DEBATE LIVEBLOGGING ROUND 1....Here it is: realtime thoughts on the first Bush-Kerry debate of 2004. Feel free to add your own fact checking in comments. I'll try to add them to the main commentary stream as I go.

Wrapup: I don't really have anything very creative to say. Neither candidate made any huge mistakes.

Bush's performance was mediocre, I thought. He was smirking too much during the cutaways, he alternated between defensiveness and an unattractive belligerence, and he repeated the same phrases a little too much. Staying on message is fine, but sounding like you've been hypnotized isn't.

Kerry did pretty well. He explained himself lucidly, he stayed on message, and he was clear and firm. He didn't have any killer lines, but he did have a few good ones. Overall, it seems to me that for an undecided voter who's just now starting to pay attention, Kerry won on points.

Liveblogging, on the other hand, didn't work out so great. The combination of frequent posting, high traffic, and lots of comments pretty much brought our server to its knees. The commentary below isn't sparse because I wasn't paying attention, it's sparse because that was about all I was able to get in while waiting for Movable Type to come back to life in between posts.....

A complete transcript of the debate is here.

10:16 — Kerry: "You can be certain and be wrong." Yep.

10:14 — Bush's stock phrases so far:

Saddam was a threat.
We must spread liberty.
My opponent keeps changing his position
You can't say "wrong war at the wrong time."
Central part of the war on terror.
Solemn duty to protect the American people.
You can't send mixed messages.

I've heard each of these at least half a dozen times so far. It's like a robot talking.

10:06 — Moo-laws?

10:02 — Bush just tried to make some hay out of Kerry's phrase about pre-emptive action having to "pass a global test." That was poor wording from Kerry, but Bush couldn't manage to do much with it. I'm surprised. That was sort of a softball.

9:55 — Bush: "I never wanted to commit troops." Give me a break.

9:49 — Kerry: "The president's plan is four words: 'More of the same.'" That's a good line.

9:44 — Bush is just relentlessly on message. The same phrases over and over and over....

9:37 — Bush: "You forgot Poland." That line could end up as fodder for Leno and Letterman.

9:35 — Overall, Bush seems more defensive than usual tonight....

9:34 — Bush: "Of course the UN was invited in." Please. Tell that to Hans Blix.

9:26 — Bush seemed a little unnerved by Kerry's accusation that he wasn't doing everything he could to protect America.

9:24 — Bush actually has the nerve to complain about a "tax gap"? Yes he does.

9:20 — Kerry really needs to stop nodding when Bush is saying stuff he disagrees with.

9:06 — I dunno, Kerry's face doesn't look orange to me. Bush looks a little bronzed, though....

9:03 — There will be green, yellow, and red lights, plus flashing red lights and a backup buzzer! Sheesh.

9:00 — Jeff Greenfield on CNN: what's important is "who controls the room." Um, OK.

IT'S NERO ON LINE 1, HUGH....Earnest commentators around the country have been urging the press to focus on substance tonight instead of obsessing over facial tics, body language, hairstyles, and other trivia. In the face of this tsunami of conventional wisdom, I'm glad to see that one man has the guts to call a spade a spade and demand that the media pay more attention to makeup and juvenile theme songs.

A grateful nation salutes you, Hugh Hewitt.

THE NEW WEST BANK....A private email from Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi about conditions in Baghdad has been getting a lot of attention today, and it's not hard to see why. Here's some of what she has to say:

Iraqis like to call this mess 'the situation.' When asked 'how are thing?' they reply: 'the situation is very bad."

What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country's roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health -- which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers -- has now stopped disclosing them.

....America's last hope for a quick exit? The Iraqi police and National Guard units we are spending billions of dollars to train. The cops are being murdered by the dozens every day-over 700 to date -- and the insurgents are infiltrating their ranks. The problem is so serious that the U.S. military has allocated $6 million dollars to buy out 30,000 cops they just trained to get rid of them quietly.

It's well worth clicking the link to read the whole thing.

It is more and more obvious that George Bush has only one overriding concern right now: to keep a lid on this until November 3. Somehow — somehow — keep the American public from learning that Iraq has turned into America's very own version of the West Bank until he's safely reelected.

After that, he'll have a choice to make: pull out or put in more troops. Which is it going to be?

DEBATE FACT CHECKING....Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post wants bloggers to form a gigantic decentralized fact checking consortium for tonight's debate.

Sounds good to me. I'll be liveblogging the debate tonight starting at 9 pm Eastern, so come on by and join the fact checking army in the comment thread. It's a little hard to liveblog and keep up with comments at the same time, but I'll do my best to follow along and fact check in real time. Should be fun.

GREETINGS!....If George Bush is reelected, will he reinstate the draft? Merely asking the question has raised such howls of indignation from conservatives that it's pretty clear this question is hitting pretty close to the warblogger bone.

And why shouldn't it? After all, Bush has made his military stance clear: he will take the fight to the terrorists. Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. Iran will not be allowed to build nuclear weapons.

But everyone knows this is meaningless rhetoric given our current military strength. In Iraq alone, there's virtually unanimous agreement that we're too undermanned to successfully fight the growing insurgency there, which means there are only two realistic options: pull out or increase troop levels. "Staying the course" is a recipe for defeat.

So what's going to happen? Bush says he won't pull out, and it's also clear that as long as he's in the White House (and maybe even if he isn't) we won't get any serious assistance from other countries. What's more, as this Defense Science Board report makes clear, there are no more Army troops available right now, and Donald Rumsfeld knows perfectly well that his "modularity" initiative won't change that. So where will the additional troops come from? Not from the National Guard, that's for sure.

Basically, then, the troop strength question boils down to this:

• Bush will not pull out of Iraq, but he also cannot afford to lose there. And while he doesn't have the political courage to say this before the election, there's clearly only one way to turn things around: more troops. More American troops. All the fatuous Rumsfeldian "by gollys" in the world won't change that simple reality.

• There's no reason to think that Bush will change his philosophy of preventive war in a second term. Neither the neocons nor the garden variety hawks that control his administration will allow that. Unless you're an incurable optimist, this means more wars in the Middle East.

• Iran is building a nuclear bomb. Does anyone truly doubt this? There are only two ways to prevent this: serious negotiations, including concessions from the United States, or military action. But Bush has refused to negotiate with Iran, and there's no reason to think this will change in a second term. That means it's either military action or a nuclear Iran. And if it's military action, that means more troops. A lot more troops.
  

The conclusion to all this is pretty obvious: either George Bush dramatically changes his military policy in a second term or else we're going to need a lot more teenage boots in the Middle East. A suprising number of moderates seem to be desperately pinning their hopes on the former — based on some wishful thinking that I have a hard time grasping — while conservatives are loudly blustering that the latter is just laughable — although they don't present any particular evidence for this. In the end, they like sounding tough, but as long as an election is on the line they aren't prepared to level with the country about the logical consequences of that toughness.

It's easy for me to be philosophical about this: I'm 45 and I have a bad back. No tours of duty in the Khyber Pass for me. But if I were 18, or if I were the father of a 16-year-old, I'd be taking a much closer look at the plain realities of George Bush's policies and setting aside the pre-election happy talk. It's naive to think he's suddenly going to become a new man in his second term, and it's foolish to think his current policies won't lead to further wars. After all, that's what a lot of his supporters are actively rooting for. As this Zogby poll shows, it looks like draft-age men are finally starting to realize this.

Bottom line: You can vote for Texas bluster and a draft, or you can vote for real-world common sense and a volunteer army. It's naive to think you can get one without the other.

THE DEBATE BOUNCE....The LA Times has an interesting chart today that showed the size of the post-debate poll bounce since 1960 (as measured by Gallup). Here's the change in the approval rating spread between the major party candidates over the years:

• 1960: 4% (Kennedy)
  

• 1976: 4% (Ford)
  

• 1980: 6% (Reagan)
  

• 1984: 3% (Reagan)
  

• 1988: 3% (Dukakis)
  

• 1992: 3% (Bush)
  

• 1996: 1% (Clinton)
  

• 2000: 15% (Bush)
  

There are some real surprises here. Gerald Ford, despite his famous gaffe about Poland in 1976, gained ground on Carter after their debate. Ditto for Dukakis, who is widely held to have destroyed his candidacy by his bloodless response to a question about his wife being raped. And the real winner of both the 1992 and 1996 debates was Ross Perot. In those years, both the major party candidates lost ground after the debate while Perot gained ground.

But the real shocker is 2000: George W. Bush picked up 15 points on Al Gore. This is like hitting a hundred home runs in a season: it's not just a record, it's an almost inhuman blowout. No one in history has ever even come close.

According to Gallup, Bush went into the first debate in 2000 with an 8-point deficit and came out with a 7-point lead. And despite conventional wisdom, this is not because Gore was an awful debater. He's actually pretty good. But Bush was apparently much, much better.

I sure hope he's not that good this year — especially since a major gaffe (as I speculated about yesterday) probably won't actually hurt him that much. At any rate, the famous debate gaffes of yesteryear sure don't seem to have done as much damage as people think.

Bottom line: George Bush is the intergalactic champion of presidential debates. John Kerry has his work cut out for him.

UPDATE: A reader emails to tell me that both Ford's Poland gaffe and Dukakis' rape gaffe came in their second debates. The Gallup numbers above refer to changes after the first debate of the year.

So: gaffe watch continues! A major league stumble from Bush could still cost him the election. Keep your eyes peeled!

LA TIMES EDITORIAL PAGE UPDATE....Win one, lose one. Adding Jon Chait to the op-ed page was a good idea, but this week we learn about the latest addition to the Times' stable: Margaret Carlson.

Sigh. And her first column is every bit as vapid as you'd expect.

NORQUIST THE SCHMUCK....Conservative über-geek Grover Norquist talks about the generation of Americans who enacted the New Deal and fought World War II:

This is an age cohort that voted for a draft before the war started, and allowed the draft to continue for 25 years after the war was over. Their idea of the legitimate role of the state is radically different than anything previous generations knew, or subsequent generations.

Before that generation, whenever you put a draft in, there were draft riots. After that generation, there were draft riots. This generation? No problem. Why not? Of course the government moves people around like pawns on a chessboard. One side spits off labor law, one side spits off Social Security. We will all work until we're 65 and have the same pension. You know, some Bismark, German thing, okay? Very un-American.

So Grover Norquist thinks that the Depression-era generation and the World War II vets who voted for increased labor protection, Social Security, and the WWII draft were "un-American." As Timothy Noah says, "Can you believe this schmuck?"

Unfortunately, yes I can.

GAFFE WATCH....Pre-debate coverage is blanketing the media right now, but for my money the best article I've read on the subject is "When George Meets John," James Fallows' take in the Atlantic a couple of months ago. Fallows didn't just find a bunch of tired campaign hacks to provide dueling quotes, he actually watched dozens of hours of Bush and Kerry debating in the past, looking for clues to how they'll perform this year.

His most interesting observation, I thought, was about the vast difference between the George Bush of today and the George Bush of 1994, when he was debating Ann Richards during the Texas gubernatorial race:

This Bush was eloquent. He spoke quickly and easily. He rattled off complicated sentences and brought them to the right grammatical conclusions. He mishandled a word or two ("million" when he clearly meant "billion"; "stole" when he meant "sold"), but fewer than most people would in an hour's debate. More striking, he did not pause before forcing out big words, as he so often does now, or invent mangled new ones. "To lay out my juvenile-justice plan in a minute and a half is a hard task, but I will try to do so," he said fluidly and with a smile midway through the debate, before beginning to list his principles.

....Obviously, Bush doesn't sound this way as President, and there is no one conclusive explanation for the change. I have read and listened to speculations that there must be some organic basis for the President's peculiar mode of speech—a learning disability, a reading problem, dyslexia or some other disorder that makes him so uncomfortable when speaking off the cuff. The main problem with these theories is that through his forties Bush was perfectly articulate. George Lakoff tried to convince me that the change was intentional. As a way of showing deep-down NASCAR-type manliness, according to Lakoff, Bush has deliberately made himself sound as clipped and tough as John Wayne. Moreover, in Lakoff's view, the authenticity of this stance depends on Bush's consistency in presenting it. So even if he is still capable of speaking with easy eloquence, he can't afford to let the mask slip.

I say: Maybe. Clearly Bush has been content to let his opponents, including the press, think him a numbskull. Even his unfortunate puzzled-chimp expression when trying to answer questions may be useful: his friends don't mind, and his enemies continue to underestimate him.

The whole article is well worth reading, but this, to me, is its single most interesting question: what happened to George Bush? Is it deliberate? Is it getting worse? And how will it affect him on Thursday?

I think it's unlikely that Kerry will make any major mistakes, but judging from his recent performances it's just possible that Bush could suffer a sudden brain freeze and make a huge gaffe in front of 40 million people. It's going to be like watching a famous but aging tightrope walker and wondering: will he manage to hang on one more time or is this the day when he'll finally make a tiny misstep and end up as political street pizza?

Other interesting debate commentary comes from Paul Krugman and Howard Kurtz, who make the same point in slightly different ways: the thing to watch is less the debate itself than the post-debate spin war. In 2000, for example, most viewers thought Al Gore did fine, but over the following week, as more and more journalists jumped on board the spin bandwagon, opinion finally morphed and Gore's performance was officially declared dismal. Expect more of the same this year as reporters start talking to each other after the show and adopting each others' views out of fear that they've missed the crucial storyline that everyone else picked up on.

Of course, this blog is a no-spin zone — you knew that, didn't you? — and to make sure there's no spin I'll be liveblogging the debate, producing realtime commentary long before the spinmeisters get their licks in. It starts on Thursday at 9 pm Eastern time, so come on by and join the fun in comments.

PORSCHE'S LATEST TOY....Pulitzer prize winner Dan Neil writes today about the new 2005 Porsche 911. It, um, sounds like a pretty nice car, except for that sluggish 4.6 second 0-60 performance. But the built-in stopwatch is nice.

MORE GENIUSES....Sigh. For the 24th consecutive year, I have failed to win a MacArthur "genius" grant. However, my mother will be pleased to learn that a high school debate coach won one this year.

I wonder how long it will be before a blogger wins one of these things? Forever?

FUNDRAISING FOR MORONS....Wow. The Republican party has done something so stupid that Stephen Bainbridge is threatening to protest by donating $50 to the Democrats.

I can't say that I blame him, either. This has got to be the dumbest fundraising idea I've ever heard of. Pissing off your most loyal supporters is really not a good idea.

EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION....Over at Obsidian Wings, Katherine has a guest post about a proposal from Dennis Hastert to ease up on those annoying UN conventions against torture. In particular, he wants to allow the federal government to suspend UN torture protections for anyone they define as a suspected terrorist. This would allow the feds to take people picked up in their terror sweeps and ship them to foreign countries with a known history of torturing prisoners unless they could prove "by clear and convincing evidence that he or she would be tortured."

Please note: suspected terrorists. And it's now up to the defendent to prove he would be tortured — an obvious sham since this is clearly an impossible task.

The technical term for this is "extraordinary rendition," one of those lovely CIA phrases from the 60s designed to protect tender suburban sensibilities from the reality of what the United States government is proposing to do: ship terrorist suspects overseas so that someone else can torture them for us.

Go read the whole post. And then call your congressman.

RANSOM....James Joyner brings together a couple of stories today that suggest western countries are paying ransoms to terrorists who kidnap their citizens in Iraq. Italy is widely believed to have paid $1 million for the release of "the two Simonas" (with an assist from Jordan's King Abdullah) and France is apparently making concessions to terrorists who have kidnapped a pair of French journalists — with the possibility of money changing hands still open.

If this is true it's almost staggeringly stupid. What are they thinking?

IRAQ'S NUCLEAR PROGRAM....A couple of weeks ago I received a copy of The Bomb in My Garden, a memoir written by Mahdi Obeidi, "Saddam's Bombmaker." I wasn't inclined to read it at first, but when I flipped it over I found enthusiastic cover blurbs from Fareed Zakaria, James Fallows, and David Kay. It doesn't get much better than that, so I tucked into it.

As it turns out, it's a short, breezily told story, thanks to co-author Kurt Pitzer, and it only took a couple of hours to read. And while I don't really feel like writing a full-blown review of the book, I do have a few comments about it:

• Making weapons-grade uranium is really hard. Sure, we all knew that already, but if you're interested in a user-friendly but technically detailed discussion of why it's so hard and what's involved, this is a pretty good place to start.

• Saddam didn't have a bomb program in place after 1991. But that's not all: not only didn't he have an active program, but Mahdi makes it clear that he couldn't have had a program. There are half a dozen extremely advanced technologies involved that Iraq could get only from foreign sources, and even with a porous embargo in place it was just laughable to think they could get their hands on them.

  In other words, all the prewar nonsense about a "smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud" was just that: nonsense. And not just nonsense, but stuff the Bushies obviously knew was nonsense. It's impossible to read this book and not come to that conclusion.

• Mahdi himself comes across as a bit of an enigma. The portrait he paints of himself alternates between nerdy scientist swept up by doing science for its own sake and terrified underling doing his job solely for fear of retribution from Saddam and his henchmen.

  And yet, it doesn't quite add up. Over and over he describes himself closing surreptitious deals and managing extremely tricky technologies in ways that could have been subtly slowed down with no effort at all and with no chance of being caught. And yet, in each case he seems to have played his role with relish. Mahdi is vouched for by no less than David Albright, but I can't help but wonder if he was a more enthusiastic proponent of an Iraqi bomb than he makes himself out to be.
  

Overall, an interesting read. I'm not sure it's worth buying in hardback, but I'm glad I had a chance to read it.

CLUELESS....Here's the PowerPoint version of Dana Priest and Thomas Ricks' survey of opinion in the intelligence community regarding Iraq:

• A former intelligence officer who maintains contact with CIA officials: "There's no obvious way to fix it. The best we can hope for is a semi-failed state hobbling along with terrorists and a succession of weak governments."

• A U.S. government official who reads the intelligence analyses on Iraq: "Things are definitely not improving."

• An Army staff officer who served in Iraq and stays in touch with comrades in Baghdad through e-mail: "There are things going on that are unbelievable to me. They have infiltrators conducting attacks in the Green Zone. That was not the case a year ago."

• An intelligence expert with contacts at the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon: "There's a real war going on here that's not just the [CIA against the administration on Iraq] but the State Department and the military."
  

So the war against the happy talk from the administration is coming from the CIA, the State Department, and the military. Is there anyone else who counts?

In other words, is there anyone outside the White House who thinks that Bush has the slightest clue what to do in Iraq?

MEAN GIRLS....I saw Mean Girls on DVD last night. Recommended. Sure, the ending was predictably sappy, but it was pretty funny throughout.

Plus, my inner nerd couldn't help but be thrilled with a teen movie whose ending hangs on the heroine solving this problem:

But how the hell did she figure out the answer off the top of her head in 20 seconds? I sure couldn't do that.

Yeah, I know. It's a movie.

WHY I HATE BALLOT INITIATIVES....I got a fair amount of email taking me to task for my stance of voting no on all ballot initiatives, so I thought I'd expand on the subject a bit and explain myself. There are three basic reasons I'm opposed to the initiative process:

1. In California, ballot initiatives were originally a progressive-era reform designed to provide a way for grass roots movements to bypass a frequently corrupt legislature. Today, however, it costs millions of dollars to qualify and pass a ballot initiative, and this means that they are now overwhelmingly the handmaiden of well-funded corporate interests, not ordinary citizens. That's the unfortunate reality, and I really don't think that wealthy special interests need yet another outlet for influencing the political process. Since the original intent of ballot initiatives has all but disappeared, I don't see the point of keeping them around.

2. Initiatives are constitutional amendments, which means that once passed they are almost impossible to change — regardless of changes in the outside word. Even if I'm in favor of reforming bilingual education, for example, I don't think it belongs in the constitution. It belongs in the legislature, where it can be changed in reaction to new facts, new demographics, and the normal give and take of the political world.

3. Initiatives increasingly are used to mandate specific expenditures. The result of this is that today the legislature has control over only a fraction of the state budget. (And when you add in federal mandates, contractual obligations, and court-ordered spending, the California legislature has practical control of perhaps 15-20% of the entire budget.) This is a horrible way of implementing budget policy.
   

The bottom line is that I think ballot initiatives do more harm than good these days. The process is mostly limited to use by wealthy interests that can afford expensive signature gathering campaigns and million-dollar ad buys, the results — locked in stone for all time — are increasingly reactionary, and they contribute to keeping the California legislature in a permanent state of infantilism since they control fewer and fewer important issues as time goes by.

The only real answer to this on my end is to vote no on everything and urge everyone else to do the same. My hope — undoubtedly vain — is that if enough people feel this way it will become almost impossible to get anything passed. And when that happens, special interests will give up and go back to bribing legislators, just like in the old days.

That said, I'll admit that my prohibition isn't absolute. Occasionally I vote yes on something, it's just that the bar is very high.

And with that in mind, Chris Nolan and Chris Mooney both have arguments for why they think the stem cell initiative ought to cross my threshold and get my vote. They haven't convinced me yet, especially since this initiative so clearly violates principle #3, but you never know. My mind isn't set in stone yet.

OCTOBER SURPRISE....In honor of Christopher Hitchens' despair over Teresa Heinz Kerry's remarks that she "wouldn't be surprised" if the Bushies suddenly sprung a freshly captured Osama bin Laden on an awed world a few weeks before the election, I dedicate this post to the subject of October Surprises.

See, I actually wrote a piece about October Surprises for the Monthly, but in the end I couldn't find the right balance between snarkiness and seriousness and it never found its way into print. But Mark Green is running a "Name the October Surprise" contest, so what better time to resurrect it?

Not the whole gruesome thing, of course. Instead, here's the barebones top ten eight list of possible October Surprises (note that this was originally written in April):

1. Saddam goes on trial — televised live on Fox!
   

2. Osama is captured (or defrosted or whatever)
   

3. Karl Rove kills Ronald Reagan
   

4. The long lost WMD is finally found
   

5. John Kerry gums up progress at the UN
   

6. Bush makes a deal with North Korea
   

7. George Soros crashes the U.S. economy
   

8. Donald Rumsfeld resigns
   

As you can see, #3 was overtaken by events, so it's really a top seven list. (And no, I don't think Karl Rove was responsible. At least, um, I don't think so.)

It's worth noting, too, that there are two famous examples of October Surprises in recent American history. The first was allegedly carried off by Richard Nixon, who derailed Vietnamese peace talks that he was afraid might help Hubert Humphrey's campaign. This one actually appears to be true. The second was the supposed handiwork of Ronald Reagan, who supposedly made a deal with the Iranian mullahs to supply them with high tech weaponry if they'd hold onto their hostages until after the election. This one appears to be bogus.

Note, though, that in both cases the surprise came from a challenger, not a sitting president. But hey, there's a first time for everything!

In any case, feel free to expand on one of mine or make up one of your own for Mark's contest. The winner gets a book, some Air America trinkets, and a live appearance on Air America to "bask in the gratitude of a skeptical nation." What more could you want?

DICKING AROUND....Really, there are times when you have to admire Christopher Hitchens. In Slate, speaking about the war, he says:

What will it take to convince these people that this is not a year, or a time, to be dicking around?

And get this: he's talking about the left! That's chutzpah!

After all, Hitchens has chosen to ally himself with the most unserious group of war leaders this country has ever seen. They treated the runup to war like a marketing blitz for a new soft drink; they have trivialized critical issues of national security because doing so made them into better partisan cudgels for congressional campaigns; they have ignored the advice of military professionals because it was electorally inconvenient; they have repeatedly misled the American public even though they surely know that this is disastrous for long term support of the war; and they have refused to seriously address the exploding guerrilla war in Iraq for months because they're afraid it might hurt their reelection chances.

Needless to say, Hitchens acknowledges none of this. In fact, later in the piece, he opines that "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a far more ruthless and dangerous jihadist" than Osama bin Laden — without so much as a nod to the fact that we might have captured or killed Zarqawi two years ago but for Bush's fear that doing so might interfere with his Iraq war marketing campaign.

So what is the real danger to the war effort? Apparently it's DC scuttlebutt about whether the Bush administration will suddenly capture Osama next month as part of an "October Surprise." That's important.

In a sense, Hitchens' pieces encapsulates everything that's wrong with so many pro-war hawks. They've defined a new kind of political correctness in which every rhetorical slip is immediately seized on as a sign of deep moral corruption, while actual issues of national security are hastily swept under the carpet because it's somehow better to have an incompetent fellow traveler in the White House than a liberal who might actually get something done. In this world, writing a column about Teresa Heinz Kerry's Osama-baiting is more important than writing about the almost unbroken string of real-world failures by the Bush administration — failures that are almost certain to continue for another four years if he's reelected.

That's important. But that's not what they want to talk about. Can you blame them?

KOS AT THE COURT OF ST. JAMES....Hey, it looks like Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos has landed a job writing a weekly column for the Guardian. Good luck explaining the American right to a British audience, Kos!

Now then, can we get back to talking about the increasing professionalization of the blogosphere....?

PLAME UPDATE....Adam Liptak has a story in the New York Times tonight about all the reporters who have been subpoenaed to testify in the Valerie Plame case. Most of the story is only moderately interesting, but it does confirm that no one knows what's going on with the reporter at the very center of the case: Robert Novak.

The real mystery in the investigation, lawyers involved in it say, is what Mr. Novak has done. Mr. Novak's lawyer, James Hamilton, declined to comment. There are four essential possibilities.

Mr. Novak may not have been subpoenaed, which would be curious. He may have asserted the reporter's privilege, but there is no reason to think that Judge Hogan would have ruled in his favor.

He may have asserted his rights under the Fifth Amendment. But Mr. Novak faces no real peril under the 1982 law, and Mr. Fitzgerald could in any event require him to testify by offering him immunity. Or Mr. Novak may have testified.

It's peculiar that we know all about the subpoenas issued to Walter Pincus and Matt Cooper and Judith Miller and several others, but apparently not one single reporter has any idea what's going on with Novak. You'd think one of these guys could find an anonymous source somewhere willing to tell them....

EMINENT DOMAIN....Via Avedon, Dwight Meredith writes about the increasingly questionable practice of local governments condemning land not for roads or schools or parks, but so they can turn it over to a private developer who wants to build a shopping center or an office building or a bunch of condos. This technique is commonly used in urban renewal schemes, sometimes for the best of reasons, but the common thread is nearly always the same: the new development, whatever it is, will produce more tax income for the city than the old one.

(Although there are exceptions. George Bush, for example, was the beneficiary of one prominent example of eminent domain used for private purposes when the city of Arlington spent $200 million to build him a baseball stadium. Bush undoubtedly fared a lot better in this deal than the city did.)

Here in Orange County, the city of Cypress recently got itself in trouble when it learned that a church had bought some nearby property and hastily decided it would rather have a CostCo there instead. Big box retailers bring in considerably more tax dollars than a church, you see. Unfortunately for Cypress, picking on a church makes the fundamental issues a lot clearer for most people, since it's pretty obvious that tax revenue is the real driver in the deal. You might be able to convince people that a CostCo is a genuine civic improvement compared to a bunch of low-income housing and some old warehouses, but it's a lot harder to sell them on the idea that it's a step up from a church.

I have mixed feelings about the whole issue, since this kind of eminent domain is often used by redevelopment agencies for genuinely worthy urban renewal projects. Still, worthy or not, I have a hard time convincing myself that it's a legitimate use of government power. What's more, once you decide that private development is a legitimate use of eminent domain, it's hard to figure out where the line gets drawn. Can a city condemn private land for anything that it thinks serves a higher purpose of some sort? What's to stop it?

Read Dwight's post for more about this. And be sure to read to the end for the punch line. He's got a question for Texas home builders.

VOTER FRAUD IN FLORIDA, PART CXXVI....Publius at Legal Fiction decided today to revisit a story he's written about before, and in the process uncovered some damn good reporting from Chris Davis and Matthew Doig of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

Short version: Felons are not allowed to vote in Florida, and last July, after a protracted battle by the state, a federal judge forced Florida election officials to make their newly created felon list public. Surprise! It turned out the list had lots of blacks (who mostly vote Democratic) but virtually no Hispanics (who mostly vote Republican). After a public outcry, the list was scrapped.

Fine. But why were there no Hispanics on the list? Was it just an unforeseen computer glitch or was it deliberate hanky panky? Publius has the full story, and the bottom line is that the evidence seems to indicate that it probably wasn't just a glitch. Go read it.

I'll add one comment of my own. The technical reason that Hispanics were excluded from the list is that Florida officials insisted that no one be purged from voting rolls unless their voter registration record matched perfectly with a prison record. This is a good idea, but it turns out that Hispanics are listed as "white" in the prison database and as "Hispanic" in the voter registration database. Thus, none of them matched perfectly.

Davis and Doig present several pieces of evidence that suggest everyone knew perfectly well this would happen, and all of it makes sense to me. I've been involved in database projects like this before, and they all the work the same way, especially when they're done by a big consulting company like Accenture. The database schemas are all carefully compared with each other, test runs are performed, data conversions are done, and sample data is run and matched against hand-checked data to make sure all the code is working properly. This and more is done multiple times by multiple people (and billed out at $200 per hour). That's just how it works, and an obvious data mismatch like this would leap out almost immediately and set off all sorts of alarms.

In other words, of course they knew. In a project of this size, it's just inconceivable that they didn't. And if CNN and several local newspapers hadn't sued to open up the database, no one would ever have been the wiser.

Disgusting. But hardly unexpected, is it?

ANONYMOUS SOURCES....Both the New York Times and the Washington Post put rules in place a few months ago barring the use of anonymous sources unless there was a good (and stated) reason for them to be anonymous. Since then, one of my personal sources of amusement has been observing the contortions their reporters go through to explain why their anonymous sources want to stay anonymous.

Needless to say, the actual reason is always the same: the source is anonymous because he/she is afraid of getting in trouble for talking to the press. However, there seems to be an unwritten rule — or perhaps it's just a point of personal pride — against using the exact same excuse more than once, which means that this basic reason gets recycled in dozens of different contorted ways. Today, however, in a story about Dan Rather's future, Jacques Steinberg just gives up:

[Blah blah blah] said the executive, who requested anonymity out of fear of being fired at a time of turmoil at CBS News.

Attaboy, Jacques. He's anonymous because he'll get fired if his boss finds out he talked to you. That's telling it like it is.

Anyway, I think that's the end of the contest, and everyone should now give up trying to find different ways of justifying their blind quotes. After all, thinking up ever newer and more creative ways to say the same thing is just taking up brain cells that could be better used writing the actual stories.

ELECTIONS IN IRAQ, PART 2....President Bush says 100,000 "fully trained and equipped" Iraqi soldiers are at work and more than $9 billion will be spent on reconstruction contracts in Iraq over the next several months. Reuters, however, reports that "many of these assertions have met with skepticism from key lawmakers." In plainer English, they think he's lying.

Then there's this:

The status of election planning in Iraq is also in question. Of the $232 million in Iraqi funds set aside for the Iraqi electoral commission, it has received a mere $7 million, according to House Appropriations Committee staff.

....According to a one-page election planning "time line," registration materials are supposed to be distributed in early October and initial voter lists to go out by the end of October, which is during the holy month of Ramadan.

So far, the United Nations has been reluctant to send staff back into the battle zone. It only has 30 to 35 people now in Baghdad, no more than eight working on the elections.

"The framework for it (free and fair elections) hasn't even been set up. The voter registration lists aren't set. There have to be hundreds of polling places, hundreds of trained monitors and poll watchers. None of that has happened," Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State for President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, told ABC's "This Week."

"Early October" is only a week away. I guess that's when the rubber starts meeting the proverbial road.

ELECTIONS IN IRAQ....I missed this when it happened — I guess everyone was too wrapped up in Rathergate to give it much attention — but Tim Dunlop points out today that there was an election recently in Iraq that might be a foretaste of the countrywide elections scheduled for January.

Earlier this month, the Iraqi National Council elected four vice-chairs. Over at Foreign Policy In Focus, Frank Smyth summarizes the results:

In the September balloting, the delegate from the Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Jawad al-Maliki, came in first with 56 votes. This is a Shiite group that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lambasted as a tool of Iran during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Another Iraqi even less attractive to Washington, the Secretary General of the Iraqi Communist Party (www.iraqcp.org), Hamid Majid Moussa, came in second with 55 votes.

Meanwhile, Rasim al-Awadi, the delegate from the Iraqi National Accord — the group once backed by the CIA and whose leader, Iyad Allawi, who was supported by the Bush administration to become the Iraqi prime minister — came in third with 53 votes. Nasir A`if al-Ani — the delegate from the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group, sympathetic to the Ba’athist-based, anti-American resistance operating both west and north of Baghdad — came in fourth with 48 votes.

Juan Cole, who did notice this at the time, quipped, "So, this list is further evidence that the US invaded Iraq to install in power a coalition of Communists, Islamists and ex-Baathist nationalists. If you had said such a thing 3 years ago you would have been laughed at."

No one's laughing now. After all, if this reflects the likely results of January's elections, what are the odds that Iraq 2.0 is going to be friendly toward the United States?

VOTE FOR US OR DIE....Mark Kleiman complains today that while there are reasonable arguments on both sides of the debate about drug importation from Canada, there's a distinct difference between the debaters themselves: supporters of drug reimportation are at least making legitimate arguments and being truthful about their goals, while opponents are just making stuff up in order to scare people.

Color me something less than shocked. After all, using scare tactics about terrorism in every imaginable situation has become practically a fetish among Republicans since 9/11. Consider:

• Canadian drugs: In an interview in August, FDA commissioner Lester Crawford tells an AP reporter that re-importing Canadian drugs is a bad idea because "cues from chatter" indicate that terrorists might target imported drugs.

• Civil service protection: During the debate on the creation of the Homeland Security Department, George Bush insisted that he would veto any bill that included normal civil service protections for workers in the department. Spokesman Ari Fleischer explained: "The president will be effectively prevented from making decisions based on national security no matter how urgent a crisis we find ourselves in."

• Refugees from Haiti: A Haitian refugee named David Joseph has been imprisoned for two years. He has an uncle in Brooklyn and nobody suggests he is anything but harmless. John Ashcroft refuses to release him, claiming that it might encourage terrorists to use Haiti as a staging area.

• Taxes: On the eve of the Iraq war, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay explains that "Nothing is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes."
  

I wonder how they expect the rest of us to take terrorism seriously when they themselves so transparently think it's nothing more than a trivial debating point?

PROPOSITION 71....Given my general policy of voting no on all ballot initiatives, Chris Mooney wonders how I'm planning to vote on Proposition 71, a $3 billion bond measure that would fund stem cell research.

Sadly, the answer is that I'm probably going to vote no. I generally support taxpayer funded basic research, and I really, really support the symbolism of sticking it to George Bush and the Christian right zealots who were responsible for cutting off federal funding for most embryonic stem cell research in 2001.

But one of the reasons I'm opposed to the initiative process in general is that it's lousy public policy for the electorate to continually lock in long-term funding for pet projects via constitutional amendments or (as in this case) bond measures. This is one of the reasons California's finances are in such bad shape: we've spent the last couple of decades allocating about 80% of state spending via constitutional amendment — and then griping loudly when the legislature and the governor don't have the maneuvering room to fix things during economic downturns.

If the legislature wanted to allocate money for embryonic stem cell research, I'd evaluate it on its merits. (Although since California is bankrupt at the moment, the timing wouldn't exactly be favorable.) But adding yet another spending mandate via the initiative process is a bad idea, and the fact that this particular spending is something I support doesn't change that.

Bottom line: I'm probably voting no on 71 unless I hear some awfully good arguments in favor. Feel free to make them in comments.

NIGHTMARE IN IRAQ....I'm pretty tired of blogging about the wretched situation in Iraq, but it's hard not to. Here's the latest, from a confidential report about insurgent attacks written by a private security firm for the government:

A sampling of daily reports produced [over the past two weeks] by Kroll Security International for the U.S. Agency for International Development shows that such attacks typically number about 70 each day. In contrast, 40 to 50 hostile incidents occurred daily during the weeks preceding the handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 28, according to military officials.

....In number and scope, the attacks compiled in the Kroll reports suggest a broad and intensifying campaign of insurgent violence that contrasts sharply with assessments by Bush administration officials and Iraq's interim prime minister that the instability is contained to small pockets of the country.

This stuff just keeps coming and coming, and virtually no one except those paid to do so even disputes it anymore. Iraq is a nightmare.

And the worst part isn't the question of whether elections can be held everywhere next January. Despite his usual belligerent phrasing, Donald Rumsfeld is basically right when he says that elections in 80% of the country are better than no elections at all. The worst part, assuming the elections go off in some semblence of order, is that there's really no reason to think they will change anything. And when the elections have been held but the attacks continue to increase, what's next? What's the plan then?

BLOG NAVEL GAZING....Whiskey Bar's Billmon breaks his blogging silence in the LA Times today to mourn the taming of the blogosphere:

Even as it collectively achieves celebrity status for its anti-establishment views, blogging is already being domesticated by its success. What began as a spontaneous eruption of populist creativity is on the verge of being absorbed by the media-industrial complex it claims to despise.

In the process, a charmed circle of bloggers — those glib enough and ideologically safe enough to fit within the conventional media punditocracy — is gaining larger audiences and greater influence. But the passion and energy that made blogging such a potent alternative to the corporate-owned media are in danger of being lost, or driven back to the outer fringes of the Internet.

....I should have seen the writing on the wall earlier this year when the World Economic Forum, the ferociously trend-following CEO club, sponsored a panel session on blogging at its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland....At the time, the idea of buying a blog struck me as funny, like trying to buy a conversation. Now, having seen blogs I admired mutate into glorified billboards, and having witnessed the emergence of the "sponsored" blog (in which the blogger is literally an employee of, or contractor to, a corporate owner), I can see who's likely to have the last laugh.

This is something that's been in the back of my mind for quite a while too — despite the rather obvious irony that (a) I myself was one of the first sponsored bloggers, and (b) Billmon undoubtedly considers me to be precisely one of those who's "glib enough and ideologically safe enough to fit within the conventional media punditocracy."

But despite (or perhaps because of) my role in this phenomenon, it's hard for me to get my arms fully around what's really happening. Just for starters, there's a fairly large taxonomy of ways in which the political blogosphere is becoming "professionalized":

• Amateur bloggers becoming pros. This is the most obvious path, but it's not all that common. Matt Yglesias and I have done it by getting hired by political magazines, and folks like Kos and Atrios have done it by raising enough money on their sites to live on, but it's still pretty rare.

• More professionals taking up blogging. Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall were the first, but since then there's been an explosion of professional reporters writing blogs. In addition, there's the growing phenomenon of serious policy analysts — Steve Clemons, Mark Schmitt, Ruy Teixeira — taking up blogs. There have always been expert bloggers around (Brad DeLong and Eugene Volokh, for example), but the DC-based policy blog is a relative newcomer, and one that subtly but noticeably changes the amateur, conversational tone of the blogosphere.

• Highly promoted blog empires. Despite the plural, there's really only one of these: Nick Denton's stable of snarkmeisters, including Gawker, Defamer, and Wonkette. Still, Wonkette's Madonna-like dedication to self-promotion is so conspicuous that I sometimes think she's single-handedly responsible for about 50% of the attention the blogosphere gets.

• BlogAds. This is a way for amateurs to make a few bucks and still remain amateurs, but as Billmon points out, it's almost impossible to accept advertising and not have it affect your writing at least a little bit.

• Outside organizations aggressively using the blogosphere. This is underappreciated, I think. It started with the success of Howard Dean's blog, but it was probably inevitable regardless: the spectacular growth of political and policy organizations working hard to get the blogosphere on their side. The DNC and RNC are obvious examples, but there are plenty of others as well, inundating us with press releases, requests for links, and conference calls to "get everyone on board." Unlike professional reporters, who are used to this, bloggers have fewer defenses (especially toward organizations they agree with) and are often flattered to be getting the attention. This is a potentially toxic combination.
  

And there's one more thing that might be the most important of all: the sense that bloggers are having an impact. When you have an audience of a few thousand, you can just write what you want without giving it much thought. But once the idea takes hold that maybe — just maybe — serious people are taking blogs seriously, it changes how you write. There's just no way around that.

All of this affects you whether you want it to or not. The Washington Monthly editors, for example, don't influence my writing at all, either directly or indirectly, and yet — somehow — they still do. My audience affects me, my commenters affect me, all the press releases and phone calls affect me, the ads affect me — everything affects me, even if I don't quite know how. That's just the way life is, and there's no reason to think the blogosphere should be immune from the ordinary pressures of human existence.

But despite the handwringing over professionalization, it's also notable how little the political blogosphere has changed. Take a look at the top 30 spots in NZ Bear's blogosphere ecosystem and you don't really see that much change from two years ago: the blogs that are popular today are the same ones that were popular back in the supposed golden age of amateur punditry. And of course, the fact that there are some new entries in the list just shows that increasing professionalization hasn't made it impossible for newcomers to break into the top ranks. Not yet, anyway.

Still, I miss the old blogosphere too, and I hope — perhaps vainly — that when the election is over some of it returns. I hope Atrios becomes funnier again, I hope I blog more on nonpolitical topics, I hope Kos becomes less of a pure fundraising site, and I hope Sullivan returns to the amusingly incandescent liberal hatred of his early blogging days.

As they say, though, hope is not a plan. Stay tuned.

ORAL HYGIENE UPDATE....Brushing your teeth left handed turns out to be harder than you'd think. Assuming you're right handed, that is. Which I am.

UPDATE: In comments, Matthew Longo points out that you can take a test to find out how right-handed (or left-handed) you are. The most well known is the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory, a 10-question test that asks which hand you use for writing, throwing, opening a box, and, yes, brushing your teeth. I scored 100% right-handed. In fact, there were only two categories where I considered ever using my left hand (using a knife and opening a box).

For comparison, here's another test, which includes a few different questions. Once again, I scored 100% right-handed.

You can also go here to test your footedness (I'm "mixed right footed"), eyedness (I'm left eyed), and earedness (I'm left eared). It turns out that being strongly left-eyed and left-eared is pretty uncommon, which perhaps makes up for my garden variety right-handedness.

You learn something new every day, don't you? Not necessarily anything useful, mind you, but at least new.

DO THE RIGHT THING....From Laura Rozen, after reprinting a piece about the popularity of beheading DVDs amid the ever growing chaos and anarchy in Baghdad:

This is almost unspeakably grim. Bush has turned Iraq into Lebanon, and he's running his election on this masking-taped Potemkin village of a liberated Iraq heading joyfully for elections that's all coming apart at the edges.

....You should hear the total condemnation of Bush's national security team I am hearing from Republican foreign policy hands I am interviewing for a forthcoming piece.

I'm looking forward to Laura's piece, of course, but why do I have to wait? Why aren't these Republicans loudly and publicly condemning George Bush's national security team now if that's the way they feel?

Criticizing your own side isn't easy, but I think there are an awful of Republicans who are going to have a hard time living with themselves a few years down the road if they don't speak up now. Time is running out to do the right thing.

CBS BENDS OVER....When CBS rushed the infamous Killian memo story to air two weeks ago, they bumped a story about the forged Niger documents to make room for it. Via Corrente, I just learned that CBS has released a statement saying it has now spiked the story entirely because it would be "inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election":

The CBS statement followed a report in the online edition of Newsweek that described the frustration of CBS News reporters and producers who said the network had concluded that it could not legitimately criticize the president because of the questions about the National Guard report.

According to the Newsweek report, the "60 Minutes" segment was to have detailed how the administration relied on false documents when it said Iraq had tried to buy a lightly processed form of uranium, known as yellowcake, from Niger. The administration later acknowledged that the information was incorrect and that the documents were most likely fake.

The Newsweek article said the segment was to have included the first on-camera interview with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian journalist who was given the fake documents and who provided them to a United States Embassy for verification. The documents were sent to Washington, where some officials embraced them as firm evidence that Iraq was aggressively trying to make nuclear weapons.

So not only was Dan Rather (with an assist from Bill Burkett) responsible for effectively killing the National Guard story for all time, but the resulting debacle has now convinced CBS that they shouldn't air any negative stories about George Bush for the next six weeks — even if they're true. That's some courageous journalism for you.

If this is the liberal media, conservatives can have it.

SHRILLNESS....Today, thanks to the fiendish intervention of Dana Milbank, Publius descends into shrillness. Can I be far behind?

FAUX FAIRNESS....Peter Beinart writes a frustrating column about democracy promotion in the New Republic today. As he points out, in four of the countries most important to our anti-terror effort — Russia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia — George Bush hasn't merely ignored their anti-democratic tendencies, he's practically given them his blessing. But then, just when Beinart ought to be delivering the punch line, the piece peters out feebly, ending only with an airy complaint that Bush and his advisors are "inconsistent" and unwilling to "grapple with the intellectual contradiction underlying their war on terrorism." That's some hard hitting column writing!

Instead, why not simply go where the evidence leads? It's plain that democracy promotion is just a rhetorical device for Bush, one that shows up in speeches about places he doesn't like — Iraq, Iran, Syria — but not something that he genuinely cares about. As Beinart himself ably points out, it's not just that Bush doesn't push as hard as he could, it's that he doesn't push at all. Why not call a spade a spade?

And it's not just Beinart. In the Washington Post today, David Ignatius writes a column about the economic train wreck coming our way that makes plenty of good points. But then, after 600 words of smart writing about the recklessness of George Bush's economic program, he suddenly switches gears and wraps up with the suggestion that John Kerry is probably as much to blame as George Bush. This despite four years of unprecedented fiscal profligacy on Bush's part and over a decade of relative fiscal hawkishness from Kerry. Why is Ignatius so reluctant to state the obvious simply because the obvious happens to put one side in a worse light than the other?

I'm all for being fair, and there are reasonable arguments to be made in favor of Bush's overall policies and against Kerry's. The problem is that even in the cases where the evidence rather clearly points in only one direction, too many columnists are afraid to let the evidence speak for itself and lay the blame directly where it lies. Why?

Read more about it here.

INDEFENSIBLE....Today, Jon Chait discusses a tax bill so grotesque that even the corporate lobbyists who were responsible for larding it up in the first place seem to be feeling a little guilty over the whole thing. He thinks it's a metaphor for what's really wrong with Bush and his cronies:

A normal administration would have some smart policy geeks in a position to prevail on the president to veto such a bill. That's what's so uniquely awful about this administration. It would never occur to anybody in power to veto a bill simply because it was indefensible.

Indeed it wouldn't. In fact, my guess is that Bush could probably sue someone for trademark infringement for using the word "indefensible" without permission.

Elsewhere on the LA Times op-ed page, Juan Cole's Wednesday blog post about conditions in Iraq was picked up and printed right next to Chait's column. It's nice to see op-ed editors mining the best of the blogosphere for compelling pieces.

WHICH COUNTRY IS NOT LIKE THE OTHERS?.... Via Laura Rozen, here's a blast from the fairly recent past: a November 2001 map from the State Department showing where al-Qaeda is active. I've cropped it down to the Middle East, and as you can see, virtually the entire area is awash in al-Qaeda activity.

With one prominent exception. Can you name the one major country in the entire Middle East that al-Qaeda was unable to operate in?

PAYPAL BLUES....Proving that idiocy knows no ideological boundaries, PayPal has suspended the accounts of both the liberal Jeralyn Merritt and the conservative Bill Quick. Jeralyn's offense