YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK....Since I've written a couple of posts about Joe Wilson recently, I decided a few days ago to read the entire Niger section of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report to make sure I knew everything they had said about him. As it turns out, there are only a couple of paragraphs about discrepancies in Wilson's testimony, and since those paragraphs have already been reproduced a thousand times in the mainstream media I didn't learn anything new.

However, it turns out that there is a pretty good story buried in there about how CIA analysis works — or doesn't. It takes a while to get to the punch line, but it's worth it. The timeline begins just four weeks after 9/11:

• October 15, 2001: The CIA receives a report from a "foreign government service" — the Italians — saying that Niger had signed a deal to ship several tons of uranium to Iraq.

• February 5, 2002: The CIA receives a second report from the Italians. This report claims to contain the "verbatim text" of the agreement, which calls for Niger to ship 500 tons of yellowcake per year to Iraq.
  

Time passes. Dick Cheney learns about the report and asks for more information. The CIA sends Joe Wilson to Niger to check things out. He reports back that a deal between Niger and Iraq is very unlikely. The Italians continue to say that their source is reliable. The State Department is skeptical.

The CIA publishes a National Intelligence Estimate saying that there are "reports" of Iraq trying to procure uranium. The State Department objects, but due to a weird drafting snafu their dissent ends up in the wrong section of the NIE.

The deputy director of the CIA, testifying before Congress, is asked about British reports of Iraqi uranium procurement from Africa and says "we don't think they are very credible." The president plans to give a speech in Cincinnati mentioning the African uranium, but the CIA suggests the passage be removed. George Tenet personally calls the White House to tell them the "reporting is weak." Despite this, references to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium continue to show up in CIA documents.

We now move on to....

• October 11, 2002: An Italian journalist provides the U.S. embassy in Rome with copies of the actual documents showing a deal between Niger and Iraq. The embassy sends the documents to both the CIA and INR (the State Department's intelligence arm).

• October 15, 2002: The INR Iraq nuclear analyst immediately emails other intelligence analysts offering to provide copies of the documents at a meeting already scheduled for the next day. The INR analyst is suspicious of the purported agreement because "it bears a funky Emb. of Niger stamp" and because a companion document mentions a military campaign against major world powers that includes both Iran and Iraq and is being orchestrated through the Nigerien embassy in Rome.

  The INR analyst dryly suggests that this is "completely implausible."

• October 16, 2002: The intelligence folks have their scheduled meeting. The documents are handed out to everyone. The CIA rep takes a copy, files it away, and promptly forgets it exists.
  

And now for the punch line. Why did the CIA analysts not even bother to look at these documents? Because "they believed that the foreign government service reporting was verbatim text and did not think it would advance the story on the alleged uranium deal."

Got that? They just assumed that the original report was a verbatim transcript so they didn't bother looking at the documents themselves — despite the fact that INR had already alerted them that the text and formatting of the source documents made them suspect.

That's some high quality analysis there. And we all know the rest of the story: three months later George Bush included the uranium story in his State of the Union address despite the fact that (a) INR had said two weeks previously in an email that the documents were "clearly a forgery," (b) the CIA didn't think British reporting on this issue was "credible," and (c) the uranium reporting from elsewhere in Africa was both old and "fragmentary."

Remember this the next time you hear about a CIA report. This is the same agency that decided not to bother looking at original source documents in the Niger uranium fiasco because they just assumed there wouldn't be anything new in them. And it turns out that without the evidence of those documents, the conclusion of the CIA (five months after the State of the Union address) was that "we no longer believe...that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad."

Your tax dollars at work.

UNDUE INFLUENCE....The White House says it opposes the creation of an intelligence czar because President Bush "wants to protect intelligence agencies from any undue influence."

The chutzpah of these people is just breathtaking, isn't it? How do they find people willing to say stuff like this with a straight face?

Still, as much as I hate to admit it, I think this anonymous official has a point — and I think John Kerry is being too hasty in suggesting that we should simply implement 100% of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations ASAP. I continue to fear that the commission was predisposed to finding a bureaucratic solution to a problem that might not be fundamentally one of bureaucracy, and that centralization of responsibility won't necessarily produce a better intelligence product.

However, one part of their recommendations that I do like is their proposal for more robust congressional oversight of the intelligence community. I don't know if they got all the details right, and there's no question that finding the right balance is a tricky task, but independent oversight is a good idea for practically any agency, and especially important for one that by definition works mostly in secret.

Regardless of what we end up with, though, I definitely don't want Congress rushing to approve the complex legislation required to implement all this. The 9/11 commissioners are doing their best to pressure them into hasty action by manufacturing public panic over the idea that terrorists are "trying to attack us sooner rather than later," but that's how we got the PATRIOT Act three years ago. These are long term recommendations, not short term fixes, and I'd prefer a serious and thoughtful debate this time around.

DARFUR....The UN Security Council has finally agreed to a watered down resolution threatening to impose sanctions if the government of Sudan does not stop atrocities in Darfur.

This has hardly been the UN's finest moment, and China and supposed-American-ally Pakistan abstained on even the milquetoast resolution that the United States eventually compromised on. But I suppose it's a start.

STABILITY AND DEMOCRACY....I'm with Matt on this:

Look, look, it is fun to get all upset about Democrats who'll accept a "stable" Iraq rather than a "democratic" one, but you've got to ask yourself a thing or two. Would I rather have a stable Iraq or would I rather have a failed state Iraq that the president of the United States calls a democracy? This is your choice. If you like what's behind door number two (i.e., Afghanistan) then you really ought to vote for George W. Bush. He's really good at talking about democracy-promotion. Way better than John Kerry. The only Democrat who even gets the text in the right neighborhood is Joe Biden and his delivery is nothing compared to Bush's. And not only is Bush good at talking about democracy promotion, he's really good at calling Afghanistan a democracy, and really, really good at pretending that Baathist hitman Iyad Allawi is an emerging liberal democrat.

I'll confess that I don't entirely know what to think of all this, but I do know that trash talking John Kerry over the fact that his speeches aren't as dishonest as Bush's in the area of democracy promotion is just frivolous.

Here's the problem in a nutshell: assuming that it's possible to impose democracy by military force in the first place, it strikes me that this is a task that (a) requires stability as a first step and (b) probably requires a military presence for at least a decade and quite possibly more like 40-50 years. In the real world, though, the Bush administration has shown neither the inclination nor the talent to accomplish (a) and the American public almost certainly won't stand for (b). In other words, it's quite likely an impossible dream.

Now, I don't know this for sure. I don't suppose anyone does. And I'll admit that there are times when the neocon fascination with a "reverse domino theory" appeals to me. Maybe we can install democracy in Iraq! And maybe this really will become a shining example for other Arab states! That would be very cool.

But the neocons don't have an especially good track record on these grand ideas of theirs, and if they want the American public to buy into this they need to make a serious case that it can work at a cost that's acceptable. Basically, anyone who thinks that America should accept nothing less than full-on democracy in Iraq needs to provide several things:

• Some compelling historical evidence that this has a chance of working. Examples from the last two or three decades would be preferable.

• An acknowledgement of how long this will take, how much it will cost, and how many American lives will be lost in the process.

• A believable plan that explains how we're going to end up with a democratic Iraq. It needs to be something that persuades not just the wonks, but average Americans and average foreigners as well. Because unless public opinion buys into this, it's not going to happen.
  

In the meantime, let's not mock stability. I suspect the citizens of Iraq wouldn't.

GREAT BRITONS....Commenting on a new piece of sculpture, Patrick Barkham writes this in the Guardian:

Is it a sheep pen, a set of stairs or a scaled-up children's puzzle?

No, this tower of 20 slabs of English oak heartwood is, of course, the greatest Briton of all time: Winston Churchill.

Mr. Barkham is writing about a country that has produced Isaac Newton, Henry VIII, Adam Smith, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Charles Darwin, James Watt, and Elizabeth I — not to mention Byron, Keats, Hume, Locke, Burke, Bacon, Cromwell, Chaucer, Disraeli, Austen, Dickens, Hobbes, Keynes, Maxwell, and a whole bunch of others who will probably occur to me in due time.

I don't care what the British public thinks — and I especially don't care what they think in a poll that ranks Princess Diana as the third greatest Briton of all time — but as undoubtedly great as he was, you have to stretch even to put Churchill in the top ten. #1 is just a joke.

SLOGANEERING....That was then, this is now:

Herbert Hoover, 1932: "Prosperity is just around the corner."

George W. Bush, 2004: "We've turned a corner, and we're not turning back."

I know that Democrats have been trying to pin the Hoover tag on Bush for a while now, but does he really think it's a good idea to help them along?

And speaking of that, I have a contest in mind. We all know that Bush is likely to be the first president since you-know-who to suffer a net loss of jobs during his term in office, but there are probably some other comparisons we can make to poor old Herbert Hoover too. So here's the contest: complete the sentence "George Bush is the first president since Herbert Hoover to ________ ."

Factual comparisons preferred. Cheap shots encouraged.

UPDATE: Winner so far is Paul: ". . . be succeeded by five consecutive Democratic administrations."

POLICY....Paul Krugman complains today that TV news flatly refuses to cover the actual policy proposals of the candidates for president:

I've been reading 60 days' worth of transcripts from the places four out of five Americans cite as where they usually get their news: the major cable and broadcast TV networks. Never mind the details — I couldn't even find a clear statement that Mr. Kerry wants to roll back recent high-income tax cuts and use the money to cover most of the uninsured. When reports mentioned the Kerry plan at all, it was usually horse race analysis — how it's playing, not what's in it.

Here's a tip for the television newshounds: read Bradford Plumer's short-but-sweet blog post at Mother Jones explaining a few of John Kerry's most important policy proposals — including one of my personal favorites, his proposal to have the feds insure catastrophic illness. (Which, oddly enough, got no play in his speech last night and is buried three links deep on his website. Go figure.)

It's a good read. Check it out.

WORSE THAN SADDAM?....I had lunch with a friend yesterday who bemoaned the chaos in Iraq and suggested that Iraqis were worse off than they were before the war. "You can't really get much worse than Saddam Hussein," I argued, but he just shook his head. He wasn't convinced.

When I got home, though, I saw that the British Foreign Affairs Select Committee pretty much agrees with him. The culprit, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, is that despite lots of high-minded talk coming out of Washington and London, nobody seems to genuinely care enough about democracy and nation building to produce both a workable plan and the resources to pull it off:

"There is a real danger if these resources are not provided soon that Afghanistan -- a fragile state in one of the most sensitive and volatile regions of the world -- could implode, with terrible consequences," the committee says in its report.

....On Iraq, the committee concluded that Al Qaeda had turned Iraq into a "battleground" with appalling consequences for the country's people.

[Committee chairman Donald Anderson] warned that the consequences of not ensuring peace and normality in Iraq "may be a failed state and regional instability."

Which is worse, a rogue state or a failed state? That gets deep into the heart of foreign policy wonkery, but it's certainly not obvious that my friend is wrong. If Iraq does turn into a failed state, it would most likely be a lot more dangerous to the U.S. than it was when Saddam was in charge.

Which is why, regardless of whether or not you opposed the war, it's critically important to succeed — or at least not fail utterly — in Iraq now that we're there. If Iraq turns into another Sudan, we really are in big trouble.

Of course, this begs the question: can John Kerry's multilateralist view of how to handle Iraq succeed? Juan Cole breaks it down and suggests a way that it might. Take a look.

ECONOMIC NEWS....Economic growth in the second quarter was worse than expected:

The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of just 3 percent in the spring, a dramatic slowdown from the rapid pace of the past year....The size of the slowdown caught economists by surprise. Many had been looking for GDP growth to come in around 3.8 percent in the second quarter.

In addition, retail sales are down, factory orders are declining, housing starts are down, and the stock market is flat.

On the other hand, consumer confidence is up — although I wonder for how long? — and inflation is in good shape.

Overall, my take on the economy has been that it's good enough to keep Bush's hopes alive and bad enough to keep Kerry's hopes alive. On balance, though, the most recent news has been mildly but consistently weaker. That's bad news for Bush.

Too bad he didn't use his term in office to genuinely try to improve the economy. Instead he used it to pursue ideological tax cuts for his corporate pals and a hodgepodge of little initiatives aimed at every interest group he could think of in key states — all the while hoping the economy would recover on its own and his policies wouldn't matter. Unfortunately for Bush — and for all of us who have to suffer through it — it's not looking as if his gamble will pay off.

UPDATE: Hmmm, it turns out that consumer confidence is up for some, but not for all. The Talent Show has the details.

BERGER UPDATE....Sandy Berger may have foolishly removed copies of some classified documents during his trips to the National Archives last year, but that's all they were: copies. The originals are still safe and sound and the 9/11 Commission has "seen everything that the archives saw."

Tapped has the story, or you can go straight to the Wall Street Journal if you have a subscription.

CONVENTION RATINGS....About 20 million households watched John Kerry's speech last night. I don't know how that compares to four years ago, but apparently ratings for the convention have been down 10-20% on each of the previous nights.

I'm surprised. I know that interest in the conventions has been declining steadily pretty much forever, but I really thought that ratings would buck that trend this year because the race is so tight and so important. But no: CSI is the ratings winner as usual.

Why the lack of interest even though people seem more engaged than normal this year? Maybe it's because the true believers on both sides don't really need to watch. The number of undecided voters is smaller than it's ever been at this point in a race, and maybe those are the voters who drive big ratings?

Or maybe people actually aren't nearly as engaged as we think. I mean, it seems like they are to me, but maybe I'm confusing lots of trash talking with actual widespread interest. At any rate, it's hard to square "the most important election of our lifetimes" with a 20% drop in ratings.

KERRY SPEECH THREAD....Here's an open thread to chat about John Kerry's speech. My take: not bad, but not a slam dunk killer either. Some of the notes it hit were pretty good, a few were oddly off key, and the second half had a bit of a laundry list quality to it. Overall, though, it was at the high end of workmanlike and did what it had to do.

....By the way, I thought Wes Clark's speech was terrific. Best of the night.

MORE ON THE DNC SURPRISE....The al-Qaeda fugitive who was captured in Pakistan a few days ago is named Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani and was involved in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Here's more about his capture:

Another U.S. counterterrorism official said Ghailani's capture would have been even more significant if not publicized so quickly.

"He's been on the run since 1998 so you have five years of critical intelligence that can be mined: where he has been, who he has been with, how his operations worked," said the counterterrorism official.

"Now, anything that he was involved in is being shredded, burned and, thrown in a river. Those things are all going away as we speak," the official added. "We have to assume anyone affiliated with this guy is on the run . . . when usually, we can get great stuff as long as we can keep it quiet."

Several U.S. officials said it was unclear why Pakistan publicized the arrest....

See the previous post for the answer that seems to have eluded "several U.S. officials."

UPDATE: In fairness, here's the Washington Post's take on the timing of the announcement:

Pakistani officials have rejected allegations that they delayed the announcement for four days to obtain maximum publicity. Hayat said the delay was a result of "double checks and even triple checks in such cases."

But in the arrests of other high-profile al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, including Abu Zubayida, Khalid Sheik Mohammad and Ramzi Bin al Shibh, the news media received word almost immediately.

So was the announcement delayed too long or made too soon? Stay tuned.

DNC SURPRISE....Four weeks ago, John Judis, Spencer Ackerman, and Massoud Ansari reported in The New Republic that the administration was turning the screws on the Pakistanis to round up an al-Qaeda bigshot before the election. That seemed plausible to me, but the additional specification that they had been told the capture should be announced on "the first three days of the Democratic National Convention" seemed like a bit of a stretch.

Silly me. The Pakistanis, apparently eager to please, have done their part right on time.

Scary, isn't it? Maybe it's time to get measured for a tinfoil hat after all.

UPDATE: More here.

FEAR OF HELL....This is a mega-wonky post on a subject of no importance, but what the hell. Feel free to ignore it if you want.

Dan Drezner links today to a report from the St. Louis Fed and concludes that it's "pretty weak." I read the same report last night, and it turns out that "pretty weak" is being altogether too polite.

Basically, two economists decided to test the hypothesis that fear of hell is good for economic growth. Now, it turns out that they actually have raw data on this: a column of numbers showing the percent of people in each country who believe in hell, and another column of numbers showing GDP per capita for each country. (Why GDP per capita when it's economic growth they're concerned about? Beats me. But let's move on anyway.)

So what's the correlation? It turns out to be -.21. However, the number you care about is the square of the correlation, which is .04, or 4%. This means that even if you assume the raw data is both correct and robust — a fairly heroic assumption — belief in hell explains only 4% of the variance in GDP per capita between different countries. In other words, it hardly explains a thing.

But the authors weren't satisfied with that, so they did two things. First, instead of using raw data they ranked each country and computed a rank correlation. (Is that legit? Maybe. Hard to say. And did they even do a rank correlation, which is a specialized statistic? Doesn't look like it. But let's keep moving.)

Second, they chose to break the correlation into two correlations:

• Belief in hell vs. amount of corruption
  

• Amount of corruption vs. GDP per capita
  

Having done all that, they computed the first correlation and got a value of -.34. Square that and you get .11, or 11%, which is a lot better than 4%. Hurrah!

However, you can also compute the rank correlation directly: belief in hell vs. GDP per capita. If you do, the correlation is .15. Square it and you get 2%. That's even worse than the 4% that Dan got using the raw data, and is so low as to be completely worthless.

This strikes me as worthy of John Lott:

• Run a correlation on the raw data. Hmmm. 4%. Not so good.
  

• Try a rank correlation instead. Hmmm. 2%. Even worse.
  

• I know! Do a rank correlation and break the correlation into two stages. Bingo! As long as you don't look too hard.
  

How does stuff like this get past peer review?

And speaking of John Lott, what's he up to these days? It turns out he's interested in electronic voting, and guess which side he's on? Tim Lambert has the details here and here.

UPDATE: After I published this post I clicked all the links to make sure they were correct (as I always do). And guess what? The Fed article now has an editor's note:

Below is a new version of this article, which discusses recent research in economics regarding a possible relationship between economic growth and religion. It is the second revision that has been posted. In both the original version and the first revision, the article ended with a discussion of simple correlations between countries’ religiosity, levels of corruption and per capita incomes. The purpose of these discussions was to use a very simple framework to illustrate the results found in the literature. Because the discussion did not go any deeper than simple correlations, it was never intended to be a substitute for serious statistical analysis.

Thanks to the keen eyes of a number of readers, however, we have discovered that the charts used in both of these versions of the article contained errors. Consequently, the version below does not include discussions of the correlations between religiosity, corruption and per capita income. It is important to note that this has no bearing on the results in the literature that are discussed in the article. It is not uncommon, for example, for simple correlations between two variables to provide different answers from regressions that control for a longer list of variables.

I would like to apologize to any of our readers who have been inconvenienced by this series of corrections. In addition, I would like to thank all of those who picked up on the errors and let us know about them.

In other words: this was just simplistic crap and it wasn't even computed correctly at that, so we're deleting the whole thing except for the literature review that was formerly just an introduction to the data. Glad to see that the St. Louis Fed holds itself to such high standards.

WHITE HOUSE vs. CONGRESS....I'm curious about something. Which would you prefer?

• Kerry wins the presidency but the House and Senate stay in Republican hands.

• Kerry loses, but Democrats win control of both House and Senate.
  

This is mainly a question for liberals, but I suppose conservatives can play too. No cheating, though: these are your only two choices. What's your preference?

FOREIGN POLICY....David Adesnik is unhappy with the lack of foreign policy detail on display at the Democratic Convention:

If you look at the speeches given by the Democrats' three most experienced foreign policymakers — Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Jimmy Carter — you won't find any common message about how America's interests and ideals should shape its foreign policy.

I'm not above the occasional criticism of Democratic foreign policy myself, but I wonder just what people like David are expecting? Some kind of lockstep agreement about the mathematical formula we're going to use to decide on foreign interventions? A bulleted PowerPoint slide signed in blood by every top Democrat in the country?

And really, any student of history can tell you that campaign rhetoric doesn't mean much anyway. LBJ based his 1964 campaign on letting South Vietnamese kids fight their own war and then shipped half a million American kids to Vietnam within a year of winning the election. Richard Nixon had a secret plan to end the war and promptly expanded to war to Cambodia and Laos as soon as he took office. (He was also a famous red-baiter who opened relations with Red China.) Jimmy Carter was all about human rights, but he supported the Shah until the bitter end — with disastrous consequences. George Bush talked about being a "humble nation" during the campaign, but after 9/11 he tossed that into the dustbin of history and invaded two countries in three years.

Now, it's true that sometimes you get what you voted for. Ike said he'd end the Korean War and he did. Reagan said he'd be tough on communism and he was. But frankly, that seems more the exception than the rule.

Besides, if you want to complain about consistency, why pick on the Democrats? After all, you can't seriously suggest that George Bush, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz have a common message, can you? Hell, if their message were any less common the Bush administration would explode like some kind of political warp core breach. Even after four years, I don't really have a clue what their second term policy toward North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, NATO, Pakistan, or Russia might be.

You won't find an American politician of any era or any party who doesn't extol the virtues of democracy. But talk is cheap, and while George Bush may have some good scriptwriters, in the real world he's shown only the tiniest and most fleeting interest in genuine democracy building. Isn't it time to look behind the curtain and admit it?

UPDATE: David takes up the foreign policy challenge here.

CHALABI'S LATEST....You remember Muqtada al-Sadr, right? Firebrand cleric, wanted for the murder of a rival cleric, took over Najaf and Sadr City, led a huge uprising that caused the deaths of thousands.

And Ahmed Chalabi, you remember him too, don't you? Iraqi exile, darling of the neocons, received millions of dollars from the U.S., then fed us bad intel to promote the war.

I guess I've already given away the punch line, but guess who's partnering up in the new Iraq?

Chalabi is a survivor. Snubbed by the Bush administration neoconservatives who once embraced him, and excluded from the interim government, he is building a grass-roots coalition of Shiite Muslim groups who lack a voice in the new Iraq.

At the same time, he's reaching out to Iraq's most prominent anti-American Shiite cleric, Muqtada Sadr, whose followers come mainly from Baghdad's urban underclass and the impoverished south of the country. Political analysts here believe that the new approach will eventually win support from a significant segment of Sadr's followers if Chalabi chooses to run for office — and, as expected, Sadr chooses to wield his power from the pulpit instead.

Can the administration's hawks pick em, or can they pick em? Short of a teamup with Osama, it's hard to image how Chalabi's betrayal of his longtime benefactors could be more complete.

GET OFF BACK ON YOUR BUTT....Jon Chait tells a story and ends with this observation:

Indeed, I see this incident as a case study in the need for reporters to avoid human contact unless absolutely necessary.

He's not joking, either, and I think he has a point. In fact, I've been meaning to blog about this one of these days but haven't ever gotten my thoughts organized enough to do it. In the meantime, read Jon's piece.

EDWARDS REACTION....It turns out that even my wife is tired of hearing the electrifying news that John Kerry volunteered to go to Vietnam after he finished college. I know why it's being done, and I'm sure it's a good idea and all, but I have to admit that they've been laying it on pretty thick tonight.

In other spousal news, Marian wasn't buying John Edwards' "Two Americas" schtick either, even though she likes Edwards. Sure, she's just one person (sort of my own personal version of the immigrant cabbie, I guess), but I'm always curious to see what she thinks of the speakers since most of them are new to her. This was the first time she'd actually seen Edwards in action.

I've always liked this speech myself, although I don't think this was his best performance. He's got some good lines about rewarding work that he only touched on in tonight's version, and I've always thought that was one of the strongest parts of his message.

Tomorrow: Wes Clark and the Swift boat lieutenant himself. I'm looking forward to it. And after that, I'm really looking forward to the convention being over....

BLOGGITY BLOG BLOGGINESS....Fafblog is blogging the convention. I think they're doing a better job than most.

OUTSOURCING NEWS....Gotta agree with Angry Bear. Starting salaries for Computer Science majors are up 4.8%, IS is up 8.2%, and MIS is up 2.9%. All those outsourced programmers in Bangalore must not be sucking up too many jobs.

But what's up with psychology majors? Even English lit majors do better.

WELL, SOMEONE'S ON DRUGS....Need a laugh? Capitol Hill Blue is better than the National Enquirer. Today they break the story that George Bush is scarfing down "powerful anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia":

[White House physician Richard] Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a clearly-upset Bush stormed off stage on July 8, refusing to answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay.

“Keep those motherfuckers away from me,” he screamed at an aide backstage. “If you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”

....The White House did not return phone calls seeking comment on this article.

Gee, I'm surprised they didn't respond. Must have been a busy day in the press office.

Maybe they'll call back tomorrow.

POSTSCRIPT: I periodically get emails from people who want to know if Capitol Hill Blue is a reliable source. I think this story should give you a clue.

THE NEXT FOUR YEARS....The Economist's John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge write in the LA Times today that some conservatives might be secretly hoping that George Bush loses the election this year.

No, that's not quite right, actually. Despite the headline writer's liberties, what they really said was merely that "in a few years, some on the right might look on a John Kerry victory as a blessing in disguise."

Why? They've got a laundry list of reasons: Bush has expanded government, he's already won his foreign policy point anyway, conservatives like gridlock, Republicans need a timeout to rethink the party, and a Kerry presidency would bring them roaring back like nobody's business in 2008.

This list is, to say the least, unconvincing. But they might be right anyway for a reason that they only fleetingly allude to in their fifth bullet: Bush has dug the country into such a godawful hole that the next four years are going to be hell no matter who's president.

The economy is the most obvious example. The fiscal reality is that we can't keep running enormous deficits forever, and the only way to get rid of the deficit is to raise taxes. Wouldn't it be nice if it were a Democrat who was forced to do that? And Social Security and Medicare need reforming, but any real reform is almost certain to enrage a significant number of people. How about letting a Democrat catch some of that grief?

And foreign affairs? Iraq is pretty much a no-win proposition at this point. We can either pull American soldiers out next year and watch the country spiral into chaos, or else we can stay the course and watch them get killed at the rate of a hundred a month or so. All the time knowing that leaving them there prevents us from credibly threatening force anywhere else in the world — and that our enemies know it.

Bottom line: during sleepless nights there's a small voice in my head that agrees with Micklethwait and Wooldridge — but in mirror image. What happens if Kerry wins and has to take over the economic and foreign policy mess that Bush has bequeathed him? Is it a poisoned chalice no matter who takes it up?

Maybe Bush should be required to clean up his own mess — and suffer the consequences that go along with it.

LOVE THEM TAXI DRIVERS....Kerryphobe Mickey Kaus talks to a taxi driver in Boston:

Passenger: "Fleet Center, please."

Boston cab driver (an immigrant): "You like John Kerry, eh?"

Passenger: "Well, I'm a Democrat but I don't really like Kerry that much."

Cab driver: "I hear that all day. All day. 'I don't like Kerry.' Why you pick him if you don't like him?"

Democrat hater and war supporter Neal Boortz talks to a taxi driver in Boston:

Had a Boston taxi driver yesterday from Iraq. He's going back home to visit his parents in a few weeks. He was none-too-pleased with the Democrats. He believes that Democrats hate his country and want Saddam to be back in power. He was adamant that things are much better in Iraq than the media is saying ... and he's at a loss as to why all of these media types won't tell the truth.

I'm happy to see that immigrant taxi drivers are continuing their longtime habit of providing journalists with exactly the opinions that they themselves happen to have. Kinda brings a tear to my eye.

Both conversations via the cab-loving conservatives at The Corner.

CALIFORNIA'S NAPOLEON....After being forced through the humiliating process of actually having to compromise with the legislature in order to get a budget passed, the Governator is pissed:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is preparing an assault on the institutional power of California legislators after a month of contorted state budget negotiations in which his clout was questioned and his ideas were rejected.

The Republican governor may call a special election next year asking voters to, among other things, convert the Legislature to part-time status, strip legislators of their power to draw their own districts and restrict campaign contributions, his spokesman said Tuesday.

Schwarzenegger spokesman Rob Stutzman said this month's contentious budget negotiations hardened the governor's resolve to move forward with all or part of this plan....

In substantive terms this is laughable, since as near as I can tell the budget deadlock was almost entirely Schwarzenegger's fault. He screwed up his negotiations with local governments and had to backpedal, and then went to the mat over two trivial items that no one would even have noticed if he hadn't suddenly brought them up out of the blue.

More to the point, though, I can't help but think that he's finally overreaching anyway. After winning the election, winning his bond measure, and enjoying sky high popularity ratings, he may think California is ready to crown him king. I doubt it, though, and if he goes through with this my guess is that it will just make him look like a power mad Napoleon who throws a tantrum when he doesn't get his way. As a historical parallel, I'm reminded of FDR's court packing scheme after his landslide win in 1936. That didn't work out so well.

Of course, as the story notes, these threats may be nothing but leverage for use in future negotiations with the legislature, which wouldn't be out of character for him. Stay tuned.

VOTING PROBLEMS IN FLORIDA....I know this is about the last thing anyone wants to hear, but apparently Florida had some voting machine problems in the 2002 election:

Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near.

The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizen's group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election.

Hoo boy.

UPDATE: Hey, they found the votes after all! They were on a computer disk in a folder among "books and bookcases and old reports" in a conference room. Whew.

OBAMA....Hey, that Obama guy is pretty good! The actual content of his speech was pretty close to zero, but that's fine for a convention keynote. He had lots of good lines, great delivery, and worked the crowd well.

Biggest applause line (as near as I could tell): "If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties."

At least, I think that was the line that got the biggest applause. But I'm not sure if C-SPAN switches the mikes to pick up crowd noise at certain points, or if the noise coming out of my TV set is really a consistent indicator of what it sounds like on the floor. Does anyone happen to know?

UPDATE: A bunch of people in the comment thread didn't get this, so let me just clear something up: by "content" all I meant was policy content. And like I said, that's fine in a speech like this.

And while a single good speech may not automatically make someone a star, this was a pretty damn good speech, tugging all the right heartstrings and getting deep into the core values that liberals hold dear. At this point, political superstardom is his to lose.

UPDATE 2: OK, OK, I give in. It was the best Democratic speech since FDR's first inaugural address. Can we stop the pummelling now? Pretty please?

In return, for your pummelling pleasure, here is Roger Clegg's galactically condescending review of Obama's speech in The Corner:

Barack Obama gave a fine speech, but it was not a speech that reflects the current Democratic Party. It celebrated America as "a magical place"; it did not bemoan our racism and imperialism. It professed that this black man "owe[d] a debt to those who came before" him; it did not call for reparations. It spoke of an "awesome God"; it did not banish Him from public discourse. It admitted that black parents, and black culture, need to change the way black children are raised; it did not blame or even mention racism. It quoted "E pluribus unum" and translated it correctly as "Out of many, one"; it did not misquote it, as Al Gore infamously did, as "Many out of one." Most of all, the speech celebrated one America, "one people," and rejected the notion of a black America, a white America, a Latino America, and an Asian America--a notion completely foreign to the multiculturalism that now dominates the Democratic Party.

Boy, Clegg is a real hack, isn't he? So, um, maybe we can all start picking on him instead? Yeah, that's the ticket....

ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN....This is bizarre. Joe Trippi can't get a credential to get into the convention? How many Democratic presidential campaigns has this guy managed? Five? Six? And the DNC won't give him a damn badge?

SHOWING THE LOVE....I don't know what he's going to say yet, but Howard Dean sure has gotten the loudest welcome that I've seen so far. Louder than Carter, louder than Kennedy, louder than Clinton....