CAT BLOGGING FRIDAY....REMOTE EDITION....Actually, if I felt like going to the trouble, I could do catblogging with Inkblot and Jasmine today. But accessing my desktop remotely is just too much trouble, and I&J have had their furry mugs displayed often enough anyway. A break would do their swollen feline egos some good.

Instead, I'll do remote catblogging today:

• Mary Kay Kare agrees that Inkblot and Jasmine are overexposed and urges everyone to come take a look at Loki and Dominic. Looks like it's still Christmas at MK's house.

• Chris Tweney's cat Zoom looks a lot like Inkblot. You can see him here and here.

• John Farr finally got pushed over the edge last week and decided to join the catblogging craze sweeping the nation. Hobbes and Sherlock are here.
  

There you go. If you're not too lazy to click a few links you've got a full Friday's worth of catblogging right there. Use it wisely.

TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION DEPARTMENT....One of the great unreported stories of our time is how conservatives have made it almost impossible for liberals to make jokes anymore. Consider my previous post. After complaining about yet another attempt to remove evolution from state teaching guidelines I said:

Next up: parents dislike the proposition that white people used to enslave black people, so the word "slavery" will be removed from the Georgia curriculum. After all, it's just a buzzword!

I guess I missed it, but in comments Dave Morgen points out that Georgia has a new high school history curriculum proposal too:

In the proposed changes, teachers will spend two or three weeks discussing the foundation of our country, with the remaining time devoted to studying events from 1876 to the present.

....Search in vain for discussion of the Civil War; that topic is off limits. In a course entitled "American History," students will not study our most devastating war. There is no mention of Fort Sumter, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee or anything else associated with those years.

Dammit, I was joking! Or trying to, anyway. But how can you make a joke when conservatives continually manage to make real life stranger than fiction?

Anyway, it's probably just a coincidence that the period from 1800 to 1876 is the one that got dropped. We liberals tend to get awfully paranoid about these coincidences, don't we?

EVOLUTION AND MEDICARE....I just have time for a couple of quick hits:

• Via Crooked Timber, Georgia's state school superintendent has proposed removing the word "evolution" from the state curriculum:

  [Kathy] Cox repeatedly referred to evolution as a "buzzword" Thursday and said the ban was proposed, in part, to alleviate pressure on teachers in socially conservative areas where parents object to its teaching.

  "If teachers across this state, parents across this state say, 'This is not what we want,' then we'll change it," said Cox, a Republican elected in 2002.

  It's just a buzzword! And if parents don't like it, we'll remove it!

  At least Cox deserves points for honesty. No prattling about how evolution is "just a theory" or some such juvenile nonsense. No, it's just that parents don't like it. Next up: parents dislike the proposition that white people used to enslave black people, so the word "slavery" will be removed from the Georgia curriculum. After all, it's just a buzzword!

• In what will come as a shock to literally dozens of people, it turns out the Bush administration lowballed the cost of its Medicare legislation and now believes that its Medicare bill will cost $530 billion instead of $400 billion. This comes a mere two months after the legislation was passed.

  Why the suddenly higher estimate? The official answer is "Give us a break, this stuff is really hard," but the experts interviewed by the New York Times suggest that it's because the law encourages participation in private plans. That's funny, isn't it? I thought that the wonders of the free market were supposed to make those private plans less expensive than government plans. I guess it didn't work out that way.

That's it for now, although I do have a question for my readers. I'm in our nation's capital right now, and outside on the streets there is some peculiar white substance all over the place. It's very cold to the touch, but if you pick it up it melts and becomes some kind of colorless, odorless liquid. Is this the long-awaited al-Qaeda WMD attack we've been worried about for so long? If so, the natives seem to be taking it very calmly.

SULLIVAN CORRECTS HIMSELF....This is peculiar. Andrew Sullivan has published a correction of his criticism of Paul Krugman yesterday, but here's what it says:

In tackling Krugman, I committed an error of hyperbole. I wrote that he had said that the "entire reason" for the deficit was tax cuts. He said the "main reason." He did, however, omit any reference to the vast increase in discretionary domestic spending under Bush.

Good for Sully for correcting himself (honest!), but what's the point of doing it if he continues to screw up what Krugman said? In fact, Krugman specifically mentioned increases in defense and homeland security spending, which are the bulk of the discretionary increases we've seen from Bush.

Weird.

TOM DELAY WATCH....Hey, the Long Beach airport has free WiFi access, at least for JetBlue customers anyway. That's pretty nice. Who cares if they turned over a few records to the feds as long as they do cool stuff like that?

Hmmm, so what to blog about until my flight boards? Choices, choices....

I know, how about this from Tom DeLay yesterday:

[Tax relief] helps us in our deficit problem. We are getting more revenue now into the government than if we had not cut taxes.

I guess my only question at this point is this: do you think he really believes this stuff? Or does he know he's just making it up? And which choice is scarier?

Of course, it goes without saying that Lou Dobbs didn't bother to challenge him on this....

(Thanks to KR in comments for the pointer.)

ON THE ROAD....I'll be out of town for the next few days. I'm taking the notebook with me and will try to get some posts in if I can find some WiFi hotspots to work with, but we all know what a crapshoot that is.

In any case, if blogging is light, that's why.

EXIT POLLS....Washington Post exit poll results for the New Hampshire primary are here. Discuss.

HUTTON REPORT FINALE....Tony Blair is having a good week. First he won a battle over university fees that he had been expected to lose, and today the final report of the Hutton inquiry cleared him completely of any wrongdoing in the death of David Kelly. He didn't expose Kelly's name, he didn't have any responsibility for Kelly's suicide, and he didn't "sex up" the WMD dossier issued in 2002.

The BBC, on the other hand, doesn't fare so well. Their editorial system was "defective" and they allowed pique to keep them from properly investigating claims that their reporter's notes didn't back up his story.

The full report is here (warning: large PDF file).

I'm in a hurry this morning and this is all I have time to post. It's been a while since I wrote about this, but off the top of my head I have these comments: (a) Hutton's criticism of the BBC is probably about right; (b) his conclusion that the government is not really responsible for exposing Kelly or causing his death is also right; but (c) the evidence that Blair wanted a punchier dossier seems stronger to me than it did to Hutton. There was some fairly damning testimony that at least a couple of very senior people doubted some of the claims in the dossier.

However, what's really remarkable about this whole thing is that the investigation happened at all. Whatever Blair's government did, their "sexing up" of the dossier was small beer indeed compared to what Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld did in the U.S. The fact that the British conducted an investigation over such relatively restrained meddling with intelligence conclusions is to their credit. Too bad we can't have one of our own.

FINAL ELECTION RESULTS....It looks the (more or less) final New Hampshire results are:

• Kerry: 39%
  

• Dean: 26%
  

• Clark: 13%
  

• Edwards: 12%
  

• Lieberman: 9%
  

Presumably Lieberman will now drop out, and for Clark and Edwards the next two weeks in the South and Midwest are make or break.

As for Kerry, I've never really warmed to him but I also don't have anything against him. In fact, the only thing I'm really worried about is that if he wins we'll be forced to listen to Kaus whining about his eyebrows or something for the next nine months. The thought just makes me shudder.

THE NEW ECONOMY....One of the downsides of being an enthusiastic participant in the high tech world for the past 20 years is that I have heard just about all the blather about the New Economy that I ever want to hear. It's not that computers and the internet and all that aren't genuinely revolutionary, it's just that....well....it's just that the blather during the late 90s became simply too much to bear. Those of you who were there know what I'm talking about; the rest of you should count your blessings that you don't.

Anyway, apparently Doug Henwood has written a rather good book, After the New Economy, skewering the worst of the high tech blather, and Kieran Healy has a nice review here. The rest of the Timberites have promised to chime in with their own thoughts, but Brad DeLong got impatient waiting around for them and added a review of his own here. More to come at Crooked Timber later this week, I presume.

As for me, I haven't read the book. But it sounds like I ought to.

POSTSCRIPT: I'm not going to try and make the whole case here, but I'll add my — not my two cents, perhaps, it's not worth that much — I'll add my one cent to a particular facet of the debate. I do believe that advances in computer technology are revolutionary and are likely to become even more revolutionary over the next few decades as increased computing power finally makes artificial intelligence genuinely feasible. Unfortunately, I also think that one of the results of this will be to increasingly marginalize unskilled and semiskilled workers in a way that has never happened before: they will be permanently marginalized. There will be no new industries for them to move to.

This will happen over the next 50 years or so, and while the endpoint may be well worth it, the transition is going to be brutal. Buckle up.

ELECTION RESULTS....Polls are closed. CNN's continually updated numbers are here. So far they match the exit poll numbers fairly closely.

SULLIVAN ON KRUGMAN....Andrew Sullivan today:

KRUGMAN BLAMES TAX CUTS: That's the entire reason for the deficit. Yeah, right. But how can he ignore the obvious place of exploding domestic discretionary spending under Bush? Well, we have long learned about the fragility of his intellectual honesty.

Here's what Krugman actually said:

A recent study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities does the math. While overall government spending has risen rapidly since 2001, the great bulk of that increase can be attributed either to outlays on defense and homeland security, or to types of government spending, like unemployment insurance, that automatically rise when the economy is depressed.

Why, then, do we face the prospect of huge deficits as far as the eye can see? Part of the answer is the surge in defense and homeland security spending. The main reason for deficits, however, is that revenues have plunged.

(Italics mine throughout.)

Did Sullivan read the same column as the rest of us? Krugman very clearly states that spending has "risen rapidly" and that revenue shortfalls are only the "main reason" for the growing deficit, not the entire reason. Was he just hoping that no one would click the link to see what Krugman actually wrote?

If you're interested, the CBPP report that Krugman relies on provides the following numbers (all are expressed as % of GDP):

• Spending increases: 1.6%
  

• Revenue decreases: 5.0%
  

• Total change: 6.6%
  

Thus, spending increases are responsible for 24% of the deficit and revenue decreases are responsible for 76%. What's more, Krugman is right to say that the "great bulk" of the discretionary increases are for defense and homeland security, things that Sullivan has enthusiastically supported. Since 2001, military/homeland security spending has increased about 16% per year while all other spending has increased only 5% annually.

If Sullivan really wanted to criticize Krugman, he could have pointed out that "revenues have plunged" is fairly slippery language. It's technically correct, of course, but at the same time it rather deliberately avoids making the distinction between how much revenues have fallen because of the recession vs. how much revenues have fallen because of the Bush tax cuts. Both are factors.

But I guess Sully prefers a lazy, cheap shot, even if it's wrong. Pitiful.

EXIT POLLS....Ah, what the hell. Here are the New Hampshire exit poll numbers so far:

1. Source: AP
   Kerry - 36
   Dean - 31
   Edwards - 12
   Clark - 12
   Lieberman - 6

2. Source: Not sure
   Kerry - 36
   Dean - 30
   Edwards - 16
   Clark - 10
   Lieberman - 6

3. Source: Probably ABC
   Kerry- 37
   Dean - 31
   Edwards - 12
   Clark - 12
   Lieberman - 7

4. Source: LA Times
   Kerry - 33
   Dean - 34
   Edwards - 12
   Clark - 11
   Lieberman - 9

5. Source: CBS
   Kerry - 37
   Dean - 30
   Edwards - 12
   Clark - 12
   Lieberman - 4

6. Source: 2:30pm exit numbers from who knows where, supposedly a network...
   Kerry - 35.7
   Dean - 30.6
   Edwards - 11.9
   Clark - 12.1
   Lieberman - 6.9
   

Take these for what they're worth, although I have to say that they're remarkably close. Here's the average of all six:

Kerry - 35.7
Dean - 31.1
Edwards - 12.6
Clark - 11.5
Lieberman - 6.4

DON'T MESS WITH AL....I guess Al Franken is Howard Dean's new bodyguard.

THE SCREAM™....It's really, really hard to keep up with the conventional wisdom about Howard Dean's infamous post-Iowa screamfest.

The initial CW was: what a loon.

Then The Scream hit the big time, repeated by every talk radio host and late night comic in the country. Revised CW: he's insane, unelectable, doomed, and unfit to be president.

Then people like me, who hadn't seen The Scream live, finally got around to watching it. Our CW: it didn't seem all that bad. Loud room, raucous crowd, plenty of energy. Sure, it might have been a little over the top, but not really worth all the attention it got.

Then the CW shifted again: Dean isn't doomed. In fact, a new, more serious Dean is now quietly gaining back support in New Hampshire.

Today, though, Matt Yglesias says we're all wrong: "I watched the thing live on television and it really was weird and frightening -- the initial CW was totally correct."

I'm so confused.

BUDGET MAGIC....A budget question from a reader:

After the SOTU, you ran a post on Bush's claim that by holding discretionary spending increases to 4 percent, the deficit will be cut in half in 5 years, showing this is highly unlikely.

Last night on the Newshour Margaret Warner asked [CBO Director] Douglas Holtz-Eakin about this claim and he said (approximately) "in 2009 the deficit will be 2% of GDP, it is now 4%, so it is cut in half". So apparently it boils down to what the definition of "half" is.

Many Bush supporters cite "percent of GDP" as a meaningful statistic in assessing the deficit, but is it?

Answer: Yes. In fact, percentage of GDP is probably the best way of looking at this.

But wait! A better question is, "Will Bush's policies actually lead to the deficit being reduced to 2% of GDP?" Answer: No. Not even close. Here are the numbers from the latest CBO report:

• This year's deficit: $477 billion.
  As percent of GDP: 4.2%

• 2009 "baseline" deficit: $268 billion.
  As percent of GDP: 1.8%

• 2009 real deficit: $552 billion.
  As percent of GDP: 3.8%
  

So using real numbers the deficit is reduced by a whopping .4% even when calculated as a percentage of GDP. This number is based on the CBO's own estimates of three things: (1) making the tax cuts permanent, a stated Bush policy, (2) reform of the Alternative Minimum Tax, and (3) discretionary spending rising at 4% per year.

(Note: the CBO report itself includes one deficit projection based on 2.5% growth in discretionary spending and another based on 4.8% growth in discretionary spending. My figure above is an interpolation that estimates the deficit if we assume Bush's goal of 4% growth.)

This is a far more realistic estimate. In fact, even keeping discretionary spending to 4% is pretty unlikely, and if you use the growth rate of the past few years instead (6.9%), you can tack on another 1% or so to the deficit number.

(Fairness alert: the Bushies say the CBO number is too high because it assumes we're going to spend $87 billion on Iraq every year. If you take that out it reduces the deficit a bit.)

Coming soon, of course, is the White House budget proposal, which will have its own deficit projections. You should expect the following smoke and mirrors:

• Projections of higher economic growth thanks to the magic power of tax cuts.
  

• Wildly unrealistic assumptions about spending restraint.
  

• No mention of AMT reform.
  

• Assumptions that military spending in Iraq drops to nothing in 2006 and beyond.
  

Whatever the assumptions, though, I predict that the deficit projection for 2009 will come in at precisely 2.1%. Amazing!

And of course the White House projections will stop at 2009, which is also mighty convenient since the real deficit problems don't start coming until the years after that. Moral of the story: keep your hands on your wallet whenever someone from the Bush administration opens his mouth. Under any remotely realistic scenario, their policies are sending the budget deficit on a permanent trip to the moon.

POSTSCRIPT: Max has more, including a pretty chart. His conclusions, however, are not so pretty.

WMD IN IRAQ....A FOLLOWUP....On Saturday I asked whether anyone besides Scott Ritter had publicly suggested that Iraq had no WMD back in September of 2002 (before the UN inspections began). My recollection was that back then everyone, even anti-war liberals, accepted the fact that Saddam had WMD stocks even if they disagreed about how important they were.

I got lots of comments, emails, and other blog posts about this, so I thought I'd follow up today with a summary of what everyone said. But before I do, a quick note on what questions I'm not asking. I'm not asking whether Iraq had delivery capability; I'm not asking whether Iraq posed a serious threat to anyone; I'm not asking if the administration exaggerated the CIA evidence; and I'm not asking whether any of this was a good reason to go to war. All I'm asking is a very narrow technical question: were there any serious analysts who publicly doubted the actual existence of WMD in Iraq?

On with the show:

• Via Tim Dunlop, here is British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in his resignation speech:

  Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of that term - namely, a credible device capable of being delivered against strategic city targets. It probably does still have biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions. But it has had them since the 1980s when the US sold Saddam the anthrax agents and the then British government built his chemical and munitions factories.

  Comment: Actually, Cook says here that Iraq does have WMD, and this was as late as March 2003. He merely doubts that they present much of a threat.

• Also from Tim, here is Australian intelligence officer Andrew Wilkie:

  Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program is, I believe, genuinely contained. There is no doubt they have chemical and biological weapons, but their program now is disjointed and limited. It's not a national WMD program like they used to have.

  Comment: Like Cook, Wilkie says Iraq does have WMD, it's just not very dangerous. And once again, this was in March 2003.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin:

  Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners as yet. This fact has also been supported by the information sent by the CIA to the US Congress.

  Comment: This is pretty good, especially since it's from October 2002. However, note that Putin followed by saying "We have apprehensions that such weapons might exist in Iraq."

• Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill:

  In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction. There were allegations and assertions by people....To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else.

  Comment: This isn't bad, but it fails on two counts: (a) it's recent, not from 2002, and (b) he doesn't clearly say he thought there was no WMD at the time. He says only that he didn't see convincing evidence.

• Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern:

  Until last week many Americans were inclined to take your top aides at their word that the looming war with Iraq is not about oil or vengeance but rather about Iraq’s continuing pursuit of “weapons of mass destruction.” Now all but the most unquestioning loyalists are having serious second thoughts.

  Comment: This isn't from 2002, it's from late January 2003, by which time the UN inspections had proceeded far enough that a lot of people were starting to get skeptical. What's more, even at that point all he said was that many people were "having serious second thoughts." That's hardly a definitive repudiation.

• Secretary of State Colin Powell:

  He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors

  And:

  And even though we have no doubt in our mind that the Iraqi regime is pursuing programs to develop weapons of mass destruction -- chemical, biological and nuclear -- I think the best intelligence estimates suggest that they have not been terribly successful. There's no question that they have some stockpiles of some of these sorts of weapons still under their control, but they have not been able to break out, they have not been able to come out with the capacity to deliver these kinds of systems or to actually have these kinds of systems that is much beyond where they were 10 years ago.

  Comment: This is from early 2001 and is of course especially damning coming from George Bush's own Secretary of State. At the same time, Powell does make it clear that he thinks Iraq still has "some stockpiles" of WMD. He just doesn't think they're much of a threat.

• Former UN inspector Rolf Ekeus:

  For me, I think it's a high probability that he has tried to strengthen his capabilities, especially production capability -- not so much to produce for storage, it's no idea to have large stocks of chemicals -- but production capabilities, and both with regard first to chemical weapons, but also with regard to biological warfare agents.

  Comment: I only included this because someone mentioned it in comments. It's from November 2002, and although Ekeus says prior to this that Iraq had very little left after the 1998 bombings, he obviously believes that they have likely restarted their programs.

• General Anthony Zinni, from a profile in the Washington Post:

  As chief of the Central Command, Zinni had been immersed in U.S. intelligence about Iraq. He was all too familiar with the intelligence analysts' doubts about Iraq's programs to acquire weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. "In my time at Centcom, I watched the intelligence, and never -- not once -- did it say, 'He has WMD.' "

  Though retired for nearly two years, Zinni says, he remained current on the intelligence through his consulting with the CIA and the military. "I did consulting work for the agency, right up to the beginning of the war. I never saw anything. I'd say to analysts, 'Where's the threat?' " Their response, he recalls, was, "Silence."

  Comment: this article was written recently but says that Zinni had doubts about Iraq's WMD in September 2002 and before. However, he doesn't appear to have stated those doubts publicly (although he did publicly state that he didn't think Iraq was a serious threat.)
  

This isn't exhaustive, but it covers most of the bases. Many thanks to everyone who took the time to send email or leave comments to the original post.

Conclusions: The CIA's estimate of Iraqi WMD in September 2002 was pretty clear. With high confidence they concluded that "Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions" and with moderate confidence they concluded that Iraq did not have the material to build a nuclear weapon. So while it's pretty clear that the OSP stovepiped questionable data directly to the White House and that the Bush administration exaggerated the CIA conclusions in some areas, notably with respect to Iraq's nuclear program, it's also clear that the CIA really did believe that Saddam had stockpiles of WMD and active WMD programs.

So who stood up at the time and said the CIA was wrong, that Iraq didn't have WMD stocks and programs? Only one: Vladimir Putin, and even he qualified his doubts. In addition, Zinni says now that he had doubts back in 2002 and O'Neill says now that he never saw anything convincing.

These quotes also show at least two additional things: (a) even among analysts who agreed that Saddam had WMD there were plenty of people who doubted that it was a serious threat, and (b) skepticism about Saddam's WMD programs grew considerably when the UN inspections turned up emptyhanded in January and February of 2003. My skepticism certainly grew considerably.

And with that, I think I'll call it quits on this topic. Just remember to keep it civil in comments, OK?

KERRY BY A LANDSLIDE?....Kos has the final tracking polls for New Hampshire, and if you just average the numbers together — which we will consider good enough for the usual sloppy blog coverage you expect here — this is how things shape up:

• Kerry: 35%
  

• Dean: 22%
  

• Clark: 13%
  

• Edwards: 12%
  

• Lieberman: 8%
  

Of course, everyone says the New Hampshire polls are notoriously unreliable, New Hampshirites themselves are notoriously contrarian, and anyway look at what happened in Iowa. Which is quite right. Still, this is probably the closest we're going to get to the conventional wisdom, so I thought I'd share it.

As for personal predictions, forget it. In fact, around here New Hampshire is already yesterday's news and we're looking forward to Oklahoma, Arizona, South Carolina, Missouri, New Mexico, and Delaware. It ain't over yet.

CLARK AND MOORE....Was Wesley Clark wrong not to directly repudiate Michael Moore's comment about George Bush being a deserter? Jonathan Chait has about the right take on it today at The New Republic.

CONNECTIONS....I've come across several snippets of economic data/analysis recently that provide a surprisingly connected view of what's going on in the economy these days. This might get a little long — apologies in advance — but here are four data points to ponder:

1. Over in the Weekly Standard, Irwin Stelzer joins the legions of conservative economists who have discovered a newfound interest in judging employment by means of the government's Household Survey (phone calls to households asking if people are working) instead of the more traditional Payroll Survey (phone calls to businesses asking how many people they employ). Why? As near as I can tell, it's because the Household Survey shows a fairly rosy employment picture, and that's what they want to believe.

   Of course, one can't just come out and say that, so some kind of plausible explanation needs to be offered up instead. But what? Stelzer suggests that firms are outsourcing jobs (say, at the company cafeteria) and that the Payroll Survey counts the job lost by the original firm but not the job gained by the outsourcing firm. So statistically it looks like a job loss, but in fact net employment stays the same.

   Ignore for the moment that Stelzer provides no evidence that this is actually happening. Give him the benefit of the doubt. Instead, ask yourself this question: do you think the outsourcing firm pays the same wages as the original company did? After all, this is a company that presumably won the cafeteria contract by demonstrating that they could save the company money, and labor costs are surely a large component of saving money. Keep this in the back of your mind for a moment and let's move on.

   (Background on the two different employment surveys is here if you're interested.)
   

2. The Los Angeles Times reports that California is suffering from a "shift of jobs from high-paying industries to lower-paying sectors such as retail sales and tourism." They are quoting a report issued by Comrade Max's employer, and as you can see from the map on the right it's a nationwide problem: every state except Nevada and Nebraska is seeing a shift from high paying industries, which are losing jobs, to low paying industries, which are gaining them.

3. Also in the LA Times, business columnist Michael Hiltzik has an excellent and insightful piece on the Southern California supermarket strike. Bottom line: the unions have stayed regional while the supermarket chains have become national behemoths. As a result, say union leaders, they are "surprised at the absence of the collegial we-can-work-it-out atmosphere that prevailed at negotiations in past contract cycles. Yet that's what happens when labor policy is made not by executives who live in the same communities where they've provoked a labor war, but by corporate bureaucrats ensconced thousands of miles away."

   The unions have done a poor job of telling their side of the story, but the fact is that the supermarket chains aren't just asking for a $5/week copay for health insurance, as their newspaper ads suggest. Rather, they are trying to substantially cut both wages and benefits across the board. And when stalled talks resumed last month, the chains actually produced a new offer than was even worse than their original one.

4. And finally, of course, there's Wal-Mart, rampaging through the countryside driving all before them. If you want to keep up, you have to match Wal-Mart's subsistence wages and benefits, and that means the race to the bottom is in full swing everywhere Wal-Mart has a store. Which means everywhere.
   

These anecdotes all point to the thing that bothers me the most about the direction of our economy: there are too many trends that are squeezing the wages of traditional working-class and middle-class workers. During the past 30 years workers in the bottom half of the distribution have seen their hourly wages increase only 10%, and among male wage earners during the same period the median income has barely budged at all. The problem isn't economic growth per se — per capita GDP has grown about 60% during this period — but rather that virtually all that additional wealth has gone to the already well off. Those in the middle and at the bottom aren't getting any better off despite economic growth, and as a result, instead of a growing middle class that's optimistic about its future, we have a middle class that's slowly but steadily stagnating and increasingly worried about its survival.

The typical conservative response to this is a collective shrug: things really aren't that bad, are they, in this age of Nintendos and big screen TVs for all? And there's some truth to this: living standards are still high for most people and there are no mobs with pitchforks roaming the streets in American cities. But what about tomorrow?

The sign of of a healthy economy is not so much that living standards are high for the middle class, but that they are getting higher — that people believe their children will be better off than they are. But as income inequality increases and income mobility decreases that's increasingly not the case, and the question at hand is whether we ever plan on doing anything about it. How long does the middle class have to stagnate in the midst of ever more stratospheric wealth for the rich before even conservatives finally admit that we have a problem?

The problem is not just one of social justice, either. One of the counterintuitive facets of the U.S. economy that various pundits and researchers keep independently "discovering" — usually with a tone of dismayed wonder — is that nearly all economic indicators in the past half century have been stronger under Democrats than Republicans. The data is hardly conclusive, but it is suggestive, and it shows that economic growth, stock market growth, budget deficits, unemployment, and inflation all tend to be better under Democrats. But why? Given the fact that the economic policies of the two parties have been so inconsistent over the years, is there anything that can account for this?

I think there is, and it's simple: Democrats care about middle class job growth. They always have. Conversely, at various periods Republicans have concerned themselves not directly with jobs but instead with inflation, or with balanced budgets, or most recently with obsessive tax cuts.

But there's no evidence that tax cuts increase economic growth — at least not at the levels that we have in the United States. Ditto for balanced budgets and low inflation. But robust middle class employment is a different matter: if you take direct aim at that you're almost guaranteed that the economy is going to do well as a result. How could it not? If you have a large, growing, well-paid middle class that's spending ever larger sums of money without going into ruinous debt, the economy will be humming along almost by definition. Call it trickle-up economics.

So even if you don't think that economic equality is any concern of the government, you should still be concerned about our ever more squeezed middle class. They are the engine of economic growth, and if we continue to pursue policies that ignore them the entire economy will pay the price. We need to start paying attention before it's too late.

CHENEY vs. THE TRUTH....Dick Cheney, two days ago:

We've found a couple of semi-trailers at this point which we believe were in fact part of [a WMD] program. I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction.

David Kay, today:

Dr. Kay added that there was now a consensus within the United States intelligence community that mobile trailers found in Iraq and initially thought to be laboratories for biological weapons were actually designed to produce hydrogen for weather balloons, or perhaps to produce rocket fuel.

I'm sure Cheney will issue a retraction any day now.

By the way, I highly recommend reading the entire text of the Kay interview along with Ken Pollack's recent Atlantic article. Taken together, I think they provide a fairly coherent summary of what actually happened in Iraq and within the intelligence community over the past decade. (Note, however, that they disagree about the extent to which the Bushies corrupted the intelligence process. On this, I think Pollack is more believable.)

2003 KOUFAX AWARDS....The Koufax Awards for best lefty blogs (plus one non-lefty this year!) are now open for voting. Scroll down and vote for all the categories.

THE WMD HUNT....A REAL EXPLANATION AT LAST?....Now that he's back home David Kay is turning into a veritable font of useful information. Today, he advances the first new theory I've heard in a while about why Saddam acted the way he did if there were no weapons to hide in the first place:

David A. Kay, who led the government's efforts to find evidence of Iraq's illicit weapons programs until he resigned on Friday, said the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies did not realize that Iraqi scientists had presented ambitious but fanciful weapons programs to Mr. Hussein and had then used the money for other purposes.

....After [about 1998], Dr. Kay said, Iraqi scientists realized they could go directly to Mr. Hussein and present fanciful plans for weapons programs, and receive approval and large amounts of money. Whatever was left of an effective weapons capability, he said, was largely subsumed into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the arts of lying and surviving in a fevered police state.

You know what? This is a winner. I think is the real explanation for what happened.

Partly I believe this because Kay is obviously basing this on things he's learned via interviews with high-level Iraqi officials, but partly I believe it because it just makes sense. Everything falls into place.

An increasingly out-of-touch Saddam makes sense. High-level scientists faking programs in order to get money for their own pet causes makes sense. Saddam's attitude toward the inspections makes sense because he thought there really were active WMD programs in place that would take time to dismantle. And it may be that even some of the exiles were telling the truth when they reported that Iraq still had active large-scale WMD programs. They might have been scammed the same way Saddam was.

This is the first theory I've heard that holds together on all levels. It explains how the CIA got fooled, it explains why Saddam acted the way he did, and it explains why we haven't found much of anything. And it does it all without making any weird and heroic assumptions about human nature.

I think this is the real deal.

UPDATE: Just to clear up a possible misconception, I don't think this absolves the Bush administration of anything. The CIA was indeed fooled, they issued guarded reports saying that Iraq had WMD, and the Bushies then cherry picked the reports and removed the qualifiers when they made public statements. This is pretty much what we knew happened anyway. There's plenty of blame for everyone in this fiasco.

BUSH AT WAR....Armed Liberal asks today, Are we at war? Good question. So let me take this chance to follow up on my earlier post and toss off a few reasons that regardless of whether we actually are at war, I don't think George Bush considers us to be (seriously) at war.

This is not a garden variety partisan policy dispute. It's war, and if George Bush considered it to be truly serious he would have done everything he could to build a bipartisan consensus and wide public support for his actions. But he didn't. Off the top of my head, here are five examples of the kinds of things he would have done if he really thought terrorism was a threat on the level of World War II or the Cold War:

• As many war supporters have pointed out (for example, Glenn Reynolds here and here), Bill Clinton has been rather supportive of the war on terror and of muscular national security in general. If Bush were serious about the war, he would have enlisted Bill Clinton's active support wherever he could, regardless of his personal feelings toward the guy. He's an ex-president and the most prominent Democrat and internationalist around, and his backing would have helped build support both domestically and internationally.

• He would have worked with Democrats from the beginning on the idea of creating a Department of Homeland Security. And he wouldn't have held things up by insisting on union busting activities that he knew perfectly well would spark outrage among Democrats.

• After his UN speech, he would have floated proposals designed to demonstrate that our goals in Iraq were not motivated strictly by oil. For instance, he might have agreed beforehand to allow the UN to control all oil contracts and civil rebuilding contracts. These demonstrations of goodwill might not have gotten France on board (though who knows), but they might have gotten many other countries on board and certainly would have muted suspicions about our motives abroad. Remember, in the end it wasn't just France that opposed us. We couldn't even get a majority of the Security Council on our side.

• He could have helped garner additional Arab support by placing increased public pressure on Israel over the settlements and the wall. This is something Bush could have gotten away with since his position as a supporter of Israel is rock solid.

• He might have made a serious call to reduce U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil by, for example, proposing a steep increase in the gasoline tax or higher CAFE standards.

There's a common thread to all of these: they are things that normally George Bush wouldn't want to do. And that's exactly the point, since one way to show seriousness is to demonstrate concretely that you're willing to sacrifice other lesser goals in order to gain support for your higher goals. This is, for example, what FDR did when he said that "Dr. Win the War" had replaced "Dr. New Deal." On the other hand, if your actions are confined solely to things that you've always wanted to do anyway, the natural conclusion is that you're using the war simply as an excuse to press forward with politics as usual.

Despite the fact that this is a global war that requires broad support over long timescales, George Bush has not tried to gain Democratic support; he has not engaged seriously with the international community; he has not asked the American public for any kind of sacrifice; he has continued to push a divisive domestic agenda; he has shown little interest in funding anti-proliferation efforts; he has declined to put adequate resources into Afghanistan; he has done nothing to fix an intelligence operation that's quite obvously broken; and he has stonewalled every investigation into the failures that allowed 9/11 to happen.

In light of this, just how seriously do you think George Bush takes the fight against terrorism? I'd say, not very.

MARY JOHN WRITES A LETTER....I was dismayed at lunch today to discover that the editors of the Economist saw fit to run a letter from John Lott in this week's issue. Surely someone with honest credentials — or even no credentials at all — could have been found in the mailbag to make the same point?

CALLING UP THE RESERVES....Apropos of nothing in particular, I note that Phil Carter has a post up about problems with readiness and morale in the reserves. In it, he relates a familiar bit of history:

Much of this problem traces to the overreliance of America's military on the reserve components. A generation ago, Gen. Creighton Abrams removed a great deal of support capability from the active force and put it into the reserves, as a mechanism to prevent any future wars like Vietnam where the President chose to fought without the mobilization of the reserves -- and without popular support. As I wrote in an op-ed last year, this concept has run into serious problems since Sept. 11, with so many reserve units being called up for long-term deployments.

Now, this is all true: a lot of our military capability is now invested in reserve forces, and the idea behind this was that any serious war would require us to call up the reserves, and this in turn would be politically impossible unless the war commanded widespread public support.

But whenever someone brings this up, the subtext is that, in hindsight, this has turned out to be an error. But is it? After all, surely the war on terror doesn't change the fact that securing public support for any kind of lengthy military engagement really is critically important. And if our reserve-heavy force structure compels a president to rally public support — or prevents him from prosecuting further wars due to lack of support — isn't that a good thing?

I certainly agree with Phil that reserve forces shouldn't be treated shabbily, but on the larger question it appears that Creighton Abrams' long shadow is doing its job rather well. There should be constraints on a president's ability to wage war, and I suspect our current constraints are probably a pretty good reflection of the actual level of public support out there. It's the public support that's the root cause here; reserve morale is merely a symptom.

PONDERING THE INFINITE....I finished reading Everything and More today, David Foster Wallace's first new book since Infinite Jest in 1996. It's not a novel, though, it's a survey of the mathematical problems that ultimately led to Georg Cantor's development of modern set theory and transfinite analysis. Some miscellaneous comments:

• No index. That's a real bummer for a work of nonfiction.

• Karl Weierstrass, a heavy-duty 19th century mathematician, did not allow his students to take notes in class.

• Odd factoid according to Wallace: "Almost all history's great philosophers never married. Heidegger's the only real exception. The great mathematicians are nuptially split about 50/50, still way below the civilian average. No cogent explanation on record; feel free to hypothesize."

• I continue to not really get Cantor's diagonal proof. It seems like (a) it could be applied just as well to the rationals as to the reals, which is obviously wrong, and (b) it doesn't really work anyway since the diagonal number can be made arbitrarily close to one of the numbers already on the list — although I admit that this second objection is a little slippery. I don't know if my lack of understanding is due to relying on popular explications rather than the actual technical proof itself, or is simply because I'm missing something.

  I realize this paragraph is probably meaningless to nearly everyone reading it. Apologies.

  UPDATE: Ah, the power of Google! The answer to my first objection is here, and my second objection is probably just logical thumbsucking anyway. I guess that Cantor fellow was a pretty smart cookie.

• Wallace attended Urbana University Sr. High School in Urbana, and the text of the book makes it clear that his math classes there covered calculus all the way through partial differential equations plus discussion of set theory and transfinite arithmetic. Even granting that these were AP classes, holy cow. Do they really teach this kind of stuff in high school these days?

• Typically for Wallace, Everything and More is filled with footnotes. Unfortunately, due to a quirk of typography, they seemed to blend in with the text so much that I kept missing them. Then I had to go back and try to figure out where the footnote was before I turned the page. Annoying.

• Wallace insists in several places that you really don't need any kind of college math background to understand his book. He's lying. It's actually surprisingly technical for a popular account, but that also means it's symbol-laden enough to scare off anyone who finds the routine use of capital Greek letters offputting.
  

Transfinite numbers, of course, are merely the 19th century's contribution to the menagerie of numbers that no one believed in at first but then eventually did, following in the rich tradition of irrationals, zero, negative numbers, imaginary numbers, and transcendentals. Eventually all of these things came to be widely accepted, putatively because they were finally put on a rigorous basis but really because the old guys died off and everyone else just clapped their hands and decided to believe. After all, it's quite a coincidence that every type of number that's actually useful has eventually found a supposedly rigorous treatment, isn't it? One might be excused for thinking that usefulness itself is the only thing that anyone really cares about.

Hell, after a thousand years we still can't divide by zero. How rigorous is that?

JUDICIAL NON-ACTIVISM....Do we live under a benign — but capricious — dictatorship? Matt Yglesias thinks we might.

About time this country was run by a woman, don't you think?

TERRORISM AND ELECTIONS....Apparently George Bush is now almost panicky in his desire to disengage from Iraq and get the UN in. The Washington Post reports today that at this point virtually any proposal from the UN will be entertained, but only under one condition:

"The United States told us that as long as the timetable is respected, they are ready to listen to any suggestion," a senior U.N. official said.

In other words, anything goes as long as we're out by June 30. The occupation has to officially end before next year's elections.

There are, of course, many reasons that liberals generally didn't support the war in Iraq, but certainly one of them was the overwhelming partisan cynicism that the Bush administration brought to the task. Karl Rove made it clear that the war would be a perfect wedge issue for Republicans, Andy Card admitted that the "marketing" of the war resolution was deliberately timed, and now we discover that they really don't care much what happens to Iraq as long as we are officially out and can claim victory before November:

In private conversations with the United Nations and its coalition partners, the administration has begun to discuss the viability of abandoning the complex caucuses outlined in the agreement and even holding partial elections or simply handing over power to an expanded Iraqi Governing Council, an old proposal now back on the table, U.S. and U.N. officials say.

Even simply handing power over to the IGC is now on the table. Anything, as long as it gets us out.

After 9/11 George Bush had a chance to build a bipartisan consensus about terrorism and how to respond to it. But he didn't just fail to do that, he deliberately tried to prevent it, and by transparently treating terrorism as little more than a chance to boost the prospects of his own party he has convinced everyone who's not a Republican that it's not really a serious threat. After all, if he quite obviously treats it as simply a political opportunity, it's hardly reasonable to expect anyone else to take it seriously either.

Treating Medicare or abortion as a partisan issue is one thing, but treating war the same way is quite another, and in the end it's George Bush who is largely responsible for convincing half the United States and most of the world that terrorism is little more than a GOP talking point. It's likely that someday we will pay a heavy price for this.

MORE DAVID KAY....David Kay is giving a lot of interviews these days. A couple of days ago he told Reuters that he now believes that Iraqi WMD never existed in the first place, and in today's Telegraph he says that a lot of material was transported from Iraq to Syria before the war "including some components of Saddam's WMD programme."

Now Jim Miller points to an interview aired this morning on NPR in which Kay says a few more interesting things. Regarding the movement of material to Syria he backs down a bit, saying "We simply don't know what was moved." But then he makes the rather striking assertion that based on what he found, he thinks that Iraq might have been more dangerous than we thought before the war.

As Jim notes, it's bizarre that interviewer Liane Hansen didn't follow up on this. If the WMD didn't exist, and even the WMD programs were in rudimentary form, what could possibly make him think that we underestimated the danger from Iraq before the war? And how could Hansen possibly be so obtuse as not to follow up on this?

Kay seems to be making the interview circuit right now, so I suppose we'll find out what he was thinking eventually. In the meantime, you can listen to the interview here, at least until NPR, as part of its ongoing campaign to make linking to its shows as difficult as it can possibly be, changes the URL

BLOGGERS SPEAK!....The Blogging of the President will be on public radio on Sunday with a program designed to "air out the internet effects that the political campaign has suddenly made obvious." Guests will include Atrios, Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall, Kevin Phillips, and others.

The show runs from 9-11 PM Eastern time, although your local station may choose to air it at a different time. A list of participating stations, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and others, is here. Or you can hear it streamed over the web here.

NEOCONS....Via David Adesnik, who has some comments of his own, I see that Max Boot's Foreign Policy article about neocons is now online. As these folks go, I generally find Boot to be one of the more readable of the neocons, and I recommend this article. It's short, it's breezy, and I think it's reasonably accurate too, even if grains of salt are required here and there since Boot is, after all, sympathetic to the cause.

But the main reason I'm recommending it is simply to do away with the nonsense about "liberal conspiracy theories" regarding neocons. Sure, there are some lefties who go overboard in blaming all the world's ills on neocons, but the fact is that they are not simply liberal bogeymen. They really do exist. Boot sensibly admits this, and then acknowledges that they do have some influence — although here he is perhaps a bit overmodest — that they have a more-or-less coherent view of the world, and that they would like to nuke Iran and North Korea off the map see regime change in Iran in North Korea.

As his finale, he suggests that things might be going better in Iraq if the neocons really had been in charge of things, since they've been arguing all along for more troops, better planning, etc. There might actually be a smidgen of justice in this, although it's worth pointing out that leading administration neocon Paul Wolfowitz certainly did his best to ridicule the idea in front of Congress last February.

Boot's ending rhetorical flourish, delivered with perhaps a bit more self-pity than is truly wise, is a suggestion that life is mighty unfair if you're a neocon:

If neocons had been in control, they would have done far more, far earlier, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, possibly averting some of the postwar problems. But fairly or not, neocons will doubtless be held responsible for the outcome in both countries; their numerous enemies, on both the left and the right, will see to that.

All things considered, I'll vote for "fairly" if this is indeed what happens.

WIRELESS UPDATE....I met up this morning with one my readers, T, who very nicely agreed to meet and show me his wireless setup. We met at Wired for Coffee, a local place that offers free wireless access plus all your other basic coffee amenities. It's also Marian's favorite coffee shop.

Anyway, I'm not sure how much interest there is in this geek stuff, but here it is anyway:

• T uses (appropriately) T-Mobile and says it works pretty well. It costs him 20 bucks a month on top of his phone bill and provides about the same performance as a dial-up connection.

• When I went through my security blitz a few weeks ago, one of the things I did was disable DHCP. Turns out that this makes WiFi unusable at public access points, something that I guess is pretty obvious once you've figured it out. (It's funny how many things are like that, isn't it?) I don't think DHCP is actually much of a security risk anyway, so leave it on if you plan to roam around with your laptop.

• Last night I downloaded some WiFi sniffing software, so after we were done I did some war driving around my neighborhood to see if I could steal some bandwidth. Sure enough, there were loads of home networks, but apparently connecting to them isn't quite as automatic as I thought. I managed to get one to work, although I don't quite remember how, but after that one success I never connected again.

  I'm not sure what the deal is with that. Windows seemed to acquire networks here and there, but I couldn't make my browser work. Eventually I went into Control Panel and manually connected, but even that only worked once (I think) and I couldn't get it to work again. In fact, once I got home I couldn't even connect to my home network until I rebooted — although I suppose that might have been because of the whole DHCP thing.

• My WiFi sniffing software, NetStumbler, was pretty rudimentary. It seems like the world needs a much better version of this software that gives more info on which networks are around and allows you to decide which ones to connect to. In fact, I'll bet something better does exist. All I have to do is find it.
  

Overall, I think I'm missing some crucial (but no doubt trivial) aspect of this whole WiFi thing. If I ever figure it out, I'll let you know.

FRITOS ARE GOOD FOR YOU!....Somebody left a link to this in comments, and the chutzpah was so magnificent that I felt like I had to share it: Frito-Lay has taken the USDA's famous food pyramid and replaced the "Bread, Cereal, Rice and Pasta" group with logos of tasty, carbo-loaded Frito-Lay snacks. Why, you'd almost think this stuff was good for you!

And apparently it is:

If you make the decision to use the Food Guide Pyramid as an aid in making the best food choices, you will discover you have the freedom to consume 6-11 servings of grain products daily. This makes it easy to fit many Frito-Lay snacks into your diet. Frito-Lay is proud to help you meet your nutrition goals by offering a variety of snacks that are not only great-tasting, but are 3 grams of fat or less per serving. So, forget the guilt and make Frito-Lay a part of your healthy diet today!

This all comes from the Frito-Lay Nutrition Center ("We are making a healthy diet so much fun!"), which seems like an oxymoron but apparently isn't. In fact, it contains advice on how Frito-Lay goodies can be part of a weight-loss plan, tackles some commonly asked questions ("Does Frito-Lay irradiate any of its products?"), and busts some common myths about dietary fat.

I sure feel better now. Isn't America great?

NEW PEACE PLAN FROM THE SAUDIS....David Bernstein points us to this Haaretz account of a new peace initiative in the Middle East:

According to a new peace initiative being prepared by Arab states, Israel will negotiate a peace agreement with all the Arab states, and not just with the Palestinians, and Arab states would absorb Palestinian refugees.

The Kuwaiti newspaper Al Siyasa reported Saturday that the initiative, led by Saudi Arabia, would include "declarations of peace agreements between all Arab states," which will bring an end to the conflict between Israel and the Arabs. The states would declare a normalization in their ties with Israel, including the appointment of ambassadors.

....Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and probably Qatar are the main supporters of the plan.

I don't follow the intricacies of Middle East peace plans closely enough to know for sure, but this sounds like good news, doesn't it? I know the Saudis have tried this before, but this time they've basically conceded the right of return, and as David says, it's hard to believe they wouldn't also be willing to concede some minor and mutually agreed land swaps near the 1967 border. That's considerable progress.

Or so it seems. Unfortunately, this whole policy area is so Byzantine that I can't pretend to know whether this is really new or just more of the same. But David is considerably more hawkish about Israel than I am, and he seems to think it's "worth taking seriously." So maybe it is.

WMD IN IRAQ....Atrios says today that maybe the administration really did believe there was WMD in Iraq before the war. Fine.

But, at the time, there were also plenty of reasonable people running around saying that this whole WMD stuff was nonsense. Remember how they were treated by our media? They were treated like escapees from an insane asylum who needed to up their Thorazine dose. Remember how radical and controversial it was to even suggest such a thing?

Actually, I think the administration did believe there was WMD in Iraq before the war. What's more, the CIA and MI6 thought the same thing and the yawning silence from both Republicans and Democrats about how our intelligence services could have been so wildly off the mark is a scandal of the first order. Is anyone serious about this stuff?

But I'm not really trying to start an argument about that. Mostly I just want a history lesson. I don't personally recall any first-rank analysts except Scott Ritter who claimed that the WMD evidence was seriously faulty around, say, the time of the UN speech (although obviously more people became skeptical later on as the inspections came up emptyhanded). Were there others? Who?

Like I said, I don't have any real argument here. I'm just curious.

UPDATE: Two things. First, as Atrios says in comments, he was just saying this for the sake of argument. In fact, he says, "I don't actually believe the administration believed that Iraq had any kind of WMDs which posed a real threat to the US or anyone else."

Second, I note that so far no one in comments has named a name, so let me make myself clear here: yes, the CIA hedged its estimates, and yes, the Bush administration clearly exaggerated what the CIA told them. No argument there. However, it is also abundantly clear that the CIA did in fact believe that Saddam had both WMD and active WMD programs.

So here's my question. Forget about threat assessments. Forget about whether their evidence was any good (obviously it wasn't). All I want to know is this: In September 2002, aside from Scott Ritter, were there any serious analysts (not Sean Penn, not bloggers, not Noam Chomsky) who were publicly saying that the intelligence was wrong and Iraq didn't have WMD? Are there any serious analysts today who have publicly said that back in September 2002 they doubted the existence of WMD but just couldn't say so at the time?

I'm not trying to restart the old fight about whether the evidence of WMD was any good. I just want some names of serious analysts who publicly questioned the intelligence back in September 2002. Does anybody have one?

CYNICISM....David Adesnik thinks it's a little hard to swallow the Pakistani government's contention that they are shocked — shocked! — that some of their leading scientists may have sold nuclear secrets to Iran. That's sad. How does the youth of America get so cynical at such a young age?

On the other hand, sometimes a little cynicism goes a long way:

The top story right now on CNN.com is that Ahmad Chalabi has come out in favor of direct elections in Iraq. Until I found that out, I was leaning towards elections. But if Chalabi is for them, something's gotta be wrong.

I think he may be on to something here....

IMAGE PROBLEMS....Wal-Mart is running some ads in an effort to spruce up its image:

The TV commercial opens with a young couple on a sofa smiling at their toddler son. As the boy nuzzles a stuffed animal and hugs his mother, his father explains that the youngster was born with liver disease and underwent two major surgeries by the time he was 7 months old.

"It's nice to know that I work for a company that would take care of everything we went through," the man says. The ad cuts to the man at work, wearing a familiar blue vest with white logo, as he says: "I don't think people know how great the benefits are at Wal-Mart. Without Wal-Mart, he wouldn't -- I don't know that he'd have made it. I don't know that we would have made it."

....In a multi-pronged counterattack, the world's biggest company -- the most feared and powerful competitor in global retail -- is seeking to hang onto its image as America's friendly hometown merchant.

It is stepping up its slate of feel-good television ads in 2004, with more spots featuring happy employees as well as examples of Wal-Mart's community involvement. Wal-Mart has also sharply increased its political donations, becoming the second-biggest giver to candidates in the 2004 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Wall Street Journal provides a different picture:

Wal-Mart makes new hourly workers wait six months to sign up for its benefits plan and doesn'