OVERESTIMATING AIPAC. My friend Ari Berman's new Nation piece on AIPAC gathers some insightful quotes and makes a valid point in the last paragaph about the gap between the moderately high level of public support for Israel and the exceedingly high level of congressional support.

But his explanation, which seems to boil down entirely to AIPAC's influence (or perceived influence) intimidating congressmen and senators into obeisance to their agenda betrays the tendency of Israel's critics to buy into an overly credulous view of AIPAC's power. For example, on the July 18th congressional resolution condemning Hamas and Hezbollah, Ari asserts, as fact, "AIPAC not only lobbied for the resolution; it had written it." But the only source he provides for that claim is former Carter Administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, not a big fan of Israel, and not someone currently in government.

Similarly, Ari describes AIPAC as "the American Jewish community's most important voice on the Hill." The notion that AIPAC speaks for the Jewish community, rather than the pro-Israel community, seems unfair to Jews who do not agree with AIPAC -- some of whom he quotes just a few paragraphs later. For instance, he cites Henry Siegman, the former head of the American Jewish Congress, who disagrees with AIPAC.

Finally Ari seems to buy into the common overestimation of the influence of the Israel lobby as a whole when he cites the fact that "[t]hirty-six pro-Israel PACs gave $3.14 million to candidates in the 2004 election cycle" as the reason that "most in Congress see far more harm than reward in getting in the Israeli lobby's way." $3.14 million is not the enormous sum it may sound. As a point of reference, consider that in 2003-2004 real estate/construction PACs gave $17.06 million in hard money, while finance and insurance PACs gave $43.76 million. Of course this influences the way congress votes, but remarkably enough many congressmembers and senators vote against those corporate interests on occasion --certainly many more than the mere eight congressmembers who voted against the July 18th resolution.

I think Ari is addressing a real problem: the position prevalent in Washington that nothing Israel does can ever be questioned, even as a loving friend. But his diagnosis of the cause emphasizes the wrong aspects. The real shift has been the emergence of what Ari accurately describes as "Christian conservatives increasingly aligned with AIPAC [who] demand unwavering support for Israel from their Republican leaders." They may be aligned with AIPAC, but their influence over the way Republican congressmembers vote comes not from that but from their heavy representation in Republican primaries. Their approach to this issue, just like their approach to social issues, is infused with a sense that they are advocating God's position, so any compromise with benefits here on earth is untenable. They are fundamentally different than Jewish-led organizations like AIPAC that simply want the U.S. to support whatever Israel deems is its security need. Those groups, unlike the conservative Christian Zionists, will support a left-leaning government in Israel that seeks to make peace, if that's what the Israelis choose. A good recent example is the Gaza withdrawal, which all zionists except those on the extreme right supported.

A greater focus on exposing on combating the emergence of uncomprising Christianist zealotry on Israel would serve the left better than more pieces "exposing" the overestimated influence of groups like AIPAC.

--Ben Adler

COULTER WATCH. Twelve years of Catholic education. Four years of the best the Society of Jesus had to offer. I have seen the May Procession, ladies and gentlemen. I have heard the Trappists sing at dusk and I have served on the altar during the old Good Friday liturgy, the one that seemed to last eight days and was the closest thing that the church of my birth had to a Ken Russell film -- except, of course, The Devils, which actually was a Ken Russell film. I have read my Aquinas and my Augustine and my Teilhard. I subscribe to the theological notion first put forth by the great Flann O'Brien in that blasphemy is a waste of time because, if there is no God, it's stupid and unnecessary, and if there is one, it's dangerous.

In short, I have seen me a few theological goat-ropings in my time, but I have never in all my Papist years read anything the likes of this. Why the Christ -- you should pardon the expression -- couldn't that twit Constantine leave us Christians in the catacombs where we belonged instead of taking us public so the crazy people could buy shares?

--Charles P. Pierce

CONSTITUTION, SCHMONSTITUTION. Some days it's difficult to remain part of the good fight -- not just because it too often feels like it's on the verge of being lost, but more so because it's on the verge of being lost and so few seem to care.

Take the Constitution, which Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is looking to throw down the sewer of a secret court (I don't find anything about secret courts in Article III), while the rest of the world is caught up in making wagers on whether or not we're living the End of Days, or whether one boring Connecticut Democrat or the other will play against the other team in November's Senate race.

Specter's so-called compromise with the White House on the matter of President Bush's domestic spying program is a piece of legislation which, if enacted, would move all lawsuits that involve the program into the double-super-secret-background court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and out of the normal federal court system. Consequently, not only would the suits and their outcomes be shielded from pubic view, but the opposing counsel would not be permitted to appear before the FISA judge, and the right to appeal would be revoked. Furthermore, the bill would not require the president to put the parameters of the current spy plan, or any future such plans, to any legal test.

So, why are people not marching in the streets over this? For that matter, why am I not marching in the street over this? Am I resigned to the death of the U.S. Constitution, a document I was taught, in my jingoistic schooldays, to revere every bit as much as the Baltimore catechism? I don't dare answer.

This weekend, George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley, interviewed (mp3) by Brooke Gladstone of NPR's On the Media, raised his voice in protest, saying, "You don't create secret courts where there is no opposing counsel and no meaningful appeal; that's not the rule of law."

The rule of law? Who needs the rule of law when we have the rule of Bush?

Turley then speculated on the real purpose of Specter's bizarre legislative fix: If allowed to proceed through the above-ground federal court system, the lawsuits challenging various aspects of the NSA spying-on-everybody program may arrive at the conclusion that "the president committed a crime more than 30 times." Then, Turley said, people would to want to know why Specter and his colleagues never investigated the program's legality.

I would go out marching against this, really I would -- but you're a big boy, Constitution. You can take care of yourself, right?

--Adele M. Stan

ON PARENTING. As a childless twenty-something, I've been really enjoying the Corner's weeks-long debate over whether or not parenting matters. In the "cranky bugger" corner, with the impressively hiked-up grandpa shorts, has been John Derbyshire, who's argued that parenting matters very, very little, and peer influences, genetics, and culture are the real determinants. His primary assailant has been Jonah Goldberg, a proud parent determined to prove he matters. And occasionally ducking into the ring to slam either Derbyshire or Jonah with a folding chair has been Charles Murray, the wise old man of strange rightwing social science arguments.

Despite a lot of harping over the evidence, none of the participants seems particularly quick with the social science data. Partially, that's because there's depressingly little on the role of fathers, which seems to be the obsession of all the participants. Derbyshire has wildly overstated the consensus of the scientific community on any number of points, and is tangled deep in the weeds of correlation/causation failures. What the datam at this point, actually seems to imply is that parenting is a sadly unpredictable process and it remains unclear what "good parenting" actually is -- in the last couple of decades the experts have advised everything from sparing the rod to spoiling the child to unleashing the belt. Even worse, genetic differences in temperament make it likely that various kids will need different types of parenting to thrive. So a good parent for Jane may be harmful to Joe. We all know, after all, a stable family with one high achiever and one ne'er-do-well. Actually, we probably know more than one.

But largely, the Cornerites are talking about the margins -- how closely can they make their children fit their ideal. Emotionally, Jonah's right there with 20th-century behaviorist John Watson who said, "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select." Derbyshire is more a Francis Galton type -- "There is no doubt that nature prevails enormously over nurture." The question is excellent parenting, not good parenting.

That's because good parenting is well understood to make a difference. Language skills are formed early, and children exposed to a large vocabulary, a lot of verbal interaction, and frequent stimulation do far better on later testing. In 1995, two social scientists recorded the number of utterances children were exposed to during the day -- the average was 325, but the range was from 100 to 800. The greater their exposure, the better the child did.

Of course, what largely determines that is not merely the parent's tendency to chatter, but the amount of time they -- or some other caregiver -- spends with a child per day. That's the real dividing line: time. The well-off can either spend it with the children themselves or hire someone else to fill the gap. Single mothers and working families all too often can't. For that reason, the Corner's discussion has been a rather upper-class discourse conducted by folks who're worried that all their advantages will eventually produce diminishing returns. That so many lower on the income ladder can hardly hope to be good, much less excellent, parents has scarcely entered the conversation.

A good example is that flextime -- that dream of being able to schedule work around family -- is available to 62 percent of workers making more than $72,000, while only 31 percent of those making less than $28,000 enjoy similar options. Daily flextime, the more useful variety, is available to only 13 percent of workers making less than $28,000.

Meanwhile, the Family and Medical Leave Act covers only half the private sector workforce and offers unpaid leave only. So not only do many parents lack the option, many others can't afford it. As for paid leave, only 30 percent of workers below the poverty line get more than a week a year. At 200 percent above the poverty line, that number swells to 76 percent. So insofar as you believe parents matter at all, a fair number of them lack the time to actually do much parenting (and let's not even get into those working double shifts to support a family). And this policy, let's not forget, is literally killing children. All the data suggests a stay-at-home parent during the first year of life is incredibly important. A massive study by the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation found that extending paid job-protected maternity leave to 10 weeks, as many European countries have done, reduces post-neonatal child mortality by 3.7 to 4.5 percent. Another study, this one localized to America, confirmed the positive impacts of paid family leave, but found unpaid leave laws lacked the same effects, presumably because many can't, or don't, use them.

So important as parents may or may not be when it comes to getting their kids interested in classical music, I'd think we could all agree that their presence in the home is something worth supporting. Except that "we," by which I mean the right, does not support laws that would allow for precisely that. While some thinkers are moving towards a more pro-family, progressive-style conception of conservatism -- and conversations with Jonah make me think he's one of them -- it's nevertheless a bit self-indulgent to spend weeks agonizing over your impact on the margins without mentioning how constrained many parents -- particularly single parents -- are from having any impact at all. But hey, if the National Review wants to make amends and start championing real paid leave, wage subsidies, and flextime laws, I'm happy to make common cause.

If folks are interested, we can wonk out more on some of this, and I may have some related articles in the coming weeks. For now, those who want to do some solo study could do worse than to start with Jane Waldfogel's overview of the social science research, What Children Need.

--Ezra Klein

GIVE ME DIGNITY OR GIVE ME EMPLOYMENT! This weekend's New York Times had a fascinating piece on the growing number of middle-aged men who are jobless by choice. It's always hard to discern if the anecdotes and quotes chosen for these articles accurately reflect the trends, but assuming they do, it's worrying stuff. The basic outline is that many workers from blue or gray collar jobs who lost their positions in layoffs and bankruptcies are finding it nearly impossible to find subsequent positions offering the same level of dignity and challenge. So a unionized steel workers whose seniority had finally brought him an acceptable level of intellectual engagement and occupational satisfaction is unable to accept a tumble down the occupational ladder into a job that his skill set, rather than his accumulated experience, actually qualifies him for. That's the basic tension here: You can take a man's job, but what if he refuses to subsequently sacrifice his dignity?

“To be honest, I’m kind of looking for the home run,” said Christopher Priga, who is 54 and has not had steady work since he lost a job with a six-figure income as an electrical engineer at Xerox in 2002. “There’s no point in hitting for base hits,” he explained. “I’ve been down the road where I did all the things I was supposed to do, and the end result of that is nil.”

So Priga, rather than take a job at lower pay and less responsibility, is borrowing against his home, living off his savings. The stratagem seemed common amongst the men in the article -- a worrying trend because second mortgages, though offering a nice cash infusion in the near term, eventually do need to be paid back. And if these men aren't finding better positions, they're going to face bankruptcy.

To some degree, this is a result of women entering the workforce. Two-income households have more room for one income to disappear. For that reason, you've seen this trend advancing internationally, with long-term unemployment among men rapidly increasing in both Europe and Japan. But in America, about 60 percent of these men live alone -- the lack of pressure to provide for a family makes the choice to eschew income much easier

But on another level, this is related to the decline of unions, the breakdown of the manufacturing sector, and the shift to a service economy. Where once blue collar jobs offered the sort of benefits and salaries that allowed for a sense of dignity and purpose, a greeter at Wal-Mart is low-skill labor that refuses to masquerade as anything else. That, of course, was the primary use of unions: to force employers to treat even lowly employees as valued labor deserving of respect and all that goes with it. But in a stagnating market where most of the blue collar growth lies in non-unionized sectors, many men simply can't bear to follow their lost job by letting go of the dignity it afforded them. Backing that far up that late in life is a tough pill to swallow, and for many, a retreat into reading, yard work, and savings is, for now, a more attractive option. It is also, however, a more economically dangerous one.

So read the piece. And try to do so without judgment -- these men are making terrible financial decisions in order to forestall worse personal admissions. If the left still possessed a labor consciousness, we wouldn't rest until the service economy offered the dignity and compensation to ensure that the scores of workers who will migrate to its industries in the coming years could do so without grievous psychic damage.

--Ezra Klein

OHIO SWIFTBOATING NOT SO SWIFT. The Ohio Republican Party has fired “social conservative coordinator” Gary Lankford, the operative responsible for last week’s e-mail suggesting that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland and his wife are gay. Lankford’s effort to discredit Strickland proved even too embarrassing for the shameless Ohio GOP, and chair Robert Bennett gave him the boot.

Lankford, a veteran of the “values voters” crowd, once again proves that moralizing doesn’t equal morality. Lankford is also the Ohio coordinator for TeenPact, which is training teenagers to bear false witness against neightbors to “change America for Christ.” (TeenPact teenagers swarmed the Capitol when the Senate took up the bogus Federal Marriage Amendment last month.)

Just because the state GOP fired Lankford doesn’t mean the swiftboating of Strickland will end, because Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell is fully capable of handling that on his own. Blackwell, who had Lankford on his campaign payroll during the primary, recently sent out an e-mail to supporters which suggested -- as did Lankford’s e-mail -- that Strickland is not an ordained minister. (He is.) Blackwell’s e-mail read, in part, that Strickland “claims to be a minister,” doesn’t belong to a church, and rarely attends church. Sound a bit familiar? One candidate really is a minister (or a decorated war hero), and the other candidate, trying so desperately to show his faith-based credentials (or his war-time leadership) dives into the gutter to discredit his opponent’s credentials.

--Sarah Posner

IRAN RESOLUTION. In a move not likely to enhance the reputation of the Security Council, Russia and China forced the West to water down the resolution on Iran's nuclear program so that it now threatens to threaten Iran with sanctions if they don't stop enriching uranium by August 31, rather than actually threatening sanctions as such. On the other hand, Iran has already said that they'll respond to the latest Western offer by August 22 so the whole thing may be moot anyway because people will be reconsidering their positions in light of whatever Teheran says then.

The genuinely ominous sign here is that the resolution passed 14-1, with the one "no" vote coming from Qatar, at the moment the one Arab nation represented on the Council. As we saw in the initial days of the Israel-Hezbollah crisis, the Arab regimes are, on the merits, actually very alarmed about Iran. But as we saw in subsequent days, they're also somewhat under the sway of Arab public opinion, which has come to be pro-Iranian out of hostility to American and Israeli policy. Qatar has one of the most America-friendly Arab governments out there (as witnessed by our giant military base in the country), so if even they won't stand by even the watered-down version of American Iran policy, we can see that there's going to be essentially no regional support for anti-Iranian measures.

As Gareth Porter reported in the Prospect a little while ago, Bush had a chance several years back to make a very good deal with Iran. But he blew that opportunity and now our hand is far, far, far weaker and the outcome will be much less favorable.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE TROUBLE WITH THE IMPOSSIBLE. I don't really have new observations to offer about the war in Lebanon, which continues to be a bad business. Sebastian Mallaby does, however, have a positively Yglesian analysis in today's Post concluding that "wars are only defensible if they can be won" -- something Olmert and Bush would both do well to consider.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: JOE, KO'd. Provoked by that blistering Times editorial, Mike "Bossman" Tomasky speculates: What if Ned Lamont not only beats Joe Lieberman, but throttles him by, say, 10 points? "[I]f it were to happen, Lieberman’s career might be effectively over August 9," says Mike. He explains why here.

--The Editors

HOLY HOWELL RAINES, MARKOS! It's as though the ghost of Howell Raines has somehow snuck back into the New York Times editorial page. Who could have guessed when looking at the Lieberman/Lamont headline that The Times would ditch their establishmentarian penchant for high-minded bi-partisanship and endorse Ned Lamont? To a political junkie, this was like Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning shot heard round the world.

Since Raines' departure from the top of the editorial page, The Times has reverted from his crusading liberalism back to a more comfortable moderation. The paper infuriated some of their liberal readers by endorsing Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Representative Chris Shays (CT-R) for re-election. And, in the case of Shays, they did so in part on the grounds that having a Republican moderate in the seat was better for the country because it was good to have some ideological diversity within the party -- even though the alternative was a Democrat whose actual policies would better reflect the values of The Times and the district's constituents.

While the editorial was well-written, it does seem strange then for the same page that endorsed Shays to be endorsing Lamont on the grounds that this is an era for vigorous partisanship, and not a time for moderates to lend political cover to the Bush administration. And, interestingly for a paper that has long championed reforms that would break up the security of legislators' seats at every level of government, The Times neglected to point out that perhaps the Lamont challenge is even good for the simple reason that Lieberman is a three-termer. But even for those of us who are under-whelmed by Lamont and are more worried about potentially losing the seat to a right-winger, it was gratifying to see The Times return to its tradition of editorials that provide the sort of strong, eloquent liberal voice more often heard from Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker than from The Times editorial page of late. One only hopes they remember the principles they've just espoused and apply them consistently when deciding who to endorse in Shays' congressional district this fall.

--Ben Adler

DEMOCRACY, IF YOU LIKE IT. I don't quite know what Jackson Diehl is trying to say about Ukraine here, but his column seemed to me to partake freely of various unfortunate but all-too-common presuppositions. As you'll recall, back in 2004 Viktor Yanukovich was Ukraine's ruling party's candidate for president. He lost to Viktor Yushchenko, but Yanukovich tried to steal the election through fraud. Then came the "Orange Revolution" and Yanukovich was forced to back down and let Yuschenko take office. Between then and now, a parliamentary election and a breakdown between Yuschenko and some of his political allies has created a situation where it now looks like Yanukovich will become prime minister in coalition with a third political party.

Describing that situation as a "setback" or "crisis" for Ukrainian democracy as opposed to for Yuschenko personally is a silly error. A democracy requires multiple political parties. Yanukovich's electoral victory was based on fraud, but much of his support was real. A political system that permanently excluded him, his party, and his supporters from power wouldn't be much of a democracy at all. And it's worth noting that this happened all over Central Europe in the mid-1990s already. Communist regimes were overthrown and replaced with opposition governments. Eventually, those governments became unpopular and ex-Communist parties regained power. That, however, wasn't the end of Central European democracy -- it was democracy in action. The victors of the 1989-91 movements ceded power peacefully to their rivals and life went on.

The real lesson here is that while it's probably true that it's good for the United States to see democracy spread, one shouldn't expect this to work at a great level of detail. Democracy isn't going to ensure that politicians we don't like never come to power, or that countries everywhere will want to align themselves with America's geopolitical goals.

--Matthew Yglesias

LEBANESE DEMOCRACY? I often had cause to wonder whether or not people understood this during the Cedar Revolution, and in light of the president's repeated insistence that Hezbollah is afraid of democracy during today's press conference, it's clear that the White House doesn't. Democracy, simply put, isn't what's at issue in Lebanese politics.

Read up on Lebanon's demographics and odd electoral system and you'll see that both before and after the Cedar Revolution, Lebanon has been a democracy of sorts. They have elections (democracy!) but no "one person, one vote" principle (no democracy!). Instead, the Taif Agreement apportions parliamentary seats according to a formula that overrepresents Christian groups mainly at the expense of Shiites. One may or may not regard this as undemocratic, but nothing changed during the Revolution. Rather, what happened in essence was that leading Sunni and Druze politicians (notably Rafik Hariri and Walid Jumblatt) defected from the pro-Syrian coalition that had been running the country and joined the anti-Syrian opposition. For his trouble, Hariri got himself killed by the Syrian government. That precipitated a protest movement which led to the departure of Syrian forces and brought to power an anti-Syrian coalition comprised of the main Druze and Sunni parties along with parties representing most Lebanese Christians (with the rest in a bloc affiliated with Michael Aoun).

Why does Lebanon's Shiite community -- the largest demographic group -- put up with this malaportionment? Well, in part because Hezbollah is allowed to remain armed, and Hezbollah along with Amal, the other main Shiite party, simply run significant portions of the country more-or-less autonomously from the central government. Most everyone concerned prefers this arrangement to re-starting a bloody civil war. What's more, it works out okay in practice. Shiites are governed by their own parties, while Lebanon's diverse non-Shiite communities together run the parts of the country where they live through a system of elite brokerage. If you wanted to turn Lebanon into a proper majoritarian democracy, you would need not only to extend Beirut's sovereignty throughout the country and disarm Hezbollah, but change the electoral system. The result of that would be to give Hezbollah more, not less, power over the country as a whole.

--Matthew Yglesias

STALINIST BLOGGERS. Ah, the great blogofascism debate of '06 returns. Josh Marshall makes this inadvertantly hilarious entry into the fray:

Actually did you know that TPM is related to Stalin by marriage? Little known fact. Actually not even sure if it's true. But it seemed to be from what I could tell. I'll look into it again.

Matt quite rightly notes that linking and excerpting are akin to editing, which reminded me that one point I'd been meaning to make about the blogs is that rather than being a totally new thing in the world, they actually reproduce some really central textual forms in Western history. Take, for example, the Elizabethan commonplace book. Created in an era where books were extremely expensive, such "common readers" were created by single or multiple authors, who would excerpt, by hand, quotations, pages, or stanzas from their favorite works into the books, under common headings. Sometimes these books would circulate in society, gathering reader comments in the margins. That's perhaps the literary form most similar to contemporary blogs. If I'm remembering my literary history correctly, common readers persisted into the 19th century and then pretty much died out, but the impulse behind them can still be found in most anthologies. Blogs are like quirky little anthologies of the present. The writer of this excellent piece, "Elizabethan Reading," (PDF) which is annoyingly password protected to prevent excerpting, makes the same point, linking Elizabethan reading strategies in which context, parallelism, and analogical reasoning predominate, to the contemporary techniques of the Internet. (Scroll down to page 4, paragraph 2.)

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TRICKY, TRICKY. Oh, those Republicans. Tired of being such grinches on the minimum wage, they flipped on the bill, crafting a proposal to raise the wage and rollback the estate tax. The Democrats, it seems to me, have precisely the right response to this gambit:

Its political blackmail to say the only way that minimum wage workers can get a raise is to give a tax giveaways to the wealthiest Americans," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. "Members of Congress raised their own pay — no strings attached. Surely, common decency suggests that minimum wage workers deserve the same respect."

"It's outrageous the Republican Congress can't simply help poor people without doing something for their wealthy contributors," said Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio.

And it really is. But there's something kind of awesome about seeing the GOP's strings so clearly -- they really can't help the poor without further wrecking the country to aid the rich. According to my sources on the Hill, Democrats do plan to stand against this, but it's unclear whether they can really block the effort. That said, they should do their damndest. The elimination of the estate tax would deprive the government of billions that currently go to programs that help the neediest Americans -- the practical effect of this bill, then, would be a lift in wages, but also further instability and frugality in such programs as Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, and Social Security. Progressivism and regressivism, together at last.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: SURVIVING SUDOKU. Cruciverbalist Matt Gaffney ponders the love-hate relationship crossword writers have with the Japanese puzzle sensation.

--The Editors

THE CONEHEAD ECONOMY. Among the best of the new Times Select features are their "Talking Points," long backgrounders penned by the editorial writers on all manner of major issues, from inequality to global warming. This week, Teresa Tritch published one on "The Rise of the Super-Rich," explaining that "[i]ncome inequality used to be about rich versus poor, but now it’s increasingly a matter of the ultra rich and everyone else." Few stories are as important, or as poorly understood. From 2003 to 2004, real average income for the top 1 percent of households shot up by 17 percent. For the remaining 99 percent, the average gain was under three percent. Indeed, the top one percent accumulated 36 percent of all income increases in 2004, a six percent increase from 2003.

In the past, I've called this "The Conehead Economy" -- plenty of growth in the economic body, but all of it happening in the top percent. Were that to happen to a person, you'd see six inches of growth in their forehead and doctors everywhere would be puzzling over how to correct the deformity. As it is, the media trumpets the growth, the politicians backslap over the roaring economy, and everyone wonders why the average American seems so unhappy. Meanwhile, the media rarely mentions data showing that incomes for the bottom 60 percent have grown by merely 20 percent in the last 30 years (the top one percent saw that much growth last year) -- with nearly all those gains coming during the mid-‘90s. Indeed, this sort of economic concentration hasn't existed since 1929 -- hardly a golden period in American life.

Meanwhile, government policy is explicitly aimed at accelerating the income distortions. "In 2006, the average tax cut for households with incomes of more than $1 million — the top two-tenths of 1 percent — is $112,000 which works out to a boost of 5.7 percent in after tax income. That’s considerably higher than the 5 percent boost garnered by the top 1 percent. It’s far greater than the 2.5 percent increase of the middle fifth of households, and fully 19 times greater than the 0.3 percent gain of the poorest fifth of households." You'd think, given the trends, the government would be using the tax code to smooth out the inequality. Instead, they're giving it a helping hand. Next up, of course, is the effort to cut the estate tax. But don't object, o' Democrats, lest you be accused of class warfare, which, as we know, only happens when the middle class wants their wages to keep up with productivity, as they did in the last generation. Had those trends continued, the median income would now be in the $60,000s, not the $40,000s. Instead, the top 1 percent accounted for 33.4 percent of total net worth in 2004, while the bottom 50 percent commanded 2.5 percent. Yes, you read that right. In the Conehead Economy, class warfare is a fact of life, and the super rich are winning in a rout.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: GENERAL HOSPITAL. Remember the SEC's investigation into Bill Frist's conveniently-timed sale of stock from his family's hospital chain, HCA? This week's news that the for-profit hospital behemoth is selling to a group of private equity investors has reminded people of that ongoing investigation. Maggie Mahar, author of the new book Money-Driven Medicine, tells the story of the Frist family empire and contemplates the larger saga of for-profit hospitals in America -- a history marked by cycles of boom, bust, and scandal. Take a look.

--The Editors

GOOD NEWS FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE BAD NEWS. The New York Times has a perceptive article today documenting the shift in support towards Hezbollah in the Arab world. After an early moment of hope, when a variety of Arab governments condemned Hezbollah’s extra-state provocations, the sustained brutality of the Israeli response has warmed the Arab world to Hezbollah's side. Now, where Saudi Arabia began by blasting Hezbollah's actions, they're warning that the peace plan is being shredded by "Israeli arrogance." Jordan is dispatching medical teams for the victims of "Israel aggression" and al-Qaeda, a Sunni organization normally hostile to Shiites like Hezbollah, released a tape making common cause. Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has become a folk hero throughout the region, raising the troubling possibility that bin Laden is no longer the only hyper-charismatic terrorist mastermind in town. Meanwhile, Condi Rice is promising to return to the region to seek an "early end" to the violence. Unless she's got some time machine technology, I've trouble seeing how she'll manage that.

--Ezra Klein

THE DETERRENCE DEBATE. Here's a new wrinkle in a longstanding controversy. Rather than argue, implausibly but in line with tradition, that we can't deter Iran because "the Mullahs are crazy" or some such thing, Reuel Marc Gerecht thinks we can't do it because we're too soft and weak. As a read of American psychology, this strikes me as stunning. It's also a theory that ill-suits Gerecht's generally hawkish views. We lack the grit to respond to a direct, unprovoked attack on our citizens but are the sort of country that should make a series of preventative wars the linchpin of our national security strategy. Really?

In response to Rich Lowry's musings on why Hezbollah wasn't deterred by Israel, I would say the problem is less that Hezbollah made an analytical error about Israel's likely response to their cross-border raid than that the risk of massive Israeli retaliation wasn't credible. This is also the problem with the theory that Israel's war is a good way of establishing deterrence. Israel's current action won't crush Hezbollah. It will kill a bunch of Hezbollah's fighters. But it will almost certainly wind up enhancing Hassan Nasrallah’s standing vis-à-vis other Lebanese figures and other members of the broader world of Islamist politics.

By committing themselves to a war whose strategic objectives they can't achieve without the deus ex machina of massive European intervention, the Israelis have put themselves in a very awkward -- very dangerous -- position. Tit-for-tat retaliations combined with vigorous diplomacy might have taught Hezbollah a lesson about the dangers of future raids and nudged Lebanon in the direction of taking responsibility for the south. But Israel and the United States have now put themselves in the position of arguing that a return to the status quo ante is unacceptable without having a strategy for forcing anything else. And, certainly, the pre-war situation was sub-optimal, but its merits can be too easily dismissed. Israelis were much better off than Lebanese Shiites or Palestinians (and the general situation in Lebanon was moving in a direction favorable to Israel) and therefore had the most to lose from rocking the boat.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ONLINE: WHAT WOULD JOE AND EILEEN DO? To complement the audio, here's the transcript: It's Chuck Schumer unleashed. The senator had breakfast with journalists from the Prospect and elsewhere on July 12. Hear him expound on the death of New Deal liberalism and Reagan conservatism, what American swing-voter prototypes Joe and Eileen can teach Democrats -- and what Tomasky got wrong about the common good.

--The Editors

CHRIS CANNON: COALMINE CANARY. As we move closer to the midterms, the list of top targets produced by various prognosticators is congealing a bit, and this week NPR published a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner survey (PDF) of the top 50 most competitive districts, based on a pooled list taken from the Cook Political Report, the Stu Rothenberg Report, the Hotline and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball.

The fact that the pooled list includes 40 GOP districts to just 10 Democratic districts is telling enough. More striking are the opinions of these 50 districts’ voters, who favor Democrats in the 10 Democratic seats by a 31-point margin but also favor Democrats by a 4-point margin in the Republican-held seats. Overall, “wrong track” voters outnumber “right track” voters by a whopping 30 points. Democrats are also more excited about the cycle. In short, the only good piece of news in the poll for the GOP is, well, nothing -- other than the fact that they don’t have more than 40 of the 50 seats on the list in the first place.

Though I still tend to find large-data reports more compelling than anecdotal evidence, a friend on the Hill who knows Utah politics pretty well pointed me to a recent Deseret News piece about what’s happening in the Utah races, none of which are on anybody’s top-50 target lists because all three incumbents there -- Rob Bishop (R-1), Jim Matheson (D-2), and Chris Cannon (R-3) -- are expected to win. What’s fascinating about the numbers in the state which gave George W. Bush his biggest margins in both 2000 and 2004 is that Democrat Matheson, not Bishop nor Cannon, has the highest re-elect number right now.

I don’t know enough about Utah politics to speculate on whether this is a function of Matheson’s greater effectiveness, constituency service or charisma. But what I do know is that, based on its presidential performance, Cannon’s is the most Republican-leaning congressional district in the country, with a partisan voting index of +26.2 Republican (according to the Cook Report). Neither Cannon nor Bishop will lose; nor will Matheson somehow win two seats* if he posts a landslide. The point is not that any of these three seats will change hands, but how stunning it is that the GOP incumbent in the most Republican congressional seat in America has a re-elect figure of only 56 percent right now.

It’s one of those anecdotal datum often overlooked by lists, yet provides an eerie coalmine canary for the GOP’s midterm fortunes.

*Junkies may recall that if the bargain to add two new seats to the U.S. House ever comes off, in addition to making D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton a voting member, Utah would get an additional seat…one that might just go Democratic?

--Tom Schaller

SUBSTITUTES AND COMPLEMENTS. I was going to just mock Lee Siegel's decision to revisit the blogofascism controversy, but he says something in there that I think is worthy of a serious response since I hear the sentiment from a lot of people. "Linking," writes Siegel, "is no substitute for thinking." This is true, but misguided. Compare it to "deciding which articles to print is no substitute for writing magazine articles." Obviously, the former is no substitute for the latter not because the former activity is useless, but because it complements the other. You couldn't have a magazine where nobody wrote articles, and the other things people do at magazines don't substitute for article-writing, but that doesn't make those other things useless.

If a blogger has a certain audience, and reads a post or an article somewhere that he thinks is insightful on some subject, and then links to it -- directed his or her audience to read the linked material -- that can be a very useful service as long as the linker's audience isn't a proper subset of the linkee's audience. Certain high-traffic blogs -- Atrios and Instapundit come to mind -- exist primarily as aggregators of other web content for their audience. Other blogs tend to do at least some of that kind of thing. Since the main characteristic of the blogosphere is that an absurdly large quantity of posts get written every day, that aggregation function is extremely useful. If The New York Times came to your house as a giant stack of totally random articles on various subjects, it would be totally useless. The people who organize the paper don't substitute for the people who write it, but they're crucial to the paper working as an information-delivery system.

--Matthew Yglesias

GUTTER POLITICS. Yesterday it was Bill, today it was Strickland. Who will it be tomorrow?

Read Ben Weyl’s comments on the Ohio GOP’s latest smears over at Midterm Madness.

--Alec Oveis

THE CONTRACTING MESS AT DHS. The House Government Reform Committee is out with a report (PDF) today documenting 32 instances of waste, fraud, and abuse in contracting at the Department of Homeland Security. It’s not the sort of reading that makes you feel all cuddly and safe, confident that the government, a good steward of your tax dollars, has everything under control. Instead, it is a stark reminder of what’s broken in Washington. And no, it’s not the Republican boogeyman, that faceless “bureaucracy.” It’s the whole sordid mess of cronyism and political corruption, where lobbyists and contractors buy influence and access, as the Prospect documented back in January.

Noting that DHS’s procurement budget is growing 11 times faster than the rest of the federal budget, the bipartisan report documents the explosive rise in sole-source contracts and widespread contract mismanagement at the department, including an alarming lack of trained procurement personnel. Dysfunctional or nonexistent oversight, the investigators found, has “squandered hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.” Regrettably, the report doesn’t address the role that lobbyists, campaign money, and the unsupervised revolving door have played in the mess. It would have been a perfect opportunity to show how the vaguely defined “culture of corruption” is actually damaging our security. But the report does confirm what former DHS Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin told the Prospect a few months ago: “the private sector was able to take the department for a ride.”

--Sarah Posner

CHARACTER COUNTS, BUT ONLY WHEN CONVENIENT. Yesterday Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland challenged Republican rival Ken Blackwell to release his tax returns, so voters could see exactly how Blackwell, who favors implementing a flat tax and cutting the capital gains tax, would benefit from his own proposals. Blackwell refused, telling the Canton Repository that his millionaire status proves his ideology that hard work leads to riches.

It’s odd, though, that he’s not being more forthcoming, since his officially sanctioned, pabulum-filled initiative The Ohio Center for Civic Character demands that people of character “appl[y] truth in our relationships.” And that truth, he says, requires accountability and transparency:

High-character people scrutinize themselves and welcome the scrutiny of others. They acknowledge that human nature compels us toward independence. Our preference for independence results in isolation from one another. Isolation breeds temptation to unethical conduct. High character people resist this chain reaction by adopting transparent life- and work-styles that invite inspection. They place themselves in relationships that motivate self-examination and encourage constructive critique from others, particularly those they serve. (Observable Virtues: an open, up-front, disclosing spirit)

Welcoming the scrutiny of others, you say? Perhaps the citizens of Ohio would like to scrutinize how in 1995, while the sitting treasurer of Ohio, Blackwell chipped in on a $500,000 investment in a radio station with some high profile Ohio businessmen, who later sold the venture for $190 million? It’s never been revealed how much of that $190 million went into Blackwell’s pocket.

Or perhaps the citizens of Ohio would like to know more about how Blackwell, while the secretary of state of Ohio, got a piece of the Cincinnati Reds? After all, one of Blackwell’s biggest campaign contributors, the Lindner family, was the majority owner of the ball club before they sold most of it to other investors, including some of Blackwell’s partners in the radio deal. The Lindners are big contributors to Republican and right-wing causes, including the Swift-Boat effort in 2004. Might they have been pleased with Blackwell’s efforts on Bush’s behalf in 2004?

But Blackwell’s not a stickler for that sort of character thing. What was his response to the complaints of 50 Ohio clergy that two other pastors Rod Parsley and Russell Johnson, illegally campaigned for him? Go out and get the endorsements of seven more pastors. To him, it shows he’s a man of faith, not that he’s flouting the law.

--Sarah Posner

WILL MEDICARE MATTER? It may be a bad bill, but the Medicare Prescription Drug Program may not be the electoral club many Democrats were hoping it would be. New polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that 8 out of 10 seniors are basically satisfied with the new benefit, hardly the sort of numbers congenial to a November counterattack. Two issues, however, may disrupt the calm. First up, seniors knowledge of the doughnut holes -- the period of a couple thousand dollars where all costs come out of pocket in an effort to discourage overuse of drugs before insurance kicks back in -- is spotty:

The survey tested seniors’ knowledge about the Medicare drug benefit’s coverage gap, or “doughnut hole,” in which most plans stop paying for medications and seniors must pay the full cost of their prescriptions. One- third of seniors in a Medicare drug plan say that their plan has a coverage gap (34%); about as many say that their plan does not have a gap (36%); and the others say they did not know or refused to answer (30%). Nearly all plans have such a gap, though seniors receiving low-income assistance, including those receiving Medicaid, do not experience the gap due to government subsidies.

Those 30 percent who don't know or won't answer aren't going to be pleased when they find that they do indeed have a coverage gap. As for the 36 percent who think themselves exempted, I called Kaiser's Larry Leavitt to see if they could plausibly be from the low-income category that actually is exempted from the benefit. As of now, it looks possible, though not certain. So however you slice it, you're going to have a third to a half of seniors who get smacked with an unexpected coverage gap in a couple months, right in time for the election.

The other politically potent element of the plan is the HHS secretary's inability to negotiate down the price of drugs. That may turn out to be a powerful example of the GOP's corporatist slant and their willingness to elevate the needs of industry over those of the average American. Such an appeal can exist and resonate even in the absence of widespread discontent over the Medicare Part D plan. That said, these numbers suggest that Medicare, if it enters the calculus at all, will not be a high priority issue in the 2006 election.

--Ezra Klein

THE OP-ED DOJO. Wandering through the nation's op-ed pages is like ambling through a dojo. Each writer has his own particular style, technique, finishing move. There's Tom Friedman, who rushes in with the Implausible Conversational Anecdote, links it to an Off-Topic Invocation Of World Travels, and finishes you with a Confusing Metaphor From Above. Or there's Maureen Dowd, who deploys Unfounded Personal Speculation mixed with Confusing Allegories till she's set up her killing blow: Insinuation of Character Defect. It's impressive stuff.

The deadliest op-ed columnist, however, is unquestionably David Brooks. He's the drunken boxer of the opinion page, luring you into a false sense of security with Banal Observations that comfort through Faux Bipartisanship until you're ready for the Illogical Conservative Conclusion. Today's column is an archetypal example of the master at work: a series of cogent critiques of Hillary Clinton's college aid proposals that effortlessly glide through research demonstrating their uselessness, a couple lavish compliments to Clinton and her team, and finally a conclusion that explains the only way to increase college attendance is to encourage two-parent homes, fundamentally reform schools, and increase church-sponsored mentoring programs. Funny thing -- this is exactly the rightwing's agenda! And yet it comes wrapped in such warm bipartisanship and elevated chin stroking that you'd never notice Newt Gingrich silently mouthing along in the background.

Comprehensive school reform and mentoring programs, however, will do little. Most research shows that the crucial period comes before the second grade, not after eighth. Indeed, by the time kids are seven, test score gaps have stabilized, and are unlikely to either widen or narrow for the rest of their schooling. Pre-schooling is where the gains are at, but you don't see Brooks advocating universalizing that leg up. As for two parent families, no one denies that universal marital bliss would be a boon on all fronts. But abusive or unhappy homes have their own problems. More to the point, single mother homes are often another way to say impoverished, or even black, homes. And one could far more easily attack the socioeconomic inequities afflicting these families than the currents buffeting their marriages.

Indeed, social class and family income overwhelmingly correlate with college attendance. Were Brooks really serious about increasing the educated class, he'd mention not martial structure, but the minimum wage, because pulling folks out of poverty and into more affluent environs increases educational attainment like just about nothing else. But he doesn't. Because that the secret of Brooks-fu -- distract your attention with a social problem that worries liberals, compliment the good intentions of progressives trying to solve it, dismiss their plans, and then offer up an evidence-free assertion that some rightwing policy would prove a panacea. Before you know it, you're on your back, staring up at the dojo ceiling, thinking that tax cuts really aren't such a bad idea after all.

--Ezra Klein

SERIOUSLY CONFUSING. Last week's puzzling editorial from The New Republic called on the United States to "move ruthlessly to prevent Iran from acquiring the deadliest arsenal of all" but couldn't quite seem to say whether or not this was a call for war. This week's edition fails to clarify matters, asking rhetorically "Will the West finally get ruthlessly serious about Iran? (No, bombing is not the only instrument of policy we have.)"

In all ruthless seriousness, what does this mean? That bombing would be insufficiently ruthless and we should mount a full-scale invasion? That we should engage in ruthless measures short of military action? Which measures? Ask the Europeans nicely to impose sanctions? How ruthless is that? What's the difference between getting ruthlessly serious about something and getting seriously ruthless about it? How serious is it to play footsie with the idea of starting a war and then totally fail to say what you're talking about?

--Matthew Yglesias

STEELE AT IT. Well, that didn’t take long: As I predicted yesterday, Michael Steele would somehow turn his media blunder around and try to blame the media, and sure enough here come this first volley, lobbed directly at the Post’s Dana Milbank.

Too bad for Steele press secretary Doug Heye that Milbank kept a record of their communications, which clearly show that not only was the Post allowed to publish the “off record” but “on background”
material, but they apparently wanted the Post to have the scoop. Not to mention, Milbank held back on some identifiers that would have made Steele’s identity obvious.

Just like the Oreo cookie incident, Steele and GOP governor Bob Ehrlich have either fabricated or embellished the events. And just like the Steve Gilliard sambo episode, Steele’s objective is not to run a serious campaign on the issues but to create a victimology vote in order to somehow endear himself to what he clearly thinks are gullible voters.

Apparently, Steele also thinks his new “homeboy,” President Bush, is still welcome and will come back to Maryland to stump for him.

--Tom Schaller

THE NUMBERS GAME. Here’s some interesting polling on the Middle East from The New York Times. Fully 64 percent of the public thinks there will never "come a time when Israel and the Arab nations settle their differences and live in peace." As a general matter, I think people are way too inclined to say that things will never happen. Lots of crazy stuff happens -- in 1910 none of these countries even existed and only crazy people thought they ever would. More specifically, people tend not to realize this but just ten years ago the bulk of the Israeli right and the bulk of the Arab states rejected the idea of a two-state solution, and only over the past five years or so has that ceased to be the case. The differences between the sides are still large (obviously) but they're way narrower than they were quite recently.

The other noteworthy finding is that 58 percent of Americans say the United States has no responsibility "to try to resolve the conflict between Israel and other countries in the Middle East." I sympathize with the spirit of this approach. That said, I think this sentiment partially reflects a failure of a lot of Americans to understand the nature of our involvement with the situation. The other day I saw Atrios and The Editors comparing not writing much about the Israel-Lebanon war to not writing about events in Ethiopia. The difference is that the United States is Israel's major patron in the world and Israel is the largest recipient of our largesse. When Israel does things that our government doesn't actively try to stop, we're seen -- correctly -- as actively enabling those actions. Insofar as people would prefer to take a more indifferent attitude toward Israeli-Arab issues, we would need to do a lot more to reduce our general level of financial and diplomatic support for Israel so as to move in the direction of actual neutrality.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: JUSTICE BYPASSED. On Tuesday, the Senate passed a bill making it illegal to take a minor across a state border for the purposes of evading parental consent and notification laws regarding abortion. If you think parental consent regulations are reasonable in the first place, this measure will of course seem like a common-sense way to bolster those state laws. And one reason those parental consent laws do strike so many people as reasonable is that they all have built-in judicial bypass procedures for minors who truly can't tell their family about their pregnancy without risking abuse or some other problem. But as Wayne Fishman and Helena Silverstein (a political scientist who has done extensive research on judicial bypass mandates) point out, on the ground, in state after state, that bypass process is either dysfunctional or simply non-functioning:

So the argument for the CCPA goes like this: Parental involvement is generally a good thing. Parents know things about their daughter’s medical history and are better equipped to deal with post-abortion complications. Parents can shield their daughter from the older boyfriend who might be pressuring her to terminate the pregnancy. Moreover, parents are responsible for their children, and this responsibility comes with rights that deserve regard. States have recognized these facts and have taken steps to respect them. Additionally, states appreciate that parental involvement is not always a good thing and have adopted procedures to handle these cases. Thus, the CCPA merely reinforces perfectly reasonable, indeed commonsensical, state laws.

If state parental involvement laws actually functioned the way they are supposed to, then the CCPA might be a logical way to support sensible state interests. But state involvement laws do not so function. There is a tendency to think that laws are dutifully executed by those charged with their implementation. After all, it’s the law. But this faith in the seamless translation of law on the books to law in practice is misplaced, both in general and in the particular case of parental involvement mandates.

The palatability of involvement mandates rests on the supposed effectiveness of the judicial bypass process. But the actual functioning of this process does not come close to resembling what is imagined. For example, research we conducted in Alabama and Tennessee shows that nearly half of the courts charged with implementing the bypass mechanism were unprepared to do so. In an even worse showing, more than two thirds of Pennsylvania courts were unprepared.

--The Editors

RUMSFELD: DIFFERENT THINGS ARE DIFFERENT. Via Andrew Sullivan, Don Rumsfeld gets asked whether or not Iraq is close to a civil war and replies, "You know, I thought about that last night, and just musing over the words, the phrase, and what constitutes it. If you think of our Civil War, this is really very different."

And, indeed, it is rather different. There are no cavalry commanders in Iraq and there were no car bombs during the Civil War. For that matter, the Russian Civil War was a whole different thing as well -- it got really, really cold and one side was full of Communists. Seriously, what's wrong with this guy? One shudders to think of the tens of thousands of American soldiers deployed in Iraq and serving under the command of a political leadership that has no idea what's going on.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHERE'S THE META-MESSAGE? One would have hoped that the announcement of the Capitol Hill Democratic confab scheduled for today -- the one at which the Democrats will lay out their election agenda -- would have brought a sense of excitement to yours truly when she read about it. (Still I look to find a reason to believe...)

But when I read of the plan in today's Associated Press story by Liz Sidoti, I found yet another laundry list of fix-it items, all worthy, but none of them big enough to raise gooseflesh on the arms of likely voters.

Calling the agenda "A New Direction for America," the Democrats list a number of laudable plans on the following: income, national security, energy, education, health care and retirement accounts. Swell. But as the Prospect's Robert Reich pointed out (PDF) some time ago, the Republicans have never won on the particulars; they have won on the narrative. And once again, it seems, the Democrats will offer no story of America, no heroic theme, to which they can hitch that agenda.

How 'bout something like, say, "A Covenant for the Common Good"? Don't sell it on particulars alone, but with stories of real people who sacrifice for their country, who sacrifice for their communities, for their neighbors, for their families, and find themselves screwed by the Republican program? How 'bout reminding folks of their professed belief in loving their neighbors as themselves, or offering a subtle, narrative-driven primer on those areas of the Constitution now threatened by the Republican Borg?

Can I get a witness?

--Adele M. Stan

ANNIE IN '06. I don't want to step on brother Sargent's turf here but, I'm sorry, this is just nuts, even by the Olympian fruitcake standards of the person in question. I'd forgotten that it is permissible to say anything about Bill Clinton, but this is straight out of the cafe car of the crazy train. (And does Ann Coulter, of all people, want to open up issues of public sexuality or questions of gender? Sometimes, the fish is just too big for the barrel, I'm just sayin'.) What exactly is the rule about putting public crackpots on television? And, once you do it, and then they act like the public crackpots they are, do you then hype yourself as the network that puts public crackpots on the air? How exactly does that make your network different from some dusty Delta carnival where the guy bites the head off a live chicken?

I do have a solution, though. With all the noise about the Lamont-Lieberman primary in Connecticut, the state's GOP is stuck with this Alan Schlesinger cat, who can't seem to avoid getting sued by casinos for being something of a welcher. (Not for nothing, but didn't casinos used to employ the law-firm of Hillerich And Bradsby to take the knees of such miscreants instead of reaching for the torts?) As I recall, our gal, a native Nutmegger, once pondered a run against that legislative titan, Chris Shays.

How about we have her step into the breach here for U.S. Senate? Here's the whole campaign, already organized and ready to go. Run, Annie, run.

--Charles P. Pierce

NO SCARLET LETTER IN OHIO. Floyd Flake, the minister and former Democratic congressman from New York who launched a burgeoning career as a closet Republican back in 1998 with a speech to the Republican National Committee, recently became the co-chair of Ken Blackwell’s gubernatorial campaign. Blackwell, who trails rival Ted Strickland by 20 points in a Columbus Dispatch mail-in poll earlier this week, bounced back with a Zogby poll showing only a 4.6 percent deficit against Strickland, with a 3.2 percent margin of error.

Blackwell, who is a leading light of the GOP effort to cultivate more black candidates (ones who won’t make ill-advised and politically suicidal comments to reporters, that is) surely thought he was burnishing his credentials with black voters by bringing Flake on board. Although he spent ten years in Congress as a Democrat, he turned to the free-market ideology that is the bedrock of Blackwell’s campaign, when he’s not pandering to the theocratic right. But will black voters be swayed by Blackwell’s recent crass attempt to make inroads in a Democratic stronghold, where many felt he disenfranchised them in 2004?

--Sarah Posner

AND THEN THERE WERE THREE. Adding to the rush of Democratic health care plans this week, Russ Feingold just stepped forward with his proposal -- a sort of strange, possibly cunning attempt to trigger a series of self-contained universal care plans in the states that would, assumedly, create a domino effect for the rest of the country. Unlike Stark's or Clinton's plans, Feingold's proposes no new national programs. Instead, it creates a $32 billion fund which would finance a handful of states running universal care pilot projects for the next ten years.

As of now, the proposal seems rather vague. The standards the states must meet seem...sketchy, to say the least. And it's not clear why Feingold wouldn't want to simply say that all states have to grope their way to universal care, or create a phase two for the plan which extends the funding and mandate to the whole union after the initial participants have demonstrated the viability of a certain array of options. On the other hand, the more states with universal health plans, the more models for others to follow. I'm willing to believe there's a certain savviness to this proposal -- that it seeks national coverage through a piecemeal, but powerful, mechanism. No governor, after all, will want to be the one who didn't bring his state UHC. That said, I'm on the fence. Which is why, over the next few weeks, I'm going to try and speak to Feingold, Stark, and someone from the DLC on the relative merits of all their plans. Stay tuned, same wonk channel, same wonk time.

--Ezra Klein

HOW TO GET REAL. Mike Crowley notes some irony in Arianna Huffington lecturing Joe Lieberman on what "real Democrats" do seeing as Huffington was a Republican through the bulk of the nineties and a "pox on both houses" radical circa the turn of the millennium. I think there's maybe a broader point in this vicinity.

Just about ten years ago, the big issue in American politics was "welfare" -- Aid to Families With Dependent Children. That issue was eventually resolved in a deal between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich that many liberals regarded as a sellout of core principles and many conservatives regarded as a sellout of Bob Dole's presidential campaign. Today, politics doesn't work like that at all either in terms of the substance of what was considered important or the process by which all that happened.

Simultaneously, a lot of people have rather quickly risen to at least moderate levels of prominence within progressive politics who weren't really involved back then. Sometimes (as in the case of Huffington or, say, David Brock) that's because they were conservatives, more often they just weren't nearly as engaged as they are now. People whose primary point of reference is very recent American politics (I would include myself here) naturally have somewhat different ideas about what it's all about and What Is To Be Done than do people who cut their teeth under a different prevailing paradigm. Lieberman, meanwhile, is truly an outlier in terms of not having adjusted his approach during the Bush era. To people who've been doing this for years, it seems very strange to have all sorts of people who nobody had heard of seven years ago (or people who were actually Republicans) show up and try to lay down the law, while others of us find it very odd to watch people struggling to shake off the cobwebs of 1990s-vintage politics at a time of dramatically altered circumstances.

--Matthew Yglesias

DEMS: WE LOVE ISRAEL MORE THAN THE GOP DOES. I've been mulling over Matt's post from yesterday, and find myself in agitated agreement, especially after yesterday's media blitz of Democratic opposition to today's scheduled address by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki before a joint session of Congress.

As Matt noted, the Dems appear to be seeking short-term political advantage by using condemnation of Maliki to posture as more pro-Israel and more patriotic than their Republican counterparts.

At yesterday's press conference convened by the Senate's Democratic leadership, Minority Leader Harry Reid said that Maliki -- who has condemned "Israeli aggression" in the current conflict with Hezbollah, and has yet to distance himself from anti-Semitic comments made by the speaker of Iraq's parliament -- did not deserve an honor that had been bestowed on the likes of Lech Walesa. The same line was repeated later in the day on several news shows by Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. (This was a terrible disappointment, since Schakowsky is one of the best congressional Democrats -- see Ezra's health care post from yesterday.)

Conveniently forgotten is Walesa's own anti-Semitic comments, which I don't recall any U.S. leader ever having condemned.

According to the U.K.'s Institute for Jewish Policy Research:

In the spring of 2000, former president Lech Walesa expressed disapproval over President [Aleksander] Kwasniewski's participation in the 'national pilgrimage' to the Vatican. During an interview broadcast on public radio, Walesa said that Kwasniewski's visit to Rome was inappropriate due to his alleged Jewish origins. Walesa, known for his controversial statements, was widely criticized in the [European] media. In a speech in Bialystok in July 2000, during his presidential election campaign, Walesa said he was sorry that he himself was not Jewish as then he 'would probably be richer'.

And like Maliki, Walesa also refused to distance himself from blatantly anti-Semitic remarks made by an ally -- in his case, Rev. Henry Jankowski who, in a Mass attended by Walesa, accused Jews of the "satanic greed" he alleged had led to communism and World War II.

None of this excuses the accusations made by the Iraqi Speaker of Parliament that Jews were the source of beheadings and violence in Iraq, or Maliki's apparent refusal to condemn those remarks. But the selective memory at work on the part of Democrats does smack of the opportunism that is most unhelpful when there are real lives, both in Israel and Lebanon, at stake.

And given the profound level of violence still pervading Iraq, a Shiite-majority country, would you really expect Maliki to survive if he supported Israel's response to Hezbollah, a Shiite organization?

--Adele M. Stan

THE SWEET SMELL OF FEDERALISM. It seems that the "Senate passed legislation Tuesday that would make it a federal crime to help an under-age girl escape parental notification laws by crossing state lines to obtain an abortion."

This is the sort of thing we can look forward to if Roe and Casey are overturned or chipped away. The abortion issue won't be "returned to the states" under any circumstances. It simply isn't the sort of issue that people are going to be inclined to take a "live and let live" attitude toward -- we're not talking about speed limits or zoning rules or what you have. Rather, people are disagreeing about a very abstract question of universal morality, and, naturally enough, people on both sides are going to try and get as close to universal rules as they possibly can. And, frankly, rightly so -- it'd be bizarre to decide that a fetus is a legal person in Oklahoma but not in Oregon.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FIGHTING RIGHT. Further thoughts from Adele on mainline Protestant fissures, religious politics, and the need for asymmetrical battling.

--The Editors

MORE ON BILL'S VISIT. I’m gonna try to last-word Ezra from yesterday (no small task, that) on the Joe Lieberman indy-abandonment theory I am propounding…and I have data.

The results of a new Rasmussen poll (courtesy of Kos) show Lieberman trailing Ned Lamont by 10 points (51 percent to 41 percent) in the primary and, more stunning than that, Joe is now deadlocked with Ned in a potential three-way general election (Lamont and Lieberman, 40 percent; Republican Schlesinger, 13 percent). The Quinnipiac poll only last week had Lieberman with a majority of 51 percent to Lamont’s 27 percent in a three-way general election contest. Even if one factors in margins of error in both polls, that’s quite a turnaround.

This race is so volatile now I wouldn’t be surprised with Lieberman winning or losing the primary. If he wins, the three-way scenario is moot. But if he loses, it looks like the floor of support for his independent candidacy has fallen out from under him. Even if Clinton didn’t put a condition on his Monday visit, I still predict Lieberman will abandon his “Connecticut for Lieberman” independent bid, with or without Clinton intervening.

It may be, as Ezra speculates, that the quo (Hillary’s dispatching of Bill to go to Connecticut) came after the quid (Hillary pledging to support the primary winner). But I still think one of the Clintons -- and Bill is the more likely deliverer of bad news -- will apply the pressure on Lieberman if he loses on August 8.

--Tom Schaller

MORE SHOES. The dog that hasn't really barked yet in Iraq is the Turkey-Kurdistan conflict. One of the most-warned-against "things go bad" scenarios before the war was that Iraqi Kurdistan might become a base for anti-Turkish operation in Turkish Kurdistan, prompting Turkey to intervene militarily in Iraq. So far, lots and lots of things have gone bad in Iraq, but this particular scenario has been pretty quiet. Until now, that is, when Newsweek reports that Kurdish separatists operating out of Iraq have killed 15 Turkish soldiers in cross-border raids over the past week and pressure is building in Ankara for retaliation, especially in light of America's strong support for Israel's incursion into Lebanon.

UPDATE: See more on this from Olivier Knox yesterday.

--Matthew Yglesias

STEELE EXPOSED. My immediate thought upon reading Dana Milbank’s column in the Post yesterday about the mystery Republican senate candidate was that it smelled like Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele. Turns out, it was.

I teach in Maryland, and the thing you have to understand is that Steele is in a bad spot. Sure, Maryland is a very blue state, and 2006 is looking more and more like a bad Republican cycle. But Steele also has four liabilities that his boss, Gov. Bob Ehrlich, does not: 1. Ehrlich is running for re-election, not his first election, and Steele has never won on his own; 2. Ehrlich has a longstanding geographic base of support from his congressional days representing Baltimore City, Baltimore County and Harford County, whereas Steele does not; 3. Ehrlich is running for state office, not national office, and that insulates Ehrlich from many of the tough issues that Steele can only duck for so long, notably Iraq; and 4. Steele just doesn’t have the natural political skill, agility and experience Ehrlich does.

This last disadvantage was on full display in Steele’s foolish attempt to play the national media to appeal to state audiences. If Steele now thinks he can use the episode to wink to Maryland voters that he really isn’t a Bush Republican, but rather his “own man,” he’s playing with fire. He will inevitably come off as a flip-flopping slickster who is trying to be too clever by half. As my polical science colleague David Lublin of American University speculates:

Democrats may be hard pressed to succeed in winning points with voters through attacks on Steele for agreeing with them. However, an excellent question for future Senate debates would be whether Steele was being insincere and acting out of political expediency when he wholeheartedly endorsed Bush in 2004 or when he bashed him in 2006. Or was he simply playing politics on both occasions? Perhaps he was for Bush before he was against him.

Of course, given the generic Republican disadvantages this cycle and in Maryland, compounded by Steele’s other liabilities, I suppose Steele has little to lose with such absurd ploys.

A final note: Steele loves to play the victim angle, so watch for him to try to portray himself as a casualty of a leak-happy liberal national media.

--Tom Schaller

THE SECOND, AS FARCE. Israel announced plans to re-occupy a strip of southern Lebanon. This is ill-advised. Israel ceased occupying a strip of southern Lebanon just a few years ago and with good reason. What's more, re-occupation will alter the whole political context in adverse ways. Syria now has its rationale for involvement in Lebanon back, and the level of pressure that previously existed on Hezbollah to disarm will melt away now that Israeli occupation has returned.

But, having decided to go all-out in response to Hezbollah's raid, what choice did Israel have? The international community doesn't seem to want to send a force in. The Lebanese government can't do what the Israelis are asking it to. The IDF can't "crush" Hezbollah. And having committed to going in and cleaning this up, the Israelis don't want to admit it was all a mistake and "look weak" by going home. No doubt Hezbollah expected "the usual, limited response" to their July 12 raid because a limited response is what it would have made sense for Israel to do.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE MYSTERY CANDIDATE. The blogosphere has been consumed today with the unnamed GOP senatorial candidate who lit into George W. Bush at a reporter's breakfast. The whole situation was a bit weird -- the cloaked complainer was frustrated at the GOP's weakness and Bush's unpopularity, so it's not clear why he didn't rip off the mask and try to carve out some public independence. In any case, ABC News confirms that the man behind the mask is Maryland's Michael Steele. I wonder how the rest of the GOP feels about him publicly blasting the party to reporters -- feeding the Bush-is-unpopular and GOP-is-doomed narratives -- while hiding behind assured anonymity.

--Ezra Klein

A TALE OF TWO PLANS. The blogosphere has endless amounts of commentary on Hillary Clinton and the DLC's American Dream Initiative, a laudable-if-modest set of policy proposals to help the middle class, subsidize the poor, and offer this undefined thing called opportunity. None of the plans are particularly inspirational, and the health care section is packed with the usual pabulum about electronic medicine, small business buying pools, and giving kids insurance. All the easy stuff, in other words. And, according to Google News, these shocking proposals garnered over 220 news articles.

Elsewhere, on Capitol Hill, Pete Stark and Jan Schakowsky presented the AmeriCare Health Act, a fully realized piece of legislation that would create a universal insurance program using a slightly revamped Medicare template. The plan would have a deductible of $350 ($500 for a family), a 20 percent copay, and an out-of-pocket limit of $2,500 for individuals and $4,000 for families. The benefits are full and comprehensive, the HHS secretary is empowered to bargain down drug prices, the poor are subsidized, the funding mechanisms are spelled out, and the plan uses a proven and highly effective model to provide universal care to everyone who wants or needs it without disrupting the care of anyone content with their current arrangement. It's a great plan. And when I searched Google News for it, I found precisely one mention of the plan -- at ModernHealthCare.com.

This is the problem many of us have with Hillary. She can focus press attention at will, but she uses her powers for, at best, mediocrity. So the press will report today on a Democratic plan to do nothing interesting and ignore one that would actually solve the health care crisis. Had Clinton decided to attend a different press conference, it could've been the reverse. Indeed, news of her finally shaking off her post-1994 stupor and coming out in support of an expansive and inspiring universal plan would've been catnip to the media, netting her magazine covers and a new look from liberals worried about her appetite for progressive reform. But she declined to lead, instead playing the safest cards she could draw and refusing to assume an actual leadership role in the Democratic Party. If anyone could explain to me why that's the sort of stratagem Democratic primary voters should reward, I'd be fascinated. In the meantime, go leaf through Stark's proposal. It's an excellent example of what a Democratic fix should look like, and all should know about its existence.

--Ezra Klein

MIDDLE MANAGEMENT. Regarding Matt's and Ezra's contentions that Democratic initiatives to strengthen and build the middle class by making it easier and less expensive to attend college are less important than focusing on high-school drop-outs, I'd just like to note that Hillary Clinton is probably taking this approach because Democratic presidential candidates have in the past two elections lost college-educated and college drop-out voters as a group, even while they consistently won high-school drop-outs.

So between trying to win voters who have turned away from a Democratic Party they perceive as caring only about the problems of ethnic and racial minorities and the unionized, and actually doing something for poor minority voters, it would seem that the ability to do the latter is entirely dependent on the ability to do the former. Democrats elected to national office can do very little about the high high-school drop-out rate, which is significantly a function of the high black and Hispanic drop-out rate in major cities with Democratic mayors as well as the increasing portion of young people in America who are minorities, so long as Republicans control both congressional chambers and the White House (though I've often wondered why Democratic mayors can't unite to do more about the problem). And Democrats are going to have a devil of a time winning the presidency again if they can't get the majority of college-educated voters to vote for them. Nearly three-quarters of voters in 2004 had at least started college; 42 percent of voters were graduates. There's no shame in going where the votes are -- it is, after all, how you win elections.

Besides, it's not like focusing a little attention on the middle class, too, is going to cause an end to such Democratic poverty-fighting measures as raising the minimum wage. But the idea that progressives think it's bad politics and bad policy to strengthen and grow the middle class, well, that can keep Democrats from having any success in implementing anti-poverty measures in the long run.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TONY SNOW, WHAT WOULD THEY DO WITHOUT YOU. I know he has a good reputation among the Beltway Cool Kids -- how good is it? Check this out -- so the question naturally arises as to when it was that Tony Snow took on the role of Mr. Stupid. First, there was the nasty shot at Helen Thomas. Then, he got up and told the world that the president believed that stem-cell research was "murder," which he had to walk back yesterday, probably because, in the internal White House polling, the answer "C: No, because this administration is as dumb as a box of rocks" scored in the mid-90s. Then, there was this little tidbit from today's gaggle:

Well, I think -- I don't want to characterize satisfied or dissatisfied. It is clear that there is -- that there is work to do to secure Baghdad. And General Casey has made no secret of that, and other spokesmen in Baghdad have made no secret of that. So now we're working with the government to say, okay, what can we do. What can we do to go ahead and get into those neighborhoods, deal with sectarian violence, but also deal with the fact that in some cases, there really is just gangs of rowdies?

--Charles P. Pierce

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: RAMALLAH STIRS. Writing from the city that houses the Palestinian government, Jo-Ann Mort reminds us of the conflict that remains the core issue in the region, and documents glimmers of potential forward movement:

Prior to Meshal's meddling, Palestinian factions had been forging a partnership -- one that might even produce a unity government -- orchestrated as a result of a document negotiated and finalized at the end of June by prominent Palestinian prisoners held in Israel’s Hadarim jail. That document marks the first time that all the Palestinian factions have come together to sign a statement of principles.

The key figure in the making of the prisoners’ document is Marwan Barghouti, considered the leading figure in the generation known as “Young Fatah” that came of age during the First Intifada (1987-1993). Barghouti is often mentioned as a possible successor to Mazen in the event that the Israelis free him.

One of Barghouti’s top allies is Qadora Fares, a 14-year veteran of Israeli imprisonment...

"When there is no hope, Hamas tells the Palestinians that resistance is the only way we can achieve our rights," [Fares] said. The prisoners’ document offers a possible first step, to convince Hamas and its supporters to embrace a program that recognizes Israel and to jump-start negotiations. The significance of the document, says Fares, is that in it, "Hamas said we should build a state on the 1967 borders for the first time. To sign a document is the first step to agree to the principle of a two-state solution… The Israelis should not read this agreement by Israeli eyes. As Fatah, it took us more than 20 years to make a change; with Hamas it took five months. I believe now that Hamas and Fatah and all the factions are ready to have a cease-fire in Gaza and the West Bank for six months and renew it every six months -- and a prisoner exchange. Abu Mazen can use this new climate to make a new government, new politics, and new messages."

--The Editors

THE GIULIANI MIRAGE. If you're interested in a little pure political analysis, I really recommend Kate O'Beirne's National Review article on exactly how dim Rudy Giuliani's odds of winning the GOP presidential nomination are. If you compare the views of New York City residents, where Bush got a pathetic 24.7 percent of the vote in relatively conservative Queens, with the views of Republican presidential primary voters, it's just inconceivable that anyone could win a majority in NYC and also be a viable member of a national Republican ticket. As O'Beirne points out, you win in New York -- even as a Republican -- by, among other things, taking stands on abortion, gay rights, and gun control that would put you in the leftward half of the Democratic Party.

--Matthew Yglesias

AND NO, I'M NOT WEARING A TINFOIL HAT. In the course of an extremely snarky review of the latest books from David Sirota and George Lakoff in this past Sunday's New York Times book section, there was this remarkable bit of analysis from one Tobin Harshaw, who is identified as "an editor with the Ope-Ed page of the Times." And, yes, it would be just as snarky of me to point out that accusing Sirota of "wafer-thin allusions to popular culture" is not a charge that should be idly thrown about by someone whose day-job may well entail the futile task of saving David Brooks from himself. Anyway, writing of Lakoff, who apparently mistrusts the good faith of modern conservatives, Harshaw writes:

But does anybody not wearing a tinfoil hat believe that Republicans really want to take the vote away from women, blacks, and non-landowners? Or that President Bush's poorly managed Medicare prescription-drug expansion was a clever ruse to destroy the program?

Well, yes, as a matter of fact, taking the vote away from minorities was how William Rehnquist got started in conservative politics and he ended up pretty well, as I recall. It's why Ed Morris bought off all those ministers. You don't have to go to the fringes of anything to argue that there was some serious (and, I would argue, nakedly illegal) voter-suppression in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. As to the second part, well, Grover Norquist was not kidding about drowning government in the bathtub. And, from Brownie at FEMA, to John Bolton at the U.N., to the revelation in The Times that the IRS is laying off lawyers who deal specifically with luxury and estate taxes, to the startling revelations by the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage this past Sunday about the murder-by-resume of the Justice Department's civil-rights division, you don't have to be Fox Mulder to divine that one way this bunch demolishes programs and departments they don't like is by creating circumstances through which those programs and departments are encouraged to fail.

-- Charles P. Pierce

WHY COLLEGE? To follow up on Matt's points below, it's worth noticing that the obsessive focus on college education bespeaks a certain cowardice and calculation in Democratic circles. College is a cost that primarily affects the middle class and the well-to-do but, particularly in the private context, is hefty enough that it can be burdensome for both. Talk of making it more affordable, while ostensibly aimed at subsidizing the poor, is really a poll-tested way to speak to the politically potent middle- and upper-income quintiles -- it's a way for the Democratic Party to speak up the income ladder, where the votes are.

The whole thing is a basically coded appeal, framed in terms of economic uplift so all can feel progressive while supporting something for themselves. If we spent one tenth the energy working on high school graduation rates, we'd have both a more powerful impact on the truly disadvantaged and a more significant impact on college attendance. The problem is, the middle class and the upper class aren't worried about their kids graduating from high school, and so talk of those problems doesn't resonate with large swaths of the electorate. And that all points to the underlying dynamic here and elsewhere in Democratic rhetoric: Progressives now try to address poverty in the context of the middle class -- they seek out economic issues which could aid the poor but have plenty of relevance up the income ladder. In doing, they ignore the most destructive and entrenched pathologies and problems, as those tend to be rather rare among higher income earners, and for that reason much more damaging to those caught in their grip. The ultimate problem here is that the poor rarely votes, while the middle class does, and it's damn hard for politicians to figure out how to focus the electorate on things that aren't their problem.

--Ezra Klein

FLEXING THE MAGISTERIAL MUSCLE. Any politician in nearly any corner of the United States will tell you that, in the world of secular politics, the Roman Catholic Church is a force to be reckoned with. But in Missouri, that's an understatement.

Appearing as a sidebar to today's New York Times story on state efforts to fund stem-cell research is a nugget on letters sent to candidates in Missouri by the Missouri Catholic Conference, the public policy arm of the Roman church in the Show-Me State. In his letter to State Representative Jim Guest (R), Missouri Catholic Conference Executive Director Lawrence Weber, according to the Times, urged Guest to return a contribution from Supporters of Health Research, a stem-cell research advocacy group, or risk a Conference campaign against him. From Stephanie Strom in today's New York Times:

“The Missouri Catholic Conference is committed to informing Missouri voters about campaign contributions promoting human cloning and embryonic stem cell research,” Mr. Weber wrote, “and will report to Missouri voters regarding candidates who choose to associate themselves with this and similar organizations that promote such unethical practices.”

He added that if candidates returned contributions from Supporters of Health Research, the conference would report that to diocesan newspapers so long as documentation was provided.

The irony is that in his last two elections, Guest won endorsements from the Missouri Right to Life Political Action Committee, which many see as a virtual arm of the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, by the time of his 2004 primary race, Guest had moved up from his 2002 rating of "Pro-life" -- meaning that he almost always votes positions deemed by the group to be "pro-life" -- to a stellar "100% Perfect pro-life voting record."

Guest told The Times, “I’m not sure if extortion is the right word, but they basically threatened me if I didn’t return the money, and that’s certainly stepping across the line.”

The candidate has declined to return the money, and Washington attorney Marcus S. Owens has filed a complaint with the IRS regarding what he says is interference in electoral politics by the Missouri Catholic Conference.

Missouri's politically ambitious Catholic hierarchy last came to my attention in 1999, when its then-executive director Louis DeFeo penned an anti-abortion bill that arguably would have made the killing of an abortion provider a defensible homicide. The bill passed both houses of Missouri's state government, and when then Governor Mel Carnahan refused to sign it, he was tarred by his opponent in the U.S. Senate race, John Ashcroft, as a supporter of "partial-birth abortion." Carnahan died during the campaign when his private plane crashed; Ashcroft went on to become the attorney general of the United States. The so-called Infant's Protection Act never became law because of court action.

--Adele M. Stan

WHY MORE GRADUATES? All right, let's follow up since commenters never agree with my college-skepticism. For starters, let me say I have no objection to increasing the number of college graduates in the United States. One thing I do worry about, though, is this. Right now a hefty proportion of kids do go to college. When you try to increase the number of college-goers by subsidizing college attendance, the tendency is for the vast majority of the subsidies to accrue to families that would have sent their kids to school anyway rather than to the marginal families who otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford it. Since college-bound kids come, as a rule, from wealthier families than do non-college kids, these schemes can often resort to upward wealth redistribution. The specific Clinton/DLC plan mostly avoids these problems, which is good, but I still think it's a strange thing for progressives to be prioritizing given that you can only focus on so many things at once.

The thing of it is that as you can read in Third Way's report (PDF) on "The Politics of Opportunity," Americans are already quite well-educated: "American students spend an average of 13.8 years in formal education—more than any other industrialized nation in the world except Norway" (see also Education at a Glance from the OECD). There's a real education problem in America concerning our large number of high school dropouts who, economically, end up doing quite poorly. But the economic problems we have vis-à-vis other rich nations -- rising levels of middle-class insecurity, enormous inequality, declining levels of social mobility -- aren't plausibly attributable to a shortfall in the number of people attending college. The statistics show that we have more people attending college than other countries do already.

--Matthew Yglesias

WOULD THAT IT WERE. I fear Tom is looking deeper into the Clinton-Lieberman rally than is really needed. Word around here is that Holy Joe forced Hillary Clinton into something of a confessional on the floor of the Senate. Hillary, you'll remember, was the first major Democrat to throw Lieberman's independent candidacy under the bus, promising to back whoever the eventual nominee is. While that was the politically pragmatic move for her, it was painful to Joe and she didn't like doing it. So when he buttonholed her and asked if she could airlift in Bill to generate some good press, she readily agreed. As attractive as Tom's speculation that Clinton is trying to kill the independent candidacy may be, this is really just an instance of the establishment working to protect its friends. Would that they cared enough about the seat, the party, and the Democratic base to actually pressure Lieberman to drop the independent candidacy.

--Ezra Klein

REALITY CHECK. So how bad are those vicious Canadian waiting times? Well, it turns out not so bad. StatCanada -- a government body somewhat similar to the U.S. Census Bureau -- just released a report on the time Canadians spend in medical purgatory, and it turns out limbo just doesn't last that long. Median waiting times for all specialized services are between three and four weeks, and 70 to 80 percent of patients found their wait "acceptable." And remember: Most everyone can receive care, and very few need to fear its affordability. Looking at this data, even though I'm no fan of the Canadian system, it nevertheless seems to offer a tradeoff I'd accept.

The invaluable Matt Holt, surveying this data, notices not only that those times don't seem so bad, but that they compare pretty favorably with the sort of inequities faced in the United States. Here's a fascinating chart he grabs from Health Affairs that does a good job making the point:

We're number one! We're number one!

So here's what I want from you guys: Last time I needed a diagnostic -- a very, very standard one -- it took about a month. A friend of mine found a simple orthopedic evaluation couldn't be scheduled less than a month in advance. It routinely takes three months before she can see a specialist. But what are your average wait times? Remember, we're not talking primary care here, but specialists, diagnostics, procedures, etc. Are you satisfied with them? Or do you feel a long lag between medical complaint and resolution?

--Ezra Klein

DID BILL STRIKE A DEAL? As we all know, Joe Lieberman called in Bill “Big Dog”
Clinton to Waterbury yesterday to help his ailing re-nomination effort. It was all hugs and kisses with the predecessor to the other president Lieberman has been known to embrace. In the Post’s report, David Broder writes:

The two have remained close through the years, despite the fact that Lieberman admonished Clinton for his moral laxity in the Monica Lewinsky affair in a celebrated Senate floor speech. Lieberman made no reference to that event Monday night but instead recalled, "I was the first senator outside Arkansas to endorse Bill Clinton for the nomination in 1992."

Now, surely Clinton is first to determine who, among Democrats, is permitted to exonerate Lieberman for that 1998 speech. But even if the Big Dog has forgiven Joe (I can’t imagine he’s forgotten), it is precisely this Democrat-when-I-wannabe instrumentalism on Lieberman’s part that has him in the stew in the first place: He’s all selective memory, and always for his own benefit. One sees why he fits in with the current occupant of the White House just as comfortably as he did the previous one.

But the most interesting comment from Clinton yesterday was this one: “I have nothing against Joe’s opponent. He has a right to run.” This smells of poll-tested crapola: Lieberman realizes that the attitude of entitlement to the re-nomination he’s exhibited thus far is hurting him -- an attitude which shone through brightly at times during his debate with Lamont a few weeks ago. I’m sure his daily polling has since revealed his aggrieved sensibilities are costing him, so he suddenly is trying to demonstrate a magnanimous respect for the process and other Democrats. So he presses the Magnanimator-in-Chief into service.

Clinton has said he will support Ned Lamont if he wins. The real question I’d like Broder or somebody else to ask Clinton before August 8 is this: Did you, as a condition of agreeing to back Joe before the primary, tell him that you would ask him to respectfully abandon his independent candidacy if he lost the primary?

If Clinton established that condition beforehand, his credibility in backing his longtime friend is beyond challenge. And if Lieberman agreed, he can restore his own Democrat credentials by holding up his end of that bargain.

Somebody get Broder to get Bill on the phone.

--Tom Schaller

DEMOCRATS BEHAVING BADLY. It seems to me that the Senate Democratic caucus have started playing a small-but-destructive role in our Iraq policy. It started with the demagogic denunciations of Nouri al-Maliki's perfectly reasonable amnesty plan for Iraqi insurgents. Such a plan would be a necessary component of any Iraqi national reconciliation scheme, but Democrats saw in it a good way to score political points. And they turned out to be correct, successfully pressuring Bush into pressuring Maliki to drop the plan. Which is a neat victory, except lots of people will die as a result. Today, my inbox includes this press release from Harry Reid's office:

Washington, DC - TODAY, Tuesday, July 25, 2006, at 11:00 AM, the Senate Democratic Leadership will hold a press conference in advance of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's address to a Joint Session of Congress. The Democratic Senators will discuss disturbing reports that the Prime Minister has condemned Israel but failed to denounce Hezbollah's role in perpetrating the current crisis in Lebanon and Israel.

Again, as a short-term political gambit, this seems clever enough. But the substantive policy is all kinds of wrong. It's also incredibly misguided to think there's any long-term political gains to be made by trying to outrage the GOP into adopting the least-reasonable approach to relations with the Arab world.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FRIENDLY ADVICE. "The idea," writes Matt, "that the United States or American Jews like me should support [Israel's war] out of friendship is akin to the notion that a real friend would lend a car to a drunk buddy after the bartender confiscates his keys." He makes the case that Israel's assault on Lebanon is "strategically blinkered and morally obtuse." Read the whole thing.

--The Editors

FREEDOM-HATING, NOW MORE THAN EVER. Cato’s David Boaz is none too happy that even Hillary Clinton and the moderate DLC proposed some new government programs that involve spending money to help people. Nor would he be much of a libertarian if he thought otherwise. But then he offers this pearl of political advice: "There are millions of libertarian-leaning voters disgruntled with the Republicans’ social conservatism, soaring spending, and ill-fated war. And Democrats are doing everything they can to discourage those voters from switching parties."

Eh. The thing of it is that there are millions more voters who have a favorable attitude toward progressive economics but like social conservatism. An "American Dream Initiative" just might be the thing to convince them to switch parties. Meanwhile, in the short term at least, a libertarian disgruntled with Republican policies has no serious choice but to back the Democrats anyway -- divided government would produce a certain amount of gridlock, congressional oversight, and checking-and-balancing that one would have to regard as superior to unified GOP control from a limited government perspective. Now from where I sit, what they've put together is a pretty decent program for increasing the number of college graduates, though I'm not at all sure which national problem is supposed to be seriously ameliorated by "produc[ing] one million more college and community college graduates a year by 2015."

--Matthew Yglesias

GIVING SMITH THE BOOT. Back in 2002, I wrote a profile of Bob Smith, then the incumbent Republican U.S. senator from New Hampshire. Smith was a likeable flake who once gave an unforgettable speech on behalf of an elephant that a circus had ensconced briefly on the grounds of the Capitol. (Yes, yes, you can all make your own jokes now. We'll wait. All done? Good.) However, in 1999, Smith also had made a speech excoriating the Republican Party for moving away from its guiding principles and, for a period of four months, Smith left the party entirely. Republicans in New Hampshire, in response, threw up Congressman John Sununu against Smith in that year's primary election. This was based partly on Smith's public apostasy, and also partly on the notion that the young and relatively charismatic Sununu could keep the general election with formidable Democratic governor Jeanne Shaheen close enough so that some jiggery-pokery with phone-jamming could help the GOP steal... ah...narrowly win it. Even some of Smith's colleagues in the Senate publicly threw him under the Sununu train.

All of which came to mind when I recalled the other day that the defenestration of Bob Smith occasioned no national hysterics. There was no talk of "purges," or "inquisitions." There was no mock horror about "defining moments" in the future of a political party. No, a cranky apostate was facing the consequences of his public career in the best way it is possible to face them in a democracy. The only difference between this race and the one going on in Connecticut is that Bob Smith was infinitely less insufferable, and manifestly more fun, than Joe Lieberman ever was.

--Charles P. Pierce

FARM SUBSIDY FREE FOR ALL. There's something very odd about the way the Doha Round of WTO talks have collapsed in an orgy of recriminations over agricultural protectionism. The essence of the issue is that poor countries were demanding that rich countries reduce their level of farm subsidies if they wanted poor countries to make any policy changes. Then the United States said it thought said subsidies should be reduced, but only if the Europeans reduced theirs too. The Europeans agreed with this position, but in reverse. Now both the United States and the E.U. are saying the other side wouldn't make enough concessions.

The issue here is that these aren't really concessions at all. High levels of agricultural tariffs and production-subsidies are bad policies -- a classic case of interest-group capture. The Europeans really should reduce their own subsidies from their current high level, but our own lower levels of subsidies aren't doing us any good. There's no reason to make changing our misguided farm policy contingent on the E.U. altering its even more misguided farm policy. Nor is there really any reason to link our farm policy to these Third World intellectual property and investment issues -- we should just make our policy better and we'd reap the benefits of doing so. Let the rest of the world do what it wants.

--Matthew Yglesias

APOCALYPSE NOW? Self-identified Christocrat Rod Parsley has officially hitched his wagon to the Armageddon addicts at Christians United for Israel (CUFI). Parsley, a member of CUFI’s national leadership, was in town last week to lobby members of Congress on his zest for an apocalyptic showdown in the Middle East.

Like his friend and CUFI’s leader, John Hagee, Parsley professes a deep love for Israel and the Jewish people. But a few minutes of a sermon reveal that Parsley, like Hagee, only loves Israel as the site of Armageddon and the Second Coming.

In his most recent production, Iran and Israel: Impending Apocalypse, Parsley pronounces us “living in the final moments of human history,” owing to Iran’s nuclear program. Although a webcast of the sermon is available online for free, Parsley nonetheless hocks the DVD for a “love gift” of cash. And to lend divine credibility to its contents, he claims that “[j]ust days before the July 12 incidents which began the current situation of war between Israel and Hezbollah, God gave Pastor Rod Parsley a prophetic word about events in the Middle East and the importance of key players in the end-times drama!”

Following a nearly incoherent account of Middle East history, replete with maps and diagrams, Parsley warns that an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel “could take place at any moment,” and counsels vigilance. Despite his scary pronouncements about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and the threats of Islamic terrorists, he ultimately isn’t too worried about Israel being wiped out by an Iranian nuke. “Watch,” he beseeches his audience, “for you do not know the hour that the man of God cometh.” Then, face contorted, looking upward, he begs, “Oh, God, send a fire not so that we can entertain ourselves, but [to] give us a revival unparalleled in human history!” Sweaty and overwrought, the televangelist pleads, “We’re standing on the precipice, on the brink, on the verge, of the . . . last moments of human history. Are you ready?” The audience stirs, and Parsley thunders, “Jesus is coming!”

Was RNC Chair Ken Mehlman waiting for Jesus when he told CUFI’s banquet last week that “If you love freedom, whether you are Christian, Jewish or Muslim ... whether you are American, Japanese, or Indian ... today we are all Israelis”?

It would take only a modicum of cynicism to realize, of course, that Jewish Mehlman was just trolling for evangelical votes. But if he has his eye on Ohio, he should take note of Parsley’s diminishing esteem in his home state. In 2004, Parsley was largely credited, along with his friend, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, with turning up the volume on homophobia and bringing out votes for Ohio’s gay marriage ban, and, by extension, Bush. But even Blackwell’s church pandering, campaign contributions from Christian right bankrollers, and affiliations with Swift Boaters hasn’t helped his current gubernatorial campaign. While Parsley thinks the world is plunging toward Armageddon, the same could be said of Blackwell’s poll numbers: He currently trails Democratic rival Ted Strickland by 20 points.

--Sarah Posner

NOW ALL WE NEED IS A BAND. I've heard the lament from so many TAP readers: You're walking along, listening to some music, and all you can think is, "If only I could somehow listen to Prospect content on my IPod." Well now you can! TAP has hit ITunes. Subscribe to our podcasts (for free!) here -- we’re currently featuring our breakfast talks with Howard Dean, Congressman Sherrod Brown, and right-wing warrior Grover Norquist. We’re going to be putting up more content soon, so be sure to subscribe.

Meanwhile, befitting our prescient and longstanding appreciation for the importance of social capital, TAP has now entered the online social networking game. Be sure to catch us at MySpace and Gather, where you can join discussion threads, enter the contests we're currently running, and listen to streaming audio of the new single from TAP's in-house emo band, once said single is written and recorded.

--The Editors

JUST LOVE ME SOME BIPARTISANSHIP. I'd suggest that if Joe Lieberman really was planning to toe the Republican line so that he could capture their endorsement for Senate, the reason wasn't because he feared a contested election, but because he desired the sort of media adulation that comes from properly feckless displays of bipartisanship. To Lieberman, such a future would've looked properly glorious -- one of the last men able to heal this bitter divide. And it shows why liberals so dislike him: If Joe really were as proudly progressive as he keeps claiming, he'd reserve at least a little distaste for this administration that has spent six years wrecking the country on all progressive metrics.

--Ezra Klein

DUAL LOYALTIES. David Gelernter wonders why American Jews don't like George W. Bush more in light of his strong support for Israeli policy. That’s a somewhat complicated issue, no doubt. But note here that were I to say Gelernter's thinking on American Israel policy seems driven by "dual loyalties," he would no doubt condemn me as an anti-Semite. And yet, the entire premise of his column is that it's inappropriate for me, and for other Jewish people, to vote for candidates whose policies would be good for the United States rather than ones whose policies would be good for Israel.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHO'S AFRAID OF A LITTLE GERRYMANDERING? I suggest folks seriously read through Jonathan Krasno's article on the "The Redistricting Myth," that oh-so-comforting belief that non-competitive house districts and lackluster incumbents can be chalked up to the evil HALs used to deviously partition off the electorate. As Krasno argues, though, redistricting is far likelier to be one of the many factors rather than the sole factor. A few data points:

• In 2004, 22 House races were decided by 10 points or less, the lowest number in 50 years. This is among the most oft-cited arguments against redistricting.

• But also in 2004, political scientists broke down the presidential numbers by congressional district and found that 102 of them saw a difference of less than 10 points. Were gerrymandering really segregating such intractable partisans, why do their team colors shine so much brighter in congressional elections?

• In 2004, the average incumbent outspent their challenger by more than 5 to 1.

Indeed, incumbency confers a series of important advantages that have little to do with the map lines. Constant coverage of events, speeches, legislative achievements, and general do-goodery is a big one, as is the ability to fundraise, draw on established political machines, convince the party structure to provide needed resources, and airlift big name supporters. Meanwhile, the parties have begun deploying much more targeted strategies during elections, concentrating resources in a handful of highly contested districts and leaving the average challenger to get slaughtered by the better-known, better-funded incumbent. Redistricting has emerged a convenient way to sidestep calls for a wider playing field, allowing Democrats and Republicans to shrug away complaints with a nod towards the insurmountable deviousness of those shadowy gerrymanders.

--Ezra Klein

DEPRESSING MIDEAST ROUNDUP. Say what you want about the Bush administration, but they sure know how to pull off a good media stunt like Condi Rice's surprise visit to Beirut, conducted via helicopter from Cyprus since Israeli airstrikes have closed Lebanon's airport. Fortunately for Rice, she managed not to be hit by any stray bombs during her trip into town. Compare that to eight-year-old Mahmoud Srour whose family decided to abide by the IDF's orders to vacate the city of Tyre and had their car blown up for their trouble. His mom seems to be more-or-less okay, but his dad and his uncle are dead. Mahmoun's "face was burned beyond recognition" and all three of his siblings are likewise hospitalized and suffering from serious burns.

That's The Washington Post's human interest tale of woe. Today's Times carries a similar story about a woman named Muntaha Shaito and her family, likewise bombed while fleeing Tyre. The IDF explained that strikes targeted "approximately 20 vehicles" that were "serving the terror organization in the launching of missiles at Israel, and were recognized fleeing from or staying at missile-launching areas." In other words, if you live near a place where Hezbollah was shooting missiles from, your house may be blown up in an effort to stop the missiles and you'll be killed if you stay put. But if you decide to flee, then your car may be blown up on the grounds that you were fleeing missile-launching areas.

In case one is inclined to wonder where the next generation of Hezbollah members and supporters is going to come from, I think you've got your candidate right here. For every dead father, mother, uncle, sister, or whatever, you're leaving behind a lot of angry people.

--Matthew Yglesias

GORE WATCH: WAL-MART EDITION. Amanda Griscom Little’s report at Salon about Al Gore's recent meeting with Wal-Mart’s leadership at the Bentonville headquarters sounds like further evidence that Gore is positioning himself for a White House bid:

Sporting a curiously thick Southern drawl, Gore heaped praise on Wal-Mart's green goal-setting. "...by taking this climate crisis on frontally and making this commitment, you will gain the moral authority and vision as an organization to take on many great challenges."

Keenly aware of his Arkansas audience's Christian inclinations, Gore peppered his hourlong commentary with religious references. He quoted Scripture, told a Bible story, and then offered a nonapologetic apology for the sermonizing: "I don't mean to proselytize here on my religious faith...If you're an atheist or agnostic" -- dramatic pause -- "God bless you!"

Gore also waded into politics. He called the partisan bickering in Washington "pitiful, seriously pitiful," and mocked national leaders for "borrowing a ton of money from China to buy a ton of oil from Saudi Arabia to burn it in ways that destroy the inhabitability of the planet -- not a good pattern!" He also called for a radical overhaul of the American tax system…

His whole spiel sounded like a dry run for red-state campaigning in 2008. So it only made sense when, in bidding Gore adieu, [Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee] Scott asked the big question: "Are you going to run for president?" Wild applause ensued, but Gore's response was predictably understated: "There's a lot about the political system that I think is really toxic ... [and] that I don't think I'm good at," he said. "I really believe that the highest and best use of my experience and skills may be to concentrate all-out on changing the minds of the American people about the [climate] crisis. That way, whoever does run for president faces an electorate that flat-out demands that they make this their priority."

Gore should stop pussyfooting around and jump in. If he dances around too cleverly he may trip over himself--and that would be a tragedy for a political career which already features one tragedy too many.

--Tom Schaller

ABOUT TIME. I finally got around to reading today's New York Times op-eds, and I have only one thing to say to Paul Krugman: "Thank you." Can we all please stop treating the neocons like serious people now? Also, in a media environment that rewards people for being provocatively wrong rather than quietly right, can we finally recognize that those who prefer attention over attentiveness are not serious actors, but clowns? Just because someone has a strong conviction, a lot of self-confidence, and some area studies knowledge does not make that person a serious thinker. It makes them dangerous. Writes Krugman:

Today we call them neoconservatives, but when the first George Bush was president, those who believed that America could remake the world to its liking with a series of splendid little wars — people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — were known within the administration as “the crazies.” Grown-ups in both parties rejected their vision as a dangerous fantasy....

Would the current crisis on the Israel-Lebanon border have happened even if the Bush administration had actually concentrated on fighting terrorism, rather than using 9/11 as an excuse to pursue the crazies’ agenda? Nobody knows. But it’s clear that the United States would have more options, more ability to influence the situation, if Mr. Bush hadn’t squandered both the nation’s credibility and its military might on his war of choice...

Few if any of the crazies have the moral courage to admit that they were wrong. Vice President Cheney continues to insist that his two most famous pronouncements about Iraq — his declaration before the invasion that we would be “greeted as liberators” and his assertion a year ago that the insurgency was in its “last throes” — were “basically accurate.”

But if the premise of the Bush doctrine was right, why are things going so badly?

The crazies respond by retreating even further into their fantasies of omnipotence. The only problem, they assert, is a lack of will.

William Kristol's recommendation that Bush go to Jerusalem to stand with Israel in its bombing campaign against Lebanon is insane. There really is no other way to describe it. It shows a complete lack of regard for the lives of Americans stationed in Iraq, who would certainly bear the brunt of Shiite rage at such an act, and it would destroy for decades any mediating role the United States could play in the Arab-Israeli conflict. But a person who treats foreign policy -- who treats grave matters of life and death and the survival of nations -- with the same ethos as a television talk show, where the wildest position is always the best one, is a person no serious person should feel a need to treat with respect. I'm sure Kristol knows very well that America's president would never be fool enough to follow his flamboyant advice, even if he acts hurt at the rejection.

Other neocons, who are even greater true believers, are upset that the president is not pushing for a new and expanded war (which, I might add, our military cannot easily conduct, given its current commitments). Angry at having to let go of their grandiose, world-historical fantasies, they have taken to calling into question the president’s convictions, treating him now as one of those little men that is buffeted by history. Last night I watched (with satisfaction, I must admit) as Frank Gaffney and others on CNN questioned whether Bush was turning into a wimp. After seeing so many sensible and serious Americans thus tarnished over the past six years of partisan bitterness, the schadenfreude was delicious. What happens when you lie down with dogs and all that.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED TAP ONLINE: COURTS DISMISSED. So should gay marriage proponents really be grateful that the New York Court of Appeals refused to overturn the state's gay marriage ban? The argument is a familiar one: judicial interventions into hot-button public debates invariably provoke a bigger public backlash than legislative actions. Scott Lemieux says it's bunk.

--The Editors

THE PEACE PRESIDENT. Remember this?

"The enemy declared war on us," Bush told a re-election rally in Cedar Rapids. "Nobody wants to be the war president. I want to be the peace president... The next four years will be peaceful years." Bush used the words "peace" or "peaceful" a total of 20 times.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ruled out a quick "false promise" cease-fire in the Middle East Friday and defended her decision not to meet with either Syrian or Hezbollah leaders in her upcoming visit to the region.

--Ezra Klein

JO-ANN MORT: DISPATCH FROM TEL AVIV The weekend begins on Friday in Israel -- and this weekend, the war is settling in. The initial shock and feeling of righteous justification have begun to yield to wonderment about where all this is going. The change in mood is slight so far, but questions are beginning to be asked, concerns beginning to be raised -- particularly as Israeli soldiers start taking casualties. (Unlike in the United States, every soldier who dies in a war or attack is written up in the media. Often, his family is interviewed on television). People in the North -- those still there -- are growing weary of life in bomb shelters. According to Israeli press reports, 30 to 50 percent of the residents in the North have left for the short term. The Tel Aviv Hotel in which I’m staying is completely filled, largely with residents of Northern Israel.

The weekend papers are filled with articles questioning where this is heading for Israel and how success and victory will be claimed. The military has announced that it is calling up several thousand reserves, and elite army units have already begun ground operations inside Lebanon. There is virtually no desire among Israelis to reoccupy Lebanon -- on the contrary. This time, they want to disengage for good, without Hezbollah rockets aimed at Israel left in place. But how exactly Israel will accomplish this aim, and what price will be paid?

As two of Israel’s top journalists, Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer, write in today’s Yedioth Ahronoth, the largest paper in Israel: “A large, uncomfortable gap has been created between the real, limited expectations of the policy-makers and the expectations that the public has built up. The longer the stay in the shelter, the greater the expectations of its outcome become. Frustration is on its way.”

The war has already begun to spark intense discussions over Ehud Olmert’s plan for what he called “convergence,” a unilateral disengagement from the occupied West Bank. It seems clearer and clearer to many Israelis that the mistake in withdrawing from Gaza was not that Israel withdrew, but that it did so without any security arrangements, and that further withdrawals will somehow have to be negotiated for Israel’s security needs. As many commentators have noted, the fact that Israel has shown such a willingness to give up land and withdraw from the territories explains much of the current international support it currently enjoys. The public is aware of this dynamic.

Meanwhile, Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz have had to learn in a literal trial by fire what previous Israeli heads of state and Defense Ministers had years of military training for. The weekend polls have good news for both of them. 78 percent are satisfied with Olmert’s performance, up from 43 percent two weeks ago. Similarly, Defense Minister Peretz, who has been the most ubiquitous civilian figure among the Israeli public and media since all of this began, has moved his own polling numbers to 61 percent from 28 percent two weeks ago.

--Jo-Ann Mort

MARMOSETS FOR LIEBERMAN. Now that angry liberal blogging crazypeople have achieved their ultimate goal of destroying civility in American politics, as demonstrated by the fact that Aunt Pittypat Kondracke has keeled over on her fainting couch, here's something that's rather gotten lost in the whole Connecticut senatorial business. Joe Lieberman, an Establishment darling and former vice-presidential candidate, is getting his withered hindquarters handed to him daily to a guy who is not exactly the second coming of Huey Long. As much as I admire the fervor of his supporters, Ned Lamont seems to me to be a perfectly amiable plutocrat, smart enough and capable, but neither overly charismatic nor particularly inspirational. (Disclaimer: I haven't been in the same room with the man yet.) He's run a good campaign that is now a great one at least partly because the opposing campaign seems to be a) on the wrong side of every issue; and b) run by marmosets. That Lieberman is now life-and-death with a rookie only a few years removed from the most local forms of local government is the best evidence I can find that there's a helluva lot more going on here than the Iraq War and cyber-Ostrogoths. If you're looking for comparisons as to what can happen when a formidable incumbent gets painted as having lost touch with his constituents, please consult Cuomo v. Pataki. The most compelling sub rosa reason that's moving people toward Lamont seems to be that he was willing to make the race in the first place. And that's more than enough.

--Charles P. Pierce

NOBODY DOES IT BETTER. Complain all you want about liberal bloggers going after Joe Lieberman -- when it comes to taking out one of your own, nobody does it better than the GOP. This week the gang at National Review goes after Rudy Giuliani with the sharpest of knives. Click through to see what I mean. "The kiss" has nothing on this.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHO KILLED COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM? Over at the Drum Major Institute, Elana Levin flags down a great Washington Post story chronicling the Bush administration's vow of silence and oath of inaction on poverty in America. At least they're getting zen about it. As the article explains, that glorious post-Katrina speech when Bush mounted the podium to have his Lyndon Johnson moment was just that -- a moment, never to be repeated, remembered, or referenced by the administration again.

But the roots of the Bush administration's betrayal on poverty reach far beyond Katrina. Compassionate conservatism, after all, was once more than an empty catch phrase; it described a policy philosophy that sought economic uplift through government incentives. Myron Magnet, author of the foundational compassionate conservative work The Dream and the Nightmare, met with Bush repeatedly during the campaign, and visitors to Karl Rove's office used to leave with a copy of the book in hand -- according to Rove, it laid out the campaign's roadmap. So when Magnet assured us that "At [Bush's compassionate conservatism's] core is concern for the poor —not a traditional Republican preoccupation —and an explicit belief that government has a responsibility for poor Americans," it was safe to assume he knew what he was talking about.

Only he didn't. Compassionate conservatism retained only its disinterest in small government conservatism. As the years ground excruciatingly onward and the Bush administration's domestic policy priorities crystallized, it became abundantly clear that this administration was corporatist, not conservative in nature -- theirs was a philosophy of industrialist, not indigent, uplift. It didn't have to be that way: Bush's early moves were promising, with No Child Left Behind a flawed but supportable attempt at codifying equality in our schools. After 9-11, though, the war president killed the poor's president, and Bush turned his already meager interest in the mechanics of governing entirely away from domestic issues.

I've never been entirely convinced by the explanations for why that happened. Bush's record in Texas and his rhetoric on the campaign trail never suggested the sort of leader that would emerge. September 11 changed him, but it's not precisely clear why it enabled such an abandonment of the domestic realm. I will, in the interest of debate, offer this thesis, which I find interesting if not convincing. I've adapted it from something Grover Norquist said at the Prospect breakfast: He argued that the high poll numbers of 9-11 straitjacketed the administration, leaving them terrified of downward drift. So in their efforts to retain 80 percent approval ratings, they refused to engage in the sort of divisive, unpopular fights needed to actualize their agenda. They just went with the interest groups as the path of least resistance. And by the time they were ready for domestic policies again, they couldn't afford to split the coalition. Compassionate conservatism died because Bush became popular and wasn't willing to sacrifice that support for issues beneath War and Peace.

Is that true? I've no idea. But what is true, and under-discussed, is that the Bush administration we got looked nothing like the Bush administration we were promised. Compassionate conservatism, at its core, was a blueprint for a Republican war on poverty. After NCLB, it was ignored. And nobody has been able to convincingly explain why. Bush did, once, have a voice on poverty. Turned out that was all he wanted.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ONLINE: ANATOMY OF A MURDER. TAP talks to director Chris Paine about his new documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car? (It was Big Auto and Big Oil in the kitchen with the candlestick.)

--The Editors

NEGROPONTE BLOCKS IRAQ EVALUATION. Considering that the United States is fighting a major war in Iraq, it's a bit curious that it hasn't been the subject of a National Intelligence Estimate since 2004. Ken Silverstein reports "that some senior figures at the CIA, along with a number of Iraq analysts, have been pushing to produce a new NIE." What's the problem? "They've been stonewalled, however, by John Negroponte, the administration's Director of National Intelligence, who knows that any honest take on the situation would produce an NIE even more pessimistic than the 2004 version."

Of course, the intelligence community's full of al-Qaeda moles, as Rep. Peter Hoekstra's been telling us without evidence, so there would hardly be any point in doing an NIE anyway.

--Matthew Yglesias

SHOW ME THE MONEY. Although there are many ways to compare “Hill committee” fundraising (year against, two-years-ago against, and, in the DNC/RNC case, four-years-ago against), and despite my advocacy for Howard Dean’s long-term investing in a 50-state strategy, you have to hand it to DSCC chair Chuck Schumer and DCCC chair Rahm Emanuel: These boys can ring the register.

Cash-on-hand isn't everything, but it's a big thing at this point in the cycle. And sure, the RNC/DNC operate with a greater (but not exclusive) focus on the four-year cycle. But the latest numbers are what they are. To wit:

* The DCCC leads the RNCC by a narrow, but still favorable 1.2 to 1 ratio in cash on hand ($32 million to $26.5 million).

* The DSCC leads the RSNC by a mindboggling 1.9 to 1 ratio in CoH ($37.7 million to $19.9 million).

* But the RNC leads the DNC by a whopping 4.1 to 1 ratio in CoH ($44.7 million to $10.8 million).

Recall that in 1994, when it looked like a GOP wave was coming, interest groups and trade associations still gave sufficient monies to the powers-that-were, not the powers-that-might-be, giving then-majority Democrats the edge overall; it wasn't until the '96 cycle that GOP committees and candidates, as the newly-ascendant majority on the Hill, got the majority of the monies raised in the two-party competition for cash. So, for the DSCC and DCCC to be ahead before the 2006 outcomes -- even if they do look favorable for Democrats at this juncture -- is quite startling...especially since, ceteris paribus, the Republicans historically (and presently) enjoy a built-in advantage among corporate and non-labor trade association givers.

Whatever displeasure has been expressed toward Schumer’s or Emanuel’s candidate and recruitment-related maneuvers (some of it justified), you can’t say they aren’t shaking the money tree at just the historical moment they need to be -- because they are.

--Tom Schaller

YOU COULD HAVE IT SO MUCH BETTER. My colleague Harold Meyerson has analogized the current Mideast crisis to the crisis set off by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914: "Nobody wanted global conflagration, yet nobody knew how to stop it, and the American president (Woodrow Wilson, who was not yet a Wilsonian) did nothing to help avert the coming war." Rich Lowry retorts "that this significantly underestimates Germany's drive to war." He quotes from Michael Lind's The American Way of Strategy:

For half a century after 1914, most historians agreed that the great powers of Europe tragically had stumbled into an avoidable war. However, research in Imperial German archives in the 1960s revealed the truth: the Kaiserreich had deliberately launched a preventative war against Russia and its ally France, out of fear that growing Russian military power would soon make German dreams of European domination impossible to realize.

I think that's right. And I also think it actually makes for a better analogy. The current dynamic, in essence, is that various elements -- mostly in the United States and in Israel, but also elsewhere throughout the West -- see Hezbollah's cross-border raid as providing a useful pretext for launching a preventative war against what's seen as rising Iranian and Hezbollah power. You can get a flavor of this line of thinking from the Washington Post's headline "In Mideast Strife, Bush Sees a Step To Peace".

In 1914, Germany viewed war with Russia as inevitable and thought it was better to fight sooner rather than later and therefore sought opportunities to get into war. Similarly, when it took office, the Bush administration was convinced that war with Iraq was inevitable and began casting about for opportunities to fight one. As of a month ago, Bush and Israeli leaders were convinced that despite the Cedar Revolution and six years of waning Israel-Hezbollah tensions that war was inevitable, and now they’ve found an opportunity to fight it. Significant elements of American opinion likewise see a clash with Iran as inevitable and have been persistently trying for the past several years to find a saleable pretext for starting one, and many see the current crisis as promising in that regard. As Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman point out in their new book Ethical Realism, this embrace of preventative war has a long legacy on the American right dating back at least to James Burnham and it's invariably been disastrous -- just as it was for Wilhelmine Germany.

--Matthew Yglesias

COUNTDOWN TO CONSTITUTIONAL MELTDOWN. It's hard to avoid the temptation to begin counting the days in which H. Marshall Jarrett, director of the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), manages to remain in that post, especially since his objections to administration intervention in an inquiry he was conducting were made public earlier this week. OPR is the internal affairs office of the Department of Justice (DoJ).

Testifying on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged that President Bush himself, in what the Washington Post's Dan Eggen called "an unprecedented White House intervention" into an OPR investigation, thwarted an inquiry into the role "Justice Department officials played in authorizing and monitoring the controversial [National Security Agency (NSA)] eavesdropping effort, according to officials and government documents." The White House did so by denying security clearances to the OPR attorneys designated to conduct the inquiry.

In a memo released in time for the hearing, Jarrett, a Clinton appointee, asserted, "Since its creation some 31 years ago, OPR has conducted many highly sensitive investigations involving Executive Branch programs and has obtained access to information classified at the highest levels. In all those years, OPR has never been prevented from initiating or pursuing an investigation."

Jarrett also noted that when the shoe was on the other foot -- when his office the DoJ Criminal Division was charged with investigating the leak that led to the New York Times' exposé on the NSA program, agents and attorneys from DoJ and the FBI had no problem obtaining clearances.

In related news, the Constitution-killing, so-called oversight bill (see Sam Rosenfeld on this one) negotiated between Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter has run into a mighty mass of trouble -- even among GOP senators. Democrats, however, are finding alternative legislation proposed by dissenting Republicans hardly more palatable than the Specter bill.

Finally, a federal judge (in San Francisco, of course -- the city that Bill O'Reilly invited al Qaeda to blow up) refused to dismiss a case against AT&T for its wholesale release of consumer phone records to the NSA. That's the good news.

UPDATE: For Jarrett's memos and Gonzales' response to the committee, see here.

--Adele M. Stan

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: I LOVE THE '90s. Greg Anrig liked Robert Wright's concept of "progressive realism" as a foreign policy doctrine, and thinks it would be a useful rubric to apply to domestic policy as well. He makes the case for reviving a Clintonian appeal based on effective government after six years of conservative failure.

--The Editors

REPUBLICANS AND CIVILIAN DEATHS. Here's the roll call for today's House resolution on the Mideast crisis. What Israel lobby?

Snark aside, despite the monolithic quality of the final vote there actually does appear to have been a bit of behind-the-scenes wrangling over some of the language in this resolution. At her weekly press conference today Nancy Pelosi was asked why she removed her name as co-sponsor of the resolution:

Pelosi: Well, last week when we met at this very time, before I came into this room, I had sent back my message to the Majority Leader that I fully supported the resolution that was sent over to us and that I would be willing to be a co-sponsor with him of it. The conversations I had with the International Relations Committee, with Mr. Lantos and his conversations with Mr. Hyde, were such that we thought this was all systems go; and I thought maybe we would take it up last Thursday.

Then all of a sudden, the Republican leadership started to slow dance this, saying Mr. Hyde wasn't fully on board and the rest. And one change and another kept coming back from their side, and I didn't feel very much like a co-author of anything anymore. So I said, “Well, this is your resolution. I'm happy to support it. I will speak for it. I will encourage my members to vote for it. But it is not something that I co-authored and would have my name on.”

Q: What was the change?

Pelosi: Well, my concern was that -- and, really, again, let's talk about where we agree. We agree that Israel has a right to defend itself. It was outrageous that Hezbollah would make the attack that it did into Israel with all the consequences, including the kidnapping of the soldiers who have yet to be released. So it was nothing about the fundamentals of it. I believed it was important for us to send a message to the region that said that all sides to the conflict should do everything possible to prevent civilian deaths. And that was the language that I thought would be good in there.

It just was that not having that language, plus other language that they had added, I wasn't the co-author of it. I have an old-fashioned idea about if you are going to be the coauthor, you should participate in writing it, don't you think? So that's what it was. [emphasis added]

Not much comment needs to be added to this, I don't think.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ONLINE: POWER PLOY. To continue with the theme of the day, Marc Lynch of Abu Aardvark fame explains why pro-American Arab regimes are criticizing Hezbollah and Iran in such an explict and public fashion during this crisis. (Hint: shockingly, it's not because they're expressing the sentiments of their citizens.)

The much-hyped communal dimension (Sunni-Shia) is probably a red herring, though. Arab arguments about Lebanon today fall along regime-popular conflicts rather than Sunni-Shia. Despite the sharp Sunni-Shia clashes in Iraq, and the anti-Iranian rhetoric coming out of Arab capitals, the appeal to the wider Arab public of the Shia Hezbollah movement seems to have only increased. Egypt’s very Sunni Muslim Brotherhood has strongly backed Hezbollah, while al-Jazeera (often described by disaffected Iraqi Shia as a “Sunni network”) has given largely sympathetic coverage.

...[T]these three regimes evidently see this crisis as an opportunity to demonstrate their value to the United States and conclusively put an end to American calls for democratization. The domestic power of Islamists has long been the trump card of these regimes, which have used the prospects of their electoral victory to frighten off American democracy enthusiasts. This gambit gained extra currency in Washington after the strong showing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt’s Parliamentary elections and the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections. In this context, protests in support of Hezbollah probably serve the interests of the pro-American despots right now. The last week will put the final nails in the coffin of democracy promotion, if these regimes have their way: Why would America push for democracy when these regimes are so publicly helpful, and the publics likely to win elections so hostile?

--The Editors

WHAT'S WRONG WITH SAMUELSON. To add to Tom's more ideological critique of Robert Samuelson's latest column, let me just point out that this is an excellent example of what irritates me about Samuelson: He's a policy writer who doesn't appear to know very much about policy. The whole column is about our lower-than-expected deficits and how stinky Republicans are for celebrating it. At no time does Samuelson see fit to mention why we have lower-than-expected deficits. Indeed, in no place does he signal that he even knows. And that's the problem.

As anyone who cracked open Monday's Wall Street Journal knew, and as I explained here, the deficits were not -- despite Republican boasts, which Samuelson quotes -- healed by growth stemming from the tax cuts. Growth was precisely in line with expectations, but it was so localized to the rich that an unexpectedly large portion of the actual money generated went to the wealthy, and since they have higher tax brackets than the middle class, the Treasury received more revenue. But that's what the growth was: A function of inequality, and a signal that the middle class and the poor are being stiffed. Samuelson should've mentioned that. More to the point, he should've known that. As the domestic policy columnist for The Washington Post, it's his job to keep up on this stuff. While his lecture about deficits was basically on-point, his readers left that column believing a major lie about last week's economic news. It's his responsibility to see that that doesn't happen, and he too routinely fails.

--Ezra Klein

TWO CHEERS FOR THE ALL-POWERFUL STATE. Some may disagree, but I say liberals should probably celebrate today's ruling that the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) supersedes the Maryland law forcing Wal-Mart to pay into a health fund. ERISA allows for uniformity across a single company's nationwide benefit plans so employers don't have to face down new regulations in every state. The Wal-Mart bill, according to the court, violated that legislative intent. By contrast, the judge wrote that something like the Massachusetts reforms do not, because they were an example of "states [performing] their traditional role of serving as laboratories for experiment in controlling the costs and increasing the quality of health care for all citizens," and were not, in intent, clear violations of ERISA.

So why should liberals rejoice? Well, though a piece of friendly legislation was knocked down, the active principle behind the court's ruling is a supportable one. If states were able to invalidate federal health care statutes, any sort of truly universal or comprehensive reforms would crash on the shoals of a thousand commerce clause challenges. The eventual aim is to smooth the disjointed patchwork of state, local, and private care systems and replace it with something more standardized, navigable, and comprehensive. For that to be possible, the federal government needs to retain its authority to trump state legislation. If the Maryland bill -- which was neither a good bill nor particularly important -- is our only casualty in that fight, liberals will have gotten off easy. The only real downside here is that this sort of legislation will no longer be available as a cudgel against Wal-Mart.

--Ezra Klein

"SPECTACULAR CHALLENGE," VAGUE SOLUTION. Okay. I don't really want to revisit the mean-spirited blog-feuds of yesteryear. Nevertheless, I've read The New Republic's editorial on the Israel/Lebanon/Syria/Iran situation, and I don't understand what it's trying to say about American policy:

The ascendancy of Ahmadinejad's perfidious Iran is a spectacular problem for the United States, and a spectacular challenge. Iran is now the single most powerful force arrayed against American ideals and interests in the Middle East. The various Islamist movements pose various threats; but here is Islamism incarnated in a large and ambitious state. For this reason, U.S. policy toward Iran must consist of more than an attempt to frustrate its nuclear designs. If we do not isolate Iran regionally and globally, if we do not do everything we can to support the democratizing forces in Iran, and of course if we do not move ruthlessly to prevent Iran from acquiring the deadliest arsenal of all, then we will have presided over the creation of a nightmare worse than the nightmare of Saddam Hussein. If we succeed in Iraq (a considerable if) and fail in Iran, we will have failed in the Middle East. Unfortunately, it is not clear that President Bush grasps this.

If this is a call for the United States to launch a war with Iran, it's a mighty unclear way of issuing it. But if it's not a call for the United States to launch a war with Iran, what is it? The criticism of Bush's allegedly insufficient anti-Iranian zeal, the call to "move ruthlessly," all signs point to war. The next paragraph, however, just wends back to the idea that we should enthusiastically endorse Israel's military campaign in Lebanon. So is this an endorsement of an American war with Iran or not? If it is, is it okay to refer to the magazine as hewing to a neoconservative foreign policy line now?

--Matthew Yglesias

CONVENIENT EXPLANATIONS. Has Bob Samuelson been asleep the past five years? In his column today, Samuelson puzzles at the fact that the Bush administration is "shamefully" (a) claiming that this year’s $296 billion deficit is an achievement; and (b) attributing said "achievement" to Bush’s tax cuts, and celebrating accordingly.

For Samuelson and others who may need a refresher course, there are two guiding principles of Bush-era public policy. First, invert the usual policy process by identifying the solution or answer you prefer, then shop around for a problem or question to fit it. Record surpluses? Time to cut taxes. Impending recession? Tax cuts are the answer. Cat stuck in tree? You guessed it: tax cuts.

Second, no matter the result, claim not merely success, but success attributable to the pre-ordained solution. Libya has come to the table? The Iraq invasion is a success! Rising violence in Baghdad? The dead-enders in their last throes know the invasion was a success! The Sox finally won the Series? Congrats to Rummy and the Iraq architects. This is why Bush in 2004 couldn’t think of any mistakes he’d made -- with this foolproof (so to speak) method, everything is a success, and always.

What’s most galling about the Bushies’ ex ante certainty about this administration’s “solutions” and the even greater ex post certainty about their root causes is that such certainty flies in the face of the administration’s reflexive notions about causality. Every social scientist recognizes that no set of variables ever explains all the variance in any equation. Bush’s EPA exploits this fact to claim that there’s uncertainty about global warming; “intelligent design” hucksters do the same with evolutionary theories. But when it comes to the complexity of fiscal accounting in a multivariate national and world economy, such uncertainties vanish because, well, it just has to be the tax cuts. Cigars all around, fellas!

The price of ideological governance is certainty where it doesn’t exist, and doubts wherever and whenever they are convenient. That’s the “shame” of this administration, one only made worse by the fact that guys like Samuelson have taken so long to figure out what so many of us realized from the outset.

--Tom Schaller

IRANIAN OPPOSITION ACTIVISTS SPURN INVITATION TO WHITE HOUSE. Leading Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji is sitting on something many people would only dream of: a personal invitation to the White House today to meet with top U.S. officials overseeing the United States policy toward Iran, including the National Security Council’s Elliot Abrams and State Department’s Iran nuclear negotiator Nicholas Burns. It's even been dangled before him that President Bush may drop by the afternoon meeting of Iranian opposition activists. But Iran's most famous former political prisoner, who arrived in Washington earlier this week for a month long U.S. tour after six years in Iranian prison says, while tempted, he's not going to accept the invitation. And he’s not the only Iranian pro-democracy activist choosing not to go: among the others are former Iranian Revolutionary Guard founder-turned-dissident Mohsen Sazegara; student leaders Akbar Atri and Ali Afshary; Iranian American human rights activist Ramin Ahmadi; and Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former shah. Their demurrals hint at the complexity of the relationship between those Iranians seeking democracy and regime change and the American administration that says it has the same goals there.

“Democracy is not machinery that can be exported,” Ganji told me, through a translator, at a ceremony Monday night where he was the recipient of a press freedom award. “Democracy needs social infrastructure. Another precondition of democracy is to live in urban areas. Another precondition is a division between the public and private sectors. Another precondition is the separation of government from civic society, and the separation of religion and state. Another is tolerance.”

“Can you make a society that is urban, tolerant, democratic with $75 million?” Ganji asked, referring to the money the Bush administration has sought this year from Congress to promote dissident forces in Iran. “You could not even do that with $75 billion,” he concluded.

So who is coming today to the White House? According to Iranian sources, Amir Abbas Fakhravar, a 30-year-old Iranian writer, student leader and former political prisoner who has become close with former Reagan-era Pentagon official and neoconservative thinker Richard Perle; Bijan Kian, an Iranian American Republican activist and businessman from California who has sought a position on Iran policy in the Bush administration; and Abbas Milani, an Iranian scholar at Stanford University.

As Pooya Dayanim, a young Iranian American activist from Los Angeles who is also declining the White House invitation, put it, the Bush administration officials want to ask the Iranians, “What the hell is it that you people want?"

Ganji does have a message for the Bush administration, but it’s one he’s asking the press to convey for now. “I advocate change of the regime in Iran,” he says. “But that regime needs to be changed by Iranians themselves.”

UPDATE: An Iranian source just informed me that the entire meeting was cancelled.

LATER UPDATE: Odd. A colleague at the White House midday press briefing today sends word that Tony Snow said, "The Iranian event I talked about in the gaggle actually is taking place today." Stay tuned.

--Laura Rozen

AGAINST ILLUSIONS. To continue with the theme of the day, I’ll point out that the absolute most dangerous thing that can happen to a country is for it to fall prey to pleasing delusions. It would be nice if Lebanese people regarded Israel's military action as a nice way to help them build democracy, but it simply isn't the case. Meanwhile, to make things worse, here comes The New York Sun with a Youssef Ibrahim op-ed arguing that Arabs everywhere are supporting Israeli action:

Rarely have I seen such an uprising, indeed an intifada, against those little turbaned, bearded men across the Muslim landscape as the one that took place last week. The leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, received a resounding "no" to pulling 350 million Arabs into a war with Israel on his clerical coattails.

The collective "nyet" was spoken by presidents, emirs, and kings at the highest level of government in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Morocco, and at the Arab League's meeting of 22 foreign ministers in Cairo on Saturday. But it was even louder from pundits and ordinary people.

The implication that ordinary Arabs have turned against Hezbollah is simply false. The only evidence Ibrahim sites for this idea is statements made in that sector of the Arab press that's owned by the government of Saudi Arabia. Somewhat along the same lines, the opening of The New Republic's latest editorial elides the difference between the views expressed by America's local client-dictators and the views of the Sunni Arab public. What's going on in the world right now is a serious business and it needs to be viewed clearly and without these kinds of illusions.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: NO CHARGE, NO EXIT. Adressing an important gap in the public discussion following the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision, Jonathan Hafetz reminds us that Hamdan's guarantee of a full trial isn't of much use to the hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners currently being held indefinitely without charge.

--The Editors

IF JOHN BOLTON ISN'T CONFIRMED, THE TERRORISTS WILL WIN. And Senator George Voinovich means that literally:

Ambassador Bolton's appointment expires this fall when the Senate officially recesses. Should the president choose to renominate him, I cannot imagine a worse message to send to the terrorists -- and to other nations deciding whether to engage in this effort -- than to drag out a possible renomination process or even replace the person our president has entrusted to lead our nation at the United Nations at a time when we are working on these historic objectives.

Because if anything discourages al-Qaeda, it's robust congressional support for our diplomatic representative to the UN. What a wanker.

--Ezra Klein

A LITTLE BOMBING WILL BE GOOD FOR YOU. Also funny, but more in a sad way, is The Washington Post's stated rationale for opposing the idea of the United States talking to Syria in order to broker an Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire: "The result will be to restore Damascus's influence in Lebanon and destroy the new independent, democratic government in Beirut -- which has far more to fear from such a deal than from Israel's cratering of its airport runways and bridges." Intriguingly, this isn't the view of the actual new independent, democratic government in Beirut -- which wants a cease-fire and doesn't enjoy being bombed.

All too many Americans seem incapable of grasping what is, perhaps, the fundamental truth of air power: Nobody likes being bombed, and nobody ever has or ever will believe that the bombing is being done for their own good.

--Matthew Yglesias

OUTSOURCING HUMOR. I've been trying for days now to write something funny about the right wing's new take on the "Freedom Babes" of yore, but I don't seem to have the requisite skills. Fortunately, Tim Cavanaugh and Dave Weigel have the goods at Hit and Run.

--Matthew Yglesias

POWER VACCUUM 101. One thing you can say about Newt Gingrich: the guy doesn't pull his punches.

On Sunday, Newt announced, on "Meet the Press," the commencement of World War III in the Middle East and explained how to use that characterization of the current wars there as an election strategy.

Come Monday, he carried his game plan to two distinct, if overlapping, constituencies: right-wing politicos and self-identified "born-again" Christians. To the rabidly liberal-hating, Ann Coulter-loving readers of Human Events Online, Gingrich laid out his whole clash-of-civilizations WWIII scenario -- targeting, one presumes, the Capitol Hill crowd. In a longish discourse with numerous bulleted points, the disgraced former House Speaker connected North Korea's bomb, a number of alleged terrorist plots targeting North American sites, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the Mumbai bombings and the "Iran-Syrian-Hezbollah-Hamas terrorist alliance."

Offering numbered talking points on the subject, Gingrich began with this:

1. It's Us Versus Them: The American people and free people everywhere must come to recognize that we are in a world war that pits civilization against terrorists and their state sponsors who wish to impose a new dark age -- with them in charge. Everything our leaders do must be judged by whether it helps or hurts us in defeating terrorists and their state sponsors.

For the readers of the religious-right publication, Church Report, Gingrich deployed his own talking points in an essay:

In a Third World War, there will be two sides, those who believe we're in a war to defend civilization – and therefore must defeat the terrorists and their state sponsors – and those who are made uncomfortable by the price of defeating terrorists and therefore will seek accommodation and appeasement with those whose values are irreconcilable with our own.

Yesterday, The Washington Post pointed to Gingrich as an example of the right wing's turn from President Bush. Truth is, Bush's approval numbers are low, and Gingrich sees his moment in the subsequent power vacuum.

--Adele M. Stan

WHY DOES NELSON GET A FREE PASS? It's been often noted, in the ever-expanding coverage of the liberal bloggers' animosity towards Joe Lieberman (the most recent and best comments come from Hendrick Hertzberg in this week's New Yorker), that many Democratic senators, like Ben Nelson of Nebraska, have equally conservative voting records but don't incur the same wrath because they are from red states or because they are more loyal to the Democratic Party in other ways. Fair enough. But yesterday's Senate stem-cell vote has me wondering: Why, exactly, is Ben Nelson being given a free pass on his morally reprehensible vote against federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research?

Here is an issue where the public policy benefit is clear and the public policy cost is non-existent to anyone who doesn't hold rather peculiar, even mystical, views of the eternal soul of a blastocyst (as opposed to, say, a viable fetus). Public opinion polls clearly support the Democrats’ position. Numerous Republicans, including both from Mississippi, voted with the Dems -- thus putting Nelson to the right of Trent Lott on this topic. Can anyone name me an issue where Joe Lieberman falls to the right of Trent Lott, Bill Frist and Thad Cochran? By being the only Democrat to defect, Nelson gives Republicans an unwarranted veneer of bi-partisanship, precisely the thing Lieberman is often accused of doing. And being only four votes short of the super-majority necessary to over-ride a presidential veto -- while it may be moot because the House isn't anywhere close to that -- I think it's fair to say that every vote counts on this bill.

I also think it's obvious that if the disability rights community wielded the same influence held by organizations representing other disadvantaged groups within the Democratic caucus, Nelson would be catching a lot more heat for this. The moderate-DLC line is that Lieberman shouldn't be held to an Iraq litmus test, nor Bob Casey to an abortion one, and so I presume they'd say Nelson shouldn't be held to one on stem cells. I'm not so sure. Some issues are so obvious that it's fair to say anyone who doesn't agree with the overwhelming majority of progressives isn't a progressive at all. Iraq and abortion don't fall into that category because the unpopular positions among Dems on those issues are still fundamentally legitimate and worth respecting. But the argument against stem cell research is not in my view -- I think opposing stem cell research is just irrational and mean-spirited. The same argument Matt made with regard to Lieberman could be applied to Nelson as well: whether Nelson did this out of sincere, wrong-headed conviction or political cowardice is simply irrelevant.

--Ben Adler

IT'S PERSONAL. It just so happens that I have a couple of really ugly-ass dogs in this fight over embryonic stem-cell research. Not many political issues are personal with me, but this one deeply is. I have watched slow death from neurological disease once too often in my life to be anything but furious when Sam Brownback, a United States senator to the everlasting embarrassment of that body, pulls out a child's drawing of an embryo with a smiley-face in order to argue his position. Or when Tony Snow, that towering public fake, starts getting glib about "murder," as though there isn't enough blood lapping at the ankles of everyone in this White House to float a barge. Or when Snow's boss, that tough-talkin', crumb-spittin', neck-rubbin' international buckaroo, uses the first veto of his presidential career and then hides behind children while maundering incoherently about a "moral line" as though he'd recognize one if he fell over it. Is there any doubt that, if this guy got Parkinson's Disease, he'd eat those little buggers out of the petri dish with a spoon, probably dribbling some of them on Tony Blair in the process? Sorry, Ez. I don't give a damn how tactically brilliant this may be. I look at this action and this is what I know -- that millions of Americans will die horrible deaths and the government of the United States doesn't give a good goddamn about them. Period. And, no, Senator Obama, I don't have to respect the deeply held beliefs of anyone who condemns their fellow human beings to miserable suffering on the basis of anthropomorphized blastocysts in the service of an anthropomorphized god. Were it in my power, I'd run all those former embryos out of government until they grew the hell up.

--Charles P. Pierce

LOSING JOE-MENTUM. Jon Chait, no Joe Lieberman fan but still a leading proponent of anti-anti-Liebermanism, seems to be edging closer to the Nedhead position since "[t]he view that Lieberman is unique is starting to seem more persuasive to me."

--Matthew Yglesias

EMBASSY CLOSURES: WHAT DOES IT TAKE? Curious to see what kind of political upheaval it normally takes to close a U.S. embassy, I googled around and found the following recent examples:

MESSAGING THE CONFLICT. Via Laura Rozen, MSNBC has this about the evacuation, which confirms the American commitment to keeping the embassy open and an American presence in Lebanon. I should note that this is probably also a gesture of support for the Lebanese government, and not just the Israelis.

U.S. Brig. Gen. Carl Jensen, who is coordinating the evacuation, estimated that more than 6,000 Americans will have been evacuated by the weekend, most of them on ferries and Navy ships.

Despite the increased efforts, some expressed frustration.

“I can’t believe the Americans,” said Danni Atiyeh, a civil engineer from Kansas City, Mo., waiting earlier Wednesday with his pregnant wife and sons, ages 6 and 10, for a bus to take them to the cruise ship. “Everybody else has gone home ... We’re still here.”

The U.S. State Department said Tuesday it had dropped a plan to make Americans reimburse the government for the transport, but Atiyeh said he and others were asked to sign promissory notes to pay for the trip before they could leave.

An estimated 8,000 of the 25,000 U.S. citizens in Lebanon want to be evacuated, but Jensen emphasized that the U.S. Embassy in Beirut will not close and that America “is not deserting Lebanon.”

“We are assisting those Americans who choose to leave. Many, many are choosing to stay,” the general said at the airport in Larnaca. [Emphasis added.]

If officials think the diplomacy of this thing is complicated now, wait until American citizens get killed by Israeli bombs because they haven't been evacuated. That will be tough to explain.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

A LITTLE GROVELING NEVER HURT. A little birdie who attended last weekend’s big DSCC fundraising event in Nantucket tells me that donors were very impressed by candidates Sherrod Brown (OH), Claire McCaskill (MO) and Jon Tester (MT), but that Virginia nominee Jim Webb fell flat. Somebody close to Webb told me that, to put it rather bluntly, Webb just isn’t good at the ass-kissing that (some) Democratic donors expect.

I’m not sure if it’s Webb’s military background, the fact that he’s a former Republican, or just his personality that’s the issue here. And, frankly, I have a grudging respect for candidates who don’t prostrate themselves to donors. Many big-dollar donors are, by definition, self-made millionaires or people who have inherited their wealth and, in either case, tend to be self-important -- with varying degrees of justification for that self-importance. Politicians tend to be self-important too, which is why it’s so rare to find pols who like to ask for money. It’s a bit pride-swallowing to make nice with people who have never put their own name on a ballot, had to cast a tough vote, or endure the withering criticism and personal scrutiny that is common to public life.

Still, if the recent cash-on-hand numbers are any indicator, for all his other political and personal assets, if he isn’t prepared to do a little groveling, Webb ($424K) is simply not going to come close to having the kind of advertising monies he will need to upend a suddenly not-so-invincible George Allen ($6.6M…that’s for million). This may be a sad statement about contemporary politics, but it is what it is.

--Tom Schaller

WHY IT'S TAKING SO LONG. A reliable source tells me that the reason the United States has been so slow in evacuating its citizens from Lebanon is that the public diplomacy (i.e., P.R.) issues raised by evacuating under Israeli assault are so complicated. Individuals within the State Department, I am told, have been reluctant to create an impression that the Israeli assault on Lebanon is as bad as it is or that civilian U.S. citizens are being threatened by U.S. ally Israel. If a conflict this severe had broken out in, say, Indonesia, the American embassy would have been shut down the next day and its personnel and families rapidly brought to safety. That's how things normally work. (See Laura Rozen on the evacuation from Albania here.) In this case, however, the diplomatic message sent by shutting down the U.S. embassy in the face of Israeli bombing would have contradicted the U.S. government message of support for the Israeli mission against Hezbollah terrorists, which, when added to the general concern within lower-level diplomatic circles about ever creating a Fall of Saigon-style visual for the news media, have led the Americans to be slower than they could have been about getting U.S. citizens out of harm's way.

On Monday, Steve Clemons raised concerns about "sending a cruise ship, a slow moving huge target, into a war zone" to evacuate Americans. However, it seems to me that such a move would be perfectly consistent with attempting to downplay the severity of the conflict and the nature of the Israeli threat to American citizens in Lebanon.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE DOUBLE PLUG. Folks really should read the Dean Baker article that the shadowy figures known as "The Editors" plug below. Baker takes on a couple of the canards meant to scare us into fearing a society with a whole lot of old people, most importantly the "how will we support them!?" fear:

We know that, barring an economic catastrophe, workers will be far more productive in 2035 than they are today. Technology will continue to improve, computers will get better, workers will be more educated. Even if productivity growth were to fall back to its slowest pace on record (1.5 percent annually), workers in 2035 would still be producing 50 percent more on average than workers do today. This means that two workers in 2035 would be as able to support a retiree as three workers are today. If productivity grows at the same rate as it has over the last decade (and during the period from 1945 to 1973), then workers will be almost twice as productive in 2035 as they are presently. In this scenario, two workers would be far better able to support a retiree in 2035 than three workers are today.

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: STAGNATION CELEBRATION. Bring on the birth dearth! Dean Baker makes the case for an aging (or even declining) population.

--The Editors

WAR PORN WITH A BEAT. There's been some great war reporting coming from NBC, especially from Martin Fletcher, who spent yesterday chasing Hezbollah's Katyusha rockets as they made landfall in Israel, and interviewing the people huddled in nearby shelters.

Here, I'd like to put in a good word for the videographers covering the conflict. It's always the on-air reporters who get the glory when a rocket lands near to the site of their reports, but it's the video guys who are the most exposed -- and without whom those reports would not exist.

Yesterday, as NBC's Richard Engel ducked during a rooftop report while a rocket whizzed overhead, the camera stayed fixed, except to record the visual effects of the rocket's subsequent landing. When Engel returned to the frame, he found himself elevated to the equivalent of this war's Scud stud. (I've yet to find a synonym for "stud" that rhymes with "Katyusha.")

Engel's close encounter occurred during a live report for MSNBC's Scarborough Country, which MSNBC, of course, replayed ad nauseum throughout the evening's broadcasts. To be expected, alas.

What I did not expect, however, was the music video presented as news, complete with a thumping, syncopated beat and ominous-sounding chords that played to some of the day's most gruesome images. This was how host Joe Scarborough closed his show. It was offensive.

It's bad enough that newscasts now brand wars and disasters with slick graphics and their own musical themes. But to present war as entertainment, well, that's just wrong. Ted Koppel got it right when "Nightline" ran the portraits of America's war dead without a musical soundtrack. Back in the day, we watched the Vietnam War on television, with only the sounds of war to accompany the image. And the heart of a nation was moved.

--Adele M. Stan

INFRASTRUCTURE AND JUSTICE. Highly trained moral philosopher Michael Walzer has a nice piece up at TNR that, conveniently enough, is in line with my take (which, in turn, is pretty much based on Walzer's book, so it all comes around) -- attacking Hezbollah rocket installations or stockpiles or what have you is fine, bombing Lebanon's civilian infrastructure is not fine, and firing rockets at random into Israeli cities is also not fine.

--Matthew Yglesias

CHUTZPAH. Hartford Courant columnist Kevin Rennie thinks he's picked up on Joe Lieberman's coming message: Heads I win, tails I make you lose. Rennie writes that "[t]he theme of a Saturday conclave of Greater Hartford Democratic town committee chairs was that if Lieberman loses the primary he will hurt all other Democratic candidates by running as an independent in November. The message was clear: help him now or your favorites suffer in November." So vote Lieb, or the Democratic Party gets it!

A similar rationale emerged during a dinner argument with a friend last weekend: How can bloggers, usually so invested in the Democratic Party's successes, possibly rationalize throwing the seat to the Republicans? Since Lieberman's independent candidacy is a virtual certainty, a Ned Lamont victory in the primaries would create a three way race that could, quite conceivably, allow a Republican to squeak through. Worse yet, given the possibility of real Democratic gains this November, it could be the crucial vote that keeps Harry Reid out of the majority leader's office.

The duplicitousness of this argument is clear enough on its face. It's not that the analysis is wrong, but that the blame is so oddly apportioned. Lieberman, after all, need not run as an independent. If he loses the primary, he could bow to the will of the voters and simply slink off into a world of corporate boards and speaking engagements. Man has known worse fates. But that's not been his choice -- which is fine. What's remarkable, though, is that so little attention is paid by Lieberman's supporters to the import of his decision: It is Lieberman, not Lamont, who will create the three-way race. It is Lieberman, not Lamont, who is choosing to render this a Republican pick-up opportunity. It is Lieberman, not Lamont, who has decided his personal ambitions outweigh the Democratic Party's prospects.

All of that, of course, is in-bounds. Were Lieberman not determinedly unconcerned with the future of the Democratic Party, he wouldn't be facing Lamont in the first place. And Holy Joe is certainly empowered to launch a self-aggrandizing post-primary candidacy if he so chooses. But the chutzpah of rejecting the Democratic Party's decision and then appealing for votes based on the Democratic Party's prospects -- which you've thrown into chaos -- is astonishing. But as Jewish grandmothers everywhere know, sometimes chutzpah works.

--Ezra Klein

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE. I've long responded to the steady stream of articles positing a Dean/Emanuel split with the hope that someone would take a breath from chronicling Emanuel's desire for more money and actually evaluate Dean's 50-state strategy. Finally, U.S. News' Dan Gilgoff did exactly that. "Here's what the front line of Howard Dean's revolution looks like." he writes, "two dozen senior citizens seated inside this gated community's clubhouse listening intently as operatives from the state Democratic Party pitch them on becoming precinct captains." The clubhouse is in Diamondhead, Mississippi, and it's the first time in more than a decade that anyone in the state had tried to train Democratic precinct captains. How's it working?

The gambit has remade the Mississippi party with four full-time, DNC-paid staffers and a fundraiser. In four months, finance director Wendi Hooks has tripled the number of $1,000-plus donors to 24 and expects to more than double the party's budget this year, to $400,000. Two field representatives have recruited captains in more than 500 precincts so far, along with volunteers for phone banks and canvassing. "I've been trying to contact the party since I moved back here in 1992," says Harold Terry, 43, a Jackson native who volunteered last week at a phone bank. "Someone finally got back to me three weeks ago."

The new DNC hires tell similar stories. Rita Royals is a 57-year-old former rape crisis counselor who paid to print her own Kerry signs in 2004. That same year, DeMiktric Biggs, a student at Jackson State University, sent a county-by-county voter analysis to almost everyone on the state Democratic committee--and never got a reply. Now, the party is using his work to plan its ground game.

As the 2006 election nears, the precinct captains whom Royals and Biggs are training will be put to work leveraging the DNC's updated voter file--improved since technical glitches stymied many state parties' get-out-the-vote efforts in 2004. Of course, with President Bush winning Mississippi with nearly 60 percent of the vote, the Democratic Party isn't expecting dramatic results anytime soon. "The Republicans had 30 years to put themselves in the position they're in," says Dean. "To think we're going to turn the party around in four is wrong."

And who knows, maybe the whole strategy is wrong. But it is a strategy, not just a meaningless diversion of resources, and its eventual success or failure will prove to be one of the major political stories of the next decade.

--Ezra Klein

FROM THE BLOGOFASCIST HIMSELF. If Markos Zunigas is the Mussolini of the anti-establishment, anti-incumbent movement known as blogofascism, Duncan Black -- better known as Atrios -- is its Giovanni Gentile, the in-house philosopher who laid out its norms and intellectual structure. So it's nice to see him repairing to the dead tree confines of the Los Angeles Times op-ed page to explain the animus against Joe Lieberman. "For too long," writes Duncan, "[Lieberman] has defined his image by distancing himself from other Democrats, cozying up to right-wing media figures and, at key moments, directing his criticisms at members of his own party instead of at the Republicans in power." What follows is a wide-ranging and convincing list of examples that aptly illustrate why Lieberman's loathsomeness extends far beyond mere ideology. If you're still confused over why Holy Joe provokes such rage while Dianne Feinstein attracts little notice, Duncan's explanation is well worth reading.

--Ezra Klein

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN. I'm rather taken with a point Matt made earlier today in the context of "progressive realism." He wrote that "I do, however, see the case for framing it as a new paradigm: Roughly, there's a sense that 9-11 made drama and novelty necessary parts of one's approach to national security, that Bush's efforts at drama and novelty have failed, and that now we need a new brand of drama and novelty." That's about right. It's also another reason why I don't actually mind all the "Big Ideas" talk humming through Democratic circles. All the new journals and articles and speeches won't, I fear, actually come up with anything new, but after finding innovation a closed route they'll begin repackaging older ideas as fashionable, fresh responses to changing conditions.

That's a real service, though, because politically, the perception of newness actually matters quite a bit. Bill Clinton understood that, as did Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. And while none of these figures -- save, at certain moments, Clinton -- actually brought in any paradigm-changing concepts, all of them benefited from press coverage that saw their new ideas, and not their opponent's staid defense of the status quo, as the hot story of the campaign. So progressive realism? Bring it on. Democracy: A Journal of Ideas? Hit me with it. WITT economics? I'm ready, baby. It may not be new, but transforming today's musty concepts into tomorrow's hip retro fad should be rather central to the Democratic strategy. It's time the Party's thinkers paid less attention to Truman's legacy and more to Converse's marketing strategy.

--Ezra Klein

EDGING TOWARD COMPROMISE. Via Rich Lowry, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni seems to be looking to back away from Israel's previous hostility to a multilateral solution to the border problem:

Speaking after a meeting with a United Nations delegation headed by special envoy Vijay Nambiar, Livni said that while Israel would prefer the deployment of the Lebanese army in the south of the country, "we will consider other solutions put forward." "If there is a need to strengthen the Lebanese army somehow, so that the military in south Lebanon is effective, and prevents Hezbollah from returning, we will consider ways to do achieve this," Livni said.

Again, it would be good to see some American leadership here. If this idea -- which has been on the table for days -- is going to be the ultimate resolution of the crisis, it would be nice to see it implemented sooner rather than later so people don't die needlessly. That means the United States would need to do a combination of leaning on Israel to take the deal and leaning on the countries that would be supplying the troops, presumably mostly Europeans, to start making firm and specific commitments regarding the troop numbers, equipment, and mandate necessary to get the job done. Mandates, in particular, are very important in these peacekeeping situations. The tendency of the troop-contributing nations is to push for a mandate that minimizes the chances of any of their soldiers getting hurt rather than one that maximizes the chances of accomplishing the mission.

--Matthew Yglesias

PROGRESSIVE REALISM: SO GOOD IT NEEDS A NEW NAME? I've been remiss in not linking to Robert Wright's curiously long op-ed in Sunday's New York Times making the case that "It’s now possible to build a foreign policy paradigm that comes close to squaring the circle — reconciling the humanitarian aims of idealists with the powerful logic of realists." He calls the paradigm "progressive realism" and lays out what it is. I endorse virtually everything therein with two petty caveats.

One -- truly petty -- is the observation that "to square the circle" doesn't mean to create a square circle as the metaphor here seems to imply. The circle squaring problem is the attempt to take a given circle and then use a finite compass and straightedge to construct a square with the same area.

More to the point, the paradigm Wright's laying out isn't really all that new. It is, in fact, the traditional liberal approach to foreign policy drawing on Kant, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and, all the usual cast of characters. I do, however, see the case for framing it as a new paradigm: Roughly, there's a sense that 9-11 made drama and novelty necessary parts of one's approach to national security, that Bush's efforts at drama and novelty have failed, and that now we need a new brand of drama and novelty. I would set against this the idea that though people have gotten pretty sour on Bush, they still tend not to believe that liberals should be trusted to run the country's national security. To me, this means we need to emphasize in our presentation the case we do, in fact, know what we're doing and that the longstanding liberal foreign policy tradition is a good one, made more relevant than ever by the contemporary situation, but not something we just made up yesterday.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: STEMMED PROGRESS. As the Senate gets set to vote on a bill to expand federal funding for stem-cell research, CAP's Jonathan Moreno and Sam Berger explain how much our current federal policy stinks.

--The Editors

SCATOLOGICAL DISCOURSE. It was a big news day for excrement, yesterday was, what with the President's reference to what the Syrians were doing, followed by Joe Wilson's performance last night on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." Speaking of the famous 16 words in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address that set off the chain of events that led to the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, her husband, a former ambassador to Iraq, explained his view of those events.

AMBASSADOR JOSEPH C. WILSON IV: …Getting the facts out did not include getting the National Intelligence Officers' letter out, which was circulated around the administration in January, representing the consensus view of the American intelligence community that the Niger claim was, quote, baseless. Those were not the facts they were getting out. The stuff they were getting out was just basically [PAUSE] crap, for want of a better word...[Emphasis added]

OLBERMANN: An appropriate turn of phrase on this day that we played the clip of the president at the G-8 summit.

I must say, that as a Jersey girl, I am flummoxed that the utterance of one of the more benign curse words in American English has made such news, even if it did come out of the President's mouth. I mean, if you ask Newt Gingrich, we're in the middle of World War III. Is that not bigger news?

And speaking of Gingrich, am I the only one who found it odd that he was chosen to represent the Republican view of the conflict in the Middle East on Sunday's "Meet the Press," opposite Sen. Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee? Were no GOP committee members available? Did Newt select himself, or did the party anoint him to hold forth?

--Adele M. Stan

ISRAEL AND THE U.N. The Times reports that "A top Israeli general said today that Israel’s offensive in Lebanon would last another few weeks, and he said that the use of large numbers of ground forces had not been ruled out." That would be unfortunate. And based on the past track record of Israeli interventions in Lebanon, it seems very unlikely that weeks or months of anti-Hezbollah actions are going to provide a permanent solution to Israel's problem on the northern border. It would be much better for them to take up European proposals to send a large, well-trained U.N. force with the authority and equipment necessary to disarm Hezbollah in exchange for a cessation of Israeli attacks.

I've seen the argument made that Israel should dismiss this proposal because, after all, there was already a U.N. force in South Lebanon and it didn't succeed in disarming Hezbollah or stopping border violations. That argument, if meant seriously, is really rather silly. That a very small U.N. force that wasn't given the mission of disarming Hezbollah and that therefore didn't have the necessary personnel or weapons to disarm Hezbollah failed to disarm Hezbollah is no reason to believe that a different mission that did have that mandate would fail.

Now, due to yesterday's microphone mishap, we know that George W. Bush doesn't seem to like this plan very much. His preference would be "to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it’s over." But does he have a plan to do that? After all, the Syrian government isn't actually in the business of helping Israel or the United States out of sticky situations. Does Bush have something he's prepared to offer Syria in exchange for their cooperation? Does Bush really see a wider regional war as the means by which Syria is coerced into cooperating? There's no sense sitting around doing nothing and whining that, shockingly, Bashar Assad doesn't want to help the White House out for no reason.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. Matt reminds us that going to war with Iran (and Syria) would still be a bad idea, and contemplates the comic book quality of the hawks' foreign policy outlook:

...Hawks seem to have convinced themselves that American military might is like a power ring -- capable of achieving anything if only we have sufficient will. There are no objective limits to our capacities, no sticky situations that need to be handled cautiously, no awkward compromises to be brokered, and no stuff we’re just going to have to live with in the hopes that things will change for the better down the road. There are only goals, force, and will, and the only relevant question in any situation is whether we have the will to achieve our goals with force.

--The Editors

LEO STRAUSS, UNREHABILITATED. If you're in the mood for a bit of a high-minded intellectual detour from the hurly-burly of the blogosphere, take a gander at Scott Horton's fascinating pushback on recent efforts to rehabilitate philosopher and second-degree mentor to various neoconservative intellectuals Leo Strauss as a hero of liberal democracy. You've got some intellectual history here and also Horton's translation of a fascinating letter from Strauss to Karl Löwith, another philosopher of the period who traveled in similar circles. The money quote, if one can speak of such a thing in this context, is this remark of Strauss' on the fact that he and Löwith have been driven out of Germany by the Nazi seizure power for being Jewish: "the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme to protest against the shabby abomination."

The French phrase means "the inalienable rights of man." So we have a German-Jewish philosopher driven from his country by Nazi anti-Semitism arguing that this unappealing aspect of Nazism doesn't discredit the "fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles" of the German right and that, in fact, it is preferable to critique Nazi anti-Semitism on the basis of those fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles than to do so with reference to the unseemly doctrine of human rights. How much bearing this all has on current events is a bit hard to say, but it does seem to confirm one's sense that the current campaign to defend and spread liberal principles against Islamist extremism is being spearheaded by people who neither understand those principles nor have any real affection for them.

--Matthew Yglesias

ANOTHER NO-SHOW. George Bush makes a habit of not making it a habit of speaking at NAACP conventions. Apparently, there is an opening in his schedule this week, and Chairman Julian Bond and President Bruce Gordon still hope Bush will drop by, since the meetings are in D.C.

What’s frustrating is how facile the coverage of the conference has been. This AP piece leads with this: “Black Americans should end ‘victim-like thinking’ and seize opportunities to help close gaps between the nation's rich and poor, NAACP president Bruce S. Gordon said Monday.” Sure, the piece later notes that Gordon’s comments (which are not online yet) echo the more muscular, less comfortable comments made by Bond. Here’s a more quote-worthy passage from Bond’s address to the members the day before:

You should know as we begin our week in Washington that a different language is spoken here, a sort of Orwellian code…

"Spreading peace" means "pre-emptive war." "Staying the course" means "to relentlessly pursue a disastrous policy regardless of the consequences." "Compassionate conservatism" translates into "tax cuts for the rich." "Endangered species in need of government protection" are "the rich people's families who inherit mega estates."

"Activist judges" are "jurists who do not belong to the Federalist Society."
"Non-partisan judicial appointees" are "jurists who do belong to the Federalist Society." "Faith-based initiative" means "passing out money and saying 'trust me'".

"Moral values" equate to "keeping homosexual illegal immigrants from burning flags." And "racial discrimination", of course, is "a problem of the past which no longer exists."

This quote is more likely to get picked up by the conservative radio and bloggers (if it hasn’t already) and used to discredit Bond as a shrill Bush-hater than to be reported by mainstream press. It’s a nice summary of Bush’s rhetorical-policy disconnect and, if the President reads it, he’s not likely to show again this year.

--Tom Schaller

THE PARTY OF BUNGLERS. Would you like the early line on the exact moment when the Democratic Party bungled the midterm elections this fall -- and, as an added bonus, People's Exhibits Q through Z why Rahm Emanuel and the folks at the DCCC would screw up a one-car funeral, even if you spotted them the hearse?

Well, this is it. This good, tough Internet ad gets pulled because some of the people who enabled the murderous lunacy depicted therein throw public hissy-fits. Almost immediately thereafter, Senator Mike DeWine (R-I'm-Not-Bob-Ney-Dammit!) drops a television spot using the people killed on September 11 as a cudgel on Sherrod Brown.

Do you want to know how I know the Democratic ad was a good one? Check out this tap-dancing by House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-I'm-Not-Either). Talk about being, as the tennis commentators say, wrong-footed.

Imagine four months worth of this kind of Republican discomfort.

Imagine there was an actual opposition party to make it happen.

--Charles P. Pierce

IRAN VERSUS THE ARAB STATES. An intriguing subplot I've overlooked so far in the Lebanon situation has been the attitude of the "axis of pro-American dictators" (to coin a phrase) which is extremely close to the main line of analysis we've heard from American and Israeli hawks. Take this reporting in The Jerusalem Post:

The anti-Hizbullah coalition, which appears to be growing with every Israeli missile that drops on the heads of Hizbullah leaders and headquarters, is spearheaded by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. These three countries, together with many Arab commentators and political analysts, are convinced that the leaders of Teheran and Damascus are using Hizbullah to divert attention from Iran's nuclear program and Syria's involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

For Arab states to so openly take Israel's side in a dispute is noteworthy on its own terms, and the Egypto-Saudi-Jordanian view that Iran and Syria are responsible seems to be an important data point. The New York Times's coverage of this angle says "the willingness of those governments to defy public opinion in their own countries underscores a shift that is prompted by the growing influence of Iran and Shiite Muslims in Iraq and across the region." What's more:

"There is a school of thought, led by Saudi Arabia, that believes that Hezbollah is a source of trouble, a protégé of Iran, but also a political instrument in the hands of Iran," said Adnan Abu Odeh, a Jordanian sociologist. "This school says we should not play into the hands of Iran, which has its own agenda, by sympathizing or supporting Hezbollah fighting against the Israelis."

It would be interesting to know to what extent this Arab state position is being driven by specific intelligence as opposed to a general desire to take a strong stand against Iran and/or Shiite militancy as a general matter. Hopefully, we'll learn more about this in days to come. Mark Lynch's analysis of Arabic media coverage suggests that the portions of the Arab public sphere not owned by the Saudi government are taking the more traditional anti-Israel point of view and Shadi Hamdi indicates that Egyptian public opinion is not with the Egyptian regime on this issue. There are some obvious issues one could raise here about the Middle East democracy initiative and its relationship to other American strategic goals.

--Matthew Yglesias

MY OH MY, WE DO HAVE A BETTER PRESS CORPS. Having already offered up an example of the press corps at its worst, let me now turn to how it looks at its best. Last week saw the release of data showing federal tax revenues far exceeding estimates. True to form, the Bush administration credited its tax cuts, arguing that they spurred the economy, generated massive growth, and proved Supply-Side Economics. Arthur Laffer lives!

Given the press corps' usual facility with economic data, the coverage went roughly as expected: Some numbers explaining the increase in revenue, some quotes from administration officials crowing over the news, some quotes from some other folks tempering their joy, and a meaningless rundown of clashes over tax cuts. The Wall Street Journal, however, let Greg Ip and Deborah Solomon actually report out the story, which is how they created that rarest of all things: A newspaper article that takes the news and helps you understand it.

Ip and Solomon found that growth had not, in fact, exceeded government estimates, which means that the revenues exceeding estimates couldn't have come from the growth, or else the numbers would have surprised no one. Rather, the increase in Treasury receipts came because inequality increased beyond estimates. Digging into the numbers, they report that "[t]he share of national income going to corporations and the wealthiest individuals, already large, has expanded, while the share going to typical wage earners has shrunk. Because corporations and the wealthy generally pay income tax at higher rates than does the typical wage earner, that shift benefits the federal Treasury." Put another way, the federal income tax is progressive. When rich people make more money, they pay relatively more of it into the Treasury than do middle-class folks enjoying the same windfall. Because the economy is becoming ever-more unequal and growth is really only helping corporations and the very rich, the Treasury got more cash while the middle class benefited less from the growth than would be expected. I wonder if the Bush administration plans to crow about that?

On a related note, Michael Kinsley just underwent brain surgery. In his charming and humorous article on how he reacted to the news, he mused that "my first words coming out of surgery are so important. They have got to tell the world—and convince myself—that I am all there." In a postscript to the piece, Time informs us that the surgery went fine, and Kinsley’s first words were "Well, of course, when you cut taxes, government revenues go up. Why couldn't I see that before?" The man's a legend in his own time.

--Ezra Klein

A WARNING FOR PODHORETZ. John Podhoretz's attempts to use a single DailyKos diary to characterize the views of all the "Kos Kids" is illustrative of either mendacity or ignorance, but certainly one of the two. Given that he later makes a big show of being uninformed -- "I am not familiar with the posting rules and systems on Daily Kos, because I have better things to do than know them" -- I'll be charitable and assume he's just a really, really, really lazy commentator, and not a willful liar.

In keeping with the laziness theme, Podhoretz clearly found it too tiring to keep reading below the diary, where the comments dismantle the diarist for lack of balance, factual misrepresentations, and anti-Semitism. Moreover, this is a peculiar impulse blogs seem to generate in some folks, particularly media professionals. Because so many of us are used to publications with a defined editorial line and a certain amount of institutional ownership over each published story, there's a desire to use singular diaries or comments to extrapolate out the opinions of entire online communities. Doing so, however, is no more illustrative than taking a sidewalk crank and deciding all of Irvine really does believe in the slogan smeared on his poster board. Daily Kos, after all, has hundreds of thousands of readers, much like my hometown Irvine has over a hundred thousand residents. And just as all my neighbors could have public conversations without accurately reflecting my political views, various diarists can speak and comment without assuming responsibility for the community. Those having trouble grasping such an elementary fact need either study harder or find a different line of work. The Internet is important now, and learning how it functions isn't something political commentators can afford to put off because they have "better things to do."

--Ezra Klein

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR! Recently, at something called the Aspen Ideas Festival -- and how did Plato and the rest of them manage without having an Ideas Fest, I ask you -- Bill Clinton said the following concerning the situation in Iraq: "Once you break the eggs, you have a responsibility to make an omelet."

I disagree. For one thing, once you break the eggs, you can make almost anything. You can make scrambled eggs, or poached eggs, a five-layer chocolate cake, or a pitcher of skullbuster eggnog, for all that. There's no affirmative obligation to make an omelet, and only an omelet, once you've broken the eggs. This is small-bore thinking, dammit, like school uniforms and V-chips. Enough of this!

Moreover, there is a more serious flaw in Mr. Clinton's approach to this vital metaphorical issue. Let us say, just for fun, that I entrust the eggs in question to some belligerent and unsophisticated children and they go out in the backyard and, for a number of reasons that later turn out to be lies, they smash all the eggs against a big, moldy old oak tree. Am I still obligated to scrape the egg-flotsam off the bark and make an omelet?

Would Mr. Clinton eat that omelet if I served it to him? He's been out of office for a while, so maybe he's a bit rusty on politics. And (I hope) he's been staying away from cholesterol, so maybe he's forgotten about eggs, too.

--Charles P. Pierce

OUR FARCICALLY DISAPPOINTING PRESS CROPS. If I were crafting a parody of the political media's decline, I could hardly construct a better set piece than today's reportage. A live mic at the G8 Summit caught Tony Blair and George Bush talking privately about the conflict in Lebanon. Given the relative opacity of Bush's thoughts on the situation, the frank discussion offered a fair amount of insight and a couple nuggets of news, including that he was going to send Condi to the region (or possibly the U.N. -- but she's going somewhere to deal with this), that he blamed neither Israel nor Lebanon for the violence, and that "the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over."

That's a big deal: Bush believes it within the Syrian government's power to calm the conflict. Theoretically, that should have major implications for American diplomacy and, possibly, policy. So what's CNN's headline? "Open mic catches Bush expletive on Mideast"! The story is not that his substantive views on the issue have been uncovered, but that the President curses. Indeed, the article even speculates on how such a stunner slipped out, arguing that "the escalating crisis in the Middle East prompted him to use an expletive in a conversation with British Prime Minister Tony Blair."

This is your press corps. The President has a potty mouth is a more pressing story than the President believes sufficient pressure on the sovereign nation of Syria could be the key to ending an intensely volatile war in the Middle East. What a proud day for my profession.

--Ezra Klein

EQUALLY -- YES! I was really hoping that my claim that Israel's targeting of Lebanon's civilian infrastructure and Hezbollah's use of indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli cities were "equally indefensible" would bring forth an outraged condemnation of my "moral equivalence." It seems I'll have to settle for Jon Chait saying he doesn't "see how [I] could morally equate the actions of the two sides."

I think it's pretty easy. Jon says Israel has been "attacking the parts of Lebanon's infrastructure that could be used to spirit the kidnapped soldiers out of the country, and followed it up by trying to destroy Hezbollah's artillery." No objection to destroying Hezbollah's artillery from me. It's the civilian infrastructure part that bothers me. Jon wants to say this is justified because Israel needs to prevent the captured soldiers from being moved out of the country. I don't think this holds any water -- surely Hezbollah can transport two guys across the Syrian border even if the roads, ports, and airstrips are destroyed. It only takes one off-road vehicle. Nor does this theory really explain why Israel hit Beirut's power plant.

Israel's anti-infrastructure campaign is aimed at the exact same objective as Hezbollah's rocket attacks -- they're trying to inflict pain on the Lebanese population in order to extract concessions from the Lebanese government. The situations are asymmetrical in two main ways. First, the Israeli government is actually capable of meeting Hezbollah's demands -- the release of captive Hezbollah guerillas and a cessation to Israeli military action, whereas all indications are that the Lebanese government actually can't make Hezbollah release the captive Israelis or disarm it. Second, as Jon says, Israel's strikes are targeted while Hezbollah's are random. This deserves some weight, but not very much. Many, many, many more Lebanese than Israeli civilians have been killed in the fighting so far. What's more, I'm sure Hezbollah would be thrilled to have more accurate missiles that let them target key elements of Israeli infrastructure -- the ports, Ben-Gurion airport, power plants, etc. -- rather than spraying rockets at random. Such attacks would inflict far more pain on the Israeli population writ large than these untargeted rocket strikes do.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: WHY WE FIGHT. TAP talks to political scientist Nolan McCarty, co-author of the new book Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. McCarty points to economic inequality as the culprit for rising political polarization in the United States:

What’s happened in the past 25 to 40 years or so is that as economic inequality has increased, there’s been a polarization of the parties on economic issues -- mostly due to the Republicans moving to the right. In the ’70s and the ’80s there was a rapid increase in incomes at the top without the commensurate increase of incomes at the bottom. And economic policies that Republicans had promoted and lost elections on in the ’60s they began to win elections on in the ’70s and ’80s with the support of this new wealthier vote. So, there’s a direct relationship between the polarization of the parties on economic issues and the increased economic inequality that took place, primarily because these new, wealthier voters gave an impetus to a set of policy priorities -- lower taxes, a more libertarian set of economic prescriptions -- that reinforced inequality.

The question is, why hasn’t this increased economic inequality produced more redistribution?

Typically economists, political economists, and political scientists think that economic inequality is self-correcting: If inequality increases there will be a mobilization of lower-income voters in a push toward greater redistribution of wealth to offset that inequality. Here’s where immigration is a big part of the story, though, because at the same time as economic inequality in America was increasing, immigration was increasing, too. There were increasing numbers of low-wage workers, but an increasing proportion of those were immigrants who were not yet naturalized and therefore not able to vote for redistributionist policies. And so there’s a reinforcing effect from the composition of the work force being more immigrant and less citizen, because these low-income workers can’t vote.

--The Editors

GORE WATCH: ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY EDITION. There are, I hasten to acknowledge, much more important things going on in the world at the moment, but nevertheless this passage from EW's cover story on Al Gore includes a softer Gore line on the "running for prez" question than I've seen before from the man:

Of course, Gore can always go back to being an ordinary presidential candidate -- he hasn't completely sealed off that option. ''I do not expect to run for president again,'' he says, choosing his words carefully. ''But I haven't completely ruled out the possibility of running at some future time. I haven't given any Sherman-esque statements: 'If nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve...'''...

UPDATE: Commenters inform me that, indeed, this has been his line for a while and I'm just behind the times. Perhaps I should stop depending on Entertainment Weekly for updates on American politics...

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: A CRISIS FORETOLD. Jo-Ann Mort reports from Israel and contemplates a major casualty of the crisis: the dream of peace achieved unilaterally.

--The Editors

ISRAEL IS NOT INDIA. I would join with Jonah Goldberg's criticism of today's Sebastian Mallaby column. That India has shown impressive restraint in responding to its rival Pakistan doesn't necessarily offer a template or commentary on the Israel-Hezbollah situation. Israel's calculus in attacking a non-nuclear, largely diffuse enemy that's incapable of matching their military strength is rather different than India's decision to refrain from courting nuclear war against a large state. That's not to say Israel's actions are right or wrong, but it's a specific situation with its own history and context that deserves to be analyzed as such. The situation is complicated enough on its own merits that our nation's op-ed columnists needn't be muddying the waters.

--Ezra Klein

WHAT MAKES A CONSERVATIVE? Fred Barnes writes about Bush's favorite foreigners:

The president's favorites don't have to be conservatives. Blair dislikes American economic policy. Merkel has urged that Guantánamo prison be closed. Rasmussen has worried aloud about abuse at Abu Ghraib prison and possible murders at Haditha in Iraq. But, an aide says, "the president is looking for people who see the world as he sees it." That means, at a minimum, they support his post-invasion policy in Iraq and regard the spread of democracy as important.

Am I correct in reading these remarks about Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as implying that not worrying about abuse and murder is actually constitutive of what Barnes thinks it means to be a conservative? By normal standards, after all, Rasmussen is a conservative. He leads Denmark's free market party and governs in coalition with the Conservative People's Party. His main economic policy agenda item has been tax cuts and he backed the invasion of Iraq. But because he's against abusing prisoners and murdering random civilians, Bush's affection for him is a sign of ideological heterodoxy in the White House -- a very strange perspective for the most pro-Bush writer on the planet to adopt.

--Matthew Yglesias

CASH, INFLUENCE, AND CONTROL. I don't have any special insight into the interrelationships between Syria and Iran on the one hand and Hamas and Hezbollah on the other, but I think it's worth saying that this notion out here that Syria and Iran actually control the latter two groups seems to lack a serious evidentiary basis. Undeniably, the two states give money and weapons to the two non-state actors. And, clearly, this affords Damascus and Teheran some degree of influence over Hamas and Hezbollah. But one needs to put this sort of relationship in perspective. The U.S. government gives money to Egypt, which gives us some influence over the government in Cairo. But we don't control Egypt in the sense of micromanaging Egyptian policy decisions. In principle, we could always tell Hosni Mubarak "do X or we'll cut off your funding." In practice, though, such threats need to be used rather sparingly, and there's always the possibility of Egypt viewing such a demand as a bluff and calling it.

And that's just one example. The U.S. government gives money to all kinds of entities around the world. Virtually every college and university in the country gets government funding, as do a huge array of states in the developing world. We have a variety of mechanisms for giving cash to civil societies groups in lots of semi-authoritarian states. We provide major security guarantees to Japan and South Korea, among others. This gives the government influence over all these actors but, again, nothing like control over them and nobody infers that Japan clears everything it does with Washington or that all South Korean policy initiatives are, in fact, being dictated by the Pentagon. This simply isn't how the world works and there's no particular reason to believe that the thrilling universe of Arab nationalism or Islamic radicalism works this way either.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE OTHER MIDDLE EAST MESS. In case Israel's attempts to level Lebanon had temporarily lifted your depression on all issues Iraqi-related, The New York Times reports that Sunni calls for American withdrawal have quieted as fears of mass slaughter at the hands of rampaging Shiites have deepened.

Recently, Shiite militias have been conducting public executions of Sunnis in broad daylight, and Sunni areas have had to erect armed checkpoints to deter roving Shiite death squads. Consequently, groups who once wished us out post haste are rconsidering the decision, fearing our vacuum will embolden a virtual genocdie. In this context, those pockets of Baghdad still littered with Saddam Hussein supporters are rejoicing every time the Americans pass, using the loudspeakers to inform residents that the military rolling through is not Iraqi, and thus should not be shot at. Next thing you know they'll be giving us BFF lockets.

--Ezra Klein

WHAT INFRASTRUCTURE WHERE? It's worth noting that Israel's target choices are a bit trickier to evaluate than Matt lets on. While it's true that "they're not just attacking armed Hezbollah personnel; they're dropping bombs on offices in urban areas with all the attendant devastation that entails," it's not true that they're just hitting the Chase Western on the corner of Jihad St. and 14th. Most of the rockets are being launched from shell civilian and urban residences, and it's neither new nor unexpected that Hezbollah's infrastructure is tucked away in the most civilian-heavy portions of the country. As always, these groups like to ensure that any destruction of their property will force the maximum in collateral damages and thus do the most to turn public sentiment against the attackers. Savvy strategizing, to be sure, but rather ruthless.

That said, it's rather hard to discern what Israel is actually attempting here. They seem to have rebuffed Tony Blair and Kofi Annan's proposal of an international peace-keeping force, and all are aware that Hezbollah can't actually be bombed out of existence, so the lack of an obvious endgame is peculiar. It may be that they're trying to bring down such hellfire and brimstone that the Lebanese population lacks any appetite for future provocations on Hezbollah's part, but that point would seem to have been reached days ago. On the other hand, it's worth noting that Bush appears to have a resolution strategy that's all his own.

--Ezra Klein

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH GAZA. Among many other things, it's run by thugs, gangs, and militias who have no more concern for civilian Palestinians than they do for Israelis. The Washington Post makes that pretty clear in this story about the Israeli ground re-invasion of Gaza:

Mariam el-Selgawi, a neighbor who fled her home with her eight children and elderly in-laws, said she knows why the Israelis are back.

"Because of the rockets, everyone is launching rockets," from the agricultural areas inside the Gaza Strip over the border at Israeli towns, she said. "Days before, there was a group trying to shoot a rocket, and they were hit by a missile from a drone, and all of them died."

"All the time I get in fights with them when they come. They know it will bring Israel back to the area," she complained of the Palestinians firing the projectiles. "The last time I said: 'The Israelis are going to come and kill us. Aren't you afraid you're going to make us orphans?' And one of them said: 'We will launch the rockets from your house. You deserve it,'" and they fired it from outside her fence, she said.

Her father-in-law, Ali el-Selgawi, 76, sat forlornly on the linoleum schoolroom floor that is the family's latest bed, sipping juice and shaking his head. "You can't talk to them, or they just hit you," he said.

Worth recalling: The civilian casualties of the Israeli assault are often the victims of Palestinian terrorists, too -- people who would use them as human shields or involuntarily conscript them as martyrs for the cause.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WEEK TWO. I'm lacking in deep thoughts on the situation at the moment, but it occurs to me that folks defending recent Israeli attacks on Lebanon seem to me to be defending something that's happening in an alternate reality rather than the actual events on the ground. Repeating the mantra that Israel is aiming to crush Hezbollah doesn't change the fact that, in practice, this isn't what Israel is doing. For one thing, they're not just attacking armed Hezbollah personnel; they're dropping bombs on offices in urban areas with all the attendant devastation that entails. But more broadly, they're systematically targeting Lebanon's civilian infrastructure -- the airport, fuel depots, power plants, roads. The direct consequences of this have been a civilian death toll that's far higher than what Hezbollah's equally indefensible indiscriminate rocket attacks have done. Whatever the intent of all this is, the actual effect is going to be to kill a lot of people, make many more into refugees (some of whom will, consequently, die), wreck Lebanon's economy, and possibly cause that country's already rickety state to collapse.

Sebastian Mallaby has some smart things to say, though I agree with Kevin Drum's caveats. Suzanne Nossel, likewise, is making sense. Robert Farley's scattered observations seem valuable, especially the point that "If Israel could have destroyed Hezbollah, it would have done so at some point between 1982 and 2000. It's clear that the IDF can hurt, but equally as clear that it can't exterminate Hezbollah through military force alone."

Meanwhile, though I'll admit this is a somewhat eccentric view of mine, I think it's always worth reading Martin Peretz on Israel issues. As you'll see here, he basically sees this as a replay of the 1982 Lebanon intervention, which he considers to be a good thing -- about half of that analysis seems right. Elsewhere in The New Republic, Michael Oren says that in order to prevent a wider war, Israel needs to widen the war by attacking Syria.

--Matthew Yglesias

THUMBSUCKERS BEWARE: NOVAK'S NAMING NAMES. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak gave quite the unconvincing performance yesterday on “Meet the Press.” As Novak answered question after question from anchor Tim Russert about his role in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson and the subsequent investigation by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, the Prince of Darkness (as he is known in these parts) proved himself more dottering than wily, contradicting himself, and giving weak and multiple explanations for why he gave up his sources to the special prosecutor. Novak's excuse? Well, the prosecutor already had their names. How's that for standing on principle?

Novak also told Russert -- who himself appeared before Fitzgerald's CIA-leak grand jury -- that the name of his primary source has not yet been disclosed, though he did not dispute that it was former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage when Russert made that suggestion. "I’m not going to speculate on who the source was," Novak replied.

One would hope that Novak would know himself who his source is -- or at least better understand the meaning of the word “speculate.”

But my favorite excuse of all was Novak's explanation of why, unlike the other reporters called before the grand jury, he didn't fight the subpoena: It would have been bad for journalism, he said.

Because my lawyer said I did not have a clear constitutional chance of surviving. I had to make this decision myself. I was operating as an independent operator, paying the burden—the great burden of my legal fees. The Chicago Sun-Times helped me, but it was, essentially, my decision. And my attorney, Jim Hamilton, a very prominent attorney, believed that there was a high probability that I would lose the case in court, and it would not be good for press freedoms. As a matter of fact, you lost the case. In fact, everybody who went to court lost the case. And the law protecting the rights of journalists, which I feel very strongly about, has suffered by people going—by fighting it, and that’s one thing I wanted to avoid.

And that's not all, but probably enough for here. For more laughs, check out Novak's backtrack on his reported claim that Plame's name was given him by an administration figure, and that the CIA told him not to publish her name because of her covert status. But he didn't out her, Novak claimed. CIA turncoat and traitor Aldrich Ames had already blown Plame's cover years ago, the columnist explained.

But the very best Novak quote from the whole interview is this: "I’m a reporting columnist, as opposed to a thumbsucking columnist..."

--Adele M. Stan

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE RULES OF THE GAME. Earlier today, Laura Rozen talked to Mark Perry, co-founder of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, which has administered dialogues between Hezbollah and former American and British officials for the past several years. Perry assesses the current crisis, and doesn't pull punches:

We’ve been hearing the theory that the timing of Hezbollah’s Tuesday kidnapping of the two Israeli Defense Force soldiers was planned well in advance and with coordination from Tehran or Damascus. Can you speak to that?

Oy vey. There are a lot of people in Washington trying to walk that story back right now, because it’s not true.

Hezbollah and Israel stand along this border every day observing each other through binoculars and waiting for an opportunity to kill each other. They are at war. They have been for 25 years, no one ever declared a cease-fire between them. … They stand on the border every day and just wait for an opportunity. And on Tuesday morning there were two Humvees full of Israeli soldiers, not under observation from the Israeli side, not under covering fire, sitting out there all alone. The Hezbollah militia commander just couldn’t believe it -- so he went and got them.

The Israeli captain in charge of that unit knew he had really screwed up, so he sent an armored personnel carrier to go get them in hot pursuit, and Hezbollah led them right through a minefield.

Now if you’re sitting in Tehran or Damascus or Beirut, and you are part of the terrorist Politburo so to speak, you have a choice. With your head sunk in your hands, thinking "Oh my God," you can either give [the kidnapped soldiers] back and say "Oops, sorry, wrong time" or you can say, "Hey, this is war."

--The Editors

SPECTER'S SHAM INDEPENDENCE, EXAMPLE #2,494. For those who haven't yet read much about the Arlen Specter-Bush administration "compromise" on the NSA domestic surveillance program, this from Marty Lederman is highly worth reading. Orin Kerr elaborates further on the troubling balance-of-power implications in the bill, while Jane Harman concurs that the thing's no good. Meanwhile, Greg highlights one particular aspect of the media's generally dismal initial coverage of the bill.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: AN END TO HEDGING The challenge against Joe Lieberman, argues Terence Samuel, will transform the Iraq war as a political issue for Democrats. The "competence" critique of the administration's war will no longer suffice, and a number of the '08 presidential contenders are going to have to hop off the fence in one direction or the other.

--The Editors

DEMOCRACY PROMOTION. Seems to me that Andy McCarthy is asking the right questions. Though democracy promotion makes for great and stirring rhetoric, it's really worth having a serious conversation about when and in which forms it conflicts with America's interests and the war on terror. It's testament to this administration's fundamental inability to shed the Cold War mindset that they seem to have avoided any actual thinking over the interplay between a transformative project to change the Middle East's regimes and the immediate imperative to calm anti-American sentiment and assure domestic safety and regional stability. Nevertheless, if Bush had come before the country in 2003 and explained that his plan to fight terror involved instituting an unstable Islamic regime in Iraq and making Hezbollah and Hamas the governments of Lebanon and Palestine, I'm not so certain reelection would have lay in his future.

--Ezra Klein

THE RIGHT WING IS VERY BRAVE. Campus Progress, the student journalism arm of the Center for American Progress (Full disclosure: I've done some writing for them), wanted to send a reporter to cover the right-wing Young America Foundation's conference. Not so fast, said YAF's smug, emoticon-using media representative, Jason Mattera. After LOL'ing over the request, Mattera explained that he'd no sooner credential CP than The Nation, contrary thought assumedly provoking allergic reactions at conservative conferences (and liability insurance being expensive, what with the lack of tort reform and all). One problem: Campus Progress had credentialed Mattera for not one, but both of their annual conferences, even after he wrote in National Review that "instead of injecting some fresh thinking into the young left-activist bloodstream, panelists at Campus Progress’s national student conference rehashed big-government policies, drew ridiculous parallels, and conveyed embarrassing talking points."

Embarrassing as Mattera's cowardice is, I'd be curious to know whether YAF is just full of wimps or if this is a trend. YearlyKos, for instance, didn't refuse a single conservative journalist credentials, despite being fully aware that they weren't likely to fawn over the liberal confab. Conversely, I remember the RNC revoking credentials from liberal bloggers they'd accepted. Anyone have other examples?

--Ezra Klein

NEGOTIATING A WAY OUT. I noticed that some commenters replying to Matt's item this morning were skeptical about the possibility of a negotiated disarmament of the Hezbollah terrorists. I'd like to point them to this story from The Jerusalem Post on the situation:

There are already Israeli government ministers discussing the need for some sort of prisoner exchange, despite Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's declared steadfast opposition to such a move. Peretz, The Jerusalem Post has learned, believes Israel should be willing to release prisoners in what he has called a "gesture" to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, if Shalit, Goldwasser and Regev are released.

Israel has made such deals in the past - most recently in 2003 - when the remains of three IDF soldiers and captured businessman Elhanan Tennenbaum, held by Hizbullah, were returned to Israel in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Such a swap, officers admitted on Thursday, might turn out to be the only way to get the soldiers back. The IDF siege on Lebanon and Gaza can't go on forever, and eventually the international community will lose patience with Israel's use of force.

"A military operation will not solve the Hizbullah problem," a high-ranking Northern Command officer said. "The international community needs to get involved and place pressure on the Lebanese government to disarm Hizbullah. That is the only way out."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

QUALITY OF LIFE. Folks should tell Tester that, once you look past this pesky crime emergency and the apparent uptick in ghoulish attacks against even residents of the fancier neighborhoods in town, DC's a swell place to live. Great summers, too!

--Sam Rosenfeld

TESTER TEST. A year ago, I had a chance to sit down in Great Falls, Montana, with Senate candidate Jon Tester, who is in DC now for fundraising events and meet-n-greets. The one thing he said last July that still sticks in my memory was this reflection on the life he and his wife have been living in Montana for 48 years: “We’ve got a great quality of life where we live. Washington will not be a step up; it’ll be a step down as far as quality of life goes.” All politicians tell you how much more they like their home district than Washington, but somehow you just knew he was serious as a heart attack when he said it.

I popped in at a house party last night here in DC hosted by a native Montanan who was meeting Tester for the first time. I wanted to see if Tester’s recent victory in the Senate primary, his current lead over Conrad Burns in the polls, and being dressed in a suit and tie at a Capitol Hill fundraiser might just reveal a different Jon Tester than the one I met a year ago. Nope. It was the same guy. When I asked him how he felt about moving to DC now that the prospects of that happening are a helluva lot greater than they were last July, his answer hadn’t changed.

--Tom Schaller

ON A LIGHTER NOTE. Shamu is back at number one on the New York Times most e-mailed list.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

IRAN'S CHESSBOARD. Kevin Drum takes up the question of how involved Iran and Syria have been in recent events in the Middle East. While Los Angeles Times reporters speaking primarily to American or U.S.-based sources painted an inconclusive picture, a Gaza-based New York Times reporter's overseas sources pointed a more direct finger at Tehran:

An Arab intelligence officer working in a country neighboring Israel said it appeared that Iran — through Hezbollah — had given support to Mr. Meshal to stage the seizure of Corporal Shalit. The officer said the Shalit case, even before the capture of two more Israeli soldiers, amounted to Hezbollah and Iran sending a message: “If you want to hurt us, there are tools that we have and that we can use against you.”

Israeli intelligence officers and analysts say they believe that the message is primarily Iran’s, acting through Hezbollah and Mr. Meshal.

Itamar Rabinovich, former Israeli ambassador to Washington and chief negotiator with Syria on a peace treaty that never quite materialized, sees Iran “on a roll, looking for regional hegemony.” Even without nuclear weapons, Iran is acquiring considerable influence in Lebanon, in Syria and with the Palestinians, not to speak of Iraq.

Further, while it may seem to domestic observers that such provocations would increase the likelihood of American military intervention against Iran or Syria by making them focal points (already chest-thumping neoconservative pundits are calling for war, arguing that the Iranians "have made their threat to America and its interests more obvious and more urgent--providing a stronger case for war than their nuclear program could provide"), it's hard to imagine that Iran would have supported or allowed such provocations by its clients if it believed that regional chaos would increase the odds of an American attack -- or even economic sanctions -- which they very much hope to avoid. I hate to cite anything from Powerline, but this from a Andrew Jacobson strikes me as an equally plausible scenario:

Iran has orchestrated much (if not all) of the current unrest and violence in order to: (i) distract attention from its nuclear weapons program, (ii) tie down Israel militarily in order to reduce the chances that Israel could unilaterally (or in combination with the U.S.) launch a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, (iii) scare the American public (and politicians) into rejecting any unilateral military option against Iran for fear of further inflaming the Mideast (e.g., "Geez, we've already got huge issues in North Korea, Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, we can't possibly afford any further foreign entanglements" or "We better not do anything to Iran, we might further inflame the Mideast, threaten our oil supply and the U.S. economy" (Lord knows we don't want to pay $%/gallon for our SUV's)), and (iv) create world furor against Israel (and indirectly the U.S.), to further raise the stakes and international opposition to any unilateral military strikes.

Syria is a whole different question, and focusing international attention on Syria's role in fomenting the present violence may actually aid the Lebanese in their desire to finally get Hezbollah to disarm, as required by U.N. resolution 1559. Michael Young lays out that case in today's New York Times, as Matt noted below, and there is a real opportunity here for both the Lebanese and the Israelis to create international pressure on Syria and support for Hezbollah disarmanent. But, as Young notes, that would require Israel to focus its attack on Hezbollah and stop putting pressure on Lebanon as a whole. Taking out the airports and bridges and blockading the port is a strategy designed to make all of Lebanon -- beautiful, resurgent Lebanon, the vacation destination of choice in the Middle East and for more than a million people a year -- suffer. Israeli intelligence and military officials know very well where most of the Hezbollah encampments along the border are -- heck, you can see them from Israel, along with the yellow Hezbollah flag -- and could take those out if it wanted to focus its attack on the terrorists. Instead, its early military moves have nationalized the attack on Lebanon, when the solution would seem to involve strengthening, not weakening, the Lebanese government's position vis a vis Hezbollah.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

BIKINI KILL. I hadn’t noticed at first, because the print is squintishly small, but the latest Vanity Fair cover takes a pretty rude and gratuitous shot at Hillary Clinton. The cover is of two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank in a white bikini kneeling in the surf, accompanied by the tag “Hey, there, HILARY!*” The asterisk references the following clarifying text: “*The Hilary you want to see in a bikini!”

You may recall the January 1998 episode when the Clintons were vacationing in the Virgin Islands and an Agence France-Presse photog hiding in the bushes snapped a shot of then-50-year-old Clinton in her bikini, dancing with the president. Her response, as recounted in Living History (p. 438), to the charge that she choreographed that for political gain: “Just name me any fifty-year-old woman who would knowingly pose in her bathing suit -- with her back pointed to the camera.” Even Hillary’s indefatigable, her-ambition-is-limitless critics, who are convinced that 99 percent of Clinton’s every word and deed is designed to slake her bottomless political thirst, would at least have to classify that moment in the remaining 1 percent. (Oh, except woman-derogating Kate O’Bierne at the National Review, who was still pushing psycho-analytical crap like this less than a year ago.)

Congrats to Vanity Fair for classing it up. Perhaps the magazine's editors aged 50+ might consider putting their asses where their snarks are and posing in white bikinis on the cover.

--Tom Schaller

MUM'S THE WORD. I just returned from the ostensible news conference at which Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, issued statements on the reasons behind their launching of a civil lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, former vice presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and 10 unnamed political operatives. I use the word "ostensible," because it seemed to me that no news was broken here, with neither of the Wilsons taking questions. (Unless, of course, you count the revelation of the creation of a fund for the Wilsons' legal expenses, to which supporters may contribute here.)

The Wilsons' attorney, Christopher Wolf of Proskauer Rose LLP, answered questions in a lawyerly way, which meant he didn't really answer them at all. I asked if he could explain how the Bevins precedent on which the case is based -- which, in the past, apparently applied only to the actions of law enforcement officers -- could encompass political figures, and was told that he could not comment on that.

On the way out, I found myself crammed into the far corner of a press club elevator, the only woman on the fringe of a huddle of cameramen.

"She sure doesn't look like a CIA agent," said one of Plame. "She looks like--"

"---a porn star," interrupted another.

The one photog aware of my presence in the elevator car turned to me, saying, "You knew it was only a matter of time before that came up."

Oblivious to the murmurings of the apologist, the man who began the conversation countered, "No, she's too pretty for that."

--Adele M. Stan

FOREHEAD GROWTH. Paul Krugman returns to the economics beat with an invaluable look at how our economy is growing:

Here’s what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income — the purchasing power of the typical family — actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go?

The answer comes from the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic, and who have recently updated their estimates to include 2004. They show that even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth.

Yet that's what the commentariat does. Unused to analyzing anything more complicated than single, undifferentiated macro numbers, they look at big growth figures, smile, and wonder why the president isn't getting more plaudits for his supercalifragilisticexpialidocious economy. What they don't realize is that growth, which used to benefit us all, is now, in Krugman's words, a "spectator sport."

In fact, it's no longer just the middle class and the poor who're falling behind. The distribution has grown so uneven that the 95th percentile is making meager headway -- even the merely rich are falling behind. It's the richest of the rich making headway. But they now account for so much wealth and holdings that their acceleration can effortlessly outweigh everyone else's deterioration. Add in that the reliable income growth conveyors of yesterday, like education and hours worked, no longer heavily correlate with income increases (earnings dropped for college graduates in 2004) and you've got a real problem on your hands, one that's going to leave the average American feeling markedly insecure despite Chris Matthews' assurances that everything is hunky-dory. This may be growth, but it's a grotesque perversion of of the widely-beneficial expansions that we all hope for. Americans have noticed -- they say so on every poll. But GOP flacks and the reporters who love them are still playing catch-up.

--Ezra Klein

AND SOMEONE INVITE CHINA. Justin Logan notes a wee problem with the proposal below, namely that permanent Security Council member China isn't a member of the G-8 so, technically speaking, "The five permanent Security Council members" can't, as such, do anything at "this weekend’s Group of 8 meeting." At any rate, China doesn't normally take strong stands on these issues, so they could presumably be brought on board if everyone else could.

It's worth mentioning here that the Bush administration has a strong interest in stepping up to the plate. The elected government in Beirut is really Bush's only real positive achievement in the region and the whole thing risks falling apart at the moment.

--Matthew Yglesias

DISPROPORTIONATE? I keep seeing European diplomats and leaders refer to Israel's attack as "disproportionate," which seems a sort of weird criticism given that wild overreaction is pretty much the point. Israel has long operated off a fire and brimstone theory of military reprisals, deploying excessive strength in order to markedly disincentivize small attacks by their foes and neighbors. It's assymetrical warfare of an oddly inverted sort: Israel can launch massive attacks, their opponents can't, and so Israel responds to small provocations with massive responses. There is, to be sure, the question of why they do it, or whether it's a good idea, but pointing out that their strategy of disproportionate reprisal seems dependent on disproportionate reprisals is a tautology, not a criticism.

--Ezra Klein