TAXING CAPITAL....Max Sawicky ripped off his blogging cape today and adopted the guise of mild mannered serious economist in order to hold a debate with Tyler Cowen about the recommendations of the president's tax reform panel. Very quickly, though, the debate turned to the subject of capital gains taxes — specifically whether Max was willing to raise his hand and say: "I want to in essence double the real rate of taxation on capital income. I don't think the growth rate will fall." Here's how Tyler put it:

Max, are you willing to raise your hand and say: "I want to in essence double the real rate of taxation on capital income. I don't think the growth rate will fall"?

Sadly, the results were unedifying. I demand a rematch.

Basically, I'm on Max's side: I think taxation of capital should be at roughly the same level as taxation of labor income. However, I believe this mostly for reasons of social justice, and it would certainly be handy to have some rigorous economic evidence to back up my noneconomic instincts on this matter. Something juicy and simple for winning lunchtime debates with conservative friends would be best. Unfortunately, Max punts, saying only, "As you know, empirical research seldom settles arguments."

Tyler then accuses of Max of obscurantism and asserts without evidence that "I am asking you to believe that low rates of capital taxation are good for an economy; this accords with most empirics and with most theory."

Perhaps so. But on a question this messy I have little faith in theory. I'd like to hear more about those empirics. Max makes the point that U.S. tax rates on capital are higher than in most countries, and yet our economy is one of the best performing in the world. What's more, we've had higher rates in the past, and have had booming economies regardless. These are good points.

And yet, surely there is some serious comparative research on this matter? Perhaps a consensus within the economics profession? Or not? Inquiring minds want to know.

WIKIPEDIA....I use Wikipedia a lot, and I've noticed lately that when I Google something the Wikipedia entry is often one of the top four or five results. It's a genuinely valuable resource.

But don't believe everything you read there. John Seigenthaler tells you why.

(Via Cliopatria.)

DON'T BOMB US....In the ever expanding blogosphere, the latest entry is a blog from several Al Jazeera staffers titled, appropriately, "Don't Bomb Us." Here are five things they would like you to know:

1. Al Jazeera was the first Arab station to ever broadcast interviews with Israeli officials.
   

2. Al Jazeera has never broadcast a beheading.
   

3. George W. Bush has recieved approximately 500 hours of airtime, while Bin Laden has received about 5 hours of airtime.
   

4. Over 50 million people across the world watch Al Jazeera.
   

5. The Al Jazeera websites are http://www.aljazeera.net (Arabic) and http://english.aljazeera.net (English). AlJazeera.com, AlJazeerah.info and all other variations have nothing to do with us.
   

For what it's worth, item #4 is really the only one that matters. After all, whatever war it is that we're fighting, it's obvious that it's primarily a war of ideas — and the only way to win that war is via persuasion. Al Jazeera's 50 million viewers are our core audience for our ideas, and bombing their headquarters sure isn't going to do anything to get those viewers on our side.

In any case, "Don't Bomb Us" is your one stop shop for all news about George Bush's alleged desire to reduce Al Jazeera's headquarters to rubble. Check it out.

PRO-CHOICE AT THE FCC....That was quick. Just weeks after the publication of this piece in support of an a la carte cable system (which would require cable companies to let customers select individual channels, instead of being forced to pay for entire packages), FCC chair Kevin Martin has officially come out in favor of a la carte.

Actually, Martin has been inching this way for a while — thanks largely to pressure from social conservatives, who, understandably, don't see why they have to pay for MTV to get the Disney Channel — but it's still significant that he's made it official, since it adds to the pressure on Congress to act. Looks like more and more people are recognizing that the best way to give parents control over what their kids see — not to mention giving everyone a break from skyrocketing cable bills — is to actually give consumers the power of choice.

And yes, I think I can survive without the Oxygen Network.

FOXES AND HEDGEHOGS....In a New Yorker piece put online a few days ago, Louis Menand reviews Philip Tetlock's new book, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? His conclusion:

People who make prediction their business — people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables — are no better than the rest of us....Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote.

Still, some people score higher when it comes to predicting the political future and some score lower. What accounts for the difference? According to Tetlock:

Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.

Menand points out that Tetlock's hedgehogs are wrong more often than his foxes, but that's not the end of the story. "The upside of being a hedgehog, though, is that when you’re right you can be really and spectacularly right." Which explains why Time magazine named Power Line their blog of the year for 2004.

So there's your lesson for the day. Avoid ideologues on both left and right. Stay away from people who have unshakable faith in their convictions. The more confident someone sounds, the more likely they are to be wrong. Steer clear of cranks with big theories. Pay more attention to statistical and actuarial formulas than to expert opinion. And ignore the folks at Power Line. They aren't due to be right again for a long time.

THE MARCH OF THE BLOGOSPHERE....Instapundit on politicians and the hawkosphere:

THE WHITE HOUSE has released its Iraq strategy document. I think it owes a bit of a debt to Steven Den Beste.

Jim Henley on the same subject:

I felt safer when the freelance shills took their cues from our rulers than I do now that our rulers have started taking their cues from the shills.

I think I'm with Henley on this. Though only barely.

OUR BOOMING ECONOMY....Ann Althouse takes the New York Times to task for suggesting that there might be a gray lining to today's news of healthy economic growth. Her commenters heartily agree. The droopy old Times is just trying to bring us all down even though the economy is obviously in dandy shape.

But that depends on who you are, doesn't it? Here's the LA Times on Tuesday:

For the second year in a row, wage and salary increases will average around 3.5% in 2006, several compensation experts predict.

The good news is that the average paycheck — in theory — should keep up with inflation, which is expected to be about 3% next year.

The bad news is that most employees will get less than 3.5%. That average is driven up by very high raises — as much as 9% — expected in a few fields with acute staff shortages, including nursing and financial services.

"If you're not in a high-demand position or covered by a union agreement, maybe you'll get 1% or 2%, if anything at all," said John Putzier, president of FirStep Inc., a Pittsburgh-area human resources firm. "It's going to be spotty."

So in an economy that's allegedly in terrific shape, workers will see an average pay increase that....barely matches inflation. And that's the good news! Most of them will actually see a decrease compared to inflation. Hooray!

A good economy is one in which lots of people make lots of money, not one in which Donald Trump's investments do better than last year. Guess which kind of economy we're in right now?

RUMSFELD AND PACE....Via Tim Dunlop, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reports on a recent exchange between Donald Rumsfeld and General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The subject was torture:

When UPI's Pam Hess asked about torture by Iraqi authorities, Rumsfeld replied that "obviously, the United States does not have a responsibility" other than to voice disapproval.

But Pace had a different view. "It is the absolute responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it," the general said.

Rumsfeld interjected: "I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it's to report it."

But Pace meant what he said. "If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it," he said, firmly.

This is why Abu Ghraib happened: because of people like Rumsfeld, who insisted on cutting corners, using clever circumlocutions in place of plain language, and refusing to take a firm stand on doing the right thing. Pace is having none of it, and good for him.

The military may not always live up to its ideals, but at least they insist on having some. Rumsfeld should have been fired long ago for not understanding this.

FEAR OF FLYING....Via Talkleft, we learn that Air New Zealand and Qantas have official policies that ban men from occupying seats next to unaccompanied children.

Question: who should be more offended by this? Men or women?

PLANNING FOR WITHDRAWAL....With all the scuttlebutt pointing toward a presidential announcement that we'll start withdrawing troops from Iraq soon, Fred Kaplan asks the right questions:

President Bush is going to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. That no longer seems in doubt. The question is: How does he plan to do it? Which troops will come out first? How quickly? Where will they go? Under what circumstances will they be put back in? Which troops will remain, and what will they do?

....More to the point, does the president have a plan for all this?

If Bush is serious about starting a phased withdrawal from Iraq, then good for him whatever his reasons. But given the history of this war, I hope his political team is kept far, far away from both the planning and the timing of the withdrawal. For that matter, I hope Donald Rumsfeld keeps his opinions to himself too. This time, let's set some serious military goals and then let the military figure out the rest, midterms be damned. Karl Rove and his pollsters should not be invited to this party.

SCISSORS ON AIRPLANES....The Washington Post reports that TSA is considering new rules that would allow passengers to carry small knives and scissors on board airplanes. This sounds fine to me, and TSA's reasoning also sounds fine: they want screeners to spend less time searching for scissors and more time looking for explosives, and hardened cockpit doors prevent terrorists from taking over an airplane with small knives anyway.

Still, even though I recognize that reasonable people can disagree about this, surely this assessment from Corey Caldwell, spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants, is a wee bit over the top:

When weapons are allowed back on board an aircraft, the pilots will be able to land the plane safety but the aisles will be running with blood.

Well, no, they won't. Without the possibility of hijacking the airplane, there's not much point in threatening passengers, is there? And in a post-9/11 world, a pair of scissors or a small knife really won't get you very far anyway.

Let's leave the histrionic fearmongering to local new anchors, where it belongs, shall we?

THE TIMES AND THE LAPTOP....A couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran an article about a stolen Iranian laptop that it said contained "more than a thousand pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments [that] showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead." Surprisingly, though, readers learned very little about what was on the laptop. In fact, in a 3,000 word article there were exactly three actual facts about the contents of the laptop, summarized in a single paragraph:

One major revelation was work done on a sphere of detonators meant to ignite conventional explosives that, in turn, compress the radioactive fuel to start the nuclear chain reaction. The documents also wrestled with how to position a heavy ball — presumably of nuclear fuel — inside the warhead to ensure stability and accuracy during the fiery plunge toward a target. And a bomb exploding at a height of about 2,000 feet, as envisioned by the documents, suggests a nuclear weapon, analysts said, since that altitude is unsuitable for conventional, chemical or biological arms.

Question: was it accurate to refer to this as a "nuclear warhead," as the Times article does repeatedly? Or should the reporters have said that Iranian missile engineers appeared to be "modifying or designing a reentry vehicle able to hold a spherical object that looks to be a nuclear warhead"?

David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security says that this is not merely a trivial distinction. And there's more. In a series of emails to the Times, he argues that the story was misleading in at least three different ways:

• To a layman, "nuclear warhead" is loaded language that implies an actual design for an atomic bomb. In fact, the laptop contains no evidence of a bomb program.

• Using this language obscures the importance of an obvious question: does Iran really have a bomb program, or did these plans come from an overenthusiastic missile engineering team unconnected with the political leadership of the country? As it stands, the Times story mentions this possibility only in passing.

• The Times article quotes no one from outside the Bush administration who is skeptical about whether the information on the laptop represents a genuinely sophisticated program, despite the fact that a number of technical reservations exist. See the email exchange for more. (The Times quotes several people who question whether the entire thing was faked or not, but no one who questions the laptop's information on a technical basis.)
  

Taken together, all of these things serve to paint a grimmer picture than the evidence supports, and via email, Albright says the New York Times, of all papers, should have taken extra pains not to hype intelligence from the Bush administration:

The NYT should have not used loaded language in order to avoid hyping the Iranian nuclear threat. Such language belies the Times’ commitment to be more careful about its reporting and the use of its sources after its faulty reporting on Iraq’s presumed reconstituted nuclear weapon program.

....I do not want to give the impression that I am trying to downplay the significance of the information on the laptop. I believe this information is very troubling and should be fully assessed and investigated. However, I believe that the best party to conduct an independent, credible investigation is the IAEA. It has started its own investigation. However, the IAEA will need more time, and it will need more information declassified by the United States.

I think Albright has a good point. Unfortunately, given the Bush administration's track record, there's good reason to be skeptical that they're telling us the whole story here. The Times should have been more careful.

INTERESTING...."Virginia Governor Commutes Death Sentence." Seems someone else will be the lucky one to oversee the 1000th execution since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. This could be seen as Warner's last significant action as governor or first as presidential candidate. Compare with Bill Clinton and the execution of mentally ill Ricky Ray Rector. Something may be changing in American politics.

BOB WOODWARD'S REPORTING....Franklin Foer passes on the following anecdote about Bob Woodward's reporting style:

This is what I'm reliably told: Colin Powell has been aggressively jockeying to manage Woodward's current book project on the Iraq War. He has been especially irate that Cheney — the Newman to his Seinfeld — has managed to successfully outmaneuver him by currying favor with Woodward. But has Cheney really secured Woodward's ear? Or is he just making it seem that way, so that Powell preemptively gives him all the goods? We can be sure that Woodward's footnotes will never tell.

And thus the great mystery of Bob Woodward. After all, the whipsawing technique he uses is itself morally neutral. It can be a force for good or a force for evil. But which is it in Woodward's case?

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS...Last week I met Henry Farrell during a trip to Washington DC and learned, among other things, what an IPA is, drinkwise. (India Pale Ale, for those of you as ignorant of alcohol as I am.) Today he proves his worth again by praising Charles Palliser's "wonderful historical novel," The Quincunx. This comes as a passing reference in a long colloquium about the even greater wonderfulness of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I haven't read. Sounds like they'd both be great Christmas presents.

Just thought I'd pass that along, this being the shopping season and all.

CONGRESSIONAL CORRUPTION....Jeffrey Birnbaum has a story in today's Washington Post about the growing wave of corruption in Congress. Over at Josh's place, reader TC cries foul.

TC's complaint is that Birnbaum makes the recent corruption scandals sound like a bipartisan affair, when in fact it's almost exclusively Republicans who are under investigation. However, although TC is technically acurate, I think his criticism of Birnbaum is fundamentally misplaced.

Here's the thing: the evidence indicates that Birnbaum is basically right: most voters don't pay much attention to politics and don't understand that it's mostly Republicans who have been gaming the system in unprecedented numbers in recent years. Hell, most people don't even know that Republicans control Congress. [UPDATE: Apparently that's not true. See below.]

Now, it's fair to say that this is partly due to reporting like Birnbaum's in the first place, but it's naive to think that's the whole story. Take a look at this instructive chart from the Wall Street Journal, which shows approval ratings for various people and institutions over the past four years:

Sure, George Bush's approval ratings are at record lows, and Dick Cheney's are even lower. But guess what? The lowest approval ratings of all are for Democrats in Congress.

Unfair? Sure. The fault of pathologically "balanced" reporters like Birnbaum? Partially. But if you play in the big leagues, you have to learn to play in the big leagues. If Democrats want to get credit for being a cleaner party than Republicans, they need to make some splashy proposals that make their differences crystal clear.

A couple of months ago I suggested a list of items Democrats could all sign up to on the subject of congressional "accountability," but that's a dry subject. Norm Ornstein is interested, but probably not too many other people. So maybe instead the focus should be purely on graft and corruption and K Street largesse. But not just criticism of Republicans. It has to be accompanied by a set of firm pledges from Democrats about how they're going to clean the place up. And the pledges better be simple and compelling.

If Dems don't do this, they have no one to blame but themselves. Birnbaum isn't the true villain here. He's merely a symptom of how the world works.

UPDATE: Hmmm. According to the latest polling from Democracy Corps, 81% of Americans correctly identified Republicans as the party in control of Congress. It seems like I've seen much lower figures for this before, but I guess I was imagining it. Another factoid bites the dust.

SHIITE DEATH SQUADS?....It looks like everyone is now reporting that Iraq's security forces have been heavily infiltrated by Shiite "death squads" that are carrying out hundreds of executions in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods. The New York Times version of this story is here. A longer and more detailed Los Angeles Times story is here. Here's an excerpt from the LAT story by Solomon Moore:

An Aug. 18 police operations report addressed to Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, who has ties to the [Shiite] Badr militia, listed the names of 14 Sunni Arab men arrested during a predawn sweep in the Baghdad neighborhood of Iskaan.

Six weeks later, their bodies were discovered near the Iranian border, badly decomposed. All of the corpses showed signs of torture, and each still wore handcuffs and had been shot three times in the back of the head, Baghdad morgue officials said.

A Western diplomat in Baghdad who spoke on condition of anonymity said that "we hear repeated stories" of police raids on houses and indiscriminate arrests of Iraqi civilians — many of them Sunni Arab Muslims.

"And they disappear, but the bodies show up maybe two or three governorates away," the diplomat said.

As you may recall, Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter reported the same thing over a month ago, suggesting that crack units within the Iraqi army have essentially become Shiite militias that take orders from local Shiite clerics. In other words, "infiltrated" probably isn't really the right word. It's been the plan all along.

LATEST PLAME GOSSIP....As we all know, Karl Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, had a meeting with Patrick Fitzgerald shortly before Fitzgerald announced the indictment of Scooter Libby last month. Scuttlebutt at the time suggested that Fitzgerald had been ready to indict Rove, but got information at the meeting that made him hold off.

What kind of information? Nobody knows, but apparently it had something to do with a conversation between Luskin and Time reporter Viveca Novak (no relation to Robert Novak). From the Washington Post:

It's not clear why Luskin believes [Viveca] Novak's deposition could help Rove, President Bush's deputy chief of staff, who remains under investigation into whether he provided false statements in the case. But a person familiar with the matter said Luskin cited his conversations with Novak in persuading Fitzgerald not to indict Rove in late October.

....It could not be learned what Luskin and Novak, who are friends, discussed that could help prove Rove did nothing illegal in the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters and the subsequent investigation of it.

In other news, Raw Story reports that Fitzgerald has reinterviewed Rove's assistant, Susan Ralston, who testified last August about Rove's conversation with Time reporter Matt Cooper, in which Plame was discussed. (This is the famous conversation that ended with Rove murmuring, "I've already said too much.") Ralston didn't log the call, and told Fitzgerald it was because it came in through the White House switchboard:

But those close to the probe tell Raw Story that Fitzgerald obtained documentary evidence showing that other unrelated calls transferred to Rove’s office by the switchboard were logged. He then called Ralston back to testify.

Earlier this month, attorneys say Fitzgerald received additional testimony from Ralston — who said that Rove instructed her not to log a phone call Rove had with Cooper about Plame in July 2003.

Ralston also provided Fitzgerald with more information and “clarification” about several telephone calls Rove allegedly made to a few reporters, including syndicated columnist Robert Novak, the lawyers said.

I'm not even going to try to speculate about what all this means. There's just not enough data. But one thing is clear: whatever's going on here, it sure doesn't appear to be good news for Karl Rove.

REPEAT ABORTIONS....Garance Franke-Ruta writes in the New Republic about Amy, a woman who had an abortion at age 18 and then had a second one at age 24:

"Oh well, that's over," she recalls thinking immediately afterward. "And then I didn't think about it very much." She didn't talk about it very much either, and, even today, she is loath to reveal it. "I rarely talk about the second abortion because of society's judgments about women who have a second abortion," she says. "It's like, 'Oh, you're allowed one mistake.'" But not two.

....Despite its prevalence, repeat abortion is the least discussed or researched aspect of abortion in the United States....Yet the reluctance of liberals and pro-choice advocates to shine a spotlight on the troubling repeat-abortion phenomenon has obscured a growing public health issue. Studies suggest that women having repeat abortions as compared with those having first-time abortions are more likely to be minorities, poor, and victims of sexual abuse — in short, among society's most vulnerable.

It doesn't really surprise me to learn that women who get multiple abortions tend on average to be the poor and vulnerable. As Garance notes, there have been tremendous advances in contraception over the past three decades, and it's not surprising that those at the bottom of society's heap are the least likely to take advantage of them.

But I was surprised to learn that the subject of repeat abortions is apparently so taboo that NARAL refuses to even comment on it. Garance's main policy proposal is that "post-abortion care and counseling services ought to be made available domestically as a routine part of women's health care," and this sure doesn't sound very controversial to me. Is NARAL really unwilling to even discuss this in public?

Liberals are in favor of safe access to abortion, but surely we're also in favor of helping people get control over their lives too. If the evidence shows that post-abortion counseling helps poor women, cuts down on sexual abuse, and reduces the rate of abortion, what's not to like?

IS PRESIDENT BUSH CLUELESS?....Over at Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy notes that conservative bloggers were predictably scathing toward Joe Biden's op-ed in the Washington Post calling for "specific goals and a timetable for achieving each one" in Iraq. Comments ranged from "clueless" to "fundamentally wrong" to bits of random kindergarten name calling (from Hugh, natch).

But then, surprise! The White House released a statement saying that "Sen. Biden described a plan remarkably similar to the administration's plan to fight and win the war on terror."

Does this mean that President Bush is also "clueless" and "fundamentally wrong"? There is a strange silence from the conservo-sphere. Just goes to show how dangerous it is when you blog before you know the talking points.

READING BOOKS....In the LA Times today, Naomi Baron, a linguistics professor at American University, complains that Google and the internet are undermining the printed word:

Much as automobiles discourage walking, with undeniable consequences for our health and girth, textual snippets-on-demand threaten our need for the larger works from which they are extracted. Why read "Bowling Alone" — or even the shorter article upon which it builds — when you can lift a page that contains some key words?

....Will effortless random access erode our collective respect for writing as a logical, linear process? Such respect matters because it undergirds modern education, which is premised on thought, evidence and analysis rather than memorization and dogma. Reading successive pages and chapters teaches us how to follow a sustained line of reasoning.

Now, Baron clearly gets at least one thing wrong in her op-ed, when she suggests that old-school library stack browsing promoted serendipity while "today's snippet literacy efficiently keeps us on the straight and narrow path, with little opportunity for fortuitous side trips." No one who has browsed the internet and followed a long string of hyperlinks just out of curiosity can possibly believe this.

And yet, I suspect that Baron's main point has something to it. As Jeanne d'Arc writes today:

I find that the more I read online, the less I read off. I don't think it's even a matter of using up my reading time. It actually destroys brain cells or something, because if I've been doing too much online reading, I lose the patience for following a sustained or subtle argument, or reading a complex novel.

The same is true of me. It's not just that I spend less time reading books, it's that I find my mind wandering when I do read. After a few paragraphs, or maybe a page or two, I'll run into a sentence that suddenly reminds me of something — and then spend the next minute staring into space thinking of something entirely unrelated to the book at hand. Eventually I snap back, but obviously this behavior reduces both my reading rate and my reading comprehension.

Is this really because of blogging? I don't know for sure, but it feels like it's related to blogging, and it's a real problem. As wonderful as blogs, magazines, and newspapers are, there's simply no way to really learn about a subject except by reading a book — and the less I do that, the less I understand about the broader, deeper issues that go beyond merely the outrage of the day.

Then again, maybe it's just Jeanne and me. Anyone else feel this way?

ART BLOGGING....This is kind of cool. Kriston Capps is now the official blogger for the Smithsonian American Art Museum's new blog, Eye Level:

So what's this museum blog all about? Here's the short version: Eye Level investigates American art—its history, evolution, and currents. The hope is that this blog hosts a vital conversation among artists, curators, collectors, and enthusiasts on a broad range of subjects related to American art.

Not bad for a UT fan! Check it out.

COLUMN FODDER....From The Corner:

CLARK NEWS NETWORK [Jonah Goldberg]
CNN is giving Ramsey Clark a lot of play from Baghdad. It annoys me.

It annoys you? Hell, Ramsey Clark is a godsend for conservative writers looking for column fodder. I'm the one who ought to be annoyed.

SHARON AND BARGHOUTI....Over at Democracy Arsenal, Suzanne Nossel reminds us that Iraq isn't the only place in the Middle East that has an election coming up. On January 25, Palestinians will vote in parliamentary elections, and the winner may be the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah party:

In an interesting wrinkle, in Fatah primaries held in Ramallah over the weekend, the overwhelming victor was Marwan Barghouti, a long-time leader who is currently serving five successive life sentences in an Israeli prison for his involvement in terrorist activities.

The results have fueled speculation that a (long-discussed) pardon for Barghouti may be in the works. Barghouti, 46 years old, represents a new generation of Palestinian leadership who commands the loyalty of radical youths to a degree Abbas never has. A former leader of the notorious al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, Barghouti has "street cred" among Palestinians who believe they have no choice but to stand up to Israel through any means possible.

Suzanne speculates that this has the potential to be a "Nixon in China" moment: "For both the Israelis and the Palestinians it's become clear that at this point, with hopes dashed so often, only tested, trusted hard-liners will be given a mandate to compromise." Perhaps Sharon on one side and Barghouti on the other could be the pair of Nixons to make this happen?

I don't have any real expertise of my own to bring to bear here, but it's an interesting thought. Stay tuned.

IDENTITY THEFT....Since I wrote an article about identity theft in the latest issue of the Monthly, I was interested in Saturday's Wall Street Journal article about the latest attempts to pass identity theft legislation. It turns out that even in the wake of the ChoicePoint debacle earlier this year, in which personal data on 145,000 people was sold to criminals, Congress still can't manage to pass even weak new regulations:

Many privacy advocates, casting a suspicious eye on companies that fail to secure personal information, want legislative language in federal legislation similar to the seminal California law that requires disclosure of security lapses regardless of the potential for harm. Businesses say that poses too big a cost burden for them and say notification should be limited to breaches that threaten a "significant risk" of identity theft.

Companies say notification is expensive — and so is replacing debit and credit cards. America's Community Bankers, a trade association representing community banks, told a House panel this month that legislation should require those responsible for a data breach to pick up the tab for notifying customers and reissuing cards. It figured that reissuing debit or credit cards can cost as much as $15 each.

....The conflict over consumer notification isn't the only one stalling legislation. Three Senate committees are divided over a provision in a bill approved by the Commerce Committee during the summer that would let consumers "freeze" their credit reports, blocking access and preventing criminals from opening new accounts under their names.

Several states already allow consumers to do just that, and proponents view the freeze as a main weapon in the fight against identity theft. But credit bureaus, banks and other financial institutions argue that freezes slow down electronic commerce and hurt consumers when they really do need credit.

This is pathetic. There are some genuinely tricky regulatory issues when it comes to identity theft, but requiring disclosure of lost data is a no-brainer. The fact that the credit industry is fighting even a feeble measure like this just shows how unseriously they take the whole issue of identity theft.

The same is true of credit freezes. Basically, a credit freeze prevents credit reporting agencies from revealing your credit history without first getting your express permission. This makes it nearly impossible for thieves to acquire phony credit cards in your name, since card issuers won't issue new cards without first requesting your credit score from a credit reporting agency. If you've frozen your report, you'll be notified when the request is made and can shut it down immediately.

The downside is that if you apply for new credit, you can't get it until the credit reporting agency has contacted you first. In other words, no more same-day credit. It might take two or three days instead.

That's not much of a downside, is it? In fact, for my money, all credit reports ought to be frozen by default. If you prefer to have your report unfrozen — that is, you're willing to run the risk of ID theft in return for slightly faster approval of your credit applications — then you can unfreeze it.

There's simply no reason for consumers not to have this choice, and the credit industry opposes it solely because the slight delay it introduces might make people think twice about applying for new credit — and that's bad for business. Who cares about identity theft when there's same-day credit to be extended?

The fact is, both of these measures should be no-brainers. The cost is low and the benefit is high. But the credit industry opposes them because they simply don't care about identity theft. After all, they don't pay the price when your credit report is wrecked. You do.

That's why the credit industry should be made responsible for identity theft. If they had to pay damages whenever they lost personal data or falsely issued credit to ID thieves, they wouldn't be opposing measures like this. They'd be begging for them.

ROUTE IRISH....For the time being, I think I'm going to assume that this isn't true. I don't have any good reason for disbelieving it, but I really need a break from news of depraved behavior, and for now that's a good enough motive.

Besides, I suppose it's possible that it really isn't true. You never know.

MISCELLANEOUS EZRA BLOGGING....I've always pronounced "banal" so that it rhymes with "anal." Thus I'm crushed to find out from Ezra that I'm in the minority: among the experts on the American Heritage Usage Panel, only 38% prefer that pronunciation, compared to 46% who prefer the pronunciation that rhymes with "canal." I've always considered that hopelessly pretentious. I wonder if it's an East coast/West coast thing?

But I still have a question for Ezra: how could you and a friend have gotten into even a "meaningless dispute" over this? It only takes a few seconds to look it up.

On a related Ezra note, sign me up as a Christmas carol lover. Actually, that's an unrelated note, isn't it? Either way, I love Christmas carols, especially classic tunes — anything written after 1900 is suspect in my book. For the perfect rendition of a classic carol, check out Amy Grant's version of "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." Great stuff.

IMMIGRATION....In a few days I'll go to the polls to vote in a special election for the congressional seat vacated by Chris Cox, who was confirmed as head of the SEC last July. We've got the usual Republican and Democratic candidates on the ballot, of course, but we've also got an American Independent candidate: Jim Gilchrist, founder of The Minutemen, a group that became briefly famous earlier this year by heading down to the Arizona border with lawn chairs in tow to prevent the United States from being "devoured and plundered by the menace of tens of millions of invading illegal aliens."

Did it work? As a PR exercise it worked great, and although the Minutemen themselves didn't accomplish much, the pressure they've put on the Border Patrol for the past year seems to have paid off: vegetable growers say they're likely to get only 22,000 workers for their fields this year, compared to the 54,000 they need. Tom Nassif, president of the Western Growers Association, explains why:

"There are just some jobs people don't want to do," Nassif said. "It's the most developed nation in the world using a foreign workforce, and people need to recognize that. We need to make them legal."

Jack Vessey [who runs a vegetable farm near El Centro] said he listed openings for 300 laborers at the state office of employment last week to prepare the lettuce fields for harvest. "We got one person," he said. "He showed up and said, 'I'm not going to do that.' "

Now that's an odd thing, isn't it? Immigration foes like Gilchrist insist that if we only cut down on the supply of Mexican farm workers, wages and benefits would go up and plenty of Americans would be available for harvesting our leafy greens. And yet, despite this year's severe shortage of Mexican labor, Vessey is apparently offering the same backbreaking work, brutal conditions, low pay, and nonexistent benefits that he always has. Likewise, Ed Curry, a chili farmer who has given up on employing legal workers because the H2A program has "too many snafus," says only that he would be willing to pay legal workers "a bit more" than he does now.

Is this reluctance to increase wages caused by a fear that higher labor costs would make their produce too expensive to sell? On its face, that seems unlikely. Even a whopping 40% increase in farm wages would increase the wholesale cost of produce by only about 10%. But a shortage caused by letting crops go unharvested would surely have the same effect — and supermarkets would continue to buy.

That's not to say that foreign competition isn't a real issue for California farmers. It is. Still, the lesson from this natural experiment along the Arizona border seems pretty clear: farmers are flatly unwilling to pay their workers more. Whether that's because it would price their produce out of the market or because even a big wage increase wouldn't attract enough legal workers hardly matters. The evidence indicates that farmers would rather let their crops rot in the field than pay ten bucks an hour.

In other words, Gilchrist and his nativist ilk are barking up the wrong tree. What we need isn't a bunch of yahoos dotting the border with their lawn chairs and cell phones. Instead, we need to recognize that — like it or not — Americans very clearly want and rely on immigrant labor. The key, then, is not to eliminate it, but to figure out a rational way of limiting illegal immigration without simultaneously demonizing immigrants themselves. This might include programs that make it harder to cross the border illegally, but only if we also provide legal status to many more immigrants than we do now.

This combination — easier legal immigration paired with tougher illegal immigration — would provide immigrants with a greater incentive to try the legal route instead of the all-too-deadly "season of death" route. It would also provide us with the pool of immigrant labor we obviously want, increase immigrant wages, and cut down on the abuse they suffer from employers who know how easily they can be blackmailed.

Seems like it would be worth a try.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST....So how are things going in Iraq? First up, let's hear from Ayad Allawi, formerly prime minister in the interim government:

In a damning and wide-ranging indictment of Iraq's escalating human rights catastrophe, Allawi accused fellow Shias in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centres. The brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police, he said.

....'We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated,' he added. 'A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations. We are even witnessing Sharia courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them.'

He said that immediate action was needed to dismantle militias that continue to operate with impunity. If nothing is done, 'the disease infecting [the Ministry of the Interior] will become contagious and spread to all ministries and structures of Iraq's government', he said.

Next up is Abdul Aziz Hakim, one of the "fellow Shias" Allawi was warning about. Hakim, who heads the Shiite Muslim religious party that leads the current government, oversees the party's widely feared Badr Brigade, ground zero for "death squads and secret torture centres." However, not only does Hakim flatly deny Allawi's allegations, he suggests the real problem is exactly the opposite:

The leader of Iraq's most powerful political party has called on the United States to let Iraqi fighters take a more aggressive role against insurgents, saying his country will only be able to defeat the insurgency when the United States lets Iraqis get tough.

....Hakim gave few details of what getting tough would entail, other than making clear it would require more weapons, with more firepower, than the United States is currently supplying.

....In Iraq, "there are plans to confront terrorists, approved by security agencies, but the Americans reject that," Hakim said. "Because of that mistaken policy, we have lost a lot. One of the victims was my brother Mohammad Bakir, because of American policies."

"For instance, the ministries of Interior and Defense want to carry out some operations to clean out some areas" in Baghdad and around the country, including volatile Anbar province, in the west, he said.

There is domestic politics involved in all this, of course, but the bottom line is that Ayad Allawi, who is no shrinking violet, is already horrified by the activities of the current Iraqi government. The most powerful unofficial member of the current government, however, says you ain't seen nothing yet.

This does not sound good.

VOCABULARY QUIZ....Bret Chenkin, a social studies and English teacher at Mount Anthony Union High School in Vermont, is in hot water for giving his students a politically loaded vocabulary quiz. AP's much-quoted story provides this example:

I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes.

Well, that seems funny enough to me. But let's test this. Suppose Chenkin were a conservative and had asked this question instead:

I wish Kerry would be (forthright, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his interminable nuance charms the pretentious mind, hence insuring him Democratic votes.

Hmmm. It still seems kind of funny. I say, leave the poor guy alone. After all, if you can't make jokes about George Bush's diction even in Vermont, the terrorists have won.

BLACK FRIDAY....This morning's breakfast table conversation:

MARIAN: Did you hear about all those people who got trampled at a Wal-Mart?

ME: Ah, the annual Christmas trampling story.

Lance Mannion has the goods, so to speak. On a related note, Digby airs a different pet peeve about "Black Friday Kabuki" here.

For myself, I note that a Nexis search shows that in the four days prior to Friday the nation's news outlets ran 348 stories that mentioned "Black Friday." Last year the count was 185 over the same Monday-Thursday period. If there's a growth industry in America, that's it.

UPDATE: In comments, Mike suggests that the news media started referring to the Friday after Thanksgiving as "Black Friday" only a few years ago. Is this true? I did a Nexis search for the final ten days of November (search term = "black friday" and thanksgiving) and here's what I got:

• 1985: 0 references
  

• 1990: 6 references
  

• 1995: 31 references
  

• 2000: 216 references
  

• 2005: 630 references and counting
  

Sophisticated readers will recognize that Nexis has added new clients to its news database over the years, which makes this data useless for serious analysis. But it's perfect for blog analysis! "Black Friday" stories are indeed a growth industry.

On a related note, the first reference I found to the term "Black Friday" was in a World News Tonight segment by Dan Cordtz from November 26, 1982: "Some merchants label the day after Thanksgiving Black Friday because business today can mean the difference betweeen red ink and black on the ledgers."

The news media then went into silence on the subject until a Washington Post story dated November 20, 1987, which provided the following advice: "Do not shop next weekend (unless you're into S&M or S&Ls). The day after Thanksgiving is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year — store workers call it 'Black Friday.'"

This suggests that the phrase was invented by retail workers peering apprehensively out their windows at the post-holiday mobs waiting to shop. However, a story in the Post eight days later confirms that it is "the day when the surge of holiday buying — and profit — is supposed to put [retailers] into the black." But this same story also includes the following explanation: "'We call it Black Friday because it's the busiest shopping day of the year,' said Andria Tedesco, 19, who was waiting on customers at Bailey Banks & Biddle jewelry store."

Take your pick.

ABRAMOFF'S FRIENDS....A few days ago Jack Abramoff's partner, Michael Scanlon, finalized a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to a single bribery charge in return for his cooperation in the wide-ranging influence peddling case against Abramoff. How wide ranging? Scanlon's lawyer that the "investigation is much broader — and Mr. Scanlon's cooperation in it will be much more extensive" than merely what was set out in the indictment against Scanlon. Here's what the Wall Street Journal has to say:

A Justice Department investigation into possible influence-peddling by prominent Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff is examining his dealings with four lawmakers, [at least 17] current and former congressional aides and two former Bush administration officials.

....Prosecutors in the department's public integrity and fraud divisions...are looking into Mr. Abramoff's interactions with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, Rep. Bob Ney (R., Ohio), Rep. John Doolittle (R., Calif.) and Sen. Conrad Burns (R., Mont.), according to several people close to the investigation.

....The Justice Department also is looking into Mr. Abramoff's dealings with Steven Griles, a former deputy secretary at the Interior Department, and David Safavian, a former head of the government's procurement office, according to lawyers and others close to the investigation.

With Scanlon squealing and a couple dozen other officials getting nervous, there's no telling how far this could go. Once these guys start ratting each other out, the sky's the limit.

TAKING TERRORISM SERIOUSLY....After noting that the most dramatic charges against Jose Padilla — dirty bomber, apartment bomber, terrorist mastermind — have now evaporated, just as they did with Yaser Hamdi, Zacarias Moussaoui, John Walker Lindh and (though he's not on her list) Chaplain James Yee, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick makes a key point:

Had Padilla been charged and tried back in the summer of 2002, rather than touted as some Bond villain — the Prince of Radiological Dispersion — his case would have stood for a simple legal proposition: that if you are a terrorist, a supporter of terrorism, or a would-be terrorist, the government will hunt you down and punish you. Had the government waited, tested its facts, kept expectations low, then delivered a series of convictions of even small-time al-Qaida foot soldiers, we in this country would feel safer and we would doubtless be safer.

Instead Padilla, like Hamdi, was used as fodder for big speeches. They became the justification for Bush's position that some people are so evil that the law does not deter them, that new legal systems must be invented — new systems that bear a striking resemblance to those discredited around the time of Torquemada.

Exactly. The corrosion of civil liberties highlighted by these cases is bad enough, but it's not the only problem they've caused. Every time a dramatic set of charges turns out to be baseless, it sends a very public message that the war against terrorism is just a sham, a campaign of partisan fearmongering being used as little more than a political club. This is the same message sent by the Bush administration's misuse of intelligence, the lack of WMD in Iraq, the politically motivated orange alerts, the strategically timed marketing campaigns, and the transparent political stunts played by congressional Republicans last week in response to John Murtha's speech.

The American public can hardly be expected to take terrorism seriously if it's obvious that the Bush administration itself views al-Qaeda as primarily a political opportunity rather than a real problem. Sooner or later, we're going to pay the price for this feckless and irresponsible approach.

DECEMBER 31st CAN'T COME SOON ENOUGH....In an apparent effort to prove that he can always write a column more obtuse and witless than the last, David Gelernter takes on the question today of why college kids are so obsessed with their careers. After a bit of preliminary throat clearing about the wide ranging brilliance and intellectual curiosity of his own generation, he begins his explanation with this sentence: "In those long-ago days, more college women used to plan on staying home to rear children."

I am not making this up. I recommend that you not click the link and read the rest.

THANKSGIVING CAT BLOGGING....The cats were not being photographically cooperative this morning, so I'm afraid this was the best I could do. Still, I'm sure they are both feeling thankful today. Inkblot is thankful that I finally put the camera down and left him alone so he could take a well earned nap, and Jasmine is thankful for the catnip plant she is eyeing greedily. And both will be thankful this evening for their half-can each of Sliced Turkey & Giblets Feast® In Gravy.

From both the two-legged and four-legged residents of Political Animal World Headquarters here in sunny suburban Irvine, thanks for reading the blog all year. Have a great Thanksgiving!

CROSSWALK TIMERS....In Washington DC, all the crosswalks have countdown timers that tell you exactly how much time you have left to cross the street. As Jim Henley suggested after we had dinner Monday night, this is very cool — and I give him credit for admitting that a government agency has made a positive contribution to the welfare of mankind.

But there's something awfully strange about these timers: counting down to zero means different things at different intersections. At some intersections, when the timer hits zero the light immediately turns red and cross traffic starts barreling toward you. At other intersections, the light turns yellow and you still have a few seconds to hustle across the street. And at yet other intersections, it seems to mean....nothing. There's no cross traffic, no left turn traffic, no nothing. You can continue on your way for some unspecified time until suddenly a light somewhere turns green and traffic starts rolling again.

The countdown timers are indeed cool. In fact, they're a fine, small-bore example of the "New Progressivism" that we're trumpeting on this month's cover: a way of giving the regular guy (DC's pedestrians) more control and more choice when dealing with both government bureaucracies (DC's Dept. of Transportation) and the corporate sector (DC's taxicabs). But they could be even better if they meant the same thing at every intersection.

DENNIS HOPPER....I saw an episode of E-Ring tonight, and it prompted me to wonder — again — how it is that Dennis Hopper continues to be employed in prominent roles. I mean, on a purely technical basis, the guy is a horrible actor. Just horrible. Does he have a file cabinet full of incriminating photos of famous Hollywood producers, or what?

MANIPULATING INTELLIGENCE....AN UPDATE....Last week I posted a list of five specific cases in which the Bush administration deliberately suppressed dissenting views on some of the most important pieces of evidence that they used to bolster their case for war. I've since added two new items to the list and appended some additional information to item #2.

The added information is below. The complete list is here.

2. The Claim: An Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball" was the source of reporting that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of mobile biowarfare labs. Curveball's claims of mobile bio labs were repeated by many administration figures during the runup to war.

   What We Know Now: The German intelligence officials who handled Curveball told the CIA that he was not "psychologically stable" and that his allegations of mobile bio labs were second hand and unverified. Link. The only American agent to actually meet with Curveball before the war warned that he appeared to be an alcoholic and was unreliable. However, his superior in the CIA told him it was best to keep quiet about this: "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about." Link. This dissent was not made public until 2004, in a response to the SSCI report that was written by Senator Dianne Feinstein. Link.
   

6. The Claim: Administration officials repeatedly suggested that Saddam Hussein had substantial connections to al-Qaeda. Even after the war, George Bush said, "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda [is] because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda." Dick Cheney said the evidence of a relationship was "overwhelming."

   What We Know Now: As early as September 21, 2001, President Bush was told by the CIA that there was "scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda." In fact, according to Murray Waas, "Bush was told during the briefing that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime." Link.

7. The Claim: Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, an Iraqi defector, told the CIA that he had secretly helped Saddam Hussein's men bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. After this information was passed to the New York Times by Ahmed Chalabi, it was cited in "A Decade of Deception and Defiance" as evidence of Iraq's continued WMD programs.

   What We Know Now: Al-Haideri told his story while strapped to a polygraph. He failed. The CIA knew from the start that he had made up the entire account, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa. Link.
   

THE MORAL ARGUMENT AGAINST TORTURE....Over at Unfogged, Ogged picks up on my biggest frustration with the current state of the torture debate: namely that it's almost impossible to convincingly make the moral case against torture to anyone who's not already predisposed to think it's immoral. Stripped to its core, I realize that the only real argument I have against torture is "But don't you see that it's wrong? Don't you?" And that's just immensely frustrating, because if you don't see it then I have no ammunition left.

I wish I could do better. In the end, though, the strongest argument I can make is the one Dick Durbin made: if you didn't know better when you hear about U.S. practices in the war on terror, you'd think we were talking about Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union — and a big part of the reason that we judge those regimes to have been immoral was because of their use of routine, state sanctioned torture. Is that really the company we want to keep?

I supposed it's best not to feel too frustrated, though. Changing public opinion takes a long time, and continual repetition of the simple assertion that torture is morally repugnant — along with public disclosure of how commonplace it's become — might eventually do the trick even if movement in the right direction often seems imperceptible.

At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

CUTTING AND RUNNING....A couple of days ago the Arab League and the Iraqi Interior Minister called for a timetable for withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq. That's surprising enough, but Juan Cole passes along some even more suprising news from al-Hayat:

Sources at the conference....said that the withdrawal would be completed over a period of two years (i.e. November 2007). This timetable, al-Hayat says, appears actually to have been put forward by the Americans themselves. If that is true, we finally know exactly what George W. Bush means by "staying the course." It is a course that takes us to withdrawal.

Since I'm roughly in favor of both a benchmark-based withdrawal plan as well as the approximate timeline outlined here, I don't have a problem with the Bush administration putting forward this proposal. Still, if this really is their plan, isn't it about time for Republicans to stop demonizing liberals who make the exact same proposal as a bunch of cut-and-run cowards? This is going to come back to bite them very firmly in the ass if they don't change their tune pronto.

THE PENTAGON'S WITHDRAWAL PLANS....In the Washington Post, Bradley Graham and Robin Wright report that the Pentagon plans to start reducing the American troop presence in Iraq after the December elections. They say that all the officers they spoke to "described the moves as likely":

Barring any major surprises in Iraq, the Pentagon tentatively plans to reduce the number of U.S. forces there early next year by as many as three combat brigades....Pentagon authorities also have set a series of "decision points" during 2006 to consider further force cuts that, under a "moderately optimistic" scenario, would drop the total number of troops from more than 150,000 now to fewer than 100,000, including 10 combat brigades, by the end of the year, the officers said.

....To help gauge the particular impact that growth of Iraq's security forces might have on the pace of a U.S. drawdown, military planners in Baghdad have devised a simple formula — what one general called a "rough rule of thumb."

The formula estimates that for every three Iraqi battalions and one Iraqi brigade headquarters achieving a readiness rating of level two, a U.S. battalion can be dropped. A level two rating, on a scale of one to four, indicates that a unit is able to take the lead in operations but still requires some U.S. military support.

They can call this a "rough rule of thumb" if they want, but it sure sounds like the Pentagon is adopting a set of measurable benchmarks for a phased withdrawal. This is almost precisely what John Kerry proposed last month, and what an RNC spokesman immediately slammed as a plan that would "endanger American forces on the ground."

But politics aside, I sure hope they're serious about this. If it's done right, it's probably the best hope we have for a non-catastrophic outcome in Iraq.

TROOP LEVELS IN IRAQ....Last week, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee decided to bypass the generals and ask a group of battalion commanders directly whether or not we had enough troops in Iraq. Their answer was blunt:

According to two sources with knowledge of the meeting....the commanders said that they not only needed more manpower but also had repeatedly asked for it. Indeed, military sources told Time that as recently as August 2005, a senior military official requested more troops but got turned down flat.

....The battalion commanders, according to sources close to last week's meeting, said that because there are not enough troops, they have to "leapfrog" around Iraq to keep insurgents from returning to towns that have been cleared out. The officers also stressed that the lack of manpower — rather than of protective armor or signal jammers — posed one of the biggest obstacles in dealing with roadside bombs, which have caused the majority of U.S. casualties in Iraq.

Frankly, I'm too lazy to dig up one of the hundreds of statements from Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney/etc. telling us with a straight face that everyone in the military is happy with the current troop levels and no one has ever asked for more. Can someone else please do it for me?

BACK IN THE SADDLE....Many, many thanks to Mr. Steve Benen and Ms. Avedon Carol for guest blogging here while I was ambling through the corridors of power in our nation's capital earlier this week. If you liked what you read, you can read Steve's regular blogging at The Carpetbagger and Avedon's at The Sideshow. They're both worth bookmarking and visiting regularly.

BOMBING AL-JAZEERA....This goes right to the top of the "seriously weird" pile:

President Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a "Top Secret" No 10 memo reveals.

But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair, who said it would provoke a worldwide backlash.

....A Government official suggested that the Bush threat had been "humorous, not serious". But another source declared: "Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men."

....Bush disclosed his plan to target al-Jazeera, a civilian station with a huge Mid-East following, at a White House face-to-face with Mr Blair on April 16 last year. At the time, the US was launching an all-out assault on insurgents in the Iraqi town of Fallujah.

At first this sounded like just another bizarre British tabloid fantasy, but apparently it's quite real. That is, the conversation was real; the transcript is real; it was leaked to a guy who is now being prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act; and the Daily Mirror, which published the story on Tuesday, has been ordered not to publish any further details about the memo. In a story on Wednesday they said they have "essentially agreed to comply," but then immediately provided a bit of additional detail:

The five-page memo — stamped "Top Secret" — records a threat by Bush to unleash "military action" against the TV station.

Needless to say, both the White House and Downing Street have declined to comment.

So take your pick. Either Bush seriously tossed out the idea of bombing a TV station in a friendly country because he didn't like their coverage of the war, or else this was his equivalent of Ronald Reagan's "The bombing will begin in five minutes." There's no way to know which unless someone leaks the transcript itself. I'd sure like to see whether Tony Blair treated it like a joke when Bush proposed it.

UPDATE: I don't have a link for this, but a reader emails to tell me that this was the subject of Tuesday's "Quickvote Poll" on CNN. The question was:

Do you believe President Bush talked about bombing the HQ of Arabic-language TV network al-Jazeera?

71% of the respondents said yes. Even if this story turns out not to be true, that's quite a statement.

Peace

Wouldn't it be cool if the Iraqis all just got together and made peace with each other? And then we could just leave and declare victory.

Except that's apparently not what the Bush administration wants, either. Check out Robert Dreyfuss at The American Prospect on just this subject, Peace Talk.

And it's after four in the morning here, so I'm going to bed. It's been fun, but Kevin should be back tomorrow and I need to tend my own garden.

I just have one question: How come after two days the right-wingers still think I'm a boy? Well, I'm not.

GUILTY, GUILTY, GULTY... Murray Waas has just posted this at The National Journal:

Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.
[...]
One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

SUING SONY....One of the joys of traveling is that the newspaper of choice at hotels around the country is USA Today, which frequently highlights stories that others bury. Today, they provided me with a ray of sunshine in the otherwise gloomy weather here in Washington DC:

The crisis at Sony BMG Entertainment worsened Monday when the Texas attorney general sued the record label, saying it violated the state's new anti-spyware law.

....The lawsuits follow Sony's recall of nearly 5 million copy-protected CDs that contain a hidden file susceptible to viruses when played on a Windows-equipped computer. The company has asked retailers to remove more than 50 CD titles from store shelves and to replace them with non-copy-protected versions expected in stores by the end of the week.

Attorney General Greg Abbott says that despite the recall, his staff found CDs with XCP copy-protection created by British firm First4Internet on store shelves Monday. He estimates that as many as tens of thousands of Texas consumers have bought the CDs, and notes that Texas' spyware law calls for fines of $100,000 per violation. "Our message to Sony," he says: "Don't mess with Texas computers."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing Sony too, and good for them. I hope all the other states with anti-spyware laws join in the fun and make Sony's life as miserable as they possibly can. Corporations should never be allowed to install software on your computer without your express permission, and they sure as hell shouldn't be allowed to do it to people who think they're doing nothing more than playing a few tunes while surfing their favorite blogs. My Christmas wish is that the discovery phase of this lawsuit is long and painful and uncovers a lengthy catalog of embarrassing and incriminating emails among Sony's suits explaining just why they thought it was OK to secretly install a virus magnet on their customers' computers.

Well, that's one of my Christmas wishes, anyway.

If you're hearing about this for the first time, background details are here.

AND THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE...

The Daily Howler reported recently that the WaPo finally printed an article pointing out that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is no raving liberal, regardless of the spin. This is just the sort of thing that makes Bob Somerby so useful - if anyone was listening:

Several thoughts about this matter: First, we again note the failure of Dems to run an effective message machine. Over the past five months, pseudo-con spinners have endlessly claimed that Republicans voted to confirm Ginsburg despite her wild-eyed, kooky ways. (In her column, Marcus debunks specific claims they have repeatedly made.) On cable, voters have heard these claims again and again-but libs and Dems have rarely offered the countervailing evidence. At present, the Democratic Party is simply unable, for whatever reason, to run a capable message machine. For that reason, we badly need leadership from the liberal web. We need to find a way to publish and push elementary info-information of the kind Marcus offers this week.

Really, it's shameful to see them going on television and falling for - and even repeating - RNC spin and falsehoods. They need to study-up, and it's just plain stupid to ignore the fact that the information is available gratis and easy to find.

It's pretty obvious that the level of discourse at places like Liberal Oasis, Daily Kos, MyDD et al. is significantly higher than the stuff that comes out of the party itself, and it's about time they acquainted themselves with what's really going on. A rep could do worse than to check The Daily Howler, Media Matters, and Eschaton every day just to get a handle on what kind of bull is being spit out by the right-wingers and that it really is just lies.

And it wouldn't hurt them to check out Nathan Newman regularly to see what these monsters in the GOP are doing to us while the Democratic leaders waste time - because these are the things that really concern Americans, that affect our lives and the country's future.

On a related subject, I see that the Oreo story is breaking out, with Media Matters and Somerby both covering it:

How will Dems and liberals handle this matter? Again, Ehrlich - a consummate phony, and we rarely dislike pols - seems to be playing the public for complete, total fools. For years, we have made a simple suggestion; we have suggested that Dems and liberals tell the public that the pseudo-con empire does this routinely. But Dems and libs have tended to gambol and play while pseudo-cons work - work on their completely inane but highly effective stories.

We've been offering Democrats, for free, better advice than they've been paying for over the last several years, and their response has been to let the GOP convince them that anyone who disagrees with rabid right-wing talking points is some kind of loony. They can dismiss us as mere bloggers even while the Republicans make terrific use of their own "mere" bloggers. They use their resources while convincing Democrats to shun their own. And Democrats fall for it.

Democratic politicians are just too easily embarrassed about all the wrong things. If you compare me with Michael Moore, I'm not embarrassed - I just say, "Michael Moore was right about the invasion, and you were wrong." I can say this because I've actually paid attention to what Michael Moore has said and what the facts behind it are. No one should be ashamed to be compared with Moore; they should be ashamed to be backed down by people who think saying, "Now you're in Michael Moore territory," makes a worthwhile point. They should be able to retort with, at the very least, "Now you're in FOX News territory."

And if the GOP wants to smear left-wing bloggers, well, hell, tell 'em to look at their own. No decent human being should be proud to be repeating the mendacious and hateful trash that can easily be found on the leading right-wing blogs.

Look, the right-wing lies about liberals and about issues, pure and simple. They spin and fabricate and spread hate. You don't defeat that by cowering in the corner, you defeat it by shining the bright lights on it. They lie. We have the issues, we have the facts, and the American people agree with us. All we have to do is say it out loud.

Update: I have been remiss in not also recommending the excellent Digby on that list, for a moral dimension that the Democratic leadership has clearly forgotten. (And then, of course, there's The Sideshow....)

WHO PUT THE BUBP... Max Blumenthal has a nice little post on Mean Jean's Marine and why he thinks Murtha is a coward:

"A few minutes ago I received a call from Colonel Danny Bubp, Ohio Representative from the 88th district in the House of Representatives. He asked me to send Congress a message: Stay the course," Schmidt declared from her lectern. "He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message, that cowards cut and run, Marines never do."

By employing Bubp, a Marine reservist, as her surrogate attack dog, Schmidt sought to give the impression that the military rank-and-file overwhelmingly deplored Murtha's resolution. Murtha may have been a Marine a long, long time ago, but he doesn't understand the harsh realities of the post-9/11 world. But that tough-talking paragon of the modern warrior, Colonel Danny Bubp, whoever he is, sure as hell does. Or so Schmidt would have us believe.

A quick glance at Bubp's background reveals him to be a low-level right-wing operative who has spent more time in the past ten years engaged in symbolic Christian right crusades than he has battling terrorist evil-doers. And throughout his career, Bubp's destiny has been inextricably linked with Schmidt's. Bubp may be a Marine, but his view of Murtha as a "coward" is colored by naked political ambition. He is nothing more than cheap camouflage cover for the GOP's latest Swift-Boat campaign.

LIVE ON C-SPAN... Want to know why the president's "Ownership Society" has been such a bust, and what alternative ideas progressives can offer to give Americans the power and options they really want? Then turn on C-SPAN between 2:30 PM and 4:00 PM EST today, and check out the conference we're co-hosting with the Center for American Progress. It's all about the cover package on "The New Progressivism" in the latest issue of The Washington Monthly. Kevin Drum and I will be on the panel, along with others, and E.J. Dionne will be the moderator.

Kevin flew in to DC last night for today's event. I told him I'd pick him up at the airport and we'd have dinner together. I figured, just from talking to him and reading his site, that he's a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, so I took him to a downtown steakhouse. Turned out my guess was right. He had a rib eye, medium rare from the looks of it, with a baked potato, washed down with DC's finest tap water. Just thought I'd share that.

Don't waste your respect on Tony Blair

I've written before about the Tony Blair conundrum, but I'd like to take the opportunity Kevin has offered to tell my progressive friends back home in the States that their strange belief that Blair is a good and principled statesman who just happened to get pushed into joining Bush's war is at best wishful thinking.

My friends think Blair is some kind of a statesman because he can talk better than Bush, but he's more Ralph Reed than Al Gore. He exploits his alleged belief in God, knows how to get the support of the powerful, and keeps trying to "modernize" things that already worked just fine.

Leaving aside Blair's background as an admirer of oligarchy and an agent of corruption, there is the small fact that he has been a nightmare for civil liberties.

It's unclear whether his attempts to impose a costly and unworkable plan for biometric ID cards and a national identity register is part of another kick-back scheme, but it is certainly consistent with his continual assault on freedom. His recent push to legitimize long detentions without due process was so appalling that his own party rebelled (although not as much as they should have).

Many people mistakenly believe that all of this is just part of an overreaction to the War on Terrorism or even some sort of deal-making with George Bush, but the truth is that Blair's authoritarianism has always been a part of his program.

The only thing that is protecting what is left of Britain's civil liberties at the moment is the fact that the Tories are performing as an opposition party, despite the fact that much of this repressive legislation is also consistent with the policies that previous Conservative governments tried to push through themselves - but failed because they were so unpopular and the opposition parties in those days acted as something like an opposition. Recently, the Tories have been smart enough to seize on the unpopularity of these same policies to attack the Labour leadership.

Not a surprise, then, that he's already set to join the Carlyle Group....

OUT OF TOWN....I'll be in Washington DC for the next couple of days in order to appear on Monday's "New Progressivism" panel at the Center for American Progress. If you're in the area and want to attend, details are here.

While I'm gone two terrific guest bloggers will be handling the site: Avedon Carol of The Sideshow and Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger. Avedon blogs from Britain and Steve blogs from the East Coast, so posts will probably be appearing here at different hours than you're used to seeing from me.

I'll be back on Wednesday. See you then.

CURVEBALL....The LA Times reports today that the Bush administration publicly repeated information from a source known as Curveball despite warnings from his German handlers that the information was unreliable:

Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.

...."This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."

The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst.

....The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast when he watched Powell misstate Curveball's claims as a justification for war.

"We were shocked," the official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven....It was not hard intelligence."

There's much more, so read the whole thing.

In other news about hyped intelligence, James Bamford reports in Rolling Stone that the same thing happened in the case of an informant named Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, who insisted that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam Hussein's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. He failed a CIA polygraph test, but his claims were nonetheless leaked to Judith Miller at the New York Times and then trumpeted repeatedly by hawks both inside and outside the administration.

Nope, no manipulation of intelligence here.....

WAS HADLEY WOODWARD'S SOURCE?....The London Times says Stephen Hadley was Bob Woodward's secret source:

The mysterious source who gave America’s foremost journalist, Bob Woodward, a tip-off about the CIA agent at the centre of one of Washington’s biggest political storms was Stephen Hadley, the White House national security adviser, according to lawyers close to the investigation.

....A White House official said the national security adviser’s ambiguity [about his denial] was unintentional and repeated that Hadley was not Woodward’s source. But others close to the investigation insisted that he was.

I don't remember if this has been definitively reported before, but Hadley has almost certainly testified in this case previously. He was much too close to the action for Fitzgerald to have ignored him before now.

If the Times account is true, Hadley could be in serious trouble. It would mean he failed to testify accurately when asked about press contacts before, and that he did so despite the fact that (according to Woodward), Woodward reminded him of their conversation on two previous occasions, once in 2004 and once this year. So "I forgot" won't be a credible defense.

Or else the Times might be wrong. Stay tuned.

QUOTE OF THE DAY....In a heavily conservative district in Missouri, a Democrat recently won a surprising victory over Republican Moira Byrd in a special election for the state legislature. Was it because of Bush fatigue? Negative campaigning? Growing irritation with GOP governor Matt Blunt?

All of those things, I suppose. But John Pohlmann, a political science professor at a local community college, probably nailed the biggest reason:

"I think Byrd had a number of things going against her," said Pohlmann. "It's hard to talk about family values, and then to have your campaign treasurer busted in a drug sting."

Yeah, that would hurt.

"CAREFUL, ACCURATE, AND FAIR"?....A Washington Post editorial today says that the editor of the Post is right to describe Bob Woodward as "one of the most careful, accurate and fair journalists I have ever worked with." But the editorial then goes on to say this:

Much of the public finds the media's extensive use of confidential sources objectionable, and understandably so. Their use should be as limited as possible. When they are relied upon, reporters should impart as much information as possible about the sources' motives. Those guidelines are accepted but too often ignored by the press.

Sorry guys, but you can't have it both ways. Bob Woodward's signature journalistic method is to seek out interviews with dozens upon dozens of movers and shakers, grant them all anonymity, and then repeat their often self-serving words to his readers without providing any clue about who's saying what or why they're saying it. If the extensive and uncritical use of confidential sources is indeed objectionable, then Woodward is the high priest of objectionable.

For a better take, here is Tim Rutten in the LA Times today:

There is something singularly appropriate about the fact that the Plame affair should involve Woodward, whose skillful and courageous use of the ur-voice among confidential sources virtually created a whole genre of Washington reporting. It's a journalistic strategy style dependent on the cultivation of access to well-placed officials greased by promises of "confidentiality." It's a way of doing journalism that still serves its practitioners' career interests, but less and less often their readers or viewers because it's a game the powerful and well-connected have learned to play to their own advantage.

....The [Bush] administration has adroitly availed itself of the cultural complicity that prevails in a fin de siècle Washington press corps living out the decadence of an increasingly discredited reporting style. As the Valerie Plame scandal and its spreading taint have made all too clear, the trade in confidentiality and access that has made stars of reporters like Bob Woodward and Judy Miller now is utterly bankrupt.

It still may call itself investigative journalism — and so it once was — but now it's really just a glittering and carefully choreographed waltz in which all the dancers share the unspoken agreement that the one unpardonable faux pas is to ask who's calling the tune.

I've long been a supporter of a federal shield law for reporters because I think the value of protecting whistleblowers outweighs the risk of abuse from reporters and sources who use confidentiality for more venal purposes. But I have to say, between the Wen Ho Lee case, the WMD case, and the Valerie Plame case, America's journalistic community sure is making it hard for me to stick to my guns on this.

SONY SPYWARE....A few days ago Michael Hiltzik blogged about a piece of spyware on Sony music CDs that gets secretly installed on your PC if you play one of their disks on your computer. I didn't link to it at the time, but it's a pretty unbelievable story that's worth a click. Go take a look.

Today, Michael O'Hare follows up the story, and it's now so bad that he thinks we have to make up a whole new word just to describe it:

We need a new, short pithy word for "unbelievable! no, it's really, completely unbelievable!" I'm tired of saying the phrase and others like it, but it seems lately I have to every time I look at a newspaper. UNOIRCU? Unwarkoo...

This story is too good to try to summarize, so go read both links to see what's going on. It's a train wreck of epic proportion.

But maybe there's a silver lining, because if there's any justice in the world — admittedly an iffy proposition — Sony will get hit by a class action lawsuit so big it will make even tobacco company executives blink. And this might — might! — persuade other music/movie/television/etc. companies to try to avoid their own extinction by calling a truce in their increasingly desperate war against their own consumers.

Then again, maybe not, especially in an industry in which "new business model" seems to be a more feared concept than "extinction." Sony shareholders take note.

ILLUSION AND REALITY....In an episode scheduled to air sometime this spring, the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 on Lost are going to find the manuscript of "Bad Twin," a book written by one of the passengers who died in the crash. At the same time, bookstores around the country are going to offer eager customers the very same book, supposedly written by a Lost character and carrying cover blurbs from fictional reviewers.

All harmless fun, perhaps, but David Ulin, the book editor of the LA Times, is disturbed:

There's something creepy about the nudge-nudge, wink-wink insistence that "Bad Twin" was found instead of manufactured, and it goes beyond the idea of writing as a commodity, a gimmick, a ploy. In fact, the marketing of the novel suggests something far more insidious — that we, the audience, exist not only to be manipulated but to participate in our manipulation by seeing it as cool. This is the kind of thing that literature has traditionally stood against.

Help me out, literature mavens. It strikes me that this is exactly backward: far from standing against this kind of thing, literature has always depended on readers who not only agree to be manipulated but actively revel in it. Occasionally this is overt (clapping our hands for Tinkerbell, David Foster Wallace telling us to make up our own ending for Infinite Jest), but more often it's simply part and parcel of the willing suspension of disbelief that's required to enjoy fiction in the first place.

The phony Lost novel obviously belongs in the "overt" category (as well as the "marketing gimmick" category, of course), but if David Foster Wallace can do it, then why not the producers of Lost? In fact, perhaps they're just exploring the all-too-often uninterrogated and subtextual boundaries between art and modern marketing in an attempt to playfully subvert our lazy and unquestioned acceptance of the traditional classist hermenuetics of TV drama?

Or else they're just trying to make a buck and it's nothing to worry about. Your call.

THE SMEAR MACHINE CRANKS UP AGAIN....I guess John Murtha's call for withdrawal from Iraq really has Republicans scared — and we know what that means. Today, congressional Republicans cranked up their all-too-familiar smear machine by suggesting that Murtha has violated House ethics rules. This is based on an LA Times article from last June which revealed that last year's defense spending bill included $20 million that went to companies represented by KSA Consulting, a firm that employs Murtha's brother.

You can read the story for yourself, but all I have to say is this: if the best that KSA could do for its clients was $20 million out of a $417 billion appropriations bill, Murtha must not like his brother very much. That's a rounding error.

DECONSTRUCTING WOODWARD....OK, based on a couple of comments from the previous post, here's a possible scenario that explains why Woodward and his source (Mr. X) came forward only after they had listened in on Patrick Fitzgerald's press conference announcing the indictment of Scooter Libby:

1. Woodward hears Fitzgerald say on TV that Libby was the first administration official known to have talked about Valerie Plame's CIA status to a reporter.

2. However, Woodward knows that isn't true: Mr. X blabbed to a reporter (Woodward) before Libby did. What's more, Woodward knows that Mr. X has testified previously.

3. Woodward concludes that Mr. X must have failed to tell Fitzgerald about this conversation. He is shocked!

4. He immediately calls Mr. X and tells him that his previous testimony was faulty. Mr. X is shocked too! Woodward is right! Honest soul that he is, he agrees that he needs to immediately call Fitzgerald and tell him that he had, um, forgotten about his conversation with the most famous reporter in Christendom during his initial testimony.

5. Mr. X calls Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald calls Woodward, and the rest is history.
   

Then there's the more cynical version of this: Woodward realized that his pal lied under oath and that there was a good chance Fitzgerald might find out about it. So, the way any good friend would, he called Mr. X and told him he ought to refresh his memory pronto before he got hit with a perjury charge too.

Take your pick. I'm not sure that either of these scenarios sounds very plausible, but they're the best I've heard so far. Take 'em for what they're worth.

WOODWARD'S SOURCE....Why did Bob Woodward's source suddenly decide to come forward earlier this month and tell Patrick Fitzgerald that he had revealed Valerie Plame's CIA status to Woodward in mid-June 2003? Because Woodward himself suggested it:

In his press conference announcing Libby’s indictment, Fitzgerald noted that, "Mr. Libby was the first official known to have told a reporter when he talked to Judith Miller in June of 2003 about Valerie Wilson." Woodward realized, given that the indictment stated Libby disclosed the information to New York Times reporter Miller on June 23, that Libby was not the first official to talk about Wilson's wife to a reporter. Woodward himself had received the information earlier.

According to Woodward, that triggered a call to his source. "I said it was clear to me that the source had told me [about Wilson's wife] in mid-June," says Woodward, "and this person could check his or her records and see that it was mid-June. My source said he or she had no alternative but to go to the prosecutor. I said, 'If you do, am I released?'", referring to the confidentiality agreement between the two. The source said yes, but only for purposes of discussing it with Fitzgerald, not for publication.

I'm struggling to make sense of this. Why did Mr. X have no alternative after he got Woodward's call? Had he completely forgotten about all this until Woodward reminded him? That doesn't seem likely.

Regardless, the implication here is that it really is important news that Libby wasn't the first person to reveal Plame's status to a reporter. But why? That has nothing to do with the perjury charges Fitzgerald brought against Libby.

And yet, somehow it was important enough that both Woodward and Mr. X immediately decided that it needed to be revealed to Fitzgerald. For two years neither of them felt they needed to come forward to Fitzgerald, but as soon as Libby was indicted they did.

Why? What possibilities are there for this? Think, dammit, think!

PEAK OIL UPDATE....Suart Staniford has an interesting followup to his summary of the peak oil discussion at last week's meeting of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. Basically, there's good news and bad news:

• The bad news is increasing evidence that the decline rate for existing oil fields might be close to 8% per year, not the 3-6% per year everyone's been assuming. If that's the case, then new discoveries won't come close to matching the decline from existing fields, and oil production will peak in the very near future.

• The good news comes from Henry Groppe. He believes that oil production is near peak, but points out that about 25% of the world's oil production is currently used for heat and power generation, mostly in developing countries. The U.S. and Europe switched almost all their heat and power generation to coal and natural gas (and nuclear) in the 70s, and it's probable that developing countries will do the same if oil prices stay high. This gives the world a bit of headroom on the demand side, even if oil production does peak in the near future.
  

That's all. I just wanted to pass along the latest news on the peak oil front.

KEEPING DOWN THE BLACK VOTE....Earlier this year Georgia passed a law requiring residents to present ID at polling places before they vote. If you don't have a driver's license, as many poor and elderly people don't, you have to pay $20 to get a state ID card.

The purpose? To prevent fraud, of course. What kind of fraud? Let's listen in:

The chief sponsor of Georgia's voter identification law told the Justice Department that if black people in her district "are not paid to vote, they don't go to the polls," and that if fewer blacks vote as a result of the new law, it is only because it would end such voting fraud.

....[Rep. Sue] Burmeister said Thursday that the memo's record of what she said "was more accurate than not," but added: "That sounds pretty harsh. I don't remember saying those exact words."

I'm trying to think of what to say about this, but words fail me. I guess I'll let Burmeister's explanation speak for itself.

But remember this: the Bush Justice Department approved Georgia's law even though they had Burmeister's statement on record. In their view, this was not sufficient evidence of any kind of racial animus in the bill. One wonders just what kind of evidence Alberto Gonzales requires.

Via The Carpetbagger.

UPDATE: More on the subject here from Legal Fiction.

LEAK UPDATE....Patrick Fitzgerald says the Plame leak investigation is continuing and "will involve proceedings before a different grand jury." I'm guessing that there are at least a few people in the White House who are feeling pretty nervous about that announcement.

In other news, People magazine named Fitzgerald one of this year's sexiest men alive.

REPUBLICANS AND EDUCATION....In the past couple of weeks universities around the country have announced huge tuition increases. In California, for example, UC just raised tuition and fees for undergraduates by 8%, the fifth increase in the past five years.

The Republican response in Congress has been predictable: a massive reduction in student assistance in order to help finance their $70 billion corporate tax cut:

The budget bill would reverse a previous law capping the interest rates for student loans....would also increase the cap on parent loans....would also raise taxes on student loans, raise interest rates on consolidation loans and reduce subsidies paid to student lenders, totaling $20.5 billion in cuts over a 10-year period, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office.

You can watch George Miller's impassioned floor speech about these cuts here. Be sure to keep watching after they try to gavel him into silence.

But here's another related tidbit. Not only did congressional Republicans raise interest rates on working class and middle class students — no big surprise, really — but these supposed free market zealots also declined to change a rule that prevents students from refinancing their loans if interest rates go down. Here's Dick Morris:

While homeowners can refinance their mortgages as often as they want and relieve themselves of high-interest debt when rates cycle downward, student and former-student debtors are only permitted to refinance once for the lifetime of the loan! And now the House is considering legislation that would stop students who are in school from keeping their current interest rate of 4.75 percent and would instead force them to pay 7.9 percent, creating a lifetime burden entirely unjustified by the lending market.

....Frequently, students use their once-only refinancing option shortly after graduation and find themselves helpless as the market interest rates drop ever lower....But student loan refinancing — beyond the one shot now permitted — is blocked by special-interest regulation and legislation.

Get the picture? Republicans are raising fees and interest rates for middle class students, cutting taxes on corporations and the rich, and allowing special interests to keep a special privilege that allows them to lock in higher rates on kids for years regardless of what the market does. That's a pretty sweet deal. For someone.

RIGHT TO REQUEST....Of all the articles in our "New Progressivism" package, Karen Kornbluh's "The Joy of Flex" was the one I found the most fascinating. It describes a British program that allows working parents to request flex time:

The policy, which went into effect in 2003, works like this: Any parent with one or more children under the age of six, who has worked at least 26 consecutive weeks, has the right to file a written request with his or her employer for a change in working hours—be that in the form of compressed hours, flex-time, telecommuting, job-sharing, shift-working, or staggered hours.

The employee must explain exactly how the proposed schedule would work and offer solutions to any inconvenience that might be caused to the employer. For their part, employers are required to meet with any worker who has filed such a request within four weeks to discuss the proposed plan, and they must notify the employee of a decision within two weeks of that meeting.

The part I found most interesting is that the program doesn't rely on bureaucratic coercion. Employees have the right to request flex time, but employers aren't required to give it to them. The only requirement is that employers meet with workers who have requested flex time and give them a good reason if they turn them down.

And apparently that's all it takes — at least in Britain. 86% of workers who request flex time have gotten it, amounting to nearly one-quarter of all workers who are eligible for the program. Workers like it, businesses report no real problems adapting, and it's been a big success for Tony Blair's government.

Sounds like something that ought to be on the Democratic Party agenda.

WOODWARD'S SOURCE....The Wall Street Journal says that all of the following people have either been ruled out as Bob Woodward's source or have denied it:

• Dick Cheney ("Isn't believed to have talked to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald since last year, nor has he given a waiver to Mr. Woodward. That removes him as Mr. Woodward's source.")
  

• George Bush
  

• Dan Bartlett
  

• Doug Feith
  

• Carl Ford
  

• George Tenet
  

• John McLaughlin
  

• Colin Powell
  

• Steven Hadley
  

• Condoleezza Rice
  

• John Bolton
  

• Karl Rove
  

Marc Grossman and Rich Armitage couldn't be reached for comment.

Needless to say, any of these people could be lying. But for what it's worth, they're all now on the record saying it wasn't them.

THE LIBBY SMOKESCREEN....Yesterday Bob Woodward admitted that someone in the Bush administration had told him about Valerie Plame in mid-June 2003, a few days prior to the date that Scooter Libby leaked Plame's CIA status to Judith Miller. Media Matters has an exhaustive rundown of media figures who have now repeated the notion that this somehow hurts Patrick Fitzgerald's case against Libby. I sure don't see how.

Fitzgerald didn't indict Libby for being the first person to tell a reporter about Plame. In fact, he didn't indict Libby for leaking Plame's status at all. He was indicted for lying about how he found out about Plame. Libby testified to the grand jury that Tim Russert had told him about Plame in July, when in fact he found out about her in June from CIA and State Department sources.

I don't blame Libby's lawyer for trying to throw up some smoke over this. That's his job. But the facts in the indictment are pretty straightforward, and I don't really understand why anyone not connected with Libby is falling for the smokescreen. It's pretty thin stuff.

REVENGE OF THE CENTRISTS....Are congressional Republicans imploding? Are the fabled GOP moderates in open revolt? Michael Crowley suggests that it sure looks that way.

SHIFTING GROUND?....I don't know if this is a Walter Cronkite moment or anything, but conservative Democrat John Murtha has decided that things are going so badly in Iraq that we need to withdraw now. Not on a timetable. Now.

I said over a year ago, and now the military and the Administration agrees, Iraq can not be won "militarily." I said two years ago, the key to progress in Iraq is to Iraqitize, Internationalize and Energize. I believe the same today. But I have concluded that the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is impeding this progress.

....My plan calls:

• To immediately redeploy U.S. troops consistent with the safety of U.S. forces.
  

• To create a quick reaction force in the region.
  

• To create an over-the-horizon presence of Marines.
  

• To diplomatically pursue security and stability in Iraq.
  

....Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. can not accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them home.

Over at The Corner, even Rod Dreher was impressed:

As I listened to it, I could feel the ground shift. Murtha, as you know, is not a Pelosi-style Chardonnay Democrat; he's a crusty retired career Marine who reminds me of the kinds of beer-slugging Democrats we used to have before the cultural left took over the party....From where I sit, conservatives would be fools not to take this man seriously.

My prediction: we've already started to see this, but I think Republicans are about to crumble. Pressure is going to mount on the White House to use the December elections as an excuse to declare victory and go home, fueled by equal parts disgust over Dick Cheney's lobbying for the right to torture; unease even among Republicans that the president wasn't honest during the marketing of the war; lack of progress on the ground in Iraq; Congress reasserting its independence of the executive; a genuine belief that the American presence has become counterproductive; and raw electoral fear, what with midterm elections looming in less than a year.

I also think the Rove/Cheney/Bush counterattack is going to backfire. Congressional Republicans are looking for cover right now, and I don't think they believe that a ferocious partisan attack from the White House is what they need right now. The public is looking for answers, not administration attack dogs on the evening news every day, but this particular White House doesn't know any other way. It's going to cost them.

OSM LAUNCH....Open Source Media — formerly Pajamas Media — had its big rollout yesterday, and it was an odd affair. I never really understood what OSM was about, but I figured they'd explain themselves at their launch party and then I'd get it. Except that they didn't. The main site is here — bankrolled by $3.5 million in venture capital money! — but all it contains is a couple of posts, some newsfeeds, and an explanation (as of noon on Thursday) that they are actually OSM, not Open Source Media, so no worries over Chris Lydon's trademark of "Open Source."

Everyone else is as befuddled as me, which is an odd reaction to a product launch, but perhaps OSM is just running behind schedule and decided not to put off the party just because there was no actual product yet. It wouldn't be the first time in the high tech biz.

In any case, James Joyner did a bit of asking around and has a long post about OSM here. Jeff Jarvis continues to be confused here. And Dennis the Peasant is your one stop shop for insanely bitter former partner who was tossed into the gutter by the current management.

LET THE SELLER BEWARE....Jonah Goldberg is taking some abuse for pointing out today in his maiden column for the LA Times that FDR lied about World War II. I don't think that defending Jonah will become a regular feature here, but there's actually nothing much objectionable about saying this. FDR, after all, was a pretty consummate smooth talker.

In fact, as Eric Alterman pointed out in When Presidents Lie, FDR also lied about the end of WWII, JFK lied about the Cuban Missile Crisis, LBJ lied about the Vietnam War, and Ronald Reagan lied about Iran-Contra. Nixon lied too, but I gather that Eric left him out of the book because he was just too easy a target. And as long as we're at it, Truman continued FDR's lies, Eisenhower lied about U-2 flights and other things, Bush Sr. told a few whoppers about Gulf War I, and Clinton certainly knew he was lying when he said we'd be in and out of Kosovo in a year.

Of course, Jonah's point is that lying is OK as long as the cause is just — about which we should check back with him in a couple of decades — while Eric's point was that lying is wrong and we shouldn't put up with it. In fact, Eric's conclusion, which is one that Jonah should probably take note of, is that in most cases lying about national security leads to horrible consequences, a lesson that George Bush is relearning to his misfortune. As it turns out, most lies eventually get unmasked, and with rare exceptions the American public is not amused. In a democracy, you need public support to sustain a war, and that support usually can't survive if the public thinks it's been duped. Caveat venditor.

A BOY'S GAME?....Ann Althouse says today that the usual vitriolic tone of the blogosphere gets even worse when women are the targets:

Blogosphere-strength fighting with a woman takes on an outrageous sexual tone, aggressively declaring that that this is a boy's game. Are there any feminists around to see when it's happening and say a little something?

I'm pretty sure the answer is "yes" to both parts of that question.

As it happens, Ann's specific complaint is about a comment thread at LGF, and Matt Welch does a public service by providing a sample of the comments so you don't have to wade through the muck yourself to see what Ann is talking about. Basically, it's LGF being LGF, and therefore perhaps not worth wasting much energy on. On the other hand, the same is true elsewhere, including here from time to time, which does make it worth pointing out. Comments?

WHO WAS BOB WOODWARD'S SOURCE?....A group of New York Times reporters is trying to figure out who Bob Woodward's source was:

A senior administration official said that neither President Bush himself, nor his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., nor his counselor, Dan Bartlett, was Mr. Woodward's source. So did spokesmen for former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, former C.I.A. Director George J. Tenet and his deputy John E. McLaughlin.

....Vice President Cheney did not join the parade of denials. A spokeswoman said he would have no comment on an ongoing investigation. Several other officials could not be reached for comment.

....Only a small group of officials — at the White House, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency — are believed to have known by early June 2003 about Ms. Wilson's ties to the C.I.A. They included Secretary Powell, Mr. Tenet, Mr. McLaughlin, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Libby; Marc Grossman, then the under secretary of state for political affairs; Carl Ford, then the head of the State Department's intelligence bureau; and Richard L. Armitage, then deputy secretary of state.

OK, let's check off each member of this "small group" of officials:

• Powell — denied
  

• Tenet — denied
  

• McLaughlin — denied
  

• Cheney — declined to comment
  

• Libby — Woodward says he's not the source
  

• Grossman — not reached for comment
  

• Ford — not reached for comment
  

• Armitage — not reached for comment
  

It's not clear to me that this is actually an exhaustive list — where are Fleitz and Wurmser and Hannah? — but Todd Purdum, David Johnston and Douglas Jehl certainly seem to be implying that they have reason to believe Woodward's source has to be on this list.

So: either Dick Cheney or else someone in the State Department. And no one in the State Department really seems to be a likely candidate to stick his neck out on Libby's behalf at this late date.

In other words, they think it's Cheney, but they can't just say so. Hmmm.

POSTSCRIPT: Tom Maguire suggests that even if Cheney's the leaker, he didn't do anything wrong:

I strongly suspect that Cheney would not be guilty of anything — the Vice President may have an implicit authority to declassify information....

Now that's an intriguing variation on the White House's apparent belief that Congress has no right to limit the president's actions in any way during wartime. After all, Cheney's only a heartbeat away!

THE POWER OF SNARK....In a stellar demonstration that sustained snark can sometimes be an effective agent for change, the comment section here at Political Animal has successfully shamed provoked Praktike into changing the name of "Liberals Against Terrorism" into "American Footprints." Congratulations on a job well done!

RATING THE BLOGS....The Hotline rates the blogs from potential 2008 presidential candidates. Thumbs up go to John Edwards and Wes Clark. Thumbs down to Mark Warner and Bill Frist. No thumb at all to the blogless John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

In other bloggy news, the Wall Street Journal lists the must-read blogs in a variety of industries. If you work in real estate, advertising, publishing, finance, or half a dozen other industries — or just want to pretend you do — they clue you in to the blogs all the insiders are reading.

UPDATE: And yet more! The Guardian profiles British blogs here.

PLAME SCORECARD....I'm trying to keep score here, but I'm not sure my memory is complete. So help me out. We now know the names of at least five reporters who were told by administration officials that "Joe Wilson's wife" worked at the CIA:

1. Bob Woodward ("In mid-June 2003 [an administration official] told me Wilson's wife worked for the CIA on weapons of mass destruction as a WMD analyst.")

2. Judith Miller ("On the afternoon of June 23, 2003...Mr. Libby raised the subject of Mr. Wilson's wife for the first time. 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.")

3. Matt Cooper ("I told the grand jurors that I was curious about Wilson when I called Karl Rove on Friday, July 11....As for Wilson's wife, I told the grand jury I was certain that Rove never used her name....Rove did, however, clearly indicate that she worked at the "agency"....I have a distinct memory of Rove ending the call by saying, 'I've already said too much.'")

4. Walter Pincus ("On July 12, 2003, an administration official...veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that [Joe Wilson's trip to Niger] was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction.")
   

5. Robert Novak (July 14, 2003: "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report.")
   

And we know there were at least four administration officials involved in leaking this information:

1. Scooter Libby
   

2. Karl Rove
   

3. Bob Woodward's "senior administration official"
   

4. Robert Novak's original source
   

(It's possible that #3 and #4 are the same person, but I suspect they're not. Woodward's source mentioned only "Joe Wilson's wife" while Novak's source actually gave him the name "Valerie Plame.")

Am I missing anyone? Every one of these reporters has testified that the mention of Wilson's wife was "casual," not part of a calculated effort to spread this information. But four officials and five reporters sure sounds like some planning went into this, doesn't it? And of course, two years ago the Washington Post reported that White House officials called "at least six Washington journalists" to spread this information.

So: Just a coincidental series of offhand remarks about the exact same information — all off the record — or a calculated campaign to leak Plame's status? You make the call.

UPDATE: Lots of comments on this. A few notes:

• I added Walter Pincus to the list of reporters. I'd forgotten about him.
  

• Tim Russert and Glenn Kessler have specifically denied being told about Plame. Karl Rove famously told Chris Matthews that Plame was "fair game," but this was after Novak's column appeared.
  

• Tom Maguire's list of people who allegedly knew about Plame via the DC gossip circuit includes Andrea Mitchell, High Sidey, Martin Peretz, and Cliff May. However, none of them has claimed that administration officials specifically told them about Plame, only that it was supposedly common knowledge among the cognoscenti.
  

PARTISANSHIP AND WAR....Chuck Hagel, a moderate Republican and an occasional critic of the war, gave a powerful speech at the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday:

The Iraq war should not be debated in the United States on a partisan political platform. This debases our country, trivializes the seriousness of war and cheapens the service and sacrifices of our men and women in uniform....The Bush Administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them. Suggesting that to challenge or criticize policy is undermining and hurting our troops is not democracy nor what this country has stood for, for over 200 years.

Ivo Daalder has the rest of the highlights over at TPMCafe. As I wrote last year, Hagel's words encapsulate the thing that's been my single biggest source of disgust with the Bush/Rove machine for the past four years. They could have viewed 9/11 as a means to genuinely unite the country, but they deliberately chose not to:

After a calculated display of bipartisan mourning for public consumption, the Bush administration thereafter refused to consult with or even take notice of the existence of an opposition party. Republican consultants advised their clients to use the war as a wedge issue in reelection campaigns and the Republican leadership declared rhetorical war on mild-mannered Tom Daschle. Andy Card talked about marketing plans for the Iraq invasion. The White House cynically proposed a union-busting plan for the Department of Homeland Security designed solely to arouse Democratic opposition. The President told cheering audiences that Senate Democrats didn't care about the security of the country and campaigned tirelessly even against congressmen who had supported him. In Georgia, Max Cleland was likened to Osama bin Laden.

And it worked: Republicans won the election. And Democrats finally woke up and realized that George Bush was more interested in using the war as a partisan club than he was in actually fighting terrorists.

And that's not all. Unlike his father, Bush deliberately timed the vote on the war declaration for maximum impact on the 2002 midterms; he delayed progress on the UN declaration in order to maintain that as hot button for his base; and the Downing Street Memos make clear that the timing of "spikes of activity" against Iraq were related to the midterm elections as well.

The rest of the world sees this too and asks the obvious question: If Bush himself treats the war on terrorism as just another partisan club, like tort reform or tax cuts, why should anyone else take it any more seriously? It's a hard question to answer.

THE NEW PROGRESSIVISM....Have you ever wondered what I'm like in person? If you live in Washington DC, now's your chance to find out. On Monday the 21st I'll be joining a panel discussion hosted by the Center for American Progress about the cover package on "The New Progressivism" in our latest issue. Here are the details:

Who: An All-Star lineup!

Kevin Drum, Editor, Political Animal blog
Paul Glastris, Editor in Chief, The Washington Monthly
Robert Gordon, Senior VP for Economic Policy, Center for American Progress
Karen Kornbluh, Policy Director, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)

Moderated by: E.J. Dionne, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution; Columnist, Washington Post

Where: Center for American Progress, 1333 H Street NW, 10th Floor, Washington DC. The nearest Metro is the Blue/Orange Line to McPherson Square or the Red Line to Metro Center. Click here for a map and directions.

When: Monday, November 21, 2:30-4:00 pm.

RSVP: Click here to RSVP or call 202-741-6246

Everyone is welcome. It should be a fun discussion.

And no worries about the blog: I'll be leaving it in the capable hands of two very good guest bloggers. The show will go on.

PLAME UPDATE....This is just bizarre. According to the Washington Post, a "senior administration official" talked to Bob Woodward in mid-June 2003 about Valerie Plame. That's prior to Scooter Libby's conversations with Judith Miller, and therefore marks the earliest date that anyone in the administration talked about Plame to a reporter.

So who is this mysterious Mr. X that blabbed to Woodward? We don't know. It's not Libby, and Karl Rove's spokesman says it's not Rove. No other names were mentioned.

And why do we suddenly know all this? Because Woodward testified about it on Monday to Patrick Fitzgerald.

Why did he do that? Because Mr. X fessed up to Fitzgerald about the conversation a couple of weeks ago, and Fitzgerald subsequently asked Woodward to testify about it.

And why did Mr. X suddenly confess? No one knows.

Did Woodward tell anyone about this conversation back when it happened? He didn't tell his editor, but he says he did tell fellow Post reporter Walter Pincus. Pincus, however, says Woodward is delusional: "Are you kidding?" he says. "I certainly would have remembered that."

I can't begin to make sense of this. The only thing that's clear is that Mr. X must have had some reason to suddenly come clean, and that reason must have had something to do with Fitzgerald's ongoing investigation. Perhaps Mr. X is a cooperating witness, or perhaps he's someone who started to feel some heat and decided to come forward because he got scared. Who knows?

But what this does tell us is that the Plame investigation is alive and well and continuing to make progress. Fasten your seatbelts.

Woodward's statement is here.

PRESIDENTS ACTING BADLY....What's going on with the George Bush rumor mill?

Last year Capitol Hill Blue reported that Bush was taking anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia. "Bush's mental stability has become the topic of Washington whispers in recent months. Capitol Hill Blue first reported on June 4 about increasing concern among White House aides over the President’s wide mood swings and obscene outbursts." That was entertaining stuff, but it was just CHB being CHB. Good for some laughs, but that's all.

Then this year the National Enquirer reported that Bush was drinking again. "Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster. His worried wife yelled at him: 'Stop, George.'" Hmmm. The National Enquirer. A step up from CHB, perhaps, but not exactly the most trusted name in news.

But in October, Tom DeFrank reported in the New York Daily News that Bush was frustrated, angry, and bitter. "Presidential advisers and friends say Bush is a mass of contradictions: cheerful and serene, peevish and melancholy." DeFrank is a legitimate reporter with genuine sources. Maybe there's something to this after all?

Today, Insight on the News, a Washington Times outlet with close ties to conservatives, reports that Bush has become isolated and feels betrayed by key members of his staff. "The sources said Mr. Bush maintains daily contact with only four people: first lady Laura Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes. The sources also say that Mr. Bush has stopped talking with his father, except on family occasions."

Needless to say, all of these stories are sourced anonymously and there's no telling if there's any truth to any of them. But who are these sources? At the very least, there seem to be a fair number of people who can be plausibly labeled "insiders" and who are gleefully passing along rumors of serious presidential angst. What's going on?

THE PRAGMATIC CASE AGAINST TORTURE....I've long been leery of staking too much on the "pragmatic" case against torture — namely that it doesn't work — because it implies that if it did work then I'd be OK with it. Matt Yglesias makes a good argument in its defense:

Some people don't like to bring up "pragmatic" worries about torture because they think this obscures the "real" reason torture is wrong — it's depraved. That seems a little wrongheaded to me. A big part of the reason we know torture to be a depraved practice is precisely that it's not useful — only depraved people become professional torturers and only depraved leaders order its systematic use as a policy tool. If torture were a vital and useful investigative tool, you'd be able to point to big piles of non-depraved torturers, but you really can't.

I'm still a little leery of this argument, because I'm afraid that eventually it will lead to dueling talking heads on Hardball arguing about whether torture works or not. I'm not sure I could take that. But still, Matt makes a good point.

ETHIOPIA...WHO KNEW?....Thought I should mention that right now, a few thousand Ethiopians are conducting a protest march around the White House (and, consequently, under our windows as well), pretty much shutting down traffic for six or seven blocks. The consensus here in the office is that it's nice to see a focused march for once. No twenty-seven different signs for various causes here. Just lots of green, yellow, and red flags and signs that read, "USA, Condemn the Massacre in Ethiopia." Also, some very catchy music blasting so loud that you should probably not trying calling our offices for a little while.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some internet research to do, as I'm apparently shamefully uninformed about the situation in Ethiopia. Job well done, Ethiopian protesters. President Bush may be hanging out in Asia, and Condi Rice is in the Middle East. But you've made it impossible for The Washington Monthly to ignore you!

PROGRESS IN GAZA....Condoleezza Rice has successfully concluded a deal between Israel and the Palestinian government that gives Gaza better access to the outside world:

The deal sets out the terms of operation for Gaza border crossings used to move cargo and people, resolving a deadlock that has frustrated a team of international negotiators for weeks. It also establishes a system of bus convoys to shuttle Palestinians between Gaza and the West Bank, the two territorial components of what is envisioned as a future Palestinian state.

The agreement allows the Palestinians to begin work on Gaza's seaport, and assures donors that Israel will not interfere with its operation....The deal says discussions on renovating and reopening Gaza's international airport will continue.

As NSC director Rice was a disaster, but as Secretary of State she's been surprisingly effective. Credit where it's due. Over at Liberals Against Terrorism, Nadezhda provides some of the backstory, including props for James Wolfensohn, who negotiated the deal in the first place. As she says, "This demonstrates the benefits of actually working the issues multilaterally rather than use the Quartet as either a fig leaf for US positions or an excuse not to act."

HARRIS POLL....With a re-elect number below 40% Bill Nelson might not be the most popular guy in Florida, but in a show of remarkable electoral wisdom it appears that Katherine Harris is 20 points less popular still. What's more, her campaign manager just quit. What a shame.

LESS OF A SOAPBOX, MORE OF A CONVERSATION....Via Pandagon, Stephanie Schorow writes about women bloggers today at SadieMAG, including interviews with many of my favorites:

While a significant number of female bloggers exist, they often don't receive the credit given to male bloggers, explains [Amanda] Marcotte. "It's out-and-out sexism. That comes from my experience switching to Pandagon. For a certain percentage of the audience, there was nothing I could do to make them happy. There was nonstop sniping — obviously coming from resentment that a woman was blogging."

....Women often run up against the attitude, Marcotte remarks, that "guys make the rules and they get to decide the impact of a woman's issue. Women, for obvious reasons, are going to write about women's issues more." Kathy cites the example of abortion. "Women bloggers on both sides will post long and emotional and detailed essays. Male bloggers throw a few sentences at it."

....And yet blogging seems peculiarly suited for women. Less of a soapbox and more of a conversation, blogs comprise a "talk amongst yourselves" quality. Says [Lindsay] Beyerstein, "You get to know the people in your blog community; you get to know the bloggers. You feel like you're having a discussion with people you know."

I don't know if the "talk amongst yourselves" quality of blogs is peculiarly suited for women or not, but it's certainly one of the blogosphere's greatest attractions. If blogs didn't have comment sections and didn't routinely interact with each other, I don't think I'd bother reading them. It's what sets them apart from op-ed pages and opinion magazines.

TICKING TIME BOMBS....The "ticking time bomb" case for torture is so depraved and transparently dishonest that I've never mustered up the emotional calm to blog about it. Luckily, Alex Tabarrok does it for me today:

It does not follow from the "ticking time bomb" argument that torture should be legal. The problem with making torture legal is that the government will abuse its powers. I do not trust the government, any government, to use this power responsibly. Leviathan must be heavily restrained, especially when it comes to torture.

Here is where economics can make a contribution. By making torture illegal we are raising the price of torture but we are not raising the price to infinity. If the President or the head of the CIA thinks that torture is required to stop the ticking time bomb then they ought to approve it knowing full well that they face possible prosecution. Only if the price of torture is very high can we expect that it will be used only in the most absolutely urgent of circumstances.

This is exactly right, although I'm not sure it really takes an economist to figure this out. Torture should be flatly illegal because that's the message we want to send both to our own people and to the rest of the world. Legal torture should be reserved for regimes like Cuba and North Korea, not the United States of America.

However, in the fantastically unlikely 24-esque event that we capture a terrorist who knows the location of a ticking atomic bomb, he's going to get tortured regardless. The torturer will immediately get pardoned by the president for doing so, and would be unanimously acquitted by a jury even if he weren't. And I'm fine with that.

So please. Enough with the idiotic ticking time bomb already. If we're going to talk about torture, let's talk about how it's used in the real world.

FIRING ROBERT SCHEER....Today, LA Times editorial page editor Andrés Martinez takes a stab at explaining why Robert Scheer is no longer writing for them:

Scheer's impassioned prose has graced these pages for 13 years....Assessing the merits of a column, like assessing the merits of a movie, is a subjective exercise, so readers can agree to disagree over the wisdom of our decision. It's inaccurate, however, to ascribe ideological motives to our decision to stop running Scheer's column.

Some readers have complained that The Times is conspiring to silence liberal voices on the Op-Ed page. Others have gone so far as to suggest that Scheer is being punished for opposing the war in Iraq.

I'm pretty easygoing about stuff like this, but even I find this vaguely insulting. We're given several reasons Scheer wasn't fired — Not too liberal! Not because of ideology! Not for opposing the war! Not because his prose was too passionate! — but never given a reason why he was fired.

If they want to fire the guy, then fire away. If they want to keep quiet about the reasons, I guess that's fine too. But if you write a special box solely to tell your readers why he was let go, shouldn't you actually tell your readers why he was let go?

ROE v. ALITO....After a bit of routine brown nosing in a 1985 letter seeking a promotion in Ronald Reagan's Justice Department, Samuel Alito said this:

It has been an honor and source of personal satisfaction for me to serve in the office of the Solicitor General during President Reagan's administration and to help to advance legal positions in which I personally believe very strongly. I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued...that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court held that the constitution does indeed protect a woman's right to an abortion. It's a qualified protection, but a protection nonetheless, and Alito said he believed "very strongly" that this was incorrect not just as a personal matter, but as a "legal position."

Question: In theory, the reason that Supreme Court nominees won't comment on specific cases is because it might "prejudge" future decisions in related cases before arguments have been heard. However, having stated in 1985 that he believed Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, Alito has already prejudged his view in future cases testing Roe. So: is it OK to ask him if he still holds this view? If not, why not?

TODAY'S WAR NEWS....Hmmm. Very interesting news on the war front tonight. First, we've apparently reached a compromise on Lindsey Graham's legislation that would eliminate the right of habeas corpus to military detainees:

The compromise links legislation written by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), which would deny detainees broad access to federal courts, with a new measure authored by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) that would grant detainees the right to appeal the verdict of a military tribunal to a federal appeals court. The deal will come to a vote today, and the authors say they are confident it will pass.

Graham and Levin indicated they would then demand that House and Senate negotiators link their measure with the effort by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to clearly ban torture and abuse of terrorism suspects being held in U.S. facilities.

"McCain's amendment needs to be part of the overall package, because it deals with standardizing interrogation techniques and will reestablish moral high ground for the United States," Graham said.

I'm cautiously optimistic about this. The details of this "right to appeal" are important, but it sounds like it might be a reasonable compromise. And if it's linked to McCain's anti-torture amendment, all the better.

On another front, it looks like Democratic pressure to figure out an eventual withdrawal plan from Iraq has actually had an effect:

In a sign of increasing unease among Congressional Republicans over the war in Iraq, the Senate is to consider on Tuesday a Republican proposal that calls for Iraqi forces to take the lead next year in securing the nation and for the Bush administration to lay out its strategy for ending the war.

....The proposal on the Iraq war, from Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, and Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, would require the administration to provide extensive new quarterly reports to Congress on subjects like progress in bringing in other countries to help stabilize Iraq.

....The plan...is built upon the Democratic approach and makes it clear that senators of both parties are increasingly eager for Iraqis to take control of their country in coming months and open the door to removing American troops.

In fact, it appears to be nearly identical to the Democratic approach. Kudos to Harry Reid & Co. for producing a positive plan for Iraq that's forced a Republican response.

But will it work? Again, the devil is in the details, namely just how detailed these "extensive new quarterly reports" will be. They could turn out to be window dressing that's easily fobbed off by Donald Rumsfeld, or they could be serious instruments that force the administration to set meaningful benchmarks and report on them. With midterm elections coming up, my guess is that they'll be at least moderately serious. We'll see.

ABUSE OF POWER....Last night I provided five examples of intelligence experts who had dissented from mainstream views about Iraq's WMD but whose dissents had been kept classified by the Bush administration until after the war. These five examples are only a small part of the case that the Bush administration exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, but I think they're the most important part of the case. Here's why.

Earlier this year we went through a long (and often tedious) debate about Social Security. George Bush and his supporters said a lot of things that liberals found outrageous, and we said so loudly and persistently. If we thought conservatives were leaving important facts out of their arguments, we pointed it out. They did the same to us. In the end, it was a loud but fair debate.

This could happen only because all the relevant facts were available to everyone. The Social Security Administration publishes annual reports for all to see. Its economists publish detailed actuarial models. The CBO publishes reports, OMB publishes reports, and third parties publish reports. Everything was out in the open. That's the way most public debates work.

But there's one area where this isn't true: national security. On this single topic, the president has absolute control over which information is made public and which isn't. This gives him a much greater responsibility to present the facts fairly than it does in other debates, where his spin, no matter how outrageous, can be spun right back by opponents who know everything he does.

In the debate on Iraq, Bush acted as both prosecutor and judge. He made his case as strongly as he could — which is fine — but he also withheld crucial information that would have allowed his opponents to make their case as strongly as they could — which isn't. In short, in order to further his own political aims, he abused his power to decide what information remains classified and what doesn't.

In a democracy, this is unacceptable. It's unacceptable for the president to decide that only information favorable to his own case can be part of the public discourse. But all too often, that's what happened in the runup to the Iraq war.

Arguing the case for war passionately was fine. Exercising the executive's classification power to suppress information solely because it was inconvenient to his argument wasn't. George Bush should be held accountable for this abuse of power.

HABEAS CORPUS....P. Sabin Willett, a lawyer who represents Guantanamo Bay prisoners on a pro bono basis, writes in the Washington Post today about the Senate's decision to eliminate habeas corpus rights for prisoners suspected of being enemy combatants:

As I listened, I wished the senators could meet my client Adel.

Adel is innocent. I don't mean he claims to be. I mean the military says so. It held a secret tribunal and ruled that he is not al Qaeda, not Taliban, not a terrorist. The whole thing was a mistake: The Pentagon paid $5,000 to a bounty hunter, and it got taken.

The military people reached this conclusion, and they wrote it down on a memo, and then they classified the memo and Adel went from the hearing room back to his prison cell. He is a prisoner today, eight months later. And these facts would still be a secret but for one thing: habeas corpus.

Eliminating habeas corpus is a disgrace. It's a statement that our courts are not to be trusted, that people should be judged guilty solely on Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush's say so, and that the United States cannot survive unless its most important principles are tossed in the ash heap.

For more, go read Katherine and Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings. There's a lot there, but you might start with this one and this one, just to get an idea of Lindsey Graham's duplicitousness on this whole matter. He should be ashamed.

WINNING THE WAR....Mickey Kaus writes today that Bob Krumm has a surefire strategy for Democrats: "The strategy is this: Win the war in Iraq."

But wait. I clicked over to Krumm's site and it turns out that Mickey has subtly Dowdified his advice. Here's what he actually said: "I offer Democrats a sure-fire, absolutely guaranteed way to win the Presidency in 2008: Let Bush win the war in Iraq."

Now, I have my doubts that there are any Democrats who know how to win the war, which makes Mickey's version problematic as strategy. But Krumm's actual version is worse. After all, so far Bush has been allowed to do every single thing he's wanted. Democrats have denied him nothing. He's gotten every dollar, every weapon, and every body he's asked for. He has maintained absolute control over the strategy on the ground, which has produced anarchy, followed by insurgency, followed by Abu Ghraib. When John Kerry suggested expanding the size of the military, Bush scoffed. When Wes Clark proposed a detailed diplomatic strategy, nobody listened. A chorus of voices have suggested that the Army needs to take counterinsurgency more seriously, but Donald Rumsfeld has other ideas.

It's obvious to anyone even remotely paying attention that Bush doesn't know how to win the war — regardless of which definition of "win" you favor — but doesn't want to hear suggestions from anyone else either. So what exactly is it that Democrats are supposed to do to help him?

On the bright side, perhaps Bob Krumm can join the law firm I've been thinking of setting up with David Frum and Bob Shrum. With the four of us, it would be Frum, Shrum, Drum, and Krumm. I wonder if any of us are lawyers?

PAYING THE PRICE....One of the most depressing stories of the weekend was William Broad and David Sanger's piece in the New York Times about a laptop computer captured last year that shows that Iran is actively trying to figure out how to design and build a nuclear warhead. It's depressing because a nuclear-armed Iran isn't exactly a comforting notion to begin with, and doubly depressing because after the Iraq fiasco the Bush administration is having trouble convincing our allies that the laptop isn't a fake:

"I can fabricate that data," a senior European diplomat said of the documents. "It looks beautiful, but is open to doubt."

....The Bush administration, seeming to understand the depth of its credibility problem, is only talking about the laptop computer and its contents in secret briefings, more than a dozen so far.

....As a measure of the skepticism the Bush administration faces, officials said the American ambassador to the international atomic agency, Gregory L. Schulte, was urging other countries to consult with his French counterpart. "On Iraq we disagreed, and on Iran we completely agree," a senior State Department official said. "That gets attention."

....Without revealing the source of the computer, American intelligence officials insisted that it had not come from any Iranian resistance groups.

This is what it's come to. A European diplomat talks openly about the possibility that the entire thing is a U.S. fraud. The Bush administration is forced to lean on France to establish its own credibility. And the Chalabi fiasco in Iraq combined with the dubious track record of Iranian resistance groups makes the provenance of the laptop about as iffy as Dan Rather's National Guard memos.

As recently as five years ago, none of this would have even occurred to anyone. Today it's the first thing that comes to mind.

PEAK OIL UPDATE....The Association for the Study of Peak Oil had its annual meeting in Denver last week, and The Oil Drum has the news. Stuart Staniford has wrapups of both Thursday and Friday, as well as a few other miscellaneous posts if you click around the site a bit. There's both gloomy and hopeful news within the various presentations, so read the whole thing for a balanced look at what the peak oil community is thinking these days.

LINSE'S LAW....Patriotism or jingoism? Brian Linse reports, you decide.

MANIPULATING INTELLIGENCE....Did the Bush administration mislead the country during the runup to the Iraq war? It's true that they turned out to be wrong about a great many things, but that doesn't answer the question. It merely begs it. Were they sincerely wrong, or did they intentionally manipulate the intelligence they presented to the public in order to mask known weaknesses in their case?

The case for manipulation is pretty strong. It relies on several things, but I think the most important of them has been the discovery that the administration deliberately suppressed dissenting views on some of the most important pieces of evidence that they used to bolster their case for war. For future reference, here's a list of seven key dissents about administration claims, all of which were circulated before the war but kept under wraps until after the war:

1. The Claim: Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al-Qaeda prisoner captured in 2001, was the source of intelligence that Saddam Hussein had trained al-Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons. This information was used extensively by Colin Powell in his February 2003 speech to the UN.

   What We Know Now: As early as February 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency circulated a report, labeled DITSUM No. 044-02, saying that it was "likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers." Link. This assessment was hidden from the public until after the war. Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, says "We never heard about" the DIA assessment prior to Powell's UN speech. Link.

2. The Claim: An Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball" was the source of reporting that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of mobile biowarfare labs. Curveball's claims of mobile bio labs were repeated by many administration figures during the runup to war.

   What We Know Now: The German intelligence officials who handled Curveball told the CIA that he was not "psychologically stable" and that his allegations of mobile bio labs were second hand and unverified. Link. The only American agent to actually meet with Curveball before the war warned that he appeared to be an alcoholic and was unreliable. However, his superior in the CIA told him it was best to keep quiet about this: "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about." Link. This dissent was not made public until 2004, in a response to the SSCI report that was written by Senator Dianne Feinstein. Link.

3. The Claim: Iraq had purchased thousands of aluminum tubes to act as centrifuges for the creation of bomb grade uranium. Dick Cheney said they were "irrefutable evidence" of an Iraqi nuclear program and George Bush cited them in his 2003 State of the Union address.

   What We Know Now: Centrifuge experts at the Oak Ridge Office of the Department of Energy had concluded long before the war that the tubes were unsuitable for centrifuge work and were probably meant for use in artillery rockets. The State Department concurred. Link. Both of these dissents were omitted from the CIA's declassified National Intelligence Estimate, released on October 4, 2002. Link. They were subsequently made public after the war, on July 18, 2003. Link.

4. The Claim: Saddam Hussein attempted to purchase uranium yellowcake from Africa as part of his attempt to reconstitute his nuclear program. President Bush cited this publicly in his 2003 State of the Union address.

   What We Know Now: The primary piece of evidence for this claim was a document showing that Iraq had signed a contract to buy yellowcake from Niger. However, the CIA specifically told the White House in October 2002 that the "reporting was weak" and that they disagreed with the British about the reliability of this intelligence. Link. At the same time, the State Department wrote that the documents were "completely implausible." Link.

   Three months later, in January 2003, Alan Foley, head of the CIA's counterproliferation effort, tried to persuade the White House not to include the claim in the SOTU because the information wasn't solid enough, but was overruled. Link. Five weeks later, the documents were conclusively shown to be forgeries. Link. In July 2003, after the war had ended, CIA Director George Tenet admitted publicly that that the claim should never have been made. Link.

5. The Claim: Saddam Hussein was developing long range aerial drones capable of attacking the continental United States with chemical or biological weapons. President Bush made this claim in a speech in October 2002 and Colin Powell repeated it during his speech to the UN in February 2003.

   What We Know Now: The Iraqi drones had nowhere near the range to reach the United States, and Air Force experts also doubted that they were designed to deliver WMD. However, their dissent was left out of the October 2002 NIE and wasn't made public until July 2003. Link.

6. The Claim: Administration officials repeatedly suggested that Saddam Hussein had substantial connections to al-Qaeda. Even after the war, George Bush said, "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda [is] because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda." Dick Cheney said the evidence of a relationship was "overwhelming."

   What We Know Now: As early as September 21, 2001, President Bush was told by the CIA that there was "scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda." In fact, according to Murray Waas, "Bush was told during the briefing that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime." Link.

7. The Claim: Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, an Iraqi defector, told the CIA that he had secretly helped Saddam Hussein's men bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. After this information was passed to the New York Times by Ahmed Chalabi, it was cited in "A Decade of Deception and Defiance" as evidence of Iraq's continued WMD programs.

   What We Know Now: Al-Haideri told his story while strapped to a polygraph. He failed. The CIA knew from the start that he had made up the entire account, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa. Link.

8. The Claim: Trailers found in Iraq after the war were mobile bioweapons labs. President Bush flatly declared in May 2003 that the trailers were firm evidence of WMD production. "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories....For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them." Link.

   What We Know Now: Two days before Bush made his unequivocal statement, a DIA team had unanimously concluded that the trailers had no connection to biological weapons production. Bush made no mention of this in his public statements. Link.
   

This is not a comprehensive list, so feel free to add other specific examples of suppressed intelligence in comments.

One final word on this: the issue here is not who was right and who was wrong, or even whether the overall weight of the evidence was sufficient to justify the war. It would have been perfectly reasonable for the White House to present all the evidence pro and con and then use that evidence to make the strongest possible case for war. But that's not what they did. Instead, they suppressed any evidence that might have thrown doubt on their arguments, making it impossible for the public to evaluate what they were saying. In fact, by abusing the classification process to keep these dissents secret, they even made it impossible for senators who knew the truth to say anything about it in public.

This is not the way to market a war. It's certainly not the way to market a war that requires long term support from citizens in a democracy. But that's how they marketed it anyway.

UPDATE: I've removed a note from the first item about al-Libi providing his false information under torture. The linked Newsweek article (here) doesn't unambiguously support that notion, and it's not really germane to the topic of this post anyway.

UPDATE 2: Additional information regarding German doubts about Curveball has been appended to item #2. Items #6 and #7 have been added to the list.

UPDATE 3: Item #8 added to the list.

BEDTIMES....Sleep researchers say that sleep is important for kids:

Staying up an hour or two past bedtime makes it far harder for kids to learn, say scientists who deprived youngsters of sleep and tested whether their teachers could tell the difference.

....The teachers reported significantly more academic problems during the week of sleep deprivation, the study, which will be published in the journal Sleep in December, concluded.

Students who got eight hours of sleep or less a night were more forgetful, had the most trouble learning new lessons, and had the most problems paying attention.

So here's my question: do kids get less sleep today than they used to? When I was in third grade, my bedtime was 7:30. In fourth grade it was 8:00. In retrospect, that sure seems like an awful lot of sleep. But as near as I can tell, practically no one goes to bed that early anymore. Parents I know with kids that age typically don't put them to bed until 9:00 or 9:30 — or even a bit later depending on what else is going on.

Is this common? I'm mostly asking the parents in the crowd. When your kids were in fourth grade, what was their bedtime? Did they stay up later than you did when you were that age? Does this even matter?

HOLDING THE DOOR....Ezra Klein says he holds doors open for both men and women:

In fact, I basically hold open the door for anyone entering it less than five feet behind me....I'm clearly holding the door out of some odd motivation internal to me, not a deep-seated belief in womanly wimpitude.

Question: is this really the result of some "odd motivation"? Doesn't everyone do this, just because it's rude to let a door slam in someone's face? Or have I spent too much of my life in polite, laid back California?

ETIQUETTE QUESTION....Every once in a while I correct obvious typos when I quote something from another blog. Is this wrong? Or is it the equivalent of eliminating ums and ers and mispronunciations when you're quoting spoken text?

DECLARATION OF WAR....On Friday, George Bush said that, based on the intelligence known at the time, "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate...voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power." In tomorrow's Washington Post, one of those Democrats, John Edwards, says this:

It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002....The information the American people were hearing from the president — and that I was being given by our intelligence community — wasn't the whole story. Had I known this at the time, I never would have voted for this war.

The question of whether intelligence was manipulated is important, but I think the fact that we're arguing about it exposes an even more fundamental issue: did Edwards really vote for the war in the first place?

Article I, Section 8 of the constitution says flatly that "The Congress shall have Power...To declare War," but no Congress has declared war for the past 60 years. They've passed resolutions, they've passed authorizations, and they've passed budget authorities, but they haven't declared war. The 108th Congress certainly never declared war on Iraq.

There are several problems with this. For starters, it makes a mockery of the constitution. It's legitimate to draw a line beneath which the president can commit troops on his own authority, but there's little question that we've gone well over that line repeatedly in the past decade and a half. By anybody's definition, Gulf I was a war, Kosovo was a war, Afghanistan was a war, and Gulf II was a war. None of them required either secrecy or an instant response that couldn't wait on Congress. In other words, if a declaration of war wasn't required for these conflicts, then Congress's constitutional authority is meaningless. That clause of the constitution might as well not exist.

Second, it gives the president a blank check. Once troops are in the field, no Congress can afford to withhold its support. The reality is that if presidents are allowed to commit large numbers of troops on their own authority, there are essentially no limits to what they can do.

Third, and worst, it allows Congress to evade its own responsibility for war. Did John Edwards really vote for war? Or did he merely vote to authorize coercive inspections? Would he still have voted for the war on March 20 based on what he knew then? Or would the lack of WMD and failed diplomacy have changed his mind?

There's no reason we should have to guess about this. If the president wants to go to war, he should get a declaration of war. Not an "authorization of force" six months before the fact, but a declaration of war a few days before the invasion. Not only is that what the constitution requires, but it also means that members of Congress can no longer play games about what their vote really meant. After all, a declaration of war can hardly be misinterpreted.

IR AND TERRORISM....Abu Aardvark says that his field, International Relations, has been sadly missing in action in the post-9/11 debate over al-Qaeda and terrorism:

Realism, with its emphasis on the balance of power among self-interested nation-states, had little to say about a non-state actor motivated by religion. Liberalism, with its various arguments about international institutions, trade, and democracy, similarly offered little traction. Rationalist approaches seemed initially stymied by an organization defined by intense religious convictions, and by individual suicide terrorism....Constructivism seemed to be the best placed to account for such a religious, transnational movement. But constructivist analyses of al-Qaeda were few and far between.

Has IR really been so feeble over the past few years? The Aardvark took a look at the seven leading IR journals to find out:

All told, these seven journals published 796 articles between 2002-2005. I found a total of 25 articles dealing even loosely with al-Qaeda, Islamism, or terrorism. That's just over 3% of the articles. Now, there's lots of important stuff out there in the world, and there's no reason for the whole field to be following the headlines, but still... 3%?

Read the whole thing for more.

I don't have anything to add to this, but thought it was interesting enough to highlight. I know it takes a while for people to change gears, but you'd sure think terrorism might have captured just a little more attention among IR types by now, wouldn't you?

LA TIMES OP-ED SHAKEUP....A bunch of commenters on Thursday wondered what I thought about the recently announced overhaul of the LA Times op-ed page. Basically, Robert Scheer (hard lefty columnist), Michael Ramirez (hard right cartoonist), and David Gelernter (bizarro right wing columnist) have been dropped and Jonah Goldberg (no introduction needed) has been added.

Overall, you'd think I'd be pleased. After all, I've never been a fan of Scheer; Ramirez does nothing but raise my blood pressure every morning; and Gelernter is an embarrassment. I don't quite get the point of bringing on Goldberg, who's already syndicated, but whatever.

And yet....I don't like it. My objection to Scheer was never his politics, but the fact that I thought his writing was ineffective. But ineffective or not, his departure leaves no one on the op-ed page to represent his end of the political spectrum. What's more, I actually think his writing has improved over the past year. Or maybe events have just made it seem that way. In any case, I'm less pleased to see him go than I would have thought.

That's especially so when you pair it up with the firing of Ramirez . Sure, Ramirez raised my blood pressure, but that's what a cartoonist is supposed to do. Like him or not, he was a very sharp cartoonist. (What's more, apparently the plan is to replace Ramirez with the kind of graphical pap the Times has been running on Sunday. Yuck.)

Scheer and Ramirez were the highest profile firings, and when you put them together it's impossible to escape the conclusion that the goal is to turn the op-ed page into a nice, sedate knitting club. As Kristi Golden put it, "By eliminating some of the tension on the editorial pages, The Times is becoming metaphorically more like Muzak than like an original composition."

On the other hand, replacing Gelernter with Goldberg is a positive move. Gelernter isn't provocative, he's an idiot who's somehow convinced himself he's the heir to William F. Buckley. Goldberg usually leaves me kind of flat, primarily because I don't think he puts enough thought into his writing, but he's a step up from Gelernter.

The Times has also added a couple of new columnists: Gregrory Rodriguez, who will write mostly about immigration and race, and Erin Aubry Kaplan, who, I guess, will join Patt Morrison as a "local" columnist. Here's the new lineup:

• Sunday: Gregory Rodriguez, Jon Chait
  

• Monday: Niall Ferguson
  

• Tuesday: Joel Stein
  

• Wednesday: Max Boot, Erin Aubry Kaplan
  

• Thursday: Jonah Goldberg, Patt Morrison
  

• Friday: Rosa Brooks
  

• Saturday: Meghan Daum
  

If you're keeping score at home, we have Brooks on the left, Chait on the center left, Ferguson as a kind of maverick Tory, Goldberg on the right, and Boot on the hawkish neocon right. I don't really know how Rodriguez is going to turn out. The others focus on either local issues or lifestyle-ish things.

So we'll see. It looks to me more like a move toward the mushy, penny pinching middle than a move to the right, but it's probably that too. Stay tuned.

SUNLIGHT = DISINFECTANT....Barney Frank has introduced a piece of legislation that I like. Executive compensation has been taking a bigger and bigger bite out of corporate profits over the past decade (up from 4.8% of profit in 1993 to 10.3% in 2003 just for the top five executives at the average company), and he thinks that companies ought to be a wee bit more open about who's getting all this dough.

To that end, he's proposed a bill that does nothing at all to tell corporations how much they can pay their executives, but does force them to be open with shareholders about how much they're shelling out. His bill would require publicly traded companies to:

Provide all details about how much executives earn in cash, incentives and perks each year....Disclose the full market value of company-paid perks....Publicly report the specific criteria by which executives earn incentive pay....Tell shareholders "in a clear and simple form" how much the executive officers stand to make on a proposed takeover or acquisition that requires shareholder consent.

There's also a provision that would allow shareholders to block pay plans they don't like, but it's the disclosure provisions that I think are the most important. It's another example of the empowerment theme from the current issue of the Monthly that aims to "shift power from corporations to individuals." In some cases, merely forcing companies to provide more information is enough to make a dent in a problem. On the executive pay front, which is a national scandal, Frank's bill is a good start.

PRETENTIOUSNESS....Aside from the usual scattering of curmudgeons who get upset whenever I post about anything other than politics (BUSH IS TURNING US INTO A FASCIST STATE AND YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT EXPENSIVE RESTAURANTS!?!?!), this afternoon's comment thread about expensive restaurants is really good. And unusually civilized. Everyone's having a lot of fun, so go join in if you feel like chatting about food.

However, this thread is for something different. Loyal commenter franklyO says:

I'm waiting for the day Kevin starts a thread about the most annoying pretensions we have known.

Today's the day! I'll have to mull that over a bit myself since I tend to think of most pretensions as just harmless idiosyncrasies, but feel free to vent. What's your most annoying pretension?

THE KILLIAN MEMOS....Over at the Washington Post, Mary Mapes just finished up a Q&A with readers. Mapes was the producer of the 60 Minutes segment last year that aired those National Guard documents everyone thinks were forged, but Mapes still isn't buying the forgery rap:

Tempe, Ariz.: In the months since your termination at CBS, have you continued to follow up on the credibility of the 60 Minutes II Texas National Guard story, and if so, have you found concrete evidence either supporting or negating the claims made by your source, Bill Burkett?

Mary Mapes: I have followed up on the story and actually have obtained a new cache of duments from the Texas Air National Guard archives in Austin Texas. Some of these newly discovered documents contain proportional spacing, right hand signature blocks, odd abbreviations and other elements that were used to criticize the memos Bill Burkett gave me. I also talked with a person who worked with the Texas Guard and recounted a file scrubbing incident in 1997 that aligns with what Bill Burkett recounted to me. Some of the new docs also reference long waiting lists to get into the Guard in 1968-72. They are in the process of being made available on the website for my book truthandduty.com.

....St. Petersburg, Fla.: Do you believe the documents on which the 60 Minutes report was based are forgeries?

Mary Mapes: I do not.

Sadly, I blew it. I intended to ask Mapes a few questions, but forgot all about the session until it was nearly over. Some journalist I am. I did manage to submit one question just before the Q&A ended, though. It was about the provenance of the memos, which were supposedly written in 1972 by Jerry Killian, George Bush's superior officer in the Texas Air Guard:

Killian's secretary, Marian Carr Knox, says that the typewriters in Killian's office in 1972 were an Olympia and a Selectric. Neither had proportional fonts and neither was capable of creating the documents you aired on 60 Minutes.

Given that, where do you think the documents were created? Do you really think it's plausible that all of them were typed somewhere other than Killian's office? Knox said categorically that she typed all of Killian's memos.

I was too late to get an answer, though. Bummer. If I'd gotten there in time, I would have had a few other questions too.

THREE STARS....In Slate today, Mike Steinberger says it's a scandal that the new Michelin guide for New York gave its highest rating of three stars to four different restaurants. The truth, he says, is that New York eateries just aren't that good:

Having eaten in all three of Ducasse's three-stars, for instance, I can say without hesitation that the New York branch is a weak imitation of his Paris and Monte Carlo restaurants — the service is just as attentive, but the food is a clear step down, and I suspect that if Ducasse were plied with enough Krug, he might admit as much.

First things first: I'm not disagreeing with Steinberger here. I'm the last person in the world to have an opinion about high-end restaurant quality.

But his piece certainly arouses my curiosity. Why is Ducasse's New York branch a clear step down? Why can't the New York branch, run by the same guy and presumably making similar dishes, create food as tasty and satisfying to discriminating palates as the branches in Paris and Monte Carlo? Is it simply impossible to get ingredients as good? Is good kitchen staff impossible to find? Or what? I know that opening a branch of Ducasse isn't like opening a branch of Mickey D's, but Steinberger didn't just think the New York outlet was a little worse, he thought it was flatly, unarguably, worse.

And it wasn't just something specific to Ducasse, either. He thought all the three-star New York restaurants were undeserving.

What's the scoop here? Why is it that even with lots of money and chefs who clearly know how to produce three-star food, American restaurants still can't measure up to their French counterparts?

JUDGING ALITO....Just how conservative is Samuel Alito? Over at TNR, Jeffrey Rosen has one of the better articles on this subject that I've read. He also suggests some questions senators could ask that would help to clear up whether he's another Thomas or another Roberts.

THE LAST REFUGE....Glenn Reynolds on Democrats who claim that George Bush misled us into war:

And yes, he should question their patriotism. Because they're acting unpatriotically.

Glad we got that out in open.

UPDATE: This is peculiar. Glenn thinks I quoted him unfairly because I left out his preliminary throat clearing that "this is all about Democratic politicans pandering to the antiwar base." I don't quite get why this pro forma puffery is germane, though, especially since he explains himself this way in a subsequent post:

I didn't say (and don't think) that anyone who opposes the war is unpatriotic....But the Democratic politicans who are pushing the "Bush Lied" meme are, I think, playing politics with the war in a way that is, in fact, unpatriotic.

Unless I'm missing something, this means just what I thought it meant: Democrats who claim that George Bush misled us into war are being unpatriotic. However, there's been steadily growing evidence that the Bush administration suppressed official dissents about the WMD evidence before the war, and the fact that we now know this seems like a pretty good reason for even the most patriotic among us to suspect that Bush did, in fact, mislead the American public. There's undoubtedly political calculation going on as well, but that happens on both sides of the street and is hardly evidence of non-patriotism.

HEALTHCARE AND LIFE EXPECTANCY....Should we have a national healthcare plan? Tyler Cowen says no, but in the course of his argument suggests that increased spending on healthcare has no net effect on actual health. Matt Yglesias made the same claim yesterday.

In both cases, it turns out that the actual claim is that higher aggregate spending on healthcare doesn't do much to increase aggregate life expectancy. This may well be true, and I think it's a useful thing to know. If I remember the data correctly, for example, Americans spend wildly more than the French do in the final six months of life, and this spending is almost entirely useless. A more rational approach to end-of-life spending would probably cut down our healthcare bill a lot.

But there's more to healthcare spending than life expectancy. In a paper Tyler links to, which summarizes the results of a famous RAND study from the 70s, we learn that "Those with free care consumed on average about 25-30% more health care, as measured by spending, obtained more eyeglasses, and had more teeth filled." None of that increased anyone's life expectancy, but it's still a good thing to be able to see properly and to be able to chew hard food.

Or take my torn meniscus. I'm sure glad I got that repaired. It wouldn't have killed me, but it certainly hurt a lot. Likewise, a few years ago I injured my back, and I really wish there were something I could do about it. This isn't going to kill me either, but it hurts, it keeps me from participating in a wide variety of sports, and it's limited my lifting capacity to approximately the weight of one large cat.

As it happens, end-of-life healthcare is already nationalized in the United States via Medicare, so a broader national health plan would almost certainly have only a tiny effect on life expectancy. Tyler is therefore right that liberals shouldn't obsess about that. But that doesn't mean that national healthcare wouldn't have plenty of other important health benefits — not to mention a wide variety of tangential benefits and efficiencies as well. If we can get all that and spend no more than we do now, as seems likely, why shouldn't we do it?

TOM DELAY, IDIOT....As you'll recall, in Texas it's illegal for corporations to contribute money to election campaigns. The reason Tom DeLay is in hot water these days is because his political action committee, TRMPAC, evaded that law by collecting $190,000 from corporations, sending it to the Republican National Committee, and then having the RNC send the same amount back to its favored candidates in local races. It was a pretty transparent attempt at money laundering.

The million-dollar question, though, is whether DeLay himself knew about and approved of this plan. Back when prosecutor Ronnie Earle first brought charges against DeLay, I wondered aloud what kind of witnesses Earle had. Did someone at TRMPAC squeal on DeLay? Did one of the corporate contributors involved in the plan knuckle under?

It turns out the answer is none of the above. Apparently, DeLay himself made the admission during a conversation with Earle:

DeLay said he was also generally aware of a plan to shift money between Texas and Washington. It called for pulling together $190,000, sending it up to Washington and getting the same amount sent back to Texas for state election campaigns.

According to matching accounts provided separately by the sources, DeLay was asked whether such a deal happened and responded yes. Asked if he knew beforehand that the deal was going to happen, DeLay said yes. Asked how he knew, DeLay said that his longtime political adviser, [James] Ellis, came into his office, told him it was planned and asked DeLay what he thought. DeLay told Earle that he recalled saying, "Fine." He added that he knew it was corporate money but said it was fine because he thought it was legal.

This is bizarre. DeLay knew that Earle believed the plan to be illegal. Even if he disagreed, why would he admit to knowing anything about it? What good could that possibly do him?

Anyway, it turns out that DeLay's admission is the only evidence Earle has against him. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I sure hope DeLay has fired whatever lawyer told him it was OK to chat about this stuff with a guy who's been trying to put him in jail for the past three years.

THE PRAGMATIC CASE AGAINST TORTURE....Knight Ridder reports that many current and former CIA officers are actively opposed to allowing the agency an exemption that permits them to torture prisoners:

Robert Baer, a former CIA covert officer who worked in Iraq and elsewhere, said he recently spent time in an Israeli prison, talking with detainees from the radical Palestinian groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas for a British documentary about suicide bombers.

The Israelis, Baer said, have learned that they can gain valuable information by establishing personal relationships with the inmates and gaining their trust.

"They found that torture, abusive tactics, made things overall worse for them politically," Baer said. "The Israelis are friendly with their prisoners. They play cards with them and allow them to contact their families. They are getting in their minds to determine what makes up a suicide bomber."

.... Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations and analysis in the CIA Counterterrorist Center, said detainees would say virtually anything to end their torment.

Baer agreed, citing intelligence reports from Arab security services that yielded useless information. "The Saudis and Egyptians torture people all the time, but I have yet to see anything that helped us on the jihad movement and (Osama bin Laden's deputy Ayman al) Zawahri," he said.

This is the "pragmatic" argument against torture, one that I generally avoid using because it implies that if torture did work then I'd be OK with it. I wouldn't be. Still, it's worth spreading the truth about how poorly torture works, since there's probably a sizable number of people who are on the fence about torture but might be persuaded to oppose it if they only understand how ineffective it is.

The more that people are forced to squarely face the issue of torture — what it is, what it says about us, and what company we're keeping by refusing to ban its use — the more likely it is that their basic human decency will assert itself. The pragmatic case against torture isn't the one I consider the most compelling, but if it helps reach some of these people then it's a case worth making.

EDUCATION BLOGGING....You know what the world needs? A good education blog. I read both Eduwonk and Joanne Jacobs, and although they're both decent reads, neither one of them really offers much in the way of analysis. They're mostly just links with a little bit of connective tissue. At the other end of the spectrum, Bob Somerby is morphing the Daily Howler into an education blog, and I'm following along to see how that goes. However, in his first few posts he's gone pretty far in the other direction, offering commentary so detailed that it's all too easy to get lost in the weeds.

I'll keep reading all three, but I'd still like to find something in the middle: authoritative enough to give me a real sense of what the issues are and how to think about them, but not as exhaustive as a Brookings white paper. Any suggestions?

BLACK SITES....Bill Frist on the existence of overseas "black sites" where the Bush administration secretly holds detainees in the war on terror:

I am not concerned about what goes on and I'm not going to comment about the nature of that.

At least he's honest. He doesn't care. If it's good enough for Dick Cheney, it's good enough for him.

WAGE INSURANCE....So how should we help workers who are hurt by trade agreements? In the current issue of the Washington Monthly, Gene Sperling says, first of all, that the answer is to help all workers, not just those hurt by trade agreements. Second, here's how to do it:

The most promising way to accomplish this is wage insurance. Under a basic 50-percent wage-insurance program, dislocated workers who find new work would receive 50 percent of the difference between their new wage and the wage in the job they lost if it paid more. If a worker took a one-third pay cut — say, from $30 to $20 an hour — wage insurance would bring their hourly earnings up to $25, recovering half of the $10 gap between their old and new pay.

This design empowers workers directly and encourages work....In 2002, Congress created a small wage insurance pilot program....But the program is too limited. Only the few workers who can prove they lost their job because of trade are eligible — and even amongst that small group, only those over the age of 50 and making less than $50,000 can receive the insurance benefit. In 2003, only 42 workers even used the program.

Sperling has a few suggestions that would make wage insurance more effective, but the basic idea remains the same: a limited-time helping hand to workers who are displaced from their jobs for reasons outside their control, including outsourcing, layoffs, or plant closures.

This is an idea worth considering, even more so because it's a genuinely work-friendly and family-friendly proprosal. If you recall this post from a couple of months ago, you'll remember that not only do workers who lose their jobs to a plant closure suffer a permanent income decline, but 20 years later the children of these families suffered lower incomes too. Surely those of us who benefit from free trade and an information age economy ought to be willing to forego a small part of that benefit in order to avoid the kind of multi-generational poverty that's caused by the things that benefit us in the first place?

NATIONAL HEALTHCARE....Tyler Cowen writes:

Since single-payer national health insurance violates every economic law known to mankind, I am again unsure how I could leap on the Democratic bandwagon.

But every developed country except the United States has a national health insurance plan, right? And they mostly seem to work pretty well, don't they?

So either they don't violate every economic law known to mankind, or else economists are doing a pretty dismal job of adducing economic laws. Which is it?

FREE TRADE....Since I've gotten several emails about this, it's probably worth pointing out that I didn't intend the previous post to imply that trade agreements are bad things. I don't think they are.

Rather, I just wanted to point out that they have their downsides as well as their upsides. This is something that's obvious to anyone who wasn't comatose during the trade debates of the 90s, but I found Josh Bivens's post about the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem interesting because I hadn't realized there was such unanimity that semi-skilled workers always suffer from trade agreements. That seemed worth a link, since I figure my readers are mostly non-economists like me and might well not know this.

The solution to this problem is much harder than merely pointing it out, of course. Should we accept certain restrictions on trade? Plow money into education for displaced workers? Pair up trade agreements with legislation on labor standards that helps out the working class?

This is the argument currently taking place at TPMCafe over Gene Sperling's new book, The Pro-Growth Progressive, and various people are taking various sides in this debate. If you're interested, check it out. The point isn't that trade is bad per se, the point is that politicians frequently make promises to help out those who are hurt by trade agreements, but then quickly lose interest in those promises once the agreement passes. That inevitably produces public opposition to future trade agreements, and in the end this hurts everyone. That's something worth paying attention to.

UPDATE: Atrios is right. Opposition to trade agreements doesn't hurt everyone. That was sloppy wording. I just meant that free trade is broadly positive for the economy, so we'd all be better off if we can retain public support for free trade by promising to help out those who are harmed by it. See this post for more.

THE STOLPER-SAMUELSON THEOREM....Over at Max's place, Josh Bivens tells us about something called the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem, which predicts that workers without a college degree always get screwed by expanded trade:

There was a big debate about this in the economics profession in the early 1990s. Not one single economist argued about the direction of trade's effect — it was universally agreed that it was negative for these workers. Some said that trade's effect was small, even very small. Some said it was large. But again, there was absolute unanimity that the net effect of trade on these workers was negative, and that trade had exacerbated inequality.

Obviously it matters a lot whether the effect is large or small or very small, but I didn't know there was unanimity among economists that, regardless of the size of the effect, it's always negative "in absolute (not just relative) terms, and permanently (not just through tough 'transitions')."

That certainly puts a different spin on the standard thesis that free trade agreements are good for growth, doesn't it? If "growth" mean GDP growth, it's probably true. But if "growth" means growth in median wages, as I think it should, then it might not be. You learn something new every day.

UPDATE: I didn't mean to imply in this post that free trade is bad. In general, it isn't. More on that here.