Reuters reports that a coalition of pro-choice Catholic groups has published an open letter to the Pope, calling on him to lift the ban on Catholic use of contraception. (Letter here). Nearly all sexually active Catholics use birth control and 75 percent of Catholics already think that it's possible to be a good Catholic and disobey Church teachings on the matter, which were created over the objections of many high officials forty years ago.

If you're not Catholic or just a committed secularist, you may not care, but you ought to: Lifting the ban would have great positive consequences for HIV/AIDS prevention, ending poverty and empowering women not just in the U.S. but especially in developing countries. While liberals typically make our milieu the government and policy world, it's important to remember that older cultural institutions often have just as much effect on the same challenges. The organizations that had that letter published deserve credit for being a liberal voice for social justice in an institution that doesn't welcome them, instead of simply using their option for exit, especially because so many people -- especially women -- don't have that option.

--Tim Fernholz

Some eminently predictable buyer's remorse:

When President Bush tapped Michael B. Mukasey to lead the scandal-plagued Justice Department nine months ago, Senator Charles E. Schumer could not say enough good things about his fellow New Yorker. Mr. Schumer ran out of time in ticking off Mr. Mukasey’s accomplishments at his Senate hearing, and the senator’s vote of support ensured his confirmation as attorney general.

Yet at a hearing this month, face to face with his pick for attorney general, Mr. Schumer, a Democrat, did not hide his disappointment in what he saw as Mr. Mukasey’s reluctance to move more aggressively in investigating accusations that the Justice Department had brought politically inspired prosecutions against Democratic politicians.

Mr. Schumer was still fuming a short time later as he went to the Senate floor for a vote. “That was terrible,” Mr. Schumer told a colleague privately in assessing Mr. Mukasey’s performance, an official privy to the conversation said.

--Scott Lemieux

• In addition to giving a presidential-sounding speech in Berlin today, Barack Obama has put together a presidential transition team, something usually done by a president-elect, rather than a candidate three months before the election has taken place. Of course, not everyone is excited about Obama's confidence (see Corner, The). In the words of John Derbyshire "Is it just me, or have presidential candidates been getting worse and worse these past few decades? These two are appalling. I shall not vote for either. Fact, I wouldn't trust either of them to mail a letter."
• I know we've all been thinking it would be entertaining if Bobby Jindal were McCain's VP pick, but the Louisiana governor is adamant: "Let me be clear: I have said in every private and public conversation, I’ve got the job that I want. And I’ll say again on air: I’m not going to be the vice presidential nominee or vice president. I’m going to help Senator McCain get elected, as governor of Louisiana." Meanwhile CNN notes in an aside that Jindal is far more likely to get the keynote slot at the Republican National Convention, which, frankly, is a far more appropriate role for him.
• John McCain has proven himself not only a worthy news cycle grabber, responding to Obama's Berlin speech by watching it in a German restaurant in Ohio, but also a savvy adman, as in this new campaign video associating Obama with Fidel Castro (saith Castro, "[Obama] is the most advanced candidate." Ouch!)
• Chris Bowers has a compelling post on the role of third party candidates in this year's presidential election. The bottom line: Ralph Nader actually helps Barack Obama by over two percentage points.
• A new NBC/WSJ poll gives Obama a 6-point national lead over John McCain, although voters consider Obama to be the "riskier" choice. Gallup's daily tracking poll, meanwhile, has Obama going from a 6-point lead four days ago to just a 2-point lead today. Politico reports on Obama's large edge amongst Latino voters, and a new flurry of Quinnipac polls show McCain gaining in four swing states, including a 2-point lead in Colorado, 46-44. John Sides cautions, however, that "In 2 of these 4 key states, there has been no meaningful change, given the inherent sampling error in polls. In both Michigan and Wisconsin, McCain’s share is unchanged; Obama’s is down 2 points" and "Only in Colorado does this poll’s numbers appear to conform to a trend."
• The Arizona Republic reports that Obama has been quietly raising big money in Arizona, even more than Sen. McCain has for his presidential campaign.
• The Democratic Strategist makes the "case against McCain -- for women," citing recent polling and an In These Times cover story by Prospect alum Kate Sheppard.
• The GOP might be losing the new media war, as this Politico story reports, but it sure isn't losing its need to deify Ronald Reagan. Grover Norquist, clearly having way too much time on his hands, resurrects a decade-old quest: getting the Gip on the ten dollar bill. Take that, Alexander Hamilton!

--Mori Dinauer

Yesterday Rich Byrne explained the politics of the arrest of Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic:

Even the choice of Karadzic as the first to be arrested has the feeling of a test balloon. Karadzic's main constituency was in the Serbian portion of Bosnia. He was not a military officer, like his fellow indictee, Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic.

Sarah Posner had the latest on the religious right:

While it's no surprise that McCain, with his medieval record on women's health issues, would not address the issue, the "abortion reduction" wing of the Democratic Party could seize this opportunity to prove its mettle on contraception.

And Simon Lazarus reported on Congress' clash with the Supreme Court over consumers' rights:

The fractious finish of the Supreme Court's 2007-2008 term, coupled with new rumblings on Capitol Hill and the prospect of expanded Democratic gains in November, suggest that we could be at the brink of an epochal clash between the Court and the elective branches of government.

Today, Ilan Goldenberg explains why Maliki's endorsement of Obama's withdrawal plan is a good thing according to general Petraeus' counterinsurgency manual:

McCain is right that this is ultimately about Iraqi domestic politics. But insurgencies and counterinsurgency strategies are, at their very core, all about domestic politics. A close study of the Army's own Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine suggests that the Maliki government's position should be recognized as an important and positive development.

Abby Rapoport talks with campaign-finance guru Thomas Mann about what's next now that Obama and McCain have shattered the current system:

My inclination is not to go back in and say what can we regulate now? Mine is to say, let's acknowledge two big things happening. One, the courts have made it absolutely clear that parties, political parties, can spend as much as they want as long as they do it independently, on behalf of their candidates. Which means there's no way now that you can control spending. That's an important point to keep in mind. The second one is that we've seen just the first evidence of the possibility of a very different source of funding for campaigns -- namely small donors.

And Dean Baker has the latest economic news:

Even though McCain's drilling agenda actually has nothing to do with the price of gas, he likely bet that the media would never be so rude as to point this fact out to the public. Thus far, McCain is winning that bet.

Subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they’re published.

--The Editors

Over in Klein-land, Ezra points out that small-donor fundraising must be even more effective than we thought since the Obama campaign seems to have enough cash to bribe God to bathe today's speech in Berlin in a golden glow you normally don't see outside of a bowl of melted butter. I think he's neglecting to realize that, as the messiah, Obama is eligible for a generous friends-and-family discount.

--Sam Boyd

Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner have named a group dominated by ex-representatives (including Abner "nobody that nobody sent" Mikva) to run the new Office of Congressional Ethics including Republican former CIA Director Porter Goss who will co-chair the office with democratic ex-Rep. David Skaggs. Recall that Goss was one of the main backers of the USA PATRIOT act which sadly didn't seem to keep him in Bush's good graces as the president replaced Goss with Gen. Michael Haydon soon after. Goss was also against a public 9-11 commission. He finally got the boot from Bush after the FBI raided subordnate Dusty Foggo's office and home and connected Foggo to the Brent Wilkes/Duke Cunningham scandal. He sounds like the perfect guy to lead an ethics oversight office.

--Daniel Strauss

One thing I noticed about Obama's speech in Berlin was how good he is at bringing up the topics his hosts would rather were left unsaid. He did it was his Father's Day speech, and at various education unions. But to bring up, in Germany, where anti-Muslim sentiment and xenophobia are prevalent, how "the walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand" is impressive. Even better was when the senator observed "that just as American bases built in the last century still help to defend the security of this continent, so does our country still sacrifice greatly for freedom around the globe." As the crowd applauded that sentiment, Ezra Klein observed in real-time that he "just got them to clap for the Iraq war." That, my friends, is public diplomacy.

--Tim Fernholz

It’s pretty rare to go to an edu-wonk event here in Washington, D.C. and talk openly about the right of poor children to sit in classrooms alongside middle class ones. So kudos to Columbia University Teacher College’s Richard Colvin. Moderating an event on education and the next president at the New America Foundation today, Colvin asked Lisa Graham Keegan, McCain’s top education adviser, and Jon Schnur, an Obama adviser, whether their respective candidates support intra-district transfers between failing urban schools and high-quality suburban ones.

No Child Left Behind does have a transfer provision that, technically, makes such moves possible. But due to underfunding and lack of publicity, only 2 percent of eligible students have taken advantage of the policy. Would Obama or McCain change that? “I don’t know,” said Schnur, the Obama rep. Keegan replied with a simple, “Yes.” But chatting with Matt Yglesias after the event, Keegan said that in fact, McCain doesn’t support anything more drastic that what is already included in NCLB.

In other words, neither of these candidates is embracing the socioeconomic integration of American schools. Kevin Drum suggests today that such a goal is hopeless, due to the geographic patterns of poverty within cities. In actuality, mid-size cities such as Washington, D.C., with contiguous, affluent suburbs, would lend themselves quite nicely to intra-district transfers, and even the creation of more regionalized school districts. In Hartford, Conn., a comparable city, there’s a popular, over-subscribed program that allows suburban kids to transfer into high-quality, diverse urban magnet schools, and city kids to transfer into traditional suburban high schools. The barrier to enacting such programs isn’t just geography or the concentration of poverty, but also resistance from many suburban parents who, frankly, don’t want poor, sometimes troubled kids in their own children’s schools.

--Dana Goldstein

A key part of each Presidential candidate's foreign policy is recommitting to the conflict in Afghanistan. That's good at first glance because of the area's key strategic importance and the humanitarian problems there. But the conflict Afghanistan is worryingly reminiscent of Iraq, and we shouldn't forget about the terrible quagmire the Soviets found there in the late seventies and early eighties -- see Juan Cole via Andrew, or this piece.

I e-mailed Caroline Wadhams, an Afghanistan expert, and asked her why escalation in Afghanistan would be different from Iraq or the Soviet experience. One factor that jumped out at me is the polling [PDF] -- 65 percent of Afghans still view the U.S. favorably, even as the increase in Taliban strength has led to a decline in our popularity there. Wadhams also points out that this is a much more international effort and is perceived as such. Further, many programs are Afghan driven, from the National Solidarity Program to the Afghanistan National Development Strategy, a five-year plan developed by the Afghan government in consultation with the Afghan people. And finally there has been some development success there in terms of getting children in schools, increasing health care and improving infrastructure.

Wadhams also writes this: "We know what happened when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 1996. All of the same forces are at play in the region in 2008. Why wouldn’t another September 11th happen again?" Hopefully we have better security in place now to prevent a similar terrorist attack from around the world, but it doesn't seem wise to let Afghanistan revert into a failed state-terrorist nest.

--Tim Fernholz

Barack Obama just gave his speech in Berlin, watched by a massive crowd that stretched beyond the reach of CNN's cameras. The address was called "A World that Stands as One" and it showed: In his second paragraph he proclaimed himself a "citizen of the world" and he continued throughout the speech to emphasize themes of global unity and interdependence. Strikingly, he tied the freedom of "the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe" to the freedom of all, and emphasized the importance of "common" and "shared security". 

It's not quite world federalism, but it's a very strong version of liberal internationalism, and the most expansive, bold view of the international system's importance I've ever seen an American politician express. It's of a piece with the focus on interconnectedness found in Spencer Ackerman's April Prospect cover story, "The Obama Doctrine."

The Washington Post has the full text, which I've posted after the jump.

--Dylan Matthews

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It's easy enough to criticize the diversion of $230 million earmarked for Pakistani counter-terrorism efforts to the upgrade of Pakistan's F-16 force, but I'm not sure that it really leads anywhere. To be sure, the F-16s will be of minimal use in a counter-insurgency role (although it's fair to say that improved targeting systems are a good thing for this kind of warfare), but Pakistan has been extremely reluctant to use the money we've sent since 9/11 for anything of actual value to the fight against insurgents.

The problem, in the end, is political; the Pakistani state has good political reasons for not trying to exercise control over portions of its territory, and giving it money and telling it to fight insurgents isn't going to resolve that issue. This is true no matter who runs Islamabad. At the same time, we need Pakistani cooperation for a number of other reasons, so we can't just cut them off. Indeed, the closer we grow to India the more we're going to have to reassure Pakistan that we're not taking sides against it. This is, by nature, a frustrating, unsatisfactory, and complicated relationship.

--Robert Farley

Few phrases promise as much concentrated hilarity as “John McCain poster contest.” Indeed, the results are as, ahem, brilliant as one would expect. The first submission, with its “God-in-the-Heavens” imagery and “Peace Is Born of Wisdom” mantra, has already been roundly mocked, but let’s not forget the other gems here.

This one looks like the poster for the inevitable Oliver Stone biopic of McCain, and this copies a style with proven effectiveness -- Obama’s. This one portrays McCain watching himself just as attentively as he’ll have the NSA watch you, while this one promises “Integrity We Can Trust” as opposed to “Integrity That’s Filled With Lies”.

But my favorite has to be this one, which encapsulates both McCain’s almost instinctual belligerence and his total cluelessness about religion:

The reference, of course, is to “raising Cain”. Given that Cain is the progenitor of evil in Abrahamic tradition, this promises to be a somewhat controversial campaign pledge.

--Dylan Matthews

Yesterday John McCain took the whole vocabulary people use to talk about the War on Iraq and threw it out the window, all in order to explain away his claim that the Anbar Awakening was a consequence of the Surge even though it actually predated President Bush's announcement of the escalation. Read Ilan (and watch the amazing video) for the details: McCain is now claiming that 'surge' means 'counterinsurgency,' even though the entire country knows differently. It's long past time for any idea that McCain has more or better knowledge about Iraq to be discarded. It's even worse that McCain is subverting the national discourse on the most important foreign policy issue for this election -- this, from the candidate who "believes it is essential to be honest with the American people about the opportunities and risks that lie ahead."

--Tim Fernholz

Rumours of the DDG-1000's demise appear not to have been exaggerated; Defense News is now reporting that the Navy will ask that procurement of the remarkably expensive stealth destroyer be limited to two (down from initial plans for 32). Instead, the Navy will pursue the construction of additional DDG-51 (Arleigh Burke) class destroyers. DDG-51s have the advantage of being relatively inexpensive, practice tested (and thus unlikely to roll over in heavy seas), and capable of supporting a ballistic missile defense system, which the DDG-1000 is not.

Galrahn at Information Dissemination has a very detailed discussion of the debate between the DDG-1000 and the DDG-51. He also makes the point that the DDG-1000 has some powerful friends in Congress:

The DDG-1000 is such a massively expensive and complicated system that it is a fair bet some portion of the system development is taking place in Hawaii. Indeed virtually every state likely has an economic interest in the DDG-1000, and with many of the subcontractors of the DDG-51 no longer with a personal interest, politicians find themselves in a difficult position. They can either support a sea change in the Navy's current course, a decision absent the support of any specific constituency, or support the current course which has the side effect of supporting some specific local voting constituency.

--Robert Farley

The president has decided not to veto the Housing Bill that passed the House yesterday. So is it a good bill or not? Speaking to a few experts around town has led me to conclude it is an okay bill -- it will help allay the problems of the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the short term, but it doesn't offer long-term solutions to the problem of affordable housing or go as far as progressives might want it to go in the near term.

I'll leave an explanation of the details of the bill to David Abromowitz, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress:

Given the mortgage meltdown and plunging housing market, this is basically a good bill. In particular, it puts $4 billion into communities hard hit by foreclosures for buying up vacant properties and getting them back into affordable ownership or rental, which is essential to keeping hundreds of neighborhoods from sinking towards long term blight. …[t]he bill also offers consumer-friendly fixed rate mortgage refinancing options, to replace the high cost mortgages often with springing interest rates, that are dragging millions of families towards foreclosure.

Still, this bill, while addressing the immediate crisis, does not address a bigger question: What will make an apartment or house more affordable to the vast middle tier of families, straining to pay for shelter? We have close to 100 million Americans living in housing where the families are paying more of their income than is affordable to keep a roof over their heads.

I also spoke with Barbara Sard at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, who noted some problems with the bill. First off, only about 400,000 households will be able to refinance their mortgages under the legislation, out of 2.2 million expected foreclosures next year (though 20 to 40 percent of those are rentals which aren’t targeted by the legislation). Sard noted that the refinancing portion of the legislation is not a corporate giveaway: lenders can't access government subsidies unless they refinance mortgages at current, lower rates, eating some of the loss. But there's no guarantee that they'll do this because House Dems were unable to insert coercive measures to enforce refinancing at current rates. At this point, it's hard to say whether the bill will halt enough foreclosures to have a significant economic effect.

Our own Dean Baker strongly dislikes this bill because of the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac stockholder bailout, among other reasons. But we’re still not sure how likely it is that the government will need to bail out F&F -- the CBO puts the chances at even, and their stock prices rose yesterday.

But most on the left are disappointed because Democrats didn't get more out of the bill in exchange for the bailout. There are too few restrictions attached to the various corporate bailout and refinancing portions of the bill, and the affordable housing fund isn’t as large as it could be -- Maxine Waters originally proposed $15 billion which was bargained down to $4 billion. But the price of holding out for a better bill against a potential veto even as foreclosures continue might not have been worth the final result. A key problem is that the public good of homeownership is tied up in a lot of private interests, which makes it difficult to use policy tools to help one without helping the other. It would have been smarter to simply keep F&F as federal entities that were entirely dedicated to homeownership. But, as Abromowitz wrote me, “longer term we need to sort out the right balance of public benefit and private gain, but right now the stability in the market is the overriding goal.”

--Tim Fernholz

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Yesterday, on the 60th anniversary of the integration of the military, the House Armed Services Committee held a the first hearing to review President Bill Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

One of the opponents to gays serving in the military that testified was Elaine Donnelly, the president of the Center for Military Readiness. Donnelly seemed more than obsessed with the "sex" part of "homosexuals," as she always made sure to say. She claimed that by allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military, there would be an increase of "inappropriate passive aggressive sexual behavior common in the homosexual community."

Her definition of "passive aggressive" behavior is sexual conduct that "stops short" of sexual assault. She kept referring to the "close living quarters" military lived in and the "power of sexuality." In other words, Donnelly seems to think that gays and lesbians are unable to control their sexual conduct. She also seemed to think that by placing gays and straights in the same unit was some kind of undue hardship.

Congressman Chris Shays, a Republican from Connecticut who has called for the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" the acceptance of openly gay men and women in the military, sharply responded to Donnelly. He pointed out that there are already codes in place to penalize sexual misconduct in the military, so those who simply identify with a different orientation shouldn't be discharged. "Their conduct is what matters in the service," Shays said at the hearing.

Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) had introduced legislation that would repeal the "don't ask, don't tell" policy in the military. She compared the integration of openly gay men and women in the military to the integration of blacks into the military 60 years ago. It seems clear this legislation won't go anywhere before Bush leaves office, but perhaps the next administration will stop penalizing gays and lesbians for their identity.

--Kay Steiger

• Scott rounds up the relevant links pertinent to McCain's apparent ignorance of the basic chronology of the surge's effects. I think Ilan Goldenberg said it best: "As far as I'm concerned [this] disqualifies him from being President ... I have no choice but to conclude that John McCain has simply no idea what is actually happened and happening in Iraq." Even more disturbing, however, is the fact that CBS News deliberately edited the remarks out of the official interview. They have absolutely no business covering up McCain's obvious ignorance on a matter he has repeatedly claimed to be an expert on.
• With all the talk of Barack Obama's hubris/narcissism/etc., it's worth noting that McCain apparently suffers from the same affliction.
• Dave Weigel has been assiduously following the "Obama is foreign-born" conspiracy theory over in right-wing fantasyland, and doesn't disappoint with today's nugget.
• Patrick Ruffini, writing at the Next Right, takes Barack Obama to task for issuing fliers in German that advertise a speech he's giving...in Germany. Matt Yglesias' comments are worth reading on this matter, but I have to wonder what young conservative bloggers like Ruffini are trying to accomplish. The Next Right is supposed to be a first crack at organizing a formidable conservative Netroots, and while they do an admirable job of big picture strategy and analyzing politics at the district level, the best rallying cry they can come up with is to pander to the xenophobic? Seems to me that's the sort of sentiment you'd want to move away from in order to rebuild your shattered political coalition.
• John Sides at the Monkey Cage gives us a quick tour of an academic paper that concludes the so-called Wilder Effect -- when voters tell pollsters they'll vote for the black candidate, but don't at the polls -- has declined to irrelevance and that Obama is typically exceeding polling.
• Ron Paul's alternative convention in St. Paul appears to have the makings of a large distraction from the Republican National Convention, the NY Times Caucus reports.
• Gallup reports that Obama has increased his lead over McCain in purple states since clinching the nomination, and has extended his lead in blue states while closing the gap in red states. Meanwhile, Rasmussen has Obama up over McCain by 2 points in Florida, 49-47 (leaners included), and has him up 50-47 (with leaners) in Colorado. Public Policy Polling [PDF] has Obama up by two points in Virginia, 46-44. In New Hampshire, a Granite State Poll [PDF] has Democratic challenger Jeanne Shaheen beating incumbent Republican Senator John Sununu by 4 points, 46-42.
• George W. Bush will be a speaker at the Republican National Convention on September 1, Marc Ambinder confirms.
• And finally, The American Conservative asks, "Is California Keyes country?" And yes, that would be Alan Keyes.

--Mori Dinauer

The MSM likes to depict twenty-somethings as an elite, college-educated bunch worried about, well, nothing. But a new survey from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner finds that 18 to 34-year old Americans -- only about a third of whom hold a college degree -- are more worried about the daily costs of gas and food than just about anything else. On a scale ranging from 'freaked out' to 'slightly worried,' the 18 to 34 age group rank their anxieties as gas prices (43% are concerned), ability to pay bills (29%), finding a job (23%), and loans and debts (22%).

Roughly 21 percent of young adults are students. They have young families: 52 percent are married or living with a partner, and 45 percent have kids. Of course, like generations that came before them, most have likely not achieved their peak income. At the same time, they are entering their adult lives saddled with debilitating debt and a changing economy that offers fewer stable, good paying jobs, especially for young people without a college education. They simply do not know how they are going to make it all work out.

--Daniel Strauss

Jeff Lewis has a good article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on minimal vs. robust deterrence. The latter, advocated by folks like Albert Wohlstetter, asserts that nuclear deterrence is a delicate flower that will collapse if not nourished properly by thousands of warheads in multiple launch configurations. The former suggests that states that can be deterred from launching a nuclear attack will be so deterred by even a minimal chance of second strike response. Jeff Lewis is squarely in the latter category, as am I. The cost of absorbing a nuclear response from even a small nuclear power is so high, even for continent-spanning states, that a nuclear offensive will appear virtually suicidal. France, for example, could easily have destroyed the industrial heart of the Soviet Union if the Soviets (who had presumptive superiority) had launched an attack, even excluding the likely response of the other nuclear powers.

The question continues to have some policy relevance. For example, the irritatingly stupid arguments about how we need the RRW (Reliable Replacement Warhead) program in order to make our deterrent capacity credible vanish if minimal deterrence is taken seriously. Similarly, if minimal deterrence holds then there's no need for the United Kingdom to pursue ridiculously expensive replacements for its Vanguard class nuclear ballistic missile submarines; the need to hide from Soviet attack submarines has vanished, and no conceivable aggressor will be more deterred by the submarines than by some other, much cheaper delivery system.

--Robert Farley

Why, asks Mike Riggs at Reason, should people not be allowed to carry nooses around on public property when we let KKK members and flag burners do their thing in public?

I'll tell you why. Because people shouldn't have to live in fear for their lives. A rally is a political statement,  a noose is a threat -- just the same as a brandished gun or a burning cross. What other meaning could it possibly have? Riggs claims that the laws that ban nooses when used for "intimidation" are ambiguous, but I don't see how they possibly could be. Outside of a museum or a play, a noose in public is an explicit and clear suggestion of the possibility of racist violence.

--Sam Boyd

The increasingly Christian right-dominated Iowa Republican Party has banned Sen. Charles Grassley from being a voting delegate at the Republican National Convention. The speculation -- first fueled by the  Washington Times -- is that they're freezing him out because of his investigation of televangelists. Grassley later denied that his own party retaliated against him, and pointed out that other members of Congress won't be voting delegates either, including Rep. Steve King, long a favorite of the religious right.

Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee, whose own victory in the Iowa caucus was due to the Christian right political machine in the state, spoke at the state party's convention this month. Kenneth Copeland, the most defiant of the televangelists under Grassley's microscope, hosted Huckabee on his television program and helped raise money for Huckabee's campaign. Curious.

--Sarah Posner

Calling EPI today, I learned that the federal minimum wage is going up tomorrow, all the way to $6.55, but it's not going up that much: 23 states and the District of Columbia already have higher mandated pay rates. The raise only affects about 40 percent of the workforce.

This is not a living wage. Especially given rising costs, the trend in the past years[PDF] has been for wages not to meet productivity increases, much less inflation -- both important indicators of income inequality. A person working full-time at minimum wage cannot afford a non-government subsidized two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the United States -- and most low-income people live in non-subsidized housing. While any raise in minimum wage is a good idea in the current economic climate, it's important to keep in mind that this number is not pegged to inflation and still leaves a family of two below the poverty line.

"Congress should definitely review what workers really need to get by," Mary Gable, an EPI policy analyst, told me.

-- Tim Fernholz

This sad story just couldn't get any more D.C. Robert Novak is driving a black corvette on K Street. He hits a pedestrian crossing the street in a crosswalk with a "walk" sign. And then he speeds away...until a vigilante cyclist, who also happens to be a partner at lobbying/law firm Harkins Cunningham, uses his bike to block Novak from evading the police!

Politico recalls that this isn't Novak's first -- um -- run-in with the consequences of aggressive driving:

In 2001, he cursed at a pedestrian on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 13th Street N.W., for allegedly jaywalking.

“’Learn to read the signs, [bodily orifice]!’ Novak snapped before speeding away,” according to an item in The Washington Post’s Reliable Source column.

Novak explained to the paper: "He was crossing on the red light. I really hate jaywalkers. I despise them. Since I don't run the country, all I can do is yell at 'em. The other option is to run 'em over, but as a compassionate conservative, I would never do that."

Two years later, the same column reported that Novak had gone to a racing school in Florida.

"I've wanted to be a race car driver all my life, and anyone who has watched me drive can tell you that,” Novak said.

Wow. Somebody has a complex.

--Dana Goldstein

The news that John McCain doesn't understand even basic facts about the strategy around which he's conducting most of his campaign is obviously extremely important. First, CBS's judicious editing demonstrates the extent to which the media is still willing to cover for Maverick McStraightTalk. But more importantly, is also reminds us that Wes Clark was right. McCain's war heroism is admirable, and can even be seen as some sort of qualification for the presidency, but it most certainly does not constitute foreign policy expertise. In fact, McCain has both awful substantive views on foreign affairs and frequently has no idea what he's talking about. Given that he can barely even bother to pretend to know anything about domestic policy, this makes his case to be president exceedingly weak.

--Scott Lemieux

A WaPo editorial today characterizes Barack Obama's Iraq policy as "eccentric" -- not sure I've ever seen that word employed in political discourse before, so points for that -- but bases that judgment on two unusual criteria. One, that General Petraeus opposes a timetable; however, it's up to the Commander-in-Chief to set strategic goals. Two, and much less credibly, that "neither [do] Iraq's principal political leaders actually support his strategy."

Huh? Despite the Bush Administration's attempts to walk back Prime Minister Maliki's statement on withdrawal (the clarifying statement the Post refers to came from U.S. Central Command), it's clear that Maliki is sticking by his position. Reporters have listened to the tape of the interview to confirm the translation, and Maliki's office received a transcript to approve before the article went to press. It's clear that the Iraqi government supports Obama's strategic withdrawal along a very similar timeline. One wonders what word the Post will use to categorize McCain's policy when someone asks him whether he'll stick by his pledge to leave when Iraqi leaders request it. Peculiar?

-- Tim Fernholz

FEMA initially wasted tens of millions of dollars when it tried to aid Katrina victims. But now we find out that that one unknown federal offical's second-grade math skills aren't good enough to get people the aid they need. What was supposed to be $85 million in aid turned out to only $18.5 million due to a mathematical error which counted a single item as being worth as much as multiple items contained in a package of goods. For instance, in a package of sporks, each spork was counted as its own package, which inflated the value from $36,000 to $36 million. Many of the items were being stored in warehouses, rather than being distributed. A joint Congressional hearing on Thursday will examine the details of the give-away. Mistakes happen. But this is the second time in just a few weeks that FEMA officials embarrassed themselves. Basic competence, and learning from mistakes, doesn’t seem like much to ask for.

--Abby Rapoport

This has to be a joke:

Russian bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons could be deployed to Cuba in response to U.S. plans to install a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, a Russian newspaper reported Monday, citing an unnamed senior Russian air force official.

The report in Izvestia, which could not be confirmed, prompted memories of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear war after Nikita Khrushchev put nuclear missiles on the Caribbean island. The weapons were eventually withdrawn in an apparent Soviet climb-down, but President John F. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.

A spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry declined to comment on the report Monday, but did not deny it. Izvestia is often a forum for strategic leaks by Kremlin and other officials.

Via AG.

--Robert Farley

Some interesting stats, via Peggy Orenstein's Times Magazine essay on the normalization of assisted reproductive technologies over the last three decades:

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine has issued voluntary guidelines on the number of embryos doctors should transfer to help reduce the likelihood of multiples with their scary complications: prematurity, lung impairments, cerebral palsy. And death: twins are 6 times more likely and triplets 17 times more likely than singletons to die in infancy. Most reputable clinics observe the guidelines, but there’s always temptation to fudge. What if a couple has only enough money for one round of treatment and wants to be sure — really, really sure — that it works? Or a clinic’s success rates, which are posted on the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control, begin to founder and need a boost to stay competitive? Such pressures may contribute to the high rate of I.V.F. multiples produced in this country. Only 1 percent to 2 percent of naturally conceived children are twins. Among I.V.F. babies, it’s 32 percent.

Fascinatingly, though, in Europe, where universal health coverage pays for the cost of fertility treatments, the rate of multiples born from IVF is just 5 percent -- a staggering difference. Opponents of government guaranteed health care like to argue that when the public sector is footing the bill, consumers overspend, paying for treatments they don't really need. This is a counterexample: Because Europeans know they will be covered if they seek a second or third implantation procedure, they don't take the risk of implanting 5 or 6 fertilized eggs during one procedure, which leads to those risky (and expensive) twin and triplet pregnancies.

--Dana Goldstein

• The Politico reports on the mounting number of gaffes John McCain has made on the campaign trail, observing, "Ironically, the errors have been concentrated in what should be his area of expertise: foreign affairs."
• The Trail reports that Bush bundlers have raised nearly $26 million for the McCain's presidential campaign, even while the presumptive Republican nominee has kept his distance from the unpopular president.
• Adding another level of uncertainty on the precise status of Phil Gramm in the McCain campaign, Steve Forbes, another McCain surrogate, admits to Larry Kudlow that Gramm's advice remains "critical" to the campaign.
• Latest McCain line on Barack Obama: "It seems to me that Senator Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign." Marc Ambinder discovers a second instance of this new campaign meme on board the Straight Talk Express.
• Citizens United, a conservative non-profit group, is producing a documentary on Barack Obama set to air in October. Based on the previews, one doubts it will be flattering.
• The Boston Globe reports that Mitt Romney has written off the $45 million he loaned himself during his failed presidential run, and that by reclassifying the loans as contributions, it frees him to join a presidential ticket without the burden of settling personal debt. Hmm.
  
• Rasmussen has Barack Obama down 10 points (leaners included) in Ohio, 52-42, which is nearly the opposite of yesterday's PPP poll of the Buckeye State.
• David Plouffe is set to meet with the Democra