HALLOWEEN SCARINESS.... A reader sends in his Halloween creation for 2005: a "Cheneykin." Put on a pair of eyeglasses and it's a spitting image!

Speaking of which, I guess I better hop out to the store and get some candy for the five or six trick or treaters who show up each year. (Apparently the neighborhood across the street has a reputation for better pickings.)

In the meantime, have a Happy Halloween. Try not to get too many cavities this year.

MORE FROM LA REPUBBLICA....I don't really know what to make of this, but this week La Repubblica is running yet another 3-part series about the origins of the Iraq war. Via Nur al-Cubicle, here's an excerpt from Part 1. Note that SISMI is Italian intelligence, and Pollari is Nicolò Pollari, the head of SISMI:

The story of Italian military intervention in Iraq begins [in late 2001] when the resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Ledeen, sponsored by Defense Minister Antonio Martin, debarks in Rome with Pentagon men in tow to meet a handful of “Iranian exiles.” The meeting is organized by SISMI in an agency “safe house” near Piazza di Spagna (however other sources told us it was a reserved room in the Parco dei Principi Hotel).

Twenty men are gathered around a large table, covered by maps of Iraq, Iran and Syria. Those who count are Lawrence Franklin and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans, Michael Ledeen of the AIE, a SISMI station chief accompanied by his assistant (the first is a balding man between 46 and 48 years of age; the second is younger, around 38, with braces on his teeth), and some mysterious Iranians.

Pollari confirms the meeting to La Repubblica: "When [Antonio Martin] asked me to organize the meeting, I became curious. But it was my job and I wasn’t born yesterday. It’s true — my men were also present at the meeting. I wanted to know what was boiling in the pot. It's also true that there were maps of Iraq and Iran on the table. I can tell you those Iranians were not exactly 'exiles'. The went and came from Tehran with their passports with no difficulty whatsoever as if they were transparent to the Pasdaran [the Iranian Revolutionary Guard]."

....The bogus Italian dossier on the Niger uranium turns up [at the meeting] also — and we don’t know exactly why — because Chalabi is in possession of it.

The gist of the article is that Iran was an active supporter of the war because the Shiite mullahs in Tehran thought that a Shiite-controlled Iraq would make a better neighbor than Saddam Hussein's Sunni-controlled secular dictatorship. That's no big surprise, since Iran and Iraq were not exactly good buddies, but the implication of the Repubblica article is that not only was the Iranian regime cheering from the sidelines, but the U.S. and the Italians were actively seeking their help.

I don't know how seriously to take this. It's obviously plausible, but that doesn't mean it's true. Take it with a grain of salt until we get better confirmation of what was really going on.

HEALTH SAVINGS ACCOUNTS....The current healthcare panacea on offer from our friends in the conservative movement is something called a Health Savings Account. The idea is fairly simple: instead of a standard insurance plan, you get one with a high deductible, say $2,000. This plan costs (roughly) $2,000 less than a standard plan, so you take that dough and put it into an HSA. Then you use the HSA to pay your medical bills until you reach your deductible. If there's money left in your HSA at the end of the year, you can keep it.

In theory, HSAs motivate people to spend money on healthcare more carefully, and in the long run this helps reduce overall healthcare spending. In reality, the evidence on this score is pretty thin. What's more, it turns out that the vast bulk of healthcare dollars are spent on people who are extremely sick and quickly blow past even a large deductible anyway. Since HSAs don't affect that spending at all, it means that, at best, their effect on the total cost of healthcare is probably pretty negligible.

Still, for some people HSAs are pretty alluring. After all, if you're relatively healthy, there's a good chance there will be money left in your HSA at the end of the year. Jonathan Cohn explains in a good article about the history and use of HSAs in The New Republic this week:

In their defense, HSA enthusiasts point out that people with serious medical problems are free to stick with traditional insurance. But, by luring healthy people and their premiums away from traditional insurance, HSAs would still drain money from the existing system, leaving the unhealthy to make up the cost. And, sure enough, it's healthy people who seem to be rushing into HSAs the fastest. When Humana Inc. began offering HSAs to its workforce in 2001, the employees who chose it were "significantly healthier on every dimension measured," according to a study published last year in the journal Health Services Research. And the anecdotal evidence certainly backs that up. Articles quoting enthusiastic HSA enrollees, which seem to appear in some local newspaper almost every day now, inevitably feature people like the 20-year-old worker at a Seattle drive-in restaurant who recently told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "If you're a pretty healthy individual, and you don't need to go to the doctor or expect that something might happen, it's a good plan."

Adverse selection is a bitch, isn't it? There's nothing wrong with trying to get people to take their own healthcare more seriously (though Cohn points out that this is easier said than done), but any healthcare proposal that's designed to appeal more to healthy people than to sick people is fundamentally flawed. After all, the whole point of healthcare is to take care of sick people.

The bottom line is that if HSAs are a better deal for healthy people, then inevitably they're a worse deal for sick people. And if you take healthcare seriously, it's sick people you should be concerned about. In the end, HSAs are a feeble effort to paper over problems with our current dysfunctional healthcare system, and not a very good one at that.

FIGHTING ALITO....Marshall Wittman has the clearest statement I've seen yet about the motivations behind the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court:

The Alito nomination is evidence that Mr. Rove is once again riding high in the saddle. The Rovian solution to all of the Administration woes is to give a hot-button treat to the base and attempt to trick the Democrats into alienating swing traditionalist values voters. Meanwhile, folks will ask, "Scooter who?".

The politics of polarization has been the governing philosophy of the Bushies. It got them re-elected and it is the only way they know to govern. With this understanding, the Alito nomination makes complete sense.

That seems right to me. But does this mean that liberals should choose a smarter, lower key strategy to opposing Alito than the usual nuclear war model? Maybe. Any ideas?

NEW HILTZIK BLOG....LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik, who guest blogged here a couple of months ago, now has his own blog up and running at the LA Times site. The blog, called Golden State, is outside the subscription wall, so you don't have to register to read it, and it has an unmoderated comment section to give it that genuine blog look and feel. Here's the URL:

http://www.latimes.com/goldenstateblog

Michael's columns, which tend to be California-centric business pieces, will be posted on the blog every Monday and Thursday, and the rest of the time he'll fill in the blog with anything else that comes to mind.

Michael's guest blogging here was top notch, so I'm looking forward to what he'll do with a blog of his own. As he says, "it’s a test of whether I can balance a schedule of twice-weekly columns with the daily demands of a blog and the rest of my normal life without melting down." Good luck!

ALITO NOMINATED TO SUPREME COURT....Oh goody. George Bush has nominated Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court. Since Alito ruled against abortion rights in one of the most famous cases of all time, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, he ought to be practically a god to the social conservative right. No stealth candidate this time.

The movement conservatives wanted a war, and this time they've probably gotten one. I guess Bush was itching for revenge after Scooter Libby got indicted.

ROVE STILL IN DANGER?....For what it's worth, Dana Milbank and Carol Leonnig report that Karl Rove may still be in significant jeopardy:

Two legal sources intimately familiar with Fitzgerald's tactics in this inquiry said they believe Rove remains in significant danger. They described Fitzgerald as being relentlessly thorough but also conservative throughout this prosecution — and his willingness to consider Rove's eleventh-hour pleading of a memory lapse is merely a sign of Fitzgerald's caution.

....Another warning sign for Rove was in the phrasing of Friday's indictment of Libby. Fitzgerald referred to Rove in those charging papers as a senior White House official and dubbed him "Official A." In prosecutorial parlance, this kind of awkward pseudonym is often used for individuals who have not been indicted in a case but still face a significant chance of being charged.

I don't know if this strikes me as especially convincing, but I thought I'd pass it along.

INDICTMENT KEY....For future reference, here are the names to go along with the titles used in Patrick Fitzgerald's indictment of Scooter Libby:

• Vice President of the United States = Dick Cheney
  

• Counsel to the Vice President = David Addington
  

• Assistant to the Vice President for Public Affairs = Catherine Martin
  

• Scooter Libby's principal deputy = Eric Edelman
  

• Official A = Karl Rove
  

• White House Press Secretary = Ari Fleischer
  

• Under Secretary of State = Marc Grossman
  

• Senior officer of the CIA = ???
  

• CIA briefer = ???
  

If anyone has any corrections or additions, leave them in comments.

CRIMINALIZING POLITICS....Is the indictment of Scooter Libby an example of "criminalizing politics"? Who invented that phrase, anyway?

I was curious, so I did a Nexis search. Oddly enough, the earliest references turn out to be not from the United States, but from India in the early 1980s — in a context that's exactly the opposite of how American conservatives use it today. Back then, the Calcutta Telegraph was complaining not about politicians being turned into criminals via partisan prosecutions, but about thugs and killers taking over politics during the prime ministership of Indira Gandhi:

Criminals of the most heinous disposition — smugglers, murderers and black-marketeers — have been contesting elections and what is truly tragic, winning. The criminalization of politics has assumed a frightening shape.

But how about the origin of the phrase in its current context as used by American conservatives? Here it gets a little hazier.

The original expression was "criminalization of policy differences," a reference to the prosecutions of the Iran-Contra plotters. But who coined it? Who made it famous? Here's a rundown:

• The first reference I can find is in an op-ed by Paul Craig Roberts that ran in various newspapers on July 6, 1988.

• Later that year, Peter Brimelow credited the phrase to Oliver North, but didn't provide a source or a date.

• It was subsequently popularized by Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal, who spoke about it at an AEI seminar and later wrote a paper on the subject for the Heritage Foundation.

• Shortly before he left office, George Bush used the phrase in his pardon of several of the Iran-Contra plotters, saying that he found it to be a "profoundly troubling development in the political and legal climate of our country."
  

But when did the phrase morph into the "criminalization of politics"? Crovitz appears to have been the first to use it that way, in a paper called, appropriately, "The Criminalization of Politics," collected in 1989 in The Imperial Congress: Crisis in the Separation of Powers. Pat Buchanan and a few others picked it up after that, but then, unsurprisingly, conservatives mostly dropped it during the Clinton years — aside from the occasional embarrassed claim that Clinton had it coming because, after all, Democrats started the whole thing back in the Reagan administration.

In the past couple of months, of course, it's come back with a vengeance, as Fox News anchors have settled on it as the sound bite du jour to describe the current travails of Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Scooter Libby, and the rest of the conservative establishment. Then, in the Weekly Standard last week, editor Bill Kristol memorably transformed it into "Criminalizing Conservatives," a breathtakingly calculated act of political hypocrisy from a magazine that, from the moment of its birth in 1995, was practically slavering in its pursuit of Bill Clinton.

At any rate, it's a phrase with a fine conservative pedigree, so I think we can expect to hear a lot more of it. What's more, since it was the stated reason for George Bush Sr. to pardon his pals in the Iran-Contra affair, who knows? Maybe George Bush Jr. will follow family tradition and use it as an excuse to pardon his pals in the Valerie Plame affair, whoever they might turn out to be. Stay tuned.

THE PENSION CRISIS....Roger Lowenstein's piece in today's New York Times Magazine, "The End of Pensions," is pretty good. The short message is: we're all screwed. For the longer explanation, read the article.

SUPER DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME....Jim Lindgren likes the idea of daylight lasting long into the evening, and thus favors "Double Daylight Saving time in the summer and single Daylight Saving time in the winter."

Piker. I propose that we change our clocks every two months in order to keep sundown around 8 or 9 pm all year around. I call this "Kevin Daylight Savings Time." I know that many of you have a knee jerk dislike of sunrise being postponed until noon during the winter, and my friend with the watch collection would sure find it annoying, but I think it would be great. Mornings are a grim time anyway, and daylight is wasted on them.

Alternatively, after I win the lottery, I suppose I could simply move north and south every couple of months, always living in a spot where the sun goes down late at night. I could have mansions in Stockholm, Newport Beach, Fiji, and Melbourne.

Now I just need to win the lottery.

SUPER STARE DECISIS....Jeffrey Rosen writes in the New York Times today about "super stare decisis," the notion that some Supreme Court decisions have been reaffirmed so strongly over such a long period of time that they shouldn't be overturned regardless of how you feel about them on constitutional grounds. He notes, in particular, that conservative darling Michael Luttig seems to have embraced this doctrine with regard to the Supreme Court's affirmation of Roe v. Wade in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Ann Althouse isn't so sure:

Quite clearly, Luttig is not saying that there is a such thing as super-stare decisis. He's a Court of Appeals judge bound by Supreme Court precedent and subject to Supreme Court review. He's paying attention to what that Supreme Court has written about abortion rights, and he's reading the Court to have intended Casey to serve as an especially strong precedent.

In making up a new term, Luttig may have even been subtly mocking the Casey Court.... Saying it's super powerful doesn't make it so.

Maybe so. It seems to me though, that the focus on Roe is misguided in any case. If my understanding of Roe is correct, it's based on a generalized right of privacy as decided in Griswold v. Connecticut, which in turn was based on our current understanding of the doctrine of substantive due process. I suspect you can't overturn Roe without also substantially overturning Griswold and significantly weakening the modern application of substantive due process at the same time. Rosen mentions this, and it seems like it's really the key issue: not whether Roe is a superprecedent, but whether Griswold's interpretation of substantive due process is a superprecedent.

The funny thing is that overturning Roe might turn out to have only a modest impact on abortion rights in the real world. Blue states like California and New York would keep their liberal abortion laws, while most deep red states have put so many roadblocks in the way of getting an abortion that it's all but illegal in some of those places already. It's hard to say for sure. However, if overturning Roe required overturning Griswold, as many conservatives think it does, it would not only return us to the grisly days of back-alley abortions in red states that decided to make abortion completely illegal, but it would also have a devastating impact on an enormous variety of rights and precedents that go far beyond abortion. Clarence Thomas may be enough of a true believer not to care about that, but in the real world the rest of us do.

UPDATE: Have red states really put up so many roadblocks to getting an abortion that it's "all but illegal in some of those places already"? Maybe not. Matt Yglesias presents some evidence to suggest that abortion is still pretty readily available almost everywhere.

LA SPORTS BLOGGING....If Dodger owner Frank McCourt wants to fire general manager Paul DePodesta, that's fine. But this is ridiculous:

[McCourt] said he was pushed to the breaking point by the team's inability to put together back-to-back successful seasons.

A lot of people don't like "the kid" and "the kid's computer," but one bad season is a lousy excuse for firing someone. McCourt should have both the grace and the guts to explain why he's cleaning house, not just pretend that a single bad season is reason enough. Try telling that to Cubs fans.

In other Los Angeles sports news, I hope all you Texas fans enjoyed your week at #1 in the BCS rankings. Texas owes it's #1 ranking not to the fact that the BCS computers ranked USC behind Texas last week, but because the computers ranked USC way behind Texas last week. This travesty of cyborg justice happened only because two of the computers inexplicably ranked USC #4 and #5 respectively, behind not just Texas, but also behind Georgia, Alabama, and Virginia Tech. However, Georgia's loss this week combined with the mileage amassed by USC on the field ought to take care of that. The computers will probably still rank Texas #1, but not by enough to outweigh the obviously more considered rankings of the human judges, who understand quality when they see it.

See you in the Rose Bowl.

LIBBY'S DEFENSE....Scooter Libby's lawyer has outlined Libby's probable defense against Patrick Fitzgerald's perjury charges: he forgot.

As lawyers, we recognize that a person's recollection and memory of events will not always match those of other people, particularly when they are asked to testify months after the events occurred.

I sure hope Libby has a backup plan. Granted, pleas of faulty memory are pretty common in court cases, but Libby has a high bar to overcome:

• His first interview with the FBI was only a few months after the events in question. This isn't a matter of being hazy on a few details years after the fact.

• It's been pretty well documented that Libby was obsessed with Joe Wilson. This wasn't just a sideshow for him, it was something he spent a lot of time on.

• Libby testified that his knowledge of Valerie Plame's CIA employment came from reporters. This was false, but it isn't just a matter of Libby's testimony not matching that of the reporters who supposedly told him about Plame. Fitzgerald also has a bunch of evidence showing that Libby actively pursued information about Wilson and discussed his wife's status with numerous people within the White House. That's a lot to forget.

• Libby repeated his false story on four separate occasions. He didn't just alter a few details here and there, he made up a detailed cover story and stuck to it rigorously in front of both investigators and the grand jury.
  

I sure wouldn't want to try to put lipstick on that pig in front of a jury. If that's all Libby's got, he'd better get on the phone with Fitzgerald pronto and start trying to cut a deal.

WAS EXPOSING VALERIE PLAME A CRIME?....PART 2....Here's a bit of legal blogging on the subject of outing Valerie Plame. To start us off, Publius at Legal Fiction reminds us that judges interpret the law based on the most reasonable reading of a statute, not on a merely plausible reading. On that basis, he argues that Scooter Libby probably didn't violate a reasonable reading of the Espionage Act:

The real problem is element #4 — “reason to believe [the information] could be used to damage the United States or aid a foreign nation.”....When you read the entire statute, you get the clear sense that this statute was meant to criminalize the act of disclosing information to people potentially hostile to America or to those who wanted to harm or damage our national security....I’m not a big Judy Miller fan, but I doubt she wanted to damage the United States with this information.

This fits fairly well with Patrick Fitzgerald's statement yesterday about the Espionage Act: "That is a difficult statute to interpret....there are a lot of interests that could be implicated in making sure that you picked the right case to charge that statute."

So how about the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the law that specifically criminalizes the outing of a covert agent? Contrary to conventional wisdom, Publius suggests that a conviction would be more likely under IIPA than under the Espionage Act. There are six elements to IIPA, including the requirement that the outed agent be covert, and:

Reading the indictment, Libby comes pretty damn close to meeting all six. My guess is that it’s the “covert” that kept Fitzgerald from bringing an indictment under the IIPA....Libby’s outing of Plame is precisely the kind of conduct that the IIPA was intended to deter and punish. Libby’s conduct is thus within the “statutory essence” of the IIPA. And based on what I read today, it’s pretty amazing Fitzgerald didn’t ding him on it.

However, as Steve at Begging to Differ reminds us, "covert" is a very specifically defined term for the purposes of IIPA:

A present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency...whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States.

Here's what Fitzgerald said about that yesterday:

I am not speaking to whether or not Valerie Wilson was covert....I will confirm that her association with the CIA was classified at that time through July 2003. And all I'll say is that, look, we have not made any allegation that Mr. Libby knowingly, intentionally outed a covert agent.

So her identity was classified, but had she served outside the United States during the five years prior to her outing in 2003? She was based in Brussels in early 1997, but as Vanity Fair reported last year:

In 1997, Plame moved back to the Washington area, partly because...the C.I.A. suspected that her name may have been on a list given to the Russians by the double agent Aldrich Ames in 1994.

So for the six years previous to 2003, Plame was based in the U.S., not overseas. And legally, as far as IIPA is concerned, that means she wasn't covert.

And that's the most likely reason that Fitzgerald didn't indict anyone for the actual act of leaking Valerie Plame's name. As reckless as it was — and Fitzgerald made it crystal clear that he did think it was reckless — he probably decided on technical grounds that he wouldn't have been able to successfully win a conviction under either of the applicable statutes.

FOOTBALL TRIVIA....Is it just my imagination, or are helmets flying a lot more this year than in the past? Or is this just a USC thing? It seems like a player loses his helmet at least once or twice in every game, and I sure don't remember that happening in previous years. What's the deal?

UPDATE: In comments, MDS provides a definitive answer:

Some good guesses above, but the answer, believe it or not, is a conscious effort at making players safer. Helmets are now coming with "breakaway" chinstraps. The old chinstraps were so tight that a player running at full speed could have his neck broken when someone grabbed his facemask. The new chinstraps give, so when a player grabs another player's facemask, the chinstraps will unbuckle. The side effect, as you noticed, is that helmets fly off more easily now. But the NCAA has responded to that with the new rule that when the ball-carrier's helmet comes off, the play is immediately blown dead.

A McMARTIN APOLOGY....The McMartin Preschool case is, in some sense, old news. By now, it's common knowledge that the charges of child abuse and satanic rituals at McMartin were untrue, whipped up by hysteria, local newscasters, and bad child psychology into one of the most monumental miscarriages of justice in recent memory.

Still, the individual stories are compelling. Today, in the LA Times Magazine, one of the victims, Kyle Zirpolo, tells the story of what really happened to him at McMartin and why he made up the sensational stories he did back when he was nine years old. It's a cautionary tale, but it was this passage that really caught my eye:

One particular night stands out in my mind. I was maybe 10 years old and I tried to tell my mom that nothing had happened. I lay on the bed crying hysterically—I wanted to get it off my chest, to tell her the truth. My mother kept asking me to please tell her what was the matter. I said she would never believe me. She persisted: "I promise I'll believe you! I love you so much! Tell me what's bothering you!" This went on for a long time: I told her she wouldn't believe me, and she kept assuring me she would. I remember finally telling her, "Nothing happened! Nothing ever happened to me at that school."

She didn't believe me.

We had a highly dysfunctional family. We argued and fought all the time. My mother has always blamed anything negative on the idea that we went to that preschool and were molested. To this day, she believes these things went on. Because if they didn't, how can she explain all the family's problems?

That has the ring of profound truth to me. We often embrace bad news far more easily than good, I think, because it so convincingly provides both an explanatory and an exculpatory power that good news lacks. Explanatory because it's easy to believe that bad outcomes are the result of a single bad event while good outcomes are usually more complex, and exculpatory because it provides a explanation for bad outcomes that relieves us of our own responsibility for them. Once we've internalized that, the bad news can be rejected only at the cost of giving up the comfort that comes with it. And so the bad news becomes a psychic totem, clung to with increasing intensity until, eventually, it becomes part of the fabric of our worldview, never to be released regardless of where the truth actually lies.

And therein lies the power of our modern, siege mentality political environment: explanations based on the evil of others are simply more compelling — and comforting — than explanations based on good. At least in the short term. Not so much in the long term, I think, but what good politician ever thinks in the long term anymore?

OFFICIAL A AND MR. X....Just a quick reminder in case anyone has forgotten the sequence of events that led to Robert Novak's original column outing Valerie Plame.

Novak had two sources for his column. The first one, who he described as "no partisan gunslinger," provided him with Plame's name. This is the person I referred to as "Mr. X" in the previous post. We don't know who Mr. X is, and so far he hasn't been indicted for anything, but the best guesses about his identity seem to be either Fred Fleitz, David Wurmser, or John Hannah.

Novak's second source confirmed Plame's identity, reportedly saying, "Oh, you know about it." This source was Karl Rove, who is referred to in the Libby indictment as "Official A."

That is all. This was just a public service announcement.

PLATONIC SHILLDOM....In a New York Times op-ed today, Hugh Hewitt takes on conservatives who opposed the Harriet Miers nomination:

The right's embrace in the Miers nomination of tactics previously exclusive to the left — exaggeration, invective, anonymous sources, an unbroken stream of new charges, television advertisements paid for by secret sources — will make it immeasurably harder to denounce and deflect such assaults when the Democrats make them the next time around.

I guess that's it, then. There's literally nothing that Hugh is embarrassed to say in the service of his cause. He has reached Platonic shilldom.

WAS EXPOSING VALERIE PLAME A CRIME?....Was Scooter Libby guilty of any underlying crime in the Valerie Plame case? Or could he have completely avoided indictment just by telling Patrick Fitzgerald's investigators the truth when he first talked to them?

Although Fitzgerald himself was careful not to speculate about this during his press conference, you can make a plausible argument that Fitzgerald did have the goods on Libby but just decided not to bother trying to prove it in court. After all, as he said, the public interest in punishing the leak is served regardless of what charges are brought, so why waste time trying to prove a complex and precarious case of espionage or mishandling classified data when there's a nice easy perjury case to be made instead? Either way, the bad guy does the time.

Unfortunately, I don't think this holds water. Here's the thing: we know that it wasn't Libby who gave Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak. It was someone else. What's more, both common sense and multiple news reports suggest that Fitzgerald knows exactly who this person is. So why not bring charges against Mr. X? It's pretty clear that he leaked Plame's name, and if Fitzgerald thought the leak itself was criminal then Mr. X sure ought to be guilty of something. And since no other charges were filed against Mr. X, you can't say that Fitzgerald just decided to go for the easy case and let the other stuff slide.

That leaves only one conclusion: Fitzgerald didn't think he could win conviction for any charges related to the actual leak of Plame's name. And if he didn't think he could win a case against Mr. X, he probably didn't think he could win a case against Libby either.

(Unless, of course, he brings further charges against Mr. X at a later date, or announces a plea deal of some kind. Based on his press conference, though, my guess is that he doesn't plan to. He seemed pretty eager to lower expectations on that score.)

Anyway, that's my guess. Obviously we don't know everything yet, and we might not ever know everything. It depends on how leak free Fitzgerald's office stays. And it says nothing about how insanely malicious and reckless it was to expose Valerie Plame's identity in real world terms. Legally, though, if Fitzgerald thought he could bring charges against anyone for the actual act of exposing Valerie Plame's identity, I think he would have done it today.

UPDATE: Since I've gotten several emails about this, I'd better clear up something here. I'm not saying there won't be any further indictments. Obviously Rove is still under investigation, and there are a few others who might be in trouble too. What I'm saying is that I don't think there will be any indictments for the actual act of exposing Valerie Plame's identity.

This is all speculation, of course, and I'm certainly happy to entertain competing theories. But to be plausible, your theory has to explain why there's been no indictment of Mr. X even though it seems likely that Fitzgerald has bulletproof evidence that he did in fact disclose Plame's identity to Robert Novak.

UPDATE 2: One of Andrew Sullivan's readers argues that Fitzgerald is "one inch from prosecuting the leak itself." He makes a pretty good case and, needless to say, I hope he's right and I'm wrong.

Mark Kleiman also makes the case that I'm wrong. Neither one of these arguments addresses the Mr. X issue, but check 'em out anyway.

THE BOTTOM LINE....There are lots of interesting tidbits in the indictment. Who is the "Under Secretary of State" who helped Libby track down information about Joe Wilson's Niger trip? [UPDATE: It's Marc Grossman.] Who is "Official A"? What was Dick Cheney's role? I'm sure all of that is going to get hashed over in detail in the coming days.

But for now, here's the bottom line: Fitzgerald didn't charge Scooter Libby with mistakenly making a few unimportant false statements to the grand jury. He charged him with deliberately constructing a false story about how he learned about Valerie Plame, and then repeatedly telling this story to both FBI agents and the grand jury. That story was a lie, and it was a premeditated lie designed to cover up the fact that he had engaged in a long and persistent effort to uncover information about Joe Wilson's wife and disseminate it to reporters.

Libby could have told the truth, but then he would have had to admit his role in outing a CIA agent in order to score political points against a critic of the administration. He didn't want that campaign to become public, so he invented a cover story, repeated it under oath, and stuck to it on multiple occasions.

It's serious stuff, and that's what this is all about.

PATRICK FITZGERALD PRESS CONFERENCE....Fitzgerald is speaking now. Rough and ready liveblogging follows.

NOTE: Complete transcript here.

Fitzgerald: "I'd like to put the investigation into a little context." Wilson's CIA status was classified and was "not well known" outside the Agency.

The first reporter who was told about Plame was Judith Miller, in a conversation with Libby in June.

"Libby gave the FBI a compelling story." Libby's story: Tim Russert told him that Wilson's wife worked at the FBI. He passed this along to Matt Cooper and Judith Miller. He had passed on the information not even knowing if it was true. It was just something all the reporters were saying. Just passing along gossip.

"It would be compelling if only it were true. It was not true." Libby didn't learn about Plame from Russert. He learned it at least three times from government officials.

In early June, Libby learned about Plame from a CIA officer, a State Department official, and then from Dick Cheney. Later learned it from another official. So he learned it from at least four different officials.

Also discussed with other officials. He had at least seven discussions before he talked to Russert. What's more, Wilson's wife never came up in his conversation with Russert.

"Mr. Libby's story that he was at the end of a chain of phone calls was not true. It was false. He was at the beginning of a chain of phone calls" that disclosed Plame's identity. He lied repeatedly about this under oath.

Question: Will there be any more charges? Fitzgerald: "Substantial bulk of the work is completed." This is followed by an extended baseball analogy that amounts to: Why did Libby do what he did? We needed to find out.

Question: Any evidence that Dick Cheney encouraged Libby? Fitzgerald: There are no allegations against anyone else, so we have no comment about that. That's standard practice.

Question: So who leaked Plame's name to Robert Novak? Fitzgerald: Sorry, we're not going to tell you. That's just the way it goes. If we don't bring charges, we don't say anything.

Question: What about Karl Rove? Fitzgerald: "We either charge someone or we don't talk about them." Sorry.

Question: Was it worth it to put Judith Miller in jail for 85 days? Fitzgerald: We didn't want a fight with the New York Times. But we showed our evidence to a judge, and the judge agreed that the subpoena was legitimate. An appellate court agreed too. You can't charge someone with perjury regarding a conversation without finding out from the witnesses involved whether the alleged conversation actually took place. If you don't talk to the eyewitnesses, that's "reckless." Miller and Cooper could have exonerated Libby, after all.

Question: Did Libby know that Plame was covert? Fitzgerald: He's not saying whether Plame was covert. Only saying that her association with the CIA was classified. He's not saying anything about whether Libby leaked the name of a covert agent.

Question: Will there be a final report? Fitzgerald: No. You're either charged or you're not. If you aren't we don't talk about it further. Special counsels write final reports, but he's not a special counsel.

Question: There's no charge directly related to the leak. Does that mean the charges you brought are fairly trivial? Fitzgerald: It was a national security case. If Libby "fabricated a story about how he learned the information, how he passed it along," it's very serious.

Question: Why wasn't it enough to know that Libby passed along classified information to someone not authorized to receive it? Isn't that a crime? Fitzgerald: You have to show that he knew it was classified. That goes to state of mind. Hard to prove.

Question: Why not charge Libby with passing along classified information? Fitzgerald: Espionage Act charges are hard to prove. You need to be careful with it.

Question: Will you empanel another grand jury? Will there be more charges? Fitzgerald: "We're not quite done, but I don't want to add to a feverish pitch."

Question: What's the penalty for the charges you brought? Fitzgerald: Obstruction = maximum 10 years. Perjury and false statement = maximum 5 years. However, there are also sentencing guidelines. It would be a judge's decision.

Question: What does "not quite done" mean? Fitzgerald: You're reading tea leaves. Don't. We're just letting the public know that we're continuing to do our job.

Question: Was there any political interference with your investigation? Fitzgerald: No. Absolutely none.

INDICTMENT PRIMER....The two false statement charges are these:

• Libby told the FBI that Tim Russert told him about Valerie Plame on July 10 or 11. He also told the FBI that he was surprised to hear this from Russert. This was a lie: Russert never told him this, and Libby knew about Plame's status long before that in any case.

• Libby told the FBI that he told Matt Cooper on July 12 that reporters had told him about Plame, but Libby didn't know if it was true. This was a lie: Libby actually confirmed "without qualification" to Cooper that Plame worked for the CIA.
  

The two perjury charges revolve around the fact that Libby made the same misstatements to the grand jury. The obstruction of justice charge is based on the false statement and perjury charges. Taken together, they amount to obstruction of justice.

Basically, the charges are that Libby consistently tried to mislead both the FBI and the grand jury about how he had learned of Plame's status. On multiple occasions he told investigators that he had learned about it from reporters in July, but the truth was quite different. In reality, Libby actively sought out information about Joe Wilson's trip to Niger starting in late May; learned from both State Department and CIA sources in early June that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA; and received the same information from Dick Cheney shortly after that. Libby subsequently discussed Plame with quite a few people within the White House, at one point admitting to his deputy that "there would be complications at the CIA in disclosing that information publicly," an indication that he knew perfectly well that the CIA didn't want Plame's status disclosed. He later told Ari Fleischer that the fact that Joe Wilson's wife worked at the CIA was "not widely known."

These are serious charges. Apparently Libby figured he'd never be caught out because the reporters would stay mum and go to jail on his behalf. He lost that bet.

UPDATE: Russert's story is here.

LIBBY GONE....CNN reports that Scooter Libby submitted his resignation this morning. It was accepted.

The text of the indictment is here.

Fox says that Fitzgerald was planning to indict Karl Rove, but Rove's lawyer produced last-minute evidence that made him back off and decide to continue investigating.

Chris Wallace says, after reading the entire indictment, that Fitzgerald has a "very strong case." Seems that way to me too. Libby appears to have constructed an extensive and premeditated set of lies designed to conceal from the grand jury what really happened. Dumb.

Will it go to trial? A trial would almost certainly require testimony from Cheney, Rove, Miller, Russert, Ari Fleischer, etc. Will Libby agree to a plea in order to prevent this from happening?

The Wall Street Journal has a continuously updated timeline of today's events here.

OFFICIAL PLAME NEWS....Libby indicted. Charges are obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements....

David Ensor on CNN: The indictment is for lying about how and when in 2003 Libby learned classified information about the employment of Valerie Wilson by the Central Intelligence Agency. Total of five counts in the indictment:

• False statements on October 14 and November 26, 2003
  

• Perjury on March 5, March 24, 2004.
  

• Obstruction of justice in Spring 2004.
  

Wolf Blitzer, reading from the indictment: In May 2003, Libby began acquiring information about Joe Wilson's trip to Niger. Learned about Valerie Plame from Dick Cheney, who had learned about her from the CIA. Libby later lied about his conversations with Tim Russert, Matt Cooper, and Judith Miller. Endangered national security by discussing this with reporters.

Kevin: May 2003, eh? Nick Kristof's column was printed on May 6, 2003, so apparently it was Kristof's column that touched off the whole thing.

David Ensor, reading from the indictment: Libby told the FBI that Tim Russert and Matt Cooper had told him about Plame's identity. He knew when he said this that it wasn't true, and he concealed the fact that he had actually learned about Plame earlier from Dick Cheney. The perjury charges are apparently related to the same underlying facts.

Bob Franken, reading from the indictment: On or about July 10, 2003, Libby spoke to Official A, who advised Libby about a conversation with Robert Novak. Libby was informed that Novak would be writing about Plame.

Kevin: Hmmm. Shouldn't that be Official K?

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING....I'm sorry, but if either of our cats ever do this, they're just going to have to learn French.

NON-PLAME UPDATE....Peace in the Middle East! The Aardvark has the news.

In other, more serious rumor mongering, the Aardvark also passes on the following:

An al-Arabiya documentary claims to confirm long-standing rumours that Saddam Hussein was ready to leave Iraq shortly before the war, and take up residence in the UAE with his family. Supposedly, it was overseen by the late President Shaykh Zayd and confirmed by Crown Prince Shaykh Mohamed bin Zayd. The latter claims that the initiative had been received positively by an American representative. But it fell apart at the last minute, and they don't know whether it was only a tactical maneuver on Saddam's part, or whether he doubted American intentions or that the UAE would be able to guarantee his or his family's safety.

Yes, it's true: I'm just killing time until we get more news on the indictments. Documents are due in three minutes! A press conference in a couple of hours! Stay tuned!

MORE PLAME....Apparently Patrick Fitzgerald has a press conference scheduled for 2 pm Eastern, giving him a comfortable margin of 180 minutes before the grand jury expires. That's time management!

This morning's news is that everyone is reporting that Libby is toast and that Rove will remain unindicted but still under investigation. I remain cautious. Remember all that bogus intel during the runup to the war? The stuff where everyone agreed about something, but it turned out that everyone was getting their G2 from a single Chalabi shill routed through various layers of misdirection? That's what this feels like.

However, that said, the Washington Post does provide one little tidbit to back up the conventional wisdom:

Rove provided new information to Fitzgerald during 11th hour negotiations that "gave Fitzgerald pause" about charging Bush's senior strategist, said a source close to Rove. "The prosecutor has to resolve those issues before he decides what to do."

Really, that's just fascinating, isn't it? What could Rove possibly have told him? Unfortunately, I'll bet we won't find out at 2 pm.

NO HARM, NO FOUL?....When Robert Novak outed Valerie Plame in his column two years ago, did it actually do any damage? Or is it a case of "no harm, no foul"? Larry Johnson was on Wolf Blitzer's show today, and Crooks and Liars has the video here. Here's a transcript:

BLITZER: I think what everyone wants to know is, was there serious damage done to U.S. national security? And I've been trying to find out if the CIA actually did a post mortem, a damage assessment. You've been looking into that as well.

JOHNSON: Yeah, CIA did a post mortem, there's no way that they could not have. They have not delivered any written report to Congress, to the House or Senate Intelligence Committees. But what they've done with this report, they had to do it internally, because....

BLITZER: Is there a piece of paper there that's written?

JOHNSON: Yeah, there's a written document within CIA, there has to be, because every time that someone like this is outed, it's not just the person. In this case it's the front company, it's other NOCs who may have been exposed — non-official cover officers — also other intelligence officers who were exposed to that company, as well as intelligence assets overseas who were working with Brewster-Jennings who didn't know that it was a CIA front, and some who may have been witting assets.

BLITZER: Do you know whether or not they concluded that serious damage did occur?

JOHNSON: I have heard that serious damage did occur.

BLITZER: In terms of lives lost, agents, foreign agents, U.S. allies...

JOHNSON: To that extent I don't know, but what I do know for certain is we're not just talking about Valerie Plame. We're talking about an intelligence resource, a United States national security resource, that was destroyed by these White House officials that went out and started talking to the press about this. Reckless. And they've harmed the security of this country.

Johnson doesn't give any hint of how he's heard that serious damage occurred, or what the damage was, so take this for what it's worth. But who knows? Perhaps this was part of the "voluminous classified filings" that were referred to (and redacted from) last year's appellate court ruling that eventually sent Judith Miller to jail for refusing to answer Patrick Fitzgerald's questions.

UPDATE: In comments, cld says that Bob Woodward told Larry King on Thursday night that there was indeed a CIA report but that the report showed no significant damage. I don't know who's right, but I'd take it all with a big shaker of salt for the time being.

PLAME UPDATE....At this point, it hardly seems worthwhile to say yet again that Patrick Fitzgerald appears likely to indict Scooter Libby, but that's what the New York Times says today:

Associates of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, expected an indictment on Friday charging him with making false statements to the grand jury in the C.I.A. leak inquiry, lawyers in the case said Thursday.

Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, will not be charged on Friday, but will remain under investigation, people briefed officially about the case said. As a result, they said, the special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, was likely to extend the term of the federal grand jury beyond its scheduled expiration on Friday.

....Among the many unresolved mysteries is whether anyone in addition to Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove might be charged and in particular whether Mr. Fitzgerald would name the source who first provided the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer to Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist.

Hmmm. I hope this isn't turning into a Ken Starr-style fishing expedition. As much as I'd like to see Karl Rove frog marched out of the West Wing, I have to say that if Fitzgerald hasn't been able to make a case against him in two years, it might be time to call it a day. This investigation shouldn't last forever.

Then again, maybe the Times is wrong. Wouldn't be the first time.

TRADEMARK MADNESS....The BBC reports that a French company has failed to win trademark protection for the smell of fresh strawberries. But then there's this:

According to the Associated Press news agency, the only scent to win EU trademark protection so far is the smell of freshly cut grass. The smell was registered by a Dutch perfume company that uses it to give tennis balls their aroma.

What's next? Trademarking flourescent yellow? Trademarking the sphere? Trademarking fuzz?

MIERS REACTION....I fear that Mark Levin's reaction to the Harriet Miers withdrawal might be unnervingly on the money:

It's time for our liberals friends to worry. If the president picks a solid nominee, the base — meaning Republican Party loyalists and conservative activists — will be united, reinvigorated, and ready for battle. At least that's the indication from my radio audience. And frankly, as an aside, there's another event that is uniting them, and that's their growing resentment toward Patrick Fitzgerald. Positive press profiles aside, they increasingly view him as a threat to the presidency, and are not much impressed with all the talk in the media about possible indictments for perjury or false statements over emails or memory lapses.

There's nothing that movement conservatives like more than redemption, and if Bush chooses a God-fearing, fire-breathing conservative to replace Miers, then not only will all be forgiven, but Bush's support from the base might well be redoubled. They'll be primed and ready to go after Patrick Fitzgerald and the hated liberal lynch mob who are gunning for their newly repentant savior.

On the other hand, Mark Schmitt makes a decent case that Arlen Specter might stand in the way of a base-pleasing nominee like either of the M&Ms:

A year ago, Specter was humbled and compliant....But now the politics are very different. What's the right going to do to him now?....And knowing a little bit about Specter, I'm guessing that he feels highly insulted by the fact of the Miers nomination and that he was expected to push it through. An angry, empowered Specter is not a pretty sight, and my guess will be that if they send up a hard-right movement conservative, especially on choice, Specter will no longer feel any obligation to do anything to move the nomination forward.

Great. So liberals are now dependent on a show of peevishness from Arlen Specter? Sigh.

LETTER FROM SYRIA....Matthew Longo reports from Damascus that support for the Syrian regime is considerably less enthusiastic than the Syrian regime claims it is:

Monday's rally...was designed to make the government look strong, popular and credible.... But things are not always as they seem. Syrian broadcast news announced that there were up to 1 million people in attendance. More credible accounts put the number of actual protesters at about 10,000. Of these, most were schoolchildren, whose participation was obligatory. The main speeches were slated for 2 p.m., but by 10:30 a.m. most of the crowds had left, preferring to take lunch or idle through the city. By noon, the square was almost empty....

But let's be clear: Dissatisfaction with the current regime does not translate into support for the West....Most Syrians feel stuck between two unappealing options. "Everybody is frustrated," said one student at the University of Damascus, "because we hate George Bush, but we also know that the regime is guilty."

Condoleezza Rice has done better as Secretary of State than I thought she would, but this is likely to be her toughest test to date. If she can manage to thread this needle in a way that produces a positive outcome — or even a mediocre one — she'll deserve some praise. If she lets Cheney order an airstrike, on the other hand, then not so much.

MIERS WITHDRAWS....I suppose the only interesting part of the Harriet Miers death watch was wondering which excuse the White House would pick for her eventual withdrawal. In the end, the winner turned out to be "concerns that senators wanted documents of privileged discussions between the president and his top lawyer," but I think Harry Reid sums up the real reason:

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who said he had recommended that Bush nominate Miers, blamed "the radical right wing of the Republican Party" for killing her nomination.

"Apparently, Ms. Miers did not satisfy those who want to pack the Supreme Court with rigid ideologues," the Nevada Democrat said.

I can hardly wait to see who Bush picks to replace her. It looks like the movement conservative wing of the Republican Party is finally going to get the knock-down-drag-out fight they've been itching for.

PLAME UPDATE....Steve Clemons reports that Plamegate prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald signed a lease earlier this week for expanded office space in Washington DC. That doesn't seem like the act of a man about to close up shop and go home, does it?

All that's left now is who, what, where, when, and why. Piece of cake.

UPDATE: Oops, apparently not. Steve's source has retracted.

UPDATE 2: This is probably less important than we think it is, but Byron York has an interesting tidbit about those interviews that investigators were doing with Joe Wilson's neighbors on Monday. Oddly enough, it turns out they weren't follow-up interviews. It was the first time Fitzgerald's investigators had talked to them.

BENCHMARKS FOR WITHDRAWAL....John Kerry is calling for a withdrawal plan from Iraq based on concrete benchmarks:

"The insurgency will not be defeated unless our troop levels are drawn down," Kerry, D-Mass., said in a speech at Georgetown University.

"To undermine the insurgency," he said, "we must instead simultaneously pursue both a political settlement and the withdrawal of American combat forces linked to specific, responsible benchmarks. At the first benchmark, the completion of December elections, we can start the process by reducing our forces by 20,000 troops over the course of the holidays."

This sounds roughly correct to me. As I've mentioned before, I don't think there's a big difference between timetables and benchmarks in practice, since the adoption of benchmarks inevitably leads to at least tacit timetables. What's more, blogging about this subject has persuaded me that a benchmark-based plan retains most of the advantages of a timetable approach (reduces support for the insurgency, forces the Iraqi government to take security seriously, relieves strain on the American military) while avoiding some of the drawbacks (primarily that it gives the insurgents a withdrawal date to hold out for).

Now, will any other Democrats join Kerry? Hillary? Joe? Wes?

UPDATE: Extended excerpts from Kerry's speech are here.

BASEBALL FINALE....So in the end, I guess winning 1½ games from the White Sox was a pretty good showing for the Angels. Congratulations, Chicago!

(1½ games? Howzzat? I'm still sore about game 2, so I'm counting it as a draw.)

THE LATEST FROM IRAN....Iran's recently elected president demonstrates just what "hardline" means in Iranian politics:

Iran's new president created a sense of outrage in the west yesterday by describing Israel as a "disgraceful blot" that should be "wiped off the face of the earth".

....He said: "Anybody who recognises Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury, [while] any [Islamic leader] who recognises the Zionist regime means he is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world." He was addressing a conference titled The World Without Zionism.

Lovely. That should do wonders to help build peaceful and constructive relations with Europe and the United States.

DAVIS-BACON RETURNS FROM THE DEAD....Under pressure from a suprisingly unanimous and steadfast coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans — moderate Republicans! — the White House crumbled today and agreed to reinstate the Davis-Bacon Act for construction projects along the Gulf Coast. In related news, Mickey Kaus's head exploded this afternoon. Film at 11.

HOMEWORK....Brad Plumer argues on egalitarian grounds that homework in primary grades is "most likely evil":

Any educational system that relies on parents at home to help with the "learning process" will only end up perpetuating inequality, as long as some parents can help their kids and some cannot; as long as some parents can speak English and some cannot.

Is this true? As it happens, my parents didn't help me much with my homework when I was a kid, possibly on the "builds character" theory and possibly because it didn't occur to me to ask. In fact, I remember — as do all California children — having to build a model of a mission in fourth grade and receiving no help at all — none! — solely because I had left the job until the day before it was due. The result was predictable: a hodgepodge of margarine boxes wrapped in brown paper and set in a pattern vaguely resembling the grounds of Mission Santa Barbara. My brother, on the other hand, got help aplenty when he entered fourth grade, and as a result he turned in a magnificent styrofoam model of Mission Somethingorother, complete with miniature orange trees and a little blue reflecting pool. Not that I'm bitter or anything. Still, I like to remind my mother about this at convenient intervals, right alongside the Eiffel Tower fib she told us kids when we were in Paris in 1967. Maybe I'll tell you that story later.

Back on the homework front, however, Brad does have a point. Take my 11th grade American Literature class. At one point during the year we were all assigned a poem to analyze and report on, and I got assigned some monstrosity masterpiece by Charles Bukowski that made no sense to me at all. Luckily, mom has a master's degree in English and set me on the road to understanding in no time. A few days later I regaled the class with a world class explication of whatever poem that was, and Mrs. Randall commented that I sure was a smart kid. You betcha, Mrs. R.

Now, that wasn't exactly a make-or-break assignment or anything, but still, my classmates who didn't have a parent with a master's degree in English were certainly at a disadvantage. So Brad is right about that.

Still, that was high school, and the part that remains sort of hazy to me is how big an issue this is in the primary grades. My recollection is that I had no homework at all in grades K-3, and not really that much in grades 4-6 either. There was definitely some — preparing for those dreaded morning talks, for one — but not a lot.

Has that changed a lot since the halcyon 60s? Are K-3 kids in modern classrooms sent home groaning under the load of math sets and handwriting exercises? Are they barely able to squeeze in ballet and soccer practice in between their Gameboy time and five hours of TV? Or what? What's the deal in primary education these days? Inquiring minds want to know.

LA REPUBBLICA TRANSLATIONS....A blog about the Middle East called Nur al-Cubicle has posted complete translations of the La Repubblica series on the forged Niger documents. Here they are:

• Part 1
  

• Part 2
  

• Part 3
  

NIGER FORGERIES UPDATE....George Bush's famous 16 words in his 2003 State of the Union address, as we all know, were these:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

The slender reed that Bush apologists have leaned on ever since is that even if the uranium story was bogus, it's still true that the British believed it, and that's all Bush said. But did the British have good reason to believe it? Did they have any evidence aside from the notorious Italian forgeries suggesting that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Africa?

Henry Farrell has read part three of La Repubblica's expose on the Italian forgery scheme, and they say the answer is no. As the Butler report noted, the British did have a second piece of evidence aside from the fake Niger memos, but according to La Repubblica:

This “evidence” has never been brought forward....“If it ever were brought forward,” said a source in Forte Braschi to la Repubblica, with a smile, “it would be discovered, with red faces, that it was Italian intelligence collected by SISMI at the end of the 1980’s, and shared with our friend Hamilton McMillan.”

In other words, nobody, not the British and not the Americans, had any serious evidence that Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Africa. The only evidence in the whole affair was disinformation cooked up by Italian intelligence and their partners. As for who those partners were, no one knows. But the people who attended this meeting a few weeks after 9/11 are a pretty good guess.

Henry also has a very short summary of the affair that seems accurate to me, as well as some useful warnings. Go read.

WAL-MART AND HEALTHCARE....Wal-Mart Watch has gotten its hands on an internal Wal-Mart memo that outlines the company's plans to cut its spiraling healthcare expenses. The full memo, reproduced here, lists "nine 'limited-risk' initiatives and five 'bold steps.' "

The memo, after noting that Wal-Mart workers "are getting sicker than the national population, particularly in obesity-related diseases," proposes that Wal-Mart should take steps to discourage unhealthy people from working for them. Here is "bold step" #3:

Redesign benefits and other aspects of the Associate experience, such as job design, to attract a healthier, more productive workforce.

....Design all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart gathering.)

....It will be far easier to attract and retain a healthier workforce than it will be to change behavior in an existing one. These moves would also dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart.

The New York Times is all over this today, but the funny thing is that I can't really blame Wal-Mart very much for this. Corporate healthcare costs are a big deal, and it's only natural that an HR executive would look for ways to reduce them. Attracting healthy workers and discouraging unhealthy ones is an obvious strategy.

And that's the problem. In fact, it's the whole point behind the discussion of perverse incentives in America's current disjointed healthcare system. In any system that doesn't cover the entire population of a country, each individual insurer has an incentive to cherry pick only the healthiest workers and leave the sick ones to someone else. This problem is rarely stated as baldly as it is in the Wal-Mart memo, but it's always there. Our entire system is built around an incentive to make sure that it's always someone else who's responsible when someone gets sick.

So sure, as Nathan Newman says, "Wal-Mart has hopefully bought itself a nice Americans with Disabilities Act class action lawsuit." But really, that's just a consolation prize that will accomplish little except to make sure that nobody is ever foolish enough to say anything like this in memo form again. The plain reality is that the only way to solve Wal-Mart's problem is for the United States to adopt some form of universal healthcare. It eliminates the perverse incentives inherent in our current healthcare system, it dramatically reduces paperwork costs, it provides greater heathcare choice for nearly everyone, and it's pretty much the only chance we have of seriously reining in the skyrocketing healthcare costs that are currently borne disproportionately by private sector corporations.

When will Wal-Mart and the rest of the business community figure this out?

MAÑANA....CNN says no indictments today.

MILLER LEAVING TIMES?....This will hardly come as a surprise after the events of the past few days, but the Wall Street Journal reports that "New York Times reporter Judith Miller has begun discussing her future employment options with the newspaper, including the possibility of a severance package." Maybe she'll start up a blog.

TIM KAINE'S TEST OF FAITH....Garance Franke-Ruta commented yesterday on the ads here in the D.C.-area for Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tim Kaine's campaign, noting that Kaine has responded to attacks on his anti-death penalty position by taking a page out of the GOP playbook and putting his faith--Catholic--front and center. "My faith teaches that life is sacred," Kaine says in one ad currently running. "That's why I personally oppose the death penalty."

I'm actually not thrilled to see Kaine take this ploy to its obvious extreme--hey, back off, man...if you attack my position, you're attacking my faith. That's a nasty Republican habit Democrats would do well to stay away from. But it is fascinating to see that Kaine has accomplished something few other Democrats have. His political opponents attack his political stands, and he's come under his share of scrutiny in the media, but no one questions that his faith is sincere.

That may seem like a simple thing. But the pervasive double standard in politics is that Republicans are assumed to be genuinely religious and Democrats who talk about religion or claim to be religious are just faking it. That puts Democrats in an automatic hole, because before they can even begin to talk about their faith, or explain how it shapes their views, they have to prove that they're for real. Republicans get to skip straight to step two.

So whether or not you like the fact that Tim Kaine has brought his faith into this Virginia race, it's remarkable to see a Democratic candidate avoid the "can you name the books of the Bible?" game and concentrate instead on explaining how his faith impacts his politics and why voters should care.

In our October issue, Mark Murray explains how Kaine accomplished this.

NIGER UPDATE....Henry Farrell has translated portions of Tuesday's La Repubblica article about the forged Nigerien documents, and this bit provides a surprising answer to the question of where the documents came from:

The game-plan was rather transparent. "Authentic" documents relating to an attempted acquisition in Niger (old Italian intelligence from the 1980’s) were the dowry of the second-in-command of SISMI’s Roman headquarters (Antonio Nucera). They were bundled together with another fabricated document...through a simulated burglary on the Nigerien embassy (from which they had gotten headed notepaper and seals).

Isn't that fascinating? If I'm reading this right, La Repubblica's story is that the document regarding the sale of uranium yellowcake was actually genuine — except that it was from the 1980s. That certainly explains why the names and dates didn't check out. Then a second document was added to the first one that was forged on genuine Nigerien notepaper. The Italians got this notepaper from an asset inside the Nigerien embassy, but their story to the Americans was that both documents had been burglarized.

(I should add that this second document was a genuinely strange affair, and it's never been clear why the forgers wasted their time creating it. For what it's worth, Matt Yglesias has an entertaining theory here.)

Some of the other stuff in the La Repubblica story I didn't quite get, which might be because the article is unclear or because the translation is unclear. Or just because the whole thing is outlandishly baroque. One thing's for sure, though: a bunch of people have some explaining to do.

LAST MINUTE PLAME UPDATE....The Financial Times, along with pretty much every news outlet in the galaxy, says Wednesday is the day:

Indictments in the CIA leak investigation case are expected to be handed down by a grand jury on Wednesday....On Tuesday night, news reports, supported by a source close to the lawyers involved in the case, said that target letters to those facing indictment were being issued, with sealed indictments to be filed today and released by the end of the week.

There was also some more peculiar news. Various reports confirm that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was conducting last minute questioning on Tuesday, including an interview with a White House colleague of Karl Rove as well as interviews with some of Joe Wilson's neighbors, apparently to find out if any of them knew Valerie Plame worked for the CIA before Robert Novak wrote his column exposing her.

I don't know what to make of this. On the one hand, it seems odd that Fitzgerald would still be questioning witnesses at this late date. If he has a good case, shouldn't he have wrapped up this stuff long ago?

On the other hand, it might also mean that he's just being super meticulous. Or, perhaps, that he's considering which charges to indict on. As the LA Times puts it:

Some of the questioning indicates that Fitzgerald may still be considering indictments for theories in the case that some have viewed as too difficult to pursue, including a prosecution under a federal law that makes it a felony to reveal the name of a covert agent.

We'll see. Wednesday should be an exciting day, shouldn't it?

INDICTMENTS TOMORROW?....Last night the New York Times reported that it was CIA director George Tenet who originally told Dick Cheney that Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA. Cheney then passed this along to Scooter Libby, who passed it on to Judith Miller.

Today, Crooks and Liars says that MSNBC correspondent David Shuster has reported that Tenet denies this. Tenet says he didn't tell Cheney or anyone in Cheney's office about Wilson, nor was he asked about this by investigators two years ago.

For what it's worth, this sounds right to me. It just doesn't sound like the kind of thing Tenet would have told Cheney.

In other Plamegate news, Steve Clemons passes along a rumor that Patrick Fitzgerald will hand down 1-5 indictments tomorrow and that the targets of indictment have already received their letters. This is sourced to an "uber-insider source," whatever that means.

The bad news, though, is that Steve's source confirms my worst fears: Fitzgerald will be handing down sealed indictments. If that's true, it means we won't be any wiser tomorrow than we are today. All we'll have is some names and some charges, but no evidence.

Stay tuned for more.

CONSTITUTION PASSES....It's official. Iraq has a new constitution:

According to the vote tallies released by officials here, more than 78 percent of the voters nationwide approved the constitution.

....A majority of voters in three of Iraq's 18 provinces voted against the constitution, but one of them failed to reach the two-thirds threshold — a veto provision designed to protect Iraq's minority communities. In Anbar province, 96 percent of those casting ballots voted against the referendum, and 81 percent rejected it in Salahaddin. But in the key swing province of Nineveh, 56 percent voted against the constitution — about 10 percentage points short of what was necessary to kill the charter.

Complete results by province (via the BBC) are below the fold.

NIGER FORGERY UPDATE....One of the million dollar questions at the heart of Plamegate is: where did those forged Niger documents come from, anyway? The short answer is that they came from Italian intelligence. And another question: why, in June 2003, was the White House seemingly so afraid of further publicity about those documents, which had been exposed as forgeries months before without doing them any real damage? Laura Rozen puts a few more puzzle pieces together over at the American Prospect today:

In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002.

....Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.

La Repubblica's story suggests that the Italians pushed hard on the documents because they were eager to impress the Americans with their loyalty to the war cause. When the CIA and the State Department didn't bite, they went straight to the White House. Read Laura's entire piece for all the details.

There are plenty of questions still open, of course. Whose idea were the documents in the first place? Did Sismi know they were fake when they handed them over? Did Hadley? And why did everyone ignore the State Department's conclusion, rendered almost immediately after Sismi turned over the documents, that they were obvious forgeries?

So many questions. So few answers. I don't think Patrick Fitzgerald is going to answer them, but perhaps we're getting a bit closer to someone else figuring it out.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall answers one of my questions. He says that La Repubblica's story reports that Nicolo Pollari knew the documents were fake at the time he was peddling them to the CIA and the White House.

IRAQ WAR MILESTONE....The Wall Street Journal reports that we've passed the halfway point: more than half of all Americans now think that invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do. The raw data is here. I've interpolated missing data on the chart to show a continuous trend.

In other news, 66% of U.S. adults now say President Bush is doing a "poor" or "only fair" job of handling Iraq; 61% say they aren't confident U.S. policies in Iraq will be successful; and 44% believe the situation for U.S. troops in Iraq is getting worse (compared to only 19% who think it's improving). I have a feeling that yet another series of "same 'ol, same 'ol" speeches from the president aren't going to turn this around.

WILSON AND PINCUS....This is not the most important thing in the world, but since I happened to write about it just yesterday I suppose I should follow up on it. In a post about Joe Wilson's trip to Niger in 2002, I mentioned that both Nick Kristof and Walter Pincus later wrote stories — based on anonymous conversations with Wilson — that credited Wilson with debunking the forged Niger documents when he returned home. However, that wasn't true: at the time of his trip he had never seen the documents.

Did Wilson mislead Kristof and Pincus? Or did they just scramble what Wilson told them? As I mentioned yesterday, in an email to me last year, Wilson stated flatly:

I told Nick and later Walter Pincus about my trip and the fact that it was a report based on those documents that had led to my being asked to travel. I never claimed to have seen the documents or to have known anything about signatures or dates.

A couple of weeks later, he said that he had spoken to Kristof and "He confirmed that I had made clear to him that I had never seen the documents."

But what about Walter Pincus? Today Pincus wrote this:

Wilson has also armed his critics by misstating some aspects of the Niger affair. For example, Wilson told The Washington Post anonymously in June 2003 that he had concluded that the intelligence about the Niger uranium was based on forged documents because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." The Senate intelligence committee, which examined pre-Iraq war intelligence, reported that Wilson "had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports." Wilson had to admit he had misspoken.

Unless I've missed it before, this is the first time Pincus has publicly said that Wilson misled him. Wilson addressed this issue in a letter to Pat Roberts after the Senate intelligence committee report was released last year, but never specifically addressed the question of what he told Pincus. In fact, he said of his investigation into Iraq's alleged attempt to purchase uranium, "My mission was to look into whether such a transaction took place or could take place. It had not and could not. By definition that makes the documents bogus."

And there it stands. I wonder why Pincus chose today to finally mention this? Odd timing, no?

SLOGANEERING....The Hill reports on the latest Democratic Party strategerizing:

House Democratic leaders are holding a closed-door meeting with members of their caucus this afternoon to discuss a new slogan for the 2006 midterm elections: "Together, We Can Do Better" or "Together, America Can Do Better," according to Democratic sources.

...."America Can Do Better," which lacks the word "Together," has also been in frequent rotation this fall.

....Democrats plan to unveil their 2006 party platform in the coming weeks, much earlier than in previous cycles and way ahead of the GOP's 1994 "Contract With America," which came out six weeks before the election.

God knows I've been in charge of enough product naming and company slogan fiascos to have some sympathy for anyone else trying their hand at this, but it sure looks like these guys have managed to consider every combination of words for this tagline except for the obvious one: a quick, pithy, "We Can Do Better." It's punchier, it's less saccharine, it hits harder, and it still gets the point across. For a few minutes in the debates last fall, John Kerry ended every criticism of George Bush with "We can do better," and I thought it worked pretty well. He should have kept it up.

Whatever. I know how these things go. But on another subject, what's the deal with unveiling the party platform so soon? I assume it's gong to be same bland, gutless marshmallow that it usually is, so I suppose it doesn't really matter, but a lot of things can change in the next nine months. Nobody's paying any attention to this stuff right now anyway, so why not wait and ensure that the Dem platform addresses whatever the most important issues happen to be at the time of the actual election? Just asking.

CHENEY AND PLAME....Andrew Sullivan does some theorizing about Dick Cheney's role in Plamegate here and here. Bottom line: he was behind the whole thing.

Could be. Sullivan's theories are as good as anything else I've heard. If Fitzgerald hands down indictments this week, I sure hope they contain enough substance to actually answer a few of these nagging questions.

POWELL AND THE WHITE HOUSE....Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, expands on his earlier criticism of the White House foreign policy "cabal" in the LA Times this morning:

The administration's performance during its first four years would have been even worse without Powell's damage control. At least once a week, it seemed, Powell trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet. He held a youthful, inexperienced president's hand. He told him everything would be all right because he, the secretary of State, would fix it. And he did — everything from a serious crisis with China when a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft was struck by a Chinese F-8 fighter jet in April 2001, to the secretary's constant reassurances to European leaders following the bitter breach in relations over the Iraq war. It wasn't enough, of course, but it helped.

This was an unfortunate paragraph for Wilkerson to add to his general critique of how the Cheney/Rumsfeld axis ramrodded reckless and poorly planned foreign policy proposals through a White House unprepared to understand the consequences. Regardless of what you think of his overall assessment, this paragraph makes it look like nothing more than the usual pissing contest between State and Defense, with Powell playing the part of far sighted but long suffering wise man who will eventually be vindicated by history.

The problem is that no one's going to buy that after Powell's four year history within the administration of doggedly loyal public support combined with a steady drip of self-serving private leaks designed to distance himself from anything that turned out badly. If Powell himself believes what Wilkerson is saying, then it's long past time for him to step forward and say it himself in no uncertain terms. If he doesn't, he should say that too. He can't have it both ways.

PLAMEGATE AND NIGER....UPI's Martin Walker reports a strange twist in the Valerie Plame case today. He says that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has asked for, and obtained, the full version of an Italian parliamentary inquiry into the forgery of the pre-war documents that claimed Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger.

But why did he do that? Mark Kleiman argues persuasively that it's unlikely that Fitzgerald has widened the scope of his investigation to include Uraniumgate, so what's the point of getting his hands on the Italian report? I'm not sure myself, but here's a bit of thinking out loud on the subject.

For starters, the White House's motivation for smearing Joe Wilson has always been murkier than it might seem at first glance. After all, as Bob Somerby is fond of pointing out, Joe Wilson's famous July 2003 op-ed in the New York Times didn't actually contradict anything the White House had said. In his 2003 State of the Union address, George Bush said that Iraq had "sought...uranium from Africa," while Wilson said only that his trip to Niger convinced him that Iraq had not in fact succeeded in buying uranium. So why the desperate smear campaign against Wilson? Even Karl Rove must have known that leaking his wife's name was fantastically reckless and over the top. Why not just point out the lack of contradiction and leave it at that?

To figure that out, you have to go back in time to May and June of 2003. Before Wilson wrote his op-ed, he spoke anonymously about his trip to two reporters, Nick Kristof of the New York Times and Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, both of whom wrote about an "envoy" (i.e., Wilson) who had gone to Niger the previous year and, when he returned, told the CIA that the Nigerien documents were phony. Since we know that the smear campaign against Wilson started in June (or earlier), it was those reports that got the White House up in arms, not the July op-ed.

Now, as it happens, Kristof and Pincus were wrong: Wilson had not actually seen the documents at the time he traveled to Niger and he hadn't debunked them. Did he tell Kristof and Pincus that he had? In an email to me last year, he stated flatly that "I never claimed to have seen the documents or to have known anything about signatures or dates." A couple of weeks later, he said that he had spoken to Kristof and "He confirmed that I had made clear to him that I had never seen the documents."

But regardless of where the truth lies, the fact is that Kristof and Pincus wrote what they wrote, and obviously their stories scared the daylights out of the White House. But again, why? After all, even though Wilson hadn't debunked the documents, in March of 2003 the IAEA did. At the time all this was happening, the entire world had known they were fake for months. So why the panic?

Well, there was something the White House knew at that point that the rest of us didn't. They knew that not only were the Nigerien documents fake, but that they had been proven fake the previous year — though not by Wilson or the IAEA. At that time, everybody thought the timeline went like this: (1) Bush gives SOTU address in January 2003, (2) IAEA proves Nigerien documents are phony in March. That's bad, but not catastrophic. However, the real timeline, known to only a few, was this: (1) State Department determines Nigerien docs are phony in October 2002, (2) Bush mentions African uranium anyway in January SOTU address.

Connect the dots. Rightly or wrongly, Kristof and Pincus reported that Wilson had told the administration the Nigerien documents were fake long before Bush's 2003 SOTU address — contrary to the storyline accepted at the time. What's more, Wilson was a former ambassador, which made the Kristof/Pincus reporting pretty plausible. The White House probably figured Wilson still had friends in the State Department who had told him the documents had been debunked long before the SOTU. And if Wilson knew that, maybe he knew about the source of the forged documents as well. Or was on the trail of it. Or something.

And that's what scared them: the possibility that someone was about to expose the story behind the forged documents. That would have blown the pre-war stories about "mushroom clouds" and nuclear programs sky high, and that's what caused them to wildly overreact to Wilson's otherwise innocuous criticisms.

And that's why Fitzgerald wanted to see the Italian report. He figures it might explain the original motivation for the whole affair, and knowing the motivation might help him make his case.

At least, that's my best guess. The irony, of course, is that Wilson didn't know the story behind the forged documents and neither did anyone else. And despite plenty of digging, to this day no one knows the story. But the aftershocks live on.

POSTSCRIPT: For easy reference, here's the basic Uraniumgate timeline:

• February 2002: The CIA receives "verbatim text" from Italian intelligence of some documents claiming that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger. Joe Wilson goes to Niger to investigate this claim and reports back that it seems highly unlikely.
  

• October 2002: State Department intelligence agency (INR) gets an actual copy of the Niger docs and immediately concludes that they're bogus. However, nobody outside the government knows this.
  

• January 2003: George Bush gives SOTU address, claiming that Iraq has sought uranium from Africa.
  

• March 2003: IAEA publicly announces the Niger docs are forgeries.
  

• May/June 2003: Based on anonymous sourcing from Wilson, Kristof and Pincus report on the Niger story, mistakenly saying that "the envoy" had debunked the docs back in February 2002.
  

• July 6, 2003: Wilson publishes his op-ed.
  

• July 11, 2003: CIA director George Tenet admits that Bush shouldn't have included the uranium claim in the SOTU.
  

LIBBY AND CHENEY....Here's today's bombshell in the Valerie Plame case:

I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.

Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby’s testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.

....Mr. Libby’s notes indicate that Mr. Cheney had gotten his information about Ms. Wilson from George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, in response to questions from the vice president about Mr. Wilson.

An anonymous source quoted later in the story disputes this, saying he "strongly doubted that the White House learned about Ms. Plame from Mr. Tenet."

Still, that doesn't get Libby off the hook. It's not nice to lie to a grand jury.

BAD NEWS FROM IRAQ....Via Tapped, the Telegraph reports that a poll commissioned by the British military shows an appalling decline in support for the occupation among ordinary Iraqis:

The survey was conducted by an Iraqi university research team that, for security reasons, was not told the data it compiled would be used by coalition forces. It reveals:

• Forty-five per cent of Iraqis believe attacks against British and American troops are justified — rising to 65 per cent in the British-controlled Maysan province;

• 82 per cent are "strongly opposed" to the presence of coalition troops;

• less than one per cent of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security;
  

....The opinion poll, carried out in August...differ[s] markedly from a survey carried out by the BBC in March 2004 in which the overwhelming consensus among the 2,500 Iraqis questioned was that life was good.

Yes, it's only one poll, and there's no telling how reliable the methodology was. But if it's really true that 82% of the population is strongly opposed to the presence of coalition troops — and 45% are fanatically, murderously opposed — then there's simply no hope left. Karen Hughes can't do anything about poll numbers like that.

SPRAWL....Robert Bruegmann wrote a fascinating (to me) op-ed in the LA Times yesterday. He says that Los Angeles isn't the icon of suburban sprawl that people think it is:

Although it is true that the Los Angeles region in its early years had widely scattered settlements, these settlements were not particularly low in density. Since World War II, moreover, the density of the Los Angeles region has climbed dramatically, while that of older cities in the North and East has plummeted. The result is that today the Los Angeles urbanized area, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau, has just over 7,000 people per square mile — by a fair margin the densest in the United States.

Oh come on. This must be some kind of statistical trick, right?

Many people think that this must be a statistical trick because no part of the L.A. region could possibly be as dense as Manhattan or central Chicago. But there is no trick. Los Angeles has always had relatively small lot sizes, very little abandonment and, because of the difficulty in obtaining water, almost none of the really low-density suburban and exurban development that extends for dozens of miles in all directions outside older cities in the northern and eastern United States.

Bruegmann argues that in addition to being denser than you think, Los Angeles is actually better planned than most older cities. What's more, LA's sprawl predates the automobile, so car culture isn't responsible for our physical landscape.

Is this right? I have to say that he makes a persuasive case. It's hard to blame cars for Southern California sprawl if our land use patterns were set in the early 20th century. And yet....somehow it still seems like there must be a statistical trick in there somewhere. But where?

NEW BLOGS....The New Republic has a new blog authored by Franklin Foer, Michael Crowley, Jason Zengerle, and "TNR's staff." It's called The Plank.

In other news, I understand that former Washington Monthly guest blogger Michael Hiltzik will start writing a blog of his own for the Los Angeles Times next week. URL tk.

BERNANKE GETS FED NOD....Well, it's official. Ben Bernanke is George Bush's choice to replace Alan Greenspan as head of the Federal Reserve. Other people will likely have learned commentary on this choice, but not me. I'm just passing on the news.

UPDATE: Reviews from around the blogosphere:

• Tyler Cowen: "An excellent choice and a first-rate economist." Gives him an overall grade of A-/B+.
  

• Max Sawicky: Not bad. Better than Martin Feldstein, anyway.
  

• Larry Kudlow: "A good choice." Better than Donald Kohn, that's for sure.
  

• Brad DeLong: "A very good choice."
  

"WHAT MONEY?"....Via the Carpetbagger, here's an excerpt from a New York Times Magazine interview with former Senator Connie Mack, the guy who's in charge of the president's tax reform panel. Read and be amazed:

Well, the U.S. government has to get money from somewhere. As a two-term former Republican senator from Florida, where do you suggest we get money from?

What money?

The money to run this country.

We'll borrow it.

I never understand where all this money comes from. When the president says we need another $200 billion for Katrina repairs, does he just go and borrow it from the Saudis?

In a sense, we do. Maybe the Chinese.

Is that fair to our children? If we keep borrowing at this level, won't the Arabs or the Chinese eventually own this country?

I am not worried about that....

Tell me again how these guys ended up in charge of the country?

POSTSCRIPT: I have a feeling the typography got screwed up in this interview. The line that begins "When the president says" sounds like it was something the interviewer said, not Mack. Can someone who has a copy of the print magazine look this up and see?

POSCRIPT 2: A reader confirms my suspicion. I've corrected the text.

BUSH'S BRAIN....Tom DeFrank is back with another peek inside the White House. Long story short, he says Bush has turned into Richard Nixon:

Bush usually reserves his celebrated temper for senior aides because he knows they can take it. Lately, however, some junior staffers have also faced the boss' wrath.

....Presidential advisers and friends say Bush is a mass of contradictions: cheerful and serene, peevish and melancholy, occasionally lapsing into what he once derided as the "blame game." They describe him as beset but unbowed, convinced that history will vindicate the major decisions of his presidency even if they damage him and his party in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

Who the hell are DeFrank's sources for this stuff? And why are they leaking it?

In any case, it's worth noting that although Bush may be peevish and melancholy, his legendary poor judgment is still intact. According to DeFrank, "The vice president remains Bush's most trusted political confidant."

CRONYISM UPDATE....The Wall Street Journal reports that if Patrick Fitzgerald hands down indictments in the Valerie Plame case this week, George Bush will probably be forced to shake up the White House Staff. But there's a fly in the ointment:

If Mr. Bush has to make such decisions, his choices could be complicated by the possibility that White House chief of staff Andrew Card might want a new post. Mr. Card has been chief of staff for Mr. Bush's entire first term and one year of his second — an unusually long stint in a very stressful job. Mr. Card is thought to be interested in the Treasury secretary's job, when and if John Snow decides to step down.

Well, I'm interested in that job too. But aside from being a Democrat, there's also the minor problem that I have no relevant experience. Neither does Card.

I don't imagine that a PhD in economics is required to be Treasury Secretary, but shouldn't the nominee have at least a wee bit of experience in finance or business? The closest Card has come has been a stint as a lobbyist for the auto industry.

If Card wants a reward for long and faithful service, I'd be happy to see him appointed as ambassador to some pleasant and reasonably important country. But Treasury Secretary? Please.

SCOWCROFT SPEAKS....Steve Clemons has a long series of excerpts posted today from Jeffrey Goldberg's New Yorker article about Brent Scowcroft's unhappiness with the current Bush administration. Since Scowcroft is a close friend of George Bush Sr., it's a significant piece. Here's Scowcroft on Dick Cheney:

"The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney," Scowcroft said. "I consider Cheney a good friend — I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."

As for W himself, Goldberg reports that he has no time for guys like Scowcroft:

According to friends of the elder Bush, the estrangement of his son and his best friend has been an abiding source of unhappiness, not only for Bush but for Barbara Bush as well. George Bush, the forty-first President, has tried several times to arrange meetings between his son, "Forty-three," and his former national-security adviser to no avail, according to people with knowledge of these intertwined relationships.

And Scowcroft doesn't think much of W, either:

When I asked Scowcroft if the son was different from the father, he said, "I don't want to go there," but his dissatisfaction with the son's agenda could not have been clearer. When I asked him to name issues on which he agrees with the younger Bush, he said, "Afghanistan." He paused for twelve seconds. Finally, he said, "I think we're doing well on Europe," and left it at that.

Read the whole thing. If the New Yorker puts up a link to the full piece later, I'll let you know.

HEADSET QUERY....I'd like to buy a headset for my telephone. Actually, let me rephrase that: I've already got a headset for my telephone, and I'd like to buy a really high quality replacement for it.

Any suggestions based on personal experience? My preference is for something that plugs in via a standard sub-mini jack (see picture at right) so that I can use it on a variety of corded and cordless phones, but I'm willing to consider more complex alternatives as well. Within reason, cost is not an issue. What I'm looking for is something with very high sound quality: no tinniness, no echo, no "you sound like you're talking from inside a barrel." Something that will make sound engineers happy when I'm chatting on radio shows.

Recommendations are welcome. And failing that, does anyone know why the sound quality on most headset sucks so badly? I mean, a mike is a mike. Why should the 20-cent microphone on a headset be any worse than the 20-cent microphone in a handset?

IN DEFENSE OF THE UNITED NATIONS....Suzanne Nossel suggests that UN bashers should take a look at its role in investigating the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri:

Without a broadly mandated UN, how could the Hariri case have moved beyond finger pointing? The Lebanese government could never have been trusted to investigate. There's no way the US itself could have interfered. The Arab League could not have been objective. The EU would never have waded in. The International Criminal Court would not have had jurisdiction. Without the UN, its hard to envision how the investigation, particularly given its depth and breadth, could have been carried out.

She's right. The UN report has given a huge boost to calls for reform in both Lebanon and Syria, and it wouldn't have happened if the report had come from anywhere else. Are you listening, John Bolton?

TABOR BLUES....Colorado's Republican governor, Bill Owens, is fighting to overturn his state's TABOR law, a spending cap that has devastated the state so badly that even the business community now wants to get rid of it. Here's what Owens says about the law:

"I don't think it was designed to cripple government," he said of the Taxpayers Bill of Rights, or TABOR, amendment his state's voters approved. "This is an unintended consequence."

Idiot. Of course it was intended to cripple government. That's why Grover Norquist and Dick Armey and the rest of the tax jihad army are still fighting to keep it around. To them, destruction of state services is a feature, not a bug. They won't be happy until Colorado and the entire rest of the country look like Mississippi.

WHAT DEMOCRATS STAND FOR....David Adesnik recently sat in on a focus group of (Ivy League) Democratic activists and came away surprised. Conventional wisdom says that if you ask ten Democrats what the party stands for, you'll get 11 different answers:

Yet in our focus group, almost every answer was exactly the same. The purpose of the Democratic party is to help the poor and the disadvantaged.

....The organizer's response to this unexpected consensus was both sympathetic and devastating. On the one hand, this consensus suggested that there is a foundational commitment on which Democrats can build. On the other hand, if the purpose of the Democratic party is to help the disadvantaged, what can the party possibly offer to the overwhelming majority of Americans who see themeslves as middle class?

In terms of domestic politics, Mark Reutter points toward the right answer in this piece in the Washington Post today about the increasing number of large corporation filing for Chapter 11 protection:

As the prospect of other large enterprises taking a spin down Chapter 11 becomes more widely discussed in business circles ("maybes" on the list include such iconic names as General Motors and Ford), the tactics used in bankruptcy courts are shaking the very foundations of the American workplace.

Whether an assembly-line worker or middle manager, an employee can no longer assume that promises made earlier — health benefits or fully funded pensions — will be there when he or she retires. The loss of security arising from Chapter 11 reorganizations has introduced a new element of anxiety into the lives of baby boomers who are approaching 60, not to mention younger workers just starting out in their careers.

To a growing extent, the type of gnawing stress and uncertainty that has always afflicted the daily life of the poor is increasingly afflicting the working and middle classes as well: stagnant wages, booms and busts in income from year to year, disappearing pensions, predatory lending, unreliable healthcare, and the constant, everpresent background fear of being laid off and falling into a hole you can never dig yourself out of.

This growing instability affects a huge swath of workers in the United States, and it's something the Democratic Party should dedicate itself to addressing. For more, see Jacob Hacker's terrific New Republic article on the subject and Peter Gosselin's related take in the Los Angeles Times.

IDLE CHATTER?....The New York Times reports today that in a memo to editor Bill Keller, Judith Miller said that when Scooter Libby told her Joe Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, it was nothing but casual conversation:

She wrote that...she had discussed Mr. Wilson and his wife with government officials, but "I was unaware that there was a deliberate, concerted disinformation campaign to discredit Wilson and that if there had been, I did not think I was a target of it."

Compare that to Robert Novak's self-defense from two years ago:

I would like to stress three points. First, I did not receive a planned leak....During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA's counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger.

The story from both of these extremely experienced reporters is that the disclosure to them of Plame's employment was nothing but idle chatter. Nothing planned about it. They want us to believe that the only way White House operatives plant rumors is to pick up the phone, dial it methodically, and then spit out the dirt along with a request to please try to see that this ends up on the front page.

They should stop insulting our intelligence. Intelligent adults don't operate this crudely and they both know it. They're either lying or else exceptionally gullible. Here's what we've known since September of 2003:

A senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife...."Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.

I have no doubt that these officials did their best to make their disclosures sound casual. Miller and Novak either fell for it, or else were willing accomplices. Neither option speaks well for their ability to do their job.

UPDATE: In the original version of this post I said that Novak's initial source was now known to be Scooter Libby, but Libby's lawyer says Libby never spoke to Novak. My memory must have been playing tricks on me. The text has been corrected.

GOOGLE vs. THE WORLD....The Washington Post has a couple of op-eds today providing pro and con views of Google's project to scan the world's books and allow people to search them online. For copyrighted books, the search will return only a small extract of the book, something that Google argues is covered by the existing fair use doctrine. Conversely, Nick Taylor, president of the Authors Guild, opposes Google's project as an infringement of copyright, suggesting that when Google made a unilateral decision about what counts as fair use and what doesn't, it set itself up as "the arbiter of a legal concept it has no right to interpret." Dave Munger cries foul:

Google has done anything but usurp the role of government, because copyright law doesn’t give government the role of determining whether a specific use of copyrighted material falls under the fair use guidelines. The only way for that to be achieved is by filing a lawsuit.

True enough. After all, there's no Office of Fair Use Resolution in the federal government. At the same time, that sort of makes Taylor's point, doesn't it? The only way to figure out what the law says is for someone to sue Google and get a judge to rule on it.

For many people, especially writers who benefit from copyright but would also benefit from Google's project, this case is excrutiatingly hard to form an opinion about. On the one hand, it's a truly stupendous undertaking, a boon to both popular and scholarly research that's hard to overestimate. What's more, Google's restriction of search results to small snippets demonstrates considerable sensitivity to the rights of the original authors. As a matter of public policy, it seems like a no-brainer that something like this should not only be legal, but positively encouraged.

On the other hand, it's true that this isn't a use that authors had in mind when they originally published their books. And as with other database-driven collections, there's a big difference between an author excerpting one book for the purpose of illustration or criticism and a huge corporation excerpting millions — and making money off it.

If it were up to me, I'd vote with the public interest. I sometimes feel that if the increasingly expansive view of copyright asserted today had been around a couple of centuries ago, the Supreme Court would have ruled that lending libraries were illegal. But just as circulating libraries have a social value that far outweighs the minimal intrusion they produce in an author's ability to control the distribution of her work, the same is true of Google's project. The technology has changed, but the principle is the same.

At the same time, it's too bad this has to be decided by the courts. It's really a job for Congress, after all. Unfortunately, both Republicans and Democrats appear to be so thoroughly bought and paid for by the content industry that it's pretty much inconceivable they'd do the right thing if it were brought to a vote. So it's off to court we go, with the hope that existing law will be enough. I hope Google wins.

MIERS ON THE CONSTITUTION....On her Senate questionnaire, Harriet Miers only took a stab at answering one question about her experience with constitutional law — and she blew it:

At one point, Miers described her service on the Dallas City Council in 1989. When the city was sued for violating the Voting Rights Act, she said, the council "had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection clause."

But the Supreme Court repeatedly has said that the Constitution's guarantee of the "equal protection of the laws" does not mean that city councils or state legislatures must have enough minority members to match the proportion of blacks, Hispanics and Asians in the voting population.

....Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan...said she was surprised the White House did not check Miers' questionnaire before sending it to the Senate.

"Are they trying to set her up? Any halfway competent junior lawyer could have checked the questionnaire and said it cannot go out like that. I find it shocking," she said.

So much for that famous attention to detail. This soap opera just gets worse with every passing day.

SYRIA IN TROUBLE?....A UN report blaming Syria for the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri has electrified the Middle East:

The publication of the report on the deaths of Hariri and 22 other people in a car bombing in Beirut on Feb. 14 unleashed a reaction seldom seen in the Middle East. The 54-page document was read in its entirety on al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite television network; other stations broadcast hours of coverage Friday on the report and its fallout. To many people here, its publication marked a turning point in Middle East politics, signaling a looming confrontation with an uncertain outcome.

"This is simply the beginning," said Farid El-Khazen, a Lebanese lawmaker and political scientist. "There is little room for maneuver left for the Syrians now. They have to cooperate fully to save themselves from more isolation or they opt for rejection of the report, claiming it is all political. Syria doesn't have a middle-ground option."

This article, written by the Washington Post's Anthony Shadid, is much more interesting than any of the others I read, which mostly just regurgitated predictable quotes from George Bush and Condoleezza Rice about the need for the UN to take some kind of "action."

But what really matters is how this is playing in the Middle East. Reading a 54-page report on the air doesn't sound like very compelling TV to me, but I assume al-Jazeera knows its audience. This must be big stuff.

POSTSCRIPT: On the other hand, Michael Totten, our man on the scene, says he talked to a few people in Beirut Friday morning and "none were particularly worried about what is going to happen." In fact, "It’s a nice day, actually. The weather is glorious." We'll see who calls this one right.

RAT, MEET SINKING SHIP....Now that Colin Powell's former chief of staff has spoken his mind about the folks running the White House these days, who's next? Steve Clemons says that the New Yorker will be running an article on Monday by Jeffrey Goldberg in which Powell's longtime mentor, Brent Scowcroft, levels a "powerful new attack" on the Bush administration.

That should be interesting. Scowcraft, an old school Bush Sr. wise man, opposed the Iraq war, but after last year's election said the decision was "behind us" and it was time to move on. By "move on," though, he meant that the Bush administration needed to revitalize the Middle East peace process and start engaging seriously with Iran, two things that pretty clearly haven't happened. Apparently he's now had enough.

Steve also says that Goldberg's article will contain some "incredibly juicy commentary from President George H.W. Bush on the performance of his son's national security team." We'll see. I suspect it will actually be fairly restrained.

For genuinely juicy commentary, though, there's always Chris Nelson, who makes the following observation about Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage:

There is no question from private remarks and public grimaces, some reaching back to early 2001, neither Powell nor Armitage had or has much trust or respect for Rice, and they share with other senior Republican wisemen the conviction that Rumsfeld is quite literally mad, and Cheney a dangerous, vindictive monomaniac.

It's too bad these guys couldn't have spoken up, say, last year, when it might have mattered, but better late than never, I guess. At any rate, I eagerly await the revelation of just what it was that caused Scowcroft to finally flip his lid. Maybe it will help Powell will grow some balls and speak out too. That would be fun.

MAGGIE ON MARRIAGE....At the risk of butting in on Kieran's territory, I decided to go read Maggie Gallagher's complete week of guest blogging over at the Volokh Conspiracy to see if I could figure out why she's so violently opposed to same-sex marriage. Clearly she thinks that SSM will have disastrous effects on the institution of marriage, but it turns out that she managed to write several thousand words over the course of five days without ever explaining why she thinks that. "Bad time management," she explains. Here's the closest she comes:

If the principle behind SSM is institutionalized in law...then people like me who think marriage is the union of husband and wife importantly related to the idea that children need moms and dads will be treated in society and at law like bigots.

I promise that this isn't mockery or an attempt to miss her point. Out of all the posts she wrote, this was the best she could do. She's afraid that if society comes to accept SSM, then people who dislike it will be marginalized.

Well, I suppose that's true. And it's especially true if they can't actually verbalize their reasons for opposing it in the first place. And I'm afraid this won't do either:

Imagine you stand in the middle of vast, hostile desert. A camel is your only means of transversing it, your lifeline to the future. The camel is burdened — stumbling, loaded down, tired; enfeebled — the conditions of the modern life are clearly not favorable to it. But still it’s your only hope, because to get across that desert you need a camel.

Now, chop off its legs and order it to carry you to safety.

That’s what SSM looks like, to me.

I dunno. That's what a camel snuff film looks like to me, but not much else. I think this argument needs some work.

NEWS OF THE WEB....Dan Froomkin reports that Valerie Plame prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has launched a brand new website:

Could it be that he's getting ready to release some new legal documents? Like, maybe, some indictments? It's certainly not the action of an office about to fold up its tents and go home.

You can see the site here, and it's pretty bare bones. It certainly, um, looks like it could use some additional content, if you know what I mean.

(Fitzgerald's flack says we shouldn't read too much into this. Sure, sure. I say, it's Friday, and I'll read whatever I want into it. And I think you know what that is.)

"METHODICAL, DETAIL-ORIENTED, AND COMPREHENSIVE"....Did Scooter Libby pull a Nixon over Joe Wilson? In the LA Times this morning, Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger suggest he did:

"Scooter had a plan to counter Wilson and a passionate desire to do so," said a second person, a former White House official familiar with the internal deliberations.

....Libby's anger over Wilson's 2003 charges has been known. But new interviews and documents obtained by The Times provide a more detailed view of the depth and duration of Libby's interest in Wilson....After Wilson published a book criticizing the administration in April 2004, during the closely fought presidential campaign, Libby became consumed by passages that he believed were inaccurate or unfair to Cheney, former aides said. He ordered up a meticulous catalog of Wilson's claims and public statements going back to early 2003.

Will anyone defend Libby? Mary Matalin basically says, hey, that's just Scooter. He's a "methodical, detail-oriented and comprehensive worker."

Works for me. I guess if a smear is worth doing, it's worth doing right.

LIFE WITHOUT KARL....The wonkish Bruce Reed contemplates life without Karl Rove and likes what he sees:

From Atwater to Ailes, Morris to Rove, American politics has become obsessed with the cult of the evil genius. This cult is especially popular in Washington, where young Mini-Me's come to cut their teeth, and the Art Formerly Known as Government is hopelessly passé.

This is the single biggest catastrophe of Rovism. Not the tax cuts, nor the Social Security fiasco, nor the lousy Medicare bill, but the simple fact that nobody really cared whether any of these policies worked in the first place. Remember what John DiIulio told Ron Suskind three years ago:

In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues....the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking.

And what Suskind himself heard while he was waiting outside Karl Rove's door for an interview:

Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!"

Will the White House be ruined if Karl Rove leaves? If it is, there was nothing there to be ruined in the first place.

CAR-OWNING, PILL-POPPING, BODY-PIERCING, CAREER-ORIENTED, DEGREE-GRANTED, SEXUALLY CONFIDENT, FREQUENT-FLYER, ATHEISTIC SLUTS....Kieran Healy takes on Leon Kass over at Crooked Timber. It's worth a read if you're in the mood for some high quality mockery.

BLOGS AND SOCIAL SECURITY....I'm not generally much of a blog triumphalist, but Reed Hundt caught my eye today with this criticism of Jackie Calmes' Wall Street Journal article about why George Bush's Social Security reform failed:

First, she neglects huge role played by blogworld, which every moment eagle-eyed every distortion, misrepresentation, confusion, and unanswered question embedded in the White House campaign against defined benefits for retirees.

Hmmm. That actually sounds plausible. I wouldn't buy the maximal case that Blogs Won The Social Security War, mind you, but they probably did have a real effect, didn't they? They helped drive media coverage to some extent, and they probably also helped stiffen the spines of Democratic politicians who might otherwise have been tempted to compromise on the issue.

It's funny that I hadn't thought of this, but until now I hadn't. It still seems to be the case that blogs are better at stopping things than making things happen, but helping stop a major policy fiasco is certainly more impressive than getting someone fired. The blogosphere is growing up!

MAKE WAR NO MORE?....In the American Prospect this month, Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias chastise liberal hawks who have defended their past support of the Iraq war by claiming that it failed only because George Bush has prosecuted it incompetently. Instead, they argue, liberal hawks should admit that it was just a bad idea, full stop. It's simply not possible to impose democracy by force, and it wouldn't have worked no matter who was in charge.

This criticism certainly applies to me. Sure, I switched from pro-war to anti-war before the war started, but so what? I did so because I thought that "Bush's implementation of the war is the very one that will prevent it from ultimately being successful," and this statement clearly implies that I thought it was possible for a different implementation to succeed. So let's take a look at that.

Sam and Matt make three practical — not moral — points, all of them technical in nature. First, they take apart the argument that the occupation would have worked better if only we'd used more troops. This may be true, they point out, but since we didn't have more troops, this is just wishful thinking. I've made this argument myself, so obviously I'm sympathetic to it.

Second, they claim that hawks are wrong to think that we might have succeeded if only we hadn't disbanded the Iraqi army shortly after the fall of Baghdad. Unfortunately, Sam and Matt gloss over this pretty quickly, suggesting only that this wasn't the result of incompetence, it was the result of insistent Shia and Kurdish demands that any president would have been forced to respond to. This is unconvincing, and it's something that deserves a deeper look since it's pretty clear that the disbanded army has been one of the primary recruiting grounds for the Sunni insurgency we've been fighting ever since.

Third — and here I'm paraphrasing very loosely — they argue that the American military is lousy at policing and counterinsurgency. In fact, I'd go further, and argue (for example, here, here, and here) that no Western power has ever demonstrated much success at counterinsurgency. As Major John Nagl, a scholar of guerrilla war, admits, "counterinsurgency requires an excruciatingly fine calibration of lethal force. Not enough of it means you will cede the offensive to your enemy, yet too much means you will alienate the noncombatants whose support you need." That knife edge may simply be impossible to balance.

These are all good arguments, but I think they obscure two more fundamental points that Sam and Matt don't address. Point #1 is the fact that democratization was probably never more than a small part of the original plan anyway, so maybe the whole "democracy at the point of a gun" argument isn't all that important. Here is Josh Marshall describing the neocon grand plan back in April 2003:

In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East.

....In short, the administration is trying to roll the table — to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism....Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments — or, failing that, U.S. troops — rule the entire Middle East.

In other words, democracy is nice — eventually — but the bigger issue is kicking over the status quo in the Middle East and forcing change. And the hawks would argue that this is happening. Slowly and fitfully, to be sure, but let's count up the successes so far: Iraq and Afghanistan are better off than before, Libya has given up its nuke program, Lebanon's Cedar Revolution is a sign of progress, Egypt has held a more open election than any before it, and the Syrian regime is under considerable pressure.

Did the invasion of Iraq precipitate these changes? I think the hawks considerably overstate their case, but at the same time they do have a case. Even if Iraq is a mess, it might all be worthwhile if it eventually produces progress toward a more open, more liberal Middle East. At the very least, it's an argument that needs to be engaged.

Point #2 is a little more abstract. Because Sam and Matt's arguments against democracy building are technical, they beg a question: what if we corrected the problems they allude to? After all, it's not impossible to have a bigger army, or to have an army that's better at policing and counterinsurgency, as Thomas P.M. Barnett argues we should.

So, should we? This question deserves a considered answer, because it gets to the heart of both liberal and conservative hawkishness. Is the threat posed by Middle Eastern terrorism great enough that we should take on the task of building a military that can fight and win wars of counterinsurgency and occupation in the future? Or should we just flatly rule it out?

As it happens, regular readers know that I mostly agree with Sam and Matt's probable views on all these questions. Kicking over anthills and hoping against hope that something good comes out of it is — to put it mildly — not a very convincing argument for war. The Iraq invasion has had some positive effects on the Middle East, but they've been modest and have been counterbalanced by some negative effects — and those effects are likely to get ever more negative as time goes by. In general, military action is counterproductive in a long ideological struggle like the war on terrorism, just as hot wars — Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Afghanistan — were the most disastrous events of the Cold War for everyone involved. And while I think that taking counterinsurgency more seriously is a good idea, I also suspect that there are systemic reasons that will prevent Western powers from ever successfully fighting a large scale overseas guerrilla war.

Still, these are assertions, not arguments, and if you're going to flatly suggest — on practical rather than moral grounds — that war "can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or comparable mass slaughter or loss of life," you need to engage these broad arguments, not merely demonstrate that Iraq would have been difficult verging on impossible no matter who was running the war. I think we need a sequel.

MIERS SINKS SLOWLY IN THE WEST....Byron York reports that Harriet Miers's courtesy calls with senators aren't going very well. An anonymous source who's been participating in the twice-weekly conference calls designed to bolster Miers's nomination says this:

"The meetings with the senators are going terribly. On a scale of one to 100, they are in negative territory. The thought now is that they have to end....Obviously the smart thing to do would be to withdraw the nomination and have a do-over as soon as possible. But the White House is so irrational that who knows? As of this morning, there is a sort of pig-headed resolve to press forward, cancel the meetings with senators if necessary, and bone up for the hearings."

Goodness. A "pig-headed resolve to press forward"? From George Bush? Who would have guessed?

WAR TORN....Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias have an article in the American Prospect this month called "The Incompetence Dodge." Nickel version: the problem with the Iraq war isn't just that the Bush administration carried it out incompetently. Rather, it was fundamentally impossible in the first place. It wouldn't have worked no matter who was in charge.

Sam and Matt would like you to read it. I already have, and have a few pointed comments, which I will share later since I have to go run some errands right now. In the meantime, do two things: first, read their argument, and second, take a trip back in time and read Josh Marshall's "Practice to Deceive" from April 2003.

I'll have my own comments later today.

VALUE-ADDED SCHOOL TESTING....In light of recent reports that the No Child Left Behind Act seems to have had little effect on student test scores, it's worth taking at look at problems with NCLB that even its supporters agree need to be addressed. One of them is NCLB's reliance on a single "one size fits all" set of standards for all students, a problem that Tom Toch explains in the October Monthly:

Educators in impoverished neighborhoods argue that the law's criteria for school success don't sufficiently take into account of how immensely far behind many of their students are when they start school. Educators and parents in affluent communities, where students routinely score above state standards, have a different complaint: that the NCLB accountability system is leading to a dumbing down of their schools' curricula. Many testing experts, meanwhile, point out that NCLB creates a host of perverse incentives, including encouraging states to set their academic standards low to reduce the number of their schools labeled “failing” under the law — the opposite of what NCLB's authors intended.

What's the answer? According to Sandy Kress, a Texas school reformer who was one of the original guiding lights behind NCLB, a better method is something called "value added," the system used in the Dallas School District:

Dallas, by contrast, measures individual student progress from a relative starting point. It compares a pupil's current test scores with the same pupil's scores a year earlier. A school in Dallas wins a high rating if its students on average score higher than would have been predicted based on those same students' prior level of achievement and if the school's performance overall is better than that of other schools with the same demographics. It earns a low rating if its students perform worse than would have been predicted.

....The “value added” school-rating metric provides a more accurate picture of which schools are actually educating their students well. It is also fairer to schools and teachers working with the most disadvantaged kids. It pressures them to perform without penalizing them for taking on the hardest assignments in education. Conversely, the system doesn't reward rich schools with privileged students merely for standing still. Passing the state test, an easy task for many of their students, is not good enough.

The technology to implement a value-added system is fairly complex, but Kress believes it's now at a point where it could be widely and accurately implemented across the nation. Combining value-added metrics with the current standards-based metrics, he believes, would produce a system that motivates the best possible teaching while also being fairer to students. Value-added metrics "ought to be one of the central improvements made to NCLB when it's reauthorized in two years," he says.

It's an intriguing article for those of us who don't keep up with the nitty gritty of school testing regimes. Worth reading.

GROVER vs. THE BIGOTS....Grover Norquist is famous for the anti-tax pledge that he presents to every Republican running for national office: you either sign his statement pledging never to raise taxes, or else the hounds of hell will oppose your election, your reelection, and your every waking moment in office.

Guess what? It turns out that some Republicans have a pledge of their own, and they want Norquist to sign it. Say it with me: "I will never, ever, talk to gay people again. They're yucky."

Lovely, isn't it? With any luck, Grover and the homophobes will rip each other's bodies to shreds and leave them for the vultures to feed on. With any luck.

MAKING CALIFORNIA SAFE FOR TAX CHEATS....Arnold Schwarzenegger has spent the past couple of years busily reprising the greatest hits of the national Republican party, from tax demagoguery to union busting to gay baiting. His latest pick from the songbook is his opposition to efforts to crack down on tax cheating:

The governor has vetoed several bills that would allow agents to go after more businesses and individuals who cost the state millions by cheating on their returns, or not filing at all.

....The governor blocked efforts to increase penalties on retailers who filch the sales taxes they collect, and on companies that don't collect taxes when they should. A proposal to help authorities garnish wages of convicted tax evaders for as long as their debt is unpaid also was vetoed.

....Republicans and business groups make no apologies.

"We need to encourage businesses to come to California," said Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee Vice Chairwoman Mimi Walters (R-Laguna Niguel). "If we start to penalize them for every little thing, we will push them out of the state."

This comes one day after a report that Mr. Tough On Crime is gathering signatures for a classic wedge initiative that would require sex offenders to be tracked for life with global-positioning devices. If you're against it, of course, that means you're soft on crime. It's perfect for his 2006 reelection campaign.

But cracking down on tax cheats? Hold on there, pardner! We can't go around just penalizing every little thing, can we?

THE OVAL OFFICE CABAL....You may recall a GQ interview a last year with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff, that made it pretty clear that Powell's office was not very happy with the direction of U.S. foreign policy. On Wednesday, Wilkerson decided to spill his guts, a decision that led to a "personal falling out" with Powell, who he has served for 16 years. Here's a long excerpt:

Decisions that send men and women to die, decisions that have the potential to send men and women to die, decisions that confront situations like natural disasters and cause needless death or cause people to suffer misery that they shouldn’t have to suffer, domestic and international decisions, should not be made in a secret way.

That’s a very, very provocative statement, I think....But fundamental decisions about foreign policy should not be made in secret. Let me tell you the...practical reasons why it’s true.

....When you cut the bureaucracy out of your decisions and then foist your decisions on us out of the blue on that bureaucracy, you can’t expect that bureaucracy to carry your decision out very well and, furthermore, if you’re not prepared to stop the feuding elements in that bureaucracy, as they carry out your decision, you’re courting disaster.

....What I saw was a cabal between the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

....And, of course, there are other names in there, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, whom most of you probably know Tommy Franks said was stupidest blankety blank man in the world. He was. Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man.

And yet, after the Secretary of State agrees to a $400 billion department, rather than a $30 billion department, having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself in a closet somewhere.

....And so it’s not too difficult to make decisions in this, what I call Oval Office cabal, and decisions often that are the opposite of what you thought were made in the formal process. Now, let’s get back to Dr. Rice again. For so long I said, yeah, Rich, you’re right. Rich being Under Secretary of State Richard Armitage. It is a dysfunctional process. And to myself I said, okay, put on your academic hat. Who’s causing this? Well, the national security advisor. Even if the framers didn’t envision that position, even if it’s not subject to confirmation by the Senate, the national security advisor should be doing a better job. Now, I’ve come to a different conclusion.

And what different conclusion would that be? Unfortunately, the transcript ends at that point, even though Wilkerson obviously had a lot more to say. The main Financial Times article includes these bullets:

• Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was “part of the problem”. Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, “she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president”.

• The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example” of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it.”

• The military, particularly the army and marine corps, is overstretched and demoralised. Officers, Mr Wilkerson claimed, “start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam....and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel”.
  

There's more, so read the whole thing if you have a few spare minutes. As the Bush administration continues to unravel, I wouldn't be surprised to hear a few more people speaking out like this.

And at least we have confirmation that Doug Feith is, in fact, really, really stupid.

Via Henry Farrell.

UPDATE: You can watch a video of the speech here. Note that I've corrected the transcript based on the video.

DOG BITES MAN....I'd like to nominate this for this week's least surprising headline. Here's the official White House excuse:

White House spokesman Scott McClellan...said President Bush "believes that we should look at having a reasonable increase in the minimum wage....But we need to make sure that, as we do that, that it is not a step that hurts small business or prices people out of the job market."

Whoa, Nelly! Sure, it's been eight years since the last increase to the minimum wage, but even so an increase of $1.10 over an 18-month period might "price people out of the job market." Yeah, that's the ticket. It might price them out of the job market.

That must be a helluva job market President Bush has bequeathed us. It's a shame he's not part of it.

THE NUKES....Laura Rozen writes about the bigger picture surrounding the smearing of Joe Wilson and the outing of Valerie Plame:

Rove and Libby weren't just telling reporters, 'Cheney doesn't know anything about Wilson's trip.' No. They created a fuller, alternative narrative: 'Cheney didn't know anything about Wilson's trip to Niger, because Wilson only got the trip as a boondoggle from his wife who works on unconventional weapons at the CIA.'

It may seem like an almost random side note that has cost them considerable trouble. But it wasn't random at all. As we know from recent reports surrounding the Fitzgerald investigation, the Vice President's office was leading an all-out propaganda war — every bit as choreographed as the pre-war propaganda campaign by the same officials — to blame the CIA for the fact that there weren't any WMD to be found in Iraq after all, and the chief stated reason for the war was collapsing. And it enlisted not just leaks to reporters about Valerie Plame to conduct that war against the CIA. It also enlisted key Republican officials in Congress....

The key-est of the key Republican officials, it turns out, is Pat Roberts, the obliging Cheney supporter who chairs the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. For more on all this, see:

• Larry Johnson on Niger, the White House, and those forged documents.
  

• Matt Yglesias on Iraq's lack of a nuclear weapons program.
  

• Kevin Drum on nukes and the base.
  

Remember, it's all about the nukes....

CARNIVAL....Just in time for my birthday, the Carnival of the Feminists #1 is up. Head on over for all your gender-neutral and misogynist-bashing needs.

Of course, I'd still like to see Cheney resign today. Who do I need to see about getting that done?

STEM CELLS....This story in the LA Times this morning caught my eye:

The South Korean researcher who was the first to clone human embryos for the creation of stem cells plans to establish a worldwide stem cell bank to make the technology available to other scientists.

The World Stem Cell Foundation, to be unveiled today in Seoul, intends to produce about 100 new cell lines each year and make them available to scientists, particularly those in the U.S. who have been stymied in their research by federal funding restrictions.

...."I think U.S. scientists will be lining up to request them," said Dr. George Q. Daley, a professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard Medical School.

I am just delighted that George Bush's pandering to the Christian Right has allowed South Korea to overtake us as a world leader in an area that's almost certain to be critical for future biotech development. But hey — we can always buy our drugs from Asia, right? We'll pay for them with all that revenue we get from writing blogs and making movies.

I don't remember him promising to make the United States a scientific backwater when he ran for president in 2000, but I guess it must have been in the fine print. Good work, George.

SCUTTLEBUTT....Last weekend Karl Rove canceled an appearance at a Virginia fundraiser. Just one of those things? Maybe, but since then he's also canceled two other appearances and has no plans for any in the future. The Carpetbagger rounds up the scuttlebutt.

In other news, Andrew Sullivan says he's still hearing buzz about Dick Cheney resigning over Plamegate. I don't believe this for a second, but I'd be delighted to be proven wrong.

BLOG TELEPATHY....In what can only be described as a scary development, Matt Yglesias has now written two posts in two days that I was going to write myself but didn't. I mean, they're practically word for word what I intended to say. Does this mean that I'm secretly controlling Matt's brain?

Anyway, the first one is here, a comment on an LA Times story about shrinking worker compensation in America. I would only add my (usual) comment that executives who complain about the high cost of labor in the United States compared to, say, China, are surprisingly silent about the high cost of executive talent in the United States compared to, say, China.

The second one is here, and it concerns Jacob Weisberg's bizarre Slate thumbsucker in which he preemptively suggests there's no evidence of wrongdoing in the Plame case simply because Patrick Fitzgerald hasn't released any of his evidence yet.

I haven't decided what post I'll force Matt to unknowingly write tomorrow, but I'll give it some thought. It's a real labor saver.

PRESIDENT UPSET OVER "CLUMSY" COVERUP....Being on West Coast time has its disadvantages sometimes. Apparently I've been missing out on the latest soap opera nugget in the Plame investigation, courtesy of the New York Daily News:

Bush whacked Rove on CIA leak

An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News.

"He made his displeasure known to Karl," a presidential counselor told The News. "He made his life miserable about this."

...."Karl is fighting for his life," the official added, "but anything he did was done to help George W. Bush. The President knows that and appreciates that."

....But the President felt Rove and other members of the White House damage-control team did a clumsy job in their campaign to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, the ex-diplomat who criticized Bush's claim that Saddam Hussen tried to buy weapons-grade uranium in Niger.

If this is true — and it's credited to multiple sources — then Rove knew exactly what he was doing, Bush knew what Rove was doing, and Rove flatly lied to the grand jury about it.

Josh Marshall has more about the bona fides of Tom DeFrank, the reporter who wrote the story, as well as Scott McClellan's subsequent bobbing and weaving at this morning's press gaggle.

NCLB UPDATE....Has the No Child Left Behind legislation had an impact on student test scores? The latest NAEP results are out and it sure doesn't look like it:

"Let's put it this way," said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, "reading scores were flat and math scores on the rise before No Child Left Behind, and reading scores are flat and math scores are still up after No Child Left Behind. It's impossible to know whether NCLB had an impact — either positively or negatively."

Fourth grade reading scores are here and math scores are here. The full report is here.

PLAME UPDATE....The latest on the investigation from the New York Times:

The special counsel in the C.I.A. leak case has told associates he has no plans to issue a final report about the results of the investigation, heightening the expectation that he intends to bring indictments, lawyers in the case and law enforcement officials said yesterday.

....By signaling that he had no plans to issue the grand jury's findings in such detail, Mr. Fitzgerald appeared to narrow his options either to indictments or closing his investigation with no public disclosure of his findings, a choice that would set off a political firestorm.

That would be a helluva thing if he just closed up shop and went home without saying anything, wouldn't it?

But that probably won't happen. Chris Nelson reports that Dick Cheney’s deputy chief of staff, John Hannah, has been sent a target letter and has cut a deal to testify against his boss, Scooter Libby. Raw Story claims that Hannah is the "cooperating witness" that I mentioned earlier today.

And when will all this happen? Contrary to earlier rumors, the Times says that Fitzgerald "is not expected to take any action in the case this week." And here I was hoping for some good news on my birthday....

FUN WITH TAXES....The President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform released their recommendations today. Sort of. There was nothing on paper and no real details, mind you, but there was a three-hour discussion this morning where they presented a bunch of their ideas. I've collected all the recommendations I could find by combining lists from here and here.

So who benefits from the panel's recommendations? The poor? The middle class? The rich? Do you have to ask?

These are mostly guesses on my part, but for each proposal I've tried to figure out who benefits or gets hurt the most. Bottom line: the rich do mighty well under these recommendations, which include a lower top rate, lower taxes on investment income, and elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax. The rest of us? Not so well.

Recommendation	Who It Hurts/Who It Helps
The alternative minimum tax would be abolished.	This tax currently applies only to high income taxpayers. Eliminating it helps the rich and the well off.
The six tax brackets in the existing law would be replaced by four, with a low bracket of 15 percent and a top rate of 33 percent. The top rate now is 35 percent.	A lower top tax bracket benefits the wealthy.
There are two different recommendations for investment income. One would eliminate taxes on dividends paid by U.S. companies and exclude 75 percent of stock capital gains from taxation. The other would tax investment income at 15 percent.	Either plan would primarily benefit the wealthy, who have much greater investment income than the poor and middle class.
Eliminate and replace the home mortgage deduction with a 15 percent credit for mortgage interest paid during the year. The size of a mortgage eligible for the credit would be limited to the Federal Housing Administration loan limitation, which varies by geographical region but averages about $265,000.	Hurts the middle class and the well off, who can currently deduct interest on loans up to $1 million. Hurts residents of coastal states and cities with high housing values. Replacing a deduction with a credit is probably good for the working class, but not so good for the middle class, which can currently deduct at a higher rate than 15%.
Increase the capital gains exclusion for homes sales from $500,000 to $600,000 and escalate in future years to keep up with inflation.	Helps upper middle class and well off, who are the ones who own homes likely to increase in value by more than $500,000.
No deduction would be allowed for state and local income and property taxes.	Hurts anyone who deducts state taxes, but especially hurts residents of high-tax blue states like California and New York.
Eliminate the marriage penalty by making tax breaks for married couples worth twice that of individual taxpayers	Not sure.
Employer-paid health insurance premiums above $5,000 a year for an individual and $11,500 for a family policy would be treated as income to workers and taxed accordingly.	Primarily hurts the middle and upper middle class. High income taxpayers with executive healthcare would also be hurt, but not very much since healthcare is a small percentage of their income. The working poor would probably be largely unaffected since they are mostly either uninsured or already under the proposed limits.
Replace Earned Income Tax Credit with a work credit and give low-income taxpayers eligible for the credit the option of letting the Internal Revenue Service calculate its value.	Hard to say without more details.
All taxpayers could deduct charitable donations, but only to the extent they exceeded 1 percent of a taxpayer's income.	Most likely beneficiary is churches, who get a lot of their donations from taxpayers whose incomes are too low to qualify for itemized deductions.
Personal exemptions and deductions and credits for children would be eliminated and replaced by a credit of $1,600 for a single person, $3,200 for a couple, $1,500 for each child and $500 for each other dependent.	Hard to say. Depends on the details.
Replace multiple retirement savings accounts with two simpler accounts. One, Save at Work, would let employees save by setting aside untaxed wages, similar to 401(k) accounts. The other, Save for Retirement, would let individuals put up to $10,000 in a savings account that, like Roth IRAs, grows tax-free and can be withdrawn tax-free after age 58.	Ditto.
Education, health and savings: Eliminates existing tax breaks and replaces them with a savings account, Save for Family, that lets individuals put $10,000 aside each year for medical, education and home-buying expenses. Individuals could withdraw no more than $1,000 a year for other needs. Low-income savers could qualify for a credit worth up to $500.	Ditto.

COAL TO LIQUID....Can we solve our future oil shortage by mining coal and converting it to liquid hydrocarbons? Maybe. After all, the United States has plenty of coal and the conversion process seems feasible.

Over at the Oil Drum, Stuart Staniford sat in on a conference call about CTL technology with Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, who wants to make use of Montana's enormous coal reserves for exactly this purpose. Stuart's conclusion: Schweitzer might be right, but we still have that nasty global warming problem. Plus we need lots of water. Details here.

SOFT ON HITLER!....The Carpetbagger today:

As a rule, when one side accuses the other of being soft on Hitler, you know a campaign has reached a certain depth.

Yes, I think we can all agree on that. Details here.

FOCUSING ON IDEOLOGY....There are several things I'd take issue with in Paul Waldman's latest column for the American Prospect, but I think he's exactly correct about this:

Liberals may write best-selling books about why George W. Bush is a terrible president, but conservatives write best-selling books about why liberalism is a pox on our nation (talk radio hate-monger Michael Savage, for instance, titled his latest book Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder).

Indeed, large portions of the conservative movement can be understood as an effort to crush liberalism in all its manifestations. Conservatives understand that their main enemy is not a law, government program, or social condition they don't like. Their main enemy is a competing ideology, and that is what they spend their time fighting.

In contrast, liberals spend very little time talking about conservatism. They talk about their opposition to President Bush or the policies proposed by the Republican Congress, but they don't offer a critique of conservatism itself. When was the last time you saw a book-length polemic against conservatism? Liberals have failed to understand that a sustained critique of the other side's ideology not only defines your opponents, it helps to define you by what you are against.

It's not just the term "liberal," either. Conservatives have also done a masterful job of demonizing, for example, "feminist," "environmentalist," "trial lawyer," and "labor union," despite the fact that sizable majorities of Americans support equal rights for women and stronger environmental rules, and equally sizable majorities are helped far more than harmed by trial lawyers and labor unions.

Conservatives succeed at this, of course, by focusing only on the most extreme positions of these groups: trial lawyers who sue McDonalds over hot coffee, the prison guard union that practically bought Gray Davis' soul in California, feminists who agitate for single-sex restrooms, and environmentalists who smash the windshields of SUVs. That's the populist, Bill O'Reilly version of liberalism, and it's the one that tens of millions of Americans hear about every day.

So how do we fight back? Presumably by focusing on extremist conservative ideology, something we don't do often enough. Paul has a book on this subject coming out in the spring called Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success, and it sounds like it should be an interesting read. In the meantime, there's always the blogosphere....

POPULIST vs. ELITIST....This is not everyone's cup of tea, but if you're interested in a political science-y analysis of why Harriet Miers has provoked such a thoroughgoing public split in the conservative movement, Steven Teles provides one today over at Mark Kleiman's place:

Today each party has two wings — an electoral wing, which tends to be more populist and rests on a larger mobilized base, and a non-electoral wing, which tends to be elitist and defines itself more by intellectual principles. Each of these wings has substantial coordination within itself, and some degree of "coupling" to the other wing.

Thus back to Miers. What this conflict is really driven by is the temporary "decoupling" of the electoral and the non-electoral wings of the Republican party....

I still suspect that "temporary" is the right word to use here. I admit that the hostility toward the Miers nomination has already been deeper and longer lasting than I thought it would be, but at the same time it seems to have had only a minimal effect on the senators who will actually decide her future. Unless she blows it badly in her confirmation hearing — which she might — I think she'll be confirmed.

Still, regardless of her personal fate, the Miers nomination has also been a crystallizing event. Even if she ends up getting confirmed, the dam has now been broken on conservative complaints about George Bush that have been kept under tight wrap for four years. If Patrick Fitzgerald hands down serious indictments in the Valerie Plame case soon, the true believers will take it merely as confirmation that there's a vast conspiracy out to get them, but everyone else will start jumping ship. It won't be pretty.

SECRET SNITCH....Via Josh, the New York Daily News reports that the reason Patrick Fitzgerald has made such good progress in the Valerie Plame case is that he's gotten help from a "secret snitch":

"They have got a senior cooperating witness — someone who is giving them all of that," a source who has been questioned in the leak probe told the Daily News yesterday.

I think that's right. In fact, it might be the same "senior administration official" who originally told Mike Allen and Dana Priest the blockbuster news that the White House had tried to peddle the Plame story to six journalists. "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," their source told them, a pretty good indication that he was genuinely upset by this whole mess. The same source confirmed the story a couple of weeks later, and I've seen subsequent blind quotes that, to my ears, sound like they may have come from the same person.

So yes: I think there's someone in the White House who was genuinely shocked by what happened and has probably cooperated with both reporters and with Fitzgerald to break open this case. But who?

REMINISCING ABOUT JUDY....Laura Rozen writes about her experience reporting on the anthrax investigation three years ago:

At one point in the winter/spring of 2002, it was becoming evident that the FBI was shifting its focus of investigation from foreign sources...to US domestic sources, in particular those with a connection to the US government biodefense program.

....But the NYT's Judith Miller...who had established close ties with several members of the US government bioweapons and biodefense community for research for her book, simply wouldn't report out what was really happening with the investigation....It was hard at the time to not wonder if her close relationship to her sources in the US government program hadn't steered her away from what the rest of us were finding and reporting.

Former New York Times UN bureau chief Barbara Crossette writes about Judith Miller's reporting on Kofi Annan and the oil-for-food scandal:

Obscured behind the large issues of weapons of mass destruction and Joseph Wilson's links with the CIA is another story. Over the last year or so, Judith Miller also wrote a series of damaging reports on the "oil for food" scandal at the United Nations...frequently based on half-truths or hearsay peddled on Capitol Hill by people determined to force Annan out of office.

....As a former NYT UN bureau chief [now retired] I have been asked repeatedly by diplomats, former US government officials, journalists still reporting from the organization and others why Times editors did not step in to question some of this reporting — a lot of it proved wrong by the recent report by Paul Volcker — or why the paper seemed to be on a vendetta against the UN. The Times answered that question Sunday in its page one report on the Miller affair.

I have a funny feeling we're going to be seeing a lot more personal recollections like this over the next few days.

MAGAZINE ROUNDUP....The American Society of Magazine Editors announced today that it has chosen the top 40 magazine covers of the past 40 years. There are actually 41 of them, and you can see them all here. (UPDATE: Apparently ASME took down the cover pictures. The link now leads to a press release that describes each cover.)

Best decade: the 60s, with 11 favorites even though they only counted half the decade.

Worst decade: the 80s, with only three covers.

Most popular subject: 9/11 and the Vietnam War, each with three covers.

Most popular magazine: Time, Life, and Esquire, each with four covers.

Only person pictured on two covers: Andy Warhol. Honorable mention: George Bush, pictured 1½ or 2 times, depending on how you count.

CHENEY AND PLAME....Today's Washington Post story about Dick Cheney being a target of the Valerie Plame probe turns out to have no actual new information about Cheney being a target of the Valerie Plame probe. In fact, it quotes a former Cheney aide saying that "it is 'implausible' that Cheney himself was involved in the leaking of Plame's name because he rarely, if ever, involved himself in press strategy."

However, if you're still holding out hope that Cheney is a target, Stephen Bainbridge confirms that both Democrats and Republicans agree that a sitting vice president can be indicted on criminal charges. Only the president is immune to criminal indictments. And of course, both president and vice president are vulnerable to civil suits, as the Supreme Court helpfully reminded us in the case of Clinton v. Jones. Joe Wilson says he and his wife may be taking advantage of that once Patrick Fitzgerald wraps up the criminal stuff.

And when might that be? The Post article isn't very helpful on the Cheney front, but it does include this tidbit about timing:

In a move people involved in the case read as a sign that the end is near, Fitzgerald's spokesman yesterday told the Associated Press that the prosecutor planned to announce his conclusions in Washington, where the grand jury has been meeting, instead of Chicago, where the prosecutor is based. Some lawyers close to the case cited courthouse talk that Fitzgerald might announce his findings as early as tomorrow, though hard evidence about his intentions and timing remained elusive.

Since the story is dated Tuesday, "tomorrow" refers to Wednesday. Stay tuned.

STEALING CHRISTMAS....A couple of months ago, a federal judge ruled that the Forest Service was improperly approving projects without public comment or appeals. Their response? Like a petulant teenager bedazzled by his own cleverness, Forest Service officials have since refused permission for hundreds of minor, noncontroversial projects, claiming they are merely obeying the rules forced on them by environmental groups. What kind of projects? Cutting down the Capitol Christmas tree is one of them.

Got that? The eco-nazis are stealing Christmas!

Sierra Club head Carl Pope has more here. As he says, "The real purpose of the cancellations, it's pretty clear, was to put the blame on those who want to protect the forests from logging." Karl Rove would be proud. It's his kind of hardball.

TERM LIMITS....Ron Brownstein writes today that "an informal band of prominent legal thinkers from left and right" thinks we should do away with the current system of life tenure for Supreme Court justices because it produces long terms and infrequent vacancies:

Fewer vacancies mean more conflict over those that occur because neither side can be certain when it will receive another chance to change the court.

Longer tenure also raises the stakes in each confirmation by multiplying the effect of each nominee. The common assumption during the recent confirmation debate over new Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was that he would serve at least 30 years.

This sounds like yet another good idea that will never go anywhere, but it's worth tossing out anyway. After all, it doesn't help one party any more than the other and its benefits almost certainly outweigh its drawbacks. Why not give it some serious thought?

HEALTHCARE....General Motors announced today that it has reached a deal with the UAW to slash healthcare costs:

Under the deal, GM's health-care costs for union members, retirees and their families will be reduced by about $1 billion a year, the world's largest automaker said....GM said that in addition, health-care liabilities on its balance sheet will be slashed by about $15 billion.

....GM has said since March that controlling health care costs was a key for its efforts to stem losses at the company.

Hmmm, I wonder if there are any other ways for multinational corporations to control their healthcare costs? Let's see what the New York Times reports:

The company has been losing market share to foreign rivals that operate at lower costs, partly because Japan, Germany and other governments provide universal health care for all their citizens.

That sounds like a good idea. Maybe big American corporations should start thinking about supporting policies that help the entire business community survive, instead of fighting each other like trained cocks for the tax scraps tossed their way each year by Grover Norquist and Tom DeLay. Just a thought.

KARL VALJEAN....Ranting is a matter of taste, of course, but Marshall Wittmann has a nice one today warning Patrick Fitzgerald to watch his back if he decides to bring charges against anyone in the White House:

If he indicts, nothing else will matter to the GOP smear team than sullying the reputation of the special counsel. Hopefully, he has no unpaid parking tickets, has never jaywalked or removed a label from a mattress. If he has committed these misdeeds, we will see them advertised as a screaming headline on Drudge. They will do a "South Carolina" number on Fitzgerald.

....All of the pack that relentlessly pursued Clinton will kvetch about the "criminalization of politics." They will see no irony or hypocrisy in their complaint because this is a fight about preserving power not maintaining consistency. The conservative standard is clear - when a Democratic President is the target it is about the "rule of law" and when the "victim" is a Republican it is about the "criminalization of politics." It is particularly rich that Tom DeLay, the relentless pursuer of Clinton, is making this claim. One wonders whether he agonized over this injustice with Casino Jack Abramoff and Righteous Ralph Reed as they jetted over the Atlantic on the way to their golfing outing in Scotland.

I bet it felt good to get that off his chest.....

DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE....If you want some entertainment, be sure to read Benjamin Wallace-Wells' article in the October Monthly about Patrick McHenry, the latest in a long line of Stepford Republicans to be elected to Congress:

In the nine months since he came to Washington, McHenry has cultivated a role as a kind of fraternity pledge for the House leadership, willing to do the dirty work on behalf of crusades that the rest of his caucus will no longer touch. He was still pumping Social-Security privatization this summer, months after the GOP leadership had given up on the bill. He was still attacking Terri Schiavo's husband after other Republicans, with an eye toward opinion polls, clammed up. And in June, he was summoned by the cable networks to defend Karl Rove after it began to appear likely that the president's chief strategist had identified Valerie Plame as a CIA agent while talking to reporters.

McHenry is perhaps the most successful and precocious of the endless string of those guys, the youngish Republican representatives who show up on cable television to defend the indefensible....

You will be unsurprised to learn that McHenry got his start in the North Carolina chapter of the College Republicans.

MIERS AND ROE....John Fund writes in the Wall Street Journal today that on a recent conference call among James Dobson and a likeminded group of religious conservatives, two close friends of Harriet Miers said categorically that she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade:

An unidentified voice asked the two men, "Based on your personal knowledge of her, if she had the opportunity, do you believe she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?" "Absolutely," said Judge Kinkeade. "I agree with that," said Justice Hecht. "I concur."

Later, speaking on the record, Dobson, Kinkeade, and Hecht all either declined comment or claimed that the two men had said only that Miers was personally pro-life. But Fund says that "several who participated in the call confirm that both stated Ms. Miers would overturn Roe":

Some participants in the conference call fear that they will be called to testify at the Miers hearings. "If the call is as you describe it, an effort will be made to subpoena everyone on it," a Judiciary Committee staffer told me. It is possible that a tape or notes of the call are already in the hands of committee staffers. "Some people were on speaker phones allowing other people to listen in, and others could have been on extensions," one participant told me.

Pass the popcorn.

PROPOSITION 77....Like many liberal Californians, I've been debating how to vote next month on Proposition 77, an initiative that would take redistricting out of the hands of politicians and turn it over to a panel of retired judges. The argument in favor is that somebody has to do it first, so why not set a good example and hope that other states follow? The argument against asks why we should be the wide-eyed naifs who cheerfully set up a neutral system in a big blue state while Tom DeLay and his pals are busily gerrymandering big red states?

All of this dithering, however, turns on the notion that Prop 77 truly sets up a neutral system. If it doesn't, then it's a definite No vote.

Today, Brad Plumer, who has actually read the initiative, persuasively argues that Prop 77 is a Trojan horse deliberately designed to favor Republicans. I might be willing to do the right thing and vote for genuine redistricting reform, but I'm sure not going to do it in the service of a stealth effort to permanently gerrymander California in favor of the GOP. If anyone has a convincing argument that Brad is wrong, leave it in comments. Otherwise it's No on 77.

POSTSCRIPT: Brad may have the analysis right, but these guys make the argument against 77 much more colorfully than he does:

If you think Governor Schwarzenegger wants to redistrict California out of a nonpartisan sense of good public policy then stand right here while someone goes to buy your dope for you. While you’re waiting for the man to come back with your grass, think about this simple arithmetic problem....

It's worth noting that the pro-reform League of Women Voters is also opposed to 77.

FLEITZ TO BOLTON TO NOVAK?....I've always thought that the single most mysterious issue in the Valerie Plame case is...."Valerie Plame." Reporters never refer to a woman by her maiden name if she normally goes by her married name, yet for some reason Robert Novak's July 14 column specifically referred to Joe Wilson's wife as Valerie Plame, not Valerie Wilson. Why?

As I've mentioned before, Novak has vaguely implied that the name "Valerie Plame" was available in public records, and indeed it was. This doesn't explain why Novak would use her maiden name, but it's a possible explanation for where it came from.

Until now. Because it turns out that Judith Miller was also provided with Valerie Wilson's maiden name, but in her case she misspelled it as "Valerie Flame." Obviously Miller didn't get a misspelled name from Who's Who, nor did she get it from Joe Wilson's internet bio, despite John Podhoretz's heroic effort to suggest that "the type on that bio was incredibly small" and Miller might not have been able to make it out.

So if not Who's Who, how about that State Department memo that got passed around on Air Force One shortly before Novak wrote his column? No dice. Walter Pincus reports that it referred to her as Valerie Wilson (in a paragraph specifically marked "(S)" for secret, mind you).

What's more, the (admittedly sketchy) evidence so far indicates that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove both referred to her as "Wilson's wife," not as Valerie Plame. So where did "Valerie Plame" come from, and why did Novak and Miller think it was worth writing down?

One thing we know is that Valerie Wilson used her maiden name only inside the CIA. This suggests a CIA source, and Jeralyn Merritt reminds us that this was Novak's original story too, though he later backtracked on it.

But who in the CIA? Laura Rozen resurrects the name of Frederick Fleitz as the most likely suspect. Fleitz didn't just work at the CIA, he worked at WINPAC, a bureau within the CIA that analyzed WMD. And what did Scooter Libby tell Miller on July 8 about Joe Wilson? "Wife works at Winpac." That's pretty specific information.

So how did this information get from Fleitz to both Novak and Miller? As Arianna Huffington told us last month, Fleitz was actually working two jobs at the time all this was going on, and his second job was acting chief of staff for John Bolton. Yes, the same John Bolton who is, apparently, a pretty close friend of Judith Miller's. Novak seems to be pretty friendly toward Bolton as well, acting as practically a one-man cheering squad for him during his ill-fated confirmation hearings this year.

So: Fleitz to Bolton to Novak & Miller? Granted, this is free form speculation, but it answers the otherwise mysterious question of why Robert Novak and Judith Miller were interested in Valerie Wilson's maiden name. It was because their source specifically told them that was the name she used on Agency business, and Novak, at least, decided that was therefore the name he wanted to publicize. Stout fellow.

MILLER AND FITZGERALD....Hold on a second. I've now read several blog posts speculating that Judith Miller managed to scam Patrick Fitzgerald when she negotiated her agreement to testify before the grand jury. As Mickey Kaus tells it, the basic storyline is that Miller's lawyer, Robert Bennett, cleverly convinced Fitzgerald to limit his questioning solely to her conversations with Scooter Libby:

But a key question is who told Miller the name "Valerie Plame," which she miswrote as "Valerie Flame" in her notebook. Miller says she's not sure it was Libby. Therefore it might have been someone else — i.e. she might well have had another very "meaningful" source, contrary to Bennett's alleged representations to the prosecutor. Am I missing something, or does Fitzgerald have grounds for being extremely p-----d off?

This doesn't sound right to me. First of all, surely something like this can't happen in real life, can it? Bennett's representations to Fitzgerald would be considered binding, wouldn't they? If it turned out he misrepresented the evidence, Fitzgerald would no longer be bound by the original agreement. (Someone with experience in federal prosecutions should feel free to step in and tell me I'm wrong, but this sure doesn't sound like something a judge would spend more than a few seconds ruling on.)

Second, Miller didn't refuse to answer the question because it went beyond her original agreement with Fitzgerald. She said she didn't remember:

Mr. Fitzgerald wanted to know whether the entry was based on my conversations with Mr. Libby. I said I didn't think so. I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall.

This account is vague about exactly what Fitzgerald asked, but it seems like he felt free to ask the question in the first place, and would have followed up if Miller hadn't pleaded forgetfulness.

Right?

SPEAKING ARABIC....Why do we have so few diplomats fluent in Arabic? In the Washington Post today, Jennifer Bremer explains that the State Department classifies language ability on a scale from 1 to 5, and the key distinction for effective diplomacy is the transition from level 3 (OK at one-on-one conversation) to level 4 (fluent even in fast moving, hostile situations).

Currently, though, we have a grand total of 27 diplomats who are trained in Arabic at level 4 or 5. Bremer says the reason is primarily bureaucratic. Diplomats can't get training in Arabic until after they've been assigned to a "language-designated" position, and by that point the hiring embassy just wants to hire someone. They don't want to wait around while their preferred candidate goes to school:

This set-up creates a strong disincentive to designate positions as requiring language skills. No embassy wants to restrict its search to the comparatively few officers already qualified in Arabic or, even worse, effectively give up the position for the two years required to train an officer to a level 3 — and carry them on its budget the whole time they sit in language classes.

So no posts are designated above level 3, which means, naturally, that the Foreign Service does not offer training beyond the 3, either. If 3's want additional language training to improve their skills to a 4, they have to do it on their own time and their own nickel.

In addition, there's not much incentive to spend a lot of time learning fluent Arabic, since it neither boosts your pay nor helps your career. In fact, Bremer says, taking a few years away from mainstream diplomatic posts to sit in language classes "could even be a career-stopper."

Your federal bureaucracy at work. For recommendations on what to do about this, read the article. Her proposals sound pretty sensible.

IRAQ CONSTITUTION APPEARS TO PASS....Early indications suggest that the Iraqi constitution has been approved — barely:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that initial assessments indicate Iraqis had probably approved a controversial constitution, although the turnout alone showed the fragile new political process has taken hold despite a deadly insurgency.

....News services from Baghdad reported Sunday that early returns suggested large numbers of voters rejected the constitution in the Sunni strongholds of Anbar and Salahuddin provinces. But according to initial results, Sunni voters may not have been able to reach the two-thirds threshold in Diyala province east of Baghdad or in Nineveh province in the north, where Sunnis also have large representation.

The LA Times and New York Times are carrying the same report: the constitution seems likely to fail in two provinces, but not in three. And that means it will pass.

It's not clear to me that passage of the constitution is going to affect the basic security problem in Iraq all that strongly, but this is still good news. Going back to the drawing board would be unlikely to benefit anyone, least of all the Sunni minority.

MILLER'S MEMORY....For what it's worth, I just want to point out that Judith Miller's contention that she can't remember who originally provided her with the name "Valerie Flame" is completely ridiculous. She apparently wrote down the name in her notebook sometime around July 8, 2003, and obviously she knew where it came from at the time. Within a week, Robert Novak had written his infamous column in which he outed Valerie Plame, and Miller certainly hadn't forgotten who provided her the name that quickly. A couple of days later all hell broke loose, and that would have etched the name of her source in her mind permanently.

Miller's excuse for her forgetfulness is that "It is also difficult, more than two years later, to parse the meaning and context of phrases, of underlining and of parentheses." But it's not a matter of Miller not remembering a trivial detail two years after the fact. It's a question of whether she remembered it a week after the fact.

Answer: of course she did. And if she remembered it then, she certainly remembers it now. She just doesn't want to say so.

MILLER TALKS, PART 2....The main New York Times story about Judith Miller and the Valerie Plame case is only moderately interesting. There's some dissing of Miller and some description of internal dissension at the Times, but nothing we haven't heard before.

However, there's also a description of the initial meeting at the Times where they discussed whether Miller should testify before the grand jury. The Times' attorney is Floyd Abrams and Scooter Libby's attorney is Joseph Tate:

Mr. Abrams told Ms. Miller and the group that Mr. Tate said she was free to testify. Mr. Abrams said Mr. Tate also passed along some information about Mr. Libby's grand jury testimony: that he had not told Ms. Miller the name or undercover status of Mr. Wilson's wife.

That raised a potential conflict for Ms. Miller. Did the references in her notes to "Valerie Flame" and "Victoria Wilson" suggest that she would have to contradict Mr. Libby's account of their conversations? Ms. Miller said in an interview that she concluded that Mr. Tate was sending her a message that Mr. Libby did not want her to testify.

According to Ms. Miller, this was what Mr. Abrams told her about his conversation with Mr. Tate: "He was pressing about what you would say. When I wouldn't give him an assurance that you would exonerate Libby, if you were to cooperate, he then immediately gave me this, 'Don't go there, or, we don't want you there.' "

...."Judy believed Libby was afraid of her testimony," [Times editor Bill] Keller said, noting that he did not know the basis for the fear. "She thought Libby had reason to be afraid of her testimony."

Italics mine. Tate denies this interpretation, of course, but Miller's view is clear: Libby didn't want her to testify because he knew she would contradict his earlier testimony to the grand jury. Draw your own conclusions.

MILLER TALKS....Judith Miller writes today about her grand jury testimony in the Valerie Plame case. Here's the meat of her recollections about her meetings in 2003 with Scooter Libby:

On the afternoon of June 23, 2003, I arrived at the Old Executive Office Building to interview Mr. Libby....Soon afterward Mr. Libby raised the subject of Mr. Wilson's wife for the first time. I wrote in my notes, inside parentheses, "Wife works in bureau?" I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I believed this was the first time I had been told that Mr. Wilson's wife might work for the C.I.A.

....I interviewed Mr. Libby for a second time on July 8, two days after Mr. Wilson published his essay attacking the administration on the Op-Ed Page of The Times....At that breakfast meeting, our conversation also turned to Mr. Wilson's wife. My notes contain a phrase inside parentheses: "Wife works at Winpac." Mr. Fitzgerald asked what that meant. Winpac stood for Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control, the name of a unit within the C.I.A. that, among other things, analyzes the spread of unconventional weapons.

I said I couldn't be certain whether I had known Ms. Plame's identity before this meeting, and I had no clear memory of the context of our conversation that resulted in this notation. But I told the grand jury that I believed that this was the first time I had heard that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for Winpac. In fact, I told the grand jury that when Mr. Libby indicated that Ms. Plame worked for Winpac, I assumed that she worked as an analyst, not as an undercover operative.

....Mr. Fitzgerald asked me about another entry in my notebook, where I had written the words "Valerie Flame," clearly a reference to Ms. Plame. Mr. Fitzgerald wanted to know whether the entry was based on my conversations with Mr. Libby. I said I didn't think so. I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I could recall discussing the Wilson-Plame connection with other sources. I said I had, though I could not recall any by name or when those conversations occurred.

.... My third interview with Mr. Libby occurred on July 12, two days before Robert D. Novak's column identified Ms. Plame for the first time as a C.I.A. operative. I believe I spoke to Mr. Libby by telephone from my home in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

I told Mr. Fitzgerald I believed that before this call, I might have called others about Mr. Wilson's wife. In my notebook I had written the words "Victoria Wilson" with a box around it, another apparent reference to Ms. Plame, who is also known as Valerie Wilson.

Apparently Patrick Fitzgerald was also interested in Miller's reaction to Libby's letter to her suggesting that they had never discussed Valerie Plame. "I replied that this portion of the letter had surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby to suggest that I, too, would say we had not discussed Ms. Plame's identity. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job."

PIGSKIN UPDATE....Speaking of liberal elitism, I'm off to the living room to root against Notre Dame for a few hours. For my conservative readers, I hasten to add that there is no anti-Catholic animus at work here. It is merely that Notre Dame is evil and must be crushed.

Oh, and cheating by not mowing the grass will get them nowhere. Touchdown Jesus would not be proud of them for that. It's going to be USC by 20 points.

HALFTIME UPDATE: Hmmm. Touchdown Jesus seems to think that third down penalties are the key to keeping His team in contention. Gotta work on that in the second half. Keeping the ball in play for more than three downs at a time would help too.

FINAL UPDATE: Oh man oh man oh man oh man....

Am I the only one who almost had a heart attack? Probably not. What a finish.

LIBERAL ELITES....Ramesh Ponnuru is bemoaning the apparent victory of elite liberal culture:

In 1997, Republicans lost a special election in the 22nd House district of California. I talked to a well-known Republican strategist afterward, and he blamed, in part, social-conservative activists who had run ads on abortion during the campaign. The strategist said that this was a stupid move "in a wine-and-brie coastal California district." It was a nice line at the time. But my impression is that the proportion of our population that consumes either wine or brie, or both together, has gone up since then.

....Hasn't the insult lost its bite? I thought of this when I read a crack against elites that mentioned bottled water. It sure seems as though drinking bottled water has ceased to be an elite activity. Back in 1997, conservatives could mock latte towns — but you can find latte in any town you're in nowadays. Conclusion: We need some new put-downs.

Of course, Ponnuru gives the game away when he admits that he himself drinks bottled water but hastily adds that it's because of "the high lead content in D.C. water rather than a preference on my part." Sounds like a job for an elite liberal lead abatement program.

In any case, let's help him out. Other Cornerites suggest hybrid cars and disdain for NASCAR as reliable markers, but surely we can do better. What's the elite liberal marker of choice these days?

BLOGGERS AND SHIELD LAWS....There aren't many subjects that unite the left and right wings of the blogosphere, but there's always one sure fire winner: slights — real or perceived — aimed at the blogosphere itself. The current favorite is the possible passage of a federal shield law, which would protect reporters from being forced to reveal confidential sources in court. The problem, of course, is the possibility that such a law might not apply to bloggers.

Here's Instapundit, from the right: "I think that such special privileges are a bad idea, as I've said here before. But to the extent that they apply only to Registered Official Journalists...rather than to the activity of reporting, I think that they're also deeply troubling."

And Atrios, from the left: "If a source tells me something newsworthy and I put it on the blog then I'm practicing journalism and I should get the same protections as anyone else practicing journalism. It isn't about creating a special class of people who are above the law, it's about understanding that certain types of activities deserve certain protections because it's in the public interest..."

Even some journalists are leery of a federal shield law, fearing that it amounts to a kind of tacit "licensing" of who's a journalist and who's not.

But this is all very strange. After all, nearly every state in the union has a shield law of some kind, and you never hear a peep of complaint about them, least of all from professional journalists themselves. But if a shield law is a good idea for state courts, why isn't it a good idea for federal courts too? What's the difference?

Now, despite the fact that reporters have badly abused their use of faux anonymous sources in recent years, I happen to think that protecting their access to real anonymous sources is important. Valerie Plame aside, the Bush administration has been unusually aggressive about investigating leaks of confidential information, and I simply don't trust them to show good judgment in this area. For that matter, I don't trust whoever we elect in 2008 either. We've seen longstanding norms of conduct deteriorate too much recently for me to take any comfort in the fact that reporters are seldom hauled in front of judges and tossed in jail. This is the "things have worked fine for 200 years" argument, and I'm not buying. With the crew we currently have in office, the fact that it hasn't happened before is no guarantee that it won't become SOP in the future.

At the same time, I agree with both Glenn and Atrios that it's the activity of journalism that should be protected, not any particular medium. There's an obvious objection to this, of course: if an activity as common as blogging provides protection against testifying in federal court, the Corleone family would just set up a blog and then sit back and happily thumb their noses at prosecutors forever.

This is unpersuasive. It's perfectly possible to define "journalism" in a reasonable way, and judges are quite capable of distinguishing between genuine journalism and obvious ploys. It's a matter of intent, and judges rule on stuff like that all the time. They won't do it perfectly, but even a modest check on executive branch zeal is worth having.

At an absolute minimum, I think we should pass a federal shield law simply to make sure everyone actually knows what the law is. Even if it explicitly provides no protection, we should codify that. But I think we should go further, providing a qualified reporter-source privilege for anyone actively and sincerely engaged in an effort to inform their readers about affairs of public interest. For my money, the work that journalists do in exposing government secrecy is every bit as important as the work that therapists and priests do, so why not grant them similar privileges?

I understand that this is not a good time to be making this argument. Judith Miller is hardly a poster child for a federal shield law (although it's possible that a well written shield law wouldn't have protected her, since it's not clear she was engaged in journalism, even if she is a journalist). But the broader principle is more important. If it's really true that reporters are seldom forced to testify about anonymous sources anyway, why not codify that now before someone decides we've been going too easy on them all these years? And if you think this notion hasn't already crossed a few people's minds, think again. After all, don't you know there's a war on?

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, OR MINERAL?....Quote of the day:

"It goes very nicely with red wine," said...44-year-old Kim Hwa Yeon, a stockbroker in a crisp navy blue suit and pearls, who said she was buying for clients.

What is "it"?

FROG MARCH UPDATE....The Washington Post's account of today's grand jury testimony from Karl Rove includes the following from a "source familiar with Rove's account":

Rove's defense team asserts that President Bush's deputy chief of staff has not committed a crime but nevertheless anticipates that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald could find a way to bring charges in the next two weeks, the source said.

So Rove's own defense team thinks that charges are likely? That's mighty interesting, isn't it?

SELLING IT....Umpire Doug Eddings's blown call in the bottom of the ninth of Wednesday's Angels-White Sox game was indeed a blown call for the ages. On the bright side, though, I've learned something new: umpires are supposed to "sell" their calls. I had no idea. Here's what the ump himself said:

"The only thing I'm down on myself for is I should have sold it either way," Eddings said, which is umpire language for making a big deal out of whatever call he makes. "I should have said, 'No catch,' or if I did have a catch, that he was out. But I never said he was out."

Here's former Angels manager Buck Rodgers:

When it came time to sell the biggest call of his life, Eddings appeared to panic.

...."The kid caught the ball, the umpire rang him up, and it would have been fine if the umpire had just kept selling the call," Rodgers said. "The minute he stopped selling the call, all hell broke loose."

I suppose this is common knowledge among serious baseball fans, but it's news to me. I'll be watching tonight's game intently to see if the umpires redouble their on-field theatrics.

"THE SCANDALS FINALLY BREAK"....Abramoff. DeLay. Rove. Plame investigation. Katrina investigation. Armstrong Williams investigation. I know I'm missing others, but you get the idea.

Kevin's far too modest to point this out himself, but he predicted all of this (at least the general storyline) more than a year ago: "What do we have to look forward to if George W. Bush is elected to a second term? One word: scandal."

Waiting for the Pendulum to Swing....We want to first thank Kevin for giving us access to this terrific forum. We emerge with some good new ideas, a great deal of helpful feedback, and a huge amount of new respect (and we already had a lot) for the efforts of serious bloggers.

The two objections Kevin raised—the GOP never moved that far right, and anyway, things are swinging back—are helpful challenges. We responded to the first yesterday (and got a lot of help from those who commented on Kevin’s post). Just to repeat one key point: Simply listing the labels of the GOP’s big domestic initiatives hugely distorts the true content of their activities. Indeed, as we emphasize in the book, this distortion is a crucial component of the GOP’s larger attempt to cloak immoderate policies in moderate garb.

Kevin’s second objection is of even greater interest at the moment. Aren’t the Republicans cracking up? Isn’t the pendulum swinging back?

It’s Friday afternoon, so we’ll do this in bullet point style:

• It is essential to recognize that Bush’s fate and the GOP’s are not identical. The heart of GOP power rests in Congress.

• Polls this far ahead of an election tell us something, but confidence that the Republican Congressional majority is on the ropes is premature. As Chris Bowers noted yesterday at MYDD, “generic” Congress polls from the summer of 2004—that is, far closer to the election—showed Democrats about nine points ahead of Republicans. Anybody remember how many GOP incumbents lost?

• Given the deplorable performance of this government, its extreme initiatives, and the supposed dangers of an “off-year, second-term” election for flagging presidents' parties, it speaks volumes that we even have to discuss whether Democrats can pick up just fifteen seats in 2006. As we have argued, that such a small shift by historical standards represents such a big mountain reflects the GOP’s dramatic institutional and organizational advantages.

• From our perspective, a critical thing to watch will be whether the Congressional GOP can restrain centrifugal tendencies that are currently on display. As observers, we need to distinguish between divisions that are largely staged for public consumption (to placate some audience) and those that truly undercut the GOP’s impressive capacity to coordinate political action. Staged activity occurs all the time, as Matthew Yglesias recently documented in an American Prospect article on GOP moderates appropriately titled “The Fraud Caucus.” (One Democratic member of Congress complained that “a moderate Republican is someone who throws a ten foot rope to a man drowning twenty feet off shore.") And, ironically, staged “independence” reinforces GOP control rather than undercutting it. Actual splintering would represent a truly important change in the political climate.

• The focus of our book is on where the GOP’s organizational and institutional advantages came from and how they are exploited to pursue extreme goals and protect incumbents. We don’t focus on what agenda Democrats should present. In fact, we largely agree with Jon Chait’s excellent piece this summer, “The Case Against New Ideas," that the importance of the specific ideas, or even their tone, tends to be exaggerated. We should make clear that we do think ideas matter (thanks, "cmdicely," for the call for clarification), particularly for governance, and indeed one of us has been arguing for making economic security a key Democratic theme for a while. Still, the crucial challenge for the Democrats over the next year is to work in as unified a fashion as possible. It was the creation of that unity, after all, that was Gingrich’s greatest contribution to the GOP’s success—in 1994 and since.
  

As we said, we’ve benefited enormously from this forum, and we’re grateful to Kevin for letting us reach out to and hear from an amazing group of serious political thinkers. We consider our book a journey of inquiry, not a blueprint for action. But we see the action brewing.

As we say at the book’s end, “The next journey—a journey of action—will have to begin in living rooms and meeting halls across the nation. It will have to begin, as American democracy began, in the once-radical notion that 'We the People' are both the mapmakers and the navigators on the great voyage of discovery called democracy.” This week has made us more confident that the next journey will have many able guides.

NEEDED: A DEMOCRAT WITH GOOD PHONATION CONTROL....I've long had the vague thought that the key to being a popular actor — or even just being popular and charismatic in general — is voice control. If you can expertly (or instinctively) control pitch, timbre, speed, volume, and so forth, the world is your oyster.

Maybe that's true and maybe it's not, but Matt Yglesias channels Franz de Waal today to say that voice control does predict the winner of presidential elections. Apparently the key characteristic is something called "phonation," and if you can manage to look your opponent in the eye and make him change his phonation during a debate, you win! If you're the one who changes your phonation, you lose. More details here.

RIGHT ON RIGHT VIOLENCE....Byron York writes today that relations among the conservative groups focused on defending President Bush's judicial nominees has gotten a bit testy lately:

The groups hold a daily strategy conference call which, in the last ten days, has at times become contentious. "We've all had some fairly nasty exchanges," says one person familiar with the calls. In such an environment, name-calling is not terribly unusual. For example, one conservative said of Progress for America, "They are a bunch of political hacks and they do what the White House wants. You could nominate Humpty Dumpty for the Supreme Court, and they'd be out arguing for Humpty Dumpty." That's not the kind of thing one hears in a well organized, unified movement.

Jon Chait has more along these lines in the LA Times.

Oh, and did you know that Harriet Miers is in favor of higher taxes?

ROVE IN THE DOCK....I love the way that AP characterizes Karl Rove's appearance before a grand jury this morning: "It is likely Rove's final chance to convince grand jurors he did nothing criminal in the leak case." Yeah, baby!

THE ZAWAHIRI LETTER....Juan Cole is skeptical about the authenticity of a letter the CIA released recently that's allegedly from Osama's #2 to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. The letter seemed a little too pat to me, but Juan's objections are mostly stylistic: he says it seems like it was written by a Shiite, not a Sunni.

Obviously I don't know if he's right, but if he is it means the CIA is double plus incompetent. Has anyone else weighed in on this?

FORGETTING ABOUT KATRINA....Chris Kromm at Facing South challenges liberals to keep their attention focused on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

Katrina put issues of race and class on the national radar in a way that won't be repeated for a very long time. But the opportunity to discuss and act on these issues — progressive issues — is being largely squandered.

....This is our moment. Endlessly speculating about DeLay's indictments or the Plame investigation may be fun. But the Gulf debacle is something progressives can do something about, now, that has the potential to permanently shift the debate about fundamental inequalities in our society.

Progressives need to step up to the plate, and 1) support the fight for a democratic, just and sustainable rebuilding in the Gulf, and 2) work tirelessly and with laser focus to return issues of poverty and inequality to the top of the national agenda.

E.J. Dionne agrees, and although he lays the blame for our sudden amnesia squarely where it belongs — on congressional conservatives — he also thinks liberals need to do more:

It has long been said that Americans have short attention spans, but this is ridiculous: Our bold, urgent, far-reaching, post-Katrina war on poverty lasted maybe a month.

Credit for our ability to reach rapid closure on the poverty issue goes first to a group of congressional conservatives who seized the post-Katrina initiative before advocates of poverty reduction could get their plans off the ground.

....I was naive enough to hope that after Katrina the left and the right might have useful things to say to each other about how to help the poorest among us. I guess we've moved on. You can lay a lot of the blame for this indifference on conservatives. But it will be a default on the part of liberals if the poor disappear again from public view without a fight.

Bloggers can help out here, but if we're going to get sustained attention on this topic it needs the help of some big guns. I know that John Edwards and Bill Clinton are involved, but they aren't in government anymore. Maybe I've missed it, but are there any congressional Democrats who are out front on this?

CIVIL WAR....The underappreciated Tom Lasseter has a chilling story today about the makeup and motivation of the new Iraqi army. Even the best trained units, he says, are largely looking forward to this year's elections as a way of cementing Shiite power in preparation for a bloody civil war. You really need to read the whole thing, but here's a snippet:

The Bush administration's exit strategy for Iraq rests on two pillars: an inclusive, democratic political process that includes all major ethnic groups and a well-trained Iraqi national army. But a week spent eating, sleeping and going on patrol with a crack unit of the Iraqi army — the 4,500-member 1st Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Division — suggests that the strategy is in serious trouble. Instead of rising above the ethnic tension that's tearing their nation apart, the mostly Shiite troops are preparing for, if not already fighting, a civil war against the minority Sunni population.

....American commanders often refer to the 1st Brigade as a template for the future of Iraq's military.... Increasingly, however, they look and operate less like an Iraqi national army unit and more like a Shiite militia.

....[Brig. Gen. Jaleel Khalif] Shwail, the 1st brigade's top officer, regularly reviews important decisions, including troop distribution, with a prominent local Shiite cleric who's closely aligned with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shiite religious figure in Iraq.

.... When they roll through the Shiite neighborhood of Kadhemiya in pickup trucks, the Iraqi troops see men saluting them and yelling, "Heroes! Heroes!" Little children salute and smile.

But as soon as they cross into nearby Sunni neighborhoods, the troops lean out of the trucks with AK-47s and shoot above the cars in front of them to clear traffic.

.... Asked if he worried about possible fighting between his men and the Sunnis at Umm al Qura, the brigade's command sergeant major, Hassan Kadhum, smiled.

"Your country had to have a civil war," he said. "It will be the same here. Everything in this world has its price. In Iraq the price for peace will be blood."

Kadhum thought the matter over for a few more moments.

"There will be a day when we take that mosque and make it an army headquarters," Kadhum said.

Yes, it's only one story, and yes, empty chest thumping among soldiers is hardly unknown. Still, it's not good news. There doesn't seem to be much sign yet that either the Sunnis or the Shiites have any intention of letting elections decide their future.

PHOTO-OP HELL....Was today's presidential videoconference with some soldiers in Iraq staged and scripted? Let's find out! Here's the White House version:

QUESTION: How were they selected, and are their comments to the president pre-screened, any questions or anything...

MCCLELLAN: No.

QUESTION: Not at all?

MCCLELLAN: This is a back-and-forth.

And here's the Associated Press version:

It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution.

"This is an important time," Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, said, coaching the soldiers before Bush arrived.

....A brief rehearsal ensued. "OK, so let's just walk through this," Barber said. "Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?"

"Captain Smith," Kennedy said.

...."If the question comes up about partnering — how often do we train with the Iraqi military — who does he go to?" Barber asked.

"That's going to go to Captain Pratt," one of the soldiers said.

"And then if we're going to talk a little bit about the folks in Tikrit — the hometown — and how they're handling the political process, who are we going to give that to?" she asked.

More here about drilling the troops to make sure their answers were suitably soothing for His Bubbleness. As Atrios says, it's a sad day when the Bush administration can't even produce a photo-op competently. That's always been the one thing they were good at.

Is there a puzzle?....Kevin raises some important issues in his last, agreeably skeptical post. And, ironically—given that he’s the political commentator and we’re the political scientists—he mounts a spirited and thoughtful defense of the traditional political science view: namely, that pushing politics and policy off center for any length of time inevitably creates gridlock and backlash, pulling politics, like a pendulum, back to the middle.

We were trained to be partial to this view, and we still find aspects of it appealing, even as we dispute its accuracy as an account of present politics. If nothing else, the “center-always-rules” position is valuable because it identifies the crucial mechanisms that are supposed to ensure accountability—mechanisms that can be, and we think have been, thwarted. (Since there have been a lot of “why don’t you discuss this?” comments, we should make clear that Off Center considers each of these mechanisms in depth. We analyze the constrained capacities of voters to enforce accountability, the—to date, limited—role of the media and opposition Democrats in keeping the ruling party looking over its shoulder, and the reasons why Republican moderates haven’t yet much pulled their party toward the center.)

Still, the conventional view can veer much too quickly from healthy skepticism into unhealthy complacency. It misses, as we argue in the book, (a) how far to the right of center Republicans have managed to remain over a fairly substantial length of time, (b) how effectively they’ve been able to insulate themselves from retaliation (mainly through what we call “backlash insurance”—a concept nicely described by Chris Hayes in his nice review of our book), and (c) how impressively they’ve been able to pursue some of their key goals, despite slim margins and public concern about what they’re doing.

So, in the spirit of healthy skepticism, let us take up the initial half of Kevin’s skeptical question: Have Republicans achieved all that much on domestic policy? Kevin ably runs down the legislative scorecard. But in doing so, he misses four crucial aspects of Republican achievements that simply aren’t well captured by such tallies:

• First, how profound some of these achievements are (the tax cuts fall into this category, representing in their aggregate costs, more than twice the expense of permanently fixing Social Security);

• Second, how much that’s truly unpopular and unsavory has been done under the cover of popular policy “labels” (the Medicare prescription drug legislation, with its giveaways to big medical interests and its concessions to conservative animus toward Medicare, fits the bill perfectly);

• Third, how much has been achieved through executive and regulatory measurs that receive almost no public attention and, perhaps more important, through the blocking of popular courses of government action that would help millions (can you say expanding health coverage and raising the minimum wage, or thinking seriously about addressing global warming?);

• Fourth, how actively Republicans have focused on locking in their policy and political achievements against future public backlash—and, indeed, even against losing office.
  

There are two whole chapters on Republican policy successes in the book, but consider one very revealing example that’s underway right now, even as the GOP is supposedly on its last legs. Over the next few months we are going to see a big GOP assault on government programs, ostensibly to “fund” the costs of Katrina. Some observers are likely to note, at least in passing, that the Republican budget this year will cut taxes on the wealthy by extending some “sunsetting” provisions of earlier tax cuts that would otherwise be curtailed. And, in the ensuing deliberation, GOP “moderates” may well succeed in somewhat limiting, although not fundamentally altering, a budget package that is wildly out of line with the priorities of middle-of-the-road opinion.

What's unlikely to get much attention, however—even if Democrats scream about it—is that come January two big new tax cuts (estimated to cost $150 billion over ten years if extended) will automatically go into effect, because they were already passed in 2001. And, according to research by the tax team at Brookings and the Urban Institute, 97 percent of the benefits will go to those making $200,000 a year or more, and more than half will go to those making $1 million a year or more. Confidence in the moderating tendencies of our system seems out of place when such policies can go into effect at a moment like this.

Of course, there’s a second part to Kevin’s skepticism. He thinks the center may well reassert itself—presumably for a while, or it wouldn’t be too comforting—in the coming election. We’ve already offered much of our take on that subject. But we'll say a bit more in our next post, and we'll try to provide a wrap-up regarding some of the many other perceptive questions we’ve received.

MOUSETRAP....Did Patrick Fitzgerald deliberately con Judith Miller into lying in front of the grand jury so that he could then leverage further testimony out of her? Mark Kleiman sums up the latest pros and cons of the "mousetrap" theory.

MORE MIERS DIRT....Drudge digs up the latest dirt on Harriet Miers that's certain to drive the far right into conniptions:

The Drudge Report has obtained a copy of sworn testimony given by Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers in 1990 in which she said that she “wouldn’t belong to the Federalist Society” — a conservative and libertarian lawyers’ organization — because it was “politically charged.”

.... Miers was also asked whether she considered “the NAACP [to be] in the category of organizations” that she considered to be “politically charged.”

Her answer: “No, I don’t.”

The endless popcorn bowl that is the Miers nomination just keeps getting refilled. She's the gift that keeps on giving.

COHEN AND FITZGERALD....Richard Cohen is getting a lot of abuse for a column today suggesting that Valerie Plame prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald should pack up his tent and go home. After all, he says, "it was not the intent of anyone to out a CIA agent and have her assassinated."

It's not clear how Cohen thinks he knows this. I'm sure he's correct on the assassination front, but my guess is that outing Plame might very well have been deliberate, a way of sending a very strong message that this administration was not to be fucked with. I don't know this for sure, of course, and neither does Cohen, because Fitzgerald has kept a very tight seal on his investigation so far. But that's exactly why Fitzgerald should finish his investigation and let us know his conclusions.

On the other hand, I do have some sympathy for this:

Now we are told by various journalistic sources that Fitzgerald might not indict anyone for the illegal act he was authorized to investigate, but some other one — maybe one concerning the disclosure of secret material. Here again, though, this is a daily occurrence in Washington, where most secrets have the shelf life of sashimi. Then, too, other journalists say that Fitzgerald might bring conspiracy charges, an attempt (or so it seems) to bring charges of some sort.

....This is why I want Fitzgerald to leave now. Do not bring trivial charges — nothing about conspiracies, please — and nothing about official secrets, most of which are known to hairdressers, mistresses and dog walkers all over town.

I think Cohen is fundamentally wrong to treat the outing of a covert agent in the same way that he treats the nonstop revelation of minor secrets that practically defines official Washington. Outing an agent represents a far more serious kind of breach, and deliberate