PLAYING THE GAME....I forgot to mention this yesterday, but John Ashcroft has continued to declassify documents that were written by 9/11 commissioner Jamie Gorelick back in the mid-90s. Needless to say, his gleeful reaction when he released the first of those documents a couple of weeks ago made it clear that the sole purpose of these declassifications is to try to embarrass Gorelick, not to shed any light on counterterrorism efforts prior to 9/11.

Yesterday we learned that the president was "disappointed" in Ashcroft's actions. He doesn't like finger pointing, you see, and his disappointment has been clearly conveyed to the Justice Department.

Isn't that elegant? By playing it this way the documents themselves are still made public, thus accomplishing the aim of embarrassing a Democratic member of the 9/11 panel, but Bush himself gets to look mature and presidential by condemning Ashcroft's childish political gamesmanship. Nicely played, Mr. President, nicely played....

WAR DEATHS....War supporters are betraying more than they realize by their panicky reaction to recent media portrayals of Americans who have died in the Iraqi war. Some examples:

• Robert Alt writes at NRO about the four contractors whose charred bodies were hung from a bridge in Fallujah last month. He objects to the New York Times running a picture of this because, although he believes their editors intended for it to enrage, "the Times meant this rage to be directed not primarily toward the terrorists, but toward those politicians who brought us to this inhospitable land."

  I wonder why he's so convinced of that? I ran the same picture when I wrote a post about the events in Fallujah, and I remember doing it for exactly the opposite reason. I was afraid that a graphic portrayal of what the Fallujah insurgents did to American citizens might fan the war flames, but figured that people ought to see it anyway. After all, that's what we're up against.

• Conservative pundits were rabidly opposed to releasing pictures of military coffins being delivered to Dover, and I even semi-debated one of them on a radio program a few days ago. He thought it showed a lack of sensitivity. But as I wrote last week, I just don't get it: "It's almost impossible not to be moved by these photos, and impossible not to recognize from them how much care is taken with the bodies and how seriously these deaths are taken."

• Ted Koppel plans to read the names of all the soldiers killed to date in Iraq on tonight's Nightline, and the folks at Sinclair Broadcast Group have decided not to air the show on their stations. As Keith Berry points out, Sinclair's loyalties are pretty obviously with the Bush administration, and they have apparently decided that honoring our war dead in this way is a political statement aimed at undermining support for the war.

  But Washington Monthly editor Ben Wallace-Wells emails to say he discussed Nightline on a radio show in a deeply Republican area of North Carolina recently and got a different reaction:

  The host and his sidekick (whose brother was KIA in Vietnam) opposed Koppel on the established conservative line: it's politically opportunistic, it's a cynical ratings-grab, it's unpatriotic to drum up opposition to a war president. But we heard from 6 or 7 callers, all but one conservative (and even the Democrat was a military wife), and to a person they disagreed with the hosts, thought the reading was noble and honorable, a proper way to honor our dead. Some still agreed that the timing was opportunistic, politically motivated, but nevertheless they said they supported the name-reading.

  Maybe the Sinclair executives need to get out more.
  

All this leads me to believe that war supporters need to get a grip. In a popular war, battlefield losses serve to redouble public commitment to the fight, and honoring the dead is viewed as a solemn and patriotic gesture. It's only in unpopular wars that combat deaths cause public support to decline.

Present day conservatives seem to unthinkingly assume that any public acknowledgement of Iraqi war deaths is obviously just an underhanded political gesture designed to weaken support for the war. This is partly a result of their paranoid conviction that the sole purpose of the media is to undermine conservative causes, but it's also a tacit admission that this is, fundamentally, a war with very shallow support indeed. If they really believed in the war and in the administration's handling of it, they'd show some backbone and welcome Ted Koppel's gesture of respect tonight. Instead they're acting as if they're ashamed we're over there.

ABU GHRAIB....What happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad was horrific:

According to sealed charging papers that were provided to The Washington Post, soldiers forced prisoners to lie in "a pyramid of naked detainees" and jumped on their prone bodies, while other detainees were ordered to strip and perform or simulate sex acts. In one case, a hooded man allegedly was made to stand on a box of MREs, or meals ready to eat, and told that he would be electrocuted if he fell off. In another example, the papers allege, a soldier unzipped a body bag and took snapshots of a detainee's frozen corpse inside. Several times, soldiers were photographed and videotaped posing in front of humiliated inmates, according to the charges. One gave a thumbs-up sign in front of the human pyramid.

You don't have to read Arabic to see how this is playing in the Middle East, either. At Al Jazeera's English-language site it's just one small story among many, but at their main Arabic-language site it's front and center. And while I can't read the text, my guess is that the Arabic version is more inflammatory than the relatively straightforward English version.

I hope the folks responsible for this get what they deserve. Maybe we should let an Iraqi court do the honors.

UPDATE: The Memory Hole has a complete set of pictures.

CHALABI WATCH....Matt Yglesias writes that "Plans for fixing the mess in Iraq are spreading like kudzu through the circles of punditry." Indeed they are. Barbara Lerner, for example, believes that the root of our problems is not that Donald Rumsfeld stubbornly refused to listen to his own Army Chief of Staff, but that the president did not listen enough to Donald Rumsfeld:

Rumsfeld's plan was to train and equip — and then transport to Iraq — some 10,000 Shia and Sunni freedom fighters led by Shia exile leader Ahmed Chalabi and his cohorts in the INC, the multi-ethnic anti-Saddam coalition he created.

This never happened, of course, thanks to Colin Powell, George Tenet, and "State Department Arabists." But there's still hope:

It is not yet too late for us to recognize these facts and act on them by dismissing Brahimi, putting Secretary Rumsfeld and our Iraqi friends fully in charge at last, and unleashing our Marines to make an example of Fallujah. And when al Jazeera screams "massacre," instead of cringing and apologizing, we need to stand tall and proud and tell the world: Lynch mobs like the one that slaughtered four Americans will not be tolerated.

Indeed. What we really need in Iraq is more Chalabi. These folks just never give up, do they?

WILSON AND NOVAK....Tim Dunlop is reading Joe Wilson's book for us. What a stand up guy!

Today's he's got an interesting excerpt: it turns out Wilson talked to Robert Novak several days before Novak's infamous July 14 column in which he outed Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent, and told him that speculating on his wife's CIA connections was dangerous and irresponsible. In other words, writing what he did in his column that day wasn't a momentary lapse in judgment on Novak's part. He knew very well he was doing someting dishonorable and he went ahead and did it anyway.

Details are here.

AT LEAST IT'S NOT A DRIVE-BY SHOOTING....Problems in paradise:

Two big-rig trucks are blocking all northbound lanes of the Santa Ana (I-5) Freeway north of Washington Boulevard in Commerce, according to the California Highway Patrol.

Fox 11 is reporting that the trucks were stopped intentionally by the drivers in a protest over the high cost of fuel and that truckers intend to block other freeways as well.

That should get them some sympathy, eh? I wonder who, exactly, they think they're protesting against?

KERRY AND IRAQ....Several people have written to take me to task for criticizing John Kerry's foreign policy flabbiness (here and here) without offering something constructive to take its place. This is a fair point, so let's offer something constructive.

First, though, a question: does Kerry's national security policy really matter that much? I think it does for a couple of reasons:

• We liberals would like to think that the election is going to turn (or can be made to turn) on the state of the economy, or perhaps on favored social issues like education or healthcare. This is dreamland. The economy is going to do whatever the economy does, and right now it looks like it will be bad enough that Kerry has a chance to win but good enough that it won't hurt Bush too badly. Relying on that to win the election would be foolish.

  Whether we like it or not, this just isn't the year for social issues to take center stage. The president has far more ability to control the agenda than the challenger, and Bush's campaign message is already clear: the world is a dangerous place and John Kerry can't be trusted to keep you safe.

  This is not to say that the economy and social issues won't play a role. Of course they will, and Kerry should take advantage of his strengths in these areas. But the key issue is going to be terrorism and — especially — the war in Iraq. I think liberals need to face up to this squarely even if we don't like it.

• Survey results for the past several months have been clear: Bush's approval ratings for handling the war have gone down, people increasingly believe it was a mistake to invade Iraq, and sentiment is moving in the direction of bringing the troops home. But this hasn't helped Kerry. It does give him an opening, but by itself it's not enough for people to have doubts about Bush; they also have to believe that Kerry is likely to do a better job.
  

What to do? Dan Drezner summarizes Kerry's problem pretty well: (a) when things go badly overseas — even if people blame the president — they tend to rally around him; (b) as a Democrat, Kerry can't afford to look weak if he wants to win moderates to his side, but he can't seem too aggressive or else he'll lose his liberal base; and (c) it's hard to figure out a way to really distinguish his Iraq policy from Bush's.

To a certain extent, this is OK for the moment. One of the advantages that challengers have is that they can wait before they lay their policies in stone. After all, facts on the ground in Iraq could change dramatically in the next few weeks, so why shouldn't Kerry let Bush stew in his own juices a while longer before committing himself to a policy that he won't be able to execute until next year anyway?

These are good points, and waiting until after the June 30 handover in Iraq might not hurt Kerry. But to win the election Kerry has to convince the fence sitters that he can do better than Bush, and I think he needs to do it by July at the latest, before Bush has had a chance to irrevocably define him as untrustworthy on national security. What's more, this is a case where policy wonkishness and 20-page position papers won't do the job for him. Max Boot may come at this from a different perspective, but he's right when he says that Kerry needs a "compelling alternative." To distinguish himself, he needs to have two or three very clear, very simple, and very persuasive proposals that he knows Bush can't endorse. And he needs to hammer on them.

Here are some examples of the kind of things I'm talking about:

• Break Iraq into three parts. Peter Galbraith made the case for this a few days ago and I was skeptical of it, but it's nonetheless a compelling and worthwhile idea. It's easy to understand and explain, it cuts through a lot of problems at once, and it's not something Bush is proposing.

• Significantly expand the Army, especially its peacekeeping functions. You could put a humanitarian spin on this too. Or maybe a new branch of the military dedicated to special ops. No more arguments between the CIA and the Air Force about who's in charge of Predator drones.

• Propose killing a major weapons system. Maybe the F-35, or something to do with missile defense. Recommend a major new program for technology better suited to asymmetrical warfare against terrorists. A military that's oriented toward fighting terrorism, not the Cold War, is badly needed, and Bush has done little to get us there. He's vulnerable on this issue, and it's an area where Kerry could really score some points.
  

I'm not necessarily advocating any of these specific ideas, but you get the idea. Kerry needs to pick something he believes in and then hone it into a proposal that's easy to understand, that provokes a serious debate, and that makes him look like the guy with new ideas compared to a hidebound administration that refuses to face up to the requirements of a new kind of warfare. And don't get hung up on the details.

And one more thing: as Mark Schmitt observed a few days ago, this is something where the usual Democratic pressure groups need to give Kerry some breathing room. Some of them undoubtedly think he should just declare the Iraq war unwinnable and propose that we withdraw. But in the America we actually live in, as opposed to the one in our imaginations, that would be suicidal. George McGovern is still alive and can confirm this.

So let Kerry make proposals like these without attacking him from the left, especially since there's no telling what the actual situation in going to be next January 20 anyway. There will be plenty of opportunity to start pressuring him after he's comfortably ensconced in the Oval Office.

IRAQI RECONSTRUCTION....The CPA's inspector general has delivered a progress report on Iraqi reconstruction:

Seven months after Congress approved the largest foreign aid package in history to rebuild Iraq, less than 5 percent of the $18.4 billion has been spent and occupation officials have begun shifting more than $300 million earmarked for reconstruction projects to administrative and security expenses.

That's about a billion dollars, the bulk of which has gone to big ticket projects like the electric grid and getting the oil flowing.

The real shame of this is that we've insisted that all this money be spent through normal channels. Needless to say, there are good reasons for maintaining oversight over federal funds, but it's hard not to think that loosening the normal requirements would have been a good idea for at least a piece of this funding.

Think about it: give or take a bit, we have about 200 battalions in Iraq. Each battalion has four to six companies. Give each company captain $20,000 a week to spend on local projects staffed by Iraqis. Total cost: around a billion dollars a year.

My arithmetic may be off for a variety of reasons, but you get the idea: put some money into the hands of the folks closest to the action and let them spend it with only minimal oversight. Probably half of it would have ended up wasted, but even at that it would have been a bargain.

It's probably too late to do this now, but it might have worked a year ago. Another missed opportunity.

VALERIE PLAME UPDATE....Who leaked Valerie Plame's name to the press? Joe Wilson is naming names:

The guessing game continues. Those hoping to solve the mystery of who leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak -- a matter under investigation by a grand jury and a special prosecutor -- won't find a clear answer in the new book by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, Plame's husband. But in "The Politics of Truth," set for release tomorrow, Wilson points to Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, as "quite possibly the person who exposed my wife's identity."

There are other suspects in Wilson's closely held book, a copy of which was obtained by The Post's Linton Weeks. Citing unnamed sources, Wilson writes that a "workup" on his background was done by the White House in March 2003 after his public criticism of Iraq policy. "The other name that has most often been repeated to me in connection with the inquiry and disclosure into my background and Valerie's is that of Elliott Abrams, who gained infamy in the Iran-Contra scandal during the first Bush administration." (Abrams is on the staff of the National Security Council.)

But Wilson hasn't given up entirely on his first suspect, Karl Rove, whom he said last summer should be "frog-marched" out of the White House in handcuffs. "The workup on me that turned up the information on Valerie was shared with Karl Rove, who then circulated it in administration and neoconservative circles," Wilson alleges.

No surprises here, but apparently it's still just guesswork. There's no indication (yet) that Wilson has any hard evidence to back him up.

DECLASSIFICATION GAMES....Sorry, this post was a complete cock-up. I've deleted it. Apologies.

ABORTION AND TERRORISM....A few days ago Karen Hughes made this remark about abortion:

I think after September 11th the American people are valuing life more and realizing that we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life....The fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life.

So supporters of abortion are like terrorists? Not quite, says Ramesh Ponnuru in NRO today:

The most that can fairly be said is that by implication she was likening abortionists to terrorists, and supporters of abortion to supporters of terrorism....In no way is she saying that abortion is just like terrorism, or that abortionists are as evil as terrorists, or that support for abortion is as inexcusable as support for terrorism.

Let me get this straight: Hughes wasn't comparing abortion supporters to terrorists, she was just comparing abortion supporters to supporters of terrorism. So that's OK!

I wonder if it ever occurs to these guys that it's possible to make your arguments a little too clever? Especially when he goes on to say this:

Hughes and Bush should probably not have said what they said, because such comments could undermine both the campaign against abortion and the war on terrorism. But what they said was true, and I hope they stand up to the pressure.

This is typical of the pro-life crowd: most of them are plainly unwilling to face up to the logical consequences of their beliefs and too cowardly to make their real case to the American public.

Ponnuru is right: if abortion is murder, then anyone who gets an abortion should be jailed. Anybody who performs an abortion should be put on death row. Anybody who supports abortion rights is little better than a mobster or a terrorist.

But if that's what they believe — and they do — why does he think it's unwise to admit it in public? The question answers itself, doesn't it?

FALLUJAH....Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Fred Barbash of the Washington Post seem to have the best account of the decision to withdraw U.S. Marines from the siege of Fallujah and replace them with a newly created all-Iraqi army:

The former general who would likely be supervising Iraqi security forces in Fallujah, Salah Aboud, was the army's deputy chief of staff following the 1991 Gulf War and had close ties to Hussein. He participated in the cease-fire talks with U.S. officers that ended that war.

Before the U.S. invasion in March 2003, Hussein named Aboud military adviser to Ali Hassan Majeed, better known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of poison gas against Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s. Majeed was the commander responsible for all forces in southern Iraq during the most recent war.

....The generals said they would assemble and command a force of 900 to 1,000 trained Iraqi soldiers, Sunni Muslims, so that it could replace the Americans on the front lines of the fighting.

This new "Fallujah Protection Army," Byrne said, would be a subordinate command reporting to Lt. Gen. James P. Conway, the commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which is in charge of Western Iraq, including Fallujah.

....Some U.S. commanders had previously believed such proposals to be dicey propositions in part because the Iraqi troops have been inactive for more than a year and might not be a fit fighting force. In addition, some of them have been battling U.S. troops.

A Marine officer familiar with the arrangement said the force would be made up largely of Iraqis with prior military experience. But it was not clear how much vetting, if any, would be done, given the pressure to form the force within days. The officer acknowledged that some former insurgents may well be part of it, creating the potential situation of U.S. troops having to work with people who have very recently been shooting at them.

I suppose there's no choice but to trust the commanders on the ground to take this risk, especially since a full-scale assault seems like the only alternative, but it still fills me with foreboding. There are at least 2,000 heavily armed insurgents in Fallujah, and this new army will be poorly trained, half the size of the forces they're fighting against, commanded by a former Saddam loyalist, and possibly infiltrated by insurgents.

I sure hope they know what they're doing. It seems a rather desperate gamble.

RUGBYGATE....Slacktivist tells us today that George Bush apparently has a habit of exaggerating his college sports career in the presence of foreign leaders:

Now, okay, this isn't that big a deal. I'm not even sure it's a little deal. But the fact is the guy played a bit of intercollegiate intramurals and he likes to tell people that it was more than that -- that he played Ivy League varsity.

That's kind of smarmy and less than admirable, but whatever.

Still, consider the kind of treatment this story would be getting if it were John Kerry, rather than George W. Bush, who was caught lying about his athletic resume.

Mickey Kaus would latch onto the story for at least a week, interpreting it as a deeply meaningful and revealing metaphor -- maybe even a "synecdoche." Mickey would begin referring to it through some semi-clever nickname -- "Rugbygate" -- and Slate would publish day after day of his explorations of all the deplorable things such a story might indicate about the senator's character. (All of which would be more substantial than the confused trivialities Kaus has recently been peddling on Microsoft's dime.)

That sounds about right. I don't happen to be either part of Mickey Kaus' fan club or part of the Mickey Kaus death squad, but his unending armchair psychoanalytic bashing of John Kerry with virtually no grounding in actual events is a wonder of the modern world. I wish he could think up something about Kerry that was actually worth saying. Either that or explain what childhood trauma it was that led to his pathological Kerryphobia.

POSTSCRIPT: This also reminds me that some magazine — the Weekly Standard? — devoted an entire cover story sometime in the 90s to allegations that Bill Clinton took a few too many mulligans during his golf outings. I eagerly await a similar cover story on George Bush's athletic exaggerations.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST....Some poll results:

51. How much confidence do you have in George W. Bush's ability to make the right decisions about the ongoing conflict in Iraq -- a lot, some, not much, or none at all?

    28% — A lot
    30% — Some
    18% — Not much
    24% — None at all
    

61. In his statements about the war in Iraq, do you think George W. Bush is telling the entire truth, is mostly telling the truth but is hiding something, or is mostly lying?

    20% — Entire truth
    56% — Hiding something
    20% — Mostly lying
    

77. When it comes to what they knew prior to September 11th, 2001, about possible terrorist attacks against the United States, do you think members of the Bush Administration are telling the truth, are mostly telling the truth but hiding something, or are they mostly lying?

    24% — Telling truth
    56% — Hiding something
    16% — Mostly lying
    

15. Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq?

    41% — Approve
    52% — Disapprove
    

Discuss.

4%....This year, about 50% of the voting age population will vote in the presidential election.

However, only 30% of the population lives in contested states.

And according to the latest New York Times poll, only 25% of the people they surveyed are still undecided about who they're going to vote for.

Do the arithmetic and that adds up to 4% of the electorate. Everything you see for the next six months from George Bush and John Kerry — every ad, every dollar, every speech, every prerecorded telephone call — is aimed at trying to convert about 4% of the total voting age population. The other 96% of us are basically spectators — either we're not going to vote, we live in states that are foregone conclusions, or we've already made up our minds.

Do you know anyone who's part of the 4%? If you do, get to work on them.

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS....Can you say "suck" on the radio? As in, say, "George Bush sucks" (just to pull an example from a hat)?

Perhaps once upon a time you could, but no longer. NPR's lawyers believe that the FCC's new "zero tolerance" rule prevents use of the word. The Simpsons will never be the same.

REGISTRATION....I'm really tired of registering with online newspapers. Apparently Knight Ridder recently decided to require registration, and you have to register separately with every single one of their papers. What's more, a slew of other newspapers have also decided to require registration within the past week or two. Is it something in the water?

Can charging for content be far behind? I hope not. It would be the end of the blogosphere.

CLEANING UP AFTER GEORGE....I had lunch today with a longtime friend. He's a Bush supporter and strongly favored invading Iraq.

At least he used to. Today, though, before I could even get a few words out of my mouth, he started shaking his head. There's nothing more we can do in Iraq, he said. Bush's planning was hopelessly bungled. It's a complete mess. We should have finished off Afghanistan first. The Iraqis haven't shown a bit of gratitude for all the aid we've given them. We're screwed if we attack Najaf, we're screwed if we don't. We just need to leave and let them sort it out for themselves. If it turns into an Islamic theocracy — well, that's the way it goes.

Wow. And did he think this would affect Bush?

Well, he said, you can't change horses in midstream. He should be reelected.

Even though you think he's bungled the war completely? Why not vote for Kerry?

Oh no, there was no way he could do that. Maybe he wouldn't vote for either one of them. You know, cast a protest vote or something, maybe for whoever the Libertarian candidate is. But Kerry? No way.

And this, in a nutshell, illuminates John Kerry's problem. My friend is conservative, but not hardline conservative, and he has more reasons than just Iraq to be disappointed in Bush. But even so, voting for Kerry is beyond the pale. There's no reason to think he could do any better, you see.

And that's the key, isn't it? It may be too late for Kerry to win my friend's vote, but he's going to need the votes of lots of people similar to him — not hardline conservatives, but moderate conservatives who might change their votes if they're given a good enough reason. But to move those voters into his column, he's got to convince them he can fix George Bush's mess.

So far, he hasn't done that.

UPDATE: Penultimate paragraph modified to clear up some unfortunate confusion about what I meant.

KINSLEY MOVES TO LA TIMES....This is good news for Southern Californians:

Michael Kinsley, the founding editor of the online magazine Slate, was named editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times, John Carroll, editor of The Times, announced today.

....Kinsley, who also has been the editor of the New Republic and Harper's magazines, will be responsible for The Times' daily editorial and letters page, the Commentary page and the Sunday Opinion section.

Like many people, I've long found the LA Times' editorial and op-ed pages to be considerably flabbier than they should be for a paper of the Times' stature. If anyone can turn that around, Kinsley's the guy.

And here's Job 1 for you, Michael: get rid of the juvenile, jokey, 3rd-position editorials that show up like a bad penny every few days. They aren't funny, they aren't even witty, and if you can't find three legitimate subjects to have an opinion about every day then you shouldn't be running an editorial page. Don't disappoint me on this, OK?

MUQTADA AL-SADR....Who is Muqtada al-Sadr? He seems to have popped up out of nowhere to most Americans, but his roots in Iraqi politics run as deep as George Bush's in American politics. Juan Cole recommends this very good profile of the Sadrist movement in the Christian Science Monitor:

While Moqtada's religious credentials are weak, his family's political standing is as deep as the modern history of Iraq. His grandfather was the prime minister in 1932. And this young, militant cleric didn't spontaneously emerge after the fall of Saddam Hussein. US forces now entering the city of Najaf, are up against a man who has donned the well-cultivated mantle of his father (Sadek al-Sadr), the leading Shiite thorn in the side of the Hussein regime in the 1990s.

....By 1999, Sadek al-Sadr was openly attacking Hussein's rule. He called for Shiites to stop making direct donations to the Shiite clergy, since he said some of the money was being diverted to the regime for use on "women and liquor."

....This all proved too much for the regime. On Feb.18, 1999, the car carrying Sadek al-Sadr home to Najaf was riddled with bullets in an ambush, and he was killed along with two of his four sons. Most of his supporters believe Sadr survived the initial attack and was later finished off at a Najaf hospital.

....Sadek al-Sadr had left instructions for his followers to take religious instruction from Kazim al-Hairi, a cleric based in the Iranian shrine city of Qom. But on April 8, 2003, Hairi issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, calling on his followers to listen to Moqtada and to ignore the US occupation, urging the Shiites to take power for themselves.

The whole story is well worth reading.

CIRCUS DAY....Tim Dunlop has a pretty good summary of President Bush's relationship with the 9/11 commission....

SPECTER vs. HOEFFEL....Kathryn Jean Lopez in The Corner earlier today:

That's an easy one, K-Lo: of course not. Arlen Specter is far more dangerous to conservatives due to his greater seniority and well-known radical leftist tendencies. I recommend that all good conservatives vote for Joe Hoeffel, especially since this year's election won't be very close and the Senate leadership is therefore not likely to be up for grabs.

No, really, I mean it. I'm pretty sure Atrios has a donation button, too....

OUTSOURCING....Dan Drezner, aka Outsourcing-R-Us, links to a New York Times article today suggesting that outsourcing of software development might be harder than it looks:

Another Indian executive in the United States who has soured on outsourcing is Dev Ittycheria, the chief executive of Bladelogic, a designer of network management software with 70 workers, also in Waltham. Bladelogic, whose client list includes General Electric and Sprint, outsourced work to India within months of going into business in 2001. But it concluded that projects it farmed out — one to install an operating system across a network, another to keep tabs on changes done to the system — could be done faster and at a lower cost in the United States.

That was true even though programmers in India cost Bladelogic $3,500 a month versus a monthly cost of $10,000 for programmers in the United States. "The cost savings in India were three to one," Mr. Ittycheria said . "But the difference in productivity was six to one."

This fits with my own experience. Several years ago, the company I worked for was acquired by a Swiss company that had offices around the world, including one in Kuala Lumpur. This made it very easy to experiment with contracting some work out to Malaysia, but the experiment turned out to be more expensive than we had thought. In the end, my conclusion was that the raw cost needed to be about one-fourth the cost of doing the job in California in order to be worthwhile. The Malaysians only charged about half what it cost to do it at home, and eventually we gave up.

(The problems are the obvious ones. You have to spend a lot more time writing very detailed and clear specs if the work is done overseas. The coding takes longer because communication is more difficult. The overseas programmers ideally should set up the exact same coding environment as headquarters, but they can't always do it. Management overhead is greater. Etc.)

I'm no longer there, but after I left they tried again, this time with programmers in Vietnam. I had lunch with one of the company's manager last week, and she told me that it's worked out better this time because the raw cost is about 20% the cost of U.S. programmers. Even after the usual markups, it still saves the company money.

Of course, this varies from company to company and project to project. IT departments building internal systems are usually able to make more efficient use of overseas programmers than companies building consumer software. And certain types of projects (ones that are more easily broken into modules) lend themselves better to outsourcing than others.

But overall, my guess is that outsourcing isn't quite the bogeyman in the software industry that it's made out to be. It definitely exists, and it will certainly grow in the future, but people who try it often find that in the end it doesn't save nearly as much money as they hoped. My rule of thumb remains the same: the raw cost needs to be in the neighborhood of one-fourth what it would cost to do the same job at home in order for the cost savings to be worthwhile. Caveat emptor.

FRIST vs. DASCHLE....Bill Frist really wants to get rid of Tom Daschle:

In the latest indication that Frist will personally campaign against his Democratic counterpart, the Republican leader signed a two-page fundraising letter last week for Thune that was sent to thousands of potential donors. The letter was a clear call to arms on behalf of the former three-term House Member who is trying to oust Daschle, a three-term Democrat.

“If you can only make one more contribution to one of our Republican Senate candidates this election cycle ... you should make that gift to John Thune,” Frist proclaimed in the letter. To add emphasis, that phrase was set in bold-faced capital letters, accompanied by an exclamation point.

Am I the only one who thinks this could backfire? State politicians can usually make a lot of hay over accusations of "outsiders" trying to influence their elections, and I wonder if Daschle can turn something like this into a positive?

UPDATE: A reader reminds me that Daschle testified as a character witness for South Dakota congressman Bill Janklow in his vehicular manslaughter trial last year. Janklow, of course, is a Republican. I guess no good deed goes unpunished.

IRANIAN BOMBS....Is Iran accelerating its bombmaking too?

An Iranian opposition group with sources inside Iran's military is making public a list of the senior military personnel and military units it says are involved in Iran's secret nuclear weapons programs.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) says in a summary of its findings that Iran is rushing to complete a first nuclear bomb in "between one and two years."

....The Iranian opposition group's summary says the view of Iran's government is that "because of its problems in Iraq, the United States has no choice but to go soft on Iran."

Based on other reports, it's hard to say whether NCRI is really reporting anything new here, although U.S. sources seem to be taking it seriously. But that last paragraph caught my eye.

I'm not sure I buy it — something about it just doesn't click — but NCRI is supposed to release a more complete report later Wednesday. I'll be curious to see how Iran experts react to it.

GEORGE BUSH? OR LOUIS XIV?....YOU MAKE THE CALL....The Campaign Desk summarizes Allan Murray's theory (in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal) about why George Bush likes Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack even though it paints a pretty unflattering picture of his administration:

How can this be? Well, Murray explains, if read with neither liberal nor conservative blinders on, the book paints a flattering portrait of Bush -- and of no one else. Secretary of State Colin Powell is painted as "Hamlet on the Potomac," forever out of the loop. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld comes off as a schemer who refuses to take a clear stand on much of anything. CIA chief George Tenet is blamed for monumental intelligence failures. Vice President Cheney is feverish with dreams of war. Only Bush, the steadfast figure at the core of this collection of flawed climbers, is portrayed almost admiringly, says Murray, a former Washington Bureau Chief of the Journal, who now performs that role for CNBC.

So Bush is fine with the fact that everyone around him looks like an idiot just as long as he looks OK. Jeebus. Did we elect a president or the Sun King? Sometimes it's hard to tell.

NORTH KOREAN BOMBS....The Washington Post reports that U.S. intelligence agencies now believe North Korea has at least eight working nuclear bombs. "Among the evidence used in making the assessment is a detailed analysis of plutonium byproducts found on clothing worn by members of an unofficial U.S. delegation that was allowed to visit North Korean nuclear facilities several months ago."

It's comforting that George Bush's muscular attitude toward North Korean bombmaking is producing so much better results than Bill Cinton's feckless approach, isn't it?

GEORGE BUSH'S MILITARY RECORD....Like many people, I'm puzzled that the Bushies have decided to unleash the attack dogs on the issue of John Kerry's Vietnam service. It's possible, of course, that they know something I don't and have some devious trick up their sleeves that I can't figure out, but the most obvious consequence of doing this is that it gives the press an excuse to revive the issue of George Bush's military service, which until now had been allowed to die a conveniently quiet death. For example, here is James Moore in Salon today:

The president and his staff are doing a very good job of convincing the public he has released all of his National Guard records and that they prove he was responsible during his time in Alabama and Texas. But the critical documents have still not been seen. The mandatory written report about Bush's grounding is mysteriously not in the released file, nor is any other disciplinary evidence. A document showing a "roll-up," or the accumulation of his total retirement points, is also absent, and so are his actual pay stubs.

If the president truly wanted to end the conjecture about his time in the Guard, he would allow an examination of his pay stubs and any IRS W-2 forms from his Guard years. These can be pieced together to determine when he was paid and whether he earned enough to have met his sworn obligations.

This is exactly right, and there are other documents that are missing from Bush's file too. Why is Bush giving the media an excuse to start pressing him on this question again?

As Moore points out, Bush never actually released his complete records. All he did was release a pile of documents that he said were complete. The only way to know if anything was left out is for Bush to sign a release form that allows the relevant archives to release his files directly to reporters. And here's a guess: if he agreed to do it, Kerry would probably follow suit.

Then there's the testimony of Bill Burkett, who claims that Bush's military files in Austin were "cleansed" after he became governor of Texas. If Bush signed a release form that allowed a direct release to reporters of the archived version of his files, it would clear up the question of whether the Austin files have been tampered with.

Nobody has ever pressed Bush on this. He dumped a big pile of paper on the White House press corps, who accepted that the pile was complete because he said it was. But if it really is, why not sign the release forms and allow reporters to get direct access to the archived files on microfiche?

More to the point, why is Bush providing an excuse to bring all this up again? Is his brain trust convinced that it's worth it just to get lots of 1971 photos of a shaggy-haired John Kerry protesting the war in print? Beats me.

POSTSCRIPT: I may follow up with some further details about this, depending on how they pan out. In the meantime, this post from February summarizes everything I know about Bill Burkett's file cleansing claim. I spoke with George Conn, one of Burkett's witnesses, about this, and a transcript of the interview is included in the post. Conn doesn't support Burkett's charges, but as I wrote at the time, "Conn's story doesn't hold up." I explain why in the post.

PACKER ON BLOGS, PART 2....Mother Jones has gotten the message: George Packer's ruminations about blogs in the May/June issue is now online in its entirety. It includes this paragraph:

This is potentially the most radical innovation of the form: It opens up political journalism to a vast marketplace of competitors, reminiscent of earlier ages of pamphleteering. It also restores unvarnished opinion, for better and worse, to a central place in political writing. Insult and invective were the stock-in-trade of the English political essayists of the 18th century, and of their American counterparts during the early years of the republic (when bimbo eruptions made their first appearance in press coverage of presidential campaigns). The explosion of blogs has blown a needed hole in the sealed rooms of the major editorial pages and the Sunday talk shows.

Now see? That's not so bad, is it?

On the other hand, there's also this odd pronouncement about the limitations of blogs:

Above all, they didn't grasp the intensity of feeling among Democratic primary voters — the resentments still glowing hot from Florida 2000, the overwhelming interest in economic and domestic issues, the personal antipathy toward Bush, the resurgence of activism, the longing for a win.

This is truly peculiar. If there was any medium anywhere that did capture the "personal antipathy" toward Bush and the "longing for a win," it was blogs. This really seems to pop out of nowhere.

Overall, though, I liked the piece for pointing out both the good and the bad about blogs. In fact, Packer comes close to making a point that I've been planning to write about for a while: the question isn't whether blogs are good or bad, it's what they're good at and what they're not:

Blogs, by contrast, are atomized, fragmentary, and of the instant. They lack the continuity, reach, and depth to turn an election into a story. When one of the best of the bloggers, Joshua Micah Marshall of talkingpointsmemo.com, brought his laptop to New Hampshire and tried to cover the race in the more traditional manner, the results were less than satisfying....But the failure wasn't personal; this particular branch of the Fourth Estate just doesn't lend itself to sustained narrative and analysis.

I think that's exactly right. In the same way that TV is good at images and magazines are good at in-depth analysis, blogs are very good at some things and ill-suited to others. It's all about strengths and weaknesses, not good and bad. More on that later.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, did you know that among English words of more than a few letters, "strengths" has the highest percentage of consonants? Just thought I'd mention that.

GOOGLE: A NAME OR A VALUATION?....Google is expected to go public shortly at a valuation of about $25 billion. John Quiggin looks at Google's economic fundamentals and concludes, "I find it hard to draw a plausible earnings path that would yield a present value of $25 billion at any reasonable discount rate."

Well, duh. It's an internet company, John. Its valuation is based on the following: (a) it will never have any substantial competition, (b) earnings will increase 100% per year for the next century, (c) earnings growth is a discredited way of valuing companies anyway, and (d) you just don't get it, do you?

And they let this man have a blog?

JOHN KERRY'S MEDALS....I know that I'm hardly in a position to complain about political minutiae, but is this whole John Kerry flap really about (a) whether he threw ribbons over a fence in 1971 or the actual medals themselves, and (b) whether or not soldiers routinely refer to their uniform ribbons as "medals"?

(Answer: (a) ribbons, (b) yes.)

Even by the admittedly low standards of Campaign 2004, isn't this a fairly desperate line of attack?

Anyway, Thomas Oliphant was there when it happened, and he tells the story in the Boston Globe today.

INHOFE TO RECEIVE TD LYSENKO MEMORIAL AWARD....Chris Mooney reports that senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma will be receiving a prize for "supporting rational, science-based thinking and policy-making." Inhofe has called the EPA "a Gestapo bureaucracy," he's believes global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," and he thinks 9/11 was God's punishment for our inadequate support of Israel.

OK, OK, that last one doesn't have anything to do with science. But you get the picture anyway: as far as Inhofe is concerned, it's only "rational" if it doesn't discomfort his energy industry buddies. It's nice that conservatives even have their very own science these days, isn't it?

GUEST POSTS....When we were first putting together the blueprint for Political Animal back in February, one of our ideas was to invite some regular guests to contribute occasional posts. Today we have our first one. Our inaugural guest post is from Bruce Reed, Bill Clinton's chief domestic policy advisor for eight years and now president of the Democratic Leadership Council.

Bruce attended the abortion rights rally on Sunday and noticed something missing. His thoughts are below.

BREAKING UP IRAQ....Several people have recommended Peter Galbraith's piece in Sunday's New York Review of Books called "How to Get Out of Iraq." So I read it.

Galbraith provides a long summary of what's gone right and what's gone wrong in Iraq, and after a couple of warnings that we may be completely screwed no matter what we do he spends the final third of his article suggesting a possible solution. This turns out to be a fleshed-out version of Leslie Gelb's suggestion from last year to divide Iraq into three parts. The Kurds get the area in the north that they occupy now, the Sunnis get the central area, and the Shiites get the south.

Iraq, Galbraith believes, "is not salvageable as a unitary state" — and as a former ambassador to Croatia he knows something about trying to salvage unitary states. Unfortunately, he also believes that "the problem of Iraq is that a breakup of the country is not a realistic possibility for the present." His solution, therefore, is a sort of loose federation, where the three territories are about 90% autonomous, with a weak central government in charge of foreign affairs, monetary policy, and not much else.

I was skeptical of this idea when Gelb proposed it in a stronger form, mainly because there's no oil in the central Sunni region:

Giving the Sunni state a permanent claim on oil wealth from two other countries just isn't realistic in the long term, while forced destitution would create an insanely enraged anti-American state smack in the middle of present-day Iraq. It's a disaster waiting to happen.

It's not clear how Galbraith's loose federation makes this any more workable: he acknowledges that "some sharing of oil revenues would be essential," but doesn't suggest how to make that happen. After all, with a weak central government and no U.S. presence to force the issue, how long would it be before the Kurds and the Shiites simply cut the Sunnis off? Unfortunately, this kind of hazy thinking then becomes a pattern.

Under his plan, the Kurds are "more likely" to see advantages if they feel secure. Shiites, however, "strongly support the idea that petroleum should be owned by the respective regions," a problem that is mentioned but then goes unaddressed. "We can hope" that the Sunnis will become more moderate if they are offered semi-autonomy. If U.S. troops disengage from the south, this "may mean" the south would be less overtly anti-American.

In the Sunni triangle, "one hope" is for elections to produce a set of leaders who can restore order and end the insurrection. What's more, "with skilled diplomacy" the United States or the United Nations might be able to arrange for a more liberal regime in Baghdad than would exist in the south.

You get the idea: there's a lot of things in this plan that seem to be backed up by little more than hope. In fact, Galbraith himself pretty much admits this, and further admits that even if his plan works it won't exactly be a dream come true. Essentially, he seems to believe that it's just the least worst of a bad bunch of options.

Unfortunately, he may be right, and for that reason my skepticism toward his proposal may be unfair. After all, I suspect the real question is whether it's possible for us to impose any kind of political structure on Iraq that's likely to stick once we leave. I doubt it. Which means we really have only two choices: stay in Iraq for a long time — five or ten years — or else get out and let a civil war sort things out. Galbraith's plan is probably little more than a fig leaf for the latter option, but maybe that's the only choice we have left.

YET ANOTHER FAMOUS WRITER ADMITS HE IS ADDICTED TO BLOGS....Gotta disagree with Matt: George Packer's ode to blogs in Mother Jones isn't "dripping with condescension." After admitting that he's addicted to blogs and spends uncounted hours reading them, his judgment is surprisingly accurate:

There's a constant sense that someone (almost always the blogger) is winning and someone else is losing. Everything that happens in the blogosphere -- every point, rebuttal, gloat, jeer, or "fisk" (dismemberment of a piece of text with close analytical reading) -- is a knockout punch. A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another. They are also nearly without exception men (this form of combat seems too naked for more than a very few women). I imagine them in neat blue shirts, the glow from the screen reflected in their glasses as they sit up at 3:48 a.m. triumphantly tapping out their third rejoinder to the WaPo's press commentary on Tim Russert's on-air recap of the Wisconsin primary.

OK, I take it back. Maybe it is dripping with condescension, although, as Matt notes, I'll never know for sure unless (a) I buy a copy of the magazine or (b) they print the entire piece online, not just the first few paragraphs.

However, based solely on the thousand words that are online, I'd say Packer has blogs pegged pretty well. While it may be true that mainstream journalists are sometimes more contemptuous than they should be toward blogs, Packer is dead right when he says that we more than return the favor. In fact, practically the only place that liberal and conservative bloggers find common ground these days is their apparent belief that the New York Times ranks just below Richard Nixon's White House on the list of trustworthy American institutions.

Can that be true? Off the top of my head, here's how I'd rank the most common sources of news, counting only those with large audiences. Starting with the worst:

1. Supermarket tabloids
   

2. Talk radio
   

3. Local TV news
   

4. Small local newspapers
   

5. Chain newspapers
   

6. Network newscasts
   

7. Major national dailies, including the New York Times
   

8. The very best of the glossy magazines
   

In other words, with the exception of a small number of top-notch magazines, which pay well, allow lots of time to report stories, and provide lots of space to tell them, the New York Times is about as good as it gets. If you think the Times sucks, then, it mostly means that you're just unhappy with the current human capacity to report events. It's like complaining that the Yankees suck because no one on their team has ever hit a hundred home runs in a season.

And now for the most important question of all: how did this post somehow turn into a defense of the New York Times? Honestly, I don't know. But maybe Packer can add that to the list of blogdom's charms: like that proverbial box of chocolates, you just never know what you're going to get. Sometimes, neither do the bloggers themselves.

UPDATE: The whole article is now available here. Further commentary on Packer's observations is here.

LIBERALS AND THE LEFT....Virginia Postrel reports on the LA Times Book Festival:

The problem isn't that conservatives or libertarians are missing (though they mostly are) but that liberals--the non-socialist, non-Marxist people who make up the mainstream of the Democratic Party and, for that matter, American journalism--are so dramatically underrepresented. While you can find exceptions, the LAT Book Festival, like the LAT Book Review, represents the world according to David Horowitz, in which there are no liberals, only the left and a few token anti-leftists for "balance."

Hmmm.....

FOREIGN POLICY....John Kerry's foreign policy vs. George Bush's foreign policy:

''I think there is a fundamental difference here in terms of their approach to the world," said Samuel L. Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, who now advises Kerry. ''I think this administration believes you go it alone and you use allies when necessary, and I think John believes that you use allies whenever possible and go it alone when necessary."

Does that seem a little....abstract for a presidential campaign? It does to me.

Berger's quote is from an article by Farah Stockman in the Boston Globe today that highlights a key Kerry problem: as Kerry moves rightward after the primaries, and as Bush becomes more receptive to ideas that Kerry has long championed — giving the United Nations a far greater role in Iraq, emphasizing the importance of welcoming NATO to Iraq, and beefing up the number of US troops in Iraq — Kerry loses any chance of distinguishing himself from Bush over foreign policy.

This strikes me as a serious problem. National security is almost certain to be the defining issue of the campaign, and there's just no way for Kerry to get any traction there if his positions aren't clearly distinguishable from Bush's. And despite the pro-war partisans' continuing fantasy that George Bush is dedicated to the same kind of vast war of civilizations they are, the fact is that Bush has adopted an awful lot of Democratic positions in the past year. Aside from rhetorical tone, it's getting harder and harder for Kerry to find points of disagreement that are more than just nitpicking.

Unfortunately, that leaves only a charge of incompetence: Bush is prosecuting the war poorly and getting American soldiers needlessly killed. But that's a charge that's unlikely to stick. As John F. Kennedy said when his popularity rating shot up after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, "The worse I do, the more popular I get!"

I think that's exactly right. If the war goes poorly, a lot of people are likely to rally around Bush, not toss him out of office. And that means that if John Kerry wants to win, he has to figure out some genuinely bold and popular foreign policy initiative to identify himself with. But what?

NUTS? OR JUST PLAIN CRAZY?....Eric Alterman writes about Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack in his Nation column this week. Here is the second of his six observations:

2. That's too bad, because unfortunately Cheney is nuts. As Powell puts it, Cheney was in the grip of a "fever," no longer the "steady, unemotional rock that he had witnessed a dozen years earlier during the run-up to the Gulf War. The vice president was beyond hell-bent for action against Saddam. It was as if nothing else existed." Woodward gives us the backstory: Cheney, confirmed by his equally fevered aide "Scooter" Libby, repeatedly pitched--as he does today--the apparently imaginary meeting between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague. Powell/Woodward aptly term this contention "worse than ridiculous." It goes on. "Cheney would take an intercept and say it shows something was happening. No, no, no, Powell or another would say, it shows that somebody talked to somebody else who said something might be happening. A conversation would suggest something might be happening, and Cheney would convert that into a 'We know.'"

This will now be the third time that I've done this, but Eric's column brings to mind an essay about Dick Cheney written by John Perry Barlow last year. Turns out Barlow knew Cheney pretty well back in the day and thinks that "nuts" might be exactly the right description for him. But with a catch.

Not everyone agrees with me, but Barlow's essay struck me as eerily plausible. Here it is.

BAIT AND SWITCH....Glenn Reynolds links today to a Fox News piece about a student writer at Oregon State who was fired for writing a racially insensitive column. Fox suggests there's a "double standard" at work.

Maybe. Fox claims that David Williams, who is white, was fired for writing, "I think blacks should be more careful in deciding whom they choose to support. They need to grow beyond the automatic reaction of defending someone because he or she shares the same skin color and is in a dilemma."

They chose to highlight that paragraph because it's similar to — plagiarized from, actually — a paragraph written by Pulitzer-Prize winning African-American columnist Leonard Pitts a few weeks ago. Hey, nobody at OSU protested his column. What gives?

The problem is that Williams wrote more than just that one paragraph. How about this instead?

One would think that with the strong presence of talented blacks in government, sports and entertainment, this minority base would have a slew of noble and moral leaders. However, especially as of late, this has not been the case.

[Robert Kelly and OJ Simpson are hauled out as examples.]

My point, however, is this: There is a lack of morality in the black community because African American leaders, whether Jesse Jackson or the NAACP, choose to rally around minorities who seem to have little quality characteristics about them.

Personally, I'd fire the guy just for being a crappy writer. However, even taking into account the hypersensitive atmosphere common at universities, it's also egregiously ignorant and insensitive.

Is it a firing offense for a 20-year-old kid? Reasonable people can disagree, and the campus groups who protested the column apparently weren't asking for Williams to be fired in any case. (Pitts agrees. He thinks Williams mostly displayed ignorance, not racism.) But there's not much question that Fox pulled a bait-and-switch, deliberately leaving the genuinely offensive portion of the column out of their report. Maybe somebody on their staff needs to be fired.

Or more likely given a medal for race baiting above and beyond the call of duty.

RELIGION UPDATE.... Earlier today I said that although we liberals should be more accomodating toward religion, it was still perfectly OK to blast away at folks who use religion as a thin cover for "their own little liberal-hate cults." Well, this is the guy I was talking about. Feel free to spare no invective against cretins like this. Better yet, demand that if conservatives don't loudly denounce him then they obviously support what he's saying.

This fellow was at the big abortion rally today, and speaking of abortion, here's what Karen Hughes had to say about it today:

I think that after September 11, the American people are valuing life more and we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life....Really, the fundamental issue between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life.

So if you get an abortion, you're no better than Osama.

Ten minutes from normal, my ass. Try 23 hours.

UPDATE: Apparently the New York Times dumped the Karen Hughes quote in favor of some different ones for the final version of the story. That's why the quote doesn't show up in the linked article.

DOUBLE STANDARDS?....Leonard Pitts:

When a white person screws up, it ignites a debate on the screw up. When a black person screws up, it ignites a debate on race.

The subject, of course, is Jack Kelley vs. Jayson Blair, and Pitts' point is precisely on target. Don't the folks who loudly insisted that affirmative action was to blame for Jayson Blair's transgressions owe us an explantion for their relative silence about the far worse journalistic fabrications of Jack Kelley? Has it given them any second thoughts at all?