FRIDAY CATBLOGGING....This week was all about the evil eye. On the left, Inkblot is pretty plainly saying, "Dude, don't even think about blogging unless you find some other chair to do it in." Luckily I keep a spare chair around for just these circumstances.

On the right, Domino has taken possession of a box full of peanuts. She was so thrilled with it that she wouldn't even come out for dinner. I had to haul her out and plop her down in front of the dish. Inkblot looked on enviously as long as Domino was in the box, but after she left he just sniffed around a bit and then decided that the whole setup looked a little too scary to try. He's not a very courageous cat, our Inkblot.

PRIORITIES....Last month I linked briefly to a report by Daniel Kimmage of RFE/RL analyzing al-Qaeda's media and internet strategy. Marc Lynch has this to say about Kimmage: "There are very few people inside or outside the government who have worked harder or thought more deeply about how jihadists use online media, drawing on the original Arabic sources rather than from second and third-hand conjecture. It is clear that everyone working on the issue has learned a tremendous amount from those reports, even when we don't agree on how to interpret his findings."

You can guess the end to this story, can't you? He's been fired. Budget cutbacks. Apparently analyzing al-Qaeda didn't make the cut for FY08, priority-wise.

THE IRAQ ALBATROSS....Scott Lemieux on Hillary Clinton:

Admittedly, this is the kind of counterfactual that's impossible to prove, but my guess is that if she had voted against the war Clinton would be the Democratic candidate. Given the closeness of the race, her inherent advantages going in, and that the war had to be a liability it's hard to imagine that she wouldn't have prevailed without the Iraq albatross. Whether or not Clinton's support was sincere — I don't think it really matters — sometimes getting big policies wrong really is politically damaging.

I agree. Barack Obama is highly likely to be the next president of the United States because he opposed a dumb war. Democrats should take notice.

DEBT RELIEF....The latest rumor making the rounds is that maybe Barack Obama will pay off Hillary's $11 million loan to her campaign if she quits the race. I suppose that makes some kind of sense — and it would be a gracious and unifying gesture from Obama — but I'm not sure why Hillary would really be moved by this. She and Bill have earned over $100 million in the past few years and Bill obviously has tremendous earning capacity in the future. $11 million just isn't a big deal to them.

Or shouldn't be, anyway. But I suppose that kind of casual attitude toward money is one of the reasons I'm not rich.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, I want go on the record as being pretty unenthusiastic about an Obama/Clinton "dream ticket." It reminds me of the fabled Reagan/Ford dream ticket of 1980, and I'd say Reagan (and Ford) were smart to kill that idea. A strong vice president is one thing, but if you choose Hillary as a running mate you get the whole Clinton family in the bargain, and having Bill Clinton as a de facto part of the White House staff just smells like big trouble. That aside, the bigger issue is that picking Hillary would be a sign of weakness from Obama, and a completely unnecessary one. Obama certainly ought to reach out to Hillary once the primaries are over, but he can win in November on his own, and there are plenty of good, solid VP choices out there that would nonetheless make it crystal clear that an Obama White House would be an Obama White House.

What's more, Hillary can probably do more good in the Senate than she can from the veep's chair. I'd rather have her there anyway.

OIL PRICES AND DRIVING HABITS....So how much have Americans cut back on driving in the past few months? Here are a couple of data points.

First, on the right, is the weekly amount of motor gasoline produced in the United States as a percent of the amount produced in the same week last year. If you sum up the first 18 weeks of the year, gasoline production in the United States is down about 0.7% compared to the same period last year. This is a pretty rough measure of gasoline consumption, but still suggests that high prices have had only a fairly modest effect.

Second, via ThinkProgress, is a USA Today chart taken from Federal Highway Administration data. It only goes through February, but it's a more direct measure and suggests a reduction of about 5% in total miles driven. This is nothing to sneeze at. Sure, considering that gasoline prices have gone up about 50% since the beginning of last year, even 5% might not seem like much of a reduction. But if you add in population growth, it means that per capita miles driven is down about 6% compared to last year. If you then compare it to the 1.5% annual growth we've been experiencing for the past decade, it means that per capita driving is down about 7-8% from its trendline. That's the first time this has happened in a long time.

Still, there's a caveat. In Los Angeles, for example, driving is down and use of mass transit is up. But will it stay up?

Not everyone who switches to biking, walking or carpooling will stick with it, MTA spokesman Dave Sotero said. The MTA usually sees a temporary increase in riders when gas prices reach certain thresholds, like $3, $3.50 and $4 a gallon, he said. Then ridership goes down once people become accustomed to the higher cost.

If oil really does go up to $200 per barrel, maybe MTA will finally be able to hold on to a few of those new riders.

IRAN'S WEAPONS....Tina Susman of the LA Times reports that Iranian involvement in Iraq's civil war may not be everything it's been cracked up to be:

There was something interesting missing from Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner's introductory remarks to journalists at his regular news briefing in Baghdad on Wednesday: the word "Iran," or any form of it. It was especially striking as Bergner, the U.S. military spokesman here, announced the extraordinary list of weapons and munitions that have been uncovered in recent weeks since fighting erupted between Iraqi and U.S. security forces and Shiite militiamen.

....A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin.

When U.S. explosives experts went to investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all.

This item only showed up on the LAT's Iraq blog, not in a regular news piece. If it weren't for the blog, I wonder if we ever would have heard of this?

I DO NOT THINK THAT WORD MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS....The Wall Street Journal asked its panel of economists which presidential candidate offers the most responsible fiscal policies. Only 28 answered:

However, Sen. John McCain was the clear favorite of those who answered the question. Twenty-one economists [or] 75% of the respondents chose the Republican contender.

I guess blowing a $5 trillion hole in the budget and proposing a gas tax holiday counts as responsible among the WSJ's team. Maybe Hillary was right about economists after all. Via Krugman.

QUOTE OF THE DAY....From Judah Grunstein, commenting on Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's legal troubles:

I don't know a whole lot about Israeli campaign finance laws, but I imagine that suitcases full of cash that go undeclared until a police raid on your home probably violate them.

I dunno. Olmert sure doesn't seem to think so.

THE 100% AUCTION....Wait a second. Via Ezra Klein, Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center has this to say about cap-and-trade schemes for addressing global warming:

Cap'n Trade would work like this. The government would require companies to obtain permits that give them the right to emit a fixed amount of greenhouse gasses. The limit on emissions (the cap) would be gradually ratcheted down over the years until the overall amount of schmutz reached some agreed-upon level. A relatively clean company could sell (trade) its unused rights to pollute to a dirtier company.

The candidates have not said how they would distribute these permits. But they only have two choices. The government could auction those mandatory licenses, a process which would look an awful lot like a tax....Or, Washington could give the permits away based on prior energy use, which would generate a massive corporate windfall.

Unless I'm missing something, this just isn't correct. It's true that John McCain hasn't taken a position on how to distribute permits — though his past history strongly suggests that he'll go for the "massive corporate windfall" version. But both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have proposed cap-and-trade systems that auction 100% of all greenhouse gas permits. This is the very thing that makes their plans noteworthy.

A 100% auction is one of those technical details that usually gets lost in the shuffle of a presidential campaign. But it's not just a detail. It's the thing that distinguishes a real cap-and-trade plan from a fake one. Both Democrats have the beginnings of a real plan. The Republican candidate doesn't.

PROBLEMS IN ANBAR?....Is the Anbar Awakening coming unraveled? In the last four weeks nine U.S. soldiers have been killed in Anbar province. That's up from two in the previous six months. Something to keep an eye on. Via Robert Farley.

McCAIN CRAVENNESS WATCH....Speaking of craven pandering, Mother Jones and Brave New films have released a pretty good short video about one of John McCain's newest homies, the Rev. Rod Parsley. Compare and contrast. First, here's McCain on a stage in Cincinnati a few weeks ago:

"I am very honoured today to have one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide, Pastor Rod Parsley....I am very grateful you are here."

And now, the great moral compass himself:

"I do not believe that our nation can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam....I know that this statement sounds extreme. But I am not shrinking back from its implications The fact is that...America was founded in part with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed."

We have, of course, all gotten inured to this over the past few decades. Frothing at the mouth about Muslims and gays and baby killers and Hurricane Katrina just seems like normal stuff from crazy right-wing white preachers. But it's not normal. It's crazy, and John McCain used to agree that it was crazy. But now there's an election coming up, so he's delighted to cozy up with lunatics like Parsley and John Hagee.

This isn't just some dumb campaign gotcha, either. Unlike Jeremiah Wright's egocentric blatherings, which got truckloads of attention but don't, in the end, really matter, this does. That's why I chose to link to al Jazeera's report about McCain's appearance with Parsley in Cincinnati even though lots of other news outlets covered it too. One of the biggest foreign policy challenges Barack Obama will face if he wins in November is the fact that a very large number of Muslims believe that the United States is not merely fighting terrorism, but is engaged in a war against Islam. And why wouldn't they? Rod Parsley says so, and one of our presidential candidates is willing to get up on a stage, shake his hand, and call him a "moral compass." Andrew Sullivan, who is occasionally still readable when he takes a break from his 24/7 Hillary hatefest, gets it right:

And the truth is: the GOP is far, far more influenced by its religious fanatics than the Democrats by theirs'. And yet the right-wing extremist ranters are given a pass, as mainstream Republicans like McCain feel obliged to suck up to them. After what the right has done with Wright, they don't get a pass any more. The GOP needs to be held accountable for every religious extremist it panders to, especially when their sectarian rhetoric could impact the work of American foreign policy.

If McCain were serious about the war on terror, he'd stay a million miles away from a guy like Parsley. Instead he begs for his endorsement. It's an election year, after all.

MOVING ON....Hillary Clinton insists, unsurprisingly, that she's going to press on, but I wonder if the rest of us have to press on as well? Instead of continuing the internecine warfare of the past couple of months, maybe the best thing to do is to start ignoring her — perhaps the worst fate of all for someone who seems to gain strength via umbrage. So if she says something outrageous, who cares? Just shrug and move on. After all, Barack Obama is, at this point, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, so why not start treating him that way? There's really not much point in fanning the flames any longer.

McCAIN MAVERICKINESS WATCH....Is John McCain really a maverick? His home state newspaper investigates the cases where his vote actually made a difference:

Over the years, Sen. John McCain has publicly condemned Republican Party leaders and occasionally voted against the GOP on selected issues. But an Arizona Republic analysis of his Senate votes on the most divided issues in the past decade shows that McCain almost never thwarted his party's objectives.

....During the 10 years The Republic examined, McCain crossed over to vote with Democrats 19 times in 82 close votes. He did so just once in the four years he was running for president: 1999, 2000, 2007 and 2008.

What this really reveals isn't so much McCain's principles, conservative or otherwise, as his lack of them. During the six years he wasn't running for president, McCain publicly and gaudily promoted his maverick credentials by voting against his party 18 times. But in the four years he was running for president, Mr. Straight Talk suddenly became Mr. Straight Ticket, voting against the GOP only once.

Conclusion: he'll do whatever it takes to get your vote. During off years he pimps for the independent vote and during election years he pimps for the conservative vote. Sure, it's craven, but it's a nice gig if you can get away with it.

Via Steven Benen, who has more.

A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE....Iraq's foreign minister says he's caught in the middle of two quarreling giants:

Prospects for another round of talks between Iranian and U.S. officials soon appeared dead Wednesday after Iraq's foreign minister said tensions between Tehran and Washington made such a meeting impossible.

....The Iraqi foreign minister made it clear that his government found it maddening to be squeezed between two crucial allies who cannot get along. "The atmosphere of...media attacks, exchange of attacks and accusations and lack of trust and confidence....I don't think we will succeed in having the fourth round" of talks, he said.

When you get to the point of being lectured about political stubbornness by the Iraqi foreign minister, it's probably time to tone down the rhetoric.

NIXON LIBRARY UPDATE....When I blogged the other day about Matt Yglesias's talk at the Nixon Library on Wednesday, several commenters wanted to know what that was all about. The Nixon Library? Matt? Well, just for the record, it turns out that last year the library was transferred into the federal system and a new director, Tim Naftali of the University of Virginia, was hired. The old private foundation still controls a couple of buildings, but basically it's now a nonpartisan institution under federal control, just like all the other presidential libraries. Naftali told me that they're busily updating the displays and that Nixon's presidential papers, kept in Washington until now, will be shipped to California as soon as a new archive building is constructed. It is, one might say, the New Nixon Library.

So that's that. As for the talk itself, it went fine aside from a couple of odd harangues from the St. John's Wort dude. But even that, it turned out, just provided a bit of comic relief, so it wasn't all bad. Nickel summary: a militaristic foreign policy is bad and everyone should buy Matt's book. Or, at a minimum anyway, everyone should buy Matt's book.