STATE OF THE UNION 2005 LIVEBLOGGING....Another year, another State of the Union address to liveblog. Shall we begin?

Wrapup: The international part of the speech was mushier, more platitudinous than usual. In fact, what's interesting is that I think that entire section of the address could have been given by a President Kerry with no more than a few sentences changed.

The domestic stuff was just a laundry list. And what happened to healthcare? That was supposed to be a big focus of the speech, but he barely mentioned it. Nothing about tax reform, either. If he's serious about the clean energy stuff and the basic physical research, that's good news, but I'll bet he isn't. I'll wait to see the actual numbers on all that stuff. And the plea from Karl Rove's boss for bipartisan comity was either laughable or revolting, depending on your temperament. But it might play well in Peoria.

Overall, it was an ode to the era of Clintonian "small bore" initiatives. I suppose that's for the best.

A full transcript of the speech is here.

10:05 — 52 minutes. And a stirring wrapup. Except that Bush really doesn't do "stirring" all that well. Oh well.

9:57 — Human-animal hybrids? Huh?

9:55 — "We must never give in to the belief that America is on the decline." How Carter-esque.

9:54 — Fewer abortions than anytime in the past three decades? Is that true? [UPDATE: Apparently it is. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rate has declined every year since its peak in 1990.]

9:51 — The increase in basic research funding sounds good. I wonder if it's for real? The investment tax credit stuff will be popular in Silicon Valley.

9:49 — The R&D stuff he's talking about for clean energy research doesn't really sound like much. I wonder what those percentage increases come to in actual dollars?

9:47 — HSA watch: Bush wants to make them available to small businesses and make them more portable. Is that it? That's not much for all the HSA hype we've been hearing for the past couple of weeks.

9:44 — Now a reference to Clinton. That makes the score 4-1 in favor of references to former Democratic presidents. Aren't there any former Republican presidents he wants to give a shout out to?

9:41 — Still with the business about cutting the deficit in half by 2009? Sheesh. I think Kash took care of that one a couple of days ago.

9:39 — "Roosevelt to Truman to Kennedy to Reagan"? What happened to Ike and Nixon and Ford and Dad? Is Bush embarrassed of his own party?

9:37 — By the way, Matt lost ten bucks a few minutes ago....

9:34 — Yep, he's on the offensive about the NSA's domestic spying program — complete with lies about previous presidents doing the same thing and federal courts having approved it. Points for chutzpah, though.

9:32 — Who are these "isolationists" Bush keeps talking about?

9:23 — In Iraq, "we've changed our approach to reconstruction." Didn't we just cut the budget for reconstruction to zero? That's more than just a "change," isn't it?

9:17 — Hmmm, the Palestinians were left out of Bush's list of emerging democracies in the Middle East. Isn't that odd?

9:00 — Wolf Blitzer on Dick Cheney and Dennis Hastert: "They look mighty good there together, don't they?" Give me a break.

8:59 — Cindy Sheehan tried to unfold a banner and got arrested by Capitol Police? Sheesh.

8:56 — Let's see, George Bush has already adopted John Kerry's Iran policy, and tonight he will apparently adopt Jimmy Carter's energy policy as well. "America is addicted to oil," we are reliably informed he will tell us. Let's keep a sharp eye out for FDR references too, shall we?

SOTU TRIVIA....Trivia fact of the day: Up through the Carter administration, outgoing presidents traditionally gave a final SOTU address shortly before leaving office (usually in early December until FDR skipped 1933 and moved the address into January). Ronald Reagan put a stop to this lame duck nonsense, leaving the 1989 address to George Bush Sr., and ever since then there have been no State of the Union addresses in the first year of a new administration. There have only been "administration goals" speeches before a joint session of Congress. This is why tonight's State of the Union is Bush's fifth, even though it seems like his sixth.

You may now return to your normal business.

THE WAR ON TERROR....In the Boston Globe today, James Carroll asks about the elephant in the room:

Here is the embarrassing question: Is America actually at war? We have a war president, war hawks, war planes, war correspondents, war cries, even war crimes — but do we have war?

....Iraq is not a war, because, though we have savage assault, we have no enemy. The war on terrorism is not a war because, though we have an enemy, the muscle-bound Pentagon offers no authentic means of assault.

It would be easy to dismiss this as pedantry if it weren't for one thing: it seems as though the Pentagon pretty much agrees. In this year's Quadrennial Defense Review there are no terminations of major weapons programs and, apparently, no serious changes planned in the way the military operates. InsideDefense, which has seen the QDR and spoken to a senior defense official who was one of its architects, reports that instead of offering concrete changes to respond to the war on terror, we're mostly getting Dilbert-style happy talk:

“The misguided game in town is: ‘Give me the programmatics, show where the money is going and that will tell me where the department is going,’” the senior defense official said. “I think that would be a misreading of what’s happened, because what the QDR did was to get us to start to work differently, in a much more collaborative, horizontal fashion.

....“A refined force planning construct...implies the previous force planning construct is about right. I think the programming that’s occurred to date, too, is about right. And what we’re seeing here are refinements of that.”

“That’s not to say there’s not some changes in there,” the military official acknowledged. “But the [services] were on a pretty good vector and the QDR helped make some adjustments to those vectors. That’s why there’s not going to be [any major weapon system terminations].”

So 9/11 didn't really change anything after all. We just need a few tweaks here and there and we'll be fine.

So where's Osama?

STATE OF THE UNION REBUTTAL....Bruce Reed discusses at greater length than I have why the rebuttal to the State of the Union address is a preordained disaster:

Why is the response doomed to fall short, no matter who gives it? Consider the inherent disadvantages. First, it's a ten-minute rebuttal to an hour-long speech. By the time the opposition leader speaks, the television audience is desperate to go to sleep or change the channel to Sports Center.

Second, the contrast in settings is a killer. The State of the Union highlights all the president's majesty, as he speaks to a packed chamber of members who throng to shake his hand and applaud even his lamest lines. The rest of the year, the Founders' checks and balances are theoretically in effect — but on this night, the president looks down on Congress and the Supreme Court, sitting powerless in the well below. By contrast, the poor sap giving the official response is like a movie without a sound track — no buzz, no applause, no majesty.

I agree completely, which is why I also agree that the blogosphere should give Tim Kaine a break. Being picked to give the rebuttal is more a hazing ritual than an honor.

Anyway, I'll repeat my suggestion to the Democrats from a couple of years ago: either insist that the rebuttal speaker be allowed to speak in front of an audience or else just pack it in. The current format is so bad that I'm convinced it does the opposition party more harm than good.

ACADEMY AWARD ROUNDUP....So the Best Picture nominees are Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Munich, Good Night and Good Luck, and Capote. For the first time in years I've already seen all but one of them (Capote), which means I'm pretty much caught up. Capote aside for the time being, I'd cast my vote for Crash.

HSA QUESTION....We've been hearing ad nauseam for the past couple of weeks that George Bush's domestic centerpiece for this year's State of the Union address will be Health Savings Accounts. Fine. But what exactly does that mean?

The reason I ask is that we already have Health Savings Accounts. They've been around for a couple of years now (or even longer if you count their predecessors, Medical Savings Accounts). So obviously Bush isn't going to propose that we create a new and wonderful thing called an HSA. Instead, he's going to propose some kind of expansion or modification of HSAs.

But what? I haven't even heard any speculation, and it's an important question since — as an emailer reminded me last week — since there are plenty of proposals Bush could make that would be pretty popular among people who already use HSAs. For example: increasing the contribution limit; expanding the range of services covered by HSAs to include things like hearing aids and maternity care (which isn't covered by many plans); allowing money to be withdrawn for nonmedical purposes after age 65 (or even better, 55); and so forth.

My point here is mainly a political one. Fighting HSAs on philosophical grounds is one thing, but people who already use them would be pretty pleased to see some concrete, money-saving improvements to HSAs — and wouldn't much care about their abstract virtues or defects. If we're going to fight the HSA-ization of healthcare, we'd better be prepared to be on the opposite side of some motherhood and apple pie proposals from the White House that might sound pretty good to current users. I'm not quite sure how we plan to do that.

GONZALES AND THE LAW....The Washington Post is reporting, essentially, that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales perjured himself during his confirmation hearings last year. Gonzales said that it was "not the policy or the agenda of this president" to authorize actions that conflict with existing law, but since Gonzales knew perfectly well the White House had repeatedly authorized warrantless wiretaps in violation of the FISA act, he was lying.

But here's the funny thing: I'd take a different lesson from the transcript of that testimony. Think Progress reported on this last December, and here's a fuller extract of Gonzales's testimony:

SEN. FEINGOLD: [Does the president] have the authority to authorize violations of the criminal law under duly enacted statutes simply because he’s commander in chief?....

MR. GONZALES: ....There is a presumption of constitutionality with respect to any statute passed by Congress. I will take an oath to defend the statutes. And to the extent that there is a decision made to ignore a statute, I consider that a very significant decision, and one that I would personally be involved with, I commit to you on that, and one we will take with a great deal of care and seriousness.

SEN. FEINGOLD: Well, that sounds to me like the president still remains above the law.

MR. GONZALES: No, sir.

....If Congress passes a law that is unconstitutional, there is a practice and a tradition recognized by presidents of both parties that he may elect to decide not to enforce that law. Now, I think that that would be —

SEN. FEINGOLD: I recognize that, and I tried to make that distinction, Judge, between electing not to enforce as opposed to affirmatively telling people they can do certain things in contravention of the law.

MR. GONZALES: Senator, this president is not — I — it is not the policy or the agenda of this president to authorize actions that would be in contravention of our criminal statutes.

What's notable is that Gonzales rather plainly didn't promise that the president would never violate the law. What he said is that if he did ignore a statute, he would do it with a "great deal of care and seriousness." And furthermore that it was not the president's "policy or agenda" to violate the law — meaning, I suppose, that he would only do it occasionally.

The real lesson here is that everything these guys say has to be deconstructed word by painstaking word to find out what it really means. Gonzales never said flatly that the president wouldn't violate the law, and that's exactly what he meant. Hell, Feingold even recognized that at the time.

Honor and dignity, baby, honor and dignity.

IRAN UPDATE....China and Russia have agreed to report Iran to the UN Security Council following resumption of their uranium enrichment work. Of course, neither China nor Russia has indicated that their opposition to sanctions has changed, so it's not clear how meaningful this is. Not to mention that sanctions have a pretty lousy history of working anyway. Still, I suppose it's a step in the right direction.

The BBC has a roundup of Iranian blogger reaction, including this one from a couple of weeks ago: "They want to deprive Iran of the right to play in the World Cup on the pretext that Iran is building a nuclear weapon." Maybe this guy is onto something....

24 WATCH....Assuming that the phrase "jumped the shark" applies in any meaningful sense to 24, I think 24 finally jumped the shark tonight. Anybody disagree?

SECULAR MEDIA WATCH....Newsweek interviewed Jerry Falwell about the Liberty University debate team recently and made a wee transcription error:

Correction: In the original version of this report, NEWSWEEK misquoted Falwell as referring to "assault ministry." In fact, Falwell was referring to "a salt ministry"—a reference to Matthew 5:13, where Jesus says "Ye are the salt of the earth." We regret the error.

That's some good bulletin board material for the Brent Bozell crowd. I guess Newsweek's copy desk needs to bone up on its Bible.

THEMATIC AND VISIONARY....Former Bill Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet sticks his finger in the air and takes a guess at the subject of George Bush's State of the Union address tomorrow:

Sure, his staff has been using words like "thematic" and "visionary" to describe the speech....But, beneath some idealistic and futuristic rhetoric, Bush's theme may well be that he's right and his critics are wrong; and his vision may well be of a year of partisan trench warfare with congressional Democrats.

Sounds about right to me.

ALITO AND THE 'SPHERE....The lefty blogosphere has spent the last week trying to fire up support for a filibuster of Samuel Alito. This campaign was never likely to succeed, and today it failed as expected. But that's not all: it failed by the embarrassingly lopsided margin of 72-25.

I'm glad the filibuster took place, because even in failure it puts a marker down for future court fights. Still, even given the amateurish way that Senate Dems handled it, I expected it to get more than 25 votes. So here's today's assignment: In 5,000 words or less, what does this say about the influence of the lefty blogosphere?

THE LEGAL MAINSTREAM....Yesterday's cover story in Newsweek described how Jack Goldsmith, after he was appointed head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2003, stood up to hardliners in the Bush administration and insisted that the president was not above the law. Dan Drezner says he has nothing to add to the Newsweek story and then immediately adds this:

I've known Jack Goldsmith for many years from his time at the University of Chicago. If you think that Goldsmith is either a RINO or a squishy "must kowtow to all forms of international law" kind of guy, well, then you don't know Jack.

The fact that Addington, Cheney, and by extension Bush managed to force out people like Goldsmith and Comey means that the legal consensus within the administration is way, way outside the legal mainstream.

Yep. And what does that say about Samuel Alito, who apparently thinks that the Addington/Cheney/Bush president-as-king theory of wartime governance is just peachy? Outside the legal mainstream, no?

DEAN AND THE DNC....Steve Benen takes a look at Howard Dean's fundraising priorities — or, more accurately, his fund spending priorities — and links to an article in Roll Call that reports serious angst on the subject among party leaders:

As the piece explains, Dean spent freely in 2005, developing infrastructure and nurturing state and local parties as part of his broader, long-term vision.

This represents something of a sea-change in how the party operates. For years, the party has bolstered the DNC coffers towards helping boost congressional candidates. This year, the DNC offers a key year, with the opportunity to take back Congress on everyone's mind, but start off without much in the bank — about a seventh of what the RNC has on hand.

I'm inclined to think that Dean is doing the right thing, because in the end I suspect that Democrats will be able to raise sufficient money for every specific race that's worth contesting this year. Conversely, if you put off the infrastructure rebuilding yet again because an election is coming up, when are you going to start? Sure, it's painful, but it has to be done. Better now than later.

And besides, this is the exact issue he campaigned on when he ran for DNC chair. It's not like anyone can say that his priorities come as a surprise.

CULTURE WAR POLITICS....Matt Yglesias reminds me today that I had planned to excerpt another part of Garance Franke-Ruta's article, "Remapping the Culture Debate," but forgot to do it. Here she's talking about why low income voters — who seemingly ought to be receptive to liberal pocketbook politics — are instead strongly receptive to conservative culture war politics:

Lower-income individuals simply live in a much more disrupted society, with higher divorce rates, more single moms, more abortions, and more interpersonal and interfamily strife, than do the middle- and upper-middle class people they want to be like. It should come as no surprise that the politics of reaction is strongest where there is most to react to. People in states like Massachusetts, for example, which has very high per capita incomes and the lowest divorce rate in the country, are relatively unconcerned about gay marriage, while those in Southern states with much higher poverty, divorce, and single-parenthood rates feel the family to be threatened because family life is, in fact, much less stable in their communities. In such environments, where there are few paths to social solidarity and a great deal of social disruption, the church frequently steps into the breach, further exacerbating the fight.

Maybe I'm just stupid or unobservant, but this particular insight had never really occured to me before. Liberal bloggers often make snide remarks about the irony of blue states being more "moral" than red states — lower crime rates, less divorce, etc. — but then don't put two and two together. If it's true that red states tend to have more social disruption, then it makes sense that red state voters are going to be unusually vulnerable to politicians who focus on the evils of "moral decay," doesn't it? They may indeed be getting suckered by the culture war mongers, who make their living by assuring their audience that of course someone else is to blame for all this, but if they are, it's only because they're reacting to the actual conditions of their lives in the first place.

I don't have anywhere special to take this right now, but it seems like a worthwhile notion to mull over. So mull away.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS....Niall Ferguson writes that he thinks the good old days of the Cold War look pretty good compared to today's complex and multipolar world:

What makes me nostalgic is that Soviet wickedness made politics so much simpler in my youth. All you had to do was to go to the Eastern Bloc to see what a real military-industrial complex looked like — and to feel for yourself what the absence of freedom really meant.

....The other key difference between the Cold War era and the present is, of course, the role of Islamic fundamentalism on the global stage. With the benefit of hindsight, 1989 was not the decisive turning point of the late 20th century. That came 10 years earlier, in 1979 — the year of the Iranian Revolution. And militant Islamism is now as big a headache for Russia as it is for Western Europe.

Ferguson carefully notes that he's kidding — sort of — but I've read this kind of thing too often not to believe that he means it. An awful lot of people who should know better make the mistake of believing that the past was simple just because we now know how things turned out. But we didn't at the time. The Depression, World War II, "losing" China, Stalin getting the bomb, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the counterculture revolution of the 60s, Watergate, stagflation and the twin oil shocks, the Iranian hostages, Afghanistan — at the time, all those things seemed plenty dangerous and disorienting. A historian like Ferguson should know better than to pretend otherwise, even in a casual op-ed.

There was another thing that struck me about his op-ed too. I realize that you can't make every single relevant point in an 800-word column, but in a piece comparing the Cold War era to the world of today, surely it's at least worth noting that the modern geopolitical makeup of the Middle East is almost entirely a result of Cold War geopolitics of the 50s and 60s? Ferguson is right that militant Islamism is equally a problem for both Russia and the West, and there's a reason for that. It's because Russia and the West treated the Middle East as a proxy in their ideological war for decades, and the Iranian revolution was largely a reaction to that. It's a cliche, but we really are reaping what we've sown. Today's hawks might want to keep that in mind.

STATE OF THE STATE OF THE UNION....As we prepare ourselves for George Bush's sixth fifth State of the Union address, here's your chart of the day, courtesy of the Pew Research Center.

Bottom line: if you think this year's speech is likely to be a bore, you're not alone. Apparently hearing Bush recite the same old stuff year after year is starting to lose its appeal.

I know that it's lost its appeal for me. I'll liveblog it tomorrow like I do every year, but I'm not sure my heart is going to be in it. I'll try to keep my yawning under control and hope that someone drops a glass of water on Cheney's head or something just to liven things up.

MORE MILITARY WOES....The LA Times has yet another report indicating that the military is under considerable stress from the Iraq war. Junior officers are leaving the Army in record numbers, which means the only way to fill the more senior ranks is to promote practically everyone who's eligible:

Last year, the Army promoted 97% of all eligible captains to the rank of major, Pentagon data show. That was up from a historical average of 70% to 80%.

....The service also promoted 86% of eligible majors to the rank of lieutenant colonel in 2005, up from the historical average of 65% to 75%.

...."The problem here is that you're not knocking off the bottom 20%," said a high-ranking Army officer at the Pentagon. "Basically, if you haven't been court-martialed, you're going to be promoted to major."

....According to Army data, the portion of junior officers (lieutenants and captains) choosing to depart for civilian life rose last year to 8.6%, up from 6.3% in 2004. The attrition rate for majors rose to 7% last year, up from 6.4% in 2005. And the rate for lieutenant colonels was 13.7%, the highest in more than a decade.

It's worth reading the whole article to get more of the context behind this, but I have to say that I've been surprised over the past couple of years to learn how fragile the Army apparently is. I wouldn't have expected an occupation of 150,000 soldiers for three years to have caused as much stress as it has.

IS CHARLES LOGAN A REPUBLICAN?....A few days ago a reader threatened to report me to Glenn Reynolds unless I cleared up an important issue that I brought up last Sunday: Is Charles Logan a Republican?

Logan, of course, is the hapless president of the United States currently on offer from the producers of 24. As we all know, he was formerly vice president Charles Logan until the untimely destruction of Air Force One in Season 4, so the question of his party affiliation boils down to this: Was John Keeler a Republican?

The basic argument goes like this. The president during Seasons 1-3 was David Palmer, and we know for a fact that Palmer was a Democrat. In Season 3, Palmer is running for reelection and part of the plot involves a debate against his opponent, John Keeler. Later in the show, for reasons that need not detain us, Palmer pulls out of the race and Keeler wins the presidency. Occam's Razor suggests that if Palmer is a Democrat, and Keeler was running against him, then Keeler — and Logan — are Republicans.

Unless — it was a primary debate. Perhaps, as in 1980, a prominent Democrat decided to challenge a sitting president. After all, would Palmer really pull out of a race against a Republican opponent? Doesn't it make more sense that he'd do that against a fellow Democrat?

On the other hand, no sitting president would deign to debate a primary opponent. And in Season 4 there's a reference from the daughter of Keeler's Secretary of Defense to a Heritage Foundation meeting, clearly a Republican hangout.

But then there's Mike Novick. If Palmer was a Democrat and Logan is a Republican, how did Novick manage to worm his way into both men's staffs? And what's with Palmer's suggestion that he had been "frozen out" of the Logan administration? That doesn't even make sense unless Logan is a Democrat and Palmer expected to retain a bit of influence with him.

Perhaps a bit of Googling could clear this up, but I figured I'd throw it out for comments instead. I think it's pretty clear that Logan is a Republican, but perhaps there's further evidence on this score that I've missed due to my lazy TV-watching habits. What say you?

A KING OR A PRESIDENT?....Via TalkLeft, Newsweek has a fascinating inside account of the long-running battle between the executive power absolutists in the Bush Administration (Cheney, Addington, and Yoo) and those who believed in the rule of law (Comey, Goldsmith, and — perhaps surprisingly — Ashcroft). There's no simple takeaway, but it's worth reading.

TRAITOR-MONGERING, SPECIAL 2006 ELECTION VERSION....Jon Chait responds to Karl Rove's laughable suggestion that Republicans are more serious about terrorism than Democrats:

So how exactly was Bush transformed by 9/11 in a way Democrats were not? Rove listed three ways in his speech. One is the Patriot Act. "Republicans want to renew the Patriot Act, and Democrat leaders take special delight in proclaiming they've killed it," Rove said. Rove is referring to a controversy over the efforts by Democrats, and some Republicans, to modify some of the more overreaching elements of the Patriot Act while keeping in place its core.

Rove's account is actually close to the opposite of the truth. Democrats have proposed extending the law temporarily — beyond the five-week compromise hastily agreed to before the holidays — until the two sides can work out their disagreements. Bush has opposed an extension, so that he can say the act was killed altogether by Democrats. Apparently the law is a vital tool in our national defense, but not so vital that it can't be suspended in order to give the GOP a campaign issue.

In the Bush White House, nothing is more important than a campaign issue. Nothing.

GLOBAL WARMING....Juliet Eilperin has a good story about global warming in the Washington Post today. Read it.

And keep in mind that the issue is not that the things she writes about are going to happen in 50 or 100 or 200 years. The issue is that within 20-30 years it will become impossible to stop them from happening no matter what we do. And since it will take a minimum of 20-30 years to make any serious progress on greenhouse gas emissions, we need to get our asses in gear now.

Here's how. Step 1: Get rid of the nitwit in the White House who's convinced global warming can't exist because that would be inconvenient for the Republican Party's funding base. Step 2: Replace him with someone who can read a simple chart. Step 3: Pray.

KUWAIT'S OIL RESERVES....This news is a week old, but I forgot to blog about it last weekend:

Word just came out that Kuwait, long regarded as home to some of the world's largest reserves of petroleum, may possess only half the amount of oil reserves that it officially has been stating for many years.

According to a restricted report issued by the authoritative industry newsletter Petroleum Intelligence Weekly (PIW), internal Kuwaiti records reveal that the nation's oil reserves are far below the officially stated amount of about 99 billion barrels....The PIW report is based upon data circulating within the top echelons of the Kuwait Oil Co....The PIW report claims that Kuwait's remaining proven and nonproven oil reserves total about 48 billion barrels, or 51 billion fewer barrels than previously advertised.

Stuart Staniford has more here, including a technical discussion suggesting that this news shouldn't come as a surprise.

For my money, though, you can forget the technical discussion. Instead, take a look at the second graph in Stuart's post, which shows that virtually every OPEC country abruptly increased their reserve estimates in 1986. Although this was partly legitimate (the American companies that had provided the earlier reserve estimates had been systematically too conservative for reasons of their own), the increases were mostly nothing more than a response to OPEC politics. Export quotas are based on reserve estimates, and in the mid-80s every country raised their reserve estimates in order to get a bigger quota. They hadn't suddenly discovered a whole bunch of new oil they never knew was there before.

My rough rule of thumb is that OPEC's real reserves are about halfway between the 1980 estimate and the 1990 estimate — or maybe a bit under that. Eventually it will be impossible to pretend otherwise, and we'll start hearing rumblings from other countries similar to those we're hearing from Kuwait. Buy a hybrid now and be prepared.

THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON SCIENCE, CONT'D....The New York Times reports that NASA scientist James Hansen says administration politicos are trying to shut him up because he insists on continuing to talk about global warming as if it actually exists. It all started after he gave a lecture in San Francisco last month:

After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be "dire consequences" if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.

....In one call, George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National Public Radio to interview Dr. Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute.

Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, Ms. McCarthy said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. "the most liberal" media outlet in the country. She said that in that call and others, Mr. Deutsch said his job was "to make the president look good" and that as a White House appointee that might be Mr. Deutsch's priority.

....Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's supervisor, said that when Mr. Deutsch was asked about the conversations, he flatly denied saying anything of the sort. Mr. Deutsch referred all interview requests to Mr. Acosta.

Ms. McCarthy, when told of the response, said: "Why am I going to go out of my way to make this up and back up Jim Hansen? I don't have a dog in this race. And what does Hansen have to gain?"

Note to George Bush: global warming won't stop happening even if you do manage to muzzle James Hansen. This is just not something that the White House spin shop can fix.

PUBLIC vs. PRIVATE....Do private schools do a better job of educating our kids than public schools? Lots of people think so. But a new, large-scale statistical analysis of the 2003 NAEP test results suggests that when you control for things like income, race, home environment, and so forth, the performance of private schools actually turns out to be worse or about the same as that of public schools, not better.

The study analyzed only the math portion of the NAEP test, and the results from the 4th grade test are shown below. The red line shows the average public school score, and as you can see from the black bars on the graph, the raw scores for most types of private schools are higher than the public school average. However, much of this difference is due to the fact that private schools attract better kids in the first place, not because the schools themselves are better.

So what would happen if both types of schools had similar student bodies? Those results are shown for private schools in the gray bars in the graph, where test scores are controlled for demographics, and they're considerably lower than the public school average. In other words, if you took two similar kids and sent one to a public school and one to a private school, the kid in the private school would probably do a little worse than his public school twin. (Note that a difference of 10 points is roughly equal to one grade level.)

The 8th grade results are better, with most private schools scoring about the same as public schools. The only exception is the conservative Christian schools, which continue to score considerably lower than public schools — although the sample size is small enough that the results aren't conclusive.

I don't imagine that one study will change any minds, but the size and sophistication of this one should at least give us pause. The full report is here. The New York Times summarizes the results here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY....Republican Senator Trent Lott lost his house to Hurricane Katrina last year, and the LA Times reports that although he's upset at FEMA, he's also got some other beefs:

The longtime Washington foe of "frivolous" lawsuits was no less critical of insurance companies that balked at paying claims to Mississippi homeowners. And he didn't hesitate to file suit against a company he once defended, State Farm Fire & Casualty Co.

"Funny how frivolous lawsuits stop being frivolous when it's you," said Lott's brother-in-law, Richard Scruggs, who is representing the senator. Scruggs lost his home not far from Lott's house — and he, along with thousands of other Mississippi home owners, also has a claim against State Farm.

Mugged by reality indeed.

A BIPARTISAN SCANDAL?....The American Prospect has commissioned Dwight L. Morris and Associates, a specialist in campaign finance, to examine the contribution records of Indian tribes since 1991 to find out how their giving patterns changed based on whether or not they hired Jack Abramoff to represent them. The full article by Greg Sargent is here, and there are two significant results.

First, Morris compared the contribution patterns of tribes that hired Abramoff to tribes that didn't. The result? Over the past 15 years, non-Abramoff tribes have given 72% of their contributions to Democrats. Conversely, Abramoff's tribes, during the period they were represented by Abramoff, gave 70% of their contributions to Republicans. Since these tribes would almost certainly have given 30% of their contributions to Democrats on their own, this is compelling evidence that Abramoff directed his clients to give the vast bulk of their contributions to the GOP.

Second, Morris looked solely at the tribes that hired Abramoff and compared their contribution patterns before and after they hired him. The figures in the Prospect article are a little unfair in this regard, since the pre-Jack period is generally twice as long as the post-Jack period, so I recalculated their figures based on approximate contribution rates per year.

The chart on the right shows what happened. Before hiring Abramoff, annual contributions to Democrats and Republicans were roughly equal. After hiring Abramoff, contributions went up across the board, but skyrocketed for Republicans. Abramoff not only persuaded his clients to increase their overall giving, but persuaded them to give practically all of the additional money to Republicans.

Here's the bottom line:

“If you’re going to make the case that this is a bipartisan scandal, you have to really stretch the imagination,” says Morris. “Most individual tribes were predominantly Democratic givers through the last decade. Only Abramoff’s clients switched dramatically from largely Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican donors, and that happened only after he got his hands on them.”

There's not much doubt that Abramoff directed his clients to contribute small amounts to certain Democrats. Taken as a whole, though, his direction to his clients was clear: to give more — much, much more — to Republicans.

POSTSCRIPT: In some sense, it's unfortunate that this has even become an issue. After all, there's nothing wrong with a politician taking a donation from an Indian tribe, regardless of whether it was directed by Abramoff or not. It's only wrong if there's specific evidence of wrongdoing associated with the contribution.

Still, since this has become an issue, it's worth looking at the figures to see what they show. And what they show is no surprise: Jack Abramoff was a Republican lobbyist who directed his clients to give overwhelmingly to Republicans. And they did.

6-1, 2-0, RET....I suppose any win is a good win, but has anyone ever before won a grand slam title via forfeits in both the semifinal and final rounds? And did Justine Henin-Hardenne really just have an upset stomach? Weird.

WHO'S THE ANTI-NEWT?....Liz Marlantes wonders aloud in The New Republic if 2006 could be a Democratic version of 1994, when Republicans won 54 seats in the House and and eight in the Senate and seized control of both houses:

In Democratic circles these days, there is much talk of 1994 — with good reason. The president's approval ratings are bad, Congress's are even worse, and, most importantly, scandal is sweeping the nation's capital. The atmosphere is poisonous enough that some Democrats believe it could produce the kind of electoral storm last seen twelve years ago, when Republicans retook Congress by railing against corruption in Washington. Of course, the 2006 Democrats differ in many ways from the 1994 Republicans. One key difference may well be the lack of Newt Gingrich — or, rather, a liberal version of him.

Marlantes may be right, but I doubt that she's really nailed the key factor. Yes, Gingrich was a pit bull, but the biggest thing he had going for him was simpler: he was on the tail end of a 30-year shift of white, mostly Southern conservatives from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Pressure had been building along that particular tectonic plate for a long time, and in 1994 Gingrich was able to turn it into an electoral earthquake. Instead of gaining a few seats per election, he gained them all at a single time.

Without that underlying dynamic, the 1994 landslide would have been a fizzle, gaining a dozen seats, not 54. So while Democrats might very well need a Newt Gingrich of their own, what they really need if they want to win back control of Congress is a tectonic shift they can take advantage of — and so far I just haven't seen any big, pent-up frustration on the part of center-right voters that might turn large numbers of them into center-left voters instead. It'll be healthcare eventually, but in the meantime I'm stumped.

RIOTS IN GAZA....The CNN headlines out of Gaza City have been getting steadily more dire all day. Here's the latest one:

Mob demands leaders pay for election thrashing

A mob of up to 2,000 furious Fatah supporters took to the streets Friday, burning cars, firing guns and demanding the resignation of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas after the militant group Hamas trounced their party in parliamentary elections.

....Waving yellow Fatah flags in the flickering light of bonfires, protesters swarmed around Abbas' home in Gaza City, where they shot in the air and accused him of being a "collaborator" with Israel.

I'm not really sure what this all means, but I thought I'd open it up to comments anyway. Is this good? Bad? Impossible to say?

TAKE IT BACK....Charles Pierce has this to say about James Carville and Paul Begala's new book, Take It Back: Our Party, Our Country, Our Future

C&B have some very good policy recommendations, as well as some very bad ones....

In a 1,300-word review, though, this is the last we hear about their policy recommendations.

I realize that it's currently fashionable to believe that policy doesn't matter for liberals because liberals aren't in power right now, but it's discouraging that this view seems to have become damn near universal on the left. Pierce's review may be amusing in places — though only to people who already get the joke and hate Carville and Begala to begin with — but if we don't start caring about policy again, the next Democratic president is going to be precisely the kind of triangulator that Pierce claims to despise. Would it really have killed him to spend a few lousy paragraphs telling us what Take It Back is actually about?