen's take on Carhart II. Part of this has to do with questions about "minimalism," which I'll leave to another post. Like his colleague Benjamin Wittes, Rosen doesn't like Kennedy's opinion, agrees with the outcome of the case, but doesn't explain what the Court should have said. But as I've said before, Kennedy's sexism wasn't gratuitous; it provided the crucial link to a legitimate state interest necessary under Casey. Given that the ban doesn't actually protect fetal life or otherwise protect a woman's health, Kennedy had little choice.

In addition, I think it's worth pointing out that while Kennedy's discussion of the underlying principles of this legislation may have been impolitic, it certainly wasn't inaccurate. As Ginsburg noted in dissent, the idea that obtaining abortions is contrary to a woman's fundamental nature and hence bad for her long-term health wasn't invented by Kennedy; it's a well-worn shibboleth of the lobby that got the bills passed. Obviously, this is something of an embarrassment for the pro-choice anti-Roe position, as its adherents (including Rosen) generally insist that abortion bans be evaluated as having the sole purpose of protecting fetal life (despite the fact that this is generally inconsistent with the way such statutes are written and enforced.) If anything good has resulted from Kennedy's otherwise disastrous opinion, it's that getting the truth in the U.S. Reports makes obfuscating the extent to which abortion regulations involve reactionary conceptions of gender and sexuality less tenable.

--Scott Lemieux

THE GENDER GAP BEGINS AT HOME. Via The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, this is hilarious:

After a brief stop at a Little League game in Beranek Park, where Emma Claire mentioned that her softball team's name is the Hawkeyes, the family ventured on to Tipton to rejoin their favorite candidate. Oh, but that's not entirely accurate -- or at least it wasn't on Saturday. When the Edwardses visited the Cedar County Democrats' tent, Mrs. Edwards asked her daughter which of the presidential candidates she liked best.

Did she point to dear old Dad? No, she pointed to Hillary Clinton. One strange political event, indeed.

I blame those "I Can Be President" buttons the HRC campaign has been handing out to girls.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

EZRA'S TALKING HEAD. Our fair staff writer will be on Kudlow & Company (on CNBC) talking about health care at around 5:15 p.m. tonight.

--The Editors

BLOOMBERG AS DEM VP CANDIDATE? When Michael Bloomberg announced he was leaving the Republican Party, my initial reaction was that it was a disaster for the Democrats. If he ran as an independent candidate for president, Bloomberg would almost certainly cut into the votes of self-identified independents that Democrats picked up in 2006 and that they will need again if they are to win the presidency in 2008. But now that Bloomberg has said he's not running for president, another possibility emerges. He would be an ideal candidate for vice president on a ticket with any of the major Democratic possibilities except, of course, Hillary Clinton.

Bloomberg's attractions -- his business reputation, executive experience, centrist image, and not least of all deep pockets -- are obvious.

Moreover, this would be the rational step for Bloomberg to take. The record of third-party candidates for president is dismal; running an independent campaign, Bloomberg would almost certainly only play the role of spoiler. But if he were paired with, say, Barack Obama, Bloomberg would have a genuine chance of ending up in the center of power.

The vice presidency is no longer something to be scoffed at. Al Gore played a central role under Bill Clinton, and Dick Cheney has exercised even more influence under Bush. With his executive experience, Bloomberg could become equally important in running a new Democratic administration.

Amazingly, Bloomberg has not one but two ways to alter the outcome of the 2008 election. He can help keep the Republicans in power by running as an independent, or he can help put the Democrats in power by taking the second spot on the Democratic ticket. Our future may hinge on the choice he makes.

--Paul Starr

GOOD SPEECH=GOOD POLLING=MOMENTUM. The gang at TalkLeft was wondering why I said yesterday that Barack Obama's speech to Take Back America mattered. The answer is the existence of the first-ever TBA straw poll, which Obama won with 29 percent of ballots cast, according to results announced this afternoon. John Edwards followed a close second with 26 percent of the 720 votes, and Hillary Clinton came in third with 17 percent -- which is a surprisingly good showing for her, given the audience. (Online straw polls at liberal blogs usually find her in the low single digits.)

The Obama victory over Edwards was fairly narrow -- just 3 percentage points -- and so the quality of their respective speeches could well have made the difference. The speech also mattered because it represented an opportunity for Obama to seize the favorite's mantle from Edwards, who has thus far been the liberal darling and netroots hero. Time will tell if he's been able to do that, but winning the poll provides a nice boost, either way. The poll was conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for The Politico.com.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

SLAUGHTER ON THE AMERICAN IDEA. Former Prospect intern Asheesh Siddique's review of The Idea That Is America by Anne-Marie Slaughter over at Campus Progress is worth a look. He captures the essence of the book here:

Most important for Slaughter, by engaging in the torture of "enemy combatants" suspected of association with Al Qaeda at the Guantanamo military base, the Bush administration has not merely reneged upon America's commitment to the Geneva Conventions but also abandoned the fundamentally American principal of "liberty and justice for all." [Slaughter's emphasis.] She passionately argues that the president's "sweeping claims of absolute power," especially to deny detained terrorists fair trials in court and to violently interrogate them, undermines our ability to fight terrorism by producing bad intelligence, alienating our allies, and mocking our values.

--Kay Steiger

WHAT I'LL BE DOING TOMORROW MORNING. Health Care on Film: Clips from SiCKO and Its Competitors

CAPITOL HILL BRIEFING
Thursday, June 21, 2007
8:30 AM (Breakfast Included)

With comments by: Stuart Browning, Fellow, Moving Picture Institute; Michael F. Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies, Cato Institute; and Ezra Klein, Writing Fellow, American Prospect.

B-340 Rayburn House Office Building

"Michael Moore's new documentary SiCKO unfavorably contrasts the U.S. health care system with government-run systems. According to Moore, the U.S. system leaves millions of Americans behind and allows insurance companies to profit by denying care to cancer patients. Meanwhile, patients in Canada, Cuba, and the United Kingdom receive quality care free of charge. Several short films from the Moving Picture Institute argue the opposite. Do these films provide an accurate or complete picture? Clips from SiCKO and the Moving Picture Institute will serve as a launching pad for a discussion of health care system failures, domestic and foreign."

You should come!

--Ezra Klein

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Paul Waldman has a question: What accounts for the fact that the GOP race for the presidential nomination has been, so far, "remarkable in its utter lack of substance, even by the standards of contemporary campaigns"?

Think about it this way: Can you think of a single substantive proposal consisting of more than a sentence or two that any of the GOP candidates has made on the campaign trail? I'm not even talking about some lengthy policy paper or plan for overhauling a major sector of government. But any idea to do something, anything, differently than the Bush administration has? The closest one can come is the immigration bill that Congress is debating, of which John McCain is a co-sponsor. But one gets the impression that McCain wishes no one would bring it up, at least until the primaries are over and all those pesky nativists have nowhere to go but to the Republican nominee. Is there anything else the Republican candidates are actually proposing to do? Any discernable agenda coming from any of them? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

--The Editors

RE: EDWARDS AND EXEMPLARISM. I think Dana makes some very good points on the implausibility of the John Edwards' Grand Unified Theory of Energy Independence. But I don't think that's actually the relevant question. While it was, and is, an interesting vision, the appeal of his vision had literally nothing to do with whether it'll happen or not. We all appear to agree on pursuing renewable forms of energy and undoing our intense reliance on Middle Eastern oil, so whether such efforts actually create a classless socialist utopia in the Middle East or just lead to some weakened dictatorships is really neither here nor there. The key is that though the rhetoric may have envisioned a causal role for the US in changing the world, the policy -- invest in biofuels -- really suggested nothing of the sort. It was just sold as if it did.

And that's what's new and useful here: What I read Edwards as trying to do was put some meat on the bones of a soft power foreign policy vision. Too often, soft power approaches are read as isolationism or retreat by another name. We'll stop being a forceful player in the world, but we will donate $25 million to clean water efforts. That's not a terribly popular foreign policy, and it tends to bring down extraordinary amounts of oppobrium from political elites, almost all of whom seem oddly invested in a quasi- or fully-hegemonic conception of america's role in world affairs. Edwards' odd discourse on the domino effects of energy independence were, I think, an early attempt to articulate a more aggressive vision of a soft power foreign policy focus. In the same way that force is sold in terms of what it can get us (a democratic Middle East!), Edwards was selling soft power in terms of what it can get us (a democratic Middle East!). In both cases, my hunch is that the speaker is lying or misguided. The Middle East simply isn't going to be democratic in the near future. But insofar as it's really important to move America from a foreign policy defined by force and intimidation and towards a sort of rules-guided, humanitarian internationalism, framing soft power as a legitimate alternative, rather than a dishonorable fallback, to hard power, is something Democrats are going to have to start doing.

--Ezra Klein

HEALTH CARE WORKERS UNITE! In what seems like a fairly interesting initiative, SEIU is forming a health care union of 1 million members (with plans to expand to 9 million) to create a sort of unified force of health care workers able to coherently advocate and argue for change. "The creation of a national healthcare union will enable us to pool our resources, coordinate our strategies, and unite our strength like never before," said Dennis Rivera, chair of SEIU Healthcare. "Healthcare workers need to speak with one strong voice for quality care." Their first days will see "a new contest for healthcare workers to submit their ideas on how to fix America's broken healthcare system, called Best Thing Since Aspirin," a "petition drive to collect signatures supporting $50 billion in new funding for children's health insurance through reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)," "a joint campaign of the United American Nurses and the Nurse Alliance of SEIU for safe staffing to improve the quality of care in our nation's hospitals."

What'll this mean? Who knows? Possibly nothing. But those who've studied the history of health reform know how powerful the American Medical Association has, in the past, been, on blocking change. Those providing health care have a naturally unique storehouse of credibility on how to reform it. In recent years, the nurses have become deeply politically active, and a number of their associations have banded together to follow Michael Moore's movie around the country and use it as an organizing vehicle to advocate for national health care. They'll be in uniform, at theatres, with literature on reform and an open offer to answer any lingering questions. Their voices will now be amplified by million(s) of lower-tier health workers who, as the boomers age, will become more and more relevant, and listened-to, and numerous. Whether these groups will create momentum capable of anything in particular remains to be seen. But the creation of more countervailing forces to the medical industries and the AMA (which is itself increasingly split, and weakened) is interesting to watch.

--Ezra Klein

BLOOMBERG AND LIBERTARIANISM. Matt notes that libertarians may be irrationally unsympathetic to Michael Bloomberg because of his support for relatively trivial nanny-state regulations like public smoking and trans-fat bans. (As an aside, it's worth pointing out that public smoking bans actually have a serious non nanny-state, if not quite libertarian, justification: even I'm libertarian enough to oppose smoking bans to protect the health of smokers or patrons, but they're defensible insofar as they protect the health of workers.)

However, there is a serious reason libertarians should be skeptical of Bloomberg: the appalling string of arbitrary detentions with no serious justification during the 2004 GOP convention. With Giuliani (in my view) effectively out of the race, it's conceivable that Bloomberg's stance on the crucial issue of lawful constraints on executive power could be worse than even the GOP nominee.

--Scott Lemieux

EXEMPLARY AMERICA? I too was at Take Back America yesterday, wowed and moved by both Obama and Edwards' speeches. But I find it strange that Matt and Ezra found Edwards so "persuasive," "direct," and "plausible" on foreign policy. Edwards laid out a wildly optimistic vision in which:

1. American energy independence (hence, no more oil cash) forces Middle Eastern nations to invest in education, economic development, and good government.

2.The United States starts to rely on homegrown energy sources (ethanol).

3. Europe doesn't have enough empty space to compete, so it invests heavily in African agriculture and energy.

4. African poverty lifts.

These would all be excellent accomplishments. But the causality here is far from assured. I agree with Brian Beutler that this seems "incredibly difficult to pull off." And more disturbingly, the notion that we can "remake the Middle East" politically just by decreasing our dependence on their oil -- as Edwards suggested today -- is, I fear, as ignorant of entrenched ethnic and religious tensions as the neo-conservatism of George W. Bush. Both theories over-reach and rely upon a grandiose rhetoric in which the United States is not a helpmate to the world's disenfranchised but a direct architect of ideal societies. (To be fair, Edwards' words on aid to alleviate global poverty had an entirely different tone.)

The exceptionalist (and exemplarist) impulse in American history is well-covered, and has of course led to both triumphs and tragedies. Call me a realist, but I'm hoping for a newer, humbler tone to a progressive foreign policy.

--Dana Goldstein

GET YOUR HUNGER UNDER CONTROL. In today's Times, Maureen Dowd takes a predictably sneering look at Hillary Clinton's Sopranos video (if you haven't seen it yet, you can watch it at her web site). Fine -- nothing surprising there. But Dowd feels the need to throw this in:

"And like Tony, Hillary is so power-hungry that she can justify any thuggish means to get the prize."

Haven't we had enough of this? Dowd should be smart enough to know that she, like so many others, is applying a ridiculous double-standard to Clinton. How many times has she called Rudy Giuliani "power-hungry," or Mitt Romney, or John Edwards, or Barack Obama? After all, they're all running for president. You have to have a pretty strong thirst for power to subject yourself to the marathon of begging, pandering, and humiliation that is a presidential campaign. Yet there's not supposed to be anything wrong with a man who is ambitious, while the same ambition in a woman is described as sinister, even pathological.

In answer to the rhetorical question posed in the last paragraph, I did the blogger equivalent of the old reporter's trick of picking up the damn phone -- booting up the damn Lexis-Nexis. Turns out that in the couple thousand columns she's written over the years, Dowd has used the term "power-hungry" twice before today. In 1987, she referenced "critics' caricature of [Al] Haig as the sort of power-hungry general who showed up in movies," and in 2000, in one of her imagined conversations in the head of George W. Bush, she mentioned "power-hungry connivers like Bill and Hillary and Al." So there you have it.

--Paul Waldman

THE OFFENSIVE. I'm as skeptical of the latest offensive effort as of just about all the other offensives that U.S. forces have launched in Iraq, and I'm wondering whether the planning and execution of this operation reveals some frustration in the Army with the surge. The very first thing that a counter-insurgency expert will tell you is that sweeps don't work; the insurgents always manage to escape, and there's no way to cover all of the exits:

Taking the fight to insurgents from Al Qaeda did not so much destroy them in Anbar Province as dislodge them, prompting the fighters to build up their strength elsewhere, including Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province.

So the planners of this latest operation are attempting to plug the holes that have allowed the insurgents to escape in the past. The goal is not merely to reclaim western Baquba from insurgent control, but to capture or kill the estimated 300 fighters to 500 fighters who are believed to be based in that part of the city.

Part of the point of the surge was to allow the possibility for traditional counter-insurgency operations, in which insurgents were forced to launch their own offensives against American forces, and consequently be destroyed. This was, given the trivial size of the surge compared to what Petraeus's own counter-insurgency manual demanded, a forlorn hope. That the U.S. has apparently returned to pointless and destructive sweep operations may be a recognition of that within the command structure. These operations are emotionally satisfying, but by and large have never worked, and almost inevitably cause more damage than they prevent.

--Robert Farley

BLOOMBERG'S CANDIDACY IS BLOSSOMING: So New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg just announced he's leaving the Republican Party and registering as Independent. Funny how his announcement makes no mention of why he's leaving the Republican Party, he simply touts his achievements and attributes them to over-coming partisanship.

If Bloomberg didn't suddenly discover that his supposed commitment to reproductive freedom, civil rights, a clean environment or a fair shake for New York from Congress is contradicted by the positions and actions of the rest of his party (and this was just as true, say, in 2004 when he praised President Bush at the Republican Convention), why is he doing this now?

Clearly, as I've been saying for a while, Bloomberg is seriously thinking of running for president. I believe this is bad news for the Democrats, since he's smart enough to only sink his billions in blue and purple states that he has a chance of carrying and where he'll split the non-fundamentalist vote. Now granted, the polls say he actually draws more from Repubilcan candidates in three-way match ups. But I suspect that may just demonstrate that Republican-leaners are more dissatisfied with their choices currently.

--Ben Adler

THE DIXIE BONUS. Ezra notes below, "Edwards' Southern accent and manners are critical in his ability to project a much more combative, sharp form of liberalism than the others are offering. What would sound like Marxism from the mouth of Howard Dean or Hillary Clinton sounds like good, old-fashioned, American populism from Edwards." From the standpoint of public perceptions, I don't disagree. And let's put aside Edwards' smooth-but-not-slick manner for a moment (to understand where smooth crosses over to slick, see Mike Huckabee). My question is, why is it that Edwards' accent makes what he has to say more palatable? And why is Edwards at least partly right that he can go to places where Clinton, and to an extent Obama, can't?

Part of this is that, to be frank, while people in Rhode Island or Oregon don't look on presidential candidates who come from regions other than their own with suspicion, lots of southerners seem to be reluctant to vote for people who don't share their drawl. Of course, this is never characterized as pathological regional xenophobia -- it's just how regular folks think, and there's not supposed to be anything wrong with it.

Southern-ness, furthermore, is supposed to be a marker of "authenticity." People who are from the South are genuine, forthright, the kind of folks you'd like to have a beer with, while if you come from somewhere else, chances are you're a big phony. Witness Fred Thompson, the "down-home" corporate lobbyist. Southerners are always taking offense at people who supposedly look down on them, but to someone who was raised in the Northeast, the idea that southerners are inherently more "real," and more American, than the rest of us is deeply insulting.

Of course, this is part of a whole complex of stereotypes about what and who is really American. And nobody embraces them more than the liberal northeastern elitists in the media. As far as they're concerned, the South is more American than the Northeast or the West, small towns are more American than big cities, country music is more American than folk or jazz or hip-hop, NASCAR is more American than basketball, and so on. The fact that those media Brahmins themselves don't live in small towns or listen to country music or watch NASCAR is precisely what feeds their idealized view of what a "real" American is, and what his beliefs and tastes are.

-- Paul Waldman

OBAMA AND EDWARDS. Edwards said better things, Obama said things better. That's my summary of their two speeches. Both have matured as candidates -- and considerably so. Obama gave the best speech I've seen him give -- and I was at the 2004 Democratic convention. In what's a major maturation of his message, the rhetoric attacking cynicism and disengagement has evolved from a floating meta-commentary reasserting the tawdriness of the process into an actual political message. Speaking at the same Hilton where, during the DNC Winter Convention, he received weak reviews after an address too focused on the theatre of politics, Obama this time brought his critique of apathy back from the heavens and into the halls of Congress. When the citizens turn away and the voters accustom themselves to disappointment, he argued, a vacuum opens up. And politics, like nature, abhors vacuums. So the lobbyists and the special interests and the lawyers rush in to fill it. This only further wrecks citizen trust in the government, further alienating the populace, and opening more space for self-interested, narrow elements to control our politics. This is why Obama's movement, his 20,000 person events, matters. Because the citizens must return to squeeze out the interests, and only he's proven able to spark that sort of civic revitalization.

The summary of Obama's speech doesn't quite do justice to its power: For that, read Addie below. I genuinely felt bad for John Edwards, who had to follow what seemed an unmatchable performance. But he did, and if the reactions in my immediate environs were representative, for many, his focus on concrete policy changes bested Obama's attention to a reengaged citizenry.

Unlike Obama, Edwards did not lash himself to a particular theme. His was not a grand commentary on politics, except in this way: We need bold change, and it must be be now. His speech was nothing but that, a litany of bold changes he would make, or at least fight for, if elevated into office. It was not as inspiring as Obama's address, but it was much more concrete, and far-reaching, and in that way, more comforting. As Matt said, he was far better and more direct on foreign policy than he's been in past addresses, and he laid out a long scenario connecting energy conservation to a collapse of Middle Eastern dictatorships (without petrodollars, they'll need to invest in education and development) and widespread investment in Africa (from Europe). It was interesting stuff, and plausible, if a bit hard to recount. Easier to explain was the focus on humanitarian works as a centerpiece of foreign policy, an argument Edwards fleshed out in some detail, and displayed evidence conviction during.

The underlying message of all his remarks, though, was that much could be done, and there is no reason, either political or substantive, to approach these problems incrementally, or even cautiously. To put the contrast another way, where Obama promised to radically change our politics, Edwards promised to radically change our policies. Those were the choices offered to the conference this morning, and they were good ones.

tba2007

--Ezra Klein

IN WHICH I BRIEFLY SUCCUMB TO DOWDISM. I try to remain focused on substance here, but I am also puzzled about why someone running for president would analogize themselves to an (albeit fictional) mob family. And, of course, Cox is correct that the punchline is even more horrific; embodying a mass murder and his enabler is one thing, but choosing a song by History's Greatest Monster is well beyond the pale of human decency. I'm afraid I'm going to have to, er, continue to not support her primary campaign. (Via MY.)

--Scott Lemieux

POWER MODE. The Campaign for America's Future will be posting the 2008 Democratic presidential candidate speeches online later today. Like Addie, I'd particularly recommend Barack Obama's to those who have been worried that he has been playing things a little too cool of late, or been chastened by inside-the-Beltway campaign consultants into adopting too cerebral and dispassionate a pose. He was anything but that this afternoon. Indeed, watching him at the TBA conference, I started to wonder if perhaps the best way to understand his campaign style is by reference to energy-efficient appliances, which spend a few moments a day in masterful and electric action, and the rest of the time whir along in quiet stand-by mode. Not every stump appearance can be the best one of a candidate's career, but this was a speech that truly mattered, and Obama knocked it out of the park.

I suspect we're going to see a lot more of that as the campaign progresses. He'll be low-key on a day-to-day basis, and just when people start to wonder if he's changed, turn on that big Obama grin and electrify the crowd. By conserving his energy he may well also escape that curse of challenger-candidates everywhere, peaking too early. Today he had the audience hopping to its feet from his rock-star entry to the thunderous applause that met the close of his remarks. Tomorrow, he may well be back to his quieter workaday style.

tba2007

--Garance Franke-Ruta

OBAMA'S MAGIC. So, call me crazy, but there's this thing I do when I'm reporting on speeches designed for motivation and inspiration; I've done it while chasing the religious right, the labor movement, and the self-described religious left. What I'm talking about is opening up the emotional core of myself to feel the mojo wafting through a room, allowing changes in those feelings to link to words, rather than the other way around. It's a surefire way of reading dynamic flows, of getting an undulating view of a moving current rather than a snapshot of a river. And so it was -- now here's where all the fellas get to make fun of me, and my favorite commenter, aimai, can accuse me of internalized sexism -- that I found myself weeping during Barack Obama's levitational address, during which I found myself embodying a veritable panoply of cliches, including goosebumps and smeared mascara.

It's not that the junior senator from Illinois said anything that I hadn't already heard him say: it was the way he made use of the energy that was in the room. He took what the crowd so eagerly wanted to give him, channeled it through, and gave it back to them. He became more preacher than politician -- no, make that faith healer -- as he delivered his standard lines about how hope is the reason he is standing here before us, meaning the hope that the civil rights activists had that they could indeed prevail against racism.

I leave it to my colleague and blog-sis, Garance Franke-Ruta, to contextualize the means by which Obama accomplishes this, and how he plays to different audiences. But I sure did feel sorry for John Edwards for having to follow Obama, especially with a speech that would have been received with a good bit of enthusiasm on its own merits, were it not for Edwards's unfortunate placement on the program.

The former senator for North Carolina opened his speech by invoking his wife, Elizabeth, who is widely admired as an inspirational figure, sending the crowd "her love." The rest of his speech, full of good ideas and earnest appeals, fell rather flat, except for at the end, when he asked his audience to look at America through the eyes of the rest of the world, as the genocide continues in Darfur without action from the U.S., or as bodies floated down the streets of New Orleans. Best line: "It is time to ask Americans to be patriotic about something other than war."

There was, I concede, a hush. Indeed, his words were sobering, as was the knowledge, of which I'm quite certain, that a man who would probably make a decent president doesn't stand a chance. It's just not his time. The moment -- and momentum -- is Obama's. Can he be elected? Sure he can -- he'll just have to walk through hell. By the time an Obama presidency would even begin, we'll have had a very good idea of what he's made of.

tba2007

--Adele M. Stan

SEEKING ANTI-ABORTION LAWYER, ASAP. There's a lot of mopping up to do after Gonzales v. Carhart, and Americans United for Life, one of the central addresses for model anti-abortion legislation, is getting busy. In a letter on AUL's website, under the headline "A New Dawn," the group's president lays out its strategy for a post-Carhart era. The decision, he writes, restores deference to the states, reinforces the importance of informed consent, and "opens the door for utilizing all our research on the negative impact of abortion on women."

Which means, he continues, that they'll be looking at litigation and legislation in the states, and "we expect to be very busy." In order to "take full advantage of these new opportunities," AUL, which is holding its annual "Legal Institute" is in Chicago this week, is "looking to hire two additional attorneys as quickly as funding permits." Send resumes to Clarke D. Forsythe, Esq., President, AUL.

--Sarah Blustain

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. With the meeting-of-the-lefty-minds that's going on this week at Take Back America, we thought it was an appropriate time to highlight the cover story from our July/August issue, in which John Judis and Ruy Teixeira take stock of their "emerging Democratic majority" theory as it applies to the 2006 election -- and the '08 race.

Seeing 2006 as an anomaly, political analyst Michael Barone argued that population growth patterns favor Republican-leaning areas in the interior of the country rather than Democratic-leaning areas on the coasts.

We take a different view: that this election signals the end of a fleeting Republican revival, prompted by the Bush administration's response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the return to political and demographic trends that were leading to a Democratic and center-left majority in the United States. In 2006 the turn to the Democrats went well beyond those offices directly concerned with the war in Iraq or affected by congressional scandals. While Democrats picked up 30 House seats and six Senate seats, they also won six governorships, netted 321 state legislative seats, and recaptured legislative chambers in eight states. That's the kind of sweep that Republicans enjoyed in 1994, which led to Republican control of Congress and of the nation's statehouses for the remainder of the decade.

Read the whole thing here. (Elsewhere in our new issue, for subscribers only, we've got pieces by Robert Borosage on how conservatism failed Bush and pollster Stan Greenberg on what Democrats will face if they succeed in retaking the White House.)

Also on the site today, Kay Steiger notes that, in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision gutting employers' right to sue for pay discrimination, Congress needs to step up and pass the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Plus, Scott Lemieux debunks the myth that pro-gay-rights decisions in the courts have produced a serious backlash.

--The Editors

"WINNING THE CRITICAL WAR OF WILL." Via K-Lo, Fred Thompson endorses the Green Lantern theory of foreign policy in his response to Harry Reid's critique of General Peter Pace.

Harry Reid, though, has taken a different route. He made his statement about General Pace on a conference call with fringe elements of the blogosphere who think we're the bad guys. This is a place where even those who think the 9/11 attacks were an inside job find a home ...

But Reid's comments are not meant for logical analysis. He proclaimed the war lost some time ago, and the surge as a failure even before the additional troops were on the ground. The problem is that every one of Reid's comments I've noted here has also been reported gleefully by Al Jazeera and other anti-American media. Whether he means to or not, he's encouraging our enemies to believe that they are winning the critical war of will.

--Sam Rosenfeld

RICHARDSON: IRAQ NO, AFGHANISTAN YES. As part of the phenomenon that Matt discussed a while back, I must confess to having had little interest in the candidacy of former New Mexico Governor and UN Ambassador Bill Richardson before seeing him speak here this morning at the Take Back America conference. It's not like I'm declaring him as my candidate or anything, but he's a good bit more interesting than I had been willing to consider before. (I had nearly choked on the saccharine several weeks ago in his telling of the story, to Paula Zahn on CNN's icky Dems-and-religion night, of his Latina grandma giving him a crucifix to keep in his pocket as a good luck charm when he played in Little League.)

But today, he proved to be a most engaging fellow with some serious stands, especially on climate change and energy policy. On Iraq, he's simultaneously including himself among the top-tier candidates while setting himself apart from Obama, Clinton and Edwards by claiming to be the only one who opposes "leaving behind" a single troop in Iraq (other than those detailed to the embassy). A candidate for the women of Code Pink to love?

When it comes to Afghanistan, that's another story. "I'm for our involvement in Afghanistan," Richardson said in answer to a question I asked at his after-speech press conference. "There's a clear multinational force there; NATO is there... al-Qaeda and the Taliban still pose a threat... I would refurbish our commitment there."

While liberals rally around the cause of ending the American adventure in Iraq, no one, on any side, really quite knows what to do about Afghanistan, which is every bit as broken as it was when our forces first arrived there. Relations between the U.S.-backed government and next-door neighbor Pakistan are frosty; relations between the Taliban and Pakistani intelligence forces are chummy; and the Musharraf dictatorship in Pakistan is looking very shaky these days (though it's been looking pretty shaky since 2001). And did I mention that Pakistan has nukes?

Richardson knows the players well. In 1998, he tried to broker a peace deal between the Taliban and rival war lords. He didn't get far. But things are different now, and I suppose that, whatever the outcome of the presidential race, there's a role for Richardson in the coming administration.

tba2007

--Adele M. Stan

CULTURE OF LIFE. If anyone still thinks we should refer to the anti-abortion movement as "pro-life," this event next week should change their mind. The forced-pregnancy movement is holding a four-day rally to honor Paul Hill, who murdered abortion provider Dr. John Britton and his clinic escort in Pensacola, Florida in 1994.

Why Milwaukee? Why not? There are people here who recognize Paul Hill as a hero, and we would love to welcome others from around the country who share our belief. Hopefully, in the future, others will host events in their cities.

The event will feature a re-enactment of the day Hill murdered Britton. Fun for the whole family!

For a compelling read on Dr. Britton's life and death, check out Tom Junod's National Magazine Award-winning feature, "The Abortionist." This is how Junod describes Paul Hill and his life's work:

His church "excommunicated" him. Hill is not without a congregation, though; there are others who believe as he does that Christians have to live above the laws of man, answering only to the laws of God; who believe that the Bible not only allows them but asks them, commands them, to kill in the cause of Christ. [...] There is a movement, by God, and Hill, by virtue of his residence in Pensacola, is at its center. He is in the vanguard of a historical inevitability, yes, and now, with the trial of Michael Griffin about to begin, they will gather together, all the Christians who envision the gun as the tool necessary to reconfigure our society in accordance with God's laws, and they will announce themselves.

"Coming out here in front of the clinic used to be considered outrageous," Hill says as the cars go in and out of the clinic's parking lot. "Now it's old hat. Rescue used to be outrageous. Now it's old. The next thing will be the use of force. Right now it's the focus of a lot of attention, but pretty soon it will be old hat and we'll wonder why we didn't think of it sooner."

Clearly Hill's "congregation" of homegrown terrorists is alive and well.

--Ann Friedman

ELECTABILITY. Ben Smith asks:

Well, two questions, really:

Is John Edwards allowed to suggest he's more electable than Hillary and Obama because he's a Southern white guy?

And -- is it true?

I'm both unsure that he's wrong, and unsure that it's wise for him to tread this ground. What is true, and what I argued in my profile a few months back, is that Edward's Southern accent and manners are critical in his ability to project a much more combative, sharp form of liberalism than the others are offering. What would sound like Marxism from the mouth of Howard Dean or Hillary Clinton sounds like good, old-fashioned, American populism from Edwards. It's a genuine advantage. But whether he's right that a white male is more electable -- and it sure hasn't proven an infallible strategy for the Democrats recently -- it's a dangerous argument to engage.

--Ezra Klein

THE DEFICIT DODGE. I'm at the Take Back America conference's Economics panel, where Rep. Jerry Nadler just made a good point on the deficit dodge. "You deliberately create a huge deficit," so that whenever someone says they need 75 new schools, or investment in health care, or an expanded EITC, the Republicans can say, "well, we'd love to, but we have this hundred-million dollar deficit."

This is what starve-the-beast economics have evolved into. The working theory used to be that you rob the government of revenue, and then it can't spend. That's not the case. As Cato's William Niskanen has proven, starve-the-beast strategies actually encourage spending by divorcing politicians from the economic consequences of their actions. Where higher taxes used to disincentivize more spending, now you can just keep passing the buck onto future generations. So we get the deficit dodge. It's not that the GOP cares about the deficit, but the people, in theory, do, and it can be used to obstruct otherwise popular investments. So they build it up while in office in order to fund the priorities they won't tax for, then talk it up when in the minority to block liberal legislation that they don't like. Neat trick.

tba2007

--Ezra Klein

LEFT IN THE WEST. The Hill discusses recent changes that have improved Democrats' '08 Senate prospects a bit. Several of them are happening in the West, where, as we've been hearing for a while, Democrats have been resurgent and well-placed to capitalize on opportunities as they arise. To be momentarily callous here, the death of Republican Senator Craig Thomas in Wyoming opens up a seat Republicans will have to defend next year; though the state's governor is Democratic, that obviously remains a deeply red state and would be a tough prospect. Wayne Allard's pending retirement in Colorado opens up a far better chance for Dems to pick up a seat. The Hill also mentions New Mexico's attorneygate-tarred Pete Domenici and Alaska's Ted Stevens (connected to a burgeoning state corruption scandal) as incumbents who could potentially undergo swift reversals of fortune.

Meanwhile in Nebraska, Chuck Hagel is facing a primary challenge from the dead-ender Republican right while rumors keep growing that the deeply aggravating Pain Caucus emeritus member Bob Kerrey is going to throw his hat in the race.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE BIG REVEAL. Beyond the question of whether or not Hillary Clinton will be booed again, the big buzz surrounding this week's Take Back America conference is about tonight's Gala Dinner, where the blogger long known as Digby will be given an award sources say she plans to accept in person, thus ending her tenure as the best-known still-pseudonymous liberal blogger in the 'sphere.

tba2007

--Garance Franke-Ruta

EVERYTHING IS NOT P.R. The New York Times had a potentially interesting "White House Note" yesterday morning, carrying Sheryl Gay Stolberg's byline, on the possible confrontation over executive privilege if the White House refuses to comply with the subpoenas for Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor to testify. Rather than defiance, the White House reaction to the subpoenas so far has been silence, reflecting apparently a dispute or uncertainty about how to respond.

Stolberg presents this as entirely a public relations problem: If Bush resists, "he risks looking like he is stonewalling -- at the very moment that he is trying to salvage his domestic agenda." If the White House complies, it risks subpoenas for Karl Rove, and the image of Rove hauled up to testify before what the president refers to, somewhat disgracefully, as "show trials." "There's a big problem for both the White House and Congress on these subpoenas, and that is that everybody looks bad," said Ari Fleischer, Mr. Bush's first press secretary. "The White House doesn't want to get into a visible public executive privilege court fight because it makes it look like they're hiding something. Congress shouldn't go down this subpoena line because they're only cooking their own goose. It's great for the base, but lousy for the country."

OK, I appreciate that appearances matter. We live in an age of images. But, um, not to be totally naive: doesn't the legal reality matter, too? Doesn't the question of whether the executive privilege claim is legitimate or totally bogus have some bearing here? And I don't need to be told that both sides are at risk of appearing to go too far. But I would like to learn something about the actual legal claims. Would the White House succeed in a claim of executive privilege? Is it all just a matter of which judges they draw to hear the case? Or is this another one of those cases of pure bluster, where even Bush-appointed judges wouldn't be able to find a logic to justify the claim?

The story quotes one legal expert: "'I think they have excellent prospects of winning in court,' said David Rivkin, who served in the White House counsel's office under the first President Bush." Of course, that's not just David Rivkin, former White House lawyer, speaking, that's one half of the pair, David Rivkin and Lee Casey, Federalist Society old-timers who populate the op-ed pages with arguments for a rather extreme view of executive power as essentially unlimited. What Rivkin considers "excellent prospects" of winning might be based on his own view of executive power, and not that of the mainstream.

But if Rivkin is right on the legal question, then doesn't the public relations question answer itself? If courts are likely to uphold the White House's claim of executive privilege, then why not pursue it? No one would consider the White House to be "stonewalling" if their claim is consistently upheld. And no one would consider Congress to be "cooking their own goose" if courts uphold their subpoenas. Sometimes, reality matters.

--Mark Schmitt

QUIEN ES MAS SCHMALTZY? Andrew Sullivan -- who is daily reminding disappointed readers that he is, in fact, still a conservative with his attacks on diversity (something liberals prefer to think of as egalitarianism in action) and praise for attacks on the left -- today mocks this treacly Maya Angelou video for Hillary Clinton. And, indeed, it is pretty darn cloying -- the music! ugh! -- as well as a reminder that Ms. Angelou owes the Clintons for making her the nation's Poet Laureate in 1993.

Still, for pure schmaltz nothing can top Mitt Romney's website, which is truly an endless font of campaign cheese. Take, for example, his recently posted narrative about meeting his wife, Ann Romney:

We met in elementary school - we did. I was a Cub Scout, and she was riding a horse bareback over some railroad tracks. What do Cub Scouts do when they see a little girl on a horse? We picked up stones and threw them.

The time I really noticed her, however, was when she was a sophomore. She was just about to turn 16, and we went to Cindy White's house for a party. She came there with someone else. I saw her across the room and said, "Wow, has she changed!" I went over and talked to her and told her date that I lived closer to her home than her date did and I'd give her a ride home if it was OK. And I did. I asked her to go on my first date on March 21st of 1965 - we went to the Sound of Music that was just coming out. We saw that movie and I don't know what it was in terms of the magic that love is.

Clearly, she was beautiful then. But there was something else that happened very quickly ... I didn't want to be anywhere else but with Ann. I wanted to be with her all the time and couldn't imagine being anywhere else besides being with her. And so, at the senior prom, as we danced a little bit, we went outside of the school and I turned to her and said, "Ann, would you marry me?" And she said, "Yes."

That makes him sound so clean-cut I'm suprised he doesn't squeak when he walks.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. Besides Eric Alterman's print piece on Marty Peretz, Sarah Posner reports on an increasingly popular tactic in anti-gay-rights activism: the Christian right's argument, often articulated by African-American spokesmen, that laws meant to protect homosexuals constitute acts of outright discrimination and oppression against religious citizens and organizations. Meanwhile, Paul Starr, in another free preview from our new July/August print issue and on the eve of Congress possibly resuscitating the immigration reform fight, makes the case that "passing even an imperfect compromise of the kind the Senate had been debating would be far better than doing nothing," and argues that progressives should support a modestly proportioned guest worker program. Take a look, and comment on the articles.

--The Editors

DEPRESSING. It's definitely unpleasant to consider that of the courses available in Iraq -- the status quo, a reduced but still substantial force, a massive infusion of troops to try to engage in serious state-building, or actually withdrawing -- the one all major Democratic candidates are advocating is the second most irresponsible. All that can be said for it is that if you're going to keep a force that clearly can't accomplish anything in terms of building a stable state, it's better to do it more cheaply. A much larger force is also a bad idea (and beside the point, given that the necessary troops don't exist), but at least one could argue that a much different strategy might produce a different outcome. Doing slightly less of a strategy that has failed and crossing your fingers, however, is just indefensible.

--Scott Lemieux

TAIBBI VS. LIBERALS. "The biggest problem with modern American liberalism may be the word itself," writes Matt Taibbi. "There's just something about the word, liberal, something about the way it sounds -- it just hits the ear wrong. If it were an animal it would be something squirming and hairless."

Are we not past this by now? After endless books by George Lakoff and Jeffrey Feldman and Geoffrey Numberg on words and framing and language and linguistics, have we really not ascended beyond fruitless whining about how the word "liberal" somehow makes you feel like less of a holy warrior? Apparently not. And Taibbi goes further, quoting three anonymous "iconoclastic columnists and journalists who've had bylines in places like The Nation"(!) who get all quivery when someone tries to call them a liberal. "When the people who are the public voice of a political class are afraid to even wear the party colors in public, that's a bad sign," writes Taibbi, "and it's worth asking what the reasons are." This is your crisis, Liberalism: Self-defined journalistic iconoclasts don't like you as a descriptor.

Taibbi goes on, with an admirable lack of self-consciousness, to first blame Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity and Michael Savage for saying mean things about liberals, and then - in the next paragraph, natch -- writes, "the American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility." Writer, read thyself.

The article continues like this. Liberals ignore "hardcore" economic issues but whine about the PATRIOT Act "in a way that reveals unmistakably, to those who are paying close attention, a not-so-secret desire to be relevant and threatening enough to warrant the extralegal attention of the FBI." Lucky thing that Matt Taibbi was paying such close attention to discern the secret reverse psychology animating the ACLU.

Taibbi's an interesting writer. His gifts as a prose stylist are undeniable. His evisceration of Tom Friedman's The World is Flat stands as one of the great achievement's of the written word. But this skill with a one-liner, this very sharpness of pen, can also convince editors to publish tripe like this piece, which is an endless series of assertions and rhetorical questions -- no evidence needed. Who, for instance, is on this Left? Taibbi writes that "Thus," -- and there's really no previous supporting evidence requiring a thus -- "the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion." Who are these "people?" I assume not Andy Stern, or John Sweeney, or Bruce Raynor. I assume not George Miller or John Edwards or Taibbi's own hero, Bernie Sanders.

And the points Taibbi makes don't even support his arguments. "Americans who self-identify as liberals have an average annual income of $71,000 -- the highest-grossing political category in America. They're also the best-educated class, with over one in four being post-graduates," he writes. Okay: Matt Taibbi went to Bard College, a "small, highly selective, four-year liberal arts college" with an endowment of $150 million. His father is an NBC reporter. Is he really the guy to be making this critique? Bernie Sanders, for his part, attended the University of Chicago, home of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys. Is he suspect? The Bankruptcy Bill, atrocity though it is, was blocked, by Democrats, every year between 1997 and 2005. But it turns out that when you lose the presidency and the Congress, you lose the capacity to set the agenda.

Meanwhile, Taibbi's big conclusion: "That, in sum, is why I don't call myself a liberal. To me the word "liberalism" describes an era whose time is past, a time when a liberal was defined more by who he was fighting against -- the Man -- than what he was fighting for. A liberal wielding power is always going to seem a bit strange because a liberal always imagines himself in an intrepid fight against power, not holding it. I therefore prefer the word "progressive," which describes in a neutral way a set of political values without having these class or aesthetic connotations." Great, I call myself a progressive too. But really, this linguistic substitution required Taibbi's 2,700 word shotgun blast at the left? Did we really need to kill perfectly good trees in order to publish platitudes like "when [liberals] start embracing their position of privilege and taking responsibility for the power they already have -- striving to be the leaders of society they actually are, instead of playing at being aggrieved subjects -- they'll come across as wise and patriotic citizens, not like the terminally adolescent buffoons trapped in a corny sixties daydream they often seem to be now?" I can't imagine so.

Oh, and Shakes has more. Much more. And she's not as genteel as I am. A taste: "[Taibbi] quotes only Senator Bernie Sanders, author and activist David Sirota, and investigative journalist and author Christian Parenti -- three well-educated, well-off white men with access -- thereby suggesting that what’s really wrong with the American Left just might be him." Ouch.

--Ezra Klein

MY MARTY PERETZ PROBLEM -- AND OURS. Our July/August print issue is now out, and as a free preview available to non-subscribers, Eric Alterman offers a retrospective feature on New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz. You'll want to take a look:

[D]uring his reign, Peretz has also done lasting damage to the cause of American liberalism. By turning TNR into a kind of ideological police dog, Peretz enjoyed the ability -- at least for a while -- to play a key role in defining the borders of "responsible" liberal discourse, thereby tarring anyone who disagreed as irresponsible or untrustworthy. But he did so on the basis of a politics simultaneously so narrow and idiosyncratic -- in thrall almost entirely to an Israel-centric neoconservatism -- that it's difficult to understand how the magazine's politics might be considered liberal anymore. Ironically Peretz's stance ultimately turned out to be not only out of step with most liberals but also most American Jews, who consistently cling to views far more dovish, both on Israel and on U.S. foreign policy generally, than those espoused in TNR.

It is a sad but true fact of American political life that liberals rarely exercise so much influence as when they happen to be endorsing conservative causes, and this temptation has proven consistently irresistible to Peretz and his magazine. TNR under Peretz has been a vehicle that proved extremely helpful to Ronald Reagan's wars in Central America and George Bush's war in Iraq. It provided seminal service to Newt Gingrich's and William Kristol's efforts to kill the Clinton plan for universal health care and offered intellectual legitimacy to Charles Murray's efforts to portray black people as intellectually inferior to whites. As for liberal causes, however … well, not so much.

But the final irony that must also be mentioned when discussing the legacy of Peretz's control of the magazine is the fact of the magazine itself. And I think any honest reader would be forced to admit that for many if not most of these years, The New Republic was, despite everything, a truly terrific little magazine. Frank Mankiewicz once famously quipped that Peretz had turned TNR into "a Jewish Commentary." This was funny but also unfair. Unlike Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, Peretz believed that his magazine should include the views of people with whom he disagrees. And for longer than one could have imagined -- due in large measure to the editorial talents of Michael Kinsley and Hendrik Hertzberg at the front of the magazine and Leon Wieseltier in the back, coupled with the writing talents of more youngish and underpaid liberal journalists than one can comfortably name in one sentence -- this gave TNR a political frisson entirely absent from more monochromatic political magazines of both the left and right. It was alive with passion for politics and literature and peopled by some of the most talented writers and thinkers to grace any masthead, anytime, anywhere. While Wieseltier alone has remained, steadily steering the back of the ship as the front veers from war to war, controversy to controversy, many of the rest of TNR's alumni have gone on to shape American journalism for better and worse from more remunerative perches at The New Yorker, Time, Harper's, and The Atlantic, and many of the nation's (remaining) great newspapers.

...

My Marty problem -- and ours -- is just this: By pretending to speak as a liberal but simultaneously endorsing the central crusades of the right, he has enlisted The New Republic in the service of a ruinous neoconservative doctrine, as the magazine sneered at those liberals who stood firm in the face of its insults. He has done so, moreover, in support of a blinkered and narrow view of Israeli security that, again, celebrates hawks and demonizes doves. Had the United States or even Israel followed the policies advocated by those genuine liberals whom TNR routinely slandered, much of the horror of the past four years would have been happily avoided -- as most of its editors (but not Peretz) now admit. At the same time, the hard work of coming up with a genuinely liberal alternative to the neoconservative foreign-policy nightmare, an alternative to which TNR might have usefully contributed, remains not merely undone but undermined in the pages of the magazine.

If the sale of TNR had meant liberating liberalism from the burden of Peretz's myriad obsessions and insinuations, TNR's loss of its independence might have been liberalism's gain. Alas, as Peretz himself has pointed out, the Asper family, which controls CanWest, happens to share these exact obsessions, right up to the point of censoring its newspapers' coverage of the Middle East conflict and replacing the word "Palestinian" with the word "terrorist" when it suits the owners' purposes. Peretz will no longer be incurring TNR's losses, but he will remain the Aspers' man at the helm. However much Frank Foer sincerely seeks to recapture the liberalism of the magazine's storied past, Peretz's continued presence will likely continue to push it in a rightward direction.

--The Editors

BLIND JUSTICE. Remember all those statues of justice as a blindfolded woman holding the scales in balance? The reality is just a little bit different. Justice these days might not be quite so blind, especially in the Department of Justice, where the party affiliations of prospective employees have been checked before hiring decisions are made. The person holding the scales is also not terribly likely to be a female, and the contents of those scale cups might surprise some of you, too. For instance, did you know that religious discrimination is one of the main areas of focus for the department?

A recent New York Times article discusses how well the Department of Justice has served the religious base of the Republican party by focusing its resources on fighting discrimination against the religious. Too bad that the focus on these beneficiaries has meant less reinforcement of civil rights in general. From the New York Times article:

Some critics say that many of the Justice Department's religious-oriented initiatives are outside its mandate from Congress. While statutes prohibit religious discrimination in areas like employment and housing, no laws address some of the issues in which the department has become involved.

"They are engaging in freewheeling social engineering," said Ayesha Khan, counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and "using the power of the federal government to put in place an ideological, not constitutional agenda."

The department declined to make available for interviews Assistant Attorney General Wan J. Kim, who heads the civil rights division, or Eric Treene, who holds the newly created position of special counsel for religious discrimination.

Ms. Magnuson, the Justice Department spokeswoman, said it was justified in devoting so much attention to the issue because Congress has demonstrated its interest by including religion in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and enacting the 2000 law involving zoning restrictions, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

I'm not sure what to make of all this. Perhaps the old saying about "elections having consequences" will do. On the other hand, some of those consequences are pretty surprising. Take the new hiring policies of the Department of Justice:

Figures provided by the department show that from 2003 through 2006, there was a notable increase of hirings from religious-affiliated institutions like Regent University and Ave Maria University. The department hired eight from those two schools in that period, compared to 50 from Harvard and 13 from Yale.

Several career lawyers said that some political appointees favored the religious-oriented employees, intervening to steer $1,000 to $4,000 annual merit bonuses to them.

Ms. Oliveri and several other law professors said placement officers and faculty at their schools found that graduates seeking work at the Justice Department had a better chance by cleansing their resumes of liberal affiliations while emphasizing ties to the Federalist Society, a Washington conservative group, or membership in a religious fellowship.

Ms. Oliveri recalled that when she was hired in 2000 by the Justice Department, she was impressed by the accomplishments of her peers. But once the political appointees controlled the hiring, she said, "The change in the quality of people who were chosen was very pronounced."

When the front office sent around the resumes of those newly hired for the honors program, she said, "It was obvious what they had: conservative and religious bona fides."

--J. Goodrich

HACKISH CONSERVATIVE THINK TANKS: I agree with Ezra that Heritage is the most hackish of the Big Three conservative think tanks in Washington (AEI has some non-ideologues and Cato is honest about how ideological they are.) But I think it should be added that outside Washington reside some pretty shameful rightwing think tanks as well. Consider, for instance, the California-based Hoover Institution, which has "scholars" like Peter Schweizer, author of Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy. This intellectually incoherent smear job on the personal lives of predictable targets like Michael Moore and Barbara Streisand has zero value in terms of policy analysis.

Meanwhile, as I've written before on TAPPED, City Journal, the publication of the neo-conservative Manhattan Institute, shamelessly flacks for Giuliani's presidential candidacy (if my organization did anything like that we'd lose our tax status in a heartbeat.)

These kinds or organizations may not be perceived as influential within Washington (they don't have a roster of former Reagan and Bush officials working for them and so forth.) But books like Schweizer's influence the public debate (I once debated him about it on an NPR affiliate), and giving him the imprinteur of a think tank allows him to be taken more seriously than he deserves. And the Manhattan Institute, as Giuliani's house organ, had a lot of influence on local public policy during his administration. Perhaphs its time for someone to start an organization that systematically rebuts the nonensense spewed by rightwing think tanks, as a complement to what Media Matters does to FOX News and rightwing talk radio.

--Ben Adler

RESOLVING THE LIBBY-PARDON DEBATE. Once you recall that Libby fixed septic tanks and dutifully attended a bachelor party back in 1994, the case for a pardon becomes clear, no? No? Take one last look at the petty highlights of the Libby character testimonials, today on TAP Online.

--The Editors

TAKING THE PENTAGON TO TASK. The Pentagon today admittedtoday it's understaffed on doctors to treat mental illness. The House Veterans Affairs Committee has already begun the process of gathering expert evidence to support more funds designated for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental illnesses. The Pentagon's task force estimated as many as 40 percent of returning soldiers may suffer from some form of mental illness, and National Guard members are reporting higher levels of stress than other branches. The task force gave Defense Secretary Robert Gates a deadline six months from now to have a plan of action for dealing with soldiers with mental illness. Experts attribute this to the varying degrees of training among the armed forces.

--Kay Steiger

A NEW IRAN TIMELINE EMERGES. Back in February, U.S. point man on Iran Nick Burns told the Brookings Institution (.pdf): 'We have got some time" for diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran to show results. Now State department officials are signaling, the window for multilateral diplomacy is "unwinding." The immediate cause of the change in tone? The U.S. is badgering allies on the UN Security Counil to impose a third round of sanctions on Iran for failing to comply with the International Atomic Energy Agency on its nuclear program. "Look, the third round of sanctions is critical," a State Department official said. "If we're up there begging and bargaining and negotiating over the graduation of what are largely ineffective sanctions, then fine, time is not long..."

But on a June 6th visit to Washington for the US-Israel Strategic Dialogue, the Israeli team leader, Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, said he and Secretary of State Rice agreed to review sanctions' effectiveness at the end of the year. "Sanctions must be strong enough to bring about change in the Iranians by the end of 2007," Mofaz was cited by JTA.

So a new timeline would appear to be emerging: if the current route of multilateral diplomacy and economic pressure hasn't achieved a change in Iran's behavior on the nuclear front by the end of the year, there is likely to be renewed and concerted pressure on the Bush administration to contemplate military action.

-- Laura Rozen

SHADOW GOVERNMENT IN WAITING. The Bush administration had the American Enterprise Institute as its ideological brain trust and frequent employment agency. The next White House will likely have the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a new, bi-partisan, national security-oriented think tank at 13th and Pennsylvania Avenue. CNAS launches a roll-out June 27, featuring a new Iraq report that has already generated some interest around town. The paper, Phased Transition: a Responsible Way Forward and Out of Iraq, is expected to argue for reducing the US troop presence in Iraq by 100,000 to 60,000 by the end of 2008, and a total withdrawal by 2012. In the short term, the report also urges reorienting the US military mission in Iraq toward an enhanced advisory and training role, and focusing on a "bottom up" approach of reinforcing local security forces over the current top-down approach of propping up the Iraqi central government. "We would like this administration not to hand off a catastrophe," says CNAS' director of external affairs Price Floyd, a 17-year veteran of the State Department.

Led by two defense experts and veterans from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Dr. Kurt Campbell, and Michele Flournoy, and with a board that includes Bush's former deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Clinton-era Defense Secretary Bill Perry and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, CNAS has attracted some of the rising stars -- both uniformed and civilian -- of the Pentagon intelligentsia. On the QT, we hear prez aspirant Hillary Clinton, former councilor to Secretary of State Rice Philip Zelikow, rumored future Dem administration national security advisor Jim Steinberg, and Senator Chuck Hagel are slated to address the CNAS kickoff at the Willard. But it will be the ability of the younger thinkers driving the enterprise to come up with new and transformative ideas for the next administration that is the real test of its clout.

--Laura Rozen

GAY PANIC. Can it really be true that there's such a thing as a "gay panic" defense, "wherein "the defendant claims that he or she was the object of romantic or sexual advances by the victim...[and] found the propositions so offensive and frightening that it brought on a psychotic state characterized by unusual violence?" Apparently, there is. According to Wikipedia, "the defense rarely wins acquittals, but it is often successful at reducing culpability and mitigating punishments. In the cases where it does so, the verdict is often cited as a case of jury nullification rather than being one based upon legal fact or precedent." Meanwhile, read Rachel Sklar on the media's utter inattention to a horrific hate crime in Indiana, where the "victims," obviously in the throas of gay panic, responsed to a purported sexual advance by beating the victim, "first upstairs, then downstairs, then in the back of a pickup truck en route to a remote spot where they dumped him, first stopping to snap a cellphone pic and send it to a friend." They left him to die, came back, collected the body, and stored it in a garage for months. But the body wasn't of a white woman, and nor was it pregnant, so the media didn't much care.

--Ezra Klein

MARCHING LEFT. Michael Kinsley notes something that has been apparent for some time:

On no issue is history moving faster than on "gay rights"--an already antiquated term for full and equal participation and acceptance of gay men and women in American life. The work is not finished, of course, but what took black Americans more than a century, gays have accomplished in two or three decades (thanks in no small part to blacks, who designed the template for this kind of social revolution). We still argue about it, but the whole spectrum of debate has moved left. A right-wing thug like Tom DeLay or Newt Gingrich probably has more advanced views about homosexuals than dainty liberals of the past century like Adlai Stevenson or Hubert Humphrey. And whatever the actual views, public expressions of overt homophobia are now unacceptable from any national politician.

Kinsley is right that the speed with which the debate on gay rights has shifted to the left is simply incredible. Think about where we were on this issue just five years or so ago. Howard Dean, we were told by the sage pundits, would inevitably be seen as outside the mainstream, because he signed a civil unions bill in Vermont. Now support for civil unions is the position of the moderate middle. Remember what an enormous to-do it was when Ellen DeGeneres came out? Magazine covers, thousands of articles, much hand-wringing - and that was April 1997, just ten years ago.

And the Republicans? They're just racing to keep up. Find me a Republican politician today who'll say what conservatives used to say - that gays should be prevented from teaching in public schools, or that they should be fired from their jobs. (Note how the hapless Tommy Thompson had to backtrack when he took the latter position). No, today they say they're just drawing the line at marriage, but they don't want anyone to be discriminated against. As Kinsley notes, a couple of decades back they would have been seen as crazy liberals, upending the social order with their radical homosexual agenda.

Not that Democrats have exactly been models of moral righteousness on this subject - they've generally been content to keep a step or two behind public opinion, gripped as usual by fear of offending the people who dislike them the most. Listening to them proclaim their support for civil unions but their opposition to marriage equality, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they're keeping their actual beliefs secret lest they be tarred as radicals. History won't be kind to that positioning, either.

Though gay rights is the hot-button social issue of the moment, it's important to keep in mind that on a whole range of social issues, the country is moving steadily to the left, and will continue to do so. Forty years or so ago, "conservative" beliefs held that women belonged in the home, not in the workplace - and if they had to work, they should be paid less than men; and that blacks and whites should be strongly discouraged, if not prohibited by law, from marrying, to name just two. Today those beliefs belong to a dwindling number of reactionary bigots (and a couple of Supreme Court justices).

And there is simply no doubt which direction opinions will continue to move: issues like these show a strong "cohort effect," meaning a divide between generations that results in steady change over time. The most socially conservative Americans are the oldest, those who are now in retirement. Each successive generation is more progressive than the one before it, down to today's young people, for whom a racially and sexually diverse environment is a given. I graduated from a public high school in New Jersey in the mid-1980s, and there was not a single out gay person in my class of 500. Today, there are gay-straight alliances in schools all over the country. Those kids aren't going to become more conservative when they get older - this country is simply not going back.

Just as today Republicans call themselves "the party of Lincoln" in order to obscure their (and their ideological brethren's) despicable history on race (as though there is any doubt which side the likes of George W. Bush and Newt Gingrich would have been on in the Civil War), in years to come they will try to distance themselves from the gay-baiting and bigotry in which they currently wallow. My guess is it'll happen sooner than we think.

--Paul Waldman

THOMPSON: GRISWOLD WAS WRONG. I suppose there's nothing terribly surprising about Fred Thompson asserting that Roe v. Wade is the worst Supreme Court decision since 1967. And nor is it surprising that he would repeat the abject nonsense that overturning Roe would "send the issue back to the states" (a claim that the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the arbitrary federal ban on "partial-birth" abortions in Carhart II makes straightforwardly false.) Since many anti-choicers are smart enough to be vague about this, however, it is worth noting the significance of Thompson's claim that Roe was "was fabricated out of whole cloth." If one argues that Roe has no basis on constitutional jurisprudence, however, then it's not only Roe but Griswold that is wrong.

If Democrats are smart, this should be a major weapon against Thompson and any Republican who makes similar arguments. As Amanda notes, Roe is a popular decision, generally favored by 2-to-1 majorities. It should be pointed out often that Thompson opposes any constitutional right of privacy, which means not only that the states and the federal government can force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term under virtually all circumstances, but they can also prevent married couples from using contraception in their own homes. Supporters of reproductive freedom should be able to use these openings to move the debate onto favorable ground.

--Scott Lemieux

TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. In an excerpt from her recently published book, Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War, Senior Editor Tara McKelvey chronicles what life was like for soldiers assigned to guard Iraqi detention facilities. The sexually-charged, drugged-up, violent environment played a huge role in creating the culture of abuse, she reports.

In November, he says, he overheard a conversation in the dining hall at Camp Victory. One soldier told his friends at a cafeteria table how detainees were being treated in Abu Ghraib. "They would hit the detainees as practice shots…The detainees would plead for mercy," according to Provance's sworn statement in Major General Antonio Taguba's March 2004 report on military abuse, "Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade."

"The whole table was howling with laughing," Provance tells me.

"They'd talk about their experience when the detainees were being humiliated and abused," says Provance. "It was always a joke story. It was like, 'Ha, ha. It was hilarious. You had to be there.' It would be funny if it were in a movie -- in a spoof like Naked Gun 2 ½."

He puts his chin in his hand and looks across the room. "You see these Iraqi people. It's hard to imagine they're human," he says. "They're just the stock detainee. Like a movie prop."

Read the whole thing here.

Also today, Terence Samuel has some thoughts on the still-alive-and-kicking immigration bill. And Judah Grunstein marvels at how newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been able to secure a parliamentary majority in just over a month in office.

--The Editors

THE PRICE OF POWER. A resident of Gaza describes the mood following the decisive Hamas victory:

A resident of a Hamas-dominated neighborhood, identifying himself only as Yousef for fear of reprisal by his neighbors, said Gazans would always back the winner, regardless of ideology.

"Today everybody is with Hamas because Hamas won the battle. If Fatah had won the battle they'd be with Fatah. We are a hungry people, we are with whoever gives us a bag of flour and a food coupon," said Yousef, 30. "Me, I'm with God and a bag of flour."

Hearts and minds, indeed.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

IMMIGRATION STRIKES BACK. To say a bit more on this, Reid and McConnell have struck a deal they think will shepherd the bill through the Senate. The key is a pay-to-play structure, in which precisely 22 amendments will be offered, and every Senator who offers an amendment agrees to vote for cloture in return. This, theoretically, will get the bill through cloture -- and Reid and McConnell wouldn't be bringing it back if they believed it would fail a second (well, technically, a fifth) time.

The next steps look like this. Reid could bring the bill to the floor as early as Monday, through a Rule 14 motion, wherein the Majority Leader pushes the legislation to the floor. A filing for cloture could come on Wednesday, and the vote could hit on Friday.

The question, of course, is what's different this time -- why will the bill succeed when it previously failed? There are a couple answers I'm hearing: One is that Bush is back (he was at the G-8 during the last push), and he's leaning hard. The second is this pay-to-play system. A surprisingly large amount of opposition came because various senators felt they were being shut out of the debate -- and anger was intensified because the next agenda item was the no-confidence vote on Gonzales. To close debate on the immigration bill for that the no-confidence vote caused serious resentment. Third is Trent Lott, who sees redemption in this bill, and says he's whipped enough GOP votes to clear cloture. Fourth is a counter-backlash from business and pro-immigration groups furious about the bill's original failure. Fifth is internal pressure from GOP strategists and party-builder types who don't want to lose the Hispanic vote for, well, ever.

Will these pressures pass the bill? Who knows? Reid and McConnell, however, would not be bringing it back up if they thought they were facing a second embarrassment. There's a second question, also, as to what the bill will look like when the amendments are closed. Dorgan's amendment to sunset the guest worker program remains in the legislation, and the other senators would be presumably less eager to enter into the pay-to-play structure if they didn't think they could alter the legislation, too.

--Ezra Klein

DEPT. OF YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP. The New York Times reports on the pursuit of justice in the new Iraq:

Two naval investigators testified at a military hearing here on Tuesday that their inquiry into allegations that marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005 was hampered by insurgent bombs and gunfire as well as the absence of basic equipment like tape recorders.

Worth reading in full.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

IS IMMIGRATION BACK? I'm hearing that not only the backers of the bill, but both Reid and McConnell, think they've hammered out a passable compromise. I'm a bit skeptical given the intensity the opposition showed last time around, but stay tuned.

--Ezra Klein

BARACK'N ROLL. As I noted elsewhere earlier today, the "I Got a Crush...on Obama" video Dana points to comes courtesy of the same singer-songwriter, Leah Kauffman, who gave us the SNL-spoof "My Box in a Box," which helps explain why it's kind of over the line. The question is: Does this kind of stuff help Obama? I couldn't tell at first if the video was actually supporting Obama or mocking the intensity of his supporters, and, while I'm sure it was intended to be all in good fun, it's a little to close to the damaging anti-Harold Ford "Playboy" ad for my taste. I mean, let's remember what country we're living in -- this may seem cute, but the last thing Obama needs is people thinking about him in the context of babes in bikinis. Also, FYI, the actress in the spot is one Amber Lee Ettinger, a model-actress better known for her work with Maxim and Hooters than her political acumen.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MASS. ROMANTICS. The Massachusetts legislature has rejected the proposed constitutional amendment calling for the revocation of gay and lesbian marriage rights and the restoration of bigotry by a 151-45 vote. It should be noted that this is precisely the opposite of what was predicted by proponents of the countermobilization myth, people for whom it's never the right time for social change, etc. Goodridge, we were often informed, was going to be a crushing setback for gay equality, but less than 5 years later it's supported by an overwhelming vote in the legislature. The backlash, conversely, had been confined to states... that already overwhelmingly opposed gay marriage.

Litigation is not, of course, appropriate in every situation, but sometimes it's effective. Gay rights is the kind of case where courts are likely to go first, and once they act 1) people realize that the predicted social apocalypse isn't occurring, and 2) legislators who may be reluctant to extend rights on a divisive issue are much less likely to revoke rights.

--Scott Lemieux

"YOU CAN BA-ROCK ME TONIGHT". Hillary leads Obama by 6 points among young women voters. But can she compete against Obama's dreaminess? Check out the newest volley in the election 2008 Internet video wars, "I Got a Crush...On Obama." Opening lines: "You seemed to float onto the floor, Democratic convention 2004. I never wanted anybody more than I want you. So I put down my Kerry sign, knew I had to make you mine. Barack, you're so sexy, you're so fine." (Warning: certain frames of this video are barely safe for work.)

--Dana Goldstein

OPTIONS ON GAZA. Well, it turns out I couldn't see where the U.S. ought to go in handling the situation in Gaza because, as The New York Times reported this morning, there are "Few Good Options for U.S. on Palestinian Violence", or perhaps, as another story reported, "a dwindling menu of policy options." I doubt the U.N. peacekeeping force that some Fatah officials and Israelis want will materialize, though I can see why the Israelis want it, because I can't imagine anything more likely to move Europeans away from their support for the Palestinians than having their countrymen caught in the crossfire of a Palestinian civil war. A European Union border force is also under discussion. The move the U.S. is considering of pressuring Israel to dismantle West Bank settlements as a way of shoring up support for Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas seems as likely to be interpreted as a reward to the Palestinian people for militarily defeating his forces in Gaza, and so shore up support for Hamas, instead. If settlement dismantling is to be done, it ought to be done because it is the right thing to do and as part of a broader move toward Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, rather than as a direct response to growing Hamas military power.

Perhaps the hardest thing for Israelis and Americans to do would be to begin to engage with Hamas through informal talks, a policy option the Times reports some in Israel are considering, though I suspect the present American government would be extremely reluctant to go along with this approach. And at least one Israeli observer sees the division of the Palestinians into a Gaza-Hamastan and a West Bank Fatah-land as an opportunity. Should Abbas use the Gaza takeover as an opportunity to annul the Basic Law, the observer suggests, "Israel should consider strengthening Abbas by transferring funds, renewing free movement for trade and lifting constraints on cooperation with Fatah members." In the meantime, the Israelis are also reportedly considering the rather extreme step of cutting power to Gaza-Hamastan's 1.3 million people, though not the water supply. Such a cut-off has been repeatedly considered over the years, and would likely only make the situation even worse, and the population more strongly pro-Hamas.

I can't help but think in looking at the situation that we are looking at the birth of the new Palestinian state. Think about it: Israel is more or less gone from Gaza, and now the democratically-elected government of Hamas is consolidating its monopoloy over the use of force there, a precondition for internal stability in any state. Gaza-Hamastan has a strong regional ally in Iran, from whom it has received funds, weapons, and military training. What if the idea that the now 40-year-old occupation can still be resolved into a peaceful two-state solution at the negotiating table is simply out of date, because it is too late for that? And what if the new Palestinian state is being born as we speak, but with a sword, and not with a pen? Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, is calling the military victory "Gaza's second liberation." Israel has no desire to recoccupy the Gaza strip. The need for managing electricity, water, and border issues will eventually force Israel into some kind of talks with the Gaza-Hamastan government. Fatah will continue to fight Hamas in Gaza for a time, but that opposition could also wither away due to Hamas's greater military strength and the reluctance of Israel or America to seriously arm it.

And what then? Then there it will be: a heavily-armed "liberated Gaza," under the control of an Islamist government and dedicated to Israel's destruction. Brutal, poor, and isolated from the world, it will be independent of the levers of American and Israeli influence. If the world continues to isolate it, it will cleave ever more tightly to Iran and those Arab nations that send in suitcases of cash to helps its people survive. And if the world choses to engage it, and to negotiate with it, it will have achieved its aim: recognition on its own uncompromising terms.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

HAWKERY BY ANY OTHER NAME. As a sidenote on all the Iran hawkery, I'm pretty tired of folks touting lines like "military action really should be the last resort" as some sort of anti-war sentiment. "We'll go to war, but we won't enjoy it" is not the same as "bombing Iran is a foolish idea advocated only by unreconstructed neocons and horsemen impatient for the apocalypse." The issue here is not whether you want to accomplish their disarmament by peaceful means -- theoretically, we all do. It's whether you support war with Iran if you fail.

--Ezra Klein

BLACK GOLD... NO, THE OTHER KIND. To follow up on Matt's point about liquid coal, take a gander at this recent Defense News article:

Coal dug from deep in Kentucky's rugged mountains generates some $4 billion a year for the state's economy, helping to lift it to the position of ninth-poorest among the 50 United States.

With 120 million tons mined in 2006, Kentucky coal production is down from its peak of 180 million tons in 1990. But a new customer for Kentucky coal could bring an economic boost to the beleaguered state.

And Rep. Geoff Davis, R-Ky., thinks he has found that customer -- the U.S. Air Force.
A Davis amendment to the 2008 Defense Authorization Act would give the Air Force $10 million to accelerate testing of jet fuel made from coal.

The push on liquid coal is not, by and large, going to be generated by genuine national security interests, by a desire for energy independence, or from a concern for the environment. Rather, the push will come from the coal industry and its allies in coal mining states. I'm all for making Kentucky the 10th poorest state in the nation (watch out, Alabama!) but coal mining generates few positive externalities, and tons of negative ones.

--Robert Farley