In lieu of Lightning Round, lager!

Last week, Dana pondered whether Gates-gate had anything to do with masculinity. While I admit I didn't immediately see the Gates arrest in terms of gender, Obama's choice to defuse the tension by inviting them over for a beer did seem gendered to me. You know, just dudes and brews. Hangin' out. Shootin' the shit. Guy stuff.

Would this stunt have been received the same way if a woman were at the table? Or if it was staged by a female president? Like so many other day-to-day choices we make, booze preferences have gender connotations. Think Homer Simpson with his six-packs of Duff, or Carrie Bradshaw perched on a bar stool with a cosmopolitan in hand. I know men who sheepishly order sugary cocktails, and women who are called tough or manly because they drink whiskey on the rocks. While I don't think beer, in and of itself, is a strictly "masculine" beverage, I do think the idea of putting aside differences over mugs of beer is not an image that we typically associate with women.

Obviously Dana Milbank thought the idea of a woman at that table was also ridiculous, as he suggested in a silly video that Hillary Clinton, were she invited to the summit, would be "served a bottle of Mad Bitch." A screengrab:

Full video here, via Brian Beutler. (As my colleague Adam Serwer quipped, "Obviously, this is the kind of hard-hitting journalism Nico Pitney wouldn't be incapable of.")

In recent political history, candidates have declared their love for beer (and always the cheap, domestic stuff) as a way of signaling they know how to connect with "real" (usually white, working-class) Americans. That's why Adam's assessment -- that the beer summit was Obama's way of assuring white America he was just like them -- is spot on. But there're also a gender slant on this. In the Democratic primary, Obama poked fun at Hillary Clinton's inability to look authentic with a mug of beer:

“Around election time, the candidates can’t do enough. They'll promise you anything, give you a long list of proposals and even come around, with TV crews in tow, to throw back a shot and a beer,” Obama said, stirring laughter from an audience of steelworkers and steel industry executives.

Obama chose dive bars as the setting for his embarrassing faux-folksiness, too. But Hillary got way more mocking for it. I'd argue that's because of the gender connotations associated with certain types of booze -- it was easier to conclude the female candidate looked awkward chugging a mug of Bud Light. Maybe she should have ordered a white zinfandel. At least in my experience with white, working-class America, that's a common female-identified drink.

--Ann Friedman

This morning, I passed along a report that at least six letters attacking cap-and-trade legislation sent to the office of Democratic Representative Tom Perriello were forgeries. All the letters were traced to two different organizations, Bonner and Associates, a D.C. lobbying firm, and Professional Risk Management Service, Inc., a medical malpractice insurer, both of which deny any official involvement in sending the letter.

At least one letter, which was purported to come from a local Hispanic advocacy group, Creciendo Juntos, came from Bonner and Associates, a "grassroots" lobbying firm. The letter was revealed as a forgery when Bonner and Associates employees somehow discovered what happened, fired the employee, informed Perriello's office and apologized to Creciendo Juntos. Here is a statement from the firm's President, Jack Bonner, obtained by TPM Muckraker:

We take our business very seriously. A temporary employee--lied to us--and contrary to our policies sent these letters. We--no one else--we on our own found this out. We immediately fired the person. We then, called those effected, explained what happened and apologized. In the case of the group in the story--we did it in person and by letter.

This should not have happened--we had a bad employee--but through our internal checks, we found the problem, and on our own initiative took the step to notify the affected group.

Bonner's firm is not registered to lobby for any energy companies opposing global warming legislation, but interestingly enough, that's part of their business model. This press clip from National Journal, trumpeted on their website, explains how the firm avoids such disclosures as part of its grassroots (though critics would say "astroturf") lobbying practice:

Bonner & Associates steers clear of such direct lobbying. Instead, the firm's stock-in-trade is teaching clients how to tap their own networks of well-placed civic, business, and labor leaders to reach public officials themselves-hence the term "grass tops."

"More and more people are coming to appreciate that this is a very good way of influencing public policy," says company President Jack Bonner, who boasts that his firm is thriving after 24 years in business. But ask how much the company made last year, and Bonner is polite but firm: "We don't give that out."

Bonner is one of a growing number of Washington influence- brokers whose work has a big impact on legislation and federal policy but who don't disclose their company's activities anywhere. As the lobbying business expands and changes, an increasing portion of the work that lobbyists do-from public relations to policy research and legal advice-falls outside traditional disclosure rules.

After Bonner revealed the forgery, Perriello staffers discovered five more letters with similar language that had been faxed to his office, supposedly from a local chapter of the NAACP. According to their letterhead and the source fax number, they came from The Neurologist's Program, which is managed by Professional Risk Management Service, Inc., a medical malpractice insurance firm. An unknown PRMS spokesperson told Brian McNeill, the reporter who first broke the story, that at least sixty employees have access to that fax machine.

This afternoon, I spoke with Ed Kelley, PRMS General Counsel and an employee of PRMS' holding company, Transatlantic Reinsurance. Kelley said that my calls to the company earlier this morning were the first he had heard of the incident, and that's he "absolutely" confident no employees were involved:

As near as we can tell, somebody used our fax number without authorization to send at least five facsimiles to this congressman on something to do with cap-and-trade, and it was totally without authorization and … as far as we can tell, that's not the imprint that goes out on our faxes.

Kelley speculated that someone found the fax number on the internet and used it as the basis of a fake fax letterhead; he said that during the company's investigation fax records were checked back to July 21 and no similar messages had been sent since then; the faxes in question were sent June 12 and the House voted on the legislation June 26. Kelley also says that the company does not hire lobbyists or maintain a federal relations staff, since the insurance industry is regulated by the states.This afternoon I spoke to a staffer for Representative Ed Markey, the subcommittee Chairman who co-wrote the Cap and Trade legislation, could does not believe that the bill, which has yet to pass the senate, has any specific effect on the insurance or medical industries.

For now, there is obviously some connection between the various letters, which were clearly targeted to push on-the-fence Democrats into voting against cap and trade legislation. Markey promised an investigation into the matter, saying

"This fraud on Congress shows that some opponents of clean energy have resorted to forgery and theft to block progress.

"This is an appalling abuse, and Congressman Tom Perriello deserves great credit for seeing through it and casting a vote that will create clean energy jobs in Virginia and throughout the United States. I encourage all Members of Congress to be on the lookout for other suspicious and illegal materials.

"My Select Committee will immediately begin an investigation of the extent and scope of this activity."

We'll be following this story closely; the Markey staffer said the first step of the investigation would be determining if other Members of Congress received similar forged letters.

-- Tim Fernholz

CBS News reported on what appears to be a new Gitmo recidivism report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, where the recidivism rate has climbed to 18% from 14% in the last report. This is in contrast to what Defense Secretary Bob Gates has said, which is that the recidivism rate is closer to 4%.

The latter number is also the one that the New America Foundation came up with after taking a closer look at the Pentagon's numbers--which included former detainees who had given interviews to newspaper reporters, written books, or otherwise talked to the press.

Gates and New America said the recidivism rate is 4%. DIA says 18%. It's impossible to say whether the DIA is using the same flawed metrics employed in the April report until I get a copy, but as soon as I do I'll let you know.

-- A. Serwer

Universities trying to boost their rankings often use merit-based scholarships -- awarded to students with high SAT scores, grades, etc. -- to entice students to enroll. The argument for this practice is that it improves the school's profile, the quality of its students, and need not take away from need-based financial aid. Supporters say need-based and merit-based aid can co-exist.

But according to Inside Higher Ed, a new report shows that schools that begin offering merit-based aid see declines in the enrollment of blacks and recipients of Pell Grants, need-based grants provided by the government.

Three to five years after colleges start offering merit aid, the percentage of Pell Grant recipients starts to drop at middle and top tier colleges (as measured by selectivity, using SAT scores as a proxy.) Six to 10 years after starting to offer merit aid, these colleges have seen their percentage of Pell Grant recipients drop by an average of five percentage points. ... In the immediate few years after merit aid starts, there is not a notable impact on the enrollment of black students.

Here lies the real problem: "merit" is often a proxy for privilege. SAT scores are better indicators of wealth than of potential for success: students whose families raked in more than $200,000 had a math score over a hundred points higher than those whose families earned under $20,000. And as Dana argued, they are also worse predictors of success than measures like grades, which are better suited to gauge how well a student has done with the institutional resources offered to her.

But there is a distinction to be made here between merit-based admission and merit-based financial aid. Whether or not SAT scores and grades are accurate measures of a student's academic potential, they should not be used for distributing financial aid. Once a school has admitted a student, it has made a reasonable determination that he or she is likely to succeed there -- even if the way in which schools determine this is problematic. Doling out funds based on merit beyond this assessment is inefficient. After a certain threshold, grades and SAT scores are simply indications of wealth and privilege. In effect, what these schools are doing is continuing the legacy of advantages for the wealthiest children, distributing finite financial aid resources to families with high incomes.

It is unfortunate that children from poor backgrounds are much less likely to be prepared for college success. But it's even more unfortunate that when they do succeed, higher education turns out not to be a "great equalizer" but the same unjust system despite which they have succeeded.

--Gabriel Arana

I think it's pretty silly for Andrew Sullivan to refer to the "Obama-Bush police state." The beginnings of modern acquiescence to excesses in law enforcement and incarceration begins with Richard Nixon's "Law and Order" campaign of 1968, and has been nurtured by both parties and several administrations since. A more accurate title might be the "Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama police state."

More important, both Obama and Bush recognized that the ballooning incarceration rate was something that needed to be dealt with. Bush stuck his toe in the water by supporting the Second Chance Act, and Obama has gone further by supporting a repeal of the crack/powder disparity, putting millions in Justice Department grants for re-entry programs, and picking a drug czar who wants to de-escalate the war on drugs. Personally, I'd like to see the president do a lot more, like bring an end to fusion centers and paramilitary raids on nonviolent drug dealers. Still, this administration is already a welcome change from tradition.

The roots of excesses in law enforcement and incarceration however, have almost the same impetus as those that created our modern surveillance state: fear of the other. Nixon's 1968 campaign was implicitly premised in large part on his ability to protect the silent majority from black criminality and radicalism, just like Bush's imperial presidency was meant to protect us from scary Muslim terrorists. It's only now, that fully 1 in 31 Americans is in prison, on probation or parole, that the public is beginning to recognize the problem, because the police state has gone beyond its mandate to protect "us" from "them." It's now locking "us" up too. The surveillance state will likewise only be met with sufficient skepticism once people realize it can be turned on "us" as well as "them."

This is part of the reason that I don't mind Obama not using the "bully pulpit" on issues of criminal justice, because ironically, to deal with the problem--including the vast disparities in imprisonment for black men--the entire issue needs to be decoupled from race at the national level, and dealt with as an "American problem" not a "race problem." Leave the bully pulpit to Jim Webb--whose efforts are sincere and whose allegiances won't be questioned.

-- A. Serwer

Last week President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan officially rolled out the Race to the Top competitive grant program, which will reward $4.3 billion to states that encourage education reform in four areas: implementing standards and assessments, improving teacher quality, building data systems, and putting highly qualified teachers in front of the neediest kids.

But edu-blogger Alexander Russo made a very good point this morning, via twitter: In its focus on teaching -- the DOE actually bans states from applying for Race to the Top if they have laws preventing student testing data from influencing teacher assessments -- the program neglects to tip the scale in favor of ending another, more basic form of educational inequity: unequal funding.

The initial Race to the Top application weighs whether states are maintaining overall education funding in the midst of the recession, but it does not prioritize equitable funding across school district lines. In the vast majority of states, local property taxes are the major funder of public schools, meaning that affluent suburban schools have way more money to play with than inner-city or rural schools. Sure, there are school districts -- such as Washington, D.C. -- that spend more money per pupil than their suburban counterparts, yet have far worse results. The reasons why are myriad -- I happen to believe that concentrated poverty and segregation are the biggest culprits. But across the United States, teachers regularly leave city schools for suburban ones, not because they aren't motivated to work with struggling students, but because in a relatively low-paid profession, they simply can't afford to turn down the extra thousands and tens-of-thousands of dollars that suburban districts offer.

For example, the average New York City public high school teacher earns about $60,000 annually; in nearby Westchester County, the average teacher earns closer to $70,000. In super-rich Scarsdale, a Southern Westchester town, about half of all teachers have base salaries exceeding $100,000. The highest-possible base salary in New York City is $74,796, for teachers with a master's degree and eight years of classroom experience. "Our teachers are our best asset," Donna O. McLaughlin, the White Plains school board president, told the New York Times in 2005, explaining high teacher pay in the suburbs. "I think it's very important that we pay them well. You need to be competitive."

The Obama administration has echoed those sentiments again and again, usually in the context of support for performance pay. But as the Department of Education considers ways to tweak the Race to the Top Program -- the grants will be given out in two phases over the course of two years -- it should consider pushing state legislatures to centralize school funding, or even, as research suggests is necessary, provide more money and support to schools with the neediest kids.

For more: Read this Center for American Progress report on school funding issues.

--Dana Goldstein

Terence Samuel on why the president needs a vacation after a tough week:

The House is scheduled to start its summer recess at the end of next week. The week after that, the Senate leaves, and then President Barack Obama heads to Martha's Vineyard with his family for a two-week vacation that ought to dampen the noise coming out of Washington. Can everybody say "Amen"? We all need the break, but the president, maybe, most of all.

By all accounts, Obama suffered a bad week. It involved everything from Birthers to Blue Dogs, Glenn Beck to beer. While the White House does not seem to be facing any imminent threat of failure -- though, you have to wonder about health care at this point -- the president just seems a little off his game. His appearances have been a little forced, and he hasn't presented the usually unflappable Obama, the one we have come to expect especially in times of trouble.

KEEP READING ...

Wells Fargo targets black people of all income and class backgrounds for sub-prime mortgages, calling them "mud people" to whom they're offering "ghetto loans." The NAACP files a class-action lawsuit.

What does the Urban League do? It has Wells Fargo sponsor their "State of Black America" forum.

UPDATE: The state of Illinois just filed another lawsuit against Wells Fargo for discriminatory lending.

-- A. Serwer

Orlando Patterson reviews A Tolerable Anarchy by Jedediah Purdy:

Freedom in America has been the subject of several lines of scholarship. Philosophers attempt to derive freedom's true meaning, intellectual historians examine what eminent minds have argued about it, and social historians study continuities and variations in its meanings and practices, while linguists decipher the ways of framing freedom in the political mind and empirically minded social scientists use surveys and interviews to probe what Americans think about freedom. In recent years, a more synthetic approach has emerged in which theory, intellectual and political history, and findings from political studies inform a critical appraisal of freedom in America. These works run the ideological gamut from James Bovard's Freedom in Chains on the right to the centrist critique of Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg in Downsizing Democracy to thoroughly liberal defenses such as Paul Starr's recent Freedom's Power.

Jedediah Purdy's book sits firmly in this last, broadly synthetic school.

KEEP READING ...

Ben Domenech is a conservative and founder of RedState. He opposes health reform. And yet even he finds ridiculous Megan McArdle's argument that Big Pharma is the only entity capable of producing medical innovation. He writes:

Working at the Department of Health and Human Services provided me the opportunity to learn a good deal about the workings of the NIH, and I happen to have multiple friends who still work there — and their shocked reaction to McArdle’s description was stronger than mine, to say the least.

“McArdle clearly doesn’t understand what she’s writing about,” one former NIH colleague said today. “Where does she think Nobel prize winners in biomedical research originate, academic researchers or in Pharma? Our academic researchers run clinical trials and develop drugs. I’m not trying to talk down Pharma, which I’m a big fan of, but I don’t think anyone in the field could read what she wrote without laughing.” ...

The truth, as anyone knowledgeable within the system will tell you, is that private companies just don’t do basic research. They do productization research, and only for well-known medical conditions that have a lot of commercial value to solve. The government funds nearly everything else, whether it’s done by government scientists or by academic scientists whose work is funded overwhelmingly by government grants.

It’s just simple math: if you have a condition that has a relatively small number of patients, there’s just no market incentive to sink a great deal of time and money into researching it. This is why you’ll usually find that 100% — not a majority, the entirety — of the research into a cure is done either via taxpayer-funded grants to academic researchers or, more frequently, it’s entirely found on the NIH campus.

Organ transplantation? Just about 100% is funded by NIH. Low prevalence cancers, or cancers with low survival rates? Just about 100% of all three phases is funded by NIH. You start to understand how this works.

Read the whole thing.

--Dana Goldstein

Before the big House vote on the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), Rep. Tom Perriello had a tough choice to make. Perriello won his seat by a small margin and worried about attacks from Republicans campaigning against the bill. Ultimately, he voted for it, in part because he believes a sustainable energy industry is the future of his district's economy.

But even as he was considering how to approach the legislation, he received at least five letters from local constituency groups opposing the bill, including a local Hispanic advocacy organization and the area branch of the NAACP. There was just one one small problem: The letters were forgeries; at least one came from Washington, D.C.-based lobbyists Bonner & Associates.

“They stole our name. They stole our logo. They created a position title and made up the name of someone to fill it. They forged a letter and sent it to our congressman without our authorization,” said Tim Freilich, who sits on the executive committee of Creciendo Juntos, a nonprofit network that tackles issues related to Charlottesville’s Hispanic community. “It’s this type of activity that undermines Americans’ faith in democracy.”

For all the reprehensible shenanigans that lobbying firms involve themselves in, forging letters from civil-rights groups to oppose this legislation is still pretty outrageous -- in fact, the NAACP even supports the legislation. Members of Congress are already very skeptical of constituent communications in this day of Internet-organized communications blitzes; the possibility that they may take these messages even less seriously due to fraud is a very disheartening one. Hopefully the reporting on this story will spur an investigation by legal authorities and some serious punishment for the perpetrators.

Further Reading: New Kids on the Hill.

-- Tim Fernholz

According to a new poll, only 42 percent of self-identified Republicans believe Barack Obama is an American citizen; 30 percent are "not sure," and 28 percent believe he's not a citizen. In the general population, 77 percent of people know their president -- as required by law -- is a citizen.

Via: Taegan Goddard.

Update: Steve Benen has this useful chart breaking these birther beliefs down by region.

--Dana Goldstein

Yesterday, Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohammed Jawad's lawyers may have secured his freedom after seven years of imprisonment. The question is, does the government's behavior in this case signal continuity or change from the prior administration?

It depends who you ask. The Obama administration would certainly like you to think it represents change. Justice Department spokesman Matt Miller said yesterday that the administration had "made a dramatic break with the policies of the past by rejecting the use of torture ... and making it clear that we will not rely on statements obtained through such methods."

That may be giving themselves a little too much credit. The administration didn't voluntarily agree not to use the coerced confessions--it merely opted not to contest Judge Ellen Huvelle's suppression of them--so it initially tried to get them admitted. Some close to the case have suggested to me that this is at least partially the result of the Justice Department still being filled with Bush hires--but I couldn't say for sure one way or another.

The DOJ lawyers prosecuting the case were also not privy to the "new evidence" supposedly collected by the task force on detention that may lead to a criminal indictment--one of the reasons why Huvelle described the government's case yesterday as an example of how "one arm of the government doesn't know what the other arm is doing." But if Jawad is indicted before he makes it home--or indicted by the Afghans when he returns, I doubt that there will be much praise for the administration from the human-rights and civil-libertarian activists who fought for his release.

As for the implications for a future preventive detention policy--the Jawad case would have provided pretty poor terrain for the government to pitch its battle on--because the case against him was so tainted. Interestingly enough Assistant Attorney General David Kris told the Senate last week that the task force on detention has sorted through half of the detainees' cases--and none have been put in the so-called "fifth category" who can't be tried or released. The administration said there would be a preventive detention policy--but they may simply have wanted to preserve the option--and I think it's entirely possible that we could end up without one.

Reacting to the verdict, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, Jawad's onetime prosecutor in the military commissions who resigned in disgust and denounced the whole process as a sham, said in an e-mail that "I see no way that Jawad would have been released (and he still may not be) under the legal regime the Bush administration attempted to put in place, and I view the comments of the DOJ attorney at the habeas hearing today, about Jawad's possible prosecution, as a face-saving gesture."

Vandeveld added that "I do know the same DOJ lawyers, CIA attorneys, and other civilians remain in charge of the Commissions, and it's a facet of human nature to resist admitting failure the longer any kind of enterprise continues, particularly when these same people are the architects of the system."

-- A. Serwer

Ah, the "Beer Summit." Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Sergeant Joe Crowley, President Barack Obama, and even Vice President Joe Biden got together yesterday for a beer and, presumably, a discussion of Crowley's decision to arrest Gates last week. While critics have been happy to call the event a substance-free photo op -- Time's Michael Scherer has a good take -- I'm not sure that I care.

Despite the wildly high expectations of some that the president, by dint of his election, would solve America's racial conflicts, the issues underlying Gates' arrest last week aren't going to be solved in one day by anyone, nor are the tensions in this conflict limited to race -- class and police power also play a role. The idea that Obama would somehow provide some kind of substantial resolution to these problems, especially as the appropriate local authorities are already addressing them, is a bit much. Obama wasn't acting as chief executive in these pictures, his most common role; he was acting as the head of state, the job we tend to elide when talking about the president's duties.

In his statement after the meeting, Gates wrote a very academic but also accurate description of what his tussle with Crowley means on a national scale: "Sergeant Crowley and I, through an accident of time and place, have been cast together, inextricably, as characters – as metaphors, really – in a thousand narratives about race over which he and I have absolutely no control." And by his comments last week, Obama became another character in this symbolic narrative. But as president and owner of the bully pulpit, he does have some power to control the narratve he, Gates, and Crowley found themselves in.

Hence the beer photo op, moving the defining image of this conflict from a photo of Gates in handcuffs on his porch to a few guys talking over their problems, making Gates and Crowley symbols of attempted reconcilliation -- or at least gracious behavior -- rather than divisive characters. It was one of those "only in America moments." Where else would the top two elected officials in the country sit down in the nation's capital with a local police officer and a prominent academic at the center of a racial drama, just to talk?

So no, it didn't "solve" anything -- I'm not even sure in what form a "solution" would come. But just as Gates' arrest last week rudely reminded us all that issues of race and police power we'd rather sweep under the rug are still quite real, so yesterday's photo op should remind us that these are just regular people, at the end of the day, who can come together as well as pull apart. That's the first lesson to understand if we want to address the underlying causes of this very American conflict.

-- Tim Fernholz

• In light of new polls showing an undeniable downward trend in Barack Obama's approval ratings, Greg Sargent picks apart the numbers to ask whether the Obama "brand" itself has taken a hit. Taking a less scientific approach, Dan Balz sits in on a focus group and concludes that while skepticism and unease are affecting short term perceptions, a more durable "bond" has taken root with some voters. Finally, Eric Kleefeld gives us another reason to treat Scott Rasmussen's polling dubiously.
• Health care reform roundup: Medical problems are responsible for 62 percent of all personal bankruptcies in America; Harry Reid isn't going to be bullied by Mike Enzi; House Republicans introduce their own reform bill without any input from the GOP leadership; and why Max Baucus needed Ted Kennedy.
• I think Conor Friedersdorf is being hasty when he suggests that Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein are calling for "radical" reforms of the U.S. government. I get the idea that the Constitution was designed to resist rapid change, but the whole story is a bit more complicated than that. Besides, When Yglesias talks about "abolishing" the Senate, what he's actually talking about is reforming Senate procedure, which is a rule change, not a radical alteration of our founding document.
• Mike Tomasky makes the case that Blue Dog Democrats actually have less to fear from their district's constituents than is commonly believed, noting that most of them easily won re-election despite hailing from districts that John McCain won last year. Meanwhile, Hendrick Hertzberg argues that Barack Obama ought to sick Bill Clinton on the Blue Dogs to get them behind the president's agenda.
• Remainders: Senate Democrats introduce a bill prohibiting the "sport" of aerial hunting; National Review needs to purge the Birchers birthers; and Eric Cantor lies, The Washington Post reports.

--Mori Dinauer

One of the problems with the Administration's plans to use loan modification to prevent foreclosures is that the lending industry is set-up to be more profitable when loans fail. For instance,

When borrowers fall behind, mortgage companies typically collect late fees reaching 6 percent of the monthly payments.

“For many subprime servicers, late fees alone constitute a significant fraction of their total income and profit,” said Diane E. Thompson, a lawyer for the National Consumer Law Center, in testimony to the Senate Banking Committee this month. “Servicers thus have an incentive to push homeowners into late payments and keep them there: if the loan pays late, the servicer is more likely to profit.”

While the Administration has to deal with the present reality in setting up an effective response to the current foreclosure crisis, the mechanics of this situation demand redress through regulatory reform. The whole idea is to create a set of incentives so that lenders are rewarded when loans perform, not when they fail.

-- Tim Fernholz

Maybe we don't need to do anything at all about our health care system. After all, it's junk food and divorce that are making people unhealthy. And those are things people "choose." Megan McArdle:

These aren't just a way to save on health care; they're a way to extend and expand the cultural hegemony of wealthy white elites. No, seriously. Living a fit, active life is correlated with being healthier. But then, as an economist recently pointed out to me, so is being religious, being married, and living in a small town; how come we don't have any programs to promote these "healthy lifestyles"?

No. Seriously: Health reform is not about using the muscle of government to control "lifestyle." If this were Obama's modus operandi, he wouldn't have appointed a secretary of agriculture from Iowa, Tom Vilsack , who reflexively defends Big Corn, aka The Industry That Fattens Us. Rather, health reform is -- or should be -- about the simple unjustness of a system in which health care costs are a leading cause of personal bankruptcy, and in which some parents can afford to enroll their child in an experimental drug test to control seizures, and some parents can't.

If big Pharma and private insurers lose a marginal amount of their profit margin due to reform, it won't be the death knell of medical innovation in America. After all, government can -- and does -- fund important medical research, and could do even more, as our own Dean Baker has persuasively argued.

It seems that people oppose reform because they oppose taxing the rich to pay for it. And because they are okay with vast inequality, as long as the folks at the top have maximum medical "choice." It's too bad we keep talking about "bending the curve." Because really, the health reform debate is far simpler than all that.

--Dana Goldstein

Conor Friedersdorf dabbles in a little populism on behalf of the black incarcerated:

Thus six months into his tenure, President Obama offered his most prominent statement on race and criminal justice on behalf of a wealthy Ivy League buddy. Were that all, the president might have avoided burnishing his reputation for elitism. Last week, I defended him against that charge, noting that he was asked about the Gates incident. Notably "stupid" is his deliberately prolonging the controversy—beyond even a second press conference—for a round of beers and several more news cycles.

[...]

There are literally hundreds of cases where innocent, disproportionally black prisoners would benefit from a presidential mention, never mind two press conferences and a happy hour. Admittedly, most would prove more politically fraught than defending an elderly Ivory Tower star: wrongly arrest and release a black man who happens to be a Harvard professor and the national press corps writes searching pieces on race in America; wrongly imprison for years on end a black man who happens to be working class and without celebrity, and the national press corps continues to mostly ignore a criminal justice system that routinely convicts innocent people.

Gates isn't being invited to the White House because he's black and Ivy League. Gates is being invited to the White House because Sgt. James Crowley has become the latest totem of burgeoning white resentment against the president, which happens to be a matter so urgent that Obama felt obligated to make a dramatic gesture of reconciliation -- lest racial resentment swallow his presidency. This is not an example of black class privilege. This is an example of white privilege -- and how even a country that elects a black man president still demands that he assuage feelings of white resentment when they grow strong enough. Totems of black resentment, which Gates is not, get called racists and race hustlers. They do not get invited to the White House. They get denounced by black candidates in presidential debates in order to prove to white people everywhere that they have no sway over him. Totems of white resentment? They get interviews with the vice president.

I guess the most irritating irony is Friedersdorf criticizes Obama for not bringing this up before Gates, but I don't remember him bringing this up before Gates. Glenn Loury can get angry at Gates for coming late to this issue, because he's written a great deal about how ostensibly "color-blind" corrections policies look like Jim Crow. Here, Friedersdorf does his best impression of a campus liberal, telling everyone what they should think about an issue he discovered last week. Hopefully he'll still care when the cable chatter and link traffic dies down.

-- A. Serwer

Ben Adler on what has disability activists worried in the debate on health reform:

With an estimated 37.5 million eligible voters with a disability -- and the aging baby boom generation means the ranks of the disabled will grow -- disability rights is an emerging brand of identity politics. The Democratic Party has been attuned to the change. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) disability caucus is growing in size and prominence. The Obama campaign had a comprehensive disability-issues platform, and President Obama hired Kareem Dale to be the first White House special assistant for disability policy. On July 21 the president also announced the U.S. will sign on to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

So why are disability activists in an uproar? Instead of celebrating Obama's announcement, on July 21 a coalition of disability-rights organizations held 26 simultaneous protests at the DNC headquarters, local Democratic Party offices, and at Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus' state office in Missoula, Montana. In April, 400 activists chained themselves to the White House fence and were arrested for civil disobedience. Why do they say they are being ignored, and even that they are victims of political discrimination? Because, like other key progressive constituencies, such as gay-rights and reproductive-rights advocates, disability-rights groups are watching long-awaited priorities be delayed as the president and Congress focus on the economy, climate-change legislation, and health reform.

KEEP READING ...

Gershom Gorenberg on how the story of one Jerusalem hotel reflects the larger struggle over the city's future:

Western communists, it was said in another era, took out their umbrellas whenever it rained in Moscow. I remembered that adage as I read a recent statement from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that arrived in my inbox. The subject was the latest U.S.-Israeli flap over construction in East Jerusalem. No matter that the diplomatic thunderstorm appears artificial -- deliberately engineered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deflect the Obama administration's pressure to freeze settlement activity. At the Presidents Conference headquarters in New York, the umbrellas were opened with alacrity. The statement is an uncritical repetition of Netanyahu government spin.

The locus of the clash is a four-story building known as the Shepherd Hotel in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood north of Jerusalem's Old City. It's an affluent area where foreign consulates are scattered between mansions of aristocratic Palestinian clans such as the Husseinis and Nashashibis. The hotel building itself was once the headquarters of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem and Arab nationalist leader during British rule of Palestine. After Israel conquered and annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, a government agency -- the Custodian of Absentee Property -- took possession of the building.

KEEP READING ...

August 21.

That's the date Judge Ellen Huvelle has set for Mohammed Jawad's "prompt" transfer home to Afghanistan, pending a report to Congress on Jawad's status.

"I want to see a status report, and I have every expectation on August 24, that he will be flying, en route, transatlantic as you put it," said the judge.

Nevertheless, Jawad's attorneys expressed concerns about the conditions of Jawad's travel, namely that he would be traveling by military transport and could be shackled and hooded during the journey. One of Jawad's lawyers, Major David Frakt, argued that such conditions are for "enemy combatants who have been lawfully detained, not innocent people who have been unlawfully detained."

"This is not a national security issue," added Frakt.

Judge Huvelle said that she would put in her order that Jawad's treatment be "humane" but that she didn't have jurisdiction to determine the travel conditions of his transfer. The lawyer for the Department of Justice, Ian Gershengorn, said, "The government shares your honor's concern about jurisdiction here," stating that Jawad would be treated "humanely, consistent with security and operational concerns."

Another issue seems to be the deal the State Department is negotiating with Afghanistan over Jawad's transfer and the possibility that he could be detained and prosecuted by Afghan authorities on arrival. Frakt argued that whatever deal the DoS strikes with the Afghan government should not include an agreement that entails Jawad being prosecuted on arrival -- but conceded that if the Afghan government decided to do so independently was a separate issue.

Judge Huvelle, for her part, seemed to discourage a potential prosecution, either as part of an agreement with Afghanistan or as a part of the Justice Department's ongoing criminal investigation.

"Enough has been imposed on this young man to date," she said. "I hope the government will succeed in immediately sending him home."

-- A. Serwer

Shot:

"Key lawmakers on Wednesday moved to cut roughly $100 billion from the cost of health-care reform proposals as they sought to break weeks of gridlock on President Obama's signature legislative initiative before Congress departs for a month-long recess." -- Washington Post, today.

Chaser:

"A bipartisan coalition of senators withheld support for President Obama's economic recovery package yesterday, leaving the scope and timing of his first major initiative in doubt as they sought to cut more than $100 billion from the legislation." -- Washington Post, February.

Yes, the big round number theory of legislating continues to have many supporters, if not any intellectual credibility. There was no policy justification for cutting $100 billion from the stimulus package (indeed, many of the provisions cut were replaced with other provisions that economists agree had weaker positive effects). Similarly, with health care there is no policy reason to cut $100 billion. The questions that need to be answered are what kind of mechanisms we want and how we want to pay for them, in that order.

Instead of starting with what good policy will be, though, we're starting with "lop $100 billion off whatever the president thinks is a good idea and we'll go from there," even if that has the potential to produce a health-care plan that doesn't work very well. Remember that all of this is to ensure that charitable donations from rich people are valued more than charity from the poor (I remember a story about that) and that people who make over $350,000 don't have to pay an extra few percentage points of their income above that point to the government. It's a ridiculous way to approach legislating.

See Also: Moderates on Parade.

-- Tim Fernholz

There's been a lot of attention for this video, where President Obama describes hearing from a woman who doesn't want the government touching her Medicare. Obama says he really wants people to understand that Medicare is a government program (and, in fact, a very popular one, especially compared to private medical insurance).

Today, The New York Times ran an article about a poll indicating more trouble for health-care reform -- basically the same old story: People don't like the status quo and sincerely desire change, but are afraid of said change and confused about what kind of reform Congress is going to pass. I don't blame them. But then you read something like this:

“First of all,” Mr. Obama said, “nobody is talking about some government takeover of health care. I’m tired of hearing that. I have been as clear as I can be. Under the reform I’ve proposed, if you like your doctor, you keep your doctor; if you like your health care plan, you keep your health care plan. These folks need to stop scaring everybody, you know?”

... In one finding, 75 percent of respondents said they were concerned that the cost of their own health care would eventually go up if the government did not create a system of providing health care for all Americans. But in another finding, 77 percent said they were concerned that the cost of health care would go up if the government did create such a system.

All this public confusion and false messaging -- where people don't understand that Medicare is a government program, that insurance companies are limiting your choice of doctors and rationing your care, that single-payer is not the same as nationalized health care (and that neither are on the table) -- makes me wish there was some kind of institution that gathered information on public policy and published that information, maybe on a piece of paper that could be delivered to your house every day or just on the Internet where people could learn what's going on. The people who did this would be called "reporters" because they would report on what's happening.

Snark aside, I think every time journalists read a poll that says the public is incredibly confused, they should understand that this situation is their fault. Maybe one reason that newspapers are dying is that it's incredibly unhelpful to read an article that informs you, the reading public, that you have no idea what's going on. You probably already knew that. But maybe you'd like something explained to you. Which is why, on one hand, it's really cool that the Washington Post hired Ezra, who likes to explain this stuff, and really weird that they run factually inaccurate op-eds by Bill Kristol, who can't even tell the difference between numbers going up and numbers going down.

Further Reading: The 10 Dumbest Arguments Against Health-Care Reform.

-- Tim Fernholz

Mohammed Jawad may be going home.

In a filing to the D.C. Circuit Court yesterday, the U.S. government offered a deal to facilitate Jawad's transfer from Guantanamo Bay Prison. Jawad is an Afghan national who has been detained at Guantanamo Bay since 2002 after being accused of tossing a grenade at a passing American convoy--an attack that resulted in the injury of two U.S. servicemen. In recent weeks, the government's case for detaining Jawad--who was a minor when he was captured and was subject to torture by Afghan and American authorities--has unraveled, with Judge Ellen Huvelle suppressing the coerced confessions that comprised the core of the government's case against him and slamming the case as an "outrage."

At a recent hearing on July 16, Huvelle said, "This guy has been there seven years, seven years. He might have been taken there at the age of maybe 12, 13, 14, 15 years old. I don't know what he is doing there. Without his statements, I don't understand your case. I really don't."

The government has proposed a 15-day timetable to facilitate Jawad's transfer from Gitmo, pending an obligatory report to Congress about Jawad's release and "any risks to national security" that might result from his transfer, mandated by the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009. Jawad's defense team however, is concerned that the 15-day proposal will merely serve as a window for the government to indict him on criminal charges--despite not having enough evidence to hold him in the first place. The government claims in its filing that it has "newly available evidence" of Jawad's involvement in the grenade attack seven years ago that they have not submitted to the court.

Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU, a member of Jawad's defense team, heard about the government's order only minutes after touching down in the U.S. after visiting Jawad at Guantanamo Bay."We believe we are getting closer to ending this young man's near seven-year nightmare of lawless detention and abuse by the United States," said Hafetz. " We remain concerned by the suggestion that the government could prolong his detention by bringing the same basic charge in another court after failing to provide any credible or reliable evidence against him. It is time for Jawad to be sent home to his family."

Ken Gude from the Center for American Progress says, "Judges usually show a fair amount of deference to the government in terrorism cases, but this case is not usual by any means." Given Jawad's status as a minor and the length of his detention, Gude doubts that "a judge would allow the government to play tricks with the system to keep him in custody. " 

Major Eric Montalvo, who acted as Jawad's defense counsel in his military commissions trial, was more optimistic about the government's position. "The stressful question was whether [the government] would stipulate to release...It is a sign of hope that the US government is finally able to recognize when a case has no merit and to resolve it. This case is precedent setting and an example of the government doing the right thing even when it is difficult."

In the government's filing, they suggest that a criminal prosecution may result from an ongoing DoJ investigation--although the government claims that logistical and legal reasons preclude Jawad's immediate transfer, not the possibility of prosecution. Hafetz and Montalvo both told TAP that the Afghan government has offered to bring him home immediately, at their expense, and that no delay is necessary. "They want him back," says Hafetz.

Lt. Col. Darrel J. Vandeveld, who acted as Jawad's prosecutor in his military commissions trial and resigned after concluding that the evidence against him was unreliable because it was gleaned through torture, warned that the DoJ's filing asked for time to prepare for Jawad's transfer merely to "the receiving government."

"Given how Orwellian and Kafkaesque these proceedings have been," Vandeveld says, "it's at least conceivable that DOJ will attempt to have the US government be the 'receiving government.'"

Jawad doesn't seem to be out of the woods yet. I'll be at the U.S. District Court this morning for today's hearing. I'll let you know what happens.

-- A. Serwer

• Even as the Senate Finance Committee is positive about the CBO's score of their health care reform bill and the House Energy and Commerce Committee was able to keep the public option in exchange for a September vote, it's clear that Americans are all over the map on what reform means to them. An interesting Gallup poll finds great discrepancy between how the public sees reform affecting the country and how it affects themselves. Furthermore, a forthcoming New York Times/CBS News poll confirms that while Americans prioritize deficit reduction, they don't want to pay more taxes or reduce government spending.
• This exchange between Jeff Sessions and Justice and Defense Department counsels over reading Miranda rights to to terror suspects in the field is very surreal. Despite assurances that "Miranda warnings have been given in less than one percent of cases" and only by the FBI "in a very few cases in order not to foreclose prosecutions," Sessions seems to think this is some sort of widespread practice that will "diminish intelligence" because then suspects will know when they should keep their mouths shut. I was under the impression that this was the justification for "enhanced interrogation," so what's the problem?
• I think this Gregory Levey opinion piece that proposes -- but not really! -- that Barack Obama dispatch George W. Bush as his Mideast envoy to set up a little good-cop, bad-cop routine, doesn't seem to understand the dynamic of that particular mind game. In the good-cop, bad-cop routine, both actors are equally powerful but of radically different temperament and ethics. But only Obama is president, so Bush could never be "the decider" in any real sense, and hence his "bad-cop" routine would be a transparent charade. But hey, I've heard that contrarianism is good for a journalist's career...
• Ben Smith is "puzzled" as to why the "health care reform will lead to euthanasia" meme has become so prominent, but does console himself with the fact that the current media environment is "less hospitable" to spreading misinformation because of all the independent fact-checking. Well, maybe. But wasn't it just yesterday that Smith's own paper, Politico, ran a piece with the headline, "Will proposal promote euthanasia?" Yeah, real puzzling.
• I don't have anything to significant to add to this, but this collection of RSS feeds for political science (mostly IR) journals is a fantastic resource. For all the brouhaha over blogging's relationship to journalism, the use of the technology to disseminate academic materials is one of the great untold story of this still-unfolding "information revolution."
• Remainders: Another Senate retirement is announced; the White House issues another veto threat; the Post Office is in dire straits; and can Norm Coleman still have a political future?
  

--Mori Dinauer

Earlier this morning, TAP obtained a copy of a letter from the Office of Professional Responsibility in the Justice Department detailing the conclusion of an investigation into possible ethics violations by former Voting Rights Section Chief John Tanner and one of his former deputies, Susana Lorenzo-Giguere, who is referred to in the letter as a senior litigation counsel. According to the letter, dated June 24 of this year, Tanner authorized Lorenzo-Giguere to submit "false travel vouchers" for government reimbursement of per diem expenses ($64 a day) while ostensibly on a work-related trip in Boston, when in fact she was in Cape Cod (where she owns a beach house) or Maine on trips unrelated to work--something Tanner was apparently aware of, though he authorized the expenditures anyway. The OPR said they did not have enough evidence to conclude that Tanner and Lorenzo-Giguere's much ballyhooed trips to Hawaii in 2004 were improper. The OPR came to similar conclusions about per diem expenses Lorenzo-Giguere claimed in Springfield, Massachussetts, in 2006. The Washington Post reported in October of 2007 Tanner's extravagant travel habits had become a focus of OPR investigation.

Sources in the Justice Department describe Tanner as a "friend and mentor" of Lorenzo-Giguere, who was hired in 2003 shortly after Tanner took over the section. Although the OPR found that both Tanner and Lorenzo-Giguere "committed misconduct", Lorenzo-Giguere is apparently still employed at the DoJ, although both she and another Tanner deputy and current DoJ employee, Yvette Rivera, were demoted in January of 2008. Rivera, like Tanner, had developed a reputation for racial insensitivity. Tanner resigned in disgrace in 2007.

In the ocean of scandals surrounding John Tanner and his tenure in the Voting Rights Section, this is pretty small stuff. But it's a reminder of the kind of corrupt shop the Bushies ran in the Justice Department, and the kind of lax, unprofessional practices Eric Holder and company are having to clean up. 

The Justice Department did not respond to TAP's requests for comment.  

UPDATE: I feel like I should note explicitly that Paul Kiel, while he was at TPM, was doing a lot of the heavy lifting on this story when it first broke.

-- A. Serwer

Well, not really. But at a roundtable for reporters hosted by the Religion News Service this morning, Rabbi Jeffrey Wohlberg, president of the Rabbinical Assembly and rabbi emeritus of Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C., gave anti-gay-marriage advocates a little lesson on marriage in the Torah.

The roundtable was inspired by the Interfaith Alliance, and the efforts of its president, the Rev. Welton Gaddy, to excise religion from debates on gay marriage. Gaddy opened the conversation with a discussion of his paper, "Same-Gender Marriage and Religious Freedom: A Call to Quiet Conversations and Public Debates." In it, Gaddy, who supports gay marriage, calls for conversations about gay marriage to start with the Constitution, and not religion, for the sake of preserving both civil discourse and religious freedom.

Much of the discussion was substantively predictable. Maggie Gallagher, the anti-gay-marriage warrior who was hired by the Bush administration to opine in favor of its marriage initiatives and now leads the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), engaged in lengthy disquisitions on a mythical American culture of nuclear family. A well-trained pundit, Gallagher monopolized much of the conversation, throwing in lines like the gay marriage movement is "driven by powerful cultural elites." (Ooh, scary.) Like NOM's ad campaign, The Gathering Storm, Gallagher warned of gay marriage's supposedly disastrous effects on American culture and the religious liberty of people who oppose gay marriage on religious grounds. (Other people's religious liberty, not so much.) Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said, "This debate is really about a hostility toward orthodox religion and its defining influence on culture of country." Yes, we've heard these songs before.

But Rabbi Wohlberg, who opened his remarks with an objection to the use of the term "Judeo-Christian heritage" (one Perkins often employs), provided a fascinating history of marriage in the Torah and ancient Jewish law. Contrary to the apocryphal "tradition" of marriage propagated by gay-marriage opponents, Wohlberg said that the concept of marriage does not exist in the Torah; the term divorce is found in the Book of Deuteronomy, but the term marriage is not found in any of the five books. Later generations, he said, understood marriage as a bride entering the groom’s tent with witnesses, and the wife as the husband's chattel. Men maintained concubines. The practice of polygamy wasn't outlawed until the 10th century in Ashkenazic Jewish tradition.

Judeo-Christian heritage? That puts a whole new spin on it, doesn't it?

UPDATE: Rabbi Wohlberg, through a spokesperson, writes to say that he may have misspoken, and that the Torah makes no mention of a "marriage ceremony," not marriage. Still, I think his point was that there was no concept of a ceremony that sanctioned a particular type of relationship or conferred legal rights on the couple.

--Sarah Posner

That health care reform might be passed without the involvement of any Republican senators is an irresistibly tempting thought. Who needs 'em? Unfortunately, the possibility of that happening is but an illusion. To get all 60 Democratic votes in the Senate puts one at the mercy of the two or three most conservative and disruptive Democrats (Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu et. al.) who are in their own ways more difficult than the two or three most cooperative Republicans. And those Democrats will be a lot more comfortable if there are at least two or three Republicans providing them with cover. As a result, health reform is much more likely to get either 64 votes or 56 than to hover on the cusp of 60.

I know what you're thinking: What about reconciliation? Budget reconciliation bills are subject to strict time limits on debate, so 40 Senators cannot stand in the way. If Nelson and/or Olympia Snowe stand in the way of a good bill getting 60 votes, the door has been kept open to move some form of health reform through the reconciliation process, with just 50 votes. The Republicans did it all the time when in power, even when they had Democratic support, just to limit the concessions they had to make. Why not do the same, rather than let a minority of senators, who represent but a small fraction of the electorate, thwart the will of a real majority?

But reconciliation is not just a “50-vote senate,” as it's sometimes called. It's a process constructed in the 1970s for a specific, limited purpose: to bring existing programs in line (reconcile them) with a long-term budget. Since then, it's been used for huge policy changes: the Reagan and Clinton budget plans, the Bush tax cuts. But there are limits. Under the senate's Byrd Rule, intended to hold the process somewhat to its original purpose, reconciliation can't include provisions that have no budgetary effect or that have an effect outside the current budget window, which right now is five years. (Byrd Rule limits can be waived, but by 60 votes, so you're back in the 60-vote Senate.)

To greatly oversimplify, what this means is that it's almost impossible to use reconciliation to build something new. You can expand Medicare or shrink it, cut taxes or raise them. But to construct something that doesn't already exist will inevitably require provisions that don't in themselves have a significant budgetary impact: regulations, structures, guidelines, realigned bureaucracies. In particular, much of the structure of health insurance exchanges that are envisioned in the House and HELP Committee bills would not survive the Byrd Rule axe. Only the flimsiest outlines of a health reform bill would survive – the financing would be there, but not the structures to ensure that the money would be used properly. Further, reconciliation would give the Finance Committee – which controls the money – even more clout over the more liberal HELP committee.

Some have suggested using reconciliation to install the rough skeleton of reform, and then fixing it later, but the act of using reconciliation in the first place is such a nuclear option that it is likely to poison the waters not just with the four semi-reasonable Republicans but also with the Democrats who are left out of the deal, and will be needed on subsequent legislation.

But what if Congress did it in reverse? Use the 60-vote Senate to pass whatever they can pass now -- we liberals will grumble but live with it -- and then use reconciliation next year to fix it. With the exchange structure and subsidies established, it wouldn't be hard to add an employer mandate, which would save money. With the rudiments of even a weak public plan in place, it wouldn't be complicated to expand it and modify its eligibility rules, in ways that might save or cost money but in either event, involve budget changes to an existing program rather than creating something new. Aggregating small changes over the next few years (on the model of the steady expansion of Medicaid engineered by Henry Waxman and others over the 1980s and 1990s) could non-controversially build the kind of robust and equitable system we dream of.

It's not ideal, and any political scheme based on do something now and hoping to fix it later faces the reality of all the partial reforms that litter the landscape. A plan that is so bad that it brings a backlash is more likely to be repealed than fixed. But it might just be that the big reform of health care can't be achieved all at once. And this would at least get the pieces in place for the next phase to move forward, with or without the current obstructionists.

-- Mark Schmitt

None of the health-reform bills before Congress mandate abortion coverage in a potential public plan. Rather, they kick that ball down the field, allowing a council of experts -- after reform passes -- to advise the Health and Human Services secretary on what procedures should and shouldn't be covered. Yet continuing its campaign to use the abortion issue to kill health reform, the Family Research Council will be airing this TV ad in five states with swing senators: Pennsylvania (Arlen Specter and Bob Casey), Arkansas (Blanche Lincoln), Alaska (Mark Begich), Louisiana (Mary Landrieu), and Nebraska (Ben Nelson).

What this ad doesn't tell you is that behind the scenes, religious-right groups are lobbying Congress to ban all abortion coverage within the health-insurance exchanges, even abortions covered by private insurers. Another tactic of abortion opponents is to use health reform as a vehicle for cutting off federal funding to Planned Parenthood, which currently uses tax dollars to provide basic preventive gynecological care, contraceptives, and sex-ed to poor women and girls. (The group is already banned from using federal funds to pay for abortions.) So Planned Parenthood has been running its own national TV ad:

Sadly, the Planned Parenthood ad just doesn't pack the same punch, because it doesn't tell viewers Planned Parenthood's mission is under threat in the health-reform debate -- or ask them to do anything.

--Dana Goldstein

We've discussed the problems with Making Home Affordable, the administration's anti-foreclosure plan before; despite a smart structure, its lack of enforcement structures and a worsening housing market has led to a less-than-promising inauguration. One new solution that has been suggested is letting borrowers pay rent instead of face foreclosure. But now ACORN has produced a solid white paper [PDF] on how to fix Home Affordable's Modification Program (HAMP).

While the need for better enforcement mechanisms -- some kind of sticks to go along with the various incentives and ensure that mortgage services actually follow the new rules -- has been clear for a while, one overlooked aspect of the program's problems have been the worsening housing and employment markets:

HAMP guidelines do not account for rising unemployment and falling property values. Any homeowner who falls 90 days behind on a HAMP modification is automatically terminated from the program, including homeowners who are laid off or have their work hours cut back. Currently, any HAMP modified loan which becomes over 90 days late is terminated from the program. The administration should permit the re-entry of a re-modified loan once timely payment is reached. Furthermore, where a homeowner has a viable modification proposal, but fails to meet a standard, such as the net present value (NPV) test, the administration should pressure the servicer to waive these requirements (which in many instances, is permissible under HAMP) to keep the homeowner in his home.

This report, which has a lot of good ideas, was timed to coincide with a big meeting between government officials and mortgage servicers intended to chide them into putting more effort into the project, but I'm not sure that increasing capacity to deliver loan modifications will ultimately solve the problem if those mods aren't particularly good.

-- Tim Fernholz

The veterans I know are clearly not planning a terrorist attack. And apparently the government officials had enough evidence to charge Boyd and others, all of which may lead to a series of convictions. Yet the question remains: When should suspects be arrested?

British law-enforcement officials seem more inclined to watch and wait. In other words, they will do everything they can to make sure that the suspects do not get too close to carrying out their plans but nevertheless will spend a relatively long period of time observing them. And when they do bring the suspects in, they will have a large store of evidence, including, for example, videotaped messages designed to be aired after a suicide attack has been carried out. This kind of evidence is crucial in court and is part of “operational art,” or developing an understanding of one’s enemy, as a Massachusetts law-enforcement officer (and former Marine) describes on Rethinking Security.

Americans seem more inclined to arrest suspects relatively early, a decision that can lead to botched cases. Investigators had been watching Boyd, who, by the way, had a "Support Our Troops" bumper sticker on his truck, for three years, according to The Washington Post. They decided to bring him in because they had heard that he was planning to move to Jordan. Over time, a more complete picture of Boyd, as well as of the investigation, will emerge.

--Tara McKelvey

Mark Schmitt on how Obama's belief in the power of our institutions is forcing change:

The occasions on which President Barack Obama says something simply preposterous are rare enough that they ought to attract some attention. Yet it passed almost without notice when, in his May 21 speech on national security, Obama explained that he is opposed to creating a commission to explore the abuses of the Bush years "because I believe that our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability." He continued, "The Congress can review abuses of our values, and ... the Department of Justice and our courts can work through and punish any violations of our laws or miscarriages of justice."

Maybe that's true in an alternate universe.

Obama's apparent belief that existing institutions can do what they have so far failed to do -- and his resistance to creating new ones -- is emerging as an odd, surprising theme of his presidency.

KEEP READING...

Ezra objects to my post, arguing that it might be better to reject a health bill that sells out too much to the Blue Dogs. He writes:

But it's also worth offering a more general reality check here: The public option is not now, and has not ever, been the core of the argument for heath-care reform. It is the core of the fight in Washington, D.C. It is an important policy experiment. But it was not in Howard Dean or John Kerry or Dick Gephardt's plans, and reformers supported those. It was not in Bill Clinton's proposal, and most lament the death of that. It is not what politicians were using in their speeches five years ago. It is a recent addition to the debate, and a good one. But it is not the reason were are having this debate.

Rather, what has kept health-care reform at the forefront of liberal politics for decades is moral outrage that 47 million of our friends and neighbors are uninsured.

If reformers cannot pass a strong health-care reform bill now, there is no reason to believe they will be able to do it later. The question is whether the knowledge that the system will not let you solve this problem should prevent you from doing what you can to improve it. Put more sharply, the question should be whether this bill is better or worse than another 19.5 years of the deteriorating status quo.

This is a really important point about the Congressional Budget Office, which has been worrying reformers lately with harsh cost estimates on various health-care overhaul plans:

Put most simply, the CBO’s track record in predicting the effects of health legislation is abysmal. Over the last two decades, the CBO has routinely overestimated the costs of expanded government health care benefits and underestimated the savings from program changes designed to reduce expenditures. Most recently, it overestimated the five-year cost of Medicare Part D — the prescription drug benefit -— by more than 35%. Even more dramatically, the CBO’s estimates of the Medicare savings from the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 underestimated the impact, on average, by a full 100%. That’s right: In the BBA’s first three years, Medicare spending fell fully twice as fast as the CBO had projected.

It comes from this Roll Call column that explains why the CBO's task is so difficult and inherently results in errors; essentially, the assumptions that CBO makes about the world and the requirement that it look 10 years into the future make forecasting difficult. The only appropriate way to go about it is to be exceedingly conservative (risk-wise). But that doesn't mean analysts and politicians should forget these caveats -- as Bruce Vladek, the column's author, says, "Instead of treating CBO estimates like the Ten Commandments, we should treat them like the informed wild guesses they actually are."

Before conservatives come out with this "you like the CBO when it favors your plans and criticize it when it doesn't" business -- pot kettle black, incidentally -- I'd note that this is my favorite CBO graph, which I highlighted in this very CBOcentric post.

Meanwhile, Stan Collender, a top budget analyst and a sober-minded man, thinks the conflict between CBO and OMB is "as close as you get to a knife fight among federal budgeteers." I wouldn't necessarily go that far, but there is certainly interest on the reformers' side in pushing the CBO to focus on the fundamentals and avoid speculation.

-- Tim Fernholz

Tim Fernholz on what to expect from the Obama administration's renewed diplomatic push with China:

It's a new dawn of summitry in Washington with this week's Strategic & Economic Dialogue between the United States and China, a meeting of several hundred top government officials to talk about shared interests. The discussions made little news -- some shared macroeconomic ideas here, a framework for climate-change discussions there. Mainly, they served to keep leaders in both countries informed of each other's plans and motivations, a way to prepare both countries for four years of Obama administration policy.

There's little question that as long as China and the U.S. are the two largest economies in the world and deeply intertwined, all other issues will be a distant second priority. So it makes sense that the explicit talk was of trade deals and carbon caps, while references to the recent crackdown on the Uighurs, China's Muslim minorities in Xinjaing province, were carefully worded. That doesn't mean Clinton's strategic discussions are a waste of her time, but the importance of maintaining our economic partnership overlays a patina of realism on a relationship that cries out for idealism.

KEEP READING...

Yesterday, Eric Kleefield took note of the fact that right-wing criticisms have become increasingly racial of late, since President Obama's response to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., whether it's the full-on embrace of birtherism or Glenn Beck leapfrogging the shark yesterday by claiming the president is someone "who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture."

I think what's going on here is pretty simple. The GOP has elevated a number of figures it believes represent justified white resentment at minorities encroaching on the power that is their birthright as "real Americans" from Sarah Palin to Joe the Plumber, and they're attempting to do the same thing with Sgt. Joseph Crowley. As Michael Crowley notes, the Cambridge policeman has it all over the prior two in spades when it comes to both intelligence and white cultural legitimacy. He is a cop--far more unassailable than a dishonest politician or a proto-fascist plumber without a license -- but I doubt he wants to be the racist right's great white hope.

So for folks like Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who have been wailing about the end of what Bill O'Reilly calls the "white, Christian male power structure" in coded terms for years, the Gates incident represents a tipping point. Furious at the fading power of white entitlement represented by events like the election of Barack Obama and the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, they sense that the audiences they've spent years nursing with the curdled milk of hatred are ready to hear the truth -- that whiteness and white people, and therefore America itself, is under assault.

Unfortunately for them, most of their audience will only accept such appeals as coded. People of all races cling to their resentments, but most people don't like to admit them -- deniability is an important factor in modern racism, because without it, it's too radioactive for people to associate themselves with. People want to be able to hate, but they don't want to feel like they're hating. Beck, Limbaugh, and friends misunderstand the usefulness of the product they've been offering -- without deniability, only the truly depraved will latch on. Which is why I doubt things are going to stay this temperature in the noise machine for very long.

-- A. Serwer

In a New York Times op-ed yesterday, Israeli journalist Aluf Benn asked President Obama to soften his tough anti-settlement talk with a conciliatory speech to the Israeli public, which is increasingly skeptical of the American president. Regardless of what you think of this idea, it's pretty clear that there is a pernicious narrative emerging, suggesting that Obama owes it to Israelis to woo them more than he already has in his Cairo address -- as if he were the president of Israel and not the United States.

Benn's piece is quite strange. He recognizes that some of Obama's unpopularity is driven by the reactionary Israeli right, which sows mistrust (and bias) by casually throwing around the president's middle name, "Hussein." And ridiculously, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyhu supposedly refers to Obama's top advisers, Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod, as "self-hating Jews." But then Benn engages in some anti-Obama scare-mongering himself, suggesting that the American president's view of 20th-century Jewish history is akin to that of Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadienjad:

...Mr. Obama seems to have confused American Jews with Israelis. We are close emotionally and politically, but we are different. We speak Hebrew and not English, we live in the Middle East and have separate historical narratives. Mr. Obama’s stop at Buchenwald and his strong rejection of Holocaust denial, immediately after his Cairo speech, appealed to American Jews but fell flat in Israel. Here we are taught that Zionist determination and struggle — not guilt over the Holocaust — brought Jews a homeland. Mr. Obama’s speech, which linked Israel’s existence to the Jewish tragedy, infuriated many Israelis who sensed its closeness to the narrative of enemies like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

I take Benn's point that American and Israeli Jews have different historiographies. But it is patently absurd to claim that Obama somehow sounded like an anti-Semitic "enemy" when he acknowledged that the Zionist project is a direct outgrowth of the oppression of European Jews over centuries and centuries. Zionism predated the Holocaust, but was obviously strengthened by it. Obama pointed that out as a way to signal his support for the Jewish state as morally and historically just.

Benn's misreading of Obama only further cements the mistrust between Israelis and Americans that he claims to combat. His piece leaves American Jews with the sense that it is impossible to support both their president and the State of Israel. The truth is that 79 percent of American Jews broadly support Obama's agenda, and 60 percent specifically support the president's call to freeze settlement activity. American and Israeli Jews don't have to agree about everything. We're even allowed to have our own opinions on Middle East policy -- as is our president.

And by the way: I'd like to second these sentiments.

--Dana Goldstein

• It's time to revisit the theme of Barack Obama's would-be decline and its proximate causes. The conservative assessment, exemplified by this Rich Lowry post, is "If he'd taken a more modest approach [on stimulus and "his" health-care plan], he'd probably be in a much stronger position right now." But are these things dragging the president down? The public still blames Bush, not Obama, for the state of the economy. Pluralities believe that the stimulus has had little effect in the short term but will be beneficial in the future -- precisely the White House's message. As to health care, the president is still trusted over Republicans by a 20-point gap, and the public likes the defining features of the proposed reforms. The bottom line is that as long as the economy is crummy, the president's general approval rating will remain tepid at best.
• Health-care reform roundup: The course of the legislation is being shaped by six senators who collectively represent less than 3 percent of the U.S. population; Politico pushes right-wing nonsense in order to "win the morning"; the CBO likes the public option; the concerns of congressional liberals remain irrelevant to our "bipartisan" lovefest; their position on reform notwithstanding, I can sympathize with Blue Dog Democrats who are being terrorized by right-wing thugs; and the RNC embraces Medicare ignorance.
• Ben Smith notes that, unlike his predecessor, President Obama has not made a big deal about domestic terrorism suspects that have been rounded up by law-enforcement agencies. Like the demilitarization of DHS, this represents a shift from viewing terrorism as exclusively a military problem and moving it back to a more law-enforcement-based approach.
  
• The House voted unanimously to pass a resolution honoring the 50th anniversary of Hawaii's statehood which included language describing it as the birthplace of Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States. Despite this, and despite himself voting for the resolution, Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) is undeterred in his efforts to force presidential candidates to prove their constitutional eligibility. Given that this is Posey's freshman term in Congress, I guess we'll never know whether he would have submitted his bill to make sure Clinton, Bush, or John McCain were eligible.
• Remainders: Uncontroversial Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor gets the thumbs-up from the Senate Judiciary Committee; Jim Bunning is not running for re-election in Kentucky; a pointless border wall is still being built; I'd love to know what color the sky is in James Inhofe's world; and please Fox News, don't ever change.

--Mori Dinauer

TTR offers you a warm welcome, as well as the latest public-opinion research on American health care, why undocumented immigrants should be counted in the census, how an increase in life sentences is straining the prison system, and what the Obama administration can do about global aid.

• Not according to Americans. Despite the chorus of assurances from congressional Republicans and their echo chamber, the American people are unconvinced that the United States has "the best health care system the world has ever known." That's the finding of a recent study by the Pew Center for People & the Press, which found that just 15 percent of Americans rated our national health-care system as "best in the world." Overall, 39 percent think the system is "above average" or "the best," while 59 percent say it is "average" or "below average." Conservative Republicans were the only group with overall positive ratings for the health-care system. We are pretty keen on the military, though: 82 percent of Americans rate our national defense as above average or the best. Who runs that? Oh yeah, the government. -- CKS
• Get the numbers right. The Drum Major Institute argues in favor of counting undocumented immigrants in the 2010 census. Costly as it may be, research shows that it is ultimately more costly to not count them. Failing to count undocumented immigrants will disrupt local and state government service funding, leading to inadequate health-care coverage and underfunded schools. Census data also affects business investment choices that could help immigrant communities grow as businesses profit from the economic demand of a community larger than otherwise estimated. English language classes provided by the government in response to census data could vastly improve the lives of these undocumented residents, as immigrants proficient in English make 14 percent more than those who are not. This also matters for the younger generation, many of whom are U.S. citizens but ELLs (English language learners) who are more likely to drop out of high school than language-proficient students. In the economic downturn, they argue, it is especially important that funding is apportioned accurately. -- CIA
• Prison blues. The same day President Obama ignited a media maelstrom with his comments about racial disparities in law enforcement, the Sentencing Project released a dramatic report titled No Exit on the expanding use of life sentences in prison systems nationwide. As a result of tough mandatory sentencing laws and declining use of parole for eligible convicts, more people today are serving life sentences than ever before -- 140,610, up from 34,000 in 1984. The report reveals “overwhelming” racial disparities in the allocation of life sentences: two-thirds of prisoners serving life sentences are black or Latino, and 77 percent of of juveniles serving life terms are non-white. The number of inmates over 50 has also risen sharply, nearly doubling from a decade ago to comprise 20 percent of the prison population. Because of health needs, states spend much more on older inmates ($100,000 or more per prisoner compared to the national average of $35,000). These trends have strained state budgets that are already struggling to cut costs in hard economic times. -- MD
• Foreign affairs. The Brookings Institution is urging President Obama, Congress, and top-ranking Cabinet members to act more aggressively on global development initiatives. While the administration has made commendable strides on matters such as global public health and substantially increasing foreign aid, there is a need for much greater political involvement, a less dysfunctional bureaucracy, and more multilateral aid programs. Due to a lack of leadership, the United States government fails to play the prominent role in major international aid forums, even as it remains the single greatest source of foreign aid in the world. To ensure the positive impact of U.S. international development initiatives, the policy paper recommends Obama's appointment of an empowered USAID administrator, enactment of comprehensive foreign assistance legislation, and clear delegation of authority and budgetary planning. -- AS

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups::
7/21/09
7/14/09

A steady stream of news reports in recent weeks have sought to cast new light on the decisions and inner-workings of the Bush administration (see here, here, and here). Have they told us anything new about the dynamics of the administration or its colorful cast of characters? The short -- and somewhat unsatisfying -- answer is yes and no.

For one thing, they reveal deep rifts in an administration that once presented an unshakable, united front against critics and naysayers. They reinforce the image of Cheney as the conscience-less mastermind behind many of the administration’s worst decisions and near-disastrous proposals (it was he who recommended Bush send the military into upstate New York to apprehend suspected al-Qaeda operatives, against the advice of Condoleeza Rice and Michael Chertoff, among others).

The flip side of the coin is that these stories rehabilitate, at least partially, the image of Bush as Cheney’s blindly obedient lapdog. They present several instances in which Bush stood up to Cheney and rejected his advice on moral grounds. Not only did he "bristle at the prospect of troops descending on an American suburb," he also refused to give Scooter Libby a full presidential pardon, despite Cheney’s repeated and insistent pleas during the two’s last days in office (Bush had already commuted Libby’s sentence). The Time article that reports that story cites Bush’s belief that Libby really did lie to prosecutors -- plus his distaste for pardons as a get-out-of-jail-free card for the well-connected -- as his justification for denying his vice president’s last request.

Some observers, including Rachel Maddow, have accused the Time story, at least, of being fairly transparently sourced to Bush apologists who aren’t so fond of the influential VP. While the former president has largely avoided the limelight since leaving office, Cheney has stayed in D.C. to continue the fight against Democratic lawmakers and defend his own legacy. His continued visibility and outspokenness have earned the ire of some Republicans who believe he is needlessly stirring up old resentments.

--Marie Diamond

In light of reports that Senate Dems may strip the public option and the employer mandate from the health-care bill, Steve M. asks a good question: "Is this even worth it? Is it even worth fighting to pass a compromised, inadequate bill?"

I largely agree with his take on the politics. But even if getting any bill called "health-care reform" passed would be good short-term politics, it's worth further emphasizing that signing a bill without (at a minimum) a public option would be a substantive disaster. Such a bill would not be "reform" in any meaningful sense.

The normal justification for passing a compromise bill is that once a new system is entrenched it can be tweaked later. But I don't think it applies in this case. The public option is the core of the reform; a Blue Dog bill isn't so much half a loaf as a few meaningless crumbs. And far from making a public option more viable in the future, if anything, passing something that could be called health-care reform will reduce the impetus to pass actual reform. And, worse, a bill with no public option will further entrench the insurance industry and make it easier for them to block actual reform in the future.

There's no inherent value to passing a health care bill, per se. If it doesn't contain the elements that make it worthwhile, progressives shouldn't let it out of Congress, and Obama should make clear that a Blue Dog bill would be vetoed. A bad bill would be worse than no bill.

--Scott Lemieux

Look, I should probably stop reading Richard Cohen. But I happened to bring a copy of the Post with me to lunch today, and I just can't figure out for the life of me why he's still writing. Today's column, is among other things, about how health care is too boring for him to bother figuring it out:

In truth, I did not seek an exclusive interview with the president of the United States not only because I wanted to write something that would be noticed but also -- actually mainly -- because I feared that if I did get an exclusive interview I would be expected to ask him something about health-care reform, about which I know next to nothing. What was worse, despite reading six newspapers a day, watching cable news shows, network news shows, the "NewsHour" and being online all the livelong day, I could not fathom what the president wants to do with health care. I suppose this is all my fault since, I learn from reading my e-mails, almost everything is.

This last sentence however, takes the cake and tosses it into moving traffic:

I checked my records and diaries and discovered that I had been offered many opportunities to exclusively interview the president, but only after he had been exclusively interviewed by all the other columnists and bloggers and, of course, the anchors of all the networks, including cable -- basic as well as premium. A review of the record showed that the president usually said nothing or nearly so, and indeed things have gotten to the point that when I see Obama on TV, I hurry on to another channel, even one with a Maury Povich rerun. I recently came across Anderson Cooper, who was interviewing Obama in Africa or some such place, and after noticing how they were both so trim, I quickly channel-surfed my way to Animal Planet. I knew I had not missed anything important.

"Or some such place." I can't quite figure out what he meant by that, but my eyeball is twitching.

The first black president of the United States visiting the Western Coast of Africa, where most of the slaves black Americans are descended from were kidnapped and thrust into servitude? How could that possibly be interesting?

Maybe the Animal Planet channel has an opening, or maybe Cohen could intern for Maury. Maybe then the WaPo op-ed page could find a columnist who happens to actually be interested in writing about public affairs other than to complain about how boring they are.

-- A. Serwer

Paul Waldman presents the 10 dumbest arguments against health reform that have actually been used:

As the latest iteration of our once-every-generation-or-so effort to reform our disaster of a health-care system reaches its climax, we find ourselves at one of those times. The opponents of reform are getting serious now, and they've turned the volume on their megaphones of mendacity up to 11.

Herewith, then, we have the 10 dumbest arguments currently circulating against health-care reform.

KEEP READING ...

The driving force behind many of the more center-left-leaning religious-advocacy groups that popped up in Washington after the 2004 election was that religious voters wanted their voices heard in the public square and that our elected officials care what they think. Thus, if a religious-advocacy group holds a rally for health-care reform, members of Congress will sit up and listen, right?

Not so fast, of course. As The Washington Post's religion reporter Jacqueline Salmon detailed this weekend, there are several coalitions of religious groups making a moral case for health-care reform. One such coalition, Faithful Reform in Health Care, says on its Web site, "As people of faith, we envision a society where each person is afforded health, wholeness, and human dignity. That vision embraces a system of health care that is inclusive, accessible, affordable, and accountable."

Such a vision is not limited to "people of faith," a term so meaningless it proves useless for describing a definable political constituency. Naturally the progressive vision for universal health care embodies respect for human dignity, whether that respect stems from theism or non-theism. Thus the "people of faith" who argue for health-care reform based on the dignity of each person run into the same roadblock that people making secular moral arguments do: Washington is not actually controlled by respect for the dignity of human beings.

There's another not-so-minor blip that Salmon points out, and that Dana has been documenting here: Some of the religious advocates for health-care reform based on the dignity of the person also believe that a fetus is a person and that they should not be compelled to pay for abortion with federal taxpayer dollars. (Such funding has been banned through Medicaid since the Hyde Amendment was enacted, in 1976.) Some "people of faith" believe abortion services should be covered -- as a matter of respecting the dignity of women as human beings. Others, even if they support real reform, believe that they should not -- as a matter of respecting the dignity of fetuses. That's just one example of why talking about what "people of faith" demand leads to the question: whose faith?

On the extreme end of the spectrum, the religious right is using the red herring of abortion coverage to try to stop reform altogether. Embedded in the efforts of the coalition behind Stop the Abortion Mandate is creating fear that abortion coverage in health-care reform is just a backdoor method of getting the dreaded Freedom of Choice Act passed. And on the fringes of the extremes, Randall Terry, who has renamed his organization Operation Rescue, Insurrecta Nex ("insurrection against death," in Latin), has warned "Expect a tax revolt. If you think we will willingly surrender our money to pay for murder, you are insane."

Corporate opponents of health-care reform must be loving this. Religious-right falsehoods and fear-mongering are deflecting public attention from the real policy details of the debate. And who needs to listen to the other "people of faith" when they don't have lobbyists, fundraisers, and bundlers? Which is why, if respect for the dignity of human beings is at the core of "people of faith's" advocacy for health-care reform, maybe they should have their eye on another kind of reform: fair and clean elections.

--Sarah Posner

Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth was taking a shower in the barracks of a military installation in Iraq last year when he was jolted with electricity and died; the Houston-based military contractor KBR had installed the pumps and water tanks for the shower, and the Defense Department’s inspector general report recently found that the contractor -- as well as the military -- had exposed the soldier to “unacceptable risk,” reports the Associated Press.

Mistakes happen in war, but the troublesome part is that errors, even fatal ones, remain hidden when contractors are involved. For example, when Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota tried to look into the cases of National Guard soldiers who had been exposed to carcinogens while guarding a KBR-run water plant in southern Iraq in 2003, the military stalled its investigation for months. This was even after the battalion commander was diagnosed with a fatal form of nasal cancer.

“Soldiers are dying. You would think the Defense Department would need no prodding,” Dorgan told me. “It’s unbelievable to me what the DOD has done to sweep this under the rug.”

Despite the myriad problems that contractors have had in Iraq, they are given a wide berth while they are operating in that country. And increasingly, soldiers are paying the price.

--Tara McKelvey

Like Dana, I'm extremely dismayed by what I see coming out of the Max Baucus committee. But TAP alum Ezra Klein cautions that this isn't the final version of the bill and that there may have to be some concessions for liberals to go along too:

The question is whether Baucus's final product will matter. Rockefeller and the other Democrats on the committee have felt excluded from the negotiations and will want major changes before they can sign onto the final product. Then the Finance bill will have to be reconciled with the more liberal legislation built by the HELP Committee. Then it will have to go to the floor, where it will need the support of people like Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown just as much as it will need Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh. And then, if it passes those tests, it will have to be reconciled with the House's legislation.

It's frustrating to see this group of conservative senators having so much influence on the health-care bill, not only because the states represented make up a tiny proportion of the population relative to their influence but also because their political interests lie in making reform as ineffective as possible in order to ensure reform doesn't pay political dividends for their opposition. But Klein adds some useful context to think about as Baucus and friends strip almost everything useful out of the finance committee's version of the bill.

-- A. Serwer

The AP has an anonymously sourced report on the compromise health-reform legislation emerging out of the Senate Finance Committee. It isn't looking good. Some features of the bill:

• No government-funded public-insurance option, and no national health-insurance exchange. These features of the House tri-committee and Senate HELP bills are intended to bring down costs by fostering competition on the largest scale possible. Instead, Finance is suggesting regional health co-operatives in which private insurers compete without government intervention. This is likely to lower premiums somewhat, but the smaller size and geographic reach of the co-ops will make them far weaker than a national exchange. And no for-profit company is likely to offer a plan as inexpensive as national public insurance.
• An individual mandate to buy health insurance, but no employer mandate. This is regressive. Large employers that refuse to offer health coverage to their workers will have to reimburse the federal government for part of the cost of subsidizing those workers' coverage....
• BUT Finance also drastically reduces the number of people eligible for subsidies, to only those within 300 percent of poverty ($32,490 for an individual or $66,150 for a four-person family). Senate HELP subsidizes those within 500 percent of poverty and the House bill subsidizes those within 400 percent. Those plans are far more supportive of middle-class families and the self-employed.
• Like the House and HELP Committee, Finance would prevent insurers from denying coverage or charging higher premiums because of pre-existing conditions.

House moderates -- like the Blue Dogs -- are likely to grasp on hard to whatever the Finance Committee suggests and run with it, calling it the only politically viable compromise. That's why Finance's proposal is so important. We don't know yet whether Finance, like the House and HELP, will aggressively expand Medicaid coverage. But probably the most worrying aspect of this compromise is how drastically it weakens competition, by asking insurance companies to compete only on a regional basis, and only with one another. This is a plan that leaves employers and insurers in the power seats, while giving consumers far less support than either of the other reform proposals on the table.

--Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein explains the aberration that is the American abortion debate and takes a look at how other countries handle the issue:

Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, John Dingell -- all over Washington, Democrats who once supported single-payer health care are calling Congress' stalled health-reform efforts "uniquely American." This poll-tested rhetoric is intended to reassure us that a small public-insurance option won't kill capitalism. And yet, the longer the health-reform debate drags on, the longer we have to notice that what's "uniquely American" about our health-care system may be what is least worth preserving, from the outsize influence of private insurers to the role of skinflint employers as health-care middlemen.

But perhaps the most surreal -- and American -- element of the health-reform debate has been the extent to which abortion politics have slowed the proceedings. Just as the United States spends a greater percentage of its gross domestic product on health care than any other industrialized country, yet has worse health outcomes, the notion that tax dollars shouldn't pay for abortions is an international aberration, an example of American exceptionalism run amok. If the Democratic leadership allows this conviction to set the parameters of our new health-care system, American women -- particularly the poor -- will pay a steep price.

KEEP READING ...

With Lindsey Graham being the only Republican who has said he will vote for Sonia Sotomayor, the Senate Judiciary Committee vote is expected to fall largely along party lines, with 13-6 with the remaining Republicans voting no. This will be the first time Orrin Hatch of Utah will be voting against a Supreme Court nominee in all his years on the committee.

-- A. Serwer

Yesterday, the 911 tapes of the Gates incident were released--and they answer a number of questions, while raising others. Like many, I was mystified by how Gates, a middle aged man, could be mistaken for a burglar in the middle of the day with a pile of luggage sitting on his porch--I thought that the circumstances of the call were therefore influenced by the fact that Gates was black, although I also argued that this wasn't an issue of malice.

Now it appears that Lucia Whalen, the woman who made the 9/11 call, not only didn't mention race, she told the dispatcher that she thought this might have been Gates' home. "I don't know what's happening. ... I don't know if they live there and they just had a hard time with their key, but I did notice they had to use their shoulders to try to barge in," Whalen said, according to the Boston Globe.

Simple right? The problem is that the police report written by Sgt. James Crowley states that "[Whalen] observed what appeared to be to black males with backpacks on the porch of Ware Street." Except Whalen said no such thing. Furthermore, the tapes are notable for what they don't contain--any audio that indicates Gates was shouting as Crowley claimed in his police report. The tapes do contain audio of Crowley saying Gates was being uncooperative and asking for more backup, reportedly saying "keep the cars coming."

Here's the thing: This is the second discrepancy from the police report, the first being that Gates claims he showed Crowley his Harvard ID and his driver's license, while the report says that he only showed his Harvard ID. The reason I find this odd is that Crowley seems to have believed it was Gates' residence--but how could he be sure if he hadn't seen Gates' Driver's License as he claims? Now, we also know that the claim that it was Whalen who identified Gates and his driver by their race was completely false. The Cambridge Police's explanation, that the report merely represents "a summary" of what happened seems inadequate--how useful could a factually inaccurate summary really be? And what--if anything else--is inaccurate but is asserted as fact in the police report?

Police reports should never be taken as pure gospel. If they were, we wouldn't need trials. But it seems to me that there are a number of issues here that have yet to be addressed, and while race seems to be a diminishing factor in the arrest (if not in the interpretation or response to these events) the arrest itself looks more and more inappropriate.

-- A. Serwer

They are using welfare money from the stimulus package to subsidize 300 new jobs across Perry County, with employers ranging from the state Transportation Department to the milkshake place near the high school.

As a result, the June unemployment rate, which does not yet include all the new jobs, dropped to 22.1 percent [from 25].

“If I could have done a W.P.A. out there, I would have done a W.P.A. out there,” said Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, referring to the Works Progress Administration, which employed millions during the Great Depression

The article makes clear that local officials view this money as a temporary reprieve and are struggling to attract industry that would provide long-term jobs, but in the meantime this stopgap measure is helping keep people at work and improve the community. It's a very tangible way to deploy the stimulus, and one we may see more of in the coming months as other states look for smart ways to use their federal largesse. And politically, I think it will be very difficult for anyone to convince the people of Perry County that the stimulus is a big waste of money.

I'm very interested to see how the publicity around this program affects Bredesen's national reputation. The last time he surfaced in Washington chatter was after the administration floated him as a possible replacement for Tom Daschle's health car czar/HHS secretary role, but health wonks like Ezra quickly highlighted his much less-than-awesome management of TennCare, Tennesee's low-income health-care provider, and he fell by the wayside. But this sort of can-do, old-school program will earn (and deserves, frankly) plaudits from the left.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Rush Holt (D-NJ), who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has called for the formation of a new "Church Committee" to investigate intelligence abuses committed by the CIA not only during the Bush administration, but stretching back into previous administrations as well. Steps like this are not only important for for re-establishing Congress' check on the executive, but could also dig up unsavory moments such as unscrupulous vice presidents pushing for the deployment of U.S. soldiers on American soil.
  
• Paul Krugman's column today speculates on what motivates the Blue Dog caucus in their efforts to undermine health care reform but comes up short. Steve Benen's stumped, too. I think they're motivated -- that is, if they're not outright pawns of industry -- by a vague desire to be "fiscally responsible" but don't actually understand the contours of health care policy. Hence, "compromises" that supposedly reduce the cost of the legislation while making insurance more expensive for the people the legislation is supposed to help in the first place.
• GW political theorist Steven Kelts has an interesting introduction to a series of posts about the "hollowness" of American libertarianism that should prove to be a fascinating discussion. Funny, "hollow" was just what I was thinking when reading this Welch-Gillespie item on Friday that matter-of-factly states that Obama's sliding approval numbers are because "the president has only himself to blame, for breaking campaign promises, jacking up spending, and governing in an atmosphere of perpetual crisis." Yeah, I'm sure he would still be in the high 60s today if he had just simply done nothing about the economy his first six months in office.
• The GOP's Grand Marshal, Rush Limbaugh, is deeply concerned about torture occurring under the totalitarian regime of Barack Obama, although one would expect him to be consistent in his belief that such activities are on the scale of garden-variety fraternity hazing. Meanwhile, Rush believes the key to his success lies in "being positive, respecting the audience, being inspiring and motivational at times, when it’s necessary." On reflection, I suppose he does resemble a right-wing Mr. Rogers.
• Weekend Remainders: The governor of Alaska makes an incoherent exit, Newt thinks she could be an energy wonk; Alberto Gonzales finds that having "senior member of the Bush administration" on your resume is a bit controversial; the birther movement is surprisingly resilient; Civil(ian)izing 'Homeland' Security; and is this Iran's next Supreme Leader?

--Mori Dinauer

The “New Blow to Health Plan” that was delivered over the weekend by the Congressional Budget Office illustrates the unusually powerful role that the CBO plays in determining the range of possibilities for reform, but also a little-understood fact about the CBO: It's judgments are often guesses about probabilities, and they are often guessing about political, not economic, probabilities.

The CBO determined that a proposal to give more power to an independent group that recommends Medicare payment levels, similar to the existing group called MedPAC, would produce only modest budget savings ($2 billion), and further, that “the probability is high that no savings would be realized.”

How does it reach that judgment: “The estimated savings of $2 billion over the 2016–2019 period reflect CBO’s assessment of the likely scope of the proposals that the council would make and the probability that its recommendations would be implemented by the President.”

“The probability that its recommendations would be implemented” is another way of saying, “we don't really think that the President will have the guts to make big cuts in payments.” And assuming we're talking about the current president, they are essentially saying that the president who is proposing this approach doesn't really intend to use it.

That's a political judgment. It's not a crazy one. After all, no previous president has pushed through all the recommendations of MedPAC or its predecessors. That's a significant body of evidence. But then again, no previous president has pushed through health reform either. As OMB director Peter Orszag wrote on his blog, the proposal is “a game changer, not a scoreable offset." He meant that in a more technical sense, but really, in a world where the politics have changed enough that comprehensive health reform actually passes, how useful are the facts about the political world before health reform? Big things will have changed, incentives will have shifted, and whether this president or a future one has the guts to implement cost-cutting recommendations seems kind of unknowable.

But the CBO doesn't really have the option to say “We don't know” when Congress asks it for a score that depends on a political judgment. The best it can do is the kind of balance of probabilities that we have here – a high probability that the provision will have no effect (that is, the president won't act), along with “a chance that substantial savings will be realized.” Somewhere between zero and “substantial savings” falls the magical number $2 billion.

Obviously, the CBO has to make some judgments about politics – the difference between a vague congressional resolution encouraging cost-cutting and a strict plan that requires a super-majority to act to override it is considerable. But it creates a strange, circular dynamic when the CBO is introducing its guesses about the political process into the process itself, at the very same time that the process is trying to do something that it's never done before.

To take it full circle, maybe the CBO should just issue a memo that health reform won't cost any money at all, because based on past evidence, there's a very high probability that Congress and the president won't actually pass health reform.

-- Mark Schmitt

Armando Iannucci’s new film In the Loop, a lampoon of the British-American deceptions and bureaucratic hell leading up to the Iraq War, has everything you’d expect out of a satire of its kind: convoluted debates on government informants, accidental intelligence leaks, aggressively silenced voices of dissent, and plenty of doublespeak.

The parallels between the zany fiction and pre-invasion reality are made abundantly clear: a "rush to war" in the Middle East, a stoic Rumsfeld-esque official manipulating evidence, and, of course, the fresh-out-of-college mid-level staffers influencing hawkish foreign policy (Spencer Ackerman, who was a consultant for the film, has an amusing story about this point).

But the most insightful parts of the movie are the moments when the line between satirical jabs and sad reality are suddenly blurred, almost to devastating effect.

Various excerpts of the movie’s dialogue often read like the perfect summary of reckless Bush-era war policy:

"What’s so brave about doing the right thing?"

"It’s like Bugsy Malone, but with real guns."

"In the land of truth, the man with one fact is king."

This last line is strikingly reminiscent of the baffling "poetry" of Donald Rumsfeld.

And things get uncomfortably real when Lt. Gen. George Miller, a Colin Powell-lite career soldier] played by James Gandolfini, provides a bleak estimate on infantry numbers:

Twelve thousand troops. But that's not enough. That's the amount that are going to die. And at the end of a war you need some soldiers left, really, or else it looks like you've lost.

At a climactic scene at the U.N., the less scrupulous characters demonstrate that selling a case for war can be as easy as hitting the “delete” key on a laptop and then printing copies of a doctored report minutes before a Security Council vote. The quick flash of the farce and cynical tactics of the resulting U.N. presentation (renaming an unreliable source, downplaying the cons of going to war) is almost as painful as watching old footage of Colin Powell’s own 2003 speech in favor of the Iraq War at the United Nations.

All of this makes me wonder if adding a laugh track to C-Span footage of the Bush years would produce a good sequel.

--Asawin Suebsaeng

Everybody who's anybody is reading this Michael Massing piece in The New York Review of Books, which smartly surveys the current landscape of original web reporting and analysis. I just want to say that although Massing doesn't make note of this fact, a startling number of the figures he lauds began their careers at The American Prospect, including Josh Marshall, Matthew Yglesias, and Ezra Klein. If you're reading TAPPED these days, you'll be able to say you knew Adam Serwer and Tim Fernholz way back when. Lucky you!

--Dana Goldstein

Every day that goes by without a vote in the House or Senate on universal health care makes it less likely that major reform will occur, because (1) opponents have more time to stir up public anxieties about it; (2) Democrats up for reelection next year come ever closer to the gravitational pull of the midterms, and grow increasingly worried about voting for a bill that could be a political liability in a year when unemployment may well reach double digits and the electorate is restless and unhappy; and (3), as a result of the first two, proponents increasingly have to rely for support and cover on industries like Big Pharma and insurance, as well as physician specialists and equipment suppliers, none of whom have any interest in fundamental reform but all of whom see possibilities for making more money out of whatever bill emerges.

In other words, next fall we get something called "universal health insurance" that still leaves millions of Americans uninsured and doesn't substantially slow the meteoric rise of health-care costs. That would be a tragedy.

What should be done now to avoid this?

The answer, after the jump.

--Robert Reich

First, the House must enact a bill before August recess even if the Senate is unable to -- and the House bill should include the four key elements that have already emerged from House committees: (1) a public plan option, (2) a mandate on all but the smallest employers to provide their employees with health insurance or else pay a tax or fee (so-called "pay or play"), (3) a requirement that every individual and family buy health insurance, coupled with subsidies for families up to 300 or 400 times the poverty level in order to make sure it's affordable to them; and (4) a small surtax on the top 1 percent of earners or families to help pay for this subsidy ("tax the wealthy so all Americans can stay healthy.")

Second, the president must tell Congress in no uncertain terms that all four elements are necessary. I believe he should also signal his openness to capping the amount of tax-free health care that individuals or families may receive from employers -- so long as the cap does not erode the tax-free benefits of individuals or families in the bottom 80 percent of the earnings distribution. This is the only funding mechanism that may be able to garner 60 votes in the Senate, and the only one that the Congressional Budget Office has so far said would temper the rise in long-term health care costs.

Third, the president should make clear to Big Pharma, private insurers, and other interest groups now supporting the effort that the final bill must contain mechanisms for forcing them to come up with the cost savings each has promised. Otherwise, those savings cannot be assumed -- and they won't be "scored" by the Congressional Budget Office -- thereby making it difficult for wavering members of Congress to vote for the bill.

Fourth, the president should commit to visiting, during the recess, all states of wavering Senate Democrats and even a few moderate Republicans (read Maine), in order to take the case for universal health care directly to their constituents. He or the vice president and cabinet members should do the same in the congressional districts of all Blue Dog Democrats and other wavering House Democrats.

Although universities produce 14 to 16 times more educational research in a year than advocacy-oriented think tanks, a new study of the media outlets that most influence education news coverage -- the New York Times, Washington Post, and Eduction Week -- finds that think tank reports are more likely to be cited by reporters. What's more, think tank reports perceived as "centrist" or "right" garner more media coverage than those perceived as "left."

According to the study's author, Holly Yettick of UC-Boulder, this disproportionate focus on think tank research is harmful to the public's understanding of educational issues, since reporters rarely discuss whether or not research has been peer-reviewed or has an ideological bias. "Most research reports will not lose news value during the time taken to verify their soundness. A good method of conducting such verification is to consult with a trustworthy person with expertise in research design and statistics," Yettick tells journalists, underestimating the time-demands of Internet-driven media. She also suggests that journalists link to the full research reports they cover, so that curious readers can judge for themselves.

This is good advice, and it's certainly true that education writers -- like myself -- know far more think tank edu-wonks than education academics. Here in Washington, especially, education reporters and think tank folks are likely to travel in the same circles. But I think Yettick shouldn't be too tough on journalists, because there are other, very good reasons why think tank work gets disproportionate media attention compared to academic work. For one thing, advocacy groups understand that if their research isn't relevant to a current public policy debate, it won't get any "pick-up." Think tanks make sure not just to illuminate a problem, but to suggest public policy solutions, and often with an eye toward political viability. Far too often, academics give short shrift to solutions or suggest solutions that are completely at odds with political realities.

What's more, the tenure-granting system encourages professors to tackle ever-more obscure research interests, and to focus on the academic world at the expense of making a public impact. So while journalists certainly have the responsibility to check-out the research they cite and fully disclose biases, academia really ought to put some muscle behind public relations and policy relevance.

Hat tip: USA Today education reporter Greg Toppo.

--Dana Goldstein

Stanley Crouch, comparing President Obama to "a rapper talking about race politics," comments on the Gates fiasco, before concluding:

Have no fear: Barack Obama will recover and he will bring all of the obligatory honor back to his administration and will continue to lay down the overriding challenges to all concerned—as he did in his brilliant speech to the NAACP on its 100th anniversary. It is more than significant that the president, as he told those attending his NAACP address, has chosen not to accept any excuses for selling out oneself, one's ethnic group, or one's country. Digging in and doing the very best that one can do has become a new version of patriotism. Given the stage cynicism of our moment, that version of patriotism is something far more meaningful to all of us than what happened to an influential black academic one afternoon in Cambridge on the steps of his home, where he was arrested for belligerence, no more, no less.

Once again, I'm absolutely astounded by the idea that someone could think arresting someone for "belligerence" is appropriate. But what really drives me nuts is that this is coming from Stanley Crouch, who has a reputation for assaulting people who piss him off. A few years ago, I had the privilege of meeting Amiri Baraka (I was meeting him alongside former Nixon lawyer Leonard Garment, the whole thing was as random and awesomely strange as it sounds--Garment and Baraka spent the entire time reminiscing about Jazz musicians they both liked) and Baraka casually recounted a story about how Crouch had once asked him to step outside so they could throw hands.

What I didn't realize at the time is that this is something Crouch is prone to doing. I figured that out reading this old piece from Ta-Nehisi Coates about how Crouch slapped literary critic Dale Peck after had given his book a bad review--years after. He took a swing at Jazz critic Russ Musto, threatened to kill then Village Voice reporter Guy Trebay, and tried to choke out writer Harry Allen. That's on top of trying to fight the former poet laureate of New Jersey.

Who is this dude to be lecturing anyone about "belligerence"? Lemme be careful. I don't want him coming down to the TAP offices and trying to steal me in the face.

-- A. Serwer

When this Washington Post article implied that FDIC Chair Sheila Bair opposes the Administration's proposal to create a new consumer protection agency, it was kind of shocking -- Bair has generally taken a tough, pro-consumer line throughout the crisis and has been the go-to federal official for holding major financial institutions accountable. After reading her testimony [PDF], it turns out that she supports creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, but wants to protect her own turf with two compromises:

The CFPA should have sole rule-writing authority over consumer financial products and services and the federal banking regulators should be required to examine for and enforce those standards. If the bank regulators are not performing this role properly, the CFPA should retain backup examination and enforcement authority to address any situation where it determines that a banking agency is providing insufficient supervision. By freeing the CFPA from direct supervision and enforcement of depository institutions, the CFPA would be able to focus its examination and enforcement resources on the non-bank financial providers that provide financial products and services that have not previously been subject to federal examination and clear supervisory standards.

Accordingly, the federal banking agencies should retain the authority to examine and supervise insured institutions for both consumer protection compliance and safety and soundness. The CFPA should be given the authority to examine and supervise non-bank consumer product and service providers and back-up enforcement authority over insured depository institutions.

... In addition, as the only federal regulator with exposure to all insured financial institutions, the FDIC should be represented on the CFPA Board. ... The FDIC’s direct supervision of the majority of the nation’s community banks provides it with a unique perspective and a "Main Street" orientation that resulted in it being an early proponent of affordable and sustainable mortgage loan modifications, improved economic inclusion, and the prevention of abusive lending practices. ... Some have questioned why prudential supervisors should have a position on the CFPA board when the views of the CFPA would not necessarily be reflected in the activities of the prudential supervisor. To address this criticism, the FDIC would support the addition of the CFPA Chairman as a member of our board of directors. ... this type of reciprocal arrangement could provide benefits for both safety and soundness and consumer protection regulation and supervision.

Bair is proposing that her agency and other regulators keep their powers to actually inspect banks and enforce rules while the CFPA writes regulations and focuses its enforcement powers on currently unregulated non-bank institutions. The CFPA would still have secondary authority to inspect banks but that's a much less powerful role. While Bair's concern about the CFPA's ability to field an effective enforcement team is reasonable -- especially when it will need to address a ton of previously unregulated institutions as well as the existing regulated bank structures -- it's extremely important that CFPA has first-option enforcement capability for the rules it writes; otherwise, there will be delay as the agency tries to get regulators that are closer to the banks to enforce pro-consumer rules, and controversy when the CFPA decides to use its secondary authority to enforce the rules if the other regulators don't come through. I don't think the Administration or Barney Frank will put this in the bill.

Her second idea, that the FDIC and CFPA should exchange board members, seems smart. It can't hurt to create some information sharing incentives, and the FDIC does tend to have a consumer bent even though it lacks regulatory authority in a lot of critical areas. By definition, the FDIC regulates "consumer" banks -- depository institutions -- so it makes more sense for a stronger connection between it and CFPA without actually combining their powers into a single office, which has the effect of diluting motivation to enforce, since one aspect of the agency's mandate -- usually the consumer aspect -- inevitably falls down the priority list.

She strongly criticizes the Administration's approach to the problem of "Too Big To Fail," which empowers the Fed to impose more onerous regulations on especially large or especially interconnected financial firms. That's a much thornier issue than CFPA, and one that I've been neglecting -- more TBTF analysis forthcoming!

-- Tim Fernholz

Nancy Scola asks whether the technology that helped Barack Obama win the presidency might help Hillary Clinton save the world:

"The man who saved Iran" might be the most hyperbolic thing blogged about Jared Cohen this summer, but not by much. The huzzahs that greeted the news that the 28-year-old State Department staffer called on Twitter to delay a service blackout during the height of the Tehran street protests threatened to obscure the true complexity of Foggy Bottom's new, technology-enabled approach to diplomacy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of it herself in a commencement speech at Barnard College on May 18. "With social-networking tools that you use every day to tell people you've gone to get a latte or that you're going to be running late," she said, "you can unite your friends through Facebook to fight human trafficking."

The State Department calls this new technology-driven approach "21st-century statecraft."

KEEP READING ...

Over at Reason, Radley Balko argues that the real lesson to be drawn from the Gates/Crowley fiasco has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with power:

This deference to police at the expense of the policed is misplaced. Put a government worker behind a desk and give him the power to regulate, and conservatives will wax at length about public choice theory, bureaucratic pettiness, and the trappings of power. And rightly so. But put a government worker behind a badge, strap a gun to his waist, and give him the power to detain, use force, and kill, and those lessons somehow no longer apply.

Police officers deserve the same courtesy we afford anyone else we encounter in public life—basic respect and civility. If they're investigating a crime, they deserve cooperation as required by law, and beyond that only to the extent to which the person with whom they're speaking is comfortable. Verbally disrespecting a cop may well be rude, but in a free society we can't allow it to become a crime, any more than we can criminalize criticism of the president, a senator, or the city council. There's no excuse for the harassment or arrest of those who merely inquire about their rights, who ask for an explanation of what laws they're breaking, or who photograph or otherwise document police officers on the job.

Balko's piece is worth reading in its entirety. For my part, I've already explained why I think conservatives are being deferential in this instance--and why they wouldn't be under other circumstances. Regardless of what happened between Gates and Crowley, I doubt conservatives would be arguing as forcefully in Crowley's favor if Gates hadn't been black and liberal.

-- A. Serwer

It's quite complicated to understand how, exactly, abortion opponents are using the health reform process to attempt to limit access to family planning. In this RealityCast podcast, the wonderful Amanda Marcotte and I discuss the topic, and Amanda has a helpful clarification: One reason anti-choicers are up in arms over reform is because the federal government will be providing insurance subsidies to people within 300 or 400 percent of poverty. This means that if you're a single woman who earns $38,000 annually, government will help you pay for your private insurance coverage. Thus, if you then access abortion through your private plan, it could be considered "taxpayer-subsidized."

Now, I happen to think the hand-wringing over this is absurd, even if you are genuinely horrified by abortion. After all, because 89 percent of private health plans already offer some abortion coverage, abortion opponents are already paying for other people's access to the procedure, through premiums and co-pays. It's called socializing risk.

In any case, listen here to the podcast.

--Dana Goldstein

These days, John C. Yoo, the author of the Justice Department torture memos, is traveling around the country and giving talks in order to defend his work for the Bush administration, as The Washington Post reports. At the same time, prisoners at Guantanamo are waiting for news on their situation.

The prisoners were, by and large, sane when they arrived, with only 8 percent showing signs of serious mental illness, according to a report about Guantanamo that was written by Admiral Patrick Walsh, vice chief of Naval Operations. This level was significantly lower than the 45 to 50 percent rate of mental illness among individuals in U.S. prisons. However, many of the prisoners seem to be going insane because of their incarceration, wrote Leonard S. Rubenstein in The Lancet, citing reports from lawyers who have visited the prisoners.

There are psychiatrists and physicians on the island, but they have not necessarily helped the prisoners heal from their physical wounds and psychological crises. Physicians have, in the past, assisted in harsh interrogations including the forced feeding of prisoners in restraint chairs. And despite the outcry over their role, they continue to work closely with the military, even, it seems, against the wishes of the patients on the island.

Obama said he will close down Guantanamo by January 2010, but in the meantime the prisoners are still there, with some trying to starve themselves to death as a protest against the conditions at the prison and others going quietly mad.

--Tara McKelvey

Jaclyn Friedman on the double standard for athletes and sports when it comes to misogyny and rape:

In mid July, a Harrah's hotel worker accused Pittsburgh Steelers star quarterback Ben Roethlisberger of raping her, and her employer of covering it up. And then, as reliably as thunder follows lightning, the sports misogyny apologists boomed onto the scene.

They're an essential ingredient in the modern sports culture that protects and lionizes male athletes at all costs. And when we allow them to ramble on unchecked, when we laugh at them or roll our eyes or simply ignore them, we give them tacit permission to keep using women's bodies as payment.

KEEP READING ...

On Friday, I guest-hosted Blogginghead.tv's "Week in Blog" show with affable conservative Matt Lewis. Fun stuff! In the clip above, I reveal the sordid world of White House communications strategy, where netroots bloggers get invited to chat with the president about health care, reporters crash the call and it's all just a warning shot across the bow of centrist Democrats obstructing reform. We also discussed the president's press conference, the Gates issue and health care reform. Or you could just watch the whole thing.

I look pretty shifty in that video. I need to practice looking calmly into the camera like Matt.

-- Tim Fernholz

The National Review has enlisted L.A.P.D Officer Jack Dunphy (pseudonym) to give some advice to President Obama and "his Ivy League pals" some advice in case a police questions you:

At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

Now, this is to some degree, simply true. It's why I never talk back to the police. But Dunphy's casual acceptance of this kind of relationship between citizens and police is one of the reasons why so many people have issues with the police.

We can argue about to what degree race was involved in the original incident between Gates and Crowley. But I think it's obvious that the reaction to the incident was highly racialized, that it fell largely along racial and partisan lines, and I think that says something about the right's grotesque justification of the Gates arrest or even the suggestion here that any police officer is justified in murdering anyone they please with the flimsiest of pretexts. The only reason Dunphy or others justify this type of behavior is that they envision it being applied to others, and I mean that in both the literal and abstract sense. If Gates had been white, or had he been a conservative, had he been say, Sarah Palin, the right would be using the incident as another example of the ruthlessness of the Obama police state.

The right's paranoia over guns is instructive in this instance. At least some of those rushing to buy weapons and ammo are not concerned simply about the prospect of gun bans, but about their ability to "resist tyranny" from the government. They're talking about armed resistance--who else would they be violently opposing but armed agents of the state such as police?

So understand, it's not that the state is always justified in repressive behavior. It's that the state is always justified in repressive behavior when the target is someone the right has identified as an "enemy." Their opposition to "tyranny" is not a matter of policy or principle, it's about who is being crushed. Because Gates is black, and because he is a liberal, he is identified with the other side, and therefore any police response, no matter how brutal, would have been justified. It doesn't matter what happened. What matters is whether you're an "us" or a "them". If you're black, as far as the National Review is concerned, you're a "them" that has it coming.

-- A. Serwer

Today marks the beginning of this year's Strategic and Economic Dialogue between the U.S. and China, an annual opportunity for senior American and Chinese officials to compare notes and develop cooperative policy frameworks. While numerous portfolios are up for discussion, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner are taking the lead on the strategic and economic tracks, respectively, explaining in this op-ed that "Simply put, few global problems can be solved by the U.S. or China alone. And few can be solved without the U.S. and China together."

President Obama kicked off the conference this morning, with a speech mentioning Yao Ming (I know he's famous in both China and the U.S., but do we have to allude to him every time there's a diplomatic meeting?) and offering some criticism of the recent crackdown on the Uighur Muslim minority in Western China:

Just as we respect China’s ancient culture and remarkable achievements, we also strongly believe that the religion and culture of all peoples must be respected and protected, and that all people should be free to speak their minds. That includes ethnic and religious minorities in China, as surely as it includes minorities within the United States.

That sour note aside, the main thrust of the dialogue comes on three fronts: First, the broad macroeconomic shift that the U.S. wants China to accomplish by taking steps to shift its focus from export-led growth to internal consumer demand -- a process that began earlier in the summer when Geithner visited Beijing and that will be sweetened by offering China more say in international economic institutions. (While you may hear a lot about currency reserve issues and the deficit, those policies are a fait accompli ). Second, the Administration wants to push forward on climate change, led by special envoy Todd Stern and highlighting Energy Secretary Steve Chu, the most prominent Chinese Americans in government, towards reaching an agreement in principle on climate policy before a major international conference later in the year. Third, Clinton will be focusing her discussions on nuclear proliferation and in particular the North Korean situation.

Don't expect too much concrete progress at this event; it's really designed to make sure that issues are being discussed rather than targeted at specific negotiations; at a press briefing last week senior administration officials (yup, those guys again) emphasized that beginning a major international meeting like this so early in the administration is a sign of commitment to revitalizing the U.S.-China relationship, intended to set the tone for the Administration's next three or seven years.

-- Tim Fernholz

Look, if there's an indefensible, unconstitutional, and needless government incursion into the rights of private citizens that took place during the Bush era, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden's going to be there to defend it. When President Obama released the torture memos, Hayden insisted that he had put the country in danger because, maybe the warrantless wiretapping program had revealed that Osama bin Laden had let his New York Review of Books subscription die a couple months ago and there's no way he would have already known that the United States was torturing people cause it sure wasn't a big international news story or anything.

At any rate, after defending torture months ago, today Hayden takes to the pages of the New York Times to defend the warrantless surveillance program against the recent CIA Inspector General's report, which offered conclusions of the program's utility that sounded like this:

NCTC analysts involved in preparing the threat assessments told the ODNI OIG that only a portion of the PSP information was ever used in the ODNI threat assessments because other intelligence sources were available that provided more timely or detailed information about the al-Qa'ida threat to the United States.

and

DOJ OIG found it difficult to assess or quantify the overall effectiveness of the PSP program as it relates to the FBI's counterterrorism activities. However, based on the interviews conducted and documents reviewed, the DOJ OIG concluded that although PSP-derived information had value in some coutnerterrorism investigations, it generally played a limited role in the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts.

As well as:

The CIA [inspector general] determined that the CIA did not implement procedures to assess the usefulness of the product of the PSP and did not routinely document whether PSP reporting had contributed to successful counterterrorism operations. CIA officials, including Hayden, told the CIA [inspector general] that PSP reporting was used in conjunction with reporting from other intelligence sources; consequently, it is difficult to attribute the success of particular counterterrorism case exclusively to the PSP.

Some critics claim that Congress was not aware of the full extent of the program, but the ultimate judgment on the effectiveness of much of the program may actually have been the actions of Congress. In the 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Congress judged it appropriate not only to provide additional legal underpinnings for much of what the agency had been doing but also to recognize the value of its activities by providing additional critically needed capabilities.

Whaaaaaaaaaaat? That's like saying your spouse was okay with you cheating because you lied to him/her about what you were actually doing.

Look, who are you gonna believe? A painstakingly prepared Inspector General's report or a guy who has an interest in making sure he doesn't go down in history as being associated with illegal and unethical activity that also turned out to be pretty useless in fighting terrorism?

At any rate, the headline, "warrantless criticism," is genius, and I'd be kind of shocked if Hayden came up with it, since it seems like a subtle dig at his overall point. I'm guessing the term refers to the legal authorization American citizens might have had to get in order to express themselves freely had the Bush administration decided to follow Yoo's advice again and deploy the military domestically, suspending the Bill of Rights in order to defend our freedoms from Al Qaeda.

-- A. Serwer

• Reacting to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman's threat to bypass Blue Dog Democrats on his committee and take health care reform legislation directly to the House floor, said Blue Dogs have reported that negotiations "pretty much fell apart this afternoon." It's good that Waxman stood his ground and refused to let these "centrists" bleed the legislation to death by a thousand cuts, but it sure doesn't make it any likelier that the House will get something passed before the dreaded August recess.
• Spencer Ackerman highlights President Obama's refusal to use "victory" as a a way of measuring progress in Afghanistan, and whatever you might think of the president's policy, it's clear that he has no use for buying into the sort of "World War 4" rhetoric that dominated the country for years after 9/11.
  
• "Perhaps a moment of reflection?" is how Atrios titled his response to a TIME magazine survey that placed Jon Stewart at the top of the list for "most trusted name in news" (N.B. the poll does not appear to have been conducted scientifically). Of course, Stewart himself addressed this very topic years ago but I see little evidence that much has changed. Cable news is consistently the worst offender, but arguably more damage is done by the big names at the "serious" networks who are still coasting on prestige earned decades ago.
• He might not be handing out novelty checks while bashing the federal government that provided them, but like the Louisiana governor, Texas Governor Rick Perry definitely wants the people of his state to suffer, suggesting he would evoke the "states' rights" provision of the 10th Amendment to resist federal health care reform.
• People seem to have a difficult time recalling that the minimum wage increase that went into effect this month was part of a legislative effort from 2007, you know, a year before the recession began. But to hear the usual suspects discuss it you'd think that this was further evidence that liberals are destroying the economy either through malice or ignorance.
• Remainders: John Boehner cares deeply about America's health care woes; Senate clown Al Franken gets a bill passed; Texas conservatives want to ensure your children get a head start on wallowing in ignorance; Michael Goldfarb is still deranged; and going Galt never looked so apathetic.

--Mori Dinauer

Steven Teles has a very astute analysis of L'Affaire Gates as primarily about "honor:"

This whole thing would have been a big nothing if either man were willing to swallow his pride. The cop could have defused it by letting Gates call him a racist and have it roll off his back. He couldn't because, I think, he has a self-conception as precisely not a racist cop (given that he does racial profiling seminars). To back down would have been to accept what Gates was accusing him of--to be dishonored. Gates couldn't back down and say "yes, officer, whatever you ask, officer" because he believed he was being treated in a way that was inappropriate to his status as a Harvard professor and because he thought he was being hassled because he was black. To back down would have been untrue to his idea of himself--as a race man and a part of America's elite. Again, he would have accepted being dishonored. So they both stood their ground, and the guy with the gun won.

Yep. I'd only add that "honor" and "pride" -- and anger! -- are, so often, driven by expectations around acceptable masculinity. It seems to me that men are way more likely than women to loudly and publicly defend themselves against slights, instead of "cooling down" and dealing with the problem later on, in a more constructive way. Which begs the question -- would any of this have happened if the major players had been women?

--Dana Goldstein

I somehow missed a piece of very important news this week: the House marked up Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott's Fairness in Cocaine Sentencing Act of 2009, which would eliminate the 100 to 1 sentencing disparity for possession of crack cocaine in comparison to powder cocaine. The disparity in sentencing has disproportionately affected African Americans, who are more likely to be caught with the latter instead of the former.

The harsher penalties for crack were driven by misconceptions about crack's potency. Vice President Joe Biden, one of the original sponsors of the anti-drug Abuse Act of 1986, apologized last year saying, "Our intentions were good, but much of our information was bad." While still in the Senate, he introduced a bill to amend the disparity but it didn't go anywhere -- some Republicans introduced alternate bills that would have lessened it, but that's nonsensical: Why provide harsher penalties for the same crime, except to treat people a little less unequally than before?

In a column for Newsweek, Ellis Cose wrote that Attorney General Eric Holder has stated that the administration supports changing the disparate penalties for crack and powder cocaine. Cose also notes that more than 80 percent of federal crack prosecutions are of African Americans -- even though more than two-thirds of those who use crack are white. Amending this disparity is long overdue, and if the bill makes it to the president's desk, he seems likely to sign it.

-- A. Serwer

Obama apologized to Sgt. Crowley over his remarks on the Gates arrest, saying of both men, "[t]hese are two decent people." This was both inevitable and necessary.

There are more important things for the president to do right now than have a candid talk with America about race -- because Americans aren't ready for it. After the president's speech to the NAACP, dubbed the "no excuses" speech by the press, a number of white media figures, including Chris Matthews and Howard Kurtz, complained that "a white guy couldn't have given that speech." I'm not sure why Matthews and Kurtz are so eager to wag their fingers at black folks, and I won't go into it here.

But now we know what a black man can't do -- not if he's president and not if he wants to get anything done: He can't tell white people something about race they aren't willing to hear, no matter how true it is. Regardless of the specifics of the Gates incident, Obama's larger point about racial profiling is, as the president put it, a "fact." A culturally skewed media applauds when Obama presses black folks to do better, but when it comes to challenging white people, well, that just isn't appropriate. Maybe this is a bridge too far--it's hard to imagine any politician getting away with calling cops stupid. But this conversation is inevitably charged with the tumultuous history of black folks and law enforcement.

Obama's language describing the Cambridge Police was overly derisive. But this feels like much more than a personal apology to Sgt. Crowley. Obama did try to salvage his larger argument, saying that we need to spend "a little more time listening to each other, and focus on how we can generally improve relationships between police officers and minority communities." But that point will probably be lost. In the end, Obama's statement will be internalized in part as an apology to white people for not knowing his place -- which is, at least in part, to make everyone feel really awesome about having a black president.

-- A. Serwer

According to a June study by the Pew Internet Center, one in every three Americans does not have a broadband Internet connection, and 21 percent have no home Internet at all. Just 35 percent of households making less than $20,000 and just 46 percent of blacks have broadband connections. This is the persistent digital divide. Having no access cuts off those Americans from the information and tools the Internet provides across an incredible array of topics, from politics to education to medicine. For young people, the need to be Internet-literate is even greater, and schools have traditionally placed little focus on computer access for students.

But a new study of wireless Internet use suggests a very different picture. Sixty percent of blacks use wireless Internet regularly and 71 percent use handheld data. Usage trends for low-income users are also higher on wireless. In fact, minority groups traditionally left out of the growing broadband world report significantly higher usage of mobile and wireless Internet than do whites. That makes enough sense -- wireless is both more portable and more affordable; the average monthly home broadband bill is $39, while wireless data plans are as low as $20.

Historically, the federal government has done an appallingly poor job of encouraging broadband expansion and of busting the regional monopolies that reduce choice and raise prices for home Internet connections. To that end, the stimulus included $7.2 billion for broadband expansion, including $4.7 billion in grants to “innovative programs” that reach "unserved and underserved" areas. The efficacy of this is, of course, in the details of to whom and how the money is awarded, and those are just beginning to emerge.

But perhaps we ought to just hand out smartphones instead.

--Christopher Sopher

An odd and disturbing tale of a man who was drawn into the terrorist network appears in The New York Times, raising questions about U.S. intelligence gathering. Bryant Neal Vinas went from Long Island to Pakistan in search of a wife, according to the account, and along the way received al-Qaeda training. (Meanwhile, some experts believe that Osama bin Laden has taken another wife – this time in the area where he lives, in order, perhaps to strengthen ties to the community where he is hiding out. He also has a wife in Yeman, a counterterrorism expert tells me, and he visits her occasionally.)

One of the surprising aspects about the al-Qaeda story is how little Americans knew about the group before 9/11, specially compared to the knowledge we had about our enemies during the Cold War. Back then, CIA officers hung out at cocktail parties in Berlin and Warsaw, recruiting spies, yet there were few efforts to infiltrate terrorist groups operating in the Middle East. It seemed too hard to get access. Except that it really was not, as John Walker Lindh, a California native who joined up with the Taliban, proved. The case of Vinas shows once again that becoming part of these groups is not impossible, and one wonders why the CIA has not tried harder.

There is a downside, of course, since Americans who infiltrate terrorist groups might be expected to harm innocent people as part of their membership, and as important as it is for Americans to know about these groups,
the price of the knowledge may in fact be too high.

--Tara McKelvey

The complicated dance between Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the national teachers' unions continued today. On a conference call to officially roll-out the $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" education reform competition, Duncan said states are "ineligible" for the grants if they have laws on the books prohibiting student performance from affecting teacher assessment. New York and Wisconsin are two such states, and teachers' unions have long lobbied for such laws. In an attempt to encourage states to overturn these prohibitions, the Department of Education will be handing out Race to the Top grants in two phases over the next two years, allowing state legislatures time to revisit issues of teacher compensation.

But Duncan was clear that he wants teachers' union to be "partners" in the administration's education reform efforts. That dovetails with the message President Obama sent in an interview with The Washington Post yesterday, in which he said it was "cynical" to view unions as only an impediment to reform. Duncan said today that the DOE would "give weight" to Race to the Top proposals that include union buy-in, via a signed statement of support from a union leader.

--Dana Goldstein

At a press conference yesterday, Reps. Tim Ryan (D-OH) and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) unveiled their new Preventing Unintended Pregnancies, Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents Act. Hailed as the product of years of blood, sweat, and tears of negotiating between different camps that support and oppose legal abortion, the bill gained the support of prominent religious figures as well as major reproductive rights organizations.

The bill does not deal with abortion access, and reproductive rights groups pledged to continue to work to secure that access separately from the bill. As the Religious Institution on Sexuality Morailty, Justice, and Healing's Debra Haffner, who is pro-choice, wrote on her blog, "Ryan/DeLauro is a good piece of legislation that addresses many of the important issues, including comprehensive sexuality education, family planning, and support for pregnant and parenting women. Preventing unintended pregnancy, ensuring abortion access and funding family planning initiatives are intertwined issues and should be dealt with together. But this bill is only a piece of the reproductive health and justice agenda we hope to see."

Whether this bill can pass is a big question mark. For one thing, it hasn't been scored yet, and the sponsors and their allies need to be ready to make the case that its costs are worth the benefits for Americans' health. As they know, they will face opposition from religious conservatives who oppose sex education and contraception. As was evident in the dozens of statements of support for the bill, some supporters clearly favored certain provisions over others, with pro-choice supporters emphasizing the prevention provisions and anti-abortion supporters emphasizing the economic supports. (I have more on this over at Religion Dispatches.)

Evidence of a looming internecine showdown among abortion opponents includes Democrats for Life of America's recent ouster of Ryan from its board over his sponsorship of the bill. That led Ryan to call DFLA a "fringe group" because of its opposition to contraception. DFLA is one of the major proponents of the Pregnant Women Support Act (PWSA), a bill that is intended to reduce the number of abortions through economic and other measures aimed at persuading women facing unintended pregnancies to carry them to term. The PWSA is supported by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention.

More after the jump.

--Sarah Posner

While Ryan-DeLauro was being unveiled and hailed as common ground that would tamp down rhetorical battles over whether abortion should be legal, supporters of Ryan-DeLauro were also engaged in the debate over whether abortion services should be covered in health care reform. The Rev. Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, said in a statement, "At this point in the debate, abortion should not become an issue that could doom the chances of any legislation passing. . . . Federal funding of abortions is prohibited by current law, and that prohibition should be maintained." And the Rev. Carleton Veazey, president of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which also supports Ryan-DeLauro (and unlike Wallis, is pro-choice), issued a harsh critique of President Barack Obama's statement to Katie Couric that he would like to maintain the "tradition" of no federal funding for abortion services. "It was our hope that President Obama would change this attitude and consider abortion as a health care issue," said Veazey. "It is distressing to hear President Obama reinforcing that way of thinking."

While the anti-contraception groups will surely be marginalized by pro-life activists who support Ryan-DeLauro, they do share opposition to abortion coverage in health care reform with the more moderate anti-abortion activists. The far right minions are mobilized; over 36,000 people watched a web cast last night hosted by a coalition of religious right groups (including DFLA) at www.stoptheabortionmandate.com. Not only are they aiming at preventing coverage of abortion services; they are tying efforts to derail reproductive health services in any health care reform to their long-standing mission of "defunding" Planned Parenthood. Last night, the House Rules Committee voted out the Pence Amendment, which would prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving federal funds from the Title X family planning program. (Planned Parenthood supports Ryan-DeLauro, which would reauthorize Title X funding.)

According to Lifesitenews, American Life League president Jim Sedlak "said the amendment's success in the Rules Committee 'has to be an act of God,' and strongly urged pro-lifers to deluge their representatives with calls and emails asking them to support the Pence amendment."

A witness, 40-year-old Lucia Whalen of Malden, had alerted the cops that a man was "wedging his shoulder into the front door" at Gates' house "as to pry the door open," police reported.

"I support the president of the United States 110 percent. I think he was way off base wading into a local issue without knowing all the facts as he himself stated before he made that comment," Crowley told WBZ-AM. "I guess a friend of mine would support my position, too."

Jeff Faux on Bear Stearns and the financial crisis:

"We all fucked up," says Alan Schwartz in the final paragraph of House of Cards. "Government. Rating agencies. Wall Street. Commercial Banks. Regulators. Investors. Everybody."

Schwartz was the last chief executive officer of Bear Stearns, which, when it collapsed in March 2008, became the first of the financial-market dominos that ultimately toppled the U.S. and world economies. His generous sharing of culpability is a bit like the sly confession of the serial murderer who implicates his parents, his teachers, and the police for their failure to keep him from killing. Still, he has a point; there are multiple fingerprints at the scene of this crime.

KEEP READING ...

In the middle of the overheated health-care battle, President Obama took some time out yesterday to highlight education reform in an interview with The Washington Post. The occasion is the official roll-out of the "Race to the Top" program, in which states will compete for $4.35 billion in federal grants intended to spur education "innovation." Passed as part of the stimulus, Race to the Top has garnered an inordinate amount of attention from the administration, considering it accounts for just a tiny drop in the bucket of Education Department spending. Only eight to 12 states are expected to win grants.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has indicated that the development of teacher performance-pay models will be one focus of the program. He has promised not to judge teachers' solely on their students' test scores but has otherwise been vague about what a good performance-pay model would look like. In the Post interview, the president provided some more specificity, saying he would like to assess teachers based on their ability to improve their students' aptitude levels over the course of a year. He does not say what role test scores would play in such teacher assessments, but it does seem that scores would be the primary way to measure student progress by "grade level," as he suggests:

...this is something that I had to talk to teachers about all throughout the campaign and when I was a U.S. senator. What I say is you're absolutely right it would be unfair if we set the same standard for kids in Anacostia and kids in Georgetown, and without any additional resources, any additional help, we penalized the kids who are much further behind and reward those who are coming out of middle-class homes and already doing well.

The answer to that is, let's measure progress. That we can measure. So what we can say is that if a kid comes in and they gain two grade levels during the course of that single year, even if they're still a little behind the national average, that tells us that school is doing a good job. And that's just one example of how I think you can address legitimate concerns on the part of teachers while at the same time not watering down standards, and still maintaining a link between high-quality teaching and the compensation that teachers receive.

In just a few minutes I'll be tweeting a conference call with Arne Duncan, in which he'll be speaking about Race to the Top. Follow me!

--Dana Goldstein

This Human Rights First study has been making the rounds, and with good reason. The report says that of over 120 terrorism cases prosecuted in federal criminal courts since the 1990s, the government has won convictions 91 percent of the time -- and of the 19 acquittals, the defendants were all convicted of another crime. The report also says that "Courts ... through the time-tested common law system, are delimiting the scope of military detention to meet the demands of the current circumstances." In other words, the report argues that "preventive detention" is being limited to a military context (rather than simply people we believe are "dangerous") the only one in which most human-rights advocates believe is appropriate.

The kind of material support and conspiracy laws the government uses to convict suspected terrorists are incredibly broad, which is part of the reason why they have such success securing convictions. It's remarkable to me that with a conviction rate of 91 percent (or 100 percent, if we're counting those who were later convicted of another charge) the conversation is about whether the courts are adequate to try terrorism suspects rather than say, the laws themselves are so broad that they virtually ensure conviction.

-- A. Serwer

Tsedeye Gebreselassie and Paul K. Sonn on the increase of the federal minimum wage:

It has been dubbed the "mancession." During the past year's economic collapse, job losses have been sharply higher in male-dominated industries like manufacturing and construction than in sectors like health care, services, retail, and hospitality where many women tend to work. This reality is forcing families to rely more than ever on women's wages to make ends meet.

But while unemployment is lower for women, so are their wages. That's why this month's boost in the federal minimum wage from $6.55 to $7.25 an hour couldn't come at a better time, especially because the overwhelming majority of minimum-wage earners are adult women, many of whom support children.

KEEP READING ...

Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up To Me, the precocious 1966 novel by the late Richard Farina, defined the late 1960s counterculture. The stock market rally that pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average back above 9000 for the first time since early January could be given the same title, and it might well come to define the much-wished-for financial recovery.

What's pushing the stock market upward? Mainly, unexpectedly positive second-quarter corporate profits. But those profits aren't being powered by consumers who have suddenly found themselves with a lot more money in their pockets. The profits are coming from dramatic cost-cutting -- including, most notably, payroll cuts. If a firm cuts its costs enough, it can show a profit even if its sales are still in the basement.

The problem here is twofold. First, such profits can't be maintained. There's a limit to how much can be cut without a business eventually disappearing -- becoming, in effect, a balance sheet in space. Second, when businesses slash payrolls to show profits, consumers end up with even less money in their pockets to buy the things businesses produce. Even if they hold on to their jobs, they're likely to fear that they won't have the jobs for long, which causes them to retreat even further from the malls.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

Most companies that have reported earnings so far have surpassed analyst's estimates, but that only means that earnings have been less bad than analysts had feared. According to the chief investment officer at BNY Mellon Wealth Management, if the companies that haven't yet reported earnings show the same pattern a the companies that have reported so far, overall corporate earnings will have dropped 25 percent over the past year. That may not be as much of a drop as analysts had expected, but it's still awful. Operating income for companies in the S&P 500 that have reported so far has been almost 29 percent lower than last year, more than 80 percent lower than 2007, according to Standard and Poors. Ouch.

"Better-than-expected" is Wall Street's euphemism these days for "we're happier than we thought we'd be." But Wall Street is in the business of cheerleading, even when there's really nothing to cheer about. It wants investors to think positively, on the assumption that positive thinking can be a self-fulfilling prophesy: If investors begin putting more money into the market, then the market will automatically rise, leading more investors to put in more money -- until, that is, the rally ends because nothing has fundamentally changed in the real economy.

Keep your eye on the real economy, where unemployment and underemployment keep rising. It's not as much fun as cheering and investing right now, but it's far safer.

Maybe Sonia Sotomayor was wrong. In the absence of a clear preventive detention policy, Federal District Courts have been hashing one out, case by case, wrote Chisun Lee in The New York Times yesterday:

A close examination of the decisions shows that some of the fears about sending terrorism cases to civilian courts have not been realized. The judges haven’t been particularly hard on the government, holding it to a low standard of proof: If more than half the evidence tips in the government’s favor, then the detainee stays put — a far lower bar than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The judges have also admitted hearsay evidence, and they’ve sealed courtrooms to protect government secrecy.

Yet despite these allowances, the government has not fared well. Twenty-six detainees have won their lawsuits, known as habeas petitions, while five have lost. So far, the Obama administration has filed just one appeal.

Here's the problem for civil libertarians arguing that such a policy is unconstitutional: While in individual cases, the government has been completely routed, the courts haven't dismissed the entire premise of indefinite detention outright; they've just been hashing out appropriate standards of evidence, what level of "support" is required to justify detention, how much and what kind of hearsay is reliable, and in some cases, when detaining an individual is no longer justified. The government hasn't won every case -- in fact, as Lee notes, they've lost most of them.

Lee writes that government fears about using intelligence as evidence haven't been realized -- but advocates for preventive detention would argue that the worst fears of civil libertarians haven't come true either -- that the courts haven't been blindly accepting the government's word on such matters, as proved by the number of Habeas cases they've lost. At this point, supporters of preventive detention would argue that the policy is already in place -- which is why those who oppose it should instead push for a clearer policy that forces the executive branch to say, justify its detention of particular individuals at regular intervals, as David Cole and Ben Wittes are proposing -- so that the courts aren't just making it up as they go along.

-- A. Serwer

• Confirming Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin's remarks yesterday that there will not be a vote on health care reform before the August recess, Majority Leader Harry Reid has come out saying that the vote will have to wait until September. Meanwhile, the notoriously partisan organization known as the Rand Corporation confirms the obvious: that in the absence of reform, health care costs are going to ultimately crush the U.S. economy.
  
• While there seems to be disagreement about Barack Obama's performance last night in talking about health care, there does appear to be consensus on his remarks about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama left himself open to attack, the thinking goes, and this will distract us from more serious issues (as if the press is normally consumed by deep discussions of public policy). I'm not so sure. You have the GOP making this their signature issue, fitting the pattern we saw during the Sonia Sotomayor hearings. But if they spend all their time warning that whitey is under assault in Obama's America, doesn't that temporarily drown out their attacks on health care reform?
• It's rare that RNC Chair Michael Steele makes a good point, but his expressed desire that Democrats should pass a bill without any Republican support is correct. There is no such thing as bipartisan health care reform. Democrats (mostly) want reform, Republicans (mostly) do not. Otherwise, they would have an alternative plan, instead of kinda sorta maybe promising to think about crafting one. But despite all this, here's Chuck Grassley defining a bipartisan bill as one in which 80 Senators support it. Does that mean at 79 it's hopelessly partisan?
• It's astonishing the degree to which the anti-choice movement views women as essentially inhuman. This proposed bill that would require consent of the father before performing an abortion is pretty much the modern equivalent of saying that women are little more than machines whose sole purpose in life is to be the vessels through which men sire their heirs. Maybe they can attach a rider to the legislation that makes property ownership and voting rights contingent on consent from their husbands or fathers as well.
• Remainders: The White House identifies some of its visitors; Olympia Snowe wants to have her cake and eat it too; The Washington Post op-ed page loves misinforming readers; Bobby Jindal's shamelessness isn't just an isolated incident; don't miss the 2010 edition of the Death and Taxes chart; the funniest thing about this birther video is the Sammy Hagar-era Van Halen soundtrack; and Americans sure do love their conspiracy theories.

--Mori Dinauer

Apparently all that time Obama spent talking about economics, national security, and health care is stuff black people don't do.

Americans got a rare glimpse Wednesday night of what it means to have a black president in the Oval Office.

In response to a question at his prime-time news conference about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the black Harvard professor, in his own home over the weekend, Mr. Obama declared that the Cambridge, Mass., police had “acted stupidly.”

See, black people complain about "The Man." That's all we do. 

"The" black Harvard professor. There's only one, apparently.

-- A. Serwer

We know that drones kill, but we don’t really know if they kill the right people, or at least we don’t know how often.

The Pentagon has been stingy with information on the accuracy of the drones. Counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen and Center for a New American Security fellow Andrew Exum called for a reduction in these attacks, explaining in a New York Times op-ed that they are not nearly as good at killing high-level al-Qaeda leaders as military experts claim, but Defense Department officials still have not provided much more information on why we should continue to use them at the current levels.

Now, however, military officials are talking about ramping up the use of drones and expanding their capacities, as the Times reports. It is all very exotic, particularly the drones that may someday swarm through the air, darkening the skies “like locusts.” It's also potentially lucrative. Wired’s Danger Room describes one of the cooler drones, a brand-new “Excalibur aircraft, a 13 foot-long, 10 foot-span, half-scale test model” and shows the same kind of techno-fascination that is shared by people in the Pentagon – and celebrated by military contractors who see drones, as the Times reports, as a “prime growth area.”

--Tara McKelvey

Brentin Mock on how Gov. Palin's policies on environment and energy are failing:

There has been much speculation about what outgoing Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska is running toward on the national scene but not so much about what she's running from. Back in March of 2007, shortly after she took office as governor, Palin proclaimed that under her watch Alaska would be “maintaining focus on becoming a viable and significant player in the nation’s energy plan.” The policy decisions that she sold as solutions to America's energy crisis are now failing investors, stakeholders, and the environment.

To understand the legacy Palin hoped for, it's worth examining her rejection of nearly $30 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus funds, and the status of the two energy projects at the heart of her political and economic agenda: offshore oil drilling along the Alaskan north coast and a gargantuan natural-gas pipeline project. In each case, Palin hoped to establish herself as a bonafide conservative leader who could position her state as a leader in energy production and also as a model for self-sufficiency, free of federal meddling.

KEEP READING ...

Former Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says Sonia Sotomayor should be confirmed.

-- A. Serwer

The streets outside The American Prospect offices were teeming with police today, who were securing the area for the appearance of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at the nearby U.S. Institute of Peace. Perhaps the most important takeway from Maliki's appearance was in response to a question asked by Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent, who asked Maliki about what the relationship between Iraq and the United States would be like in 2011, and whether the Status of Forces Agreement would be renegotiated.

Speaking through an interpreter, Maliki said that "if Iraqi forces require further training, we will examine this at that time ... the nature of that relationship, the amount of forces will be examined then and discussed based on the needs," suggesting that the American commitment to Iraq could be more open-ended than it appears, and contrary to what the administration seems to have indicated.

In Iraq and internationally, there are some concerns that, with many of Maliki's enemies crushed by the surge, he is positioning himself to accumulate more power and that Iraq might return to authoritarianism. Maliki dismissed concerns that arrests in the Diyala region were based more on disabling political enemies than prosecuting those who violated the law, saying that "those who have committed wrong actions or who were involved in spilling blood they will have to be referred to the judicial system," and that such operations were "happening away from any politicization and any sectarian calculation."

As for Iraq's relationship with the United States, Maliki strangely omitted any specific recognition of American efforts in his prepared remarks, instead thanking the "international community" for their support of Iraq's nascent democracy. However, when a reporter asked whether "domestic politics" were forcing Maliki to distance himself from the United States, Maliki insisted that "there are no internal politics of Iraq preventing us from having a relationship with a great and strong country like the United States." Of course, the fact that he needed to be prodded into saying so suggests the opposite.

-- A. Serwer

Matt Yglesias explains the larger meaning of the decision to cut funding for the F-22:

Overshadowed during this week's continuing debate about health care was a crucially important step in Congress: The United States Senate voted 58-40 in favor of an amendment to strip funding for the F-22 fighter plane out of the Department of Defense Appropriations bill.

At $350 million per plane, the F-22 is extraordinarily expensive. It's also remarkably irrelevant to contemporary military challenges. Indeed, for all its advanced capabilities, none of our existing F-22s have ever seen action in either Iraq or Afghanistan. The debate over the F-22 matters, however, not just because of the waste of money. It matters because it's a fundamental test of whether or not the United States' civilian government can gain some form of control over the Pentagon.

KEEP READING ...

To everyone who is up in arms about the increasingly remote possibility of "taxpayer subsidized" abortion in the public plan, think about this: Eighty-seven percent of existing private health insurance plans offer some abortion coverage. That means you're already subsidizing other people's abortions, through your employee contribution and co-pays. That's how insurance works -- we pool our money to socialize risk.

--Dana Goldstein

We've been ill-prepared over the last few weeks to deal with the kind of candor the president showed last night, discussing the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. Confronted by a gushing onslaught of white anxiety, Judge Sonia Sotomayor chose to back down from her statements about race and gender affecting one's perspective, allowing Republicans to perpetuate the myth that one's background and experience have nothing to do with how they see the world. But last night, the question of perspective was thrown back into focus when the president criticized the behavior of the Cambridge police. While acknowledging that "progress has been made," he said the police acted "stupidly" in arresting Gates after it was clear he was in his own residence, and joked about being shot if he himself tried to break into the White House.

Why was the president so candid? I think it has everything to do with his experience. After the incident, Gates said, "If it could happen to me, it could happen to anybody--anybody black, but also anybody less fortunate than me of any color." What the president was saying last night, effectively, was that he could imagine what happened to Gates happening to him. And, if he weren't the president, it certainly could. I'm not sure you can really understand it unless it's happened to you, but there's a severe trust deficit. Some white folks seemed unwilling to even consider that race was a factor in the Gates incident until a black moderate, John McWhorter, explained what it's like to be looked at as a potential menace by a man with a gun and society's implicit permission to use it, simply because of your race.

The president's honesty on race, quite frankly, makes people uncomfortable. Americans deeply yearn to be beyond race, and we are at times hostile to those who choose to remind us that we aren't. The president refused to do that last night, to the disappointment of those who believed in some kind of implicit promise of post-raciality inherent in his rise, and to the glee of Republicans who are busy blowing the dust off of Pat Buchanan's Nixon-era playbook. The argument during the election was that liberals were the ones who were looking for racial absolution in Obama's candidacy. But Republicans have been the pious keepers of that flame, and today they'll pour kerosene on the fire hoping it will engulf enough of the country and immolate the administration's chances to push through health care reform. For his part, Obama warned long ago that his candidacy was not an opportunity to "purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap." For obvious reasons, some people have refused to listen--the possibility of holding Obama accountable for a promise he never made and couldn't possibly keep is too tempting.

My first thought upon hearing what Obama said was that he may have allowed his opponents a crucial opening to destroy health-care reform. He certainly should have chosen his words more carefully, and if I'm being completely honest, I'd say this was the wrong moment to be real with the American people on race. There's an unfortunate and longstanding myth that racism is something that victimizes people of color. The truth is that institutionalized racism has always been a disaster for this entire country, economically, socially, and politically. If health-care reform is derailed because the GOP effectively exploits racial fault lines, and allows the argument over health care to become one over how the president hates the police and doesn't want them to protect you from all the scary black men out there, it will prove that race still has the power to make Americans abandon their most immediate interests in the name of petty tribalism.

The GOP is counting on it.

-- A. Serwer

Bill Kristol responds to the president's press conference last night by characterizing it as an attack on "cops and docs." Which is, you know, not true, and demonstrative of Kristol's fraught relationship with facts. In his opening paragraphs, Kristol rambles about how Obama is talking about all these things we can't actually do, not because there are arguments against them but just because Kristol doesn't think so. Take this great line:

The juvenile happy talk reached its peak with this presidential statement: “If there's a blue pill and a red pill, and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well, why not pay half price for the thing that's going to make you well?” Now, there’s good idea. Why hasn’t anyone else thought of that? For this reform, we need to spend $1 trillion?

Hahahaha so funny. It's almost as if Kristol has never heard of Comparative Effectiveness research, which compares medicines and procedures to determine which work best and how to fund them appropriately. It's not something we currently do much of, but it could save Americans a ton of money, just by doing almost exactly what the president described. It's pretty hard for Kristol to call someone naive when he clearly has no idea what he's talking about, but I digress -- back to the cops and docs.

The president suggested that doctors might be driven by the profit-motive. (Incidentally, isn't that a conservative article of faith -- that everyone is driven by the profit-motive?) Not the most felicitous suggestion, but certainly not an attack. There are some doctors who think that way, but a better way to put the president's example might be a doctor seeing a patient with a sore throat and thinking, "I'm going to get paid whether I fix this with cheap drugs or take out the tonsils, so I might as well go whole-hog." It's not so much greed as inefficiency, and it's a type of inefficiency we should seek to eliminate. In any case, as Atul Gawande has documented in the must-read story of the year, doctors will admit to over treating with a financial motive. Most docs hearing the president probably thought, 'I know that guy.'

Then Obama said the Cambridge Police acted "stupidly" when the arrested Henry Louis Gates. Question: Does anyone think they didn't? Indeed, not all the facts of the story are out, but I don't think anyone believes that arresting a septuagenarian for shouting at you in front of his house -- the best-case scenario for the officers -- is an example of really excellent police work. I'm not sure why we should impose an Orwellian standard on the president requiring him to suppress his opinion, or rather, as Kristol would have it, pretend that this big national news story isn't worthy of his comment. But even then, describing this as "disdain" for all police officers is sort of ridiculous. Are there even police offers who think the Cambridge Police handled the situation well? I guess this is what happens when you let a political operative pretend to be a journalist -- the facts are elided in favor of rash attacks.

-- Tim Fernholz

Simon Johnson makes a good point about the administration's proposed agency to protect consumers from unsafe financial products. Basically, he says, this is a smart way to improve consumer confidence:

Many consumers were burned, one way or another, by a financial product in recent years. They are now suspicious. They can spend time looking for vanilla alternatives from reputable companies, but, frankly, everything is to some extent tainted.

What happens when there is a scare regarding food contamination in the United States or globally? People buy less of that food until the government assures them that: 1) we now understand the cause of the problem; and 2) it will not happen again.

Word has gotten around that many financial products are not safe — as well as the idea that the debt levels encouraged by the finance industry are not always healthy. Consumers are going to be more careful and, if there is no way to reassure them fully, they may be excessively careful.

True that. Johnson also notes that the Consumer Financial Protection Agency would also be good for the health of the broader financial system -- it seems strange that the financial sector, in fighting the CFPA, is lobbying in favor of the terrible loan underwriting standards that led to all the toxic assets on their books. But it also seemed strange that they could wring billions of dollars out of sub-prime borrowers with insane combinations of exotic financial products, so I suppose that's pretty par for the course.

Meanwhile, if you want to read a commentary on CFPA by a smart person who has no clue whatsoever how the consumer credit system works in real life, Richard Posner has just the sort of abstract, Ivory Tower analysis that you're looking for.

-- Tim Fernholz

Given that I was pretty tough on Obama's health care performance tonight, I just want to say that I think his comments on the Henry Louis Gates arrest were surprisingly frank and brave. "Any of us would be pretty angry," he said, adding, "the Cambridge police acted stupidly" by arresting someone in his own home.

Unfortunately, it's considered rather radical for a national politician to criticize cops. But as Obama pointed out, you just can't elide the fact that "there is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately." We'll see how this plays out in the media. The indispensable Adam Serwer predicts, "Reporters are going to act like this was a 'betrayal' of a post-racial promise Obama never actually made."

--Dana Goldstein

In his health care press conference tonight, despite sounding a few optimistic notes -- "what's remarkable at this point is not how far we have to go, but how far we've come" -- the president seemed, more than ever before, on defense. Obama was clearly determined to hit back against perceptions that his health reform plan is a classic "tax and spend" proposition. Again and again, he portrayed himself as "very worried about federal spending. ... To everyone out there who's been ginned up about this idea that the Obama administration wants to spend and spend and spend, the fact of the matter is that we have inherited enormous deficits," he said. "But health care reform is not going to add to that deficit; it's designed to lower it."

Although recent polling on health care suggests the public is skeptical of the administration's reform efforts -- in part because of cost -- Obama's personal popularity remains very strong. Fifty-nine percent of Americans view him favorably. Perhaps that is why the president stated, several times, that Republican opponents of health reform are primarily concerned with scoring a political hit against him; he was asking the American people to rise to his defense by supporting his policy goals.

"I’ve heard that one Republican strategist told his party that even though they may want to compromise, it’s better politics to 'go for the kill.' Another Republican senator said that defeating health reform is about 'breaking me,'" Obama said. "So let me be clear: This isn’t about me. I have great health insurance, and so does every member of Congress." Later on, adopting the third person, he accused Republicans of opposing reform "because they think it will make Obama more vulnerable."

But after extending the deadline for health reform from August to the end of "this year," and admitting that his plan makes many Americans "queasy," there is no question that Obama is looking a bit vulnerable. When he said "Congress is still working through a few key issues" on health care, it was really the understatement of the year; the crucial Senate Finance Committee has yet to release a proposal on how to pay for reform. And in the meantime, the issue of abortion has emerged as a potential roadblock. Just yesterday, Obama rolled back his campaign promises to reproductive rights advocates, saying that excluding abortion coverage from federal health plans is a Washington "tradition" that may need to be respected when crafting a new, public insurance option.

The strongest part of Obama's remarks was his description of the crucial health insurance exchanges. He's always been good in a professorial, explanatory mode. The exchange is simply "a marketplace that promotes choice and competition," he said. "If you don’t have health insurance, or are a small business looking to cover your employees, you’ll be able to choose a quality, affordable health plan." Later on, though, he seemed to let one of Democrats' most central health reform messages slip away. Throughout this process, Democrats have been clear that people who like their employer-based insurance won't have to switch plans after reform. Yet during the question and answer session, Obama said, "Can I guarantee that there will be no changes to the health care delivery system? No."

Of course, Obama was referring here to the overall landscape of public health in America, which will indeed change -- for the better -- when insurance companies are reeled in. But his statement is likely to be widely misinterpreted and spun, not least because he simply didn't hammer home tonight the fact that employer-based insurance, as it currently exists, will remain the primary mechanism for coverage after reform. For progressives, that is a major disappointment. But since the legislation we're looking at protects our largely employer-based system, it seems politically smart to highlight that fact, for all those "queasy" upper-middle-class voters who like the status quo just fine.

--Dana Goldstein

I'll be back here after the speech with some breaking analysis. In the meantime, follow me on Twitter.

--Dana Goldstein

Yesterday, in an interview with Katie Couric, President Obama finally directly addressed the question of abortion financing in the public plan. He reiterated that he doesn't want to "micromanage" on particular benefits. But in a statement that is sure to rile his pro-choice base, Obama referred to a "tradition" of banning federal funding for abortion. That is a reference to the Hyde Amendment, which currently prevents Medicaid coverage of abortions for poor women. And while none of the health reform bills in Congress threaten Hyde, reproductive health advocates have been trying for decades to repeal the ban. By deferring to this "tradition," Obama seems to be signaling that he could support a public plan that excludes abortion coverage.

Here are Obama's words to Couric:

Katie Couric: Do you favor a government option that would cover abortions?

President Obama: What I think is important, at this stage, is not trying to micromanage what benefits are covered. Because I think we're still trying to get a framework. And my main focus is making sure that people have the options of high quality care at the lowest possible price.

As you know, I'm pro choice. But I think we also have a tradition of, in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government funded health care. Rather than wade into that issue at this point, I think that it's appropriate for us to figure out how to just deliver on the cost savings, and not get distracted by the abortion debate at this station.

Update: During campaign season, Obama said he opposed the Hyde Amendment. In a questionnaire on reproductive health issues, a member of Obama's staff wrote:

He believes that the federal government should not use its dollars to intrude on a poor woman's decision whether to carry to term or to terminate her pregnancy and selectively withhold benefits because she seeks to exercise her right of reproductive choice in a manner the government disfavors.

--Dana Goldstein

• On the eve of President Obama's public address on health-care reform, we learn, contrary to earlier reports, that Olympia Snowe is still opposed to a public option, Nancy Pelosi is willing to work through the August recess, Republicans still oppose the public option because it'll make care cheaper; and David Leonhardt describes what's at stake in the debate.
• There's no reason to be suspicious of a new Quinnipiac poll showing a dead heat in a hypothetical Specter-Toomey Pennsylvania Senate matchup. Quinnipiac, after all, does good work. Of course, it's too early to say anything about next year's elections -- we don't even know if Specter will be the Democratic candidate -- but I am confident in predicting that the inevitable "conservative comeback" storyline just got a major shot in the arm.
• In yet another example of why the U.S. Senate is an institutional anachronism, a John Thune (R-states' rights)-sponsored amendment that would have allowed concealed weapons permits to be honored across state lines was defeated despite having 58 votes in its favor. Which isn't to say the Thune amendment was a good idea. It's actually quite ridiculous. But if someone can give me an explanation as to why we need the privilege of being secretly armed at all times that doesn't rely upon a Hobbesian conception of life, I'll be happy to reconsider.
• I quite enjoyed this Stephen Walt post in Foreign Policy on the 10 foreign policy topics serious pundits should never question, particularly items two and three, because it exposes one of the most annoying contradictions in American strategic thinking: that we can have both a policy that is opposed to the spread of nuclear weapons, while simultaneously believing firmly in the deterrence theory of nuclear weapons. If deterrence theory is valid, after all, then shouldn't everyone have nukes to ensure the peace?
• As Adam observed yesterday, the whole birther phenomenon has transitioned from an entertaining sideshow to something more than a little disturbing. And if I didn't already possess zero media influence, I wouldn't even bring it up, lest the story gets legs (even mockery is semi-legitimizing exposure) in the mainstream media. Oh, wait...
• Remainders: The F-22 loses Jack Murtha and the House's support; student loan reform makes some progress; the Obama White House borrows a couple more pages from Bush; and this is excellent news for libertarians.

--Mori Dinauer

Dave Weigel was on Rachel Maddow last night, discussing the rise of Birtherism among Republicans. Maddow's shot at Lou Dobbs and CNN is pretty hilarious.

I think the operative point here, which Weigel makes, is that for conspiracy theorists, evidence disproving the conspiracy is actually evidence proving the conspiracy. At the Windy, Weigel writes that “ironically, the ‘birther’ movement began in response to Obama’s own efforts to debunk rumors." Well maybe. I'd hypothesize that it began as a response to some people's inability to accept a black man as president of the United States.

-- A. Serwer

Tim Fernholz on how the battle for health care reform resembles the battle over the stimulus, and what it means for the future of the effort:

The news of late on the president's agenda has been stalls and difficulties; a much ballyhooed July 18 Washington Post poll found public approval of the president's handling of health care, his top priority, dropping below 50 percent -- to 49 -- for the first time. Never mind that the president hasn't, technically, released a health-care reform plan, choosing instead to articulate central principles and endorse one specific mechanism, a public insurance option.

It's not that the president's agenda is overly ambitious, despite cries of "liberal overreach" -- a mysterious creature that hasn't been seen in the White House since it slunk out in 1968, never to return. Instead, the vagaries of congressional procedure are slowing its progress. The lack of a unified message provides openings for Republicans to attack the half-finished legislation emerging from the process -- criticizing, for instance, the high price of one bill before cost-cutting measures were incorporated -- and go after the president for positions he hasn't even adopted.

We've heard this story before, during the debates last winter over the stimulus.

KEEP READING ...

In a not entirely unsurprising development, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham has decided to vote to confirm Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, bringing the Republican total to five.

During the hearings, Graham was a mess of contradictions--on the one hand, he often spoke to Sotomayor in a patronizing tone, basically asking her if she understood the Constitution and demanding she respond to a handful of anonymous smears. On the other, he called her a person of "good character" and positively destroyed conservative anti-affirmative action activist Linda Chavez, whose derisive testimony against Sotomayor's confirmation was the most personal and negative of the entire proceeding, when he said that "I know that Republicans sit down and think, OK, we've got some power now. Let's make sure that we let the whole country know the Republican Party is just not a party of short white guys."

Demonstrating that the GOP isn't just "a party of short white guys" is especially important for Graham, who represents a Southern state that has seen exponential growth in its Latino population -- 211 percent in the last decade.

Referring to her "Wise Latina" speech, Sotomayor told Graham that "I believe that my life demonstrates that that was not my intent to leave the impression that some have taken from my words." Graham responded, "You know what, Judge? I agree with you. Good luck."

Looks like he meant it.

-- A. Serwer

This morning, I spoke with Ron Bloom, the head of the Administration's Auto Industry Task Force, for an article that's coming out in the September edition of the Prospect. But as we talked about his recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, he made some smart points about the automaker bailout that are worth posting today:

Disingenuous might be a fair word, to have people lecture us on the wonders of the free market, and the terrible situation we have when the government chooses to intervene, then insist that the government intervene on behalf of one particular stakeholder. Look, I understand and sympathize, certainly sympathize with the dealers. ... The fundamental fact that I think people have trouble with is that, for better or for worse, these companies were insolvent. They failed. ...This treatment of dealers, while it was quite unfortunate that these people, some of them, could lose their job -- it's terrible -- there really are fundamentally only two alternatives, and then there's a false one people put forward.

One, you could say the companies should be allowed to liquidate, and while I think that is a terrible decision, at least it has intellectual honesty. The second thing you could say is that the company ought to pay everybody everything it owes them. But if that's true, we might as well say that …there shouldn’t be consequences for [having a failed company], and that's a very dangerous place to be. ... the size of the check you've got to write is multiple of the check that we did write, which is big as it was.

The false one that people put forward is, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, you ought to do all those other guys and take their promises away, but my promise ought to be kept, my promise ought to be sanctified above all others.' And once you start down that slippery slope, then you're paying everybody everything they're owed.

The only screen I think that has intellectual rigor is a commercial screen, which is to say, what would be the treatment that you would get in the commercial marketplace? Companies that have commercial agreements with companies that go bankrupt, those agreements do not survive the bankruptcy unless the company affirmatively wants them to. This would be true for other companies in similar circumstances. That's not a nice thing, but bankruptcy isn't a nice thing. … the president has been remarkably commonsensical about this, in saying that unless there is shared sacrifice the word sacrifice has no meaning.

That's the most important thing to remember about this deal: It really is shared sacrifice. Dealers aren't happy to be closing, the unions were not pleased to trade their pensions for a stake in a company in a very precarious place, bondholders were unhappy to take haircuts on their debt, etc. But the fact that everyone took these cuts means that GM and Chrysler are still open, which is better for everybody -- and the economy -- at the end of the day.

-- Tim Fernholz

Deborah Pearlstein suggests there's too much being made of the Obama administration task force on detention delaying their report, and ultimately the closure of Guantanamo Bay Prison for at least six months, pointing out that the original executive order contemplated that possibility.

However, what's frustrating about the preliminary reports released is that much of the problems with the Obama administration's policies--the use of military commissions. The report twice uses the phrase "where feasible" in reference to pursuit of prosecution of suspected terrorists--as though prosecution were an option rather than an obligation. Moreover, while the administration appears to be restricting the use of military commissions to detainees captured on an active zone of combat, "[t]he principal factors that make the use of military commissions a distinct and appropriate forum lie in the military character of the proceedings and the nature of the offenses subject to their jurisdiction (i.e. violations of the law of war)."

However, a closer look at tab A of the preliminary report also reveals that consideration of the "appropriate forum" for prosecution is based on "the manner in which the case was investigated and evidence gathered" and "legal or evidentiary problems that might attend prosecution in the other jurisdiction." This suggests that who gets charged by military commission is likely to be far more arbitrary than simply "those who violate the laws of war." In fact, since the United States has effectively declared war on al-Qaeda, it's possible to see the government making the argument that any and all members of that organization have violated the law of war, since their methods would make them war criminals in a war context. So despite the fact that the report aims to "clarify" the nature of the military commissions and how they would be used--it doesn't, at least not yet.

"I would push for a very narrow standard for military commissions - only for battlefield crimes that are not appropriate for trial in civilian courts. That would eliminate any sense that military commissions are chosen because its easier to secure a conviction than federal court," says Ken Gude of CAP over e-mail. "That's what the Obama administration has to convince Americans and the world it has rejected -- the belief that military commissions are second class justice and the more expedient avenue to conviction."

I still don't know that we need them in the first place.

-- A. Serwer

One more reason to adopt the "Baker-Samwick" plan to allow borrowers facing foreclosure to rent their homes at market rates instead of losing them: A rising number of banks are simply abandoning foreclosed homes once their owners are kicked to the curb. In Wisconsin and Ohio, borrowers are leaving their homes when banks file for foreclosure, only to discover that their lenders eventually decided not to take the properties. That means those homes are still legally owned by the former borrowers, who are surprised to find themselves in possession of back tax bills and derelict residences. Here's Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett:

"The debtor is gone, the lender is gone and here, Mr. Mayor, you've got this attractive nuisance in your neighborhood. Then I get a call from my fire department, and they're telling me we've got too many homes that are attractive nuisances, as they say, for arson or prostitution or drug trafficking. The current situation is a lose, lose, lose situation."

It's an extremely pernicious decision on the part of lenders, with severe impact on the surrounding community. That's why during foreclosure, borrowers should be able to continue to live in and maintain their homes while paying rent. Dean Baker put up a short piece arguing in favor of this proposal today, go read it.

-- Tim Fernholz

Steve Benen, bouncing off David Kurtz, writes about how Surgeon General Nominee Regina Benjamin's weight, not her rather impressive credentials, has become a focus over at FOX and ABC:

I can't recall ever hearing a comparable "debate" over the physical characteristics of another recent presidential nominee, but the surgeon general nominee's weight has somehow, at least according to some, managed to become a legitimate area of interest.

Roberto Lovato explains how the backers of the Honduran coup may have an inside man in Washington:

"If you want to understand who the real power behind the [Honduran] coup is," says Robert White, president of the Washington-based Center for International Policy, during a recent interview, "you need to find out who's paying Lanny Davis."

Davis, an ally of the Clinton family who is best known as the lawyer who defended Bill during the presidential impeachment proceedings, was recently on Capitol Hill lobbying members of Congress and testifying against exiled President Manuel Zelaya before the House Foreign Relations Committee. White, who previously served as the United States ambassador to El Salvador, thought that such information about Davis' clients would be "very difficult to find."

But the answer proved easy to find. Davis, a partner at the law firm Orrick, Herring, & Sutcliffe, openly named them -- and his clients are the same powerful Hondurans behind the military coup.

KEEP READING ...

Five centrist Democrats --Reps. Tim Ryan, (OH), Dale Kildee (Mich.), James Langevin (R.I.), Artur Davis (Ala.) and Kendrick Meek (Fla.) -- have written a letter to Nancy Pelosi urging that health reform maintain the "status quo" on federal abortion funding. Here is their proposal:

...we believe that a common ground solution is to include language in the final legislation that makes clear that no insurance company will be required to pay for an abortion except in extraordinary circumstances -- nor will they be prohibited from paying for an abortion, so long as health insurance plans offered in the exchange that choose to provide abortion coverage pay for those services with funds that are separate and distinct from any federal subsidies.

This solution maintains the current status quo in the private market – where insurance companies can choose whether to include this coverage in their plans and individuals can choose which plan (and what sort of coverage) fits their individual needs and values while ensuring that no federal funds are used to pay for abortions.

Lastly, we believe that health reform legislation should not preempt constitutionally permissible state laws that establish pre-requisites that a patient must satisfy before obtaining an abortion, such as parental consent and waiting period laws.

The letter contains no mention of the public plan. But by opposing "federal subsidies" for abortion, these Democrats align themselves with Republican abortion opponents, whose goal is to prevent abortion coverage under any new public insurance options, just as the Hyde Amendment currently prevents Medicaid from funding abortion for poor women.

None of the health reform bills in Congress would repeal Hyde, meaning that as Medicaid is expanded to cover all Americans within 133 percent of the poverty line, the poorest women will still need to pay out-of-pocket for abortion. (A first-trimester abortion costs between $300 and $400.) What reproductive rights advocates are hoping for from health reform is that the new public insurance option will offer some abortion coverage, just as most private insurance plans currently do. But with increasing numbers of Democrats allowing abortion opponents to frame the health reform debate, little short of an intervention from the White House can slow the roll of the abortion grandstanding. So far the administration has shied away from the issue. Here's hoping that in his televised speech tonight, President Obama indicates that he won't allow anti-family planning ideologues to delay reform.

--Dana Goldstein

Two homemade bombs went off near a sidewalk in Sadr City, reports The Times, in a series of explosions that killed at least 15 people in Iraq and engulfed one vehicle traveling in a U.S. military convoy in flames. The attack serves as a reminder that the IED, or improvised explosive devise, is one of the most horrific aspects of the war.

This sort of scene is currently playing out on theater screens: The Hurt Locker, a new movie about Iraq, traces the lives of the men who are responsible for defusing the bombs. It seems super-realistic and authentic, even with its flaws (Tom Ricks on The Best Defense recommends the movie, but has pointed out quite a few of them). In truth, however, the experience of bomb-defusing in the summer of 2004, when the movie takes place, was quite different for a lot of the people who were actually involved in the undertaking.

On Sunday, I interviewed a former Marine who had been a bomb-defuser in Anbar Province during that time. We were sitting at a table at his grandmother’s house in Metamora, Illinois, and I asked him what it was like to defuse the IEDs. I said it must have been rough, and he said it wasn't bad, explaining that you just have to know how to do it right.

“No, it’s really hard and scary,” I said. “You haven't seen the movie!” (Hey, I was joking). Everyone at the table, his mom, his aunt, his grandmother, even he, laughed.

“Oh, she should know,” his mom said, “she's seen the movie!”

He told me that basically the heroes in the movie – EODs, as they were known, since they worked in Explosive Ordnance Disposal -- were understaffed and took forever to show up, sometimes six hours or more. “We call EOD guys ‘Engineers Off Duty’ because they’re OFP,” he said. They're their “Own Fucking Program.”

Another Marine who served in the same squad in Anbar Province – he is now living in Illinois, and is studying to be a paramedic -- told me that once they came across a bomb-filled mini-truck on the side of the road and contacted the people from Explosive Ordnance Disposal but had to wait so long for them that one of his friends just crawled underneath the truck and duct-taped C4 plastic explosives to the axle and then lit a fuse and left. He had less than four minutes to get out of the way. It worked. No robot suit or armor, either.

For all The Hurt Locker’s scariness and authenticity, the heroes in the movie have nothing on what these guys did.

--Tara McKelvey

I'm coming very late to this, but if Monday's report from The Washington Post about the use of sleep deprivation, noise bombardment, and forced nudity on Abu Zubayda prior to Justice Department authorization on Aug. 1, 2002, is accurate, laws were certainly broken, and those involved may be vulnerable to prosecution. There have been a number of conflicting reports about Eric Holder's willingness to pursue prosecutions. Today The New York Times reports that Holder will only be going after lower-level officials, which I think is both morally indefensible and unlikely to be an effective deterrent. Folks join the CIA because they are willing to do whatever is necessary to defend the country. Only by making sure policy-makers don't abuse that commitment can these kinds of mistakes be avoided.

The Post article focuses on the role of the two contractors assigned to develop the "enhanced interrogation" program, Bruce Jessen and James E. Mitchell. The end of the piece suggests that both men were pushed by CIA leadership to go even harder on Zubayda, even after he had been waterboarded 83 times. But most remarkable is what happened after CIA officials arrived and witnessed the procedure for themselves:

"Headquarters was sending daily harangues, cables, e-mails insisting that waterboarding continue for 30 days because another attack was believed to be imminent," the former official said. "Headquarters said it would be on the team's back if an attack happened. They said to the interrogation team, 'You've lost your spine.' "

Mitchell and Jessen now found themselves in the same position as Soufan, Shumate and others.

"It was hard on them, too," the former U.S. official said. "They are psychologists. They didn't enjoy this at all."

The two men threatened to quit if the waterboarding continued and insisted that officials from Langley come to Thailand to watch the procedure, the former official said.

After a CIA delegation arrived, Abu Zubaida was strapped down one more time. As water poured over his cloth-covered mouth, he gasped for breath. "They all watched, and then they all agreed to stop," the former official said.

So hardened intelligence professionals were so affected by the sight of Zubayda being waterboarded that they elected to stop the procedures' use once they saw it in action. But if you believe the cast of National Review, including "Human Rights" advocate Cliff May, waterboarding isn't torture. Maybe they think the CIA, as some of the officials at the Counterterrorism Center reportedly put it, "lost their spine."

-- A. Serwer

My friend and colleague from the New America Foundation, Michael Lind, has a provocative article in Salon on health reform -- well, the headline is provocative ("More Raw Deal than New Deal"), but the substance is actually a thoughtful and somewhat complicated journey through his own evolving thinking about health reform since he and Ted Halstead pushed an individual mandate to buy insurance in their 2001 book, The Radical Center.

The core of Lind's argument is that from the point of view of his preference for a "citizen-based social contract" (meaning only that benefits belong to the individual, rather than being contingent on employment or complicated eligibility), he now prefers a mandate on employers to provide insurance to the mandate on individuals to obtain it. The Obama plan, he says, is evolving toward "pay or play ... the status quo, modified slightly by a baffling Rube Goldberg scheme for covering the uninsured," not the kind of uniform benefit characteristic of New Deal programs.

Lind puts particular weight on the goal of "eliminating a multi-tier labor force that allows businesses to game the system -- for example, by outsourcing some tasks to private contractors, in order to avoid paying health benefits to full-time workers." A uniform employer mandate would prevent this, he argues.

Lind introduces a critically important idea to the health-care debate: Social solidarity. We already have a two-tier labor force, often within a single company, in which some people have health care and job security and others are vulnerable in every way, even while working. Pulling us apart in that way has social and political consequences that are deeper than the economic consequences. And a good question to ask about any policy is whether it would make that problem better or worse.

Just coupling a poorly designed public option to the existing health-care system might indeed worsen that sense of stratification by creating a third undesirable layer between private insurance and Medicaid, even if fewer people were technically "uninsured." But I'm not sure that an employer mandate is the solution. For one thing, it's almost impossible in Congress to avoid exempting small businesses, usually those with under 50 employers. That brings all the outsourcing and independent contracting games right back in, and leaves millions out of the mandate. Second, it still falls short of a seamless system where insurance doesn't change if you leave your job. And you would still want to create the insurance systems and even a public plan that smaller employers could buy into.

So I don't follow Lind all the way. I think a robust public option coupled with insurance exchanges all tied to a roughly comparable basic package of benefits, paid for by employers or individuals, with a subsidy, can create a system that feels uniform and fair, and doesn't further pull us apart. But he's put an important idea on the table, and I'll certainly watch the legislative dance with an eye to whether it would pull the tiers of the economy further apart, or bring them together.

-- Mark Schmitt

Yesterday Bill Gates -- one of the nation's leading education reform philanthropists -- delivered an address to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Over 90 percent of American school funding comes from states and localities. That means state legislatures are where education policy actually gets made, despite fireworks at the federal level. Let's take New York state as an example: Albany controls whether Mike Bloomberg's mayoral control of schools will continue. It decides how many charter schools can open in a year. After lobbying from the teachers' union, it prevented individual student test scores from being considered in the tenure-granting process for teachers.

So when Gates -- a proponent of merit pay, standardized testing, national curricula, and charter schools -- speaks to state lawmakers, he is appealing to the folks who can either empower or put the kibosh on his agenda. And in a nutshell, here is his statement on what that agenda is:

No factor advances student achievement more than an effective teacher. So a true reformer will be obsessed with one question: “What changes will improve the quality of teaching, so every student can have an effective teacher?”

Note that Gates is setting up a litmus test. This is why the "education wars" can get so nasty. Bill Gates is an absurdly wealthy computer scientist and businessman with a side interest in education policy. He happens to believe that data systems, merit pay, and charter schools are panaceas. Lots of people broadly agree, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. But other education experts are skeptical.

For example, yesterday the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, at Harvard Law School, released a short paper noting that research on charter schools has found, on aggregate, that they are no better and no worse than traditional public schools. Of course, a handful of elite charters have extraordinary success teaching poor kids, and are national models. But the majority of charter schools are mediocre and racially and socioeconomically segregated. Research shows such isolation is bad for kids, bad for society, and bad for getting good teachers in front of struggling kids. If we're going to expand the charter sector, the Institute suggests, why not also commit to integrating some charter schools?

Incentives to create charter schools that enroll students from several racially and economically distinct school districts – say, one city and several suburbs – could result in better schools that, as research suggests, are better equipped to reduce inequalities. Why not take what we have learned from the well-functioning charter schools and attempt to replicate that in desegregated settings?

Existing regional cross-enrollment programs between cities and suburbs are popular and have long waiting lists. Hartford, St. Louis, and Milwaukee offer good examples. And yet, Bill Gates never talks about integration.

--Dana Goldstein

• Here we are, Day Two of the Obama administration's death spiral, and we have more polls showing that he might as well just resign now and get it over with. Or, if you prefer, you can ignore the worthless analysis and attention-grabbing headlines that typify most Beltway journalism and try to put poll numbers like this in the context of past presidencies. You might be shocked to discover that people have, you know, actually researched this stuff and determined that Obama's approval rating is following a well-established precedent.
• The Senate's 58-40 vote to strip funding for the F-22 is undoubtedly a good thing unto itself. But the significant victory here is the slow creep of the idea that defense spending costs real money. Lots of real money. Money that is spent to prepare to fight competitors who don't exist. To preserve air superiority that hasn't been challenged in decades. To futilely attempt to preside over a world in which only 37 countries, according to one estimate, escape failing- or failed-state status.
• It isn't particularly surprising to learn the sordid details of the largess the health care industry has showered on Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus, and even though there's little question that these donations affect Baucus' stance on health care reform, there's still the question of why he accepts such massive donations to fend off non-challengers in Montana.
• I get that Eric Cantor's call for a "Judeo-Christian foreign policy" is little more than primitive tribalism. But outside of the Middle East, where "shared culture" is pertinent, what exactly would this foreign policy look like? Promoting the work of U.S.-based missionaries?
• Paul Krugman ponders the bizarre opposition to speculation in cap-and-trade legislation and concludes that it's effective regulation that matters, not that a market exists. Broadly speaking, I've never understood why markets illicit such strong emotional responses. On the one hand you have people who call markets "the most heartening intellectual development of our time" and on the other you have people who oppose them at any cost, even if it means the planet's peril.
• Remainders: Robert Byrd returns to the Senate; Roll Call buys out Congressional Quarterly; Michael "I don't do policy" Steele attempts policy with predictable results; Politico could really use a fact-checker; Bobby Jindal is without shame; and Dick Cheney asks for -- and receives -- an extension on Secret Service protection.

--Mori Dinauer

Yesterday, California lawmakers reached an agreement to close the state’s $26 billion deficit, primarily through deep budget cuts. Education took the biggest hit by far: $6 billion in cuts to K-12 education, with another $2.8 billion from the state’s colleges and universities. While Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic legislators alike have tried to paint the deal as one of “shared sacrifice,” it’s clearly the state’s students and recipients of government services who will pay the price for California’s broken budget process.

Cuts in education are particularly crippling for a state that already has its share of troubles in that department. An article today by California Lt. Gov. John Garamendi argues that California's economic future depends on investments in education, suggesting that the state cannot hope to move forward unless it reverses these trends. In many districts, California’s high school dropout rate is over 20 percent. The “slow starvation” of the state’s community colleges and universities has gotten so bad that the California State University system (CSU) will turn away 35,000 qualified students this year. California spends $5,000 less per student today in constant dollars than it did 20 years ago, while student fees at the state’s colleges have doubled or tripled. Research shows that if the state does not act soon to graduate more students, by 2025 California will have one million college graduates fewer than required to keep pace with economic growth. “In all my decades of public service,” Garamendi writes, “I've never seen a situation so dire.”

All this underscores the perverseness of the budget rules under which most states operate, which force them to balance budgets, no matter what the cost to their residents. In this case, lawmakers were forced to make impossible choices to cut essential services, not only by a short-sighted governor who refused to raise taxes, but by budget rules that push the state to take steps that will amplify the effect of the recession and inhibit its ability to crawl out of the hole.

As James Surowiecki points out in this week’s New Yorker, states’ budgetary crises are the result of fiscal federalism run amok. Fiscal policy on the national level is counter-cyclical (as the economy contracts, government spending increases to counteract the effect). But states must be pro-cyclical to balance budgets during a downturn, cutting services and/or raising taxes, which magnifes the effect of the recession. This “push-me, pull-you” approach to the recession is completely self-defeating. No wonder Surowiecki considers state governments to be the 50 most serious obstacles to economic recovery.

--Marie Diamond

Lately, it's become accepted wisdom that D.C. is a work oasis among the dunes of unemployment. The financial sector is busted; manufacturing is dying; retail is in rough shape; etc. But government! That's still growing, and thus Washington should be, too.

Politico just ran a piece spinning its own version of the Beltway boom story. Victoria McGrane reports that, courtesy Uncle Sam's largesse, the Washington metro region's unemployment rate of 6.2 percent is well below the national average of 9.5 percent. She glosses over the question of why unemployment in the District has risen to a staggering 10.9 percent while the regional rate remains low (chalk it up to "persistent sociological conditions"). Instead, it seems that the real story is that some Republican members of Congress are miffed that federal money is helping keep the wider area's economy afloat.

Christopher Lee of New York complains, "What frustrates me so much is you look at Washington and you realize how out of touch we are. This is one of the only cities that’s growing." Meanwhile, Candice Miller of Michigan calls Washington a "different world." And Mark Souder of Indiana's upset that public works spending in D.C. was even discussed during the stimulus debate:

“I’m sitting there with RV plants shutting down, parts people going down, GM plant furloughing people for 11 weeks ... and we’re talking about fixing the pond around Jefferson Memorial and planting trees on the way down to the Lincoln Memorial?” recalled Souder.

He said his constituents saw the Mall money, which was ultimately stripped out, and other stimulus items as money that would benefit the bureaucracy and the D.C. region — which is already fat on government jobs.

The question he heard: “Aren’t they thinking where they’re putting the money” for where the jobs are needed?

To answer that question: yes, actually. "They," which I believe refers to the Washington establishment and should thus include Souder, are. Indiana, Michigan, and New York were rightfully all winners when it came to stimulus funding, each receiving more than the national average of $1,750 per person, making the whining about getting shafted compared Washington seem a little bit disingenuous. Especially given that Souder -- along with Lee and Miller -- voted against the stimulus bill.

Plus, while it's easy to poke fun of things like planting trees, these are exactly the type of projects that employ those who most need work. These aren't jobs reserved for the bureaucratic boogeyman; they're meant for the people McGrane describes as "most vulnerable to recession." While Washington may often stand in for the idea of big government, it's also a city with a broken education system and stark socioeconomic inequality that's long suffered in comparison to its suburbs. The citizens of, say, neighboring Arlington County, where the unemployment rate is 4.5 percent, might not be aching for support, but District residents need it as much as Souder's constituents do.

But no matter, right? All's well when you can simultaneously maintain a reputation for fiscal responsibility, secure funding for your district, and take Washington -- a city hurting as much as any other -- down a peg.

--Alexandra Gutierrez

It's hard to believe, but more conservative luminaries seem to be latching onto the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama is not a United States citizen. Despite the fact that his certificate of live birth has been released, and there was an ad in the newspaper announcing his birth several days after he was born, both Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh have now come out of the closet as full blown birthers. Dave Weigel reported earlier this week that moderate Republican Congressman Mike Castle was booed by birthers at a town hall meeting earlier this month.

I think the fundamental racism of this conspiracy theory is obvious--only prejudice can be so immune to facts. Still, I once believed that the insanity of these claims would discredit its proponents and the movement would die off after Obama actually took office. Instead, it's gained more prominent mainstream supporters, from the leader of the Republican Party to representatives in Congress to a CNN anchor. I'm not sure what the ultimate consequences of the birther movement will be, either for the Republican Party or the country as a whole. But I'm willing to be that as long as this insanity continues snowballing, it won't be good for either.

-- A. Serwer

Today's edition of TTR delivers the Recession-times case for equal pay, a look at the challenges of overseeing the Department of Homeland Security, the latest on foreclosures and a report on the relationship between the United States and India.

• Women bring home the bacon. The recession hurts families that increasingly rely on wives’ income, according to Heather Boushey at the Center for American Progress. The sharp rise in married couples who depend women to be the primary breadwinner holds true across demographic groups, and is the result of men experiencing greater job losses during the recession (men account for three out of every four lost jobs). There are 2 million working wives today with an unemployed husband. Since most families receive health insurance through husbands’ employers, and women still earn just 78 cents on the male dollar, this trend has put real strain on family budgets. In the average married household, where both spouses work, the wife brings home only 35.6 percent of the family’s income. When husbands lose their jobs, families must struggle to live on just a third of their prior income. Given a bleak employment market, Boushey predicts this situation is unlikely to change soon and suggests policymakers focus on pay and benefits equity now more than ever. -- MD
• Department of 5,000 Briefings. Health care reform legislation will move through five congressional committees before a final bill emerges -- now, imagine having to deal with 88 committees. The Department of Homeland Security does just that, according to a new investigative report by the Center for Public Integrity. DHS is answerable to some 88 congressional committees and subcommittees, placing a unique burden on the department and producing this mind-boggling chart. In 2007 and 2008, DHS officials attended more than 370 hearings and gave more than 5,000 briefings to 108 committees. Last Congress FEMA’s administrator testified before just 12 committees. Though proposals to simplify and streamline congressional oversight of DHS have been proposed, Members of Congress fighting for control have prevented a dedicated committee from being created. -- CKS
• Focus on foreclosures. Subprime lending from 2000 to 2006 led to a home-ownership boom that was, for many families, a dream come true. Now, after the collapse of the housing market, the Urban Institute examines the impact of foreclosures on families and communities. Drops in housing prices and rising foreclosure rates are more prevalent in some regions than in others, they find, and a single foreclosure costs an estimated $79,443 in total to the community. The study compares impacts of foreclosure on different types of families, specifically renters, children, and the elderly -- groups often overlooked in the foreclosure legal process. It also looks at the shared consequences of foreclosure: declining property values, crime, social disorder, population turnover, and fiscal stress on local governments. -- CIA
• The India angle. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the United State's relationship with India is more important than ever, particularly on issues of global warming, counter terrorism, and international trade. With India emerging as a global economic power, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent trip to the country was an opportunity to establish a more robust global partnership. The report suggests compromise with New Delhi on key portfolios, including arms treaties and, more importantly, climate change; bilateral treaties and investor protection are vital for accommodating conflicting national interests. The memo also points to the potential in jointly funded initiatives for agriculture and education, citing the 2008 Fulbright-Nehru fellowship as an example of possible expansion in higher education exchanges between the two nations. -- AS

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
7/14/09
7/7/09

If you’re over 30 and struggling with debt, your mortgage, or unemployment, you should seek help. If you’re in your 20s, though, you should suck it up. Your financial woes are all in your head.

That’s the thrust of Kimberly Palmer's argument in U.S. News. In "A Financial Roadmap," she suggests that young people’s difficult financial situations are really just a matter of perspective. As she's said before, young people’s high hopes create despair.”

Palmer suggests that young people should adjust “overblown expectations” (like wanting to own a home before having children), “steer clear of debt,” and “appreciate what you have” to mitigate financial struggles.

Aside from that being poor advice, her view of young people is too narrow. As I wrote last week of “generation gurus,” the conversation is again focused on the upper-middle class, not on the majority of young people who are truly struggling. Certainly, there are young people who graduated from college expecting to own a home immediately and lead lives of unrestricted opulence. But then there’s everyone else. On average, young people carry $28,000 of student debt and $5,500 of credit-card debt. They also have the highest unemployment rate of any age group (nearly 20 percent in some estimates) and the second-highest rate of bankruptcy.

Young people need help. Here are two pieces of the real financial roadmap that can help millennials struggling with finances:

• Financial education: Only three states require dedicated financial education courses for high school students. According to a report on young people’s debt by Demos, 96 percent of college students have credit cards -- and many get them when still in high school. Credit card "bills of rights" and loan repayment programs are of little use if no one knows how to take advantage of them.
• Reforming college costs: The recent expansion of Pell grants and the introduction of income-based loan repayment are steps in the right direction, but they’re not enough. Loan reforms, grant expansions, and tuition reduction are necessary to help students get the cost of higher education back under control.

--Christopher Sopher

Over the next year, the Office of National AIDS Policy, led by Dr. Jeffery Crowley, will come up with a strategy for fighting HIV in the United States. That project is long overdue. While the Bush administration devoted unprecedented resources to combating HIV/AIDS in the developing world, it largely ignored the epidemic here at home. Over 1.1 million Americans live with HIV. In 2006, over 56,000 new infections were recorded. And the disease is increasingly associated with minority communities and the poor; in Washington, D.C., the major American city with the highest HIV/AIDS rate, 4.3 percent of all African Americans are infected. Among black men in D.C., 6.5 percent are HIV-positive.

Internationally, the HIV-prevention method gaining the most momentum -- and attracting the most press -- is male circumcision. A series of studies conducted in Africa found that circumcision decreases female-to-male HIV transmission by as much as 60 percent. That is because the cells of the foreskin are especially susceptible to infection. (Women though, aren't any less likely to contract HIV from circumcised men.) Since 2007, the World Health Organization has strongly recommended circumcision, calling the new research on the procedure "an important landmark in the history of H.I.V. prevention."

Considering this evidence, should circumcision-promotion be among the policy levers the Obama administration considers? As New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg learned two years ago, when he created a maelstrom by asking the city health department to encourage the procedure, American public health efforts must tread carefully around this issue. The promising circumcision research was conducted entirely in Africa, largely among heterosexuals. In the United States, HIV continues to disproportionately affect the gay community. In 2005, half of all new cases were among men having sex with men, compared to 33 percent among heterosexuals engaged in what the CDC calls "high risk" behaivor -- a woman who has unprotected sex, for example, with a man who is also having unprotected sexual e