ON CLICKING THE LINK....Here is why you should always click the link. Today, Todd Zywicki, writing about a controversy over speech codes at the University of Alabama, says:

[T]his is not the first time that Alabama's students have stood up to bullying by their Administrators, who once tried to prohibit the display of American flags on campus.

Wha...? They tried to prohibit the display of American flags? At the University of Alabama? That didn't compute. So I clicked:

This is, after all, the school that banned the American flag from dorm windows.

Hmmm. Dorm windows. But that still sounds peculiar. Click again:

After months of experimenting with different methods of restricting speech, the administration of the University of Alabama (UA) has "indefinitely" tabled a policy outlawing all window displays in student dormitories. The policy was issued after a student was ordered to remove a confederate flag from the door of his dorm room. Other students, aware of the threat to their liberty posed by this regulation, subsequently displayed American flags to challenge administrators to enforce the ban.

Ah. So what they actually banned was dorm room window displays of all types, and they did it in reaction to the display of a Confederate flag. That's still a misguided policy, but hardly the same as "prohibit[ing] the display of American flags on campus," is it?

Always click the link. That's why Tim Berners-Lee invented them.

POSTSCRIPT: On substance, by the way, good for the UA kids. Fighting hate speech is a worthy goal, but speech codes aren't the way to do it. First amendment and all that, you know.

REVIEWING BROWNSTEIN....Ron Brownstein's column today sure annoyed me. Reaction #1 was: good column! It's about the revolting USA Next attacks on AARP:

As synonyms for the word "vile," my thesaurus offers some of the following: offensive, objectionable, odious, repulsive, repellent, repugnant, revolting, disgusting, sickening, loathsome, foul, nasty, contemptible, despicable and noxious.

Any of those words would aptly describe the advertising attack launched last week against AARP, the largest advocacy group for seniors, by the conservative interest group USA Next.

Yep. But then there's reaction #2: how tiresome. Midway through the column Brownstein insists on playing the faux evenhandedness card by comparing USA Next's actions to those of MoveOn, even though he himself admits there's really no comparison:

The tone wasn't nearly as venomous, but it's worth remembering that the giant liberal online advocacy group MoveOn.org encouraged its members to resign in protest from AARP when the group backed Bush's prescription drug plan. The underlying message to AARP from both MoveOn and USA Next is the same....

No, it's not. Brownstein is implying that any organization that fights for its cause is playing in the same swamp as USA Next and its ilk, but that's not only untrue, it's noxious. Fighting hard is not the same thing as fighting dirty, and blurring the distinction does no one any good.

However, this was followed by reaction #3: good point!

On the left and right, the assumption is deepening that in this highly contentious political environment, no one can ever really operate as a neutral broker. Instead, politics is reduced to a binary choice: news organizations, lobbying groups and centrist legislators searching for common ground are all either with or against you. And when they are against you, they must be overrun by any means necessary.

This sense that anyone who deviates from the party line is a traitor does indeed seem to be gaining steam. Liberals, for example, are almost as dismissive of the mainstream media as conservatives these days, and the result is an increasingly fact-free environment in which both sides feel free to ignore any news report that makes them uncomfortable. This is not an area in which I hope liberals catch up with conservatives.

Finally, there was reaction #4: that's interesting. Here's what he has to say about the conservative strategy on Social Security:

The USA Next attacks on AARP so spectacularly set back the cause of restructuring Social Security that they deepen suspicion that conservatives are less interested in striking a deal than provoking a stalemate they can use as an issue in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

Now that's something I haven't heard before. What's more, I find it hard to believe. If Social Security does get stalemated, it seems likely it will be long forgotten by November 2006, let alone November 2008. Still, it's an interesting thought.

FAKE NEWS....The LA Times is just full of interesting tidbits today. Apparently the administration has launched another phony news video:

The tape looks like a news report and is narrated by a former television reporter....But unlike an actual news report, it does not provide views critical of the proposed changes. Democrats have denounced it as propaganda. Snippets aired on as many as 18 stations earlier this month, the administration said.

....The video shows construction workers, waitresses, nurses, farmworkers and a forklift operator at their jobs, and includes interviews with a farmer and a restaurant manager. The narrator says the proposal would permit workers to "eat when they are hungry, and not when the government tells them."

Oh wait. I didn't mention which administration did this, did I? This phony news video turns out to be a California-only folly from the administration of Governor Arnold. I guess he figures he knows a good thing when he sees it.

OF MATH AND MEN....Do boys have stronger innate math skills than girls? The Chronicle of Higher Education investigates:

"There may be some innate differences, but we're so far from hitting that barrier that it's silly to talk about it," says Jacquelynne S. Eccles, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who has followed several groups of students over two decades, tracking how they chose high-school courses, college majors, and then careers.

....Data from [Julian] Stanley's program, at Johns Hopkins, shows just how strong the cultural factors are in determining math achievement. In the early 1980s, he and [Camilla] Persson Benbow reported a whopping disparity in the numbers of mathematically gifted boys and girls who scored 700 on the math section of the SAT at the age of 13, a distinction achieved by one in 10,000 students. A quarter-century ago, there were 13 boys for every girl at that level. Now the ratio is only 2.8 to 1, a precipitous drop that has not been reported in the news media. "It's gone way down as women have had an opportunity to take their math earlier," says Mr. Stanley.

Following on the heels of l'affaire Summers I've seen loads of long, serious articles asking the question: are men innately better at math than women? This article is a little better than most of that genre, but I'd still like to see something in the popular press that focuses on a different question: are there unusually large cultural barriers to advancement for women in the areas of math and science? Surely there's room somewhere for an article that focuses on the research for cultural influences rather than biological ones? I assume it must be fairly voluminous.

Previous post asking the same question here. If someone can point me to a long, well-reported article in the mainstream press that focuses primarily on the rigorous evidence for social and cultural barriers, please leave a comment. It's certainly possible that I've missed one somewhere.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, the answer to the question at the beginning of the Chronicle article is "all of them." Just showing off my innate mathematical skills here.....

UPDATE: It's not the long article I'm looking for, but it turns out the Chronicle piece does have a sidebar called "Vexing Stereotypes" that looks briefly at one piece of evidence about cultural barriers.

LET GOD SORT IT OUT....Congressman Sam Johnson explains his foreign policy views:

Speaking at a veterans’ celebration at Suncreek United Methodist Church in Allen, Texas....Johnson said he told the president that night, “Syria is the problem. Syria is where those weapons of mass destruction are, in my view. You know, I can fly an F-15, put two nukes on ‘em and I’ll make one pass. We won’t have to worry about Syria anymore.”

He not only gave this advice directly to George Bush, but is so proud of it that he went right back home and started bragging about it to his constituents.

Did I mention that Johnson is an actual, living, breathing congressman? A Republican one?

DEMOCRACY IN LEBANON?....Following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri — presumably by Syrian-backed terrorists — the government of Lebanon has fallen:

With shouts of "Syria out!," more than 25,000 flag-waving protesters massed outside Parliament today in a dramatic display of defiance that swept out Lebanon's pro-Syrian government two weeks after the assassination of a former prime minister.

Cheering broke out among the demonstrators in Martyrs' Square when they heard Prime Minister Omar Karami's announcement on loudspeakers that the government was stepping down. Throughout the day, protesters handed out red roses to soldiers and police.

...."Today the government fell. Tomorrow, it's the one huddled in Anjar," opposition leader Elias Atallah told the crowd to cheers, referring to the Syrian intelligence chief based in the eastern Lebanese town of Anjar. He said the opposition will continue its actions until all demands are met.

More later.

DEMOCRACY IN EGYPT?....Is Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak serious about introducing democracy to Egypt? Abu Aardvark rounds up some of the regional press reaction:

The Arab press seems to be mulling it over just like Egyptians are, trying to figure out whether this is a serious step forward or a clever move by Mubarak to pre-empt real reform. Al Quds al Arabi runs the most skeptical piece today saying that "the opposition considers Mubarak's change of the contitution to be a superficial change to satisfy Bush": no plausible candidates to compete with him, election rules which guarantee his victory, and preparation for a democratic inheritance (i.e. succession).

....Meanwhile, al Hayat reports that opposition parties are exploring their options about who might compete against Mubarak....On the editorial front, I've seen some cheerleading from al Sharq al Awsat (Ahmed al Rubai thinks that this is a major step forward which only congenital skeptics could have doubts about....

The Aardvark also recommends this more extensive roundup from Charles Levinson.

COUNTING THE VOTES....Commenting on the Count Every Vote Act, a piece of good government earnestness currently supported solely by Democrats, Julie Saltman wonders how Republicans will justify opposing it — and then answers her own question:

So here's the interesting question. Republicans can't oppose this on the merits: in a just society this bill would be passed. One can debate the minor points, but decent people will be fundamentally in favor of it. But the Republicans will want to oppose it out of self-interest, which means they'll have to invent some spurious arguments to support their position. I have no doubt that they'll use the "Democrats want criminals to decide who gets to be president" approach.

I think that's part of it — although the primary line of defense will probably be to just bottle it up in committee and ignore it. Unless Dems figure out a way to take this cause big time and make it an election issue next year — and there are a very limited number of topics you can do that with — that's all it will take.

But suppopse it takes off. Then what? Based on past precedent, I'd guess at two possible strategies:

• Give it the Willie Horton treatment. Don't just claim that Democrats want criminals to pick your next president, find the meanest, scariest, most sociopathic ex-con in the contiguous 48 and make his name a household word. "Do you want him in the voting booth next to you? Democrats do." But best to find a white guy this time! No need to open yourself up to charges of race baiting.

  (Prior precedent for this strategy: Willie Horton himself, of course, but also the debate over the repeal of the estate tax, where Republicans were able to justify it by pointing to one trivial segment of the population that evoked public sympathy — small family farms — and claiming they'd be driven out of business. Remember: you don't have to fight an entire bill, just demonize one part sufficiently to bring the entire thing down in flames. See also Basketball, Midnight.)

• Pretend it was your idea. If public sentiment shifts even slightly on this, my guess is that President Bush will quickly endorse CEVA or else introduce a similar bill of his own (sans voting rights for felons, of course). By the time it's passed, everyone will forget it was a Democratic idea in the first place. In fact, by that time Dems will be thought of as the obstructionists and the Rose Garden signing ceremony won't have a Democrat in sight.

  (Prior precedents for this strategy: Sarbanes-Oxley and the Homeland Security Department.)
  

So how do Dems fight back? I hate to say it, but ditching felon voting rights is probably part of it, which is too bad since felons who have served their time should no more have their voting rights taken away than their right to free speech. Second, it has to gain national attention as an initiative associated solely with Democrats. Given everything else going on — Social Security, tort reform, Iraq, etc. — it's hard to see how that will happen. Hopefully Sens. Kerry and Clinton will surprise me.

PULITZER WATCH....Last year Peter Gosselin of the LA Times wrote a 3-part series that tackled a subject that's probably the key economic story of the past 30 years: the steadily increasing risk and income volatility of the American middle class. In the years since 1970, quietly but inexorably, life has gotten increasingly precarious for an increasing number of people.

It's pretty widely understood that average incomes have stagnated during the past three decades, but as bad as that is in a country as rich as America, what's worse — and less widely understood — is how much riskier life has become: income volatility has skyrocketed, the minimum wage is down, the number of people with company pensions is down, average job tenure has dropped from 11 years to 7, and the number of people with health insurance has fallen seven percentage points.

This is not easy stuff to present and it's not easy to grasp, but it's an essential part of the economic story of America and it's an essential backdrop to our current debates over Social Security, Medicaid, and tax reform. Life is getting riskier every year, more and more people are living on the thin edge of disaster, and instead of working to ameliorate this the Republican party is working hard to make it riskier still.

Why do I mention this? Because Gosselin's series has now been collected in a single place and is available even if you aren't registered with the LA Times. All you have to do is click the link.

So do it: click the link. Believe me, this story is well worth the 20 or 30 minutes it takes to read, and if there's any justice you'll be seeing this series on a list of Pulitzer nominees in a couple of months. It's what print journalism was born to do.

Go read. And if you have a blog yourself, pass it along.

OSCAR PICKS....Dwight Meredith hasn't seen any of the movies nominated for Academy Awards this year, but he has some predictions anyway. Here's the final one:

Prediction #6

I do not know what will happen tonight but whatever it is, you can be sure that right wingers will say that it proves that although they control the White House, both Houses of Congress, much of the Judiciary, much of the business world, large segments of the media, and (they believe) the hearts and minds of most Americans, they are really just an oppressed minority.

Read 'em all!

BOXERS OR BRIEFS?....Jonathan Alter tells us the origin of "boxers or briefs?" today. Oddly, it's related to Hunter S. Thompson.

RUSSIA AND IRAN....From the New York Times today:

Russia agreed today to provide fuel for an Iranian nuclear reactor and sought to assure a wary world that tough safeguards would prevent any diversion of the fuel to build weapons.

....It came only three days after President Bush, who has sharply denounced the Iranian program, expressed his trust in President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and joined with him in saying that Iran should not have nuclear weapons.

Either (a) that private mini-summit between Bush and Putin didn't go well at all, or (b) Bush privately told Putin he didn't really care much about this. Neither alternative is all that comforting.

BLOGGING WOMEN....Since this is the one-week anniversary of the great female blogger meltdown here at Political Animal, I figure it's a good time to provide links to a few resources for anyone interested in reading more blogs written by women. I'm not generally a big fan of long lists of links, but they have their uses — and after all, it's not like anyone is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to click on any of them. You can use them or discard them as you wish.

Note that this isn't meant to be any kind of comprehensive list, just a few things that have come across my radar in the past week. Feel free to add your own favorites in comments.

• Over at Preemptive Karma, Carla has created a Progressive Women's Blog Ring. A complete list of members is here.

• What She Said! has a lengthy blogroll of "Progressive Women who Blog Politics."

• Feminist Blogs is a collective blog with a pretty obvious purpose. It has about 30 contributors and the posts have lots of additional links to likeminded blogs.

• Ilyka Damen has a list of both conservative and liberal female political bloggers.

• Plum Crazy has a pair of posts (#1 here and #2 here) with links to individual posts from women bloggers. It's all part of "Estrogen Week."

• The Conglomerate is a legal blog run by Gordon Smith and Christine Hurt. Christine writes that "I have decided to be part of the solution. I am affirmatively acting to find female law blogs, read them and spotlight them." Here's the first one.

• And finally, here's a list I put together last year. It's not the same one I'd put together today, but it's a good list anyway. There's also this list of responses to last Sunday's post, most of which are from women.
  

And of course there's also the website that started all this, Susan Estrich's Stop the Bias, primarily dedicated to harassing Michael Kinsley into running more op-eds by women in the LA Times (especially from local women, although that's gotten less attention.) However, as L.A. Observed, um, observes:

Today's advantage in the Susan Estrich-Michael Kinsley feud goes to Kinsley. Last week he informed the USC professor that she was no longer welcome on the Times opinion pages, and today the lead piece splashed atop the op-ed page is by her ex-husband, fellow USC professor Martin Kaplan. Oh, the piece is about lying in Hollywood.

It doesn't really seem likely that this was deliberate, but then again.....

UPDATE: Last sentence modified slightly. The Kaplan op-ed ran on Friday, not Sunday.

KILLING SOCIAL SECURITY....Why is George Bush so committed to privatizing Social Security? Matt Yglesias thinks he knows the answer:

Many conservatives believe — quite sincerely, as far as I can tell — that privatizing Social Security will actually create new conservative voters and they also seem to believe (likewise sincerely) that liberals share this belief and that this explains why liberals don't like privatization.

It's true that some conservatives believe that creating a country of stockholders will also create a country full of people dedicated to corporate growth, and therefore a country that's more sympathetic to the goals of the Republican party. But I think that misses the forest for the trees.

The truth is simpler, although it's not something that any savvy conservative will admit these days: they just don't like Social Security and they want to get rid of it. They didn't like it in the 30s when FDR first proposed it; they didn't like it in the 50s when Eisenhower made his peace with it; they didn't like it in the 60s when they nominated Barry Goldwater for president; and they didn't like it in the 80s when David Stockman briefly tried a frontal attack on benefits but then retreated to a strategic hope that rising payroll taxes would eventually inspire a workers revolt against the whole system. (It didn't work.)

So now they've learned their lesson: not only are frontal assaults fruitless — Americans like Social Security — but they're ephemeral anyway. Sure, price indexing might cut benefits and therefore the overall size of Social Security, but so what? Even if you passed it, some future Congress would just reverse it.

Private accounts are the only thing you can do to undermine the nature of Social Security that's likely to be permanent. There are no absolute guarantees, of course, but once you start up a program of private accounts, it's almost impossible to dismantle it. In the same way that there are enormous transition costs to ditch the current system in favor of private accounts, there would be enormous transition costs in the future associated with any attempt to ditch private accounts and bring back guaranteed benefits.

And that's the key: privatization is the only plan that has a chance of permanently crippling Social Security as a system of guaranteed benefits. When FDR created the current payroll tax-supported system, he said, "With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program." And he was right. Today's Republicans are hoping to achieve the same thing in reverse with private accounts. Social Security will eventually wither away, and no damn politician will be able to do anything about it.

THE WAR AGAINST CRAP....In the LA Times today, Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan tells us about the latest front in the culture wars over in the UK:

Law lecturer James Anstice...smashed up a nativity scene at Madame Tussaud's in London that featured David and Victoria Beckham (soccer star and former Spice Girl, respectively) as Joseph and Mary, and President Bush as one of the three wise men. He was charged with criminal damage for his efforts to render a cultural service to the nation. After his court appearance, Anstice said: "I have done my bit for the war against crap, but I do not think I am going to get involved in any more protests."

A war against crap! Let's all join in!

Mangan's target of choice, which actually comes from outside the field of culture, is phony food allergies: she suggests that about 2% of the population actually have them while 45% claim to have them. This takes a rather broader view of "crap" than Anstice's, but perhaps the modern world makes that necessary. (Although this whole peanut allergy thing, which appears to be quite real, sure is perplexing. Isn't anyone ever going to figure out why so many kids have become allergic to peanuts?)

Do I get to choose something too? Hmmm. Let me think about that. In the meantime, comments are open.

WINNING THE SOUTH....Over at SouthNow, Jon Bloom interviews political strategist David “Mudcat” Saunders:

SouthNow: Why did the Democrats lose in 2004?
Mudcat: They can’t f***’n count. That’s the Democrats’ problem. You don’t get in the football game and punt on first down. You concede nothing. We condeded 20 states at first and then six more by Labor Day. That’s 227 electoral votes. Bush only needed 18 percent of the remaining electoral votes to win.

SouthNow: What’s the prescription for Democrats?
Mudcat: There’s only one precription and that’s tolerance. I’m a white, southern male who hunts. I’m a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which has two black members, by the way. I don’t know how many northern Democrats who have tolerance for my kind.

SouthNow: What’s your strategy for Southern progress?
Mudcat: We need to quit all this tap dancin’ around the truth....We need to stop tap dancin’ around the issues of guns, gays and God....We’ve lost the white male. We need to get ‘em back. We need to get through the cultural wall. It’s a wall of straw. Inside every rural Republican is a Democrat trying to get out.

Saunders, who has worked on the campaigns of Mark Warner, John Edwards, and Bob Graham, thinks that if Democrats ease up on the culture stuff they can win in the South: "We’ve got an affection for big guns and fast cars. It’s a macho thing. I’ve not seen any attempt by the Democrats to get into that culture."

I'm not actually sure I agree with this. The problem is that while there are areas where Democrats can compromise on cultural issues without betraying their souls, there are others, like abortion and gay rights, where they really can't. So the question is whether ditching the gun crusade and toughening up on national security is — by itself — sufficient to win back enough Southern votes to make a difference. I'm not quite convinced of that.

More on that here. And more on the colorful Mudcat here.

MILLION DOLLAR BABY....Shakespeare's Sister reminds me to comment about this year's crop of Academy Award™ nominees for Best Picture. Unfortunately, I haven't seen them all, but the topic at hand is Million Dollar Baby ("thoroughly wonderful") and I have seen that one. Spoilers follow below the fold.

Is there a phrase that's the opposite of "grows on you"? Whatever it is, that's my reaction to MDB. It was OK in the theater (though I wasn't blown away), but the more I thought about it the less I liked it.

It's a boxing flick and the basic story is simple: scrappy unknown from the mean streets gets a shot at the big time and becomes America's hero — and she's a girl! In other words, Rocky VI except slightly less credible. (Although if Benjamin Wallace-Wells is right about the appallingly poor quality of female boxing in his more-interesting-than-the-movie essay about female boxing in the current issue of the Monthly, maybe Maggie Fitzgerald's astonishing ability to crush the competition with only a few months of training is more credible than I think.)

In any case, as we all know it turns out that MDB isn't just Rocky in drag. And that's the problem. It's bad enough that the first half of the movie is formulaic sports movie stuff, but the unexpected injury that ends Maggie's career, far from rescuing the story, felt to me like a dramatic fraud. Instead of being a well-acted but routine sports flick, we're now suddenly supposed to accept it as a deep and moving story about the quality of life and the meaning of family.

But I didn't buy it. The plot devices are too far removed from ordinary experience to be meaningful and the emotional manipulation is done with a sledgehammer. (I can't have been the only one to wonder what Dickens horror story Maggie's family came from, can I?) But the worst part was the faux religious crisis of conscience suffered by Eastwood's character. This was done why? To demonstrate that helping Maggie die was a really, really hard thing to do? No kidding. Hell, the whole subject was treated better two decades ago in Whose Life Is It Anyway?, and I don't even like Richard Dreyfuss.

In the end, I just didn't believe. Maggie's meteoric rise was a cliche and her family was a cartoon. Morgan Freeman has played the same character about four or five times now. And assisted suicide isn't really the groundbreaking subject the movie makes it out to be. In the end, the profundity was forced and the emotional manipulation was done with all the grace of a piledriver.

But other than that I liked it fine.

Of the other nominees, I've only seen Sideways and The Aviator. Sideways was OK, but I don't quite get the cult that's grown up around it. As for The Aviator, it may be a standard Hollywood big budget biopic, but it was a pretty good Hollywood big budget biopic, a three-hour movie that played like a two-hour movie. (As opposed to the far more common two-hour movie that drags on like a three-hour movie.)

Of the three, then, my vote goes to Martin Scorsese and The Aviator. It's probably not the best movie of the year, but then again, it's better than The Gladiator. That's something.

DEMOCRACY PROMOTION....From the LA Times last night:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice canceled an official visit to Cairo on Friday amid growing tensions between the United States and Egypt over what the Bush administration views as Egypt's resistance to democratic reform.

....In an interview this week, Egypt's ambassador to the U.S., Nabil Fahmy, said he believed that the U.S.-Egyptian relationship would remain strong. But he said he was concerned that the administration's criticism of Egypt was hurting Americans' view of his country, as well as Egyptians' view of the U.S. government.

"In Egypt, the effect has not been useful. People don't like interference by anybody," he said.

Not useful? Here's the New York Times 12 hours later:

President Hosni Mubarak asked Egypt's Parliament on Saturday to amend the Constitution to allow for direct, multiparty presidential elections later this year for the first time in the nation's history.

The devil is in the details, of course, and this might turn out to be mostly window dressing in the end. But as a frequent critic of the administration's sincerity about democracy promotion, let me say that their conduct over the past couple of months has been better than I imagined it would be. Baby steps, to be sure, but hopeful ones. I hope they keep it up.

UNIFORM CODES....Via Joanne Jacobs, this lovely story of tolerance and acceptance from Green Cove Springs, Florida:

County school officials are backing a principal's decision to bar a picture of a lesbian student dressed in a tuxedo from the high school yearbook.

Sam Ward, principal of Fleming Island High School, said he pulled the senior class picture because Kelli Davis was wearing boy's clothes. His decision was debated Thursday at a Clay County school board meeting that drew 200 people, but the board took no action, and Superintendent David Owens said the decision will stand.

Most of the 24 people who spoke at the meeting supported Kelli Davis.

"This is not to be treated as a gay rights issue," said her mother, Cindi Davis. "Rather it's a human rights issue."

Others applauded Ward's decision, including Karen Gordon, who said, "When uniformity is compromised, then authority no longer holds."

Officials at the northeastern Florida school have said the picture was pulled from the yearbook because Davis did not follow the rules on dress. School board attorney Bruce Bickner said there is no written dress code for senior pictures, but principals have the authority to set standards.

The student editor of the yearbook, Keri Sewell, was fired after refusing her adviser's order to take the picture out.

"When uniformity is compromised, then authority no longer holds." Ain't it the truth? The 21st century marches on.

THEORY vs. PRACTICE....Shorter Mark Schmitt: Americans are conservative in theory but liberal in practice. They think they like conservatism until it becomes clear it might actually apply to them.

That sounds about right.

"PIGS NOT GREAT"....This story is several weeks old, but since it didn't get any play in the American press maybe you'll all find it as amusing as I did.

It started in January, when Britain's Labor Party cooked up several posters designed to mock the fuzzy accounting of the Conservative Party's taxing and spending proposals. The posters were put up on the Labor website and people were asked to vote for the one they liked best. The specimen on the right makes the point plainly: pigs will fly before the Tories come clean about the cost of their election promises.

Only one problem: the faces pasted onto the pigs' bodies belong to Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin, who are both Jewish — and the Evening Standard managed to gin up a controversy about it. "I am shocked the Labour Party finds it remotely clever or amusing to impose the faces of probably the two highest-profile Jewish politicians onto flying pigs," said a Conservative candidate for a largely Jewish district. "There is nothing more distasteful for a Jew than being associated with a pig."

One may doubt just how genuine this shock really was, but in any case the poster was taken down a few days later and the contest closed. That should have been the end of the story, but it wasn't.

The posters were concocted by an ad agency called TBWA, who were contacted by Andrew McFadyen, a reporter from the BBC program Newsnight. Who, he asked, came up with the idea in the first place? TBWA queried Labor spin guru Alastair Campbell about how to respond. Campbell Blackberried back the following message:

Just spoke to Trev [TBWA's creative chief] think tbwa shd give statement to newsnight saying party and agency work together well and nobody here has spoken to standard. Posters done by tbwa according to polotical brief. Now fuck off and cover something important you twats.

Unfortunately, Campbell didn't send this message to his mates at TBWA. He sent it to McFadyen. A few minutes later, realizing what happened, he Blackberried McFadyen again:

Not very good at this email Blackberry malarkey....Posters done by them according to our brief. I dreamt up flying pigs. Pigs not great but okay in the circs of Tories promising tax cuts and spending rises with the same money....Final sentence of earlier email probably a bit colourful and personal considering we have never actually met but I'm sure you share the same sense of humour as your star presenter Mr P.

Indeed. And I love this line: "Pigs not great but okay." Words to live by.

SOCIAL SECURITY NEWS....Via Social Security Central Josh Marshall, two separate but weirdly related stories:

• The deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration has been roaming the country to appear with Republican congressmen at events designed to promote private accounts. Is this unacceptably political? Of course not. He says (a) he's only there to provide information, not shill for the administration, and (b) he'd do it for Democrats too but none of them have asked.

  Roger that. You'd think, though, that perhaps some lower level drone might be all that's necessary if it's just pure wonkish information they're after.

• Thomas Saving, one of the seven trustees of the Social Security Administration (he was appointed by Bill Clinton in 2000), "has just signed on to be an advisor and spokesman for one of the lead pro-Social Security phase-out astroturf groups, Progress for America."

  Saving has been a privatization advocate for a long time, and I guess you could argue that the trustees are all political folks anyway. Still, this is a little brazen, isn't it? Shouldn't trustees at least draw the line at being paid lobbyists for the very program they're charged with protecting?
  

And don't forget the infamous SSI hold recording. I guess this finally explains what Karl Rove is talking about when he waxes nostalgic for the McKinley era. After all, this view of government as a mere personal appendage of the president wouldn't have raised an eyebrow back then.

BLOGGERS HIT THE BIG TIME....Trish Wilson emails today to call my attention to the OPEN Government Act, a bipartisan bill designed to "promote accessibility, accountability, and openness in Government." Among its other worthy features, this bill defines all the fine folks who write on the internet — including bloggers, apparently — as "representative[s] of the news media," at least as it applies to making FOIA requests. Hooray for us!

GUNNER PALACE....Phil Carter saw a screening of the documentary Gunner Palace last night and raves about it today:

"Gunner Palace" does what no book, no news article, and no blog can do — it makes the soldiers of 2-3 FA come alive for those experiencing the movie, in a way they could only do if they were in person.

...."Gunner Palace" stands alone for conveying a sense of how it feels to ride down a highway in Baghdad in an open HMMWV, looking at every bag on the side of the road as a potential IED, never knowing which one might explode. It may be said that this movie is crude, profane, and even obscene at times — but so is war. "Gunner Palace" gives us a brutally honest view of this war from the perspective of our young men and women fighting it, and I can't recommend this movie highly enough.

Acording to its website, Gunner Palace opens on March 4. Sounds like it's worth seeing.

ABORTION POLITICS....The LA Times reports that the Kansas attorney general, an abortion foe, wants two Kansas abortion clinics to hand over about 90 files related to "cases in which adult women had undergone late-term abortions and girls age 15 and younger had had abortions." Kansas prohibits late-term abortions except to protect the health of the mother, and the clinics say they have obeyed this law:

The clinics, which described the attorney general's subpoena as a "fishing expedition," said that they would be willing to release the records as long as specific identifying information — such as names — was blocked out.

Obviously you don't need personal information to ensure that the law about late-term abortions was followed, so why not accept the redacted records? The age of consent in Kansas is 16, and Attorney General Phill Kline says it's because he wants to investigate possible child rape cases. The New York Times adds this:

Mr. Kline's efforts to obtain records from abortion clinics follows his failed attempt last year to require the state's health workers to report any sexual activity of girls younger than 16, the age of legal consent in Kansas.

In other words, this guy really does want to prosecute anyone under 16 who's had sex. Or so it seems.

But does he? After all, if he's really serious, all he needs to do is keep track of birth records. Any teenager who has a baby at an age younger than 16 years and nine months has pretty clearly fallen afoul of the law and ought to be investigated. So why not do that?

The answer is obvious: Kline has no interest in prosecuting statutory rape, he has an interest in shutting down abortion clinics and family planning services — or at least harassing them as much as possible. That's good wedge politics, after all. Investigating thousands of single teenage mothers, on the other hand, isn't.

A CONSERVATIVE TAKES ON WAL-MART....Stephen Bainbridge makes the conservative case against Wal-Mart today. You should read the whole thing to get a sense of his argument, but here's an incomplete summary:

So opening a Wal-Mart has a small positive effect on consumer prices and employment for the community. The latter effect dissipates over time as Wal-Mart drives competitors out of business or, at least, the area.

....By trampling small businesses underfoot, through its mix of volume pricing and subsidies, Wal-Mart and its ilk undermine the possibility of "wide participation in businesses." Prospective entrepreneurs are thus pushed out of fields like retail.

....Being a conservative is supposed to be about things like tradition, community, and, yes, aesthetics. If I'm right about that, it's hard to see why a conservative should regard Wal-Mart as a societal force for good....

The funny thing is that I don't really agree with this, even though we end up at the same place. The bucolic vision of small town America as a web of communities centered on mom and pop stores lining Main Street is a pleasant one, but I've long since given up thinking it's worth fighting for. In an advanced country of 300 million, any industry with economies of scale is bound to produce powerhouse nationwide corporations that take over most of the market no matter what we do. Fighting this is like fighting the tide. (Besides, one of the benefits of big box retailers that Steve doesn't mention is that they really do provide small town customers with far more variety than they can get from Main Street shops. That's a significant social good.)

For myself, I don't want to stop Wal-Mart from expanding, I'd just like to see them accept unionization and pay better wages. Beyond that,

government should not subsidize Wal-Mart either through zoning or tax breaks. Wal-Mart’s a big boy, so to speak, who can take care of itself. We ought to let it compete in a free market. And those of us with a bully pulpit ought to use it to encourage Wal-Mart to become a better neighbor and citizen.

On that, we agree.

I SURRENDER....All right, already. I'll link to you. Just don't bring catblogging into it, OK?

To avert feline catastrophe, head over to the blog deemed Most Deserving of Wider Recognition and drop a few shekels in the tip jar.

UPDATE: And don't forget runners up Dohiyi Mir, who also has catblogging, and Majikthise, who doesn't. On the other hand, she does have penguin blogging.

AMERICAN STYLE....Via Ezra Klein, this is pretty funny. Apparently George Bush had planned an "American style townhall meeting" as the centerpiece of his current trip to Germany, but it's been quietly dropped from the schedule. Why? Because his idea of "American style" meant a scripted event in which all the questions were screened and approved in advance.

As Ezra says, "American style, in some ways, is a lot like Cuban style. Or North Korean style. It shares some threads with Russian and Iranian style too."

HAVE CONSERVATIVES WON?....Brad DeLong has one analytical quarrel with Rick Perlstein's "extraordinarily good" Before the Storm:

Goldwaterism certainly did — in the long run — unmake Republican Party commitment to the New Deal Consensus. But in the short run Goldwaterism had other consequences: the damage it did to Republican congressional power were the only things that made the Great Society possible: the Johnson-era expansions of the social insurance state and the Nixon and post-Nixon-era expansions of the regulatory state were possible only on congressional foundations that had been created by Goldwater's Samson act directed against the Republican establishment.

To make possible the Great Society — and then to cheer when Ronald Reagan rolls back 10% of it — Goldwaterism was the greatest own-goal and act of political delusion by conservatives in the twentieth century.

As it happens, I don't share Brad's view that this is a defect of the book, primarily because I think Before the Storm was meant to be descriptive, not analytic. But on the first-order point, Brad is absolutely right.

The fact is that Goldwaterism, Reaganism, and Bushism to the contrary, liberals have basically won the big war of the past 40 years. With the exception of the conservative victory (so far) on taxes, conservatives have succeeded in rolling back only a tiny portion of the liberal victories of the post-World War II era. Social Security is bigger than ever, Medicare has just been expanded, anti-discrimination laws still rule the land, environmental laws have cleaned up the country, and to prevent themselves from being voted out of office en masse Republicans have to pretend that they enthusiastically support all this stuff even while they're trying to quietly tear it down in the background.

Make no mistake: they have succeeded in tearing some of it down, and they're continuing that effort. But 40 years ago Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan could speak plainly about their dislike of Social Security, while today George Bush has to pretend to be the second coming of FDR before he proposes his plans to subtly undo FDR's legacy. If conservatives have really won the national debate, why is it that they so carefully avoid saying things that they talked about openly a mere four decades ago?

POSTSCRIPT: And go buy the book, OK? At only 12 bucks it's a steal.

ARE WE READY FOR OUR CLOSEUPS?....I may be a sexist pig, but at least my clueless musings have done some good: a bunch of my female critics made it into Howard Kurtz's column in the Washington Post today. As Trish says, that's the big time!

PSSST....Prairie Angel notes Dan Froomkin's answer to an online question this afternoon about the media's almost pathological acceptance of anonymous briefings these days:

Having waited a long time for the press corps to overtly revolt against this vile tradition, allow me to suggest another possibilty: What if White House reporters just started anonymously outing the anonymous briefers to bloggers? Just an idea.

I've wondered the same thing. Naturally, I'd be delighted for Political Animal to become anonymous source central — I'm very discreet — but anyone would do as well. So why not?

I gather that — bothersome professional ethics aside — part of the reason is that the press corps is also pathologically averse to working together in any way. But that doesn't really have to happen. All it takes is for a few reporters to pick a likely blog and start feeding it the dirt. Others would likely follow. And soon the White House's insistence on keeping its public servants anonymous for purely self-serving reasons would wither away.

Great plan. Who will bell the cat first?

BEFORE THE STORM....Last year Rick Perlstein sent me a copy of his 2001 book Before the Storm, a look at the rise of Barry Goldwater and movement conservatism in the early 60s. I thanked him, and then put it aside and didn't pick it up again until last week.

What can I say? I'm an idiot. Before the Storm is one of the best political books I've ever read and one of the best descriptions of the roots of modern American conservatism anywhere. It's not just that it's deeply researched and meticulously written — though it is — it's that Perlstein has the rare gift of bringing the past to life. He gives you a sense of what it was really like to be alive during that era, something that few authors seriously try and even fewer ever accomplish.

Here's a sample paragraph about my own hometown:

Orange County's VFW halls and school auditoriums were Meccas for traveling lecturers like former double agent Herb Philbrick (whose claim to fame was announced in the title of his book, I Led Three Lives); Korean War POW John Noble (I Was a Slave in Russia); and World War I fighting ace Eddie Rickenbacker (The Socialistic Sixteenth— A National Cancer). Another perennial was W. Cleon Skousen, who was so right-wing he had been fired as Salt Lake City police chief by Mayor J. Bracken Lee, the tax resister working to dissolve the federal government, for running his department "like a Gestapo." Another favorite was Ronald Reagan. It was glamorous having a movie star talk to your Republican precinct club. And he preached anticommunist hellfire as well as anyone else on the circuit.

This book is fun to read, and gets as deeply into the soul of movement conservatism as any I've ever read — and it does this not by being a tedious lefty rant, but by taking its subject seriously on its own terms. Conservatives can read this book about their own roots and enjoy it every bit as much as liberals.

Buy this book. Really. Buy it right now and read it. Anybody with even a flicker of interest in modern American politics won't regret it.

POSTSCRIPT: On a slightly different note, this book makes me wonder: what the hell is up with liberal funding bodies? Take a look at these reviews. Anyone who writes a first book this good should be mobbed almost immediately by foundations and "writer in residence" programs eager to shovel him a bit of cash to get him going on his next book. (It's about Nixon.) But that didn't happen.

Why not? I've read all sorts of critiques of the way liberal groups dole out money, but this really brings it home. The fact that apparently not one single person at one single liberal grantmaking institution read this book and jumped at the opportunity to help fund the followup indicates that there's something deeply wrong with our institutional funding.

For God's sake, someone step up to the plate and write this man a check.

CONSERVATIVES AND ABSTINENCE....Are modern conservatives fundamentally less open to reason than liberals? The liberal Jon Chait thinks so, but the libertarian Megan McArdle thinks he's full of hot air ("These orgies of self-congratulation to which the media (and the blogosphere) are prone make me cringe"). Over at Tapped, Sarah Wildman implicitly proposes a wee test:

A new study has found that Uganda's decline in HIV/AIDS can't be attributed to the "A" in ABC — Abstinence. The Bush administration claims that Uganda's battle with HIV/AIDS stands on abstinence, a cornerstone of both the administration's international and domestic AIDS policy and the work of friends on the far right.... [But] evidence aside, the Bush administration has blithely continued to pour money into international abstinence-focused grants, $100 million since October 2004 alone.

There's nothing wrong with ideology per se, but if preventing actual illness isn't a good test of whether pragmatism has even a sliver of support in the modern Republican party, I don't know what is. Wouldn't that $100 million be better spend on something more effective?

HARVARD AND LARRY SUMMERS....Over at Left2Right, Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy and women's studies at the University of Michigan, has an idiosyncratic look at the whole Larry Summers flap. Her overall position seems to be that the real problem is "rot in the system" at Harvard, not Summers per se, but she then proceeds to criticize Summers on three separate grounds:

• About the Cornel West kerfuffle a few years ago:

  Grade inflation is a serious issue well within the province of the President. But it is ludicrous and demeaning to single out West on this count, given its pervasiveness at Harvard....What may be a legitimate form of institutional accountability and standard-setting in an impersonal, publicly vetted, and universally applied system of rules becomes an imperious violation of academic freedom in the hands of a President who applies privately tailored standards at his personal discretion.

  Hmmm. This somehow seems too clever by half. I accept her point that if Summers is genuinely concerned about things like grade inflation he should offer an institutional solution, not a one-off dressing down. On the other hand, it's hard to get people to take this stuff seriously. Sometimes a high profile criticism is the only thing that will ruffle enough feathers to get people to sit up and take notice.

• On his recent talk about women in science:

  Research scientists are entitled to their biases, in the sense that science can't get underway without people willing to place their bets on sometimes controversial hypotheses as yet unproved, and can't succeed unless people are free to vigorously pursue such hypotheses even in the face of rival hypotheses claiming their own empirical support. [But] Summers was not speaking as a research scientist in the fields in question. He was speaking as the President of Harvard University. In that capacity, Summers' deployment of his biases could not function in the fruitful way biases often function among research scientists. They functioned instead as lame excuses for a poor institutional record of tenuring women.

  I'm not quite as convinced as Anderson that Summers' substantive case was utterly without merit — only mostly without merit — but I agree that Summers's position is really the main issue here. There's a context to everything, and the context for Summers is that he's the president of Harvard, it's an institution with some longstanding grievances in this area, and he has considerable power to influence who's hired and who isn't. When you're in a position like that, you don't just muse out loud about stuff this sensitive unless you're awfully well prepared. He's a university president, not a blogger. (For now, anyway....)

• On Summers's lack of action in response to allegations of widespread plagiarism:

  Plagiarism of published works is but a symptom of wholesale plagiarizing of texts submitted by research assistants. The offending authors failed to recognize that the passages from published works were not in their own voice, because their method of "writing" books by assembling and editing minimally referenced memos drafted by research assistants is inconsistent with having a voice.

  She's saying that the offending authors didn't deliberately plagiarize, they just outsourced their drafting to research assistants, and they were the ones who plagiarized. Damn. I had no idea. Is this really how Harvard professors write books?

  [UPDATE: Upon rereading, it's not entirely clear what Anderson is saying here. Are the research assistants plagiarizing material and the profs don't know it? Or are they quoting source material properly but the profs somehow don't realize they're reading quoted material when they steal the text? I'm not sure which scenario Anderson was actually implying.]
  

Overall, Anderson thinks the real faculty revolt at Harvard is because "the senior faculty have been getting from President Summers a dose of the humiliating medicine so many of them have happily doled out to the lower academic orders for decades" — medicine that Anderson herself presumably tasted when she was there. Sounds like maybe Summers and Harvard are a match made in heaven after all.

CHOICEPOINT UPDATE....It turns out that the massive identify theft scam at ChoicePoint happened last October — but nobody got notified until last week. And even that never would have happened if not for the fact that California has a law requiring disclosure of leakage of personal information. Security expert Bruce Schneier says the same thing is likely to happen again unless economic incentives are brought to bear:

ChoicePoint protects its data, but only to the extent that it values it. The hundreds of millions of people in ChoicePoint's databases are not ChoicePoint's customers. They have no power to switch credit agencies. They have no economic pressure that they can bring to bear on the problem. Maybe they should rename the company "NoChoicePoint."

The upshot of this is that ChoicePoint doesn't bear the costs of identity theft, so ChoicePoint doesn't take those costs into account when figuring out how much money to spend on data security....Until ChoicePoint feels those costs — whether through regulation or liability — it has no economic incentive to reduce them.

Bruce is right. Unless ChoicePoint feels some pain, why should they care about keeping their records safe? Here's the pain:

A California woman has sued ChoicePoint Inc. for fraud and negligence after criminals gained access to a database of personal records compiled by the company.

.... The suit seeks to represent anyone whose personal records were maintained by ChoicePoint from October 2004 through the completion of the suit, regardless of whether or not that data was actually released to anyone.

Let's hope George Bush's new law restricting class action suits doesn't force this one into federal court and then into infinite limbo. At the moment, a civil suit is the only way to cause ChoicePoint enough pain to make them take security seriously.

THE SLIME SLOWLY RISES....An emailer writes to tell me that Charlie Jarvis of USA Next, the outfit that ran the anti-AARP ad shown on the right, was on Inside Politics earlier today. After some blustering about how AARP is the "largest left liberal lobbying organization on the planet" and "we are going after them very aggressively," Judy Woodruff asked why the ad had suddenly disappeared:

WOODRUFF: Charlie Jarvis, is USA Next going to run this ad some more? Why did you only have it up for one day?

JARVIS: We were testing to see whether left liberal groups would overreact. And they did. The hypothesis was that they would focus on one single tiny image on one Web site.

WOODRUFF: And it worked.

JARVIS: It worked. By the end of yesterday, to show you how crazy the left liberal groups are and that they have a death wish on Social Security, they literally were having people call television stations all over the country to pull the ad that didn't exist. Remarkable.

You betcha, Charlie! You were just testing to see if us lefties would overreact. How sneaky of you.

Michael Tanner of Cato was also on the show and my correspondent says that "Tanner looked like his skin was crawling just having to sit next to Jarvis." I don't blame him. The White House sure knows how to pick their friends, don't they?

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, Jarvis claims the ad is a legitimate attack on ARRP because "they do not take a position on veterans and combat veterans health" and because they opposed the Ohio gay marriage ban. The first charge is ridiculous and the second is mendacious. AARP clearly stated that they opposed the Ohio law — and only the Ohio law — because it was so broadly and vaguely written that they were afraid it could affect things like power of attorney for unmarried older couples both straight and gay.

KOUFAX AWARDS....The Koufax Awards for best lefty blogs are now up. The winners are:

• Best Blog: Daily Kos
  

• Best Pro Blog: Talking Points Memo
  

• Best Writing: Hullabaloo
  

• Best Post: "If America Were Iraq, What Would it be Like?" by Juan Cole
  

• Best Series (tie): "The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism" by David Neiwert and "Cheers and Jeers" by Bill at Daily Kos.
  

• Best Group Blog: MyDD
  

• Most Humorous Blog: Jesus' General
  

• Most Humorous Post: Poker with Dick Cheney by the Poorman
  

• Best Expert Blog: Informed Comment
  

• Best Single Issue Blog (tie): TalkLeft and Grits for Breakfast
  

• Best New Blog: Mouse Words
  

• Most Deserving of Wider Recognition: Suburban Guerrilla
  

• Best Commenter: Meteor Blades
  

Congrats to all. And thanks to Dwight and Mary Beth at Wampum for hosting and counting. Dwight has additional commentary on the winners and runners-up here.

WHISTLEBLOWING....Remember Sibel Edmonds? She's the FBI translator who charged the FBI with incompetence in the wake of 9/11 and was then fired. When she sued, the FBI said the case couldn't be brought to trial because it would involve divulging "state secrets." They've refused to release the documents that were the basis of an unclassified congressional briefing in which they admitted that much of what Edmonds said was true, and they even went so far as to try to reclassify letters that two senators had written to them and posted on their websites.

Via Melanie Mattson, it appears the FBI has partially thrown in the towel:

Last week the Bureau withdrew its claim about the congressional briefings. "We have stated that the information in those (letters from Sens. Leahy and Grassley) is ... not classified," Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller told United Press International Tuesday evening.

He declined to say what effect this might have on the department's assertion of the "state secrets privilege" but added that the department's lawyers would be filing papers in the case on Thursday that might make its position clearer.

OK, it's not much. Really, all they're doing is admitting that they can't reclassify stuff they've already released publicly. But it's a start. And since Edmonds claims that she was told to work slowly and build up a backlog of work (in order to justify funding increases); that completed translations were erased from her computer; that the Bureau hired translators who could barely speak English; and that they hired at least one translator who was working for a Turkish organization under investigation by....the FBI — well, it's a pretty good guess that embarrassment and ass covering are more at issue here than state secrets. More background here from a 60 Minutes segment aired last year.

Stay tuned.

RETIREMENT AGE....Will Saletan has a long, number-filled column today spelling out the reasons we should raise the retirement age for Social Security. I'm all in favor of numbers, but his don't add up.

I don't mean that literally. Tired as it is, his case makes sense on its own terms: people live longer than they did 60 years ago and are both physically and mentally active longer than they were 60 years ago. So why not work longer and retire later?

Answer: because we don't want to. Sure, we could continue inexorably raising the retirement age, ensuring that no matter how much richer we get and no matter how many medical advances we make, we're still working til we drop. We could do that, but we don't want to. Most of us like the idea that we'll have more years of "active retirement" (i.e., "free of chronic functional impairment") than we did 60 years ago.

And guess what? We can. Federal spending today is about 20% of GDP. Eighty years from now, if we make no changes to Social Security at all, its costs will go up by about 2% of GDP. That's easily affordable, especially since our economy will be far larger in 80 years than it is today.

Americans already work far more hours than any comparable nation on Earth, but for today's obsessively Puritan conservatives that's not enough. We must work ever more. But this isn't solely an economic issue, it's also an issue of social choice. And if, as a society, we choose to take advantage of our increasing wealth by enjoying longer retirements, that seems like a pretty good decision to me. 49 years is plenty for a working life. There's no need to extend it further.

OIL PRICES....Over at Morgan Stanley, Eric Chaney and Richard Berner are perplexed that oil prices haven't gone down. The reason for this strange state of affairs? High demand and low supply:

New data from the February International Energy Agency (IEA) report show that global crude demand was 0.2 mb/d stronger than previously estimated in the last quarter of 2004 and that crude supply was slightly lower than prior data indicated.

....Unfortunately, however, there's more to the supply story: non-OPEC producers are operating at full capacity and output is stagnant....Moreover, with no increase in refining capacity yet visible, we are concerned that the onset of the US summer driving season will push product prices back to previous highs and crude prices could well follow.

In hindsight, it appears that OPEC was literally operating at full capacity in the fourth quarter of last year, for the first time ever.

James Peltz echoes this in the LA Times today:

Oil prices are trading at lofty levels because global supplies of crude are stretched thin, while the world's thirst for oil — especially in the U.S. and China — keeps climbing s