THUNDERBIRD UPDATE....As I mentioned last week, I've switched to Thunderbird as my email client. Aside from what I said at the time, I don't have much to add after using it for a week. Basically, it works fine and has several features that Outlook Express lacked.

One complaint: Outlook Express sends emails in the background. As soon as you press the "Send" button, it returns control to you. Thunderbird is just the opposite: it does everything in the foreground, so you have to sit around and twiddle your thumbs for five or ten seconds while it sends your email. Bummer.

The spam control is good, but not great. The good news is that it hasn't marked a single good email as spam. The bad news is that even after a week of training it misses over 50% of the actual spam. However, my ISP filters about 90% of my spam at the server, so I assume that what gets through is only the toughest 10%. Given that, a 50% hit rate might not be so bad. (I should add that some of the spam that gets through is so fiendishly disguised that I'd be astonished if any anti-spam filter caught it.)

I still haven't decided on an antivirus program, though. So far, I'd say PC-cillin is the leading candidate.

UPDATE: Well, I tried the much recommended AVG antivirus software, but unfortunately its email scanner caused my email to cease functioning altogether. If I had to guess — and I do since the documentation was no help and the configuration screens were inscrutable — I'd say it was because it didn't know the password for my POP3 server. However, since there didn't appear to be any way to inform it of the proper password, there's no way to test this theory. So for now, it's uninstalled. Further suggestions are welcome, of course.

TEXAS TWANG....Over at The Corner, Warren Bell comments on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

Maybe I'm paranoid, but Sam Rockwell plays Zaphod Beeblebrox, who has recently been elected President of the galaxy despite being notoriously stupid because he is charming and likable. Rockwell renders this charming but stupid leader with a distinctly familiar Texas twang.

So, um, what's your point, Warren?

BUSH'S WAR....I decided a couple of days ago that it would just be masochistic to complain about Glenn's latest attempt to pretend that democracy promotion was the real reason for the Iraq war. However, Julian Sanchez is a stronger man than I am and says what needs to be said. He speaks for me in this.

But I will add one more thing: except in passing, George Bush didn't mention democracy promotion as a rationale for the war until his AIE speech of February 26, a mere three weeks before the bombing started. The fact that he went months with barely a mention of freedom and democracy in the Middle East — and then made such a lame speech when he did finally mention it — was one of the main reasons that I turned against the war. I originally supported the war as a way to "promote the values of tolerance, human rights, and democratic self-government" in the Middle East, but then switched sides when I finally concluded that my reasons for supporting the war were not George Bush's ("It's simply become wishful thinking to believe that Bush is really committed to any kind of serious effort to promote democracy in Iraq"). In other words, I have a pretty good memory about this stuff since it had a considerable effect on my own thinking.

Still not convinced? Here is Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech, delivered seven weeks before the war started. Read through it. There are 1,200 words about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the danger they pose. There are exactly zero words about bringing democracy to Iraq and the greater Middle East. In fact, aside from a passing reference to Palestine, the word "democracy" is used only once in the entire speech: in reference to Iran, in a passage that specifically states that "different threats require different strategies." The United States supports Iranian aspirations, Bush said, but that's all. It's not a reason to go to war.

I can't look into George Bush's heart, but I can listen to his words and watch his deeds. And based on that, democracy promotion was not on his agenda before the war, during the war, or after the war until the Ayatollah Sistani forced his hand. Let's not demean history by pretending otherwise.

FAMILY VALUES....If you could vaccinate young women against a sexually transmitted virus, would you do it? Of course you would. Who'd be against something like that?

Via Body and Soul, we get the answer. Here's Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council:

Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV. Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex.

It just leaves you speechless, doesn't it?

REMAKES....Quick quiz: can you think of a movie remake that was better than the original? I'm looking for something made in the last 30 years or so, and it has to be a remake of a movie, not a sequel or a movie version of a TV show. Any candidates?

TIERNEY ON BUSH....Look, I know that conservatives are going to try and describe George Bush's Social Security plan as favorably as they can, but this is just a lie:

Democrats like to portray Mr. Bush as King George or Marie Antoinette. But on Thursday night, when he promised to improve benefits for the poor while limiting them for everyone else, he sounded more like Robin Hood....

Bush didn't promise to improve benefits for the poor, he promised to keep them exactly the same as they are under current law while reducing them for everyone else. Cut the crap, John.

BRITISH CAMPAIGN ADS....I was looking for a bit of fun to clear my mind of filbusters and bend points and judicial tyranny this evening, and Andrew Sullivan delivered! This site contains three British campaign ads, and you really, really ought to spend a few minutes and watch them. To someone born and bred on 30-second American attack ads, they're mesmerizing. My summary:

Labour: Sure, we kind of suck. Totally understandable you feel that way. But Christ, just look at the Conservatives. If you vote for them, they'll make you wish you'd never been born.

Conservatives: Britain has become a hellhole. A hellhole with oddly soothing music to go along with it, but a hellhole nonetheless. However, if you vote for us things might become a bit less hellish.

Liberal Democrats: Oh face it: both Labour and the Conservatives are a bunch of twits. Might as well give us a try, don't you think?

The weird thing is that mesmerizing though they might be, I don't think any of these ads would actually persuade me to vote in any particular direction. Labour's pitch is almost a parody, the Tory ad made me want to hide in the closet and never come out, and the Lib Dem ad was funny but pointless.

Anyway, give them a look. They're well worth a few minutes of your time.

UPDATE: My bad (and Sullivan's). Via FreddieMercury in comments, these aren't real ads. They were created by Lee Ford and Dan Brooks:

[Channel 4] gave us a completely open brief to do whatever we wanted. Basically, we set about creating the kind of broadcasts the three main parties would like to make if there were no regulations and they didn't have to be politically correct. The aim is leave the viewer thinking, 'O my God, did they actually make that?'

Still funny and worth watching, but not what I originally thought they were. Ford and Brooks successfully suckered me.

MORE OUTSOURCING....I'm low on energy today. Paradoxically, though, it's because there are too many cringeworthy things to blog about today. For a quick rundown, go read the Carpetbagger.

LA TIMES BASHING....I'm outsourcing today's critique of my hometown newspaper:

• In a story above the fold on Page 1, the LA Times repeats the oft-debunked claim that Sudan tried to turn over Osama bin Laden to Bill Clinton in 1996 but Clinton turned them down. Island of Balta performs the necessary debunking chores.

• David Gelernter returns to his weekly spot on the op-ed page. I was too tired to waste time on him this week, but Matt Yglesias picks up the slack. He also proposes a theory that Michael Kinsley is deliberately hiring nitwit conservatives for the op-ed page in an effort to make conservatives look stupid. I guess that's as good an explanation as any. Gelernter's columns would embarrass a high school sophomore.
  

You may now return to whatever your hometown news source is.

BUSH'S SOCIAL SECURITY PLAN....So it turns out that the Social Security plan George Bush talked about last night was based on a proposal called the "Pozen Plan," named after Bob Pozen, who first suggested it. CBPP has a detailed breakdown of the plan, but for those of you with short attention spans I've cut it down to a single chart.

Basically, low income earners ($16K/year) currently get about 49% of their income replaced by Social Security. Under the Pozen plan, this would stay the same. Medium income workers ($36K/year), however, would see their replacement rate fall from 36% to 23% by the year 2100. The replacement rate for higher income workers ($58K/year) would fall to 14% and for maximum income workers ($90K/year) to 9%.

That's a pretty substantial cut in benefits. I think you can decide for yourself whether you like this plan or not.

UPDATE: As Judd Legum points out, Pozen's plan cuts benefits for anyone making over $20,000 per year. This is Bush's definition of "people who are better off." Needless to say, this is a slightly different definition than he used when he was selling his tax cuts.

A SHINY NEW BUDGET....Here's your new Republican budget:

The House and Senate broke a lengthy impasse over federal spending Thursday night, narrowly adopting a $2.56 trillion federal budget for 2006 that aims to trim the growth of Medicaid by $10 billion over five years, add $106 billion in tax cuts and clear the way for oil drilling in an Alaskan wildlife refuge.

Attaboy! Reduce the deficit $10 billion by cutting back on healthcare for the poor, and then turn around and increase the deficit $106 billion by approving additional tax cuts for the rich. Moral values, baby, moral values.

BUSH ON SOCIAL SECURITY....Huh? Here's a transcript of what President Bush said about Social Security tonight:

As a matter of fairness, I propose that future generations receive benefits equal to or greater than the benefits today's seniors get.

Secondly, I believe a reformed system should protect those who depend on Social Security the most. So I propose a Social Security system in the future where benefits for low-income workers will grow faster than benefits for people who are better off.

....This reform would solve most of the funding challenges facing Social Security.

I assume that "equal to or greater" is code for "indexing to inflation, not wage growth." In other words, guaranteed benefits, which today are based on wage growth, would be reduced by quite a bit for everyone except the lowest wage earners. But he didn't have the guts to actually say this, instead making it sound like no one's future benefits would be cut.

Presumably the unvarnished truth will come later, at some time when the president isn't on primetime TV. What a coward.

POSTSCRIPT: Technically, I assume the plan Bush is talking about involves fiddling with Social Security's "bend points." There are currently two bend points: the first at about $7,500 and the second at about $45,000. When you retire, you get 90% of your average income up to the first bend point, 32% up to the second bend point, and 15% of the rest of your income (up to a maximum of $90,000).

A worker with an average income of $7,500, for example, would get an initial Social Security benefit of $6,750. A worker with an average income of $45,000 would get an initial Social Security benefit of $6,750 + $12,000, or $18,750, which is 42% of their total income.

Got that? These bend points are increased each year to match wage growth for the previous year. It sounds like Bush's plan is to continue indexing the first bend point to wages but to change both the second bend point and the $90,000 maximum so they increase only by the rate of inflation. Thus, middle income workers, who currently have 42% of their income replaced by Social Security, would see that percentage slowly erode. In 50 years, it would be more like 30%. In 75 years it would be 25%.

Or something like that. Presumably the White House will dish the details eventually.

A QUESTION....I just have to wonder: is it really a good idea for George Bush to repeatedly refer to the president of Russia as "Vladimir" on primetime TV? Doesn't that seem just a wee bit more intimate than the American public might be comfortable with?

POSTSCRIPT: The press conference was originally scheduled for 8:30 but then rescheduled for 8:01. Oddly, though, the White House failed to inform me of this change, so I missed the first ten minutes, including all of President Bush's opening statement.

However, thanks to the miracle of liveblogging — from James Joyner in this case, who's doing a great job — it appears that he had nothing fresh to say about Social Security. Supposedly we were going to get new details about his plan, but nada. No specifics. No news. No nothing.

So what was the point? What was this press conference all about? Very peculiar.

TOM DELAY UPDATE....NBC News has more details about Tom DeLay's trip to Moscow in 1997:

The cost of DeLay's room, with all the amenities, was $295 a night....NBC News has learned the expenses were, in fact, put on the credit card of a lobbyist and a Russian businessman.

A source close to the case says $885 was charged to [Jack] Abramoff’s credit card, and records indicate the rest was put on the credit card of Alexander Koulakovsky, general manager of a Russian oil and gas company called NAFTASib.

Most of this was reported three weeks ago by the Washington Post, but their story was based on "four people with firsthand knowledge of the trip arrangements." NBC, conversely, got hold of actual hotel records.

SCHWARZENEGGER'S SWOON....Our cover story for May is a profile of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's not doing so well these days, and LA Times reporter Mark Barabak tells us why:

It may be the contradictions are finally catching up with Schwarzenegger. After campaigning as the scourge of special interests and vowing to take money from no one, the governor has collected political cash at a ravenous pace, raising more than $30 million since taking office.
(Invitations to a recent Sacramento fundraiser, “An Evening With Governor Schwarzenegger,” blithely offered access at four levels, starting at $10,000 for a ticket and one photograph and topping out at $100,000 for a seat at the head table.)

....Worse, perhaps, for a governor so image-obsessed has been his decline in public opinion surveys, which has been almost entirely a function of Democratic and independent defections. (Like President Bush, Schwarzenegger continues to enjoy near universal support among Republicans despite his disdain for party-building.) By late February, his approval number in the statewide Field Poll was a decidedly mortal 55 percent, down 10 points in five months. More galling still, the governor's rating stood a tick below that of the rejected Davis before the bottom fell out for the beleaguered Democrat amid the 2001 California energy fiasco.

It's actually even worse than that. Pretty much all of Schwarzenegger's highly touted initiatives are in trouble. He wanted to gut California's public pension program but was forced to cave in on that a few weeks ago. Redistricting reform was a centerpiece of his State of the State speech earlier this year, but yesterday he as much as admitted he couldn't make it happen. His proposal for merit pay for teachers is dead in the water, and teachers and nurses have run an astonishingly effective ad campaign accusing him — correctly — of reneging on his promises of a year ago. Indian tribes are all over TV too, complaining about his plans to tax hardworking tribe members. The result? His latest approval ratings are down to 40%.

So how did this happen? Part of it is due to arrogance and an unwillingness to work with a heavily Democratic legislature, but I suspect a bigger part is that Schwarzenegger has no real governing principles he could fall back on when things got tough. Instead, he's a guy who's good at backslapping and has a hodgepodge of unrelated populist ideas he thought he could pass by sheer force of personality. When he turned out to be wrong, he was stuck. He has no coherent message he can sell to the public and no real core support except for rich businessmen. When he fell, there was no one to catch him.

Read the whole story for more.

REPUBLICAN RAGE....Since I have mixed feelings about parental notification laws, I also have mixed feelings about legislation passed yesterday by the House making it illegal to transport minors across state lines in order to evade parental notification laws. Basically, I think the idea of requiring parental notification for any surgical procedure is pretty defensible, but at the same time I'm appalled at the Big Brotherish potential of federal legislation that could send friends and relatives to jail merely for driving a 17-year-old across a state line. Since I'm unable to resolve this inconsistency in my own mind, that's all I have to say about it for now.

But that won't stop me from noting the spectacular temper tantrum thrown by Judiciary Committee Republicans yesterday. Democrats offered several amendments to the bill that would have exempted, for example, friends and relatives or common carriers like bus companies and taxicabs from the new law. They were all voted down, of course, but in addition the descriptions were all rewritten to say things like "Mr. Scott offered an amendment that would have exempted sexual predators from prosecution if they are taxicab drivers...." Hilzoy has all the gory details.

Republicans are just going insane with frustration these days. If they're mad because their candidates are being filibustered, they threaten to change the filibuster rule by fiat. If they don't like what the courts are doing, they threaten to defund the courts. If their candidate for UN ambassador is likely to get voted down in committee, they plan to report him out anyway. If they don't like your amendments to their pet bill, they unilaterally rewrite them in a display of juvenile pique.

I can hardly wait to see what's next. Are we going to have fistfights on the floor of Congress again? Or is the Republican caucus simply going to explode in purple cheeked rage? Stay tuned.

POP CULTURE REPORT.... Camille Paglia was in Madison, Wisconsin, yesterday. Ann Althouse reports:

In the question session, one young man asks what she thinks of blogging. She says, “I’m worried about blogging.” There’s “decadence” in the web. Once you’re “swept up in the blogosphere,” you become self-referential. (Afterwards, my colleague expresses amusement that she said other people were being self-referential.) Instead of blogs, she prefers on-line magazines. Mainly, Salon. Do you know she’s returning to Salon? There’s also Slate, but Slate’s “a little bit more wonky,” though it has “some good wonky articles now and then.” Who knows which blogs to read? There are so many! What bloggers need to do is join together and make on-line magazines. Like Salon. Did you know she’s returning to Salon?

Say, um, I've heard that Camille Paglia might be writing for Salon again. Anyone know if that's true?

DEMOCRACY IN MEXICO....A couple of weeks ago, shortly after he announced he would be running for president, Mexico's Congress made Andrés Manuel López Obrador ineligible for office by allowing him to be indicted him for a minor offense. López Obrador was the front runner, and the whole affair stank of the worst kind of partisan hackery.

But on Wednesday, President Vicente Fox announced the resignation of the attorney general who was leading the prosecution against López Obrador:

In a surprise announcement broadcast nationwide, Fox gave no reason for the departure of Atty. Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha, but analysts said the president acted because of growing criticism of the government's criminal case against Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the top contender in next year's presidential election.

...."My government will not obstruct anyone from participating in the coming federal election," he said. He went on to say that he would soon propose legal reforms that would "preserve the rights of citizens subject to trial until a final sentence is given."

That's good news. And although I wish George Bush had been a little more vocal about criticizing this anti-democratic move in the first place, I'd be inclined to cut him some slack on this. It's true that if you claim to be a democracy promoter then you should be a democracy promoter everywhere, but at the same time American interference in Mexican internal affairs is a pretty sensitive topic for obvious historical reasons, so it may well be that a private approach was best in this case. I'll be curious to see if any of the major papers write a piece over the next few days about what, if anything, the American government did behind the scenes here.

FREAK-IOLOGY....I just finished reading Steven Levitt's Freakonomics, a very nice, accessible book that addresses a hodgepodge of interesting topics. Should you read it too? Sure, although at 25 bucks for 200 pages you might want to wait for the paperback edition. (I don't buy many hardbacks these days, but I had a gift card in hand and the book looked interesting and....anyway, I bought it.)

Aside from some generic whinging about the high cost of books these days, however, there was one thing that bugged me about this particular book: virtually nothing in it had anything to do with economics. Here are some sample questions: Is sumo wrestling fixed? Does school choice matter? Why has crime declined? Do baby names have any impact on life outcomes?

Now, this is all interesting stuff, but the investigations all followed pretty much the same pattern: Levitt (or some other researcher) analyzed a huge dataset of some kind and then used statistical tools to tease out correlations that explain some aspect of human behavior. The divide between economics and other social sciences may be pretty fuzzy these days, but as near as I can tell these are almost purely sociological questions and are addressed almost purely with the standard statistical toolkit of sociology, psychology, political science, and organizational behavior. This isn't economics unless you define economics so broadly that it encompasses any investigation into stuff that human beings do.

Yeah, I know: whatever. But there was one other thing: on page 13 Levitt promised that the book would explode the myth that drinking eight glasses of water per day is good for your health. Longtime readers with good memories will remember that this is a topic of interest to me, and I wanted to hear more about it. But no. After the tease, there was nothing more.

Bastard.

24 BLOGGING....An email from a reader reminds me that intellectual integrity demands that I do some followup 24 blogging. So here it is.

Those of you who care may recall that a couple of months ago I theorized that this season's casual and frequent use of torture was actually a trick: since the torture never actually worked, the writers were sending a subtle but definite anti-torture message.

Well, this theory was always a little shaky, and the past couple of weeks have blown it completely out of the water. To recap: last week Jack shanghaied a suspect and used a taser to force him to reveal the location of the primary bad guy. At that point my theory was hanging by a thread.

[UPDATE: My bad. Jack tasered the federal agent who was guarding the suspect. The suspect himself got his fingers broken. Thanks to skeptic in comments for the correction.]

This week the thread snapped: it turned out that the torture worked perfectly. The location the bad guy coughed up was accurate and Jack & Co. promptly surrounded the bad guy's working headquarters (though he subsequently escaped). But it's actually worse than that. Not only did the torture work, but Jack did it despite specific instructions from the president not to. Because of this, the president (who was VP until a couple of hours ago, when Air Force One got shot down) was very clearly presented as an indecisive wimp who was unable to make manly decisions like authorizing the torture of suspected terrorists. The writers have left us in no doubt: not only does torture work, but real men approve of it while wimps stand around wringing their hands about consulting the the attorney general. This is not an anti-torture message.

So I was wrong. Really, really, wrong. Tomorrow I will turn in my TV merit badge and retire from pop culture criticism.

On a different note, though: way to handle an assault rifle, Chloe! IT nerds of the world unite!

LIBERAL PRINCIPLES....What do liberals stand for? If you can stand a bit more navel gazing about this, Matt Yglesias makes the following comment today:

The Prospect ran a contest a little while back asking readers to submit ideas for a liberal counter to the conservative pitch of "low taxes, traditional family values, and a strong military." We got a few good ones, but the results were pretty bad....The problem was that people didn't even seem to understand the right kind of thing to be doing. What makes the conservative pitch work is that while it's general enough to be broadly appealing, it's specific enough that liberals will have to reject it. The submissions we got tended to either operate at an overly-broad level ("we're for good things happening and against bad ones") or else to just be policy laundry-lists.

I think this is basically correct. Laundry lists don't inspire anyone, and slogans are just....slogans. As Matt points out, "we're for the middle class" is useless as a guiding principle since everyone says they're for the middle class.

I don't have any kind of comprehensive answer to this problem of modern liberalism, but I'd like to toss out a few thoughts. The first one is this: conservatives have done a great job of building intellectual superstructures that support their actual policy goals. These superstructures all share two features: (a) they are intuitively appealing to ordinary people and (b) they very definitely aren't ideas shared by liberals.

Supply side economics is a good example of this. Basically, conservatives have made the case that low taxes on capital spur economic growth and therefore benefit everyone. This is both intuitively believable and personally appealing, since everyone likes low taxes. Whether it's correct or not is beside the point. What matters is that it's (a) understandable and (b) can act as a backstop for a whole raft of specific tax cutting measures favored by conservatives.

There are other examples, of course. In the judicial realm, originalism is an intellectual backstop for conservative social policies. "Small government" is the backstop for a wide range of regulatory policies favoring corporate interests.

Note that these three things clearly differentiate conservatives from liberals. Liberals wouldn't even claim to support supply side economics, originalism, or small government.

So what do liberals need to fight back? Although no set of principles is going to cover every base, I'd argue that we need three or four backstops that underly a lot of the things we want to accomplish. But what?

Here's an example: equal tax rates for all types of income. After all, it's intuitively appealing that if wage earners pay a certain tax rate (which varies with income), people who get their incomes from capital gains, dividends, or inheritances should pay the same rate. That's something that sounds fair to a lot of people, and once it's accepted as a principle it can act as a backstop for a wide range of detailed tax policies.

On the corporate front, how about a fair shake for the working poor who want to unionize? Stronger unions — especially in the service area — would provide an automatic counterbalance to both a wide array of corporate abuses as well as our growing problem of income inequality, all without liberals being forced into either punitive taxation or ill-considered (and probably unpopular) regulatory schemes. What's more, the case that low-paid workers should be allowed to unionize without threats and abuse from management will strike a lot of people as fair and reasonable.

These are just examples. I'm not trying to propose some kind of overarching liberal frame here, I'm just trying to point out that the right way to think about this stuff is to come up with appealing ideas that can be used as jumping off points for lots of other things. This takes some imagination, since you have to think hard about the direction your ideas can ultimately take once people internalize them, and it also takes time to successfully insert them into the public discourse — most likely years, and quite possibly decades.

So toss out your ideas in comments if you have any. Just be sure to keep them appealing, wide ranging, and clearly unconservative.

ETHICS COMMITTEE UPDATE....Dennis Hastert has apparently agreed to back down on his plan to emasculate the House Ethics Committee. Good news.

LEFT AND RIGHT....Via Praktike, Michael Walzer has an interesting essay in the current issue of Dissent. He argues that over the past few decades the basic temperaments of left and right in the United States have swapped places with each other:

....the first crossover: ideological certainty and zeal have migrated to the right....Most of us on the near-left live in a complex world, which we are not sure we understand, and we move around in that world pragmatically, practicing a politics of trial and error. We defend policies like Social Security, which have worked pretty well, and try to make them work a little better. We want more redistributive tax and welfare systems, but we are not Bolshevik egalitarians-even if our opponents are Bolshevik inegalitarians. We opposed the Iraq War but are painfully unsure about how to get out and when. National health insurance is the most radical proposal that I've heard from American liberals in recent years, and it's a European commonplace.

....the second crossover: ideological uncertainty and skepticism about all-out solutions to social problems have migrated to the left. This must have something to do with 1989 and the collapse of communism — though I don't think that the left, near or far, has even begun to come to grips with the disaster that was communism. Perhaps the second crossover is also the product of the (very incomplete) success of social democracy in Europe and New Deal liberalism here, of civil rights and feminism, even of multiculturalism. Successes of this sort don't leave us without an agenda, but they may leave us without the kind of agenda that makes for passionate conviction and zealous endeavor.

I've made a similar argument before, and I think there's something to it. To a large extent, despite the triumphalism of the right, liberalism has won most of the big debates in this country. Sure, we've only gotten 80% or 90% of what we set out to get half a century ago, but it's hard to bring a lot of passion to the fight for the final 10 or 20%. The reason liberalism seems lackluster these days is that with the exception of the radical left, which is mostly ignored, garden variety liberals don't have all that much to complain about.

Conversely, conservatives do. They don't have a constructive program so much as a seething rage to tear down the liberal experiment, something they really haven't had much success at. The result is an explosive frustration that surfaces in things like the Terri Schiavo case or the recent "Justice Sunday" assault on the judiciary. But as polls clearly show, this kind of stuff doesn't go over well with the American public. There may be some support for changes at the margins, but not for wholesale revolution.

In the end, then, we have a stalemate. The left in America has limited energy because its goals are fairly modest and its story is disjointed. The right has energy and vision to spare but its goals aren't widely supported. Someone — or something — is likely to come along in the near future and smash this stalemate, but what? Or who?

THERE IS ONLY THE TEXT....Kieran Healy moderates a blog smackdown between the Montblanc Meisterstuck Solitaie Doue and the latest version of AUCTeX. Are they both equally evil? Or merely harmless diversions from the mediocrity of daily life?

BEING TOM DELAY....Should liberals be fighting to force Tom DeLay to step down as Majority Leader of the House? A friend of mine has been arguing for a while that we'd be better off keeping him around for symbolic reasons, a case that Jonathan Alter makes in the current issue of Newsweek:

On every issue — ethics, the environment, guns, tax cuts, judges — [DeLay] is a clarifying figure for anyone who might be confused about the true nature of today's GOP.

So assuming he dodges indictment, DeLay should stay in his post for 18 months, until the 2006 midterm elections....His potential successors are all just as conservative as DeLay, but they seem colorless and would thus fuzz up the choice. The midterms should be a referendum on DeLay's America. Stay on the right fringe or move toward the center? Let the people decide.

....If DeLay goes down, his shamelessness will go with him, which will make it harder to see the GOP's true agenda....Let's make 2006 a referendum on the right wing. For that, DeLay must stay.

Is there a downside to letting DeLay stay? Alter says no: the Republican majority isn't going to let the Democrats get anything done no matter who's in charge, and if keeping DeLay around distracts Republicans from accomplishing their goals, so much the better.

I have to say that the more I think about this, the more appealing I find it. The modern Republican party has always had to hide its radical agenda behind folks like Ronald Reagan and George Bush, appealing faces who strike most people as more moderate than they really are. But when voters outside of deep red states are faced with extremist Republicans who actually say what they mean, they shy away in horror. DeLay is that kind of Republican, and with the proper encouragement he could be an enormous millstone around the GOP's neck for a good long time.

In practice, what does this mean? I guess it means that we should keep pricking away at DeLay but make no serious effort to get him to resign or step down — all the while working to nationalize the 2006 election around the Bug Man. The goal would be to make Tom DeLay the national face of the Republican party by November 2006.

Who knows? It might work. It's worth a thought, anyway.

JOURNAL-ISM....I see that the Wall Street Journal is busily cementing its reputation as the most dishonest editorial page in the country. Today they crow yet again about the vast tax burden of the upper classes:

An IRS study by a trio of tax wonks shows that, even after including Social Security taxes, the overall tax burden grew more progressive from 1979 to 1999. And while that burden became a tad less progressive after the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, the rich and upper middle class continued to pay far and away the bulk of U.S. taxes.

Now, it's true that the rich and the upper middle class pay the bulk of U.S. taxes. But you know why? It's because the rich and the upper class also have the bulk of the money: the top 20% of taxpayers pay 67% of federal taxes, but they also earn 60% of all income.

And how about the super rich? Here's the Journal's half of the story: according to their tax wonks, the share of federal taxes paid by the top .1% of the country — those making roughly a million bucks a year — doubled between 1979 and 1999, rising from about 5% to about 11%.

But here's the second half of the story that the Journal mysteriously left out: during that same period, the share of income received by the top .1% tripled, from about 3% to about 10%.

So in 1979 the super-rich earned 3% of the money and paid 5% of the taxes. In 1999 the super-rich earned 10% of the money and paid 11% of the taxes. The Journal clearly has a different definition of "grew more progressive" than the rest of us.

In fact, these numbers might start you wondering. If the income share of the super-rich tripled but their tax share only doubled, doesn't that mean that their tax rates must have gone down? Indeed it does. Here's a chart from the tax wonks that the Journal must have inadvertantly overlooked:

(Note: the last line, labeled "1999 JGTRRA," is basically an estimate of 2003 tax rates after the first round of Bush tax cuts.)

So shed no tears for the super rich in America. Their incomes have tripled in the past couple of decades and at the same time their tax rates have decreased by 9 percentage points. That's a pretty sweet deal in anybody's book.

SOCIAL SECURITY COOTIES....Here's the latest on Social Security:

On the eve of the first congressional hearing on the restructuring of Social Security, Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee signaled that they will not insist that personal accounts be part of the legislation and that they will not seek further details from President Bush about his plans for the government-run retirement program.

....In yesterday's briefing, the committee official asserted that the contours of Bush's plan for Social Security are already well known and that the panel did not believe the release of further details of the plan would be helpful.

Am I missing something? Or did this guy basically ask President Bush to please shut up and stop making things worse?

WHITEWASHING BOLTON....Matt Yglesias links today to Bill Kristol's recent piece on John Bolton in the Weekly Standard. Here is how Kristol summarizes liberal opposition to Bolton's nomination as ambassador to the UN:

Bolton disagreed with — he even disliked! — a couple of bureaucrats. He challenged them. But no one has really accused Bolton of doing anything fundamentally inappropriate....For future government jobs, perhaps the Democrats should add to the job description: Only girlie men need apply.

I've seen a lot of this lately from conservatives, and it's one of the reasons I'm leery of liberal opponents focusing too heavily on Bolton's bad temper. Kristol is obviously writing in bad faith here — he knows perfectly well what the substantive charges against Bolton are — but the fact that he can plausibly write this stuff is bad news for us.

For the record, here's what Kristol didn't bother addressing:

• Bolton is not a guy who wants to reform the UN. He's a guy who fundamentally doesn't believe in the UN's mission.

• He has a history of misusing intelligence information, and lashes out at anyone who insists that he characterize intelligence data accurately. He's done this at least twice, over both Cuba and Iraq.

• Colin Powell, his boss during George Bush's first term, is apparently unable to recommend him for the UN job.

• There are credible charges that he hid information from his superiors.

• He made numerous requests to the NSA to disclose the names of American citizens in NSA intercepts. He has not explained why he needed to see these names, and it seems likely that he wanted them for purposes of bureaucratic retaliation, not national security.
  

Bolton's temperament is a legitimate issue, but it's not the primary issue. The fact that he misuses intelligence and then engages in all-out bureaucratic jihad against anyone who blows the whistle on him is the primary issue. This is not the kind of person you want as America's ambassador to the world.

IRAQI WMD....THE FINALE....The final remaining hope of the WMD-last-gaspers has been the notion that Saddam did have WMD but transferred it all to Syria before the war. As I recall, the most popular scenario involved a fleet of ambulances and some hideouts in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.

But no. Not only did Saddam not have any WMD in Iraq, the Iraq Survey Group has now officially concluded that he didn't secretly hand it over to Syria either:

Although Syria helped Iraq evade U.N.-imposed sanctions by shipping military and other products across its borders, the investigators "found no senior policy, program, or intelligence officials who admitted any direct knowledge of such movement of WMD."

....Iraqi officials whom the group was able to interview "uniformly denied any knowledge of residual WMD that could have been secreted to Syria," the report said.

Like the grassy knoll folks, I'm sure the WMD conspiracy theorists will latch onto enough loose ends in the report to convince themselves that Saddam really did have WMD but hid it too cleverly for us to find it. You know, because Saddam and his crew were so clever and thorough in everything else they did.

For the rest of us, though, the story is over. Saddam was just a sorry and deluded tinpot tyrant. He posed a major threat to his own people, but never to us.

NUCLEAR WAR....Here's an interesting thing. Democrats have been threatening to "bring the Senate to a halt" if Republicans go ahead with plans to eliminate the filibuster, but today the Senate Dems announced a plan to do just the opposite. Via email, Harry Reid's office announced this afternoon that "As a matter of comity, the Minority in the Senate traditionally defer to the Majority in the setting of the agenda. If Bill Frist pulls the nuclear trigger, Democrats will show deference no longer."

In other words, they're going to introduce some bills and demand votes on them. Here are the nine bills they have in mind:

1. Women's Health Care (S. 844). The Prevention First Act of 2005 will reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and abortions by increasing funding for family planning and ending health insurance discrimination against women.

2. Veterans' Benefits (S. 845). The Retired Pay Restoration Act of 2005 will assist disabled veterans who, under current law, must choose to either receive their retirement pay or disability compensation.

3. Fiscal Responsibility (S. 851). Democrats will move to restore fiscal discipline to government spending and extend the pay-as-you-go requirement.

4. Relief at the Pump (S. 847). Democrats plan to halt the diversion of oil from the markets to the strategic petroleum reserve. By releasing oil from the reserve through a swap program, the plan will bring down prices at the pump.

5. Education (S. 848). Democrats have a bill that will: strengthen head start and child care programs, improve elementary and secondary education, provide a roadmap for first generation and low-income college students, provide college tuition relief for students and their families, address the need for math, science and special education teachers, and make college affordable for all students.

6. Jobs (S. 846). Democrats will work in support of legislation that guarantees overtime pay for workers and sets a fair minimum wage.

7. Energy Markets (S. 870). Democrats work to prevent Enron-style market manipulation of electricity.

8. Corporate Taxation (S. 872). Democrats make sure companies pay their fair share of taxes to the U.S. government instead of keeping profits overseas.

9. Standing with our troops (S. 11). Democrats believe that putting America's security first means standing up for our troops and their families
   

Details are missing, of course, and the point isn't really to get any of these passed anyway. It's to gum up the works and force Republicans to vote against popular measures.

Still, it's not a bad list. The only clunker is #4 — the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is there for emergencies, not for intervening in the market whenever gasoline hits two bucks a gallon. But #1, 2, 3, 6, and 8 all sound good, and #5, 7, and 9 might be decent too depending on what's inside. It would have been nice to see something on the list that gives unions a fairer shot at organizing new industries, but I guess you can't have everything.

Anyway, I just thought I'd pass this along. If you want to know what Senate Democrats are doing to fight back against the nuclear option, this is it.

TURNING ON THE CHARM....George Bush met with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah today. I love this paragraph from AP's account:

Traditionally Bush holds news conferences with visiting foreign leaders, but there will be none during this visit because Abdullah rarely talks with the media. The president got around that by emerging from the building well before Abdullah's arrival and engaging in what was made to appear to be an impromptu exchange with the reporters gathered there.

Italics mine. Sounds like AP's Jennifer Loven is getting annoyed.

Elsewhere in the story there is much gnashing and moaning about increasing Saudi Arabia's production of oil. The Saudis' carefully worded reply was that they were "producing all the oil that our customers are requesting" and that they would increase their capacity by 1.5 million barrels per day by 2009 — without mentioning that by that time world demand will have increased by about 8 million barrels per day. They also claimed to have 1.5 million barrels per day of spare pumping capacity right now, an assertion I'd take with a shaker of salt.

In other words: nice talking with you, but there's no more oil to be had. Now please excuse me, I have a flight to Beijing to catch.

BUSH AND THE PEOPLE....Garance Franke-Ruta speculates today that George Bush has lost touch with the American public, a notion that seems pretty plausible to me. In fact, I'm not sure he was ever really in touch aside from his hawkish response to 9/11. His success on that front, however, convinced him that he could persuade the electorate of anything — even Social Security privatization — and he hasn't quite figured out yet that he can't.

For a different take on this issue, check out Janet Hook's article in today's LA Times about how seriously Bush takes Social Security. He takes it so seriously that he's even willing to sit down and listen to other people about it! Can you imagine?

And then this:

Invariably, when Bush talks to Republicans about Social Security, he sends an important political message: He's not going to give up this fight any time soon.

"He gives you a lot of confidence he's not going to leave you out on a limb," said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who rode with Bush on Air Force One to the senator's home state last week. "He's going to stick with this issue....Until the last day in office he's going to keep doing this."

Out of all the possible issues to choose as a centerpiece of his second term, Bush chose Social Security, a fairly moderate and non-urgent problem that's almost certain to backfire on him. Why? It's a real mystery.

CENTRISM AND THE INTERNET....Ron Brownstein has an odd column this morning. He thinks that both Democrats and Republicans are pandering so heavily to their extreme wings these days that there's a real opportunity for a new centrist party to steal some votes away. What's more, Joe Trippi agrees:

Trippi believes an independent presidential candidate who struck a chord could organize support through the Internet just as inexpensively [as starting a blog]. "Somebody could come along and raise $200 million and have 600,000 people on the streets working for them without any party structure in the blink of an eye," he says.

It might not be quite that simple. But the two parties are pursuing strategies that create an opening in the center of the electorate, even as the Internet makes it easier for a new competitor to fill it.

...."We are now moving toward a very dangerous place for both parties," he says. "It is becoming much more possible for an independent or third party to emerge because they are leaving so much space in the middle."

Now, this appeals to my centrist temperament, just as it appeals to guys like Marshall Wittman and, presumably, Matt "2% Solution" Miller. But the internet?

For all the usual reasons — which I won't bother going into — I doubt very much that an independent centrist party is going to start up. But even if one does, I sure don't see the internet providing the juice. That's sort of like suggesting that talk radio might become a force for moderation and sensible solutions to our nation's problems. But I don't see it: regardless of their actual policy positions, Howard Dean and MoveOn succeeded on the internet by pushing strident political rhetoric, not calm moderation.

Now, I could see the internet providing some traction for a revived libertarian party — although it hasn't happened yet. Or maybe a Christian right party — except that they already have one. Or maybe a hardline green party.

But $200 million from the internet for a centrist party? From the internet? Quick: can you name any centrist blogs, for example, that get more than 10,000 hits a day? I mean genuinely centrist — moderate but clearly liberal or conservative sites like this one don't count. I can't think of a single one, which makes me wonder: if centrism has a future on the internet, where is it going to come from?

And one more thing: is Brownstein's idea of an independent really John McCain? Take a look at Keith Poole's rank ordering of senators in the 108th Congress and McCain is ranked the 4th most conservative senator out of 100. That's independent?

NSA INTERCEPTS....The NSA is not allowed to spy on U.S. citizens, so when it intercepts conversations involving Americans it removes their names before forwarding transcripts to other agencies. Of the many improprieties John Bolton is accused of, one of them is that he asked the NSA to supply the missing names of American citizens in several transcripts that they supplied to him.

Guess what? Greg Miller of the LA Times reports that this is common practice:

The National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on electronic communications around the world, receives thousands of requests each year from U.S. government officials seeking the names of Americans who show up in intercepted calls or e-mails....

The State Department subsequently revealed that...the department as a whole had submitted about 400 requests during that period.

Those 400 inquiries represented only a "small percentage" of the total number fielded by the NSA, according to a government official with access to NSA data who spoke on condition of anonymity. Since January 2004, the NSA has received more than 3,000 requests, the official said, adding that "the magnitude is surprising" even to some intelligence experts.

Does this get Bolton off the hook? Maybe — although Bolton still needs to explain why he wanted to see those particular names. What's more, he has enough additional problems that it might not matter.

On the other hand, the NSA might have a few questions of its own to answer now. Apparently there's virtually no oversight of this process, and 3,000 requests a year sounds mighty close to "spying on U.S. citizens." Stay tuned.

BOLTON AND BLAIR....Tony Blair has faithfully backed up George Bush on virtually every aspect of the war on terror, up to and including his invasion of Iraq. But it turns out that even Blair has his limits.

Surprise! It's John Bolton! Laura Rozen relays the details.

WHERE PARIS HILTON'S TAX CUTS ARE GOING....Another chapter from the annals of "America has the best medical care in the world":

In Tennessee, Gov. Phil Bredesen plans to end coverage for more than 320,000 adults, many of them elderly. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to shift more Medicaid recipients into managed care and require some to pay monthly premiums.

Minnesota may stop insuring 27,000 college students and adults without children. Washington state may require senior citizens to pay $3 for each prescription that Medicaid used to provide for free.

....In Missouri, where nearly one in five residents is enrolled in Medicaid, Gov. Matt Blunt is poised to sign the most drastic overhaul of all: a bill that would eliminate the program entirely in three years.

Read to the bottom of the story and try to tell me with a straight face that you're not reminded of Dickensian England. We used to be better than that, didn't we?

NIXONIAN PARANOIA WATCH....The Bush administration is blackballing the attendance of technical experts at a telecom standards meeting this week if they contributed money to John Kerry's campaign. A telecom standards meeting!

Just to give you a flavor of what we're talking about, here's an excerpt from the agenda for the Working Party on Terrestrial Fixed and Mobile Radiocommunication Services:

Recommendation for 400 MHz bands
RLAN in the 5 GHz band
Recommendation on harmonized frequencies for property protection
Revision to Recommendation PCC.II/REC. 67 (XIX-01) on Low Power Radiocommunication devices,
Radio frequency identification devices (RFID)
Broadband Power Line Communications (BPL)
Refarming of 700 MHz band
Answer to Market questionnaire on IMT 2000 and systems beyond
Results of the video conference on wireless broadband

Atrios is right: this is completely insane. The paranoid lengths to which the Bushies will go to punish their perceived enemies is simply stunning.

THE SEMIOTICS OF SOCIAL SECURITY....A couple of days ago Jon Chait wrote that Republicans have won at least one great victory in the Social Security debate: they have forced the media to abandon the phrase "private accounts" in favor of "personal accounts":

Late last year...Republican polls found that the public reacted far more favorably to "personal" accounts than to "private" accounts. So, overnight, they banished talk of "privatization" and "private accounts," accusing any journalist who dared use the phrase that they themselves had used mere weeks before of insidious bias.

....Under this sustained barrage, the media have slowly retreated....In the weeks that have passed, "personal" seems to be overtaking "private," like untreated weeds creeping over a garden. Politicians who dare use "oldspeak" risk censure, not just from Republicans but from the media themselves.

This got me curious. Like everyone, I've seen several examples of journalists cravenly knuckling under to the GOP's version of Social Security political correctness — see here, for example. But anecdotes aside, has the use of "private accounts" really declined in the past few months?

In an effort to prove that nothing is too trivial to be graphed, I decided to check. A Nexis search gave me some baseline results: between 1998-2003, 67% of all news stories that referred to privatization used the phrase "private accounts," while 33% used the phrase "personal accounts." How does this stack up to 2004 and 2005?

The chart on the right tells the story: as a percentage of all references to accounts of some kind, media use of the phrase "private accounts" actually rose throughout 2004, and then began to decline in 2005, presumably as the Republican linguistic onslaught began to gain steam. However, it really hasn't declined very much and is still hovering around 70%, higher than both its 1998-2003 average and its 2004 average.

So: although Republicans have indeed been working with Orwellian thoroughness to influence the lexicography of Social Security, I'm happy to report that they've had only minor success. Overall, it looks to me like the media is writing about Social Security pretty much the same way it always has.

POSTSCRIPT FOR NEXIS GEEKS: I searched "US Newspapers and Wires" using the following search terms:

"social security" w/5 "private account"

and

"social security" w/5 "personal account"

That doesn't catch every reference in every periodical, but I figure it's probably a statistically random subset.

THUNDERBIRD....Quick note: I just finished converting from Outlook Express to Thunderbird as my email client. It took multiple hours, multiple installs, multiple uninstalls, multiple configurations, and a huge amount of protracted hand copying and moving of Outlook Express folders. It was an enormous pain in the ass.

My recommendation: if you have a single email account, the conversion will be pretty painless. However, if you have multiple email accounts, be prepared for plenty of frustration.

Advantages: searching large folders for messages is both faster and more flexible. I do this a lot, so it's a nice feature. Multiple email accounts (once you've finally configured them) all show up in the sidebar, so you don't have to restart the client just to check each account, the way you do with Outlook Express. Spam filtering is built in, although I can't tell you yet how well it works since it takes a few days to be properly trained. Virus protection is presumably also better just by virtue of not being a Microsoft product.

Disadvantages: I have three separate address books, one for each of my email accounts, but when they were imported into Thunderbird they were all merged into a single address book. This is not good.

That's all for now. Just thought I'd keep everyone up to date with today's high tech adventures.

BOLTON AND CUBA....Douglas Jehl writes in the New York Times today about "recently declassified" email exchanges between John Bolton's staff and various intelligence officials. On the personal abuse front, here's an exchange between Christian Westermann, the State Department's top expert on biological weapons, and Thomas Fingar, State's #2 intelligence official. The subject is Cuba's development of biological weapons:

• Westermann to Fingar: "Personal attacks, harassment and impugning of my integrity" by Mr. Bolton and Mr. Fleitz are "now affecting my work, my health and dedication to public service."

• Fingar to Westermann: "I am dismayed and disgusted that unwarranted personal attacks are affecting you in this way."
  

On the abuse of intelligence front, here's an email regarding a speech Bolton wanted to give about Cuba in 2002:

• Westermann to Fleitz (one of Bolton's assistants): "As you are probably aware, C.I.A. is not able to complete the cleared-language request on Cuba B.W. for use in Mr. Bolton's upcoming speech. The demarche coordinator told me this evening that C.I.A., N.S.A., I.N.R, and D.I.A. had several difficulties with the proposed language and that C.I.A. is trying to craft an answer to you."
  

Hmmm, that's pretty much all the intelligence agencies, isn't it?

Read the whole thing. It's not really a smoking gun, but it's pretty clear that Bolton was hell bent on saying whatever he wanted to say about Cuba, regardless of what every intelligence agency in town was telling him about our actual state of knowledge.

I give him until Tuesday, maybe Wednesday. At that point I suspect Bolton will develop a sudden desire to spare the country and the president a divisive confirmation debate. The whip marks will be barely visible.

FOLLOWING YOUR CONSCIENCE....Everitt Middle School guidance counselor Margo Lucero decided to make a wee change to the Pledge of Allegiance on Wednesday. Here it is:

One nation, under "your belief system"....

And so the worm turns. After all, if it's OK for biology teachers to decline to teach evolution and for pharmacists to refuse to dispense certain medications, why shouldn't teachers have the right to modify the pledge for reasons of personal conscience?

It's quite a little rabbit hole we have here, don't we?

ANOTHER SPAM THREAD....In response to my question about spam filtering in the previous post, several people have suggested migrating to Gmail and Thunderbird. I've been thinking about doing both, but I have a couple of questions:

• Does Gmail work with an email client or is it strictly a browser-based interface?

• Can anyone share their experience migrating from Outlook Express to Thunderbird? The FAQ is strangely silent about it. Does it work? Any problems? Any gotchas I should be aware of?
  

Thanks!

VIRUS/SPAM QUERY....My life has been flowing along too smoothly lately, so it must be time to install some new software on my computer. Virus protection and a spam filter are the order of the day.

Any recommendations based on personal use? Ease of use is probably paramount, and I don't want to use Norton. Other than that I'm wide open.

My platforms are Windows XP and Outlook Express.

DON'T READ THIS POST!....Here's an interesting tidbit of pseudo-information:

Workers distracted by phone calls, e-mails and text messages suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana, a British study shows.

....In 80 clinical trials, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, monitored the IQ of workers throughout the day.

He found the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points — the equivalent to missing a whole night's sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana.

....Wilson said the IQ drop was even more significant in the men who took part in the tests.

OK, I'll buy that. But what I want to know is this: how did they manage to monitor IQ "throughout the day"? Electrodes? Quickie IQ tests every hour? Remote gigawatt powered MRI machines?

And if email reduces your IQ by ten points, I wonder what blogging does?

HEALTHCARE ROUNDUP....There's been a bunch of healthcare blogging in the past couple of weeks. Here are a couple of roundups that are worth taking a look at if you haven't already:

• Ezra Klein has collected his snapshots of national healthcare systems in other countries here. The complete set includes Japan, Germany, Canada, Britain, and France.

• Angry Bear pulls together all his recent healthcare links here.
  

I especially recommend