FLAT FOOTED....Robert Nelson argues today that we shouldn't be too quick to get rid of the Alternative Minimum Tax:

There is wide agreement among economists on the benefits of a federal "flat tax" on income that would apply a uniform rate to every taxpayer and eliminate most current deductions and tax credits....As Post business reporter Albert B. Crenshaw has noted, the AMT "approaches a modern-day flat tax." It imposes a uniform rate of 26 percent up to $175,000 in income, and above that 28 percent.

As Nelson surely knows, there's wide agreement among economists that a broadly-based tax that minimizes exemptions and loopholes would be economically efficient. However, there is no agreement at all that having a flat rate is a good thing. It's wildly dishonest to say otherwise.

JAPAN AND DEMOCRACY....Actually, I didn't intend to write a post about a typo on the back cover of With All Our Might. I meant to write a post about Kenneth Pollack's essay, "A Grand Strategy for the Middle East." One of the things he does is make the familiar argument that a democratic Iraq will serve as a model for other Arab states:

It would be akin to how Japan showed other East Asian nations over a period of decades that democratic principles can coexist with East Asian traditions, values, and aspirations and so made the transformation of East Asia possible.

Question for any historians out there: is this a common argument? I may be demonstrating some ignorance here, but I've never before heard anyone make the case that the (partial) democratization of East Asia has been primarily due to Japan's example. Japan has obviously been the economic model for much of East Asia, but do historians and IR folks also think of Japan as a political model?

SWITCH HITTING GOVERNORS....The back cover of With All Our Might describes Mark Warner as "former governor of Virginia, Indiana." This is obviously a typo (though Warner was born in Indiana), but it got me wondering: has anyone ever served as governor of two different states? Within, say, the last hundred years or so? I'm just curious.

UPDATE: Apparently Sam Houston is the only one (Tennessee and Texas). But no two-state governors in the last hundred years.

OPTIMISM....Lindsay Beyerstein passes along the following anecdote about what the word optimist means when the subject is global warming:

My friend Ryan's dad is a famous polar zoologist. Several years ago, I asked Ryan what his dad thought about "the whole global warming thing."

"Well, my dad's an optimist about global warming," Ryan said...."My dad just thinks that global warming is going to kill off all the indigenous peoples and most of the wildlife in the arctic."

That's the lead-in to a pretty good review of An Inconvenient Truth. The whole thing is worth reading.

MOYERS ON JOURNALISM....Here is Bill Moyers defending public television against the charge that it's no longer needed because commercial TV provides us with everything we need:

One reason we get such pale and unquestioning journalism in America is that skepticism and irreverence toward the prerogatives of power and privilege are exactly what corporate media moguls don't want from the journalists who work for them. If they did, there wouldn't have been such gullible groupthink from the press when America went to war in Iraq on the basis of false information, faulty intelligence, fallacious propaganda, and flagrant secrecy. It's what happens when the news media becomes a complacent conduit for the government and multimedia corporations, failing to challenge authority, and passing information spun carefully by special interests both in and out of government.

....I believe in "fair and balanced."

I say let's be more fair than anyone else. Let's be as fair to Main Street as we are to Wall Street — to the working men and women of America as we are to the big corporations, big government, and big investors.

....Let's be as fair to the skeptic of official policy as we are to its spokesman, as fair to the commoner as to the celebrity, and as fair to the lived experience of ordinary people as we are to the calculated opinion of think tank experts.

I'm for balance.

Let's balance the spin with the evidence, the rhetoric with the record, and opinion with reporting.

....And let's balance programs written by the National Mining Association and Boeing with programs underwritten by the United Mine Workers, Consumer's Union, and Citizens for a Fair Economy. If they can't afford the underwriting, let's at least give them a hearing.

You will be unsurprised to learn that Moyers is also appalled at the idea of setting up "digital tollbooths" on the internet that will transform it into "a system of corporate-controlled pipes." Read the whole thing for more. It's a manifesto for what journalism ought to be.

CRACKUP ON THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT?....In our April issue, Amy Sullivan wrote about Randy Brinson, a conservative evangelical who became disenchanted with the zealotry of his fellow evangelicals and now finds himself fighting against them more often than not. Today, via Steve Benen, the Guardian follows up:

"They've been calling my house, threatening my wife," said Dr Brinson. "The first time was on a day when I was going up to Washington to speak to Republicans in Congress. Only they knew I'd be away from home. The Republicans were advised not to turn up to listen to me, so only three did so."

....In his office in Washington DC, Rich Cizik, vice-president of the National Association of Evangelicals, the largest such umbrella group in the US, is also feeling battered. His mistake has been to become interested in the environment, and he has been told that is not on the religious right's agenda.

...."It is supposed to be counterproductive even to consider this. I guess they do not want to part company with the president. This is nothing more than political assassination. I may lose my job. Twenty-five church leaders asked me not to take a political position on this issue but I am a fighter," he said.

Another Washington lobbyist on the religious right told the Guardian: "Rich is just being stupid on this issue. There may be a debate to be had but ... people can only sustain so many moral movements in their lifetime. Is God really going to let the Earth burn up?"

There you have it! God won't let anything bad happen to the Earth, so there's no point in worrying about it. I doubt that anyone will ever be able to talk sense into people who think like that, but kudos to guys like Brinson and Cizik for trying.

AMNESIA....You really have to wonder about guys like Taranto. Having a poor memory is one thing, but has he never heard of Nexis? Does the Wall Street Journal not have a subscription? Sheesh.

THE LATEST ON IRAN....The Bush administration is reversing course — despite Tony Snow's desperate denial that any such thing is taking place — and has agreed to direct talks with Iran. Good for them

I guess. Because of course there's a catch. As I said a few weeks ago about awkward diplomatic initiatives:

The usual response, if talks are unwelcome, is to demand some kind of obviously unacceptable precondition for the proposed meeting. This forces the other country to make concessions before negotiations have begun, and since no one is stupid enough to do that, it derails the talks nicely.

And that's exactly how it's playing out. The United States is demanding that Iran halt its nuclear program first, and only then will we join the Europeans in talks.

Here's hoping it works. It might, especially if it's true that Iran is having troubles with its uranium enrichment program and wouldn't really lose anything by halting it for a while. Still, this is straight out of the Diplomacy 101 playbook as a way of responding to pressure to look reasonable without actually running the risk of reaching a peaceful agreement. Stay tuned.

JOHN LOTT UPDATE....Today, the Los Angeles Times atones — partly — for having continued to publish op-eds by John Lott well after Lott's extreme hackitude had become obvious to anyone with a pulse. They do so by providing space for UC Irvine historian Jon Wiener to explain exactly why Lott is a hack and shouldn't be taken seriously.

Good for them. My favorite part of Wiener's piece is something I didn't know before. Here is Lott's response to Steven Levitt's statement that other researchers have been unable to replicate Lott's thesis that right-to-carry laws reduce crime:

Lott and his supporters disagree. They say it's not true that other researchers have been unable to validate his results. They point to a 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics that contains several articles by scholars who agree with Lott.

But it turns out that all the papers in that issue were originally presented at a conference organized by Lott, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle reported that Lott not only "arranged for the papers to be published in a special edition" of the journal, which is not unusual, but he also paid for the printing and postage.

It's sock puppetry on steroids!

THE MALPRACTICE NON-CRISIS....Today comes news about the latest study of medical malpractice claims. A Harvard team examined 1,452 closed cases in four areas that collectively account for about 80% of all malpractice suits, and here's what they found:

• Administration and litigation costs in our system are indeed very high, but the vast majority of the claims in the study were properly decided: the patients who suffered injury due to medical errors were compensated and those who weren't, weren't.

• About 150 of the cases involved patients who received compensation even though there was apparently no medical error.

• 236 of the cases involved patients who received no compensation even though they suffered injury due to medical error.
  

That's some out-of-control malpractice system, isn't it? I think we all agree that it would be nice to increase the accuracy of these cases, but if we did, the cost of malpractice payouts would go up, not down.

More detail here, including the fact that nearly all cases are settled out of court, and of the ones that do go to court, patients lose 80% of them. This study, by the way, follows a long line of earlier studies that show the same thing: malpractice claims are actually pretty rare; compensation is generally fair; a more accurate system would pay out more, not less; and malpractice payouts have not been rising any faster than the overall rate of medical inflation. The malpractice "crisis" is mostly just hype.

RUNNING THE CAUCUS....Sam Rosenfeld comments on Nancy Pelosi's tentative speaking style on political chat shows:

The actual job of managing a caucus in some kind of effective and strategic manner is immensely difficult in its own right. It's only the sheerest coincidence if it so happens that a person imbued with the proper skills, temperament, and ability as a caucus leader also happens to be slick and charming and photogenic. (Tom DeLay was not a good message person for the GOP. Neither is Dennis Hastert.) But the other thing about the job of congressional leader, besides that it's really hard, is that it's really important. Indeed, having someone there who's good at leading the House caucus is simply more important than having one who's good on Meet the Press.

That's right. Pelosi may get beat up about her lack of mad TV skillz, but as Michael Crowley says, "Denny Hastert, is perhaps the least articulate politician in all Washington. He may truly be among the most tongue-tied men who ever lived."

The difference, of course, is that he lets other people do the talking while he runs the caucus. Since Pelosi isn't planning to run for president, that might be the best bet for her too.

CNN RETURNS TO ARUBA....Here's the front page at CNN right now, and I just have to ask: are they trying to become a parody of themselves? They aren't even bothering to pretend there's any news in the case, either. It's just a one-year retrospective. Here's how they justify themselves:

The unfolding investigation had all the dramatic elements needed to captivate television audiences, said [Theodore] Simon, who has commented widely on the case.

"An American on an idyllic island supposedly celebrating her graduation goes missing under less than clear circumstances," he said.

Needless to say, Simon didn't have to bother mentioning that Holloway was an "18-year-old, 5-foot-4-inch blonde," because CNN had already said it for him several paragraphs earlier.

In any case, it's yet more bad timing from the White House, which probably didn't realize they were foolishly announcing a new Treasury Secretary on the anniversary of Natalee Holloway's disappearance. Who knows? If Henry Paulson were an 18-year-old, 5-foot-4-inch blonde, maybe they could have convinced CNN to cover it as actual news.

GOOGLE AND MEMORIAL DAY....Over at The Corner yesterday, Jonah Goldberg had the following bizarre complaint about Google:

It's kind of sad. They change their homepage logo for all sorts of holidays and occasions. Just last week they paid tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle's birthday. But Memorial Day doesn't seem to rate anything at all.

This meme overtook the conservo-sphere, with bloggers everywhere claiming they planned to switch to other search engines due to Google's manifest lack of patriotism.

Needless to say, lack of patriotism seemed unlikely in the extreme as the reason for Google's lack of a special Memorial Day banner. So I asked them what was up. Here's the answer from Megan Quinn in Google's press office:

Google celebrates a wide variety of holidays with Google Doodles. Doodles are generally reserved for international holidays and famous birthdays.

As it happens, Google does occasionally mark purely American holidays, but for the most part Megan seems to be correct. They generally stick to birthdays and international stuff.

Conservative bloggers may now go about their business. It turns out the republic is safe from search engine doodlers after all.

THE WAITING IS OVER....Eighteen months ago:

One senior administration official said Treasury Secretary John W. Snow can stay as long as he wants, provided it is not very long.

Well, they finally did it! It turns out that "not very long" in the Bush White House means a year and a half. Here's all you probably need to know about Snow's replacement, Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson:

But the White House spent months trying to find a prominent Wall Street figure to replace Snow, only to run into reluctance by many to take the cabinet job when economic policy was being set inside the White House.

So how did Paulson get suckered into the job? What kind of promises do you think they made to him? And how long will it be before he realizes they have no intention of honoring them?

UNAPOLOGETIC....I too noted the description of Nancy Pelosi as an "unapologetic liberal" in Mark Leibovich's recent profile of her. Matt Y. explains the problem:

Calling the Pelosis and Ted Kennedys and Dick Durbins of the world "unapologetic" has two problems. On the one hand, it suggests that maybe Pelosi should be apologetic about her liberalism. That, at a minimum, apologizing is something liberals should think about in a way conservatives shouldn't. Second, it reinforces the idea that more centrist Democrats are not, in fact, moderates but rather apologetic liberals with secret far-left hidden agendas.

I actually think #2 is the bigger problem, and this has nothing to do with Leibovich's choice of words. Rather, it's got to do with the fact that for a long time an awful lot of liberals really have been sort of apologetic about being liberals. The blogosphere may have plenty of pluses and minuses, but I think one of its pluses is that it's promoted a broadly read conversation in which liberals aren't apologetic, and that's now started to catch on in the rest of the world too. If the phrase "unapologetic liberal" ever becomes extinct, the liberal blogosphere can probably take a little bit of the credit.

THE GOOD FIGHT....I mentioned a couple of days ago that I had recently interviewed Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of The New Republic and now author of The Good Fight, a book that promotes a vigorous, anti-jihadist foreign policy vision for liberals. It's a very readable book (and fairly short, weighing in at only 208 pages), and spends most its time tracing an intellectual history of the "anti-imperialist" left.

More about that later. For now, fairly or unfairly, I assume that most liberals are going to focus on the fact that Beinart admits in the book that he was wrong about a whole host of issues prior to the war and that he no longer believes the war itself was a good idea. Which leads immediately to this:

KD: The obvious question, then, is with a track record like that why should anyone listen to you now?

PB: Anything one writes deserves to be judged by itself. The Democratic Party nominated someone in 2004 who had been flat wrong in his opposition to the Gulf War in 1991, I think most people would acknowledge that. Many people who were very prominent figures in the Democratic foreign policy debate and the Democratic Party in general--most of the people who were there at that time in 1991 were wrong about that. The vast majority of the party was wrong, and yet it still seems to me that we have things to learn from people like Sam Nunn or John Kerry. If you were to go from the Gulf War through Kosovo and Iraq, you would find that a large number of people in every facet of the liberal Democratic universe were wrong, on at least one of those wars. Very, very few people were right about all three of them. The people who were--and I think Al Gore is in this category--deserve a significant amount of credit, but the truth of the matter is, if you were looking for an untainted record, you would find very few people.

I think it's perfectly fair that Beinart get beat up about this. Aside from the fact that this was a fairly spectacular misjudgment and deserves attention on that score alone, I also think he could have been more introspective in the book, spending more time on analyzing why he thinks he was wrong back in 2002-03.

At the same time, though, he also has some provocative ideas in the book, and once we get the Beinart-bashing out of the way there are some things in The Good Fight that are worth dissecting.

I'll get into that later in the week. In the meantime, the entire interview is here.

MEMORIAL DAY.... Memorial Day didn't become a holiday until after the Civil War, but it was the Civil War that inspired it. So here's what my great-grandfather, Eli Drum, was doing 143 years ago today:

Friday 29th
Done nothing to day but patrol the streets.

Those would be the streets of Glasgow, Kentucky, where Eli and the rest of the Illinois 107th were twiddling their thumbs waiting for Ambrose Burnside to get started on the Eastern Tennessee campaign.

From these humble beginnings, Eli became a journalist in the town of Cerro Gordo, Illinois, where he and his neighbors observed Memorial Day every year with picnics and American flags. In a few minutes, I'm going to do the same.

See you tomorrow.

FAVORITE MUSIC REVISITED....How do people come up with top ten music lists from their iPods? Several people — for example, Professor Bainbridge, here — have pointed out to me that iPods keep track of which songs you listen to most often, so it's pretty easy to come up with a list of favorites: Just ask your iPod. I didn't know that.

I don't have an iPod, but I wonder if I can do the same thing? That is, not try to pick the music I think I like the best, but the stuff that I actually find myself playing most often. Or the individual pieces that I find myself looking forward to when I'm playing an album.

My taste in music is strictly middlebrow Top 40 within the genres I like (classical and 60s/70s pop), although when I went through this exercise I did find a couple of pieces that were slightly off the beaten path. So here you go: a pair of top ten music lists, one for classical and one for pop. Let the mockery begin!

Pop

Stand By Me, Ben E. King
Killing Me Softly, Roberta Flack
Figlio Perduto, Chiara Ferraù/Sarah Brightman
A Hazy Shade of Winter, Simon and Garfunkel
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, Amy Grant
Twelve-Thirty, The Mamas and the Papas
All I Know, Jimmy Webb/Art Garfunkel
Mrs. Vanderbilt, Wings
Feed the Birds, Sherman & Sherman/Julie Andrews
The Last Resort, Eagles

Nothing by the Beatles, oddly enough, though there are half a dozen songs that could have made the list. On the great Beatles/Stones question, I'm solidly in the Beatles camp.

Classical

Harpsichord Sonata #11 in G Minor, Antonio Soler
Piano Concerto #2 in C Minor, Sergei Rachmaninoff
Concerto for Mandolin in G Major, Johann Adolf Hasse
Piano Concerto #20 in D Minor, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Impromptus, Franz Schubert
Symphony #9 in D Minor, Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Sonata #14 in C Sharp Minor (Moonlight), Ludwig van Beethoven
Canon in D Major, Johann Pachelbel
Concerto in G Major for Two Mandolins and String Orchestra, Antonio Vivaldi
Sugar Cane, Scott Joplin

FISCHER ON IRAN....Germany's former foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, analyzes the Iranian situation today:

The Iran crisis is moving fast in an alarming direction. There can no longer be any reasonable doubt that Iran's ambition is to obtain nuclear weapons capability....Iran is betting on revolutionary changes within the power structure of the Middle East to help it achieve its strategic goal. To this end, it makes use of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as Lebanon, Syria, its influence in the Persian Gulf region and, above all, Iraq. This combination of hegemonic aspirations, questioning of the regional status quo and a nuclear program is extremely dangerous.

Sounds pretty non-squishy to me. So what does he think we ought to do about it?

There remains a serious chance for a diplomatic solution if the United States, in cooperation with the Europeans and with the support of the U.N. Security Council and the non-aligned states of the Group of 77, offers Iran a "grand bargain." In exchange for long-term suspension of uranium enrichment, Iran and other states would gain access to research and technology within an internationally defined framework and under comprehensive supervision by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Full normalization of political and economic relations would follow, including binding security guarantees upon agreement of a regional security design.

The high price for refusing such a proposal has to be made absolutely clear to the Iranian leadership: Should no agreement be reached, the West would do everything in its power to isolate Iran economically, financially, technologically and diplomatically, with the full support of the international community. Iran's alternatives should be no less than recognition and security or total isolation.

Security guarantees can come only from the United States, and Iran knows it. This is why the U.S. has to be part of any serious negotiations. The Europeans simply can't address security issues without us.

HADITHA....So what really happened at Haditha last November? Did a company of Marines murder two dozen Iraqi civilians in cold blood after they lost one of their own to a roadside bomb? Apparently so:

One of the most damning pieces of evidence investigators have in their possession, John Sifton of Human Rights Watch told Time's Tim McGirk, is a photo, taken by a Marine with his cell phone that shows Iraqis kneeling — and thus posing no threat — before they were shot.

A congressman who was briefed on the investigation agrees:

"This was a small number of Marines who fired directly on civilians and killed them," said Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican and former Marine who was briefed two weeks ago by Marine Corps officials. "This is going to be an ugly story."

....Almost as damaging as the alleged massacre may be evidence that the unit's members and their superiors conspired to cover it up. "There's no doubt that the Marines allegedly involved in doing this — they lied about it," says Kline.

And two more congressmen suspect that the coverup extends pretty high up the chain of command:

Two influential legislators who have been briefed on the U.S. military's investigation into the deaths of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians said today they suspect that senior officers were involved in covering up evidence of war crimes by the Marine unit involved.

Neither lawmaker — Sen. John Warner (R-Va), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a former Marine and a leading authority on military issues — said they had direct evidence of top officers trying to suppress information.

...."It goes right up the chain of command," added Murtha, who has emerged as one of the most vocal critics of the Iraq war....Warner was more cautious in his criticism, but said there were "serious questions" about "what happened and when it happened and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it."

What an appalling and tragic story. It is, I suppose, only a tiny blot compared to the carnage that Iraqi militants inflict on each other every single day in this endless and brutal war, but this one is our blot. I hope this time we do the right thing about it.

THE HAWKS REGROUP....Jacob Heilbrunn surveys the scene in liberal hawk circles these days:

A host of pundits and young national security experts associated with the [Democratic] party are calling for a return to the Cold War precepts of President Truman to wage a war against terror that New Republic Editor Peter Beinart, in the title of his provocative new book, calls "The Good Fight."

....These Democrats want to be seen as anything but the squishes who have led the party to defeat in the past.

Indeed they do. But here's the funny thing about that. I read The Good Fight a couple of weeks ago, and Beinart is pretty clear that he now believes he was wrong about a whole host of things back in 2003. He was wrong about WMD, wrong about containment, wrong about the need for international legitimacy, etc. etc. If he had it to do over again, he wouldn't have supported the war.

What's more, his prescription for how liberals should approach foreign policy going forward is distinctly non-martial. He believes we need a sort of modern-day Marshall plan for the Middle East; a willingness to work with international institutions even if that sometimes restrains our actions; an acceptance that we should abide by the same restrictions that we demand of others; greater patience in foreign affairs; and a rededication to social justice both at home and abroad.

In other words, I think he could give the keynote address at YearlyKos and not really say much of anything the audience would disagree with. If Beinart really is the standard bearer for a new incarnation of liberal hawkishness, then we're almost all liberal hawks now.

There's a little more to it, of course, and Beinart remains critical of liberals who have gotten so disgusted with George Bush's approach to terrorism that they've decided the whole war on terror is just a sham. Still, it's an interesting transformation, and many of the differences that remain within liberal circles strike me as more rhetorical than substantive.

I interviewed Beinart about all this last week, and the interview should be available in a couple of days. I'll have more to say about it then.

GEORGE BUSH'S LEGACY....Matt Yglesias says Nir Rosen's piece about Iraq in the Sunday Washington Post is the "must-read of the day." I suppose so:

I have spent nearly two of the three years since Baghdad fell in Iraq. On my last trip, a few weeks back, I flew out of the city overcome with fatalism. Over the course of six weeks, I worked with three different drivers; at various times each had to take a day off because a neighbor or relative had been killed. One morning 14 bodies were found, all with ID cards in their front pockets, all called Omar. Omar is a Sunni name. In Baghdad these days, nobody is more insecure than men called Omar. On another day a group of bodies was found with hands folded on their abdomens, right hand over left, the way Sunnis pray. It was a message. These days many Sunnis are obtaining false papers with neutral names. Sunni militias are retaliating, stopping buses and demanding the jinsiya, or ID cards, of all passengers. Individuals belonging to Shiite tribes are executed.

Believe it or not, it actually gets worse from there. Be sure to keep reading until you get to the part about the ministry of health.

Like Matt, a year ago I thought that an orderly and planned withdrawal of American troops had a chance — a small one, but a chance — of reducing tensions and producing a non-catastrophic outcome in Iraq. I don't anymore. At this point, I'm mostly worried about what happens when Iraq's low-level civil war turns into a full-scale, armies-on-both-sides-fighting-openly-in-the-streets civil war. Either we'll try to do something about it, which will produce enormous casualties and probably have no effect, or else we'll retreat to our "enduring bases" and hide. Either option will make clear to the world that the greatest military in the world is helpless.

That's quite a legacy. I wonder who George Bush will try to blame it on?

OPPOSITION AS DEFINITION....Digby sez:

The non-southern Party appears to exist mainly as a repository of opposition to conservative policies. Is that true?

Yes, there's some truth to that, but I think it works both ways. One of the reasons that American politics is stalemated these days is that activists in both parties often define themselves more by opposition to the other than by support for a positive program of change. Conservatives — especially cultural conservatives — mostly want to fight the moral relativism and assaults on traditionalism that they believe are rife among liberals. Liberals, conversely, mostly want to prevent conservatives from clawing back the gains they made in the 60s and 70s. The end result is trench warfare, with neither side ever winning any significant victories because both sides are fighting rear guard actions.

So what kinds of things would really help working families? That's not hard to figure out. Rising wages would help, and the single biggest thing we could do there would be to roll back the laws and regulations that have made private sector unionization nearly impossible over the past few decades. Fiscal and monetary policies that encourage full employment would be a good idea too.

What else? National healthcare would help, since working families frequently lose access to healthcare when they're out of work temporarily or work for someone that doesn't provide health benefits. Universal access to decent childcare would help since two-job families are the norm rather than the exception these days.

There's more, but that's enough for now. All of these things used to be part of the explicit and implicit bargains between business and labor that defined the postwar era: if you work hard you'll make enough to raise a family on one salary; you'll get decent healthcare for you and your kids; and as the economy grows, we'll all get richer and more prosperous together. That bargain broke down long ago, but nothing has since taken its place. Sounds like a pretty good campaign platform to me.

THE iPOD TEST....Everyone's pissed off over Jacob Weisberg's weird rant about Hillary Clinton's iPod, and they're right to be. He basically used it as an excuse to demonstrate that Hillary is exactly the conniving fake he always thought she was, and it's likely he would have written the exact same thing regardless of what songs had made her top ten list. It was a remarkably lazy piece.

But I'm curious about something else: How do people even come up with these top ten lists in the first place? I don't think I could do it. That's not to say that I don't have any favorites. I do, and it would be easy to prepare a list of ten pieces that I like a lot. But if you asked me to do the same thing next week, there's a pretty good chance that I'd choose an entirely different list.

On the other hand, I'd have an easier time choosing a list of favorite books, even though I own way more books than CDs. Is this because I'm not much of a music person and pretty much only listen to it as background noise in the car? Are you more likely to have firm favorites in a medium that you pay more attention to?

And why is everyone so obsessed with music, anyway? Why not ask Hillary for her top ten list of books? Or movies? Or tourist destinations? Why does music continue to be the ultimate Rorschach test of our times?

WAGE GROWTH IN AMERICA....Brad DeLong has a nice, readable introduction to income and wage trends over at his place that's worth a look. At MaxSpeak, Max Sawicky comments that "I don't envy the politician trying to explain it in less space," while the Sandwichman wonders if the tiny growth in wages over the past few decades is even tinier than it looks because some of it is due to the fact that the average worker is older now, and older workers get paid more regardless of whether average wages are going up.

Well, here's a single data point that addresses both questions. It's a chart that shows median income for 35-44 year old men and women since the end of World War II.

First the good news: women have made steady increases — though it's worth noting that about half of that gain is because women work more hours than they did 30 years ago. On an hourly basis, the increase since then amounts to about 1% per year.

And men? Not such good news. The average 40-year-old guy made $44,000 in 1973, and that was as good as it ever got. Today that number is about $40,000. It's gone down even though the American economy has nearly doubled on a per-person basis during that time.

So where did all the money go? What happened in 1973 that suddenly stopped wage growth for half the population in its tracks? And what should we do about it?

FAUX OUTRAGE....The Veterans Affairs Department lost 26.5 million personal records a few weeks ago when a midlevel analyst decided to copy a database and take it home to work on it. Congress is outraged:

"Just unbelievable," said Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs.

...."I don't think the secretary is really up to this job," said Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio), a member of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs.

Added Rep. Bob Filner (D-Chula Vista), another panel member: "You say you take responsibility, but then you tell veterans to 'go call your creditors.'...The most dramatic thing to take responsibility is to resign."

Well, I don't blame them for being outraged, although it's worth noting that every computer system has people with the privileges necessary to access and copy sensitive information. Still, even though the VA isn't the CIA, computer security sure shouldn't be taken as casually as the VA apparently takes it.

That said, I wonder just how genuine Congress's outrage really is? After all, the main problem with the loss of the data is identity theft, and there are plenty of things Congress could do to make ID theft a thing of the past. All of them would require some regulation of the credit industry, though, and the most effective measures would effectively do away with "instant credit" too, since the best way to prevent fraud is to require more than just a signature on a piece of paper in order to open up a charge account. If, instead, granting credit required an independent confirmation of identity, either in person or through some trusted intermediary, the problem of ID theft could be reduced almost to zero (though stolen credit cards would still be a problem). At that point, the theft of personal information would become an annoyance, not the nerve-wracking, years-long catastrophe it is today.

But....regulate the credit industry? Good God, man, do I know what I'm suggesting? I can't actually expect Congress to be that outraged, can I?

Even worse, if we really want to get serious about ID theft we'd have to effectively put an end to instant credit — though that doesn't really strike me as such a horrible thing. But I'll bet if the penalties for granting fraudulent credit were big enough, the credit industry would suddenly discover it wasn't such a bad thing either.

UPDATE: Of course, ID theft isn't the only problem here. The VA needs to get their computer security house in order regardless.

THOSE GENIAL CANADIANS....I really ought to pay more attention to what's happening in Canada:

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has declared he won't talk to the national media because they are biased against him, his latest move in a spat with the Parliament's press corps.

....Since Harper's minority government took office after the Jan. 23 elections, his relations with the national media have become more and more strained. Determined to impose order on the traditionally chaotic press scrum in which reporters shout out questions, Harper said he would choose questioners from a pre-screened list....After journalists refused to sign on to the list, Harper refused to take any questions.

On Tuesday, when Harper's press secretary announced there would be no questions after his announcement of aid to the Darfur region of Sudan, nearly two dozen reporters walked out, leaving the prime minister to make his statement in front of a single camera in a nearly empty room.

What fun! Don't you wish our press had the balls to do something like that?

THE FBI AND CONGRESS....Given its extremely politicized conduct in the past, Mark Kleiman believes that giving the FBI the power to search congressional offices is extremely dangerous. What's more, he's basically threatening to keep blogging about this forever unless we all go read his full argument. So go read it! He even has comments these days if you want to argue with him.

I'm not fully convinced myself. It strikes me that the FBI is the agency best qualified to conduct criminal investigations of national figures, and there are probably some narrowly targeted restrictions that could be placed on their ability to request search warrants if there are serious concerns that they might abuse it for purposes of political retribution. But go read Mark's argument and decide for yourself.

TALKING TO IRAN....Unsurprisingly, Charles Krauthammer is resolutely opposed to talks with Iran. Also unsurprisingly, his writing on the subject is little more than the darkest and most hysterical sort of agitprop:

Mark my words. The momentum for U.S.-Iran negotiations has only begun. The focus of the entire Iranian crisis will begin to shift from the question of whether Tehran will stop its nuclear program to whether Washington will sit down alone at the table with Tehran.

To this cynical bait-and-switch, there can be no American response other than No. Absolutely not.

....Just yesterday the Democratic nominee for president attacked President Bush's foreign policy precisely for refusing to consult with, listen to and work with "the allies." Another day, another principle. Bush is now being pressured to abandon multilateralism and go it alone with Iran.

Nobody — not one person — is suggesting that Bush abandon Europe and negotiate with Iran unilaterally, and Krauthammer knows it. Rather, proponents of engagement with Iran believe that we should negotiate both multilaterally and bilaterally: multilaterally with our allies so that everyone has a stake in success, and bilaterally because sometimes you can accomplish things in private talks that you can't in a more public forum. These two tracks can happen simultaneously, both formally and informally, and at multiple levels.

David Ignatius, a more sensible observer who, unlike Krauthammer, understands traditional American strengths and values, has the better argument:

America's best strategy is to play to its strengths — which are the open exchange of ideas, backed up by unmatched military power.

....There's no guarantee that a policy of engagement will work. The Iranian regime's desire to acquire nuclear weapons may be so unyielding that Tehran and Washington will remain on a collision course. But America and its allies will be in a stronger position for responding to Iranian calls for dialogue. Openness isn't a concession by America, it's a strategic weapon.

Amen to that. It's time to stop listening to the loons.

THE LAST TAX CUT?....The IRS has finally sent up the white flag in a long running legal battle over whether the 3% excise tax on long distance phone calls applies to calls that are billed at a flat rate (as opposed to calls that are billed based on "distance and elapsed transmission time"). The answer is no, so now the tax goes away and a bunch of (mostly corporate) customers will get several billion dollars in refunds.

I don't actually care one way or the other about this tax, but I couldn't resist posting this sentence from the Bloomberg summary:

The courts' involvement may deliver a victory to tax-cutting Republicans in Washington who are running out of taxes to cut and are facing a projected $300 billion budget deficit for this year.

"Running out of taxes to cut." It's funny cause it's true! And since the entire domestic policy apparatus of the modern Republican Party is based on tax cuts for their campaign contributors, what will they do now?