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?

CHILD SUPPORT....Mark Schmitt writes today that Republicans and Democrats worked together for more than ten years in the 80s and 90s to create a genuinely effective system of enforcement for child support payments. It passed in 1996 as part of welfare reform:

And it worked. In 2004, 51% of child support was paid. From 18% to 51% is a huge transformation. I doubt that anyone in the mid-1990s would have predicted that. One study showed that improved child support enforcement was responsible for a quarter of the reduction in welfare caseloads.

As Mark writes, getting this passed was hard work, a triumph of serious policymaking.

I imagine you can guess the rest of the story, can't you? Serious policymaking is not in vogue in today's Republican Party, which has decided to slash $4.9 billion from this program. And why not? It might be working great, but it doesn't benefit the K Street business interests that fund the GOP, and that's all that matters. Take that, family values.

RISKY BUSINESS....Virginia Postrel has an interesting column in the New York Times today. At least, it's interesting for people like me who are fascinated by research into how people evaluate risk and uncertainty. First, there's a brief test:

1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

2. If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half the lake?
   

What makes this interesting is that it's not really a math/logic test. That is to say, it is a math/logic test, but Shane Frederick of MIT says it's more than that. It's an indicator of your tolerance for risk: high scorers tend to prefer risky gambles more than low scorers, even when the gambles aren't especially favorable. On the other hand, there's also this:

For instance, 80 percent of high-scoring men would pick a 15 percent chance of $1 million over a sure $500, compared with only 38 percent of high-scoring women, 40 percent of low-scoring men and 25 percent of low-scoring women.

Unless that's a misprint, I just have to wonder what kind of moron would take $500 over a 15% chance of a million bucks? That's crazy unless you're dead broke and a goon with a baseball bat is coming after you with your kneecaps in his sights.

Anyway, read the whole thing. Interesting stuff. Quiz answers are at the end.

FOURTH QUARTER GROWTH....Hmmm. Economic growth was an anemic 1.1% in the fourth quarter. It would have been even worse except that businesses were busily building up their inventories in the hopes that someone will buy all their stuff next quarter. Maybe.

No one seems to be very upset about today's announcement, even though 1.1% is way below the consensus forecasts of 2.8%. It's not entirely clear to me why. With oil still over $60 per barrel, the housing market starting to cool a bit, and household debt still at record levels, it's hard to see just where the consumer demand is going to come from to get things back on track. Perhaps the blogosphere's economists can weigh in to reassure me.

FRIDAY MOZART BLOGGING.... Happy 250th Birthday, Mozart!

In celebration, we have Édouard Boubat's famous musical cat, Partition (1982), accompanied by the only slightly less famous Jasmine Sitting Over the Fireplace (2003).

Want to test your knowledge of Mozart? Put on your headphones and take the BBC's "Mozart or Not-Mozart?" audio quiz. It's my kind of quiz: so easy even I passed!

On a slightly more serious, um, note, Tyler Cowen dons his flak jacket and tells you which Mozart you need to know and which you don't. For what it's worth, I agree with him about the symphonies. He also recommends this Terry Teachout essay on Mozart's minor key masterpieces. My favorite Mozart is his Piano Concerto in D Minor K. 466 (Piano Concert #20 for the less refined, which includes me), so I recommend it too.

Better yet, go listen to some Mozart today. It might be too late for it to raise your IQ, but it can't hurt to try.

UPDATE: And I almost forgot: you might also want to go see Terrence Malick's The New World today. Not only is it a terrific film, but it features Mozart's Piano Concert #23 as a recurring theme. Lovely.

A QUESTION OF INCOMPETENCE II... I mentioned yesterday that, absent strict oversight, we can't trust the NSA — especially when it's controlled by an administration of proven incompetence — to carry out a domestic spying program that nabs terrorists but doesn't shred civil liberties. Let's just hope the NSA has its act together better than the CIA.

GEORGE AND JACK....Over at The Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez comments about George Bush and Jack Abramoff:

The Abramoff picture stuff is so ridiculous. Of course he has a ridiculous number of pictures taken all the time. That members of the press — who bring relatives to the White House for pictures with the president as a matter of form — would make such a ridiculous deal out of it is nonsense.

Normally I'd sort of agree with this. Even the fact that the White House is so assiduously keeping us from seeing all these routine pics doesn't necessarily mean much.

But when photo agencies go to the trouble of deleting pictures of Bush and Abramoff from their website, then deleting them permanently from their own CDs, and then claiming that they did it all on their own with no direction from the White House or anyone else — well, that just starts to sound a little suspicious, doesn't it? If the White House isn't guilty of anything, why are they skulking around in shadows so much?

RICK AND GROVER....Rick Santorum is getting a little touchy about the K Street Project, isn't he? Apparently he blew up at a reporter who asked about it yesterday:

"I had absolutely nothing to do — never met, never talked, never coordinated, never did anything — with Grover Norquist and the — quote — K Street Project," Mr. Santorum said.

Really? All the way back in June 2002 Jim VandeHei reported that Norquist was busily assembling the data for the K Street Project and that Santorum was an eager accomplice:

Copies of the bulky dossier, being compiled by conservative activist Grover Norquist and other prominent Republican lobbyists....dubbed the "K Street Project"...has been expedited and expanded now that Republicans control the White House and federal agencies.

....Senate Republican Conference Chairman Rick Santorum (Pa.) last month hosted a private meeting in the Capitol, during which Norquist asked a group of about two dozen lobbyists and staffers to help complete the project, according to sources familiar with the meeting.

And here's what the Philadelphia Inquirer reported a couple of months later about Santorum's biweekly breakfast meetings with the K Street elite:

Grover Norquist, a conservative activist, has appeared before the group and sought help with an effort to push lobbying firms and trade associations to hire more Republicans.

The so-called K-Street Project got the attention of the Senate Ethics Committee, which is concerned that the project could be used to deny access to Democrats.

"He [Santorum] has gotten me in to talk to all those guys," Norquist said.

It's funny that Santorum has suddenly forgotten all about his pal Norquist, isn't it? I think I detect a whiff of panic in the air.

Democrats would be wise to keep banging on this. After all, "K Street Project" has sort of a sinister ring to it, doesn't it? I can see the grainy black-and-white ads in my mind's eye already....

HAMAS....Exit polls sure have taken it on the chin lately, haven't they? The latest casualty comes from yesterday's elections in the Palestinian Authority, where the terrorist group Hamas appears to have won an outright majority, not the 30% minority the exit pollsters predicted.

Worldwide reaction has been understandably nervous, but the Aardvark counsels caution and patience:

It is an article of faith among virtually all Arabs and Muslims that in 1992 the United States and Europe green lighted the Algerian military coup after the Islamist FIS stood on the brink of electoral victory. This has been taken for a decade and a half as the definitive evidence that the American and European commitment to democracy was a hypocritical farce: democracy only if our allies won.

....For America, I think it's extremely important right now to handle this right: honor the will of the people, demonstrate a commitment to democratic process, and see what happens. Give Hamas the chance to prove its intentions. Don't get too upset about the inevitable bursts of objectionable rhetoric by excited victors — test deeds, not early words. Above all, don't give the Islamist hardliners the winning argument they crave about American hypocrisy. Refusing to deal with Hamas right now could effectively kill American attempts to promote democracy in the Middle East for a generation.

This is probably good advice. At this point, I imagine that even Hamas is stunned by the results, and the immediate rhetoric from its leaders is likely to be unrestrained. Give things a few weeks to cool down, though, and both action and rhetoric might start to adjust to the weight of actual leadership.

Or maybe not. But if they don't, patience won't have cost us anything.

FILIBUSTER ALITO....I see that the New York Times is calling for a filibuster of Samuel Alito. Good for them.

Would this end up hurting Democrats? It might. And the end result would probably be the spectacle of Bill Frist and Dick Cheney ramming through the "nuclear option" to force debate to a close and install Alito on the Supreme Court regardless.

But in politics, if you only fight when you're sure of victory, you're never going to fight at all. Senate Dems blew the Judiciary Committee hearings as a chance to educate the country about Alito's radical views on presidential power, and a filibuster fight would give them a second chance. They should take it.

TULIPS....Jeez, all the cool bloggers are getting an all-expenses vacation to Holland. Nothing for me, though, even though I love tulips. Sigh.

But in case the Australian tourist board is thinking of doing something similar, can I put my name in the hat for a vacation to next year's Australian Open? You guys wouldn't mind a week of tennis blogging next January, would you?

A QUESTION OF INCOMPETENCE... Framing thought for the day: the primary worry about the NSA eavesdropping program shouldn't be civil liberties, but incompetence.

Most people agree, or can be convinced, that in order to root out terrorist threats we need to give the NSA enhanced permission to snoop on domestic communications. But this is a potentially very dangerous power we’re giving the government. So the question is, do we trust the Bush administration to use this power with care and competence?

The answer is, of course not. The administration has shown, time and again, that it can’t be trusted to manage the power it has. Iraq, Katrina, the budget, mine safety, prescription drugs—each and every one a monumental screw-up. What possible reason do we have to presume that the administration hasn’t screwed up the NSA eavesdropping program? We have no real idea who the NSA is spying on. Could be al-Qaeda cells. Could be your wife’s cell phone conversations. We have no idea.

There’s only one way to make sure the Bush administration hasn’t blown this very important and delicate domestic spying activity. It’s the mechanism bequeathed to us by the Founders: Congressional consent and oversight. But the president doesn’t believe he needs Congress’ consent, and the Republican-controlled Congress doesn’t believe in tough oversight.

The upcoming hearings on the NSA eavesdropping program are certainly welcome. But given the realities of one-party control in Washington, there's really only one way for the American people to make sure they have a domestic spying program that smokes out terrorists without shredding their civil liberties. They have to vote for it this November.

THE THOUSAND INJURIES OF MAUREEN DOWD....I like Reed Hundt's posts over at TPMCafe: they're short, pithy, and usually full of common sense.

Today, though, Maureen Dowd has pissed him off, and short and pithy go out the window. Still full of common sense, though, except for his conclusion:

I do wish Molly Ivins had Dowd's place in the Times.

I've never really understood the attraction of Dowd's version of junior high school snark, and I'd rather read Ivins any day. However, since replacing Dowd at the Times would just put Ivins behind a subscription wall, I think I'm happy with things just the way they are.

EXECUTIVE PENSIONS....Here's a story from the Wall Street Journal that comes with a hearty dose of cognitive dissonance for well-meaning liberals. The good news is that Congress is set to pass a bill that prevents companies from funding lavish executive pension plans if the pension plan for their regular workers is underfunded and going bankrupt:

Disclosures about bankruptcy-proof supplemental executive retirement benefits at some airlines, including a $45 million fund set up a few years ago for 35 top officials by Delta Air Lines Inc., have galvanized bipartisan support for reining in such perks at other beleaguered companies.

"We've heard too many stories of top executives of bankrupt companies sticking workers with unfunded pensions while running off with millions of dollars of so-called nonqualified pension benefits," says Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican.

Hooray! I say. The brewing pension fund crisis is a scandal of epic proportions, and anything that helps rein in the venal behavior that caused it in the first place is fine with me. But then there's this:

For decades, executives relied on the same pension plan as other company employees, so they had an incentive to make it generous. The shift toward a dual system started in 1994, when Congress passed a law intended to limit the cost to taxpayers of runaway executive pay. The law barred companies from taking a tax deduction on compensation in excess of $1 million a year for any current employee. The result: Companies began setting up supplemental pension plans that encouraged senior managers to defer compensation.

Well. That's certainly a good example of the law of unintended consequences, isn't it? I mean, I'm sure the $1 million cap seemed like a good idea at the time.

So the lesson is to be careful. Corporate executives are greedy and devious and they get upset when anyone suggests their pay should be less than 500x that of the average worker. With that in mind, a simple requirement for transparent present-value accounting of all executive pay would probably be a better idea than the one-off reform on offer right now, and an even simpler requirement that all employees be paid out of the same pension fund and accept the same risks would be better yet.

NEGLIGENT HOMICIDE....Marc Cooper comments on the court martial of Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr.:

Let’s make sure we get this story right. You take the captured, uniformed general of an enemy army — and in blatant violation of all notions of human decency and of the Geneva Conventions — you beat him with rubber hoses, pour water down his nose, then stuff him into a sleeping bag, tie him with electrical cord, and then sit your ass down on his chest until he suffocates and you are convicted of what? “Negligent homicide?”

....Remember that the victim in this case, Iraqi General Abed Hamel Mowhoush was a top, uniformed officer of a recognized state-sponsored enemy army and not some “illegal combatant.” Worse, when Mowhoush was suffocated in November 2003, it was after he had voluntarily turned himself in to U.S. military authorities. At least, sort of voluntarily. Fact is, the General surrendered to American troops because they were holding his sons hostage — yet another stark violation of international law.

And we also learn this from the LA Times account of the trial:

The day after the general’s death, prosecutors said, Welshofer asked for another sleeping bag so he could continue using the technique on others.

Read the whole thing if you have a strong stomach. And then ask yourself: if the jury bought Welshofer's argument that he was just following orders, whose orders was he following?

THE COMPANY WE KEEP....The International Lesbian and Gay Association recently applied to join the United Nations Economic and Social Council. The following countries voted to consider their application:

Chile, France, Germany, Peru, Romania

The following countries voted to dismiss the application without even giving it a hearing:

Cameroon, China, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, Russian Federation, Senegal, Sudan, Zimbabwe

Guess which of these two fine groups of countries the Bush/Cheney administration voted with?

Via Cathy Young.

DELAY TO ABRAMOFF TO LIVINGSTON....A DC TRIPLE PLAY?....Via Josh, New York Post gossip maven Cindy Adams sez:

Jack Abramoff's partner Mike Scanlon admitted to digging up former Congressman Robert Livingston's private life. Set to become speaker, Livingston then got sidelined for Tom DeLay's man Denis Hastert. Prosecutors now checking if Abramoff and Scanlon took Livingston down at DeLay's behest.

Like Josh, I also say "Hmmm."

HOW WIDE A NET?....Here's a bit of thinking out loud about the NSA spying case. Don't take it too seriously; it's more barroom conversation than anything else.

First, Sifu Tweety argues that the NSA program wasn't quite as "targeted and focused" as General Hayden suggested on Monday:

Data mining WAS used, but it was used for target selection. People have been talking about “data mining” like it’s a be-all-end-all surveillance technique. It’s not. All data mining (or pattern analysis, or whatever) is going to give you is a list of potential targets.

OK, but what kind of data mining? Surely even the NSA's supercomputers can't literally track and transcribe every voice call coming in and out of the United States? A reader emails an alternate possibility:

The phone network really is two parallel systems: one that switches voice signals from user to user and a second "common channel" that passes control information between the switching systems. Once the number you dial reaches your local central office, it leaves the voice system and passes from switch to switch via the common channel.

You can see where I'm headed with this. What about monitoring the common
channel?....Why do this? Let's posit that we have a list of known bad-guy telephone numbers. In the first tier around them, we collect the phone numbers of people who have called the bad-guy telephone numbers. Probably most of these folks are bad guys: cell leaders, fund-raisers, sleepers, etc. In the second tier, we find people who have called the probable bad guys. Most of these probably aren't bad, but some small fraction are the operatives who fly planes, strap on explosive belts, and so on. Et cetera as far down as you have time to go.

This strikes me as plausible, and it also explains why NSA couldn't get wiretap warrants: this kind of analysis isn't even within yelling distance of "probable cause." If you capture Osama's cell phone, it's one thing to ask for a wiretap on all the numbers you find in his speed dial, but it's quite another thing to ask for wiretaps based strictly on a once or twice-removed traffic analysis of the phone numbers dialed by anyone who is "a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda, or working in support of al Qaeda." That's a very wide net.

Which brings up another knotty question: just how wide is this net? Who's likely to have called someone who's called someone who's suspected of being affiliated with al-Qaeda? I'd guess that this description applies to vast numbers of U.S. Muslims. In other words, the NSA program might have been nothing more than a thinly veiled excuse to identify a huge pool of American Muslims from which it could then pick and choose suspects it had wanted to track all along but otherwise had no justification for tracking. And this might have been so transparent that no judge would ever approve it.

As I said at the beginning, this is just thinking out loud and might be way off base. Comments are welcome.

KURDS AND JEWS....When it comes to social decorum doctors in every country are the same. The old ones want their asses kissed, the young ones are waiting for the day when their asses will be kissed, and the medical students resent all the asses they are kissing. Kurdistan is no exception, and the social amenities of medicine mesh nicely with the local custom of showing deference to the wishes of older men. As a medical student I'm firmly in the should-be-kissing-ass group, but tonight I am fortunate to be present for an exception.

I sit down with Dr. Z at the Kameliati, a social club situated in Sulaimania's Azadi ("Freedom") Park. This area, a large section of town, is the site of a former Baath military base, a universally dreaded place where hundreds of city residents once disappeared without a trace. When I first met with Dr. Z he had been reserved and formal, and we spent ten minutes posing for photographs in front of a portrait of Jalal Talabani. But at the end he had invited me to the Kameliati, and I suspect what he really wanted was a drink.

The waiters — most of them patients of the doctor — bring out several courses of hommus, vegetables, and salads. The doctor drinks scotch and I have a few beers. The Islamic taboo aside, many Kurdish men enjoy alcohol when removed from the public gaze, and it helps break past the formalized behavior that the culture requires in public. As the conversation turns to politics, I realize that Dr. Z is liberal by Kurdish standards, declining to say anything derogatory about Arabs or Turks, even when we discuss the atrocities.

He then pauses for moment. "Let me ask you this," he says. "Is it true that the Jews escaped on September 11th?"

Dr. Z is one of the most educated people in Iraq. "No, it's bullshit," I say. I'm trying not to act irritated. I want badly to get further into this, but there are some things I'm still not comfortable revealing. "I think so too," he concludes.

In Kurdistan, unique amongst Muslim countries, there is a pro-Israel sentiment. This is by no means universal, and on some occasions Kurds that are working with me receive hostile comments because I am "not Muslim." But the Israelis helped the Kurds militarily as far back as the 1960s, and before I left New York I spoke with an Israeli doctor who had been with the KDP guerrilas in their mountain fortress of Rowanduz at that time. In Sulaimania I met one doctor who described Kurdistan as "the second Israel," though he intended the comparison as a gripe against the Americans for failing to support the Kurds more unconditionally.

Another friend, a KDP man, explained to me that he supports Israel because he believes chauvanism is an ingrained feature of Arab politics. "They have 25 countries," he said. "And still there is this talk of pushing the Jews into the sea. In Kurdistan we have been fighting this thinking for centuries, and believe me we are very tired."

Over kebabs and arak my KDP friend tells me a Kurdish parable. A man is crazy. He believes he is a flower and birds are trying to eat him. A doctor takes him to the hospital. After months of treatment he improves. "I am not a flower," he tells himself. As he is walking home from the hospital he looks up at the sky. "I know I am not a flower," he thinks. "But those birds still want to eat me. How do I convince them that I am not a flower?"

I thought about this for a few minutes, and it gave me a better understanding of both Kurdistan and Israel.

Jonathan Dworkin, a medical student in his final year at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, is travelling in Iraqi Kurdistan from January to March of 2006. Other posts in this series:

January 25: Kurds and Jews
January 18: At Home in the New Kurdistan
January 14: City of Refugees
January 11: First Impressions

A PLEA TO THE NEW YORK TIMES....I note that the New York Times has published a piece by John Lott today and I just have to ask: what is Lott doing writing op-eds for them? The man is a fraud and the Times demeans itself by allowing him space on their pages.

This is not a matter of Lott being a conservative I disagree with. Plenty of conservatives write op-ed I disagree with. Nor does this have anything to do with complicated arguments over statistical models that require an advanced degree to understand. It's also not about the fact that he appears to have lied about conducting a survey that he doesn't seem to have actually conducted. Neither is it about his infamous career as "Mary Rosh" defending his own work under a pseudonym on the internet.

It's about the fact that he has posted, retracted, and then reposted fraudulent data and then covered it up. Details are here, and no mathematical background is needed to understand it.

If anyone from the New York Times editorial page is reading this — or anyone from any other editorial page, for that matter — do your credibility a favor. Stop publishing this guy. In a decent world, he would have been blackballed from polite editorial society long ago.

THE RUBBER HITS THE ROAD?....Terence Kindlon, the attorney for a man accused of trying to sell missile launchers to terrorists, filed an interesting motion last Friday:

An FBI sting case that targeted two members of an Albany mosque should be dismissed because the investigation originated from a national spying program that may be illegal, an attorney for one of the defendants said in a motion filed in U.S. District Court.

...."The government engaged in illegal electronic surveillance of thousands of U.S. persons, including Yassin Aref, then instigated a sting operation to attempt to entrap Mr. Aref into supporting a nonexistent terrorist plot, then dared to claim that the illegal NSA operation was justified because it was the only way to catch Mr. Aref," Kindlon's motion said.

....Now, with attorneys...confident secret surveillance was the catalyst for the FBI's Albany sting, the stage is set for the NSA program to be challenged on constitutional grounds as part of the local case. The question is whether the government will be compelled, even tacitly, to confirm that Aref was targeted because of information gleaned from the controversial spy program.

Kindlon may be fishing here, filing a motion just for the hell of it to see what happens. Then again, maybe not. This may end up being a case to keep our eyes on.

EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE WATCH....Yesterday:

The White House was told in the hours before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans that the city would probably soon be inundated with floodwater, forcing the long-term relocation of hundreds of thousands of people, documents to be released Tuesday by Senate investigators show.

A Homeland Security Department report submitted to the White House at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, hours before the storm hit, said, "Any storm rated Category 4 or greater will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching."

....Other documents to be released Tuesday show that the weekend before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Homeland Security Department officials predicted that its impact would be worse than a doomsday-like emergency planning exercise conducted in Louisiana in July 2004.

Today:

The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response.

.... In response to questions later from a reporter, the deputy White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said the administration had declined requests to provide testimony by Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff; Mr. Card's deputy, Joe Hagin; Frances Fragos Townsend, the homeland security adviser; and her deputy, Ken Rapuano.

Mr. Duffy said the administration had also declined to provide storm-related e-mail correspondence and other communications involving White House staff members.

Why am I not surprised?

FISA UPDATE....I'm still confused about a number of things, but as near as I can tell here's the state of play on the NSA's domestic spying program:

1. The administration has acknowledged that the NSA program violated the FISA act. However, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales argues that the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed shortly after 9/11, superseded FISA.

2. Yesterday, General Michael Hayden said that the reason they had to bypass FISA was because it required a showing of "probable cause" that the target of a wiretap request was a foreign power (i.e., either a terrorist organization or a foreign state). That standard was apparently too difficult to meet in many cases.

3. As Glenn Greenwald reports today, in 2002 congressman Mike DeWine introduced an amendment to FISA that would have retained probable cause as the standard for U.S. persons (i.e., citizens or foreigners with permanent residency) but lowered it to "reasonable suspicion" for non-U.S. persons.

4. Congress refused to pass DeWine's amendment. This makes it plain that Congress did not intend for AUMF to loosen the restrictions of FISA.
   

So this leaves only the argument that the president's inherent constitutional powers give him the authority to order wiretaps of U.S. citizens even when Congress has passed laws forbidding it. There is, as near as I can tell, no case law that supports this view.

It's worth noting, by the way, that the administration has been adamant that calls are only monitored if one end of the call is outside the United States. But why not also monitor calls within the United States? Last month General Hayden said simply that "that's where we've decided to draw that balance between security and liberty" — in this case "we" meaning the president and the NSA. This rather strongly implies that George Bush believes there's nothing stopping him from ordering 100% domestic wiretapping if he feels like it, and nothing Congress can do about it if he does. So much for Article I Section 8.

MAO vs. OSAMA....Noah Shachtman has some more thoughts about the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, details of which are slowly leaking to the press:

My quick, subject-to-instant-revision first impression: Rumsfeld & Co. are focusing more on China than they are on Osama.

....Terrorist-type threats will get some new attention. But the Defense Department isn’t about to optimize for that threat, the way it did for the Soviet Union. Big money will continue to be spent on fighter jets designed to duel with the Soviets and destroyers designed for large-scale ground assaults. Grunts on the ground won’t get much more than they do now. The war on terror may be “long.” But, apparently, it’s not important enough to make really big shifts.

I've never had a strong overall opinion about Donald Rumsfeld's "transformation" project, which seeks to make the military smaller and higher tech. It's an effort that seems to have both good points and bad, and I'm not savvy enough about it to offer any substantive analysis.

Except for one thing: as near as I can tell, Rumsfeld's vision barely changed a whit after 9/11. "Transformation" is still a project designed to make us better at fighting a conventional war against a conventional enemy — which is fine as far as it goes — but doesn't really address the emerging low-tech job of fighting terrorism and failed states.

This has long struck me as a serious weak point in George Bush's approach to the military, and it's one that Democrats ought to take advantage of. I hear a lot of bloviating about "running to Bush's right" on terrorism, most of which is little short of idiotic (what are we going to do, start screaming that he's not invading Iran fast enough?). But criticizing the QDR as hostage to moldy old Cold War thinking while doing too little to address the modern threat of terrorism is both good policy and good politics. Liberal military analysts ought to be latching on to this big time.

REPUBLICANS AND THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY....The conventional wisdom about the Medicare prescription drug bill is that it was a huge giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry. And it was. But the real payoff was to the insurance industry, one of the Republican Party's favorite special interest groups.

Today, the Congressional Budget Office reports on the latest valentine from the GOP to the insurance industry. It turns out that Republicans met in closed session last month to make technical changes to a budget cutting bill that saved the industry $22 billion:

The Senate version would have targeted private HMOs participating in Medicare by changing the formula that governs their reimbursement, lowering payments $26 billion over the next decade. But after lobbying by the health insurance industry, the final version made a critical change that had the effect of eliminating all but $4 billion of the projected savings, according to CBO and other health policy experts.

...."It happens in the dead of night when lobbyists get a [Republican lawmaker] in the corner and say, 'We've got to have this,' " said Rep. Fortney "Pete" Stark (Calif.), the Democrats' point man on Medicare issues. "It's a pattern that just goes on and on, and at some point the public's going to rise up."

[Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles] Grassley disputed the CBO's interpretation of the change as "ridiculous," dismissing what appears to be a major insurance industry victory as merely a mistake in CBO calculations, not a substantive policy change. He said he accepted the policy change because he "didn't see a big difference from the Senate position and the conference position."

Indeed. Not a "big difference." Then why did the insurance industry lobby so desperately to get it passed?

Read the whole thing. It's another good example of how minor technical changes with huge consequences get inserted into conference reports with no oversight from either the public or from Democrats. Only the lobbyists and the GOP know what's going on.

And it works pretty well. $22 billion is a pretty good payoff for the insurance industry's $24 million in contributions to Republicans during the 2004 election cycle, isn't it? And it all comes out of your pocketbook.

QUADRENNIAL REVIEW....The Pentagon is nearly finished with its latest quadrennial review, and I'm not sure if this is good news or bad:

While some new lessons will be incorporated into the Pentagon review, the spending blueprint for the next four years will largely stick to the script Pentagon officials wrote before the Iraq war, according to those familiar with the nearly final document that will be presented to Congress in early February.

Iraq "is clearly a one-off," said a Pentagon official who is working on the top-to-bottom study, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review. "There is certainly no intention to do it again."

In one sense, I'm glad to hear that the military doesn't really want to occupy another country anytime in the near future. On the other hand, given the realities of what's going on in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, it hardly seems wise to pretend that it's never going to happen again, does it? It sounds like 9/11 changed everything except the United States military.

AMENDING FISA....Here's another point related to General Hayden's admission today that the NSA's domestic spying program isn't some kind of dazzling high tech black op, but merely garden variety wiretapping that was done outside normal FISA channels because NSA couldn't meet the "probable cause" standard normally needed to get a warrant issued.

Administration apologists have argued that the White House couldn't seek congressional approval for this program because it utilized super advanced technology that we couldn't risk exposing to al-Qaeda. Even in secret session, they've suggested, Congress is a sieve and the bad guys would have found out what we were up to.

But now we know that's not true. This was just ordinary call monitoring, according to General Hayden, and the only problem was that both FISA and the attorney general required a standard of evidence they couldn't meet before issuing a warrant. In other words, the only change necessary to make this program legal was an amendment to FISA modifying the circumstances necessary to issue certain kinds of warrants. This would have tipped off terrorists to nothing.

So why didn't they ask Congress for that change? It certainly would have passed easily. The Patriot Act passed 99-1, after all. Hell, based on what I know about the program, I probably would have voted to approve it as long as it had some reasonable boundaries.

So there must be more to this. But what?

TRADITION....Writing about the news that gay and lesbian family groups plan to attend the White House Easter Egg Roll in order to generate some attention for LGBT issues, Bruce Reed says:

Conservatives consider this a threat to one of their most cherished traditions: politicizing religious holidays.

Read the rest.

NSA SPYING UPDATE....General Michael Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence, defended the NSA's domestic spying program today:

Hayden stressed that the program "is not a drift net over Dearborn or Lackawanna or Freemont, grabbing conversations that we then sort out by these alleged keyword searches or data-mining tools or other devices that so-called experts keep talking about. This is targeted and focused."

Unless I've missed something along the way, this is important news. Hayden is saying that the NSA program isn't some kind of large-scale data mining operation that the authors of the FISA act never could have foreseen. Rather, it's "targeted and focused" and involves "only international calls and only those we have a reasonable basis to believe involve al Qaeda or one of its affiliates."

In other words, it's precisely the kind of monitoring that the FISA court already approves routinely and in large volumes. Another few hundred requests wouldn't faze them in the least.

So if (a) NSA's lawyers are allegedly convinced that the program is legal, and (b) we're talking about monitoring a specific and limited number of conversations, why not get FISA warrants? Because they knew FISA wouldn't approve them:

The standard laid out by General Hayden — a "reasonable basis to believe" — is lower than "probable cause," the standard used by the special court created by Congress to handle surveillance involving foreign intelligence.

....General Hayden said that the difference in the legal standards...played an important role in determining whether to go to the FISA court or not.

The 1978 law allows the agency to seek a warrant up to 72 hours after wiretapping begins when speed is of the essence. But even in an emergency, General Hayden said, the law required that the attorney general approve a wiretap before it could begin. But "the attorney general's standard," he said, "is a body of evidence equal to that which he would present to the court," meaning that an emergency application would also have to show probable cause.

So what do you do if the FISA court won't approve a lowered standard, Congress won't change the law, and even the attorney general refuses to play ball? Answer: You go ahead and do what you want anyway.

Hayden seems to think this is fine. Hopefully there are some honest Republicans left in Congress who disagree.

DOUGHNUT HOLE HELL....Speaking of making healthcare more complicated, Michael Hiltzik has another column about George Bush's Medicare prescription drug debacle today:

Let's consider how this system will work in practice, using the drug Actonel, a once-a-week pill routinely prescribed for elderly patients to combat osteoporosis, as an example.

Of the 48 commercial Medicare drug plans offered in Southern California, three don't cover Actonel at all; their enrollees will have to pay full price. Twenty-eight plans require prior authorization. The remaining 17 plans cover the drug, no questions asked.

That's not all. There's wide variation in how much each plan charges for a month's supply. Most price it around $500, or $125 per pill. One lists a month's supply at $470. Blue Shield lists it at $602....[But] any patient can purchase a month's supply of Actonel from drugstore.com, an online pharmacy, for $67.99, cash — spending slightly more for a year's supply than some plans charge for a month.

The column is mainly about the absurd and cynical "doughnut hole" built into Bush's prescription drug plan — the result of policymakers who don't actually care about healthcare policy combined with lawmakers who don't care about anything except pretending that their plan costs less than it actually does. In other words, it's the toxic intersection of incompetence and venality.

Read the whole thing.

HEALTH SAVINGS ACCOUNTS....President Bush's Bold Proposal™ for 2006 is apparently going to be Health Savings Accounts, a half-baked pseudo-solution to the healthcare crisis that sounds intriguing primarily to people who are young and healthy and therefore don't think they're going to need much healthcare. That's just the right target audience for a healthcare plan, isn't it?

Technically, the idea behind HSAs is that you put, say, $2,000 in a tax-free account and then buy a health plan that doesn't pay anything until your expenses exceed $2,000. You pay for your normal healthcare expenses by drawing money out of the HSA, and if there's any left over at the end of the year you get to keep it. Ezra has more about it here.

However, for the quick and dirty explanation behind HSAs, here is Peter Gosselin in the LA Times this morning:

Most conservatives — including those in the administration — believe that the root cause of most problems with the nation's healthcare system is that most Americans are over-insured.

The debate over HSAs is going to get mighty wonky over the next few months, but always keep this explanation in mind as you're trying to make sense of the charges and countercharges. The fundamental idea behind HSAs is not to provide better healthcare, it's to provide less healthcare. Conservatives want you to think twice before spending a hundred bucks for your regular pap smear.

I'm probably going to write enough about HSAs over the next few months to make everyone scream for mercy, especially since I assume the White House will decline to publish an actual plan, leaving us instead to speculate wildly about what they really have in mind. So I'm going to wrap up this post right here. Just remember: if you think more risk, more complexity, and less healthcare are the answer, HSAs are for you. The rest of us will keep pushing for something that actually makes sense.

MALPRACTICE WATCH....Last month, in a review of Tom Baker's The Medical Malpractice Myth, I mentioned briefly that patients sometimes file malpractice suits simply to obtain information about their own treatment. They do this because hospitals routinely refuse to disclose information about their quality of care unless they are taken to court.

Some readers wondered if this could really be true. Check this out:

Claudia Mejia gave birth eight and a half months ago....Twelve days after giving birth at Orlando Regional South Seminole hospital, she was transported to Orlando Regional Medical Center where she became a quadruple amputee. Now she can not care for or hold her baby.

"Yeah, I want to pick him up. He wants me to pick him up. I can't. I want to, but I can't," she said. "Woke up from surgery and I had no arms and no legs. No one told me anything. My arms and legs were just gone."

....Her attorney, Judy Hyman wrote ORHS a letter saying, according to the Florida statute, "The Patients Right To Know About Adverse Medical Incidents Act," the hospital must give her the records....The hospital's lawyers wrote back, "Ms. Mejia's request may require legal resolution." In other words, according to their interpretation of the law, Mejia has to sue them to get information about herself.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think the doctors at Orlando Regional Medical Center just hacked off Mejia's arms and legs for no reason. She had contracted both a flesh eating bacteria and toxic shock syndrome, and amputation might very well have been the only option.

Still, if I woke up from surgery with no arms or legs, I'd want to know every last detail about what happened to me. Why should I have to file a lawsuit to get that?

Via QandO.

THE POWER OF IMAGES....What's this? Photos of George Bush with Jack Abramoff? Time has the scoop:

Time has seen five photographs of Abramoff and the President that suggest a level of contact between them that Bush's aides have downplayed. While Time's source refused to provide the pictures for publication, they are likely to see the light of day eventually because celebrity tabloids are on the prowl for them. And that has been a fear of the Bush team's for the past several months: that a picture of the President with the admitted felon could become the iconic image of direct presidential involvement in a burgeoning corruption scandal — like the shots of President Bill Clinton at White House coffees for campaign contributors in the mid-1990s.

Jack Abramoff is a longtime Republican operative who has met with George Bush on numerous occcasions. That's common knowledge. But the power of images is so great that the White House is nearly white with fear that pictures of Bush and Abramoff will eventually show up on the evening news. As well they should be.

HOWELL AND ABRAMOFF....One of the least appealing aspects of the blogosphere is its obsession with "media criticism," most of which, upon examination, turns out to have about as much heft and substance as a Krispy Kreme donut. Just in the past day or two, for example, I've come across this from a conservative, complaining about a passing remark dating the start of the current North Korean crisis to 2003. I've come across this from a liberal, complaining that the New York Times dared to even quote someone from the Discovery Institute. And I've come across this from a libertarian, complaining about differing coverage of Samuel Alito and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, despite the fact that the difference was due to the reality of what people were actually saying and doing at the time.

But sometimes the criticism is spot on, and the mainstream media would do well to figure out when those times are. I mean, what can possibly explain this week's spectacle, in which the Washington Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, made a simple factual error (namely that Jack Abramoff made "substantial campaign contributions to both major parties") and then stonewalled for days instead of issuing a quick and straightforward correction?

And then the followup reaction, in which (1) Howard Kurtz brushed off Howell's mistake as merely "inartfully worded," (2) Howell finally issued a statement but declined to admit any real error, and (3) Jim Brady, the Post's online executive editor, panicked and shut down comments on one of their blogs because he didn't like the barrage of abuse readers were directing their way?

Flame wars are ugly things, to be sure, but I think Brady is dead wrong when he says, "I don’t think the tone would have been much different if she’d posted something on Monday or Tuesday. The basic issue here is that she didn’t deliver the exact message her critics wanted her to." In fact, if Howell had posted a simple correction to her column on Monday saying that she had made a mistake and Jack Abramoff donated money only to Republicans — and left it at that instead of straining to justify her original error — none of this would have happened. The messenger may have been rude and crude in this case, but the messenger was also right.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, why is it that Howell's original column still doesn't have a correction appended? Nobody reading it either at the Post site or via Nexis would have any idea that she had made a mistake.

24 BLOGGING....A few days ago Jim Henley said he was giving up on 24:

Watched 24 last night. Not watching tonight. It was bad. Last season was bad too, but last season was resonant bad. It was bad in a culturally interesting way. Its badness had a lot to say about kinks in the post-9/11 American psyche. It was martyr-complex bad and torture-justifyin’ bad and bluster/blubber bad in addition to its esthetic failures.

This time around all we have are the esthetic failures....

I think Jim is missing a bet. In seasons 1 and 2 we watched in order to find out just how comically farfetched the "Kim in peril" scenes could get. Last season we were spellbound by the bizarre and ultimately unfathomable torture fest. This season we have....

No, not datamining, although we do have that. What we have this season is President Charles Logan, possibly the most worthless excuse for a fictional leader of the free world ever. Just how much of dink will they make him into? Will he eventually panic and order the assassination of Jack Bauer? Start rolling around on the floor and chewing the carpet? Or will the scriptwriters chicken out and allow him to redeem himself with some unexpected act of moral bravery at the end?

That's what makes this season worth watching: basking in the utter worthlessness and steady emotional deterioration — on Fox! — of Republican President Charles Logan.

IRAQI ELECTION RESULTS....The final election results from Iraq initially indicated that the combination of the Shiite religious coalition and the main Kurdish coalition had failed to win the two-thirds majority needed to form a government. Juan Cole reports that although that's true, they have enough small-party support to put them over the top:

The Shiite fundamentalist coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, won 128 of 275 seats in parliament. It needs 138 for a simple majority. The Risaliyun or Message Party won 2 seats; it represents the Sadr movement of young Shiite clerical nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr, and has announced that it will vote with the UIA. So for all practical purposes, the UIA has 130 seats, 8 short of a simple majority.

[Revised]: The Kurdistan Alliance has 53 seats. I am informed by Peter Galbraith that the Kurdish Islamists, who gained 5 seats, will vote with the Kurdistan Alliance. Together the religious Shiites and the Kurds therefore have 188. A 2/3s majority of 275 would be 184. By that calculation, the two have the votes to choose a president, who will certainly ask the UIA to form a government and provide the prime minister.

So that's that — assuming that the UIA and the KA form a partnership, as everyone seems to expect. All that's left is haggling over ministries.

And the Sunnis? Out in the cold, apparently. Stay tuned to see how that works out.

CORRUPTION WATCH....Vito Corleone or Tom DeLay? Jimmy Conway or Karl Rove? If you too sometimes have trouble figuring out which ones are Republicans and which ones are mobsters, check out Republicans....or the Mafia? They're here to help.

POMBO-PALOOZA....The Wall Street Journal reports today on congressman Richard Pombo, "public enemy No. 1 for many environmental groups":

In just a few short years, the 43-year-old has become a leader in Congress in rolling back environmental regulations — at a time when like-minded Republican conservatives in the Senate and White House are in power. Apart from contemplating a selloff of national-park sites, Mr. Pombo has recently tried to overhaul the Endangered Species Act, privatize vast government lands in the West and open up protected coasts and wilderness to more drilling.

....Not surprisingly, Mr. Pombo has many defenders in business. During the 2004 Republican National Convention, the American Gas Association hosted a bash for him called the "Pombo-Palooza," featuring a mechanical bull and country-and-western music. "The left wing is all hot and bothered over Pombo...due to his effectiveness and a lack of willingness to pander to liberal pet causes," wrote Raymond Keating, chief economist of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, last year in an op-ed piece in Mr. Pombo's California hometown paper, the Tracy Press.

Pombo also has some ethics issues stalking him, and on Friday former Republican congressman — and friend of the environment — Pete McCloskey announced that he is coming out of retirement to challenge Pombo in this year's primary:

The tough-talking, 78-year-old ex-Marine said in a telephone interview that he decided to challenge Pombo in the June 6 GOP primary because of the congressman's efforts to weaken environmental laws and connections to figures in a Washington corruption scandal.

"This is no Republican Party I recognize today," McCloskey said.

Good for him. Nobody gives McCloskey any chance of winning, but at the very least maybe he can provoke a smidgen of soul searching among Republicans in Pombo's district. Maybe.

WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD....Remember "Welcome to the Neighborhood," the ABC reality series that was cancelled before it aired last year? It starred six couples — African-American, Hispanic, Korean, tattooed, Wiccan, gay — who competed to win a house in a neighborhood whose residents "overwhelmingly identified themselves as white, Christian and Republican."

The New York Times has a story today suggesting that the series was cancelled because Disney, ABC's parent, was worried about a backlash from conservative Christian groups whose support it wanted for the rollout of the Narnia film later in the year. It's worth clicking the link to read the whole story, but here's the part that's really worth reading. The winner, it turns out, was a gay couple, Stephen and John Wright:

The neighbor who was the Wrights' earliest on-camera antagonist — Jim Stewart, 53, who is heard in an early episode saying, "I would not tolerate a homosexual couple moving into this neighborhood" — has confided to the producers that the series changed him far more than even they were aware.

No one involved in the show, Mr. Stewart said, knew he had a 25-year-old gay son. Only after participating in the series, Mr. Stewart said, was he able to broach his son's sexuality with him for the first time.

"I'd say to ABC, 'Start showing this right now,' " Mr. Stewart said in an interview at his oak kitchen table. "It has a message that needs to be heard by everyone."

Damn. When I first heard about it, this show sounded like just another piece of crass reality TV Babbittry that I was just as happy we'd been spared seeing. But maybe I was wrong. It sounds like it might have been a worthwhile show after all.

And it makes me wonder: for all we hear about how the Christian right is practically a fourth branch of government these days, is it really true? Sure, it sounds like Disney may have buckled under to them in this case, but on the other hand it's inconceivable that "Welcome to the Neighborhood" could even have been produced as recently as 10 or 15 years ago. If the Christian right is really so all-powerful, how is it that they've lost so much ground in such a short time?

THE LAST REFUGE OF SCOUNDRELS....A few days ago I remarked that although Democrats would like corruption to be the primary issue in this year's midterm elections, the White House still has something to say about that. Today the New York Times reports that Karl Rove gave a speech in which "he left little doubt that once again — as has been the case in both national elections since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — that he was intent on making national security the pre-eminent issue in 2006." Here's what Rove said:

The United States faces a ruthless enemy, and we need a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment America finds itself in. President Bush and the Republican Party do. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many Democrats.

Let me be as clear as I can be: President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why. Some important Democrats clearly disagree.

Now don't get me wrong here. Corruption is a good issue for Dems if they can bring themselves to stop being so damn timid about it, and it's also possible that Republicans will eventually discover that they've gone to the terrorism well once too often. Maybe.

But I wouldn't bet the ranch on it. Banging away on both corruption and the broader topic of Republican fealty to corporate special interests may help Democrats at the polls this year, but I don't think national security is going away either. Unfortunately, I'm not getting a sense that Dems are spending much time thinking about that.

Is it just me, or is there something odd about the tone of this report in The Hill about how Tom DeLay’s staff can all expect to find new jobs without much trouble?

“DeLay was widely regarded as highly effective at promoting the Republican agenda,” The Hill’s Jeffrey Young tells us. “His staff’s role in that success did not go unnoticed.” Then we get prominent Republicans, including RNC chair Ken Mehlman, singing the praises of the DeLay team. Two of those singled out for special credit are chief of staff Brett Loper and communications director Kevin Madden.

Let’s take a step back here. DeLay and two former staff members have been indicted on charges of using illegal corporate contributions in a scheme that was designed to increase the Republican majority in Washington. It’s at least plausible — and that’s putting it generously — that senior staff in the Majority Leader’s office had some inkling of what was going on.

To be clear, I have no evidence whatsoever that Loper and Madden — or any other DeLay staffer outside of the two who have already been indicted — did anything illegal or even unethical. But the possibility is hardly far-fetched. It’s certainly believable enough that you’d expect reporters assessing the job prospects of top DeLay staffers to at least raise the issue.

But The Hill isn’t interested. To them, DeLay’s top aides are just a bunch of honest hacks unfortunate enough to have signed on with a boss who stepped over the line. And remember, GOP bigwigs say these guys are “talented people”. They deserve to succeed.

With reporting like this, it’s not hard to see how the GOP thought it could get away this stuff in the first place.

CLEARING THE AIR....Over at The Corner, Rod Dreher writes about Margaret Keliher, the top county executive for Dallas:

I asked Judge Keliher yesterday why she, as a conservative Republican, has gotten active to fight industry for cleaner air....She replied that for one thing, it's about health, and health-care costs. For another, it's about creating a good business climate — companies don't want to move to a region that's got bad air and the health problems that go with it. And then there's the family values thing — Judge Keliher said that she's tired of seeing little children around here having to run to the sidelines during soccer games to use their inhalers. All of these are ways to think about the environment that resonate with conservative Republican voters.

My first instinct was to make fun of this, but I guess I'll resist. If "family values" and "good for business" are the code phrases that will convince conservatives to get serious about clean air, then count me in. Once they're used to it, maybe we can start talking about global warming too. That's not so good for kids or businesses either.

POLLS....This is pretty much unrelated to anything, but I just wanted to point out a tidbit from that Hotline poll I linked to yesterday:

This is one of my favorite examples of why poll results should be taken with many large grains of salt: respondents lie. The actual turnout for the 2004 election among registered voters was about 70%, which means that a full 20% of the respondents to this poll flatly lied to the polltaker. This dwarfs anything related to sampling error, the only kind of error that's ever routinely cited in news reports on polls, so instead of the usual "this poll has a margin of error of 3.5%," how about the following standard disclaimer instead:

Due to well known problems of statistical error, question wording, question order, respondent dishonesty, and poor survey design, the results of this poll are probably not accurate to within more than 10 percentage points. Caveat emptor.

Just a thought.

UPDATE: Apologies. The Hotline poll was conducted only among registered voters, not all adults. I've corrected the numbers to reflect this.

GOOGLE'S RECORDS....Since the Department of Justice has previously gained access to search records from Yahoo and Microsoft, shouldn't they already have plenty of data to help them make their case about porn searches on the internet? Why then are they still going after Google? Dan Drezner suggests an ulterior motive:

They don't care about the data for this case as much as they do about establishing a legal precedent and/or intimidating Google into compliance.

That sounds plausible, and it somehow sounded more plausible because I read Dan's post about two minutes after reading Eszter Hargittai's valentine to Flickr over at Crooked Timber. The two posts have nothing to do with each other except that they set up the following association in my mind: "Hmmm....porn....images....Flickr....sites that host images....Hmmm...."

I have nothing more profound to say on the subject at the moment, so draw your own conclusions. But I will say one other thing: given the fact that the NSA scandal has put everyone on edge over government spying, DOJ sure picked a lousy time to force this issue, didn't they? Do you think Congress will be (a) more likely or (b) less likely to vote for expansion of the Patriot Act after their constituents start to understand that it's not just used for terrorism investigations?

CIRCULAR FIRING SQUADS, CALIFORNIA STYLE....Progressives who lament the perpetually fractured and self-destructive behavior of national Democrats always have at least one place to look to cheer themselves up a bit: California Republicans. From today's LA Times:

Republican activists disenchanted with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Thursday that they will try to strip the governor of the party's endorsement unless he fires his new chief of staff, Democrat Susan P. Kennedy.

...."We've gotten to the point where we've just had it with the guy," said Michael Schroeder, an attorney from Corona del Mar and a former chairman of the California Republican Party. "It's become clear that he's no longer pursuing a Republican agenda."

Funny thing, though: it sure is easy to see how destructive this behavior is when other people do it, isn't it? I mean, don't they realize that California is a liberal state and an ideologically pure conservative has exactly zero chance of winning a statewide election? What a bunch of nitwits.

PUBLIC OPINION ON IRAQ....Here's the latest chart from the Pew Research Center showing public opinion about withdrawal from Iraq. Just thought I'd pass it along.

The most interesting detail, I thought, was the educational breakdown. It turns out that among people with at least some college education, a little less than 40% think we should withdraw as soon as possible. But among those with a high school education or less, this number shoots up to nearly 60%.

I'm not sure what that means, but it's not what I would have expected. Other interesting results can be had by clicking the link.

SAMUEL ALITO AND THE UNITARY EXECUTIVE....Robert Parry thinks that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee badly screwed up their questioning of Samuel Alito — a proposition that's hard to argue with — and suggests that instead of the scattershot approach they adopted they should have lasered in on his support for expansive executive powers:

Alito has been such an unapologetic supporter of the right’s beloved Imperial Presidency that Alito’s one noteworthy assurance — that George W. Bush was not “above the law” — was essentially meaningless because in Alito’s view, Bush is the law.

Yet the Democrats were incapable of making an issue out of Alito’s embrace of the “unitary executive,” a concept so radical that it effectively eliminates the checks and balances that the founding fathers devised to protect against an out-of-control president.

I'm inclined to agree, although there's an inconvenient fact that gets in the way of Parry's suggestion: Bush is hardly the first president to promote the "unitary executive" theory. Nor is it an exclusively Republican fixation.

It's true that the principle of the "unitary executive" was first promoted aggressively by the Reagan and Bush Sr. White Houses, but as Christopher Kelley, a political science professor at Miami of Ohio, noted in a paper last year, "President Clinton did more to move the executive branch agencies closer to White House control than either the Reagan or Bush presidencies." It was Clinton who "accepted and perfected" the notion of a unitary executive.

So that makes things harder. But far from impossible. Presidential signing statements are one of the key components of the unitary executive concept, and as Kelley noted in his doctoral dissertation on the subject, Clinton issued about 15 signing statements a year during his presidency. This makes him a piker. If we accept that Clinton "perfected" the unitary executive, we can only surmise that perfection wasn't good enough for Bush, who has issued a whopping 100 signing statements per year, a total of 435 in his first term alone — some of them making dozens of objections to a single bill. Kelley's paper makes it clear that this obsessive performance, driven primarily by Dick Cheney's counsel (now chief of staff) David Addington, has transformed a routine part of the tug-of-war between the executive and legislative branches into an arguably abusive expression of Bush's belief that he is the commander-in-chief of a virtually unaccountable wartime presidency.

So I think Parry is right. It would have taken some serious research to prepare for an all-out attack on the Bush administration's view of executive sovereignty — not to mention a bit of coordination between the Judiciary Committee's Democrats — but at least it would have given the press something interesting and unexpected to write about. What's more, even if it hadn't worked, at least it would have raised an important topic for public airing, which is more than Senate Dems accomplished with their self-indulgent and ineffectual questions about Alito's membership in CAP or his conflict of interest with Vanguard Group.

It was an opportunity missed.

JACK ABRAMOFF'S CLIENTS....Indian tribes that hired Jack Abramoff gave money to both Democrats and Republicans. That much is indisputable. But was this money "directed" by Abramoff or was it money that the tribes would have given anyway? Brad DeLong notes that one way to tell is to compare the pattern of pre-Abramoff contributions to post-Abramoff contributions:

For example, the Saginaw Chippewa gave $279,000 to Democrats over 1997-2000, and $277,000 over 2001-2004, after they had gotten into bed with Abramoff. It is a safe bet that *none* of those contributions to Democrats were "directed" by Abramoff. The Saginaw Chippewa gave $158,000 to Republicans in 1997-2000, and $500,000 to Republicans in 2001-2004, after they had gotten into bed with Abramoff. It is a safe bet that $340,000 of those contributions to Republicans were "directed" by Abramoff.

Brad then links to a Bloomberg story that provides further evidence of how Abramoff directed his clients' money:

Of the top 10 political donors among Indian tribes in that period, three are former clients of Abramoff and Scanlon: the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe of Michigan, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians of California. All three gave most of their donations to Republicans — by margins of 30 percentage points or more — while the rest favored Democrats.

So: Indian tribes usually give most of their money to Democrats, while Abramoff clients — and only Abramoff clients — give most of their money to Republicans. Coincidence? I think not.

Surely some enterprising reporter could do this kind of simple analysis for all of Abramoff's tribal clients? We already know that Abramoff's personal contributions went 100% to Republicans, and I'll bet that comparing (a) pre-Abramoff to post-Abramoff contributions and (b) Abramoff clients to non-Abramoff clients would show that the money he "directed" also went almost exclusively to Republicans. We could then finally put an end to the whole "bipartisan scandal" charade.

Perhaps Jeff Gerth can atone for his sins by cranking out five or ten thousand words on the subject?

ABRAMOFF AND THE DEMOCRATS, CONT'D....Two weeks after Jack Abramoff's plea deal was announced, the press is continuing to fall for the GOP line that the scandal is somehow “bipartisan.” In today’s Washington Post, Jonathan Weisman reports that “Congressional Democrats yesterday laid out a plan to change what they called a GOP 'culture of corruption' in Washington, even as Republicans pointed to ethics lapses on their antagonists' side of the aisle.”

One such “ethics lapse,” according to Republicans and the credulous Post, is the following:

Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), one of Abramoff's toughest critics, has acknowledged that in the fall of 2003 he pushed Congress to approve legislative language urging government regulators to decide whether the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts deserved federal recognition. About the same time, Dorgan met with the tribe's representatives and Michael D. Smith, an Abramoff associate.

But as we reported last week: “Dorgan...has been working on behalf of Indian tribes far longer than Abramoff has been bilking them.” What’s more, we also confirmed that: “Smith, a veteran Democratic operative, had worked closely with Dorgan’s office since well before he joined Greenberg [the lobbying firm for which Abramoff worked] in 2000, a year before Abramoff did." So the fact that Dorgan continued to work with Smith on behalf of Indian tribes in no way suggests that Dorgan was implicated in Abramoff’s schemes.

Maybe not every Post reporter reads the Monthly site. But it wouldn’t have taken more than a couple of phone calls to get this crucial context about Dorgan and Smith.

If reporters are simply going to repeat GOP charges wholesale — rather than subjecting them to some basic scrutiny, and figuring out whether or not they’re valid — we could be hearing the phrase “bipartisan scandal” for quite a while.

CORRUPTION WATCH....Here are three responses from the national media to Wednesday's Democratic plan to fight congressional corruption:

• Washington Post: "Democratic leaders from the House and Senate endorsed proposals that closely mirror Republican plans unveiled this week...."

• Knight Ridder: "The Democratic plan resembles the reform agenda unveiled by Republicans the day before...."

• Los Angeles Times: "But a crucial question remains: whether either party's plans would alter the close relationship between the capital's lobbyists and lawmakers."
  

Not every newspaper played it this way, but enough did to convince me that the Dem plan was simply too mushy to make much of an impact, even if the presentation and delivery were better than usual for these kinds of things.

That's too bad. As the latest Hotline poll shows, public awareness of Jack Abramoff is rising (nearly half have heard of him), as is awareness that he's a Republican operative. What's more, although independent voters mostly think corruption is a problem for both parties, a significant number don't — and of those, nearly all associate it more with Republicans than Democrats.

So there's a real opportunity here. A more dramatic proposal on Wednesday could have done a better job of taking advantage of that.

HOPE AND PRAYER....I haven't known what to write about the abduction of reporter Jill Carroll in Iraq two weeks ago, and I still don't. But I want to send our thoughts and prayers to her family, particularly her mother — and my high school English teacher — Mary Beth Carroll, who appeared on CNN this morning to appeal for Jill's release.

No aspect of war is pretty, but hostage-taking involves a special horror in that the family often has the opportunity to know their loved one is alive, they have the illusion that there is something they can do to secure a good outcome, and yet it really is impossible to predict or influence the actions of the hostage takers. We can only wish the Carrolls strength and peace at this very difficult time.

CHRIS MATTHEWS SPEAKS....The "wonderful Michael Savage"? WTF?

MORE ON PRESCRIPTION DRUGS....Jon Cohn returns to the Medicare prescription drug debacle with a simple question: are the kinds of problems we're seeing just the inevitable startup bugs you get with any big new government program? He takes a look back at the start of Medicare itself to get the answer:

So what happened on the day that this complex program was implemented? Thousands of senior citizens simply went to the hospital and got the health care they needed. "There were no crises that I remember," says Yale University political scientist Theodore Marmor, who worked in the office overseeing Medicare implementation and went on to write The Politics of Medicare, the program's definitive history. Newspaper accounts from the '60s back him up. Under the headline "medicare takes over easily," a Post writer described the program's first day as "a smooth transition, undramatic as a bed change." Three weeks later, the Times affirmed that "medicare's start has been smooth."

There's nothing inevitable about the chaos we're seeing with the prescription drug rollout. If the program had been designed with patients in mind, it would have rolled out smoothly. But it wasn't. It was designed to benefit corporate special interests and to provide a test bed for crackpot free market theories.

What's more, we haven't even begun to hit the "donut hole" problems. That should start happening a couple of months before the midterm elections, which is poetic justice indeed. By then I hope that everyone knows exactly which party was responsible for all this.

UPDATE: Michael Hiltzik's column today is a pretty good wrapup of the whole prescription drug debacle.

DIGGING DEEPER IN THE VALUES DEBATE....My professional background is marketing, and although my career was spent in smallish tech companies without access to the high-powered tools used by huge consumer-oriented firms, I have a lot of respect for those tools. They won't tell you everything, but companies spend billions of dollars a year based on what those tools do tell them, and they do it because they work.

In the American Prospect this month, Garance Franke-Ruta has a fascinating piece about Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, a pair of activists who made a name for themselves a couple of years ago with an essay called "The Death of Environmentalism" and who have now taken on a new task: using the tools of consumer marketing to try to get a better fix on the American psyche. Their goal: figuring out how to fix liberalism so that it appeals to more voters.

The Prospect article summarizes their findings and makes a couple of points that are longtime hot buttons of mine:

• Liberals need to abandon the fantasy that "opinion polls show that voters agree with us!" Only the shallowest analysis of opinion polls supports this notion, and when you dig even an inch below the surface it turns out that in many cases "our issues" have a lot less salience than we think.

• Although it's true that median incomes have largely stagnated over the past few decades, Americans are still pretty rich. This is why economic arguments simply don't resonate the way we think they ought to.
  

Nordhaus and Shellenberger's analysis suggests that the answer is to pay more attention to values — but in a subtly different way than pollsters did after the 2004 election:

They found economic changes driving changes in social values, and those, in turn, driving political preferences. Using data from Environics’ in-home consumer survey in the United States, Nordhaus and Shellenberger were able to tease apart changes in the thinking of voters since 1992 on 117 different “social values trends.” These values, such as “time stress,” “joy of consumption,” and “acceptance of violence,” are not what people normally think of as “values” — abortion, gay marriage, or other hot-button social issues.

....Nordhaus and Shellenberger arrived at what they call “social values trends,” such as “sexism,” “patriotism,” or “acceptance of flexible families.” But the real meaning of those trends was revealed only by plugging them into the “values matrix” — a four-quadrant plot with plenty of curving arrows to show direction, which is then overlaid onto voting data....Despite the increasing political power of the religious right, Environics found social values moving away from the authority end of the scale, with its emphasis on responsibility, duty, and tradition, to a more atomized, rage-filled outlook that values consumption, sexual permissiveness, and xenophobia. The trend was toward values in the individuality quadrant.

The article is too dense to excerpt it fairly, but this passage should at least pique your interest to read the rest. Roughly speaking, N&S are suggesting that although progressive policies are (mostly) fine, they need to be explained not as policies per se but as natural outgrowths of core values that resonate with working and middle class voters. That's what Peter Brodnitz found out when he started talking to focus groups in Virginia about Tim Kaine's opposition to the death penalty:

Brodnitz found that once Kaine started talking about his religious background and explaining that his opposition to the death penalty grew out of his Catholic faith, not only did charges that he was weak on crime fail to stick, but he became inoculated against a host of related charges that typically plague and undermine the campaigns of Democratic candidates. “Once people understood the values system that the position grew out of, they understood that’s he’s not a liberal,” says Brodnitz. “We couldn’t even convince them he was a liberal once we’d done that.”

There's a lot to agree and disagree with here, and it's a provocative piece. It's well worth reading the whole thing.

THE GENDER GAP....Ken Hilton is a New York statistician who has studied gender differences in school achievement and concluded that the reason more girls go to college than boys is because girls have way better reading skills. In the New Republic this week, Richard Whitmire investigates:

Combine Hilton's local research with national neuroscience research, and you arrive at this: The brains of men and women are very different. Last spring, Scientific American summed up the best gender and brain research, including a study demonstrating that women have greater neuron density in the temporal lobe cortex, the region of the brain associated with verbal skills. Now we've reached the heart of the mystery. Girls have genetic advantages that make them better readers, especially early in life. And, now, society is favoring verbal skills. Even in math, the emphasis has shifted away from guy-friendly problems involving quick calculations to word and logic problems.

....Ninth grade is where boys' verbal deficit becomes an albatross that stymies further male academic achievement. That's the year guys run into the fruits of the school-reform movement that date back to the 1989 governors' summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Democrats and Republicans vowed to shake up schools. One outcome of the summit is that, starting in ninth grade, every student now gets a verbally drenched curriculum that is supposed to better prepare them for college. Good goal, but it's leaving boys in the dust.

Read the whole thing — quickly and fluently if you're female, slowly and laboriously if you're male — to find out what he thinks we ought to do to fix this.

TARGETING AL-QAEDA....We may not have gotten Zawahiri, but we did get one of al-Qaeda's big fish in the attack on Damadola last week:

ABC News has learned that Pakistani officials now believe that al Qaeda's master bomb maker and chemical weapons expert was one of the men killed in last week's U.S. missile attack in eastern Pakistan.

Midhat Mursi, 52, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, was identified by Pakistani authorities as one of four known major al Qaeda leaders present at an apparent terror summit in the village of Damadola early last Friday morning.

...."Pakistani intelligence says this was a very important planning session involving the very top levels of al Qaeda as they get ready for a new spring offensive," explained Alexis Debat, a former official in the French Defense Ministry and now an ABC News consultant.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that we had pretty good intelligence telling us that a bunch of al-Qaeda leaders were in the house we bombed. And let's also assume that we did indeed kill al-Masri and several other major al-Qaeda leaders. Finally, let's assume that the 18 civilians killed in the attack were genuinely innocent bystanders with no connection to terrorists.

Question: Under those assumptions, was the attack justified? I think the answer is pretty plainly yes, but I'd sure like to see the liberal blogosphere discuss it. And for those who answer no, I'm curious: under what circumstances would such an attack be justified?

GOP LAMENESS WATCH....I'll get around to commenting on the official Democratic plan for battling congressional corruption eventually, but in the meantime I want to draw your attention to what may be the lamest criticism ever of an elected official:

Republicans mounted a fierce counteroffensive....accusing Mr. Reid of using his Senate office to prepare political documents.

"Does Mr. Reid think that using an official government office for political purposes is ethical?" asked Brian Nick, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Do Republicans really think they're going to score points by accusing Reid of the dastardly sin of using his office to prepare attacks on the opposition? Lee Atwater would be ashamed.

The full quote is here.

NOT ONE DIME....Tired of wimpy proposals for cleaning up the corruption mess in Congress? In the March issue of the Washington Monthly, James Carville and Paul Begala offer up their red-meat version of campaign finance reform:

First, we raise congressional pay big time. Pay 'em what we pay the president: $400,000....In return, we get a simple piece of legislation that says members of Congress cannot take anything of value from anyone other than a family member. No lunches, no taxi rides. No charter flights. No golf games. No ski trips. No nothing.

And when it is campaign time, incumbents would be under a complete ban on raising money. You read that right. No president or member of Congress could accept a single red cent from individuals, corporations, or special interests. Period.

Challengers, on the other hand, would be allowed to raise money in any amount from any individual American citizen or political action committee. No limits, just as the free-market conservatives have always wanted....The day after you disclose [a contribution], the U.S. Treasury would credit the incumbent's campaign account with a comparable sum — say 80 percent of the contribution to the challenger to take into account the cost of all the canapés and Chardonnay the challenger had to buy to raise his funds as well as the incumbent's advantage.

There are more details, so read the whole thing before you raise technical objections — of which there are plenty. However, Carville and Begala think that it may be possible to bulldoze through these problems simply because modern fundraising is such a degrading, soul-destroying pursuit for members of Congress. "You should never underestimate how much these folks hate spending half their time — or more — sniveling for money."

I don't know if their plan would work, but I'd sure like to see congressional Dems put something like this on the table. It's going to be hard to get any serious attention from anything less, and practical or not, at least it gets us talking about the core issue instead of arguing over minutiae like toothless travel bans and meaningless extensions of "cooling down" periods.

So let's talk. What do you think?

POSTSCRIPT: This proposal is from Taking It Back, Carville and Begala's new book. You can order it here.

THE PRESCRIPTION DRUG DEBACLE....PART 341....Jon Cohn — who's writing a book about the American healthcare system — promises more about the Medicare prescription drug debacle shortly but wants to pass along one tidbit while we're waiting:

It's a Government Accounting Office report, issued in December, warning that the Bush administration hadn't done enough to make sure the most medically and financially vulnerable Medicare beneficiaries could actually get their drugs.

If you do get around to reading it, make sure to check out the part where Mark McClellan, director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, says the GAO has it all wrong — the part where he insists that "CMS has established effective contingency plans to ensure that dual-eligible beneficiaries will be able to obtain comprehensive coverage and obtain necessary drugs beginning January 1, 2006."

You know, that sounds familiar. The Bush administration is warned that its planning is inadequate but it ignores the advice and plows ahead without listening.

Very familiar. It's on the tip of my tongue. Help me out here.

Jonathan Dworkin, a medical student in his final year at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, is travelling in Iraqi Kurdistan from January to March of 2006. This is his third dispatch for the Washington Monthly.

AT HOME IN THE NEW KURDISTAN....In the bazaar in Sulaimania I can buy almost anything. It's my second day in town, and I'm walking through a byzantine maze of stone passages where merchants sell everything from swords to bedroom sets. It's the latter that my friend Dr. Nazm is interested in, because he and his wife Dr. Shosha are trying to furnish their new home. They are in their mid-20s, roughly my age and recently married. In a scene repeated throughout the bazaar Dr. Nazm enters into fierce negotiations with a merchant, their voices ranging from annoyed to amused.

Dr. Shosha picks up a long, sharp knife, and points it at her husband. "I am terroreest," she flirts. Seven or eight minutes later, long after I've lost interest, Dr. Nazm ends his verbal assault and money changes hands. The couple walks away with four triple A batteries. "For my camera," Dr. Nazm explains.

With the mountains in the background, Sulaimania is prettier than ramshackle Erbil. It is also in the midst of an economic boom. The approach to town reveals new tree-lined walkways and construction sites. Older buildings crumbling from lack of maintenance are being replaced everywhere by new ones, despite the fact that these too will be poorly maintained. People are spending discretionary income on consumer goods even as the service sector remains undeveloped. An insufficient electric grid? Buy a generator. A crater in the middle of your road? Buy a truck.

It occurs to me that this is the kind of city that Americans love. Centered around the bazaar it is hectic and optimistic, and its people are hungry for knowledge of the outside world. Whenever I mention I'm an American I am met with smiles and questions about my country. Each person that I speak with long enough reveals a horror story from the days of Baathist rule, but the stories hardly seem relevant now. Even the security presence — heavy by any standard — is unobtrusive amidst the clammer of pedestrian traffic.

The journey from Erbil to Sulaimania is also a transition from KDP to PUK-governed Kurdistan. Both parties are too powerful for their own good, and each finances a separate peshmerga force as well as a large private economy that serves as a patronage system in their respective zones. Party checkpoints along the road delineate the boundaries. The mobile phone system is also divided, with AsiaCell (PUK) users in Sulaimania unable to communicate with Korek (KDP) users in Erbil. Even the hotel I am staying in is part of the PUK financial fiefdom. The situation is currently peaceful, but armed political parties are in their nature unstable things, and I wonder who stands to benefit if the system ossifies. Perhaps political Islam, a thought that makes the secular Kurdish politicians shudder.

Getting Kurds to talk openly about this situation has been a challenge the past few days, and I suspect the hesitation in voicing criticism is itself a barrier to change. "Free speech yes," says Dr. Nazm, "but not as free."

Meetings with government ministers and university professors are a requirement before we can begin our work in Halabja. It's a bureaucratic minefield, but I am fortunate because my Kurdish friends know how to navigate it. Most of the time I am required only to keep my mouth shut or to eat something. Given the chance to watch the Kurds move about their city, this suits me fine.

Posts in this series:

January 18: At Home in the New Kurdistan
January 14: City of Refugees
January 11: First Impressions

BUSHONOMICS....Bloomberg News writes the following about the state of the economy:

After 16 consecutive quarters of economic growth, pay is rising at a slower rate than in any similar expansion since the end of World War II. Companies are paying less of their cash gains in the form of wages and salaries than at any time since the Great Depression, according to government figures.

...."There is no doubt that something is happening" to reduce labor's share of income, says Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize- winning economist and professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. An economy that doesn't distribute its gains widely is "poorly performing," he says.

From the final quarter of 2001 through last year's third quarter, total compensation paid to employees by corporations, including health benefits, rose at a 4.3 percent average annual rate, according to government figures. That's the slowest growth for any similar period in post-war expansions lasting at least four years.

Translation: supply side economics works. It just doesn't work for you or me.

JERRY....Jon Stewart's interview with Jerry Bremer last night wasn't very enlightening, but it did answer at least one question that many of us have long been idly curious about: why does a guy whose legal name is L. Paul Bremer go by Jerry?

Answer: It's his nickname because he was born on September 30th, St. Jerome's Day. Now you know.

ALL ABOUT OIL?....It's no surprise that Charles Krauthammer wants to blame the Euroweenies for all our problems with Iran, but is he really serious about this?

The only sanctions that might conceivably have any effect would be a boycott of Iranian oil. No one is even talking about that, because no one can bear the thought of the oil shock that would follow, taking 4.2 million barrels a day off the market, from a total output of about 84 million barrels.

....Which is one of the reasons the Europeans are so mortified by the very thought of a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities....The problem that mortifies the Europeans is what Iran might do after such an attack — not just cut off its oil exports but shut down the Strait of Hormuz by firing missiles at tankers or scuttling its vessels to make the strait impassable. It would require an international armada led by the United States to break such a blockade.

Let me get this straight: the only people worried about Iran's oil are the Europeans? Whereas United States foreign policy is blissfully free of any concern over protecting the global flow of oil? I know that Krauthammer is prone to flights of fancy when he ponders American actions overseas, but even for him this is a doozy.

KURO WEDNESDAY?....What the hell?

Investors spooked by a raid on an Internet company and weaker U.S. tech earners dumped Japanese shares Wednesday, sending the Nikkei plunging and prompting the Tokyo Stock Exchange to suspend trading on the world's second-largest market.

The TSE halted all trade 20 minutes early at 2:40 p.m. (0540 GMT), as the number of trades neared the 4-million capacity limit of the exchange.

....The massive selling on Wednesday came as investors became nervous over an investigation into Japanese Internet company Livedoor, allied to weaker than expected results from Intel and Yahoo in the United States.

The TSE's technical problems are one thing, but the proximate cause of Wednesday's massive selloff is quite another. Livedoor may be a typically overpriced dotcom with an unsustainable market cap, but it's still not that big a company. Is the Japanese stock market really so jittery that the mere prospect of problems at a smallish company like Livedoor can send it into a panic?

SMELLING THE COFFEE....Garance Franke-Ruta notes that an all-too-common controversy has broken out over the "Saving Our Democracy" conference, sponsored by The Nation Institute and The New Democracy Project: out of 25 scheduled speakers, only two are women:

It is a source of great perplexity to me that otherwise clear-headed men who are genuinely committed to promoting Democrats or "the progressive movement" should be so blind when it comes to understanding why the Democratic Party and the left even continue to exist. The Democratic Party and left exist because of female voters and volunteers. No ifs, ands, or buts.

As I noted in detail last summer, virtually every left organization that relies on volunteer labor succeeds because of the labor of female volunteers, who comprise the vast bulk of such low-level workers, and when Democrats have won at the national level in the past 40 years, it has been because of their appeal to female voters.

What makes this whole thing even more peculiar is the makeup of the two sponsoring groups. The New Democracy Project has four staff members and four senior fellows, and half of them are women. The Nation Institute is headed by a woman, the editor of The Nation is a woman, and although TNI's staff isn't online, its Board of Trustees is about one-third women. So it's not as if these organizations are just a bunch of good old boys who don't even realize women exist.

Even so, as Garance suggests, the most likely reaction will be a defensive one:

Controversies like this benefit no one. They make women feel diminished and excluded, and men feel like they're never going to be able to organize a simple public conversation with their professional friends without getting hit over the head with identity politics. And yet the same sad script keeps playing out, over and over again, until everyone feels like throwing up their hands in despair.

But this shouldn't be an issue of quotas or identity politics. It should just be a matter of awareness. I always try to get both men and women to guest blog for me when I'm on vacation, and I've never had any trouble finding people of either sex willing to do it. Is getting speakers for conferences really that much harder?

CLASS ACTION FOLLIES....The Washington Post has a story today about one of my pet peeves: class action suits in which the "penalty" is more a benefit than a punishment. The piece in the Post is about a settlement in a case against Netflix:

In the past few years, both the FTC and the trial lawyers group have been actively protesting class-action settlements that bring little value to consumers, usually coupons with little monetary value, but pay off handsomely for lawyers.

....The FTC said the Netflix settlement was "more a promotional vehicle" for the company than a means to correct alleged misleading practices....Under the proposed settlement, which must be approved by the court, current Netflix customers would get a one-month upgrade to receive more DVDs, a value that ranges from $2 to $6, depending on the plan a customer already had. But if consumers fail to cancel that upgraded service at the end of 30 days, they would be billed for the more expensive service every month after that.

Netflix would pay to run a program like this. In fact, they do. After all, this kind of thing is a pretty standard sort of marketing come-on: "Upgrade free for 30 days! If you don't like it, cancel with no further obligation!"

I've gotten offers like this several times, most recently from my cable company. In their case, the "settlement" was (I think) a one-month upgrade to digital cable for half price — an offer not even as good as the usual promotions they run two or three times a year. It was a joke.

Why judges approve these kinds of deals is beyond me. They should either insist on cash settlements or else not bother. What we have now is just a sham.

IMMIGRATION....Nathan Newman recommends a report on immigration from the Drum Major Institute that makes a couple of points that ought to be obvious — but often don't seem to be:

• America wants immigrants and has plenty of jobs for them.

• Illegal immigrants are easily intimidated by employers and therefore accept low pay and abysmal working conditions. This drives down wages and working conditions for everyone, not just immigrants.
  

Unfortunately, the Drum Major report loses me here:

We submit that immigration reform can successfully address both of these realities if it maintains the flow of legal immigrants, enables undocumented immigrants to continue living and working in the United States and also ensures that all immigrants are able to exercise full rights in the workplace, empowering them to demand working conditions that don’t undercut the U.S. citizens with whom they share a labor market.

I simply don't see how undocumented workers will ever be able to "exercise full rights in the workplace." After all, an employer can always carry out a threat to report a worker to the INS no matter what rules you have in place, and we can hardly forbid the INS from deporting an illegal immigrant just because he or she has filed a workplace claim of some kind. This is simply unworkable, which might explain why the report doesn't recommend any actual policy prescriptions.

DMI's basic points strike me as plainly correct, but I suspect there's only one real way to address them: (a) increase significantly the number of legal immigrants we accept and (b) tighten up enforcement of immigration laws. This would lower the cost of legal immigration and raise the cost of illegal immigration, and if we can find the right balance it would make illegal immigration rare while keeping legal immigration at levels sufficient to provide the workforce we rather obviously want. Workplace protections and higher wages follow almost automatically, and that in turn will allow us to find out once and for all whether or not native Americans are willing to do the work that immigrants currently do.

Politically, of course, this is a nonstarter. Employers wouldn't like it because they prefer illegal immigrants who can be treated poorly and can't do anything about it, while the Tom Tancredos of the world just don't want any immigrants at all. It's hard to see any rational compromise coming out of Washington DC anytime soon.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN....You can have your Washingtons, your Jeffersons, and your Madisons. All great men, to be sure. But for my money, the greatest of them all was Benjamin Franklin, my favorite founding father and the first great American liberal: an outstanding humanist, brilliant scientist, and incomparable statesman; a man who could run a postal service, a small business, or a legislature with equal ease — and who'd be happy to share a friendly beer with you after he was done.

Happy 300th Birthday, Ben! We could use a few more like you these days.

STARE DECISIS....I'm curious about something and I'm not quite sure how to go about looking it up, especially since it involves a judgment call. Here it is: When was the last time the Supreme Court voted to overturn a truly seminal decision?

Obviously the definition of "seminal" is a matter of interpretation, but I'm thinking of something similar to the way Brown overturned Plessy or West Coast Hotel overturned Lochner. That is, a major and longstanding precedent that was clearly repudiated by a later court.

Any nominees?

JUDICIAL ACTIVISM....The Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government has no right to block a state law permitting physician-assisted suicide. The vote was 6-3, and John Roberts joined Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in the dissent. As E.J. Graff says:

It's very interesting to see that Scalia and Thomas are so quickly willing to desert Rehnquist's federalist revolution (i.e., the Rehnquist court's signature determination to shift power away from the federal government and back to the states), and that Roberts too has no interest in it. My guess is that Alito would have made the decision 5-4.

Federalism is at least a principled conservative position on which reasonable people can disagree. But the current crop of "conservative" justices is more interested in figuring out excuses to impose their own version of morality on the rest of us than they are in any meaningful application of conservative principle. I eagerly await thundering editorials from the right inveighing against judicial activism.

NSA vs. FBI....For what it's worth, I wouldn't get too excited about today's New York Times story suggesting that the NSA's domestic spying program accomplished nothing except sending FBI agents on hundreds of wild goose chases. Aside from the fact that the whole thing smells pretty strongly of a bureaucratic turf war, the effectiveness of the program just isn't a big issue. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't. Not every program pans out.

What's important is that the intercepts were done without a warrant even though the law expressly requires a warrant. That's the issue.

REPUBLICANS ON DRUGS....On the subject of Republicans treating legislation as mere vehicles for doling out favors to corporate special interests, one of Josh Marshall's readers offers up some comments about the Medicare prescription drug bill:

Arbitrary drug classes like benzodiazepenes and barbiturates are specifically excluded from coverage. Congress left no clue as to the legislative intent of the exclusion. Someone seems to have decided that these two drug classes are incompatible with some Biblical teaching. Or maybe the competing drug classes are much more profitable for someone's campaign contributors (as both benzodiazepines and barbiturates are cheap and produced as generics, unlike their likely treatment alternatives). As a result the nation's psychiatrists are going batshit right now, trying to figure out what to do with patients on drug regimens for things like seizures.

I don't know if this was the worst bill ever written, but it's certainly in the top ten. I'd actually be willing to cut the funding for prescription drugs in half if only they'd let actual policy experts design the implementation of the damn thing. Of course, since Republicans don't have anybody who cares about policy in this area, that would mean handing it over to Democrats.

Say....

OUR LAPDOG CONGRESS....There's plenty to highlight from Al Gore's speech today, but here's an excerpt that probably won't get the attention it deserves:

The most serious damage has been done to the legislative branch. The sharp decline of congressional power and autonomy in recent years has been almost as shocking as the efforts by the Executive Branch to attain a massive expansion of its power.

....There have now been two or three generations of congressmen who don't really know what an oversight hearing is. In the 70's and 80's, the oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I participated held the feet of the Executive Branch to the fire — no matter which party was in power. Yet oversight is almost unknown in the Congress today.

....Look for example at the Congressional role in "overseeing" this massive four year eavesdropping campaign that on its face seemed so clearly to violate the Bill of Rights. The President says he informed Congress, but what he really means is that he talked with the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees and the top leaders of the House and Senate. This small group, in turn, claimed that they were not given the full facts, though at least one of the intelligence committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to VP Cheney and placed a copy in his own safe.

Though I sympathize with the awkward position in which these men and women were placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty Coalition when it says that Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress must share the blame for not taking action to protest and seek to prevent what they consider a grossly unconstitutional program.

Democratic timidity in the face of a "wartime" president who's not afraid to play the patriot card combined with Republican subservience to a president of their own party has turned Congress into an embarrassing caricature of itself. Read the whole speech if you're interested in Gore's suggestions for turning this around.

C-SPAN has the video here.

THE BIGGER CORRUPTION PICTURE....I briefly mentioned last night that Dems might do well to tie the Republican corruption scandal to the broader theme of Republican addiction to special business interests. Greg Sargent of the American Prospect talked to some Democratic strategists about this, and they seem to agree:

Rahm Emanuel, the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee...."What we need to make sure we explain to voters is...'There’s a cost to this corruption, and you’re paying the bill. This comes at a cost to you — in the form of an $800 billion prescription drug bill, and an energy bill where your taxpayer dollars are subsidizing the energy industry.'"

....Karl Agne, a senior adviser at Democracy Corps..."Pointing to the lobbying scandals becomes more potent if it's put in a larger context of Republican fealty to special interests in energy and health care, which makes it impossible for the GOP to bring about real reform on their most pressing problems."

....Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution..."So they might be better off tying Republican corruption and incompetence to their alliance with specific sectors — energy and health — where individuals feel burned, rather than to a larger anti-business argument."

Energy and health sure seem to be the consensus favorites here, and why not? People are pissed off about both high gasoline prices and the botched Medicare prescription bill, so why not point out exactly why the Republican approach to these issues was so lousy? It's because the Republican Party considers legislation to be a vehicle for giving special breaks to favored corporate interests rather than a vehicle to actually solve people's problems.

It might work. At the very least it has the advantage of being true.

IMMIGRATION QUERY....Since my commenters frequently delight in reminding me that I'm practically a Republican compared to their pure and unsullied leftiness, I have a question for them. First, here is Jonah Goldberg writing about the conservative position on immigration:

There are, I believe, some minimal principles all conservatives agree on and I think those who disagree really aren't conservatives. Conservatives agree that there should be borders and that these borders have significance. Conservatives agree that citizenship has a definition and that there are rules, rights and responsibilities which come with it. Conservatives believe that it would be, at minimum, preferable if immigrants didn't come here illegally. Conservatives agree that there is something called American culture (though we debate its adaptability and power to assimilate).

And here's my question: is there anything here than even lefties would disagree with? I could quibble with the "American culture" thing, which is frequently a codeword for "keeping the brown people out," but it seems fairly unobjectionable here given the minimally mushy interpretation Goldberg puts on it. So what exactly makes this a set of conservative principles?

ALL ALONE IN DC....Poor George Bush. Once he was the leader of the free world. Now he can't even convince his own party to cut their vacation short.

EXECUTIVE POWER AND NATIONAL SECURITY....In the LA Times today, former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach writes about Martin Luther King, J. Edgar Hoover, wiretapping, and national security:

In October 1963, Hoover requested Atty. Gen. Kennedy to approve a wiretap on King's telephone....Bobby was furious. Hoover's charge that King was a pawn of the communists could potentially taint the whole movement and bring into question everything we were doing to vindicate the constitutional rights of black citizens. It was hard to think of an issue more explosive.

....It was only years later, at the Church Committee hearings held after Hoover's death, that the full scope of Hoover's anti-King activities became known. I was — and am — appalled. And sad. This man who was a national symbol of law and order ended up grossly violating the nation's trust and respect in the name, he said, of national security.

....Today we are again engaged in a debate over wiretapping for reasons of national security — the same kind of justification Hoover offered when he wanted to spy on King. The problem, then as now, is not the invasion of privacy, although that can be a difficulty. But it fades in significance to the claim of unfettered authority in the name of "national security." There may be good and sufficient reasons for invasions of privacy. But those reasons cannot and should not be kept secret by those charged with enforcing the law. No one should have such power, and in our constitutional system of checks and balances, no one legitimately does.

As Katzenbach says, the issue is not wiretapping per se or even national security per se. It's all about oversight. The president is not above the law, and the history of unchecked power shows pretty clearly that even if it starts out with good motives, it usually doesn't end that way.

IRAN AND ITS OIL....Iran's economy minister warned over the weekend that sanctions on Iran could "raise oil prices beyond levels the west expects." Over at the Oil Drum, Stuart Staniford suggests that this is pretty much correct:

To give you the punchline up front, I'm going to argue that, with large (50%) uncertainties, a complete loss of Iranian production for an extended period might be expected to roughly double oil prices and cause massive economic impacts, while a halving of oil production due to sanctions, or retaliation to sanctions, might be expected to produce a 30-40% increase in price and significant economic impacts.

My uninformed gut opinion is that Stuart is actually being optimistic here. A shutdown of Iranian supplies in 1979 led to a doubling of world prices, but that's only because Saudi Arabia made up for part of the loss. They can't do that anymore.

In any case, read the whole thing if you're interested in a historical perspective on oil embargoes and their impact on the global economy.

JUDGING THE JUDICIARY....I happen to think that it was never remotely practical for the activist base of the Democratic Party to think that Samuel Alito's Supreme Court nomination could be scuttled in the Senate. After all, only one nominee in the past 35 years, Robert Bork, has been rejected for ideological reasons. Rehnquist and Scalia were both confirmed easily, as was Clarence Thomas, despite the explosive testimony of Anita Hill. Both liberal and conservative nominees know perfectly well how to play the testimony game these days, and by the time the process gets to the hearings stage the outcome is all but certain. It's naive to think that a few days of questioning could change this dynamic if only Senate Dems "grew a spine."

That said, Reed Hundt has some interesting comments about how that could change over the longer term. Here are two of his points:

First, as to judicial nominees, the blogosphere is so far rather ineffective. It doesn't seem that easy to translate the record of a Judge Alito into comprehensible bits and bytes that in turn can shape the mainstream media's reporting. Law professors need to help more.

....Fifth, if the left doesn't like the way the judiciary is behaving it will have to mount a sustained critique on a broad front, with many details. Legal and popular blogs could do that, but have not yet done so. The right is ahead of the left on this topic, by about 30 years.

Obviously these two points are related, and I think they're correct. The right has a comprehensive and understandable critique of "activist liberal judges" while the left has nothing comparable (as discussed here and here.) If we lefties want to sway public opinion, we need to explain in a systematic way what's wrong with the current conservative hegemony over our judicial system. Most liberals can't do that in any kind of compelling way, which makes it hardly surprising that the public is not up in arms over it.

It's going to have to be law professors and judges who mostly take the lead on this. Who wants to start?

ABRIDGED EVENING NEWS ROUNDUP....Shorter Ralph Reed: Jack who?

Shorter Texas 22nd: Tom who?

It really couldn't happen to a more deserving pair of guys, could it?

IRAN AND THE BOMB....Niall Ferguson pretends to be a future historian looking back on today:

The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West. Certainly, that was one way of interpreting the subsequent spread of the conflict as Iraq's Shi'ite population overran the remaining American bases in their country and the Chinese threatened to intervene on the side of Teheran.

Yet the historian is bound to ask whether or not the true significance of the 2007-2011 war was to vindicate the Bush administration's original principle of pre-emption. For, if that principle had been adhered to in 2006, Iran's nuclear bid might have been thwarted at minimal cost. And the Great Gulf War might never have happened.

I have a feeling we can look forward to a lot more op-eds just like this over the next few months.

IMPEACH BUSH?....Elizabeth Holtzman has a cover story in The Nation this week called "The Impeachment of George W. Bush." Here's her case:

1. Bush illegally approved the NSA's surveillance of calls between al-Qaeda suspects overseas and persons inside the United States without getting a FISA warrant.

2. He spun the evidence for WMD and deceived the country into supporting the war in Iraq.

3. He's incompetent.

4. There is evidence that "suggests" that Bush "may have" authorized detainee abuse.
   

I gotta be honest: this strikes me as pretty weak brew. By my count, based on Holtzman's criteria, the following recent presidents would also have been in acute danger of impeachment: Hoover, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton. I've provisionally left out Ford and Carter, but I'm open to arguments that they ought to be on this list too.

Still, logic aside, I suppose the argument in favor of running articles like this is that they're good for getting the base riled up, and a riled-up base is what Democrats desperately need. But is that true? We had a pretty riled-up base in 2002 and 2004 and it didn't seem to do the trick.

But perhaps times have changed. After all, George Bush's approval ratings are in the low 40s these days, not the high 50s, and maybe the country is finally ready for a tub thumping campaign against our commander in chief (though please spare me the "evidence" of childishly contrived polls like this one). Maybe.

I guess I'm still skeptical, though, and the limpness of the Alito confirmation hearings is why. John Aravosis tries to pin the blame for this on the Democratic establishment, arguing that "Heads need to roll. ROLL." But guess what? Senate Dems pretty much followed the script favored by the blogosphere. Strip searches? Check. Membership in CAP? Check. Abortion rights in danger? Check. Imperial presidency? Check. This was the activist case against Alito, and it failed miserably. Maybe heads do need to roll, but we'd better have some better ones at hand before we haul out the guillotine and commence our knitting.

Personally, I'd like to see us warm up by actually winning a midterm election before we get too excited about impeaching George Bush. In addition to a coherent position on national security, maybe some good old fashioned populist business bashing would do the trick. Highlight the thousands of payoffs to Republican donors that have been written into law during the past five years of GOP legislation; tie it all in to Jack Abramoff and the K Street Project; and just tar the hell out of insurance companies while we're at it. I think they'd make a great target, and it might even soften up the ground for universal healthcare in some happy-but-not-too-distant future.

Anyway, consider this an open thread for random vituperation. What's your preference: ringing calls for impeachment or an actual electoral strategy?

STEALTH BUSINESS INTEREST PANDERING....The Wall Street Journal reports today that the FDA is considering a rule that would allow federal law to pre-empt state law in the area of medication labeling. If approved, it would give pharmaceutical firms protection from suits in state courts as long as they follow the FDA's guidelines on its labels:

Other federal agencies have made similar moves toward helping to shield businesses from certain forms of legal action. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last August proposed a new rule on car-roof strength that would grant legal protection to car makers that adhere to the safety standard. The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued a sweeping regulation in early 2004 that said federal banking laws take precedence over a number of state consumer-protection statutes when applied to national banks.

This is a good example of how George Bush's business pandering instincts are considerably stronger than his conservative instincts. After all, liberals are the ones who usually support federal-level regulations, while conservatives believe such things should be left up to the states as much as possible. This is not a fundamentally conservative proposal, it's just a sop to a K Street campaign contributor.

As usual, though, the whole issue is a bit trickier than it seems at first glance. The fact is that federal rules probably make a lot of sense here, for the same reason that federal rules make a lot of sense for anything related to interstate commerce. What's not so obvious, however, is what happens when you move issues into the federal court system without expanding the federal courts to handle the increased load: it doesn't simply rationalize the rules surrounding liability suits, it makes many of them impossible — if you accept that "wait five years while hemorrhaging your client's money" is frequently equal to "impossible."

And of course that's the whole goal. This is not stealth conservatism so much as stealth business interest pandering. And it's what the Bush administration specializes in.

GULLIBLE OR CREDULOUS?....YOU MAKE THE CALL....I suppose it's a little meanspirited to highlight this, but this op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post is a humdinger. Amherst grad Bess Kargman writes that until recently she had been earning some extra money editing and proofreading college applications:

Then my employer suggested that I could earn more money working as a "comprehensive" editor....After a few days of e-mail correspondence, I would churn out the model compositions, which the students were instructed to use for "inspiration" during the process of writing their own. I didn't question why a student (or, rather, a parent) might be willing to pay as much as $399 for a service that provided nothing more than inspiration.

....Several weeks into the process, I found out that my first comprehensive client had in fact included my essay with his application — verbatim....I confronted my supervisor: How could the company offer a service that was so easily abused? She said unapologetically that the firm's practices and intentions were legitimate. I was taken aback by this blatant indifference. Actually, the company's only real response was to stop sending me any clients altogether. After all, they have a whole slew of college graduates willing to do the kind of bogus work I've decided to turn down.

This form of organized, for-profit cheating was unfamiliar to me....

Do I have any Amherst grads out there? Is it really possible that a grown woman who spent four years there is so painfully naive that she didn't realize her essays were being used for a wee bit more than "inspiration"? And furthermore, was shocked to discover that an online essay writing company might not be entirely on the up and up?

The mind reels.

QUOTE OF THE DAY....Today's quote comes from Voltaire, who wrote in 1763:

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

There's no hidden agenda here. I just happen to like this quote.

PC MOVIES....Given its well known "gay cowboy" theme, you'd think that Brokeback Mountain would be a shoo-in for most PC movie of the year. But I have another candidate. Marian and I saw The Family Stone this afternoon, and Tyrone Giordano plays a character who is deaf (the whole family signs, natch), gay, in an interracial relationship, and planning to adopt a baby. And just for good measure, Diane Keaton plays a character who's dying from breast cancer.

That's PC.

Jonathan Dworkin, a medical student in his final year at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, is travelling in Iraqi Kurdistan from January to March of 2006. This is his second dispatch for the Washington Monthly.

CITY OF REFUGEES....I am in the house of Kak Lolan, a run down but beautiful stone structure in Erbil’s citadel. This is a part of town inhabited continuously since the time of the Assyrians, though in recent decades it has decayed into slums. The house is now the Erbil Textile Museum, an institution begun by Kak Lolan to staunch the exodus of one of Kurdistan’s great art forms.

Kak Lolan grew up in a shepherd's family surrounded by kilim — Kurdish tapestry — but it wasn’t until he studied anthropology in the United States that he developed an appreciation of the tradition as a cultural resource. According to my host, two events nearly destroyed the craft altogether. The first was Saddam’s military incursions — the infamous Anfal Campaign of 1988 — which leveled thousands of villages and drove the survivors into urban centers. Cities like Erbil and Sulimani swelled with refugees as the countryside crumbled. The other event, ironically, was the establishment of semi-autonomous Kurdistan in 1991. This opened the country to the UN and foreign visitors, who promptly exported the most exceptional kilim to Turkey and the EU.

The textile museum contains hundreds of colorful kilim, complete with descriptions of their tribal origins. But what makes it interesting from a social perspective is the window it offers into an aspect of Kurdish culture that was buried with the lost villages. Forced urbanization was a central feature of the Anfal campaign, and the Kurdish connection to an agrarian lifestyle was one of its principal victims.

Later in the evening I link up with an American friend, and together with an Arab employee of the Erbil International Hotel we head to Anqawa. This is a Christian town near Erbil, and it is the center of the post-Anfal relief effort, hosting NGOs and hundreds of foreign workers. It’s also the center of beer and shisha, a place where people go for fun without risk of running into their imam.

We settle into a seat at Happy Times, a smoke-filled pizza restaurant that contains colored lamps and a large screen TV. Bare armed beauties in Lebanese pop videos are the only women present in a crowded room. Our Arab acquaintance, who we will call M, is originally from Mosul, and after the American invasion he and a friend worked as interpreters for the 101st Airborne, which was stationed in the Mosul area. These were excellent people according to M. Relations with the Arab population were handled deftly, and property damages were quickly and quietly compensated.

Later a new unit arrived, and the policy became more standoffish. The soldiers had their reasons, force protection being one of them, though M argues that simple cultural incompetence also played a role. But whatever their rationale, relations with community leaders slowly deteriorated, and in the aftermath of the Falluja assault the situation exploded. The Iraqi police force collapsed, and soon afterward M’s friend was shot. A campaign of violence now consumes almost every family that cooperates with the Americans. The reconstituted police are worthless and terrified, he says; they will let anything on four wheels pass a checkpoint. M fled to Erbil, where the Kurds distrust him because he’s an Arab, and he lives in a constant state of fear that someone visiting from Mosul will recognize him.

Looking around when I return to the Erbil International, I notice that many of the employees are Arab. Often they don’t speak Kurdish. How many of these people are Kudistan’s new refugees?

As someone sympathetic to America’s broader political aims in Iraq, listening to M leaves me feeling bleak and irritated. Here is a man, rational and well-intentioned in every way, and he’s a stranger in his own country. No matter how you look at it, the inability of America to protect its friends is one of the defining failures of the Iraq war.

Posts in this series:

January 14: City of Refugees
January 11: First Impressions

DEMS ON IRAN....Atrios is almost certainly right about this, but it still doesn't answer the question. At some point it seems likely that the choice George Bush will offer the nation regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions is either (a) leaky and ineffective sanctions or (b) air strikes. I don't like this choice, but that's probably what we're going to get anyway.

Of course, you never know. Maybe diplomacy will work and Iran will back down. But just in case it doesn't, Dems would be wise to start thinking about whether (a) or (b) — or some hypothetical (c) — is the right policy. And then, having thought about it, we can start figuring out how to persuade the American public that our choice is the right one.

We can gripe and complain about the perfidy of Karl Rove all we like, but it's idiocy not to think seriously about a subject that's at least 50% likely to be a major campaign issue. And the sooner the better.

MORE ON BOEHNER....Here's a few paragraphs about John Boehner from an LA Times story about Republicans and the lobbying community:

As House Republican Conference chairman from 1995 to 1998, Boehner played a key role in the party's effort to systematically build stronger ties to businesses and lobbyists. It was an effort that included DeLay's vaunted "K Street Project" to encourage lobbying firms to hire Republicans.

Beginning soon after the GOP took control of Congress in 1995, Boehner held weekly meetings with about a dozen of the most powerful lobbyists in the speaker's suite in the Capitol.

He was heavily criticized in 1996 for distributing campaign checks from tobacco interests to colleagues on the House floor. It was not against the rules, but was said to be unseemly.

Yep, he's a real reformer. And the really pathetic part of all this is that, relatively speaking, Boehner is the good guy in the race for Republican Majority leader. The favorite, Roy Blunt, is so close to the lobbying community that they'll probably erect a statue of him in Farragut Square someday — one hand on a lobbyist's shoulder and the other holding a check, no doubt.

The K Street Project isn't a fall from grace, it's part of the DNA of the modern Republican Party. It's a joke to pretend that they can repudiate it without tearing down the entire party itself first.

CHUTZPAH WATCH....I've linked to Nick Confessore's "Welcome to the Machine" before, but I know that most of you probably haven't followed the link to read his seminal piece on the K Street Project. So here's the nickel version:

It took something that hadn't happened in 40 years to begin to change the culture of K Street: In 1994, Republicans won control of Congress....New Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, and a handful of close advisers like Ed Gillespie and Grover Norquist, quickly consolidated power in the House, and turned their attention to the lobbying community.

....In 1995, DeLay famously compiled a list of the 400 largest PACs, along with the amounts and percentages of money they had recently given to each party. Lobbyists were invited into DeLay's office and shown their place in "friendly" or "unfriendly" columns. ("If you want to play in our revolution," DeLay told The Washington Post, "you have to live by our rules.")

....Working on the outside, Norquist accelerated what he calls the "K Street Project," a database intended to track the party affiliation, Hill experience, and political giving of every lobbyist in town. With Democrats out of power, these efforts are bearing fruit. Slowly, the GOP is marginalizing Democratic lobbyists and populating K Street with loyal Republicans. (DeLay alone has placed a dozen of his aides at key lobbying and trade association jobs in the last few years — "graduates of the DeLay school," as they are known.) Already, the GOP and some of its key private-sector allies, such as PhRMA, have become indistinguishable.

Here are the key points: Today's Republican entanglement with corporate lobbyists like Jack Abramoff is not an accident. It's not a matter of a few bad apples. And it's not something that happened gradually as Republicans got overly accustomed to power and lost their revolutionary zeal. It was a deliberate strategy, conceived by the leaders of the 1994 revolution as part of their fundamental governing strategy, and pursued relentlessly ever since.

Got that? Good. Now listen to this excerpt from John Boehner's pathetically inept PowerPoint pitch, "For a Majority That Matters":

The sordid spectacle of Jack Abramoff arises from two factors....The second is that many of the lobbyists who enter our offices every day to represent their clients are, for all practical purposes, complete mysteries to us. Yet for the House to function, some degree of trust is necessary. Many lobbyists are of the highest integrity and feel as much of a duty to the House as a democratic institution as they do to their clients. But there’s every incentive for those with more questionable ethics to shortchange us and the House. And absent our personal, longstanding relationships, there is no way for us to tell the difference between the two.

The chutzpah quotient here is staggering. Boehner is seriously trying to suggest that the real problem behind the Republican corruption scandal is that Republicans don't know the lobbying community well enough.

Let that sink in. No group in history has been closer to the corporate lobbying community than today's GOP. They meet with top lobbyists weekly. They track their every donation. They keep detailed databases of thousands of them. They put the arm on them to host fundraisers at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And of them all, Jack Abramoff was by long odds the best known of the bunch: a Republican operative for three decades, a good friend (and generous campaign contributor) to more than half the Republican caucus, and a man who steered tens of millions of dollars into Republican coffers.

But according to Boehner, the real problem behind the "sordid spectacle" of Jack Abramoff is that Republicans aren't close enough to the lobbying community. What's desperately needed is more "personal, longstanding relationships," not fewer.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, liberal weenies.

ZAWAHIRI DEAD?....CNN and ABC are both reporting that al-Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri and several other high-ranking al-Qaeda figures may have been killed in a CIA airstrike on a building in Damadola, a Pakistani village near the Afghan border. No confirmation yet, but if it's true it would certainly be a ray of sunshine in an otherwise dreary news week.

CIVIL WAR WATCH....October 2005:

Four days before Iraqis are to vote on their country's proposed constitution, Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish power brokers reached a breakthrough late Tuesday that revived hopes of winning Sunni support for the charter and defusing the Sunni-led insurgency by political means, Iraqi political leaders said.

....The major concession from Tuesday's talks was agreement by the Shiites and Kurds that a committee be created early next year to consider amendments to the constitution....

January 2006:

Abdul Aziz Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the most powerful Shiite party in the ruling coalition, appeared to back away from the constitutional compromise Wednesday.

"The first principle is not to change the essence of the constitution," Hakim said in a speech given during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, according to the Associated Press. "It is our responsibility to form Baghdad provinces and southern Iraq provinces."

A spokesman for Hakim's party confirmed the remarks. "The major points in the constitution were agreed to by all the parties that participated in the drafting of the constitution," Haitham Husseini, the spokesman, said in an interview. "As for changes in the powers, some points or details, these are open to negotiation. However, the main principles which were agreed to by all sides, and approved by the people in a popular referendum, they cannot be touched."

That deal back in October never struck me as much more than window dressing, and in any case Hakim never really agreed to it anyway; he just smiled, said it was a great day for Iraq, and told his followers that if they voted Yes on the constitution everything would be fine. And from his perspective, I suppose that's true. However, from the perspective of anyone who would prefer not to see southern Iraq turn into a de facto client state of Iran, probably not so fine.

Stay tuned. The pot is starting to boil.

NATIONAL SECURITY....John Dickerson says in Slate that the president's sudden enthusiasm for a congressional investigation into the NSA's surveillance program is probably bad for the country:

But that's precisely why George Bush wants hearings on domestic spying. He's inviting Democrats to another round of self-immolation. In 2002, the Republican Party used the debate over the Department of Homeland Security to attack Democrats in the off-year election by arguing the party was soft on terror. The president and his aides hope the NSA hearings will offer the same opportunity in 2006.

That's exactly right. Marshall Wittman, who I think is dangerously complacent about George Bush's apparent belief that he has emergency war powers forever, nonetheless provides the obvious explanation:

One can question the legal rationale that was employed by President, but there is absolutely no evidence that he was attempting to do anything else but protect America. It might be satisfying for partisans to cast around comparisons to Nixon or Harding, but this was a program to thwart terrorists not for political aggrandizement.

Politically, this is almost certainly how a majority of Americans will see it, especially after a few friendly rounds of traitor-mongering and mushroom-cloud-alarmism to soften up the crowd. What's more, there's another looming national security issue on the near horizon as well: Iran. Martin Walker lays out the issue succinctly:

The only question now is whether the world is prepared to put up with a nuclear-armed Iran, which is currently led by a religious zealot who declares publicly that the Holocaust never took place and Israel should be wiped off the map.

....If Iran, as an oil-rich sovereign state, is determined to become a nuclear power there are no obvious steps short of all-out war and occupation that could prevent it eventually from doing so. So just as the world has learned to live with the Soviet-American nuclear balance, and with the Indo-Pakistani nuclear balance, it may soon start to accept that it will probably have to live with the balance of nuclear terror between Tehran and Tel Aviv.

Sometime this summer and fall we can probably expect yet another marketing campaign from the White House, this time aimed in the direction of Iran, and before long the alternatives are going to get pretty stark: do we recommend continuing sanctions and multilateral opprobrium, or do we support air strikes? Do we "live with" Iran's nuclear program or do we do something about it? Yes or no?

All this is by way of saying that although Democrats would like the 2006 election to be about Jack Abramoff and Republican corruption, the White House still has something to say about that. George Bush is going to do his best to keep national security front and center, and Democrats had better have a more crowd-pleasing answer on this subject than they did in 2002 and 2004. Just saying.

PRIORITIES....It's always good to see Republican administrations taking the actual administration of federal programs so seriously:

California officials ordered emergency action Thursday to cover drug costs for 1 million elderly citizens, many of whom have been denied life-saving medications or charged exorbitant amounts because of glitches in the new federal prescription drug program.

....Critics said the program, which Bush has touted as the most significant advance in Medicare in 40 years, was fast becoming a public health emergency. California officials said that as many as one-fifth of the 1 million elderly, poor or disabled state residents who were switched into the federal program on Jan. 1 could be wrongly denied their medications because of flaws in the program.

In Illinois, Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, took action similar to Schwarzenegger's, ordering state funds to be used to provide emergency drug coverage for the elderly. Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a leading figure among Republican governors on health policy issues, took a similar step Wednesday. Nine states, including California, have stepped in to fill the gaps in the federal program.

If George Bush and Karl Rove spent half as much time on the actual governance of the country as they do on figuring out new ways to portray Democrats as weak-kneed terrorist appeasers, seniors might be getting their drugs. But we all have our priorities.

LIFE AND DEATH....On Thursday the Supreme Court heard the case of Paul House, a Tennessee man who is appealing his death sentence based on new DNA evidence suggesting he's innocent. Antonin Scalia indicated during the arguments that he wanted to take a very strict, legalistic approach to the case, and Cathy Young isn't impressed:

So the difference between a man's life and death hinges on the difference between "could" and "would." It sounds like something out of a very black comedy satirizing the courts.

The convenience of the criminal justice system really shouldn't be the primary factor in deciding whether someone lives or dies. House deserves a new trial.

JUDGING ALITO....I've only paid a modest bit of attention to the Alito hearings, but from what I've seen I'd say that Michael O'Hare has it about right:

....He doesn't have a screw loose; what he has is a piece missing, conspicuously, radiantly, displaying the absence of any sense of, well, justice. Not a case came up for discussion in which he registered that one or another outcome was just wrong, outrageous to a sense of decency, or to him.

He's on record in a memo as believing that to shoot an eighth grader, known not to be armed, who was trying to climb over a fence in escape, is a proper use of deadly force by a policeman. In a discussion of immigration cases that have been regularly occasioning inexcusable, vile, un-American heartbreak on people who missed obscure deadlines or violated arcane requirements, all he could say was that the courts get bad transcripts and it was hard to find translators for some of the plaintiffs, but that was a problem for Congress.

It wasn't exactly Pilate washing his hands, but the man appears to be completely comfortable dealing with frightful social wrongs by moving the issue down the hall to another office. Sometimes the Court has to do this, but to Alito it's an especially good day's work, not a disappointment.

A smart, decent, small man....

FAIRY TALES FROM THE RIGHT....John Boehner, candidate for Republican Majority Leader in the House:

If I am elected Majority Leader, there will no longer be a ‘K Street project,’ or anything else like it.

Give me a break. The Republican Party would disintegrate if he magically got rid of the K Street project and "anything else like it." Who does he think he's kidding?

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT....A reader emailed me a few minutes ago asking if I had a full screen shot of the K Street Project website from which I cropped the small piece posted here. I said I was sorry, but no I didn't.

But it turned out I did: Google Desktop keeps screen captures of nearly every site I've visited in the past few months. For any individual website it only seems to keep the most recent two or three screens, but that's still pretty handy.

Just thought I'd pass that along.

AMERIKA....The Guardian describes the charges faced by Muslim cleric Abu Hamza, currently on trial in London:

The cleric faces nine charges under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 alleging he solicited others at public meetings to murder Jews and other non-Muslims. Mr Hamza denies all the charges.

....Mr Hamza faces a charge relating to the [Encyclopaedia of Afghani Jihad, which was found in his home] under section 58 of the Terrorism Act, which accuses him of possession of a document which contained information "of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism".

....Mr Hamza also faces four charges under the Public Order Act 1986 of "using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred".

Hamza is an unusually repellent person, which makes it hard to work up much sympathy for his plight. And yet something about this trial struck me: unless I'm mistaken, not a single one of these charges would make it to trial in the United States, Patriot Act or no. (I suppose the solicitation to murder is a bare possibility — though it's a longshot since the "solicitation" apparently consisted of spittle-flecked speeches in mosques, not actual conspiracies in which Hamza's followers were told to go out and kill people — but the others sound like complete nonstarters.)

I don't really have any reason to post about this except to point out that this is yet another example of a way in which America, which is supposedly far to Europe's right, isn't always. Four years after 9/11, we're still pretty distant from being the fascist state some seem to think we are.

I WONDER HOW MUCH THIS JOB PAYS?....A reader who followed my link to the K Street Project website last night emailed to point out the following item on its front page. Does the Department of Labor really have a Special Assistant for Conservative Outreach? Do they also have a Special Assistant for Liberal Outreach?

I suppose I could call and ask, but maybe someone will do it for me if I post this. Inquiring minds want to know.

SPECIAL INTEREST CONSERVATISM....Today's lecture on Republican pandering to special business interests concerns the soon-to-be-extinct legal doctrine known as "equitable subrogation." You're excited already, aren't you?

Here's the nickel explanation. Suppose you're in a car accident and you suffer a bunch of damages: medical bills, lost wages, lawyers' fees, and so forth. Your insurance company pays your medical bills, and then you sue the other guy and recover damages. What happens to the money you recover?

Your insurance company naturally thinks the first priority should be to repay them for the medical bills they covered. However, anyone who's not a paid spokesman for the insurance industry probably disagrees. After all, the insurance company has been collecting premiums for years and has enormous financial resources, while the victim is the one who's actually suffering from both physical injury and financial distress. Common sense suggests that the injured party should get first crack at the dough, and only after he's "made whole" should the insurance company get repaid. This is the doctrine of equitable subrogation.

That's fair, and it's also the law in most states. But of course, insurance companies hate it, and we all know that the insurance industry's best friend is the Republican Party. Isn't it about time for all those campaign contributions to start paying off?

You betcha! And the magic answer to the insurance industry's woes is "ERISA," a federal law that has grown since 1974 to oversee 130 million workers covered by employer pension and health plans — and oh-by-the-way, a law that sweeps away any pesky state regulation in its path. Wouldn't it be nice if ERISA were amended to get rid of equitable subrogation and give insurance companies first crack at any money recovered in legal settlements?

You hardly have to ask what happened next, do you? This is from Sue Steinman, policy director of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America:

Here’s what happened on the Hill. The House bill [on pension reform], as originally introduced, did not contain the subrogation language nor did the bill reported out of committee contain the subrogation language. It was added surreptitiously, just prior to the House floor debate as part of a Manager’s Amendment. The House Rules allow this, if a Manager’s Amendment is blessed by the Rules Committee, which is controlled by the Majority. That’s what happened in this case.

Yes, that's surreptitiously, the Republican majority's favorite way of screwing their own constituents. From here the bill will go to a conference committee, where the subrogation language will either live or die. If you think this sucks, call your congressman and complain.

NOTE: This issue was brought to my attention by Brian King, a Utah lawyer who specializes in ERISA cases. You can find a more detailed explanation of this issue on his blog.

SCIENCE BLOGGING....Chris Mooney's science blog is now being sponsored by Seed magazine, where Chris works, and has a new URL:

http://scienceblogs.com/intersection

The Seed borg is apparently swallowing up quite a few other science-oriented blogs as well, including PZ Myers' Pharyngula, Chad Orzel's Uncertain Principles, Tim Lambert's Deltoid, and about a dozen others (so far). The main site is here. It's worth checking out.

MORNING CRANKINESS....Things that bug me:

• "Link rich" commentary. This code word usually indicates that instead of taking the trouble to write a persuasive and coherent post, the author has simply done a search of Google News and linked to everything he could find.

• Full page ads covering up entire sites. The New York Times has long done this for individual articles, and now Slate and the Los Angeles Times are doing this on their home pages. Before long, the only paper I'm going to read will be the Washington Post, and this decision will have nothing to do with the quality of their journalism.

• Daily updates from bloggers who think I need an email reminding me of every post they write. I don't. Just knock it off, OK?

• Bloggers who continue to blog about New York Times op-eds available only via TimesSelect. If you really want the Times to realize how pissed off you are about TimesSelect, then quit linking to them.
  

That is all. Normal non-cranky blogging will resume shortly.

NATIONAL SECURITY....Laura Donohue provides an excellent reason to believe the Patriot Act needs a bit of tweaking before it's reauthorized. It's not that it's too tough on terrorism, it's just the opposite:

Many Americans might approve of data mining to find terrorists. But not all of the inquiries necessarily relate to terrorism. The Patriot Act allows law enforcement officers to get "sneak and peek" warrants to search a home for any suspected crime — and to wait months or even years to tell the owner they were there. Last July, the Justice Department told the House Judiciary Committee that only 12% of the 153 "sneak and peek" warrants it received were related to terrorism investigations.

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg, who believes that slippery slopes are the merest hooey, explains why he thinks all the recent concern over national security abuses is overblown:

At first, I thought this NSA story was a big deal on the merits, and I wrote that Bush should have asked to fix the law rather than work his way around it....Now I'm beginning to think this is just the latest in anti-Bush hype. The New York Times, which launched this "scandal," remains at journalistic DEFCON 1, releasing a stream of articles, editorials and Op-Ed articles as if the nation were up in arms over what some hotter heads believe to be an impeachable offense.

....Now, forgive me for not loading up my car with bottled water and canned goods and heading off into the hills to fight with the partisans, but I just don't see what the big deal is.

Translation: I used to think the critics were right, but then I realized this might actually do some damage to the Republican cause. So I changed my mind.

THE K STREET PROJECT....Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post provides a brief history of modern lobbying and how it's evolved since Republicans came to power a decade ago:

The change in standards of what is objectionable versus what is commonplace is suggested by a nearly forgotten uproar nearly two decades ago. On Feb. 3, 1987, newspapers disclosed that then-Sen. Lloyd M. Bentsen (D-Tex.), chairman of the Finance Committee, had set up a "breakfast club" for lobbyists who donated $10,000 to his campaign committee.

The implied bargain — money for access — struck many as just too obvious. Three days later, Bentsen ended the breakfasts and acknowledged that his error of judgment had been "a doozy."

Now, every day Congress is in session, there are lobbyist-organized fundraisers for senators and representatives — at breakfast, brunch, lunch or dinner — at which the basic transaction is little different than what got Bentsen in hot water.

....The pivotal point in Washington's changing culture, according to lobbyists and congressional ethics analysts, came in 1995, shortly after Newt Gingrich and his "Republican Revolutionaries" roared to power in the 1994 midterm elections. Tom DeLay, the new majority whip, and his allies began the "K Street Project" — the pressuring of trade associations and lobbying firms to hire Republican, and to contribute to Republican campaigns if they wanted access to key leaders and committee chairmen in the House.

By the way, the K Street Project has its own website if you're interested in checking it out. It's entirely "non-partisan" of course....

ARTICLE 31....Hmmm. Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commanding officer at Abu Ghraib, has been granted immunity from prosecution and will be testifying about the military's interrogation policies at an upcoming court martial. But what about the guy responsible for "Gitmo-izing" those policies in the first place?

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, a central figure in the U.S. detainee-abuse scandal, this week invoked his right not to incriminate himself in court-martial proceedings against two soldiers accused of using dogs to intimidate captives at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to lawyers involved in the case.

....Miller invoked his military Article 31 rights through his Army lawyer on Tuesday, after a Navy judge in the Military District of Washington ruled that lawyers defending the two dog handlers could interview Miller this week. Article 31 rights are almost identical to those afforded civilians by the Fifth Amendment, and invoking them does not legally imply guilt.

....In an interview with defense attorneys for those MPs in August 2004, Miller said he never told Pappas to use dogs in questioning detainees...."At no time did we discuss the use of dogs in interrogations," Miller said, according to a transcript.

So why isn't Miller willing to repeat his previous denial? His lawyer's explanation is basically that Miller is a busy guy and he's already answered the question. Am I the only one who finds that slightly less than convincing?

POLITICAL TRIBALISM... If you've ever wondered what percentage of voters think for themselves when it comes to public policy matters, and what percentage just robotically follow whatever their party's leaders happen to say, then check out this little tidbit from the new Pew poll:

[I]n the wake of the news that President Bush has authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor Americans suspected of having terrorist ties the issue has become more divisive. Today, Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats (37% vs. 18%) to say they favor allowing the government to monitor their telephone and email communications. This marks a 15-point increase in support among Republicans, and a nine-point drop among Democrats since 2002.

THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION....In their book Off Center, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that although the Republican Party has moved far to the right of the political center, it has nonetheless managed to hold onto power by adopting a variety of hardnosed and cynical electoral strategies. The problem with this thesis is that, in practice, Republicans haven't actually moved all that far to the right. Charlie Cook sums it up this way:

There is a growing divide between those members of the GOP Conference who want confrontation with Democrats and those who seek compromise. According to one influential Republican, "We cannot govern from the right," but added, "you cannot control this caucus from the center."

I think that's just about right. As Cook's source puts it, the Republican caucus has indeed moved radically to the right, but at the same time they all know perfectly well they can't govern from there lest they be tossed out of office en masse. It's just another piece of evidence that the "conservative revolution" is, and always has been, a myth.

Jonathan Dworkin, formerly of the blog Aspasia, is a medical student in his final year at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. For the past year he has organized a collaboration between Kurdish and American doctors with the twin goals of better defining the long-term consequences of Baathist chemical attacks on the Kurdish civilian population of Halabja and advocating for increased access to resources for the survivors. Jonathan is travelling in Iraqi Kurdistan from January to March of 2006 and will be sending occasional dispatches about his travels to the Washington Monthly. Here's his first one.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS....What’s the Kurdish word for chutzpah? I want to know after arriving at my window seat on Air Kurdistan and finding an old woman resting comfortably in my chair. I point to my ticket and act confused, but she just smiles serenely. “It’s ok,” she says, indicating the middle chair. The game repeats itself throughout the airplane, with arguments breaking out in a few places. Midway through the flight, when the woman starts vomiting, she refuses to surrender her window seat. Instead she climbs over her neighbors and carries plastic bags to and from the bathroom. It’s rudeness taken to an almost spiritual level. When we land in Erbil there is clapping and a few shouts of “Kurdistan!” from the passengers. Customs is a mess, with a mass of people and luggage bottlenecked behind two army checkpoints. Despite the pushiness, people are helpful and direct me to the right place. It’s not until I’m outside the airport that the emptiness of the place strikes me. Instead of our industrial zones there are concrete security perimeters. Instead of fences I see barbed wire sprawling around like confetti. Men with Kalashnikovs, many without uniform, greet individual passengers and race off in SUVs. Were they peshmerga, a private security detail, or just family members? The security system is a recurrent topic throughout my first day.

A driver from the Ministry of Health greets me at the airport and packs my bags into his car. As we drive I notice improvised concrete buildings everywhere. In the post-Anfal Kurdistan, this is affordable housing. We pass the regional bank, hit last year by RPG fire, and then a patch of green called Sammy Abdul Rahman Park. This is named after a KDP official who died in a suicide bombing, one of the few large incidents in the Kurdish region. When we reach Erbil International Hotel, I am struck by how out-of-place it looks. It is glass and steel on stone columns, and it looks like a toy skyscraper stuck in the mud. Dr. Ali Sindi, a Harvard educated physician at the health ministry, insists that I am safe here. But safe from what? It’s a question no one seems able to answer.

In the hotel lounge there’s a Kurdish version of The West Wing unfolding. Officials from political parties meet and then head to the restaurant for shisha. Wedding receptions gather, with the Kurdish men in stocky suits and bulging pink ties. The women embody modern Islam, with arms and legs covered but hair flowing. A few women use elements from the dishdasha (a colorful traditional dress), but most wear western style pants and shirts. Peshmerga search and frisk everyone who enters.

Later in the day I get bored and walk outside to the peshmerga checkpoint. I bring a book of pictures from New York and a Hershey’s chocolate bar. The soldiers politely turn down the chocolate, but they are excited by the pictures of New York. Chinatown takes a minute to explain, but then there are fast exchanges in Kurdish and everyone nods approvingly. “Demoway bizanum Kurdi (I want to learn Kurdish),” I say. They teach me a few phrases and each shakes my hand.

It’s my first day. I am exhausted, and the details of the Halabja work begin to fill my mind with petty anxieties. One thing alone seems clear: The Kurds are a people under siege. In the United States we are not. It’s a distinction that will color every aspect of life here.

BOMBING AL-JAZEERA....Did George Bush seriously suggest that coalition forces should bomb al-Jazeera headquarters because he was unhappy over their coverage of the siege of Fallujah in 2004? Christopher Hitchens describes just how loony the thought is:

The state of Qatar, which though a Wahabbi kingdom has a free press and allows women to run and to vote in elections....It has also been the host of United States Central Command....It is the site each year of a highly interesting and useful conference, co-sponsored by the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution....Its emir has been a positive help and supporter to many democrats in the region. Bombing or blowing up the Al Jazeera office would involve hitting the downtown section of Doha, the capital city of a friendly power. It's difficult to think of any policy that would have been more calamitous.

OK, agreed. But did Bush suggest it? The two guys who leaked the contents of the incriminating memo are currently on trial in Britain, and the New York Times buries the following confirmation in its report:

Peter Kilfoyle, a legislator from Mr. Blair's Labor Party, said he...had tried to publicize the document in the United States in 2004.

Mr. Kilfoyle said in a telephone interview that he and [Tony] Clarke had hoped to influence the 2004 presidential election by sharing information from the document with John Latham, 71, a British citizen with connections to the Democratic Party.

The Guardian has more details on the Kilfoyle/Latham connection, and it all sounds pretty lame to me. Are these guys seriously saying that they couldn't figure out any way at all to safely get a photocopy of this document to an American newspaper? Why? Were they afraid no one would be interested? Sheesh.

BREMER ON RUMSFELD....Anybody who writes a memoir obviously has a considerable incentive to try to make himself look good. And when you were the guy in charge of a debacle like the occupation of Iraq, you really, really have an incentive to try to make yourself look good.

That said, Paul Bremer is apparently pretty clear in My Year in Iraq that he and Colin Powell were the real hawks in Iraq — hawk being defined here as someone who actually wanted to win, as opposed to someone who just wanted to test out pet theories of military transformation. The Weekly Standard has a series of excerpts demonstrating that Bremer and Powell (a) wanted more troops in Iraq and (b) wanted to gain control of the insurgency, while Rumsfeld just wanted to get the hell out.

Perhaps someday Rumsfeld will write his own book. I can't wait.

UPDATE: Think Progress illustrates Bremer's strenuous efforts to make himself look good here. It's a pretty safe bet that no one is coming out of this debacle with his reputation intact.

TOM DELAY AND THE RUSSIAN TYCOONS....The Campaign for America's Future plans to run ads on Houston TV stations accusing Tom DeLay of corruption. DeLay says he'll sue any station that runs the ad (KHOU report here).

So what does the ad say that DeLay objects to? The fact that he's been indicted? That's perfectly true. The fact that he took money from Jack Abramoff? Also true. Perhaps the fact that he's accepted hundreds of golf trips, private airplane flights, and expensive stays at world class resorts from friends? That's public record as well. So maybe it's this:

One million dollars from Russian tycoons to allegedly influence his vote. One million dollars from Russian tycoons?

You need to watch the video to catch the announcer's wonderful inflection on the second sentence, but you get the idea. The good folks of Sugar Land might not mind a bit of red-blooded American influence peddling, but they sure as hell don't think much of taking money from commie tycoons.

For the record, here's the Washington Post story that led to the charge:

The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay....$1 million of its revenue came in a single 1998 check....from Russian oil and gas executives. Abramoff had been working closely with two such Russian energy executives on their Washington agenda, and...had helped organize a 1997 Moscow visit by DeLay (R-Tex.).

Russian tycoons! That's the ticket!

UPDATE: From comments: "DeLay will sue? For what? Definition of character?"

INTELLIGENT DESIGN UPDATE....The El Tejon Unified School District has approved a new class:

An initial course description, which was distributed to students and their families last month, said "the class will take a close look at evolution as a theory and will discuss the scientific, biological and biblical aspects that suggest why Darwin's philosophy is not rock solid. The class will discuss Intelligent Design as an alternative response to evolution. Physical and chemical evidence will be presented suggesting the Earth is thousands of years old, not billions."

The course, which began Jan. 3 and is scheduled to run for one month, is being taught by Sharon Lemburg, a special education teacher with a bachelor of arts in physical education and social science.

And just how are school officials planning to apply a gloss of secular lipstick to this transparently religious pig? Why, it's a philosophy class, they say, not a science class.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Maybe both. But it does go to show that the real divide in California is not the famous one between north and south, it's the less well known one between coastal and inland. Drive a hundred miles into the interior of the state, and you might as well be in Mississippi.

HISTORY BLOGGING....Looking for a good history blog? On Saturday at the American Historical Association convention in Philadelphia, Ralph Luker announced the winners of the Cliopatria Awards for excellence in history blogging. You can see the results here.