PARTISAN HACKERY....Over at Tapped, the boys are discussing whether America would be better off if the media junked the fiction of "objectivity" and just adopted the European habit of sporting an open ideology. Ezra Klein suggests that although overt ideology might be OK, "A bunch of partisan outlets would be a problem. There's nothing honest or constant about their opinions, and so the whole advantage of knowing their beliefs evaporates when the beliefs become inconvenient and change."

Family honor compels me to disagree. Here is the notice in the Piatt [pronounced Pie'-utt, by the way] County Republican in July 1900 announcing the first issue of the Cerro Gordo Star, my great-grandfather's third newspaper:

Eli Drum has again resumed....Eli has been a republican and then a democrat and now has decided to become — a populist and extract sweetness from both the old parties. In fact Cerro Gordo is not healthy place for a democratic paper.

Is Ezra calling my great-grandfather dishonest? Inconstant? Just because he apparently picked whichever party — or non-party — happened to be convenient depending on where and when he was setting up a printing press?

I demand satisfaction. Typewriters at twenty paces.

POSTSCRIPT: And what's this "Get there Eli" business all about? Beats me. A Google search informs me that Eli Perkins was the pen name of one Melville Landon, a stage humorist and author of Wit, Humor and Pathos. Apparently his catchphrase became popular to describe someone who was a striver, a go-getter, a person who never gave up. Eli Drum's second paper (the Democratic one, presumably) started up in 1890, but the phrase predates that. For example:

1883: Our people are free and untrammeled, and "get there Eli" every time.

1884: By his indomitable will, his sterling qualities, and his quiet, unassuming "get there Eli" and bound to succeed spirit, has kept climbing up the ladder round by round, until he is nearing the topmost.

1886: Belle Plaine is a get there Eli kind of a town, a sure go town, a good kind of a town to tie to.

1889: The people are glad to hear Colby is to have a mill. Colby knows how to get there, Eli.

1893: He was always one of the "get-there-Eli" boys.

1903: "'All right,' says he. 'I'll do it, and it's "Get there, Eli!" when I hook dirt....

1919: "Oh, I don't mind! Pick on me all you like, — either of you. I suppose there are some frills I'm not onto, — but I'm quick at catchin' on, — and I'll get there, Eli!"

There is also a song called "Get There Eli," and a town in Nebraska named Eli whose residents are under the misimpression that it was originally named Get-There-Eli because that was the nickname of one of its original residents.

Wasn't that fun?

GUANTÁNAMO....Abdullah Mujahid is a detainee at Guantánamo who pleaded innocent and called four witnesses from Afghanistan to testify at his hearing. After several months, the tribunal president said they couldn't be found. Apparently no one looked very hard:

The Guardian searched for Mr Mujahid's witnesses and found them within three days. One was working for President Hamid Karzai. Another was teaching at a leading American college. The third was living in Kabul. The fourth, it turned out, was dead. Each witness said he had never been approached by the Americans to testify in Mr Mujahid's hearing.

....In the military tribunal Mr Mujahid protested his innocence. He enjoyed good relations with American soldiers and had been promoted, not fired, he said. The three living witnesses he requested were easily located with a telephone, an internet connection and a few days work.

....The witnesses largely corroborated Mr Mujahid's story, with some qualifications. Mr Jalali, the former interior minister, said Mr Mujahid had been fired over allegations of corruption and bullying - not for attacking the government. Mr Haider, the former defence official, said Mr Mujahid had contributed 30 soldiers to a major operation against al-Qaida in March 2002. "He is completely innocent," he said.

Look. Guantánamo isn't an easy issue. The whole question of how best to handle detainees isn't an easy issue. Plenty of the inmates at Guantánamo are genuinely dangerous people, and we can hardly afford to let them go free just because we don't have Perry Mason standards of evidence against them. There just aren't simple answers to this.

But the evidence has mounted for years that many of the detainees at Guantánamo were picked up randomly in Afghanistan or turned over for reward in Pakistan, and are being held with essentially no evidence at all. See here and here for more. In Mujahid's case, we were dealing with a former police chief in Gardez, not some random guy picked up on a battlefield, and yet we still claimed we couldn't find any of the witnesses he asked for.

I think most of the world understands perfectly well the dilemma we face in handling these guys. But it's impossible to ignore the fact that we don't even seem to be trying to figure out who belongs in custody and who's just a mistake. That's why Guantánamo is a disgrace.

UPDATE: Ah, I see that this same story ran in the Boston Globe a couple of weeks ago. Oddly enough, it was co-written by the same guy who wrote the Guardian's version.

HOW HAMDAN WILL PLAY OUT....I don't agree with Marshall Wittman much these days, but I think he may be right about this:

Analysis that suggests [the Hamdan decision] is a political setback for the GOP has it exactly wrong. Republicans would like nothing better than a pre-election debate over whether Osama's buddies should receive ACLU approved rights. It is likely that many Democrats will join Republicans in supporting tough guidelines for military commissions.

Probably so. And Democrats would be right to support tough guidelines, which could probably sail through Congress with bipartisan support to spare if that's what the Republican leadership wants.

They don't, of course. They want a campaign issue, not a solution, and most likely won't rest until they manage to find legislative wording so punitive and extreme that even Hillary Clinton can't support it. It may not be good for the country, but it makes for good C-SPAN.

PRIZES....For some reason, many conservative bloggers seem to be captivated by the idea of offering prizes for scientific progress. This is mentioned most often in the context of space exploration, but how about something more down to earth? Republican congressman Dan Lungren has an idea:

What would happen if the United States were to offer a $1-billion prize for the first American automaker to sell 60,000 midsized sedans that could travel 100 miles on one gallon of gasoline?

It wouldn't be a panacea for our energy problems, but it would stimulate the development of viable technologies to reduce oil consumption while we develop alternatives to petroleum.

My problem with this is the same as my problem with most other prize ideas: it's chump change. A billion dollars for a car company? Ford's R&D budget is already somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 billion a year, and just yesterday they abandoned their pledge to sell 250,000 hybrid cars a year by 2010 because they figured it was too expensive a proposition. And that's for a technology that's already pretty well understood.

I can't imagine that any car company would seriously change its behavior for a lousy billion dollars. Better make it a hundred billion, Dan.

PANDA SLUGGER....It sometimes seems as if right-wing hawks in America must get together every few years to assign each country in the world its own personal Chicken Little, someone to consistently make the maximal case for that country's danger to American security. Iraq, for example, had Ahmed Chalabi. Iran has Michael Ledeen.

For China, that person is Michael Pillsbury, a Mandarin-speaking scholar who can be relied on to provide the most nerve-wracking possible view of China's future military capability to anyone willing to listen. And needless to say, he has the ear of Donald Rumsfeld. After all, China hawkery is the ultimate trump card when budget season rolls around and it's time to justify yet another carrier group.

There's only one problem: it turns out that Pillsbury plays a little fast and loose when he explains China's alleged future plans to American audiences. Soyoung Ho provides chapter and verse this month in "Panda Slugger," a profile of Pillsbury that includes the following explanation of one particular future terror that he warns about relentlessly:

And what about the "Assassin's Mace," one of Pillsbury's major preoccupations? Here, Pillsbury appears to have taken a common Chinese term, shashoujian, and decided, based on his own unfamiliarity with it ("I first saw this unusual term in...1995," he writes in a 2003 article) that it indicates what he calls a "secret project."

In fact, though, the term has been around for centuries and has been revived in contemporary Chinese pop culture, a slangy phrase that appears in articles about everything from soccer to romance. Pillsbury cites public speeches by Chinese leaders and articles in Chinese newspapers that speak of developing "shashoujian" weapons, but he never explains how this adds up to evidence of a secret program. It's as if a Chinese researcher, hearing a U.S. official speaking of a need for "kick-ass weapons," were to become confused by the term "kick-ass" and conclude that there must be a secret "kick-ass weapons" program. In short, Pillsbury has identified a secret program that, by all indications, is literally no more than a figure of speech.

There's much more than this, though. You can read the whole story here.

ATTENTION WAL-MART SHOPPERS....According to Ryan Sager, frequent Wal-Mart shoppers are "largely Southern, rural, lower-middle-class, female, socially conservative — not big fans of tax cuts, but huge fans of government programs." What's more, these shoppers make up about a fifth of the total U.S. population.

You may wonder why you should care, but apparently pollster John Zogby thinks this demographic is the next NASCAR Dad or Soccer Mom. And there's this:

Zogby finds that while 85 percent of frequent Wal-Mart shoppers voted for President Bush's reelection in 2004 (and 88 percent of people who never shop there voted for Sen. John Kerry), Wal-Mart voters have turned on the president dramatically. In a poll taken earlier this month, they gave Bush a 35 percent approval rating — compared to a 45 percent positive rating from born-again Christians, 49 percent from NASCAR fans, and 54 percent from self-identified conservatives.

Most worrying for the GOP: Fifty-one percent of Wal-Mart voters agreed with the statement that it's "time for the Democrats to take over and run" Congress — as opposed to just 31 percent who think "Republicans deserve to retain control."

Admit it: this is kind of interesting. I don't quite know what to make of it, but it's still interesting. Maybe Kansas is finally coming to its senses?

Via Steve Benen.

WRONG MAN, WRONG TIME....Here's one more excerpt from The One Percent Doctrine. Sometime in the next few days I'll post some overall thoughts about the book.

This excerpt is from the very last couple of pages. It's late October 2004, a few days before the election, and Osama bin Laden has just released a long anti-Bush jeremiad. At the CIA, the men and women who know bin Laden best, who have been tracking al-Qaeda practically without rest for the previous three years, are sitting around a table discussing what it means:

What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons — and those reasons are debated with often startling depth inside the organization's leadership. Their assessments, at day's end, are a distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversations that the American public, and by association the wider world community, were not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis.

Today's conclusion: bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection.

At the five o'clock meeting, once various reports on latest threats were delivered, John McLaughlin opened the issue with the consensus view: "Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President."

Around the table, there were nods....Jami Miscik talked about how bin Laden — being challenged by Zarqawi's rise — clearly understood how his primacy as al Qaeda's leader was supported by the continuation of his eye-to-eye struggle with Bush. "Certainly," she offered, "he would want Bush to keep doing what he's doing for a few more years."

But an ocean of hard truths before them — such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin Laden would want Bush reelected — remained untouched....On that score, any number of NSC principals could tell you something so dizzying that not even they will touch it: that Bush's ratings [in the U.S.] track with bin Laden's rating in the Arab world.

The fact that we're doing what bin Laden wants doesn't automatically mean we're doing the wrong thing. But it sure as hell ought to give us pause, shouldn't it?

TALKIN' ABOUT LANGUAGE....If I were commenting on someone else's book review, I suppose I'd excerpt the most incendiary paragraph I could find and then hang it out to dry all by itself. I guess, then, that it's only fair to do the same to my own review in this month's Mother Jones of George Lakoff's latest book, Whose Freedom?:

The result is richly ironic: A man who’s made his reputation advising liberals on how to use language more effectively has written a turgid and nearly unreadable book that rests on hundreds of short, disjointed sections and dozens of long bullet lists that demonstrate how, if you strain hard enough, commonplace concepts can all be rewritten in a way that includes the words “free” or “freedom.” And Lakoff’s lists make it clear that he can’t frame his way out of a paper bag. “Freedom judges” as a replacement for “judicial activists”? Spare me. And when it comes to the most salient topic in all of contemporary politics, the liberal response to the war on terror, he’s just stumped. In the entire book, Lakoff devotes only one platitude-filled paragraph to the subject.

As with all breezy blog excerpts, this makes a lot more sense if you read the stuff that comes before and after. And lest you think I'm just being cranky, I did like Geoffrey Nunberg's book about language, Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show. "Sparkling," I called it, "a witty and authoritative guide to several decades of political linguistic history."

THE NYT AND NATIONAL SECURITY....ANOTHER VIEW....Here's another take on whether the New York Times damaged national security by exposing the Treasury Department's terror finance tracking program. In The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind spends a lot of time describing the way U.S. intelligence tracked global money flows after 9/11, including accounts of the cooperation they got from Western Union (wire transfers), First Data Corporation (credit card records), and the takeover of a "money store" in Pakistan. He doesn't mention the SWIFT program specifically, but he makes it clear that U.S. teams had their fingers in a lot of financial pies and had a considerable amount of success with it.

But only for a while:

In the closing months of 2003...the carefully constructed global network of sigint and what can be called finint, or financial intelligence, started to go quiet.

In short, al Qaeda, and its affiliates and imitators, stopped leaving electronic footprints. It started slowly, but then became distinct and clear, a definable trend. They were going underground.

...."We were surprised it took them so long," said one senior intelligence official. "But the lesson here is that with an adaptable, patient enemy, a victory sometimes creates the next set of challenges. In this case, we did some things that worked very well, and they started to evolve."

Or devolve. The al Qaeda playbook, employed by what was left of the network, its affiliates and imitators, started to stress the necessity of using couriers to carry cash and hand-delivered letters. This slowed the pace of operations, if not their scale, and that was, indeed, a victory.

By the beginning of 2004, Suskind says, the finint operation was in a "state of increasing obsolescence." The money store had closed down, the Palestinians had gotten wise to Western Union, and the "matrix," as he calls the overall finint operation, was becoming less and less effective.

Take this for what it's worth. But if Suskind is right, the SWIFT program probably hasn't been producing much actionable intelligence for over two years. NYT editor Bill Keller claims that government efforts to prevent exposure of the program were "half hearted," and if he's right, maybe this is the reason. Maybe it had outlived its usefulness long before the Times discovered it.

THE END OF GITMO?....President Bush told reporters a few days ago that he'd like to close the prison at Guantanamo. No one really took him seriously, but now it looks like he might get his wish after all:

The Supreme Court today delivered a stunning rebuke to the Bush administration over its plans to try Guantanamo detainees before military commissions, ruling that the commissions are unconstitutional.

....The case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a 36-year-old Yemeni with links to al-Qaeda, was considered a key test of the judiciary's power during wartime and carried the potential to make a lasting impact on American law. It challenged the very legality of the military commissions established by President Bush to try terrorism suspects.

The Supreme Court has now denied Bush's authority to detain prisoners indefinitely and denied his authority to try them solely before military commissions. Marty Lederman comments further:

More importantly, the Court held that Common Article 3 of Geneva aplies as a matter of treaty obligation to the conflict against Al Qaeda. That is the HUGE part of today's ruling. The commissions are the least of it. This basically resolves the debate about interrogation techniques, because Common Article 3 provides that detained persons "shall in all circumstances be treated humanely," and that "[t]o this end," certain specified acts "are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever" — including "cruel treatment and torture," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." This standard, not limited to the restrictions of the due process clause, is much more restrictive than even the McCain Amendment. See my further discussion here.

This almost certainly means that the CIA's interrogation regime is unlawful, and indeed, that many techniques the Administation has been using, such as waterboarding and hypothermia (and others) violate the War Crimes Act (because violations of Common Article 3 are deemed war crimes).

Considering how deferential the court normally is to executive power in wartime, this is an extraordinary decision. The court pretty clearly feels that Bush has way overstepped his constitutional boundaries.

YOYO ECONOMICS....Jared Bernstein writes about the fact that the U.S. economy has been growing at a pretty good clip lately but middle class incomes haven't benefited:

This disconnect between productivity and living standards is one of today’s most important, and most unsettling, economic dynamics. It’s obviously not the only salient problem we face — the extent of our fiscal and international indebtedness is also worthy of our attention. But I see these all of a package.

It’s a package tied up with a YOYO. That’s the acronym for “you’re on your own,” which over the past few decades has become a disturbing and destructive thematic embedded in our economic policy.

Read the rest.

CLEAN MONEY....I missed the news when it was announced on Monday, but it looks as if a ballot initiative has qualified in California that I might actually have to vote for: the Clean Money and Fair Elections Act of 2006. It's modeled on Arizona's campaign finance law, and the goal is to remove nearly all private funding of political campaigns. To qualify for public funding under the act, you have to raise $5 contributions from a set number of people (for example, 750 contributions for an Assembly race, 25,000 contributions if you're running for governor), and agree not to raise any additional money from private sources. All candidates get the same amount of money, and if one candidate decides to forego the state limits and raise private money, the others qualify for additional matching funds.

So far, neither Phil Angelides nor Arnold Schwarzenegger have taken a position on the measure, which was put on the ballot by the California Nurses Association. Marc Cooper is, um, skeptical that either one will support it:

So will Phil, whose campaign is already faltering and scurrying behind the Governator’s, come out and boldly endorse the clean-money initiative? Will the Democratic Party machine that cranked out squads of phone bankers and door knockers for Angelides in the primary now put its muscle behind an initiative that will finally crimp the role of Big Money in state politics? Will Democrats be willing to support a measure that blocks the flow of both corporate and union funding into the electoral system? Or, better put, will Pope Benedict demand that his young nephews have bar mitzvahs? All of the above outcomes are equally likely.

....So while naive liberals might now be expecting Phil and the party to throw their weight behind real campaign-finance reform, it’s more likely they’re about to learn that there really is no difference between the two parties on this issue. The fight around the November clean-money initiative promises to be a monumental battle between the entirety of the political establishment on the one hand, and the CNA and some consumer advocates on the other.

My head says Marc is probably right, but my heart hopes he's wrong. Having a big state like California adopt a measure like this would give campaign finance reform a huge boost. We'll see.

In the meantime, a brief summary of the initiative is here. A slightly more detailed summary is here. A more complete primer with all the details is here.

BLOGGING FOR $1000, ALEX....On Sunday I had a small get-together at my house for some local bloggers. Today I realized that of the 14 people there, 21% of them have appeared on Jeopardy. That's a remarkably high proportion, no?

"HE TRULY ENJOYS GETTING PEOPLE TO KNUCKLE UNDER"....I'm reading Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine right now, and it's been an odd experience. Yes, it has quite a few anecdotes that make George Bush and Dick Cheney look bad, but at the same time it frequently paints a fairly sympathetic portrait of them as men who are reacting as well as anyone could to the furious real-time cascade of genuinely frightening and confusing events in the early days after 9/11.

More on that later, though. For now, here's one of those anecdotes instead. It's set at Harvard Business School in 1975, where Bush was captain of his class's basketball team. His team is playing the Class of '76 team:

The game was tight. The other team's captain, Gary Engle...went up for a shot. Bush slugged him — an elbow to the mouth, knocking him to the parquet. "What the hell are you doing?" Engle remembers saying. "What, you want to get into a fistfight and both of us end up in the fucking emergency room?" Bush just smiled.

Moments later, at the other end of the court, Engle went up high for a rebound and felt someone chop his legs out from under him. Bush again. Engle jumped up and threw the ball in Bush's face. The two went at it until two teams of future business leaders leapt on their captains, pulling them apart. Engle, angry and vexed by what had happened, began wondering why the hell Bush would have done what he did. He lost his composure, and his team lost its leader.

A few years later, Engle...bumped into Jeb Bush....Engle, a Republican contributor, had thought from time to time about his game against George. Nothing like that had happened to him before or since. This was his chance to get a little insight about it. He told the story. Jeb kind of laughed, Engle recalled. "In Texas, they call guys like George 'a hard case.' It wasn't easy being his brother, either. He truly enjoys getting people to knuckle under."

This, apparently, is the real Bush Doctrine: America's goal is to get the rest of the world to knuckle under to us, one dimwitted action at a time. Suskind calls it Bush's "global experiment in behaviorism." Doesn't seem to be working too well so far, though, does it?

UPDATE: Added a couple of sentences that I left out of the original excerpt.

THE WELDON FILES....Is Curt Weldon the weirdest congressman currently in office? It's a fierce contest, of course, but the latest news from Weldon-land is definitely opening up some daylight with the competition.

Here's the story. A guy named Dave Gaubatz, who was deployed to Iraq in 2003, became convinced that there were several hidden WMD caches in southern Iraq that had been overlooked by military inspectors. He tried to get someone to inspect the sites but had no luck, so he turned to Weldon and congressman Pete Hoekstra. Here's his story about his meeting with Weldon on May 4:

Congressman Weldon asked me several times during the meeting if I would go with them [along with three Iraqi citizens] to the four sites near Basrah and Nasiriyah, Iraq. During the meeting it was discussed that no member of their respective committees would be informed, specifically no member of the Democratic party.

Congressman Weldon whom I had respected very much then advised no member of the "Military" was to be informed because they could not be trusted with this intelligence information. Congressman Hoekstra did not like this statement, nor did I. I now did not feel comfortable going with Congressman Weldon because this was going to be a 'political personal venture" more so than for national security concerns.

Emphasis mine. According to Gaubatz, Weldon was seriously planning to take a secret trip to Nasiriyah and attempt to dig up the alleged WMD himself. As he told Tom Ferrick of the Philadelphia Inquirer, "They even worked out how it would go. If there was nothing there, nothing would be said. If the site had been [scavenged], nothing would be said. But, if it was still there, they would bring the press corps out....It was treated as an election issue that would get votes."

Did you get that? He was going to take a little jaunt to Nasiriyah, break out his shovel, and start digging around himself — without telling the military what he was doing. Then, when the glorious shells were found, he was going to call in the press and declare himself Weldon of Arabia, Discoverer of WMD.

Ho-lee shit. Pennsylvania can do better than this whackjob, can't they?

THE NYT AND NATIONAL SECURITY....So did the New York Times really do any harm by exposing the Treasury Department's terror finance tracking program? After all, surely al-Qaeda already knows we're doing our best to monitor their international money flows, right?

Henry Farrell, who sounds like he's been itching for the chance to write a monster post about this, has a monster post about this over at Crooked Timber today. Here are the key parts:

Privacy International has filed complaints with umpteen European and non-European data regulators that SWIFT has illicitly shared European citizens’ financial data with US authorities....The crucial enforcement authorities when it comes to issues like SWIFT aren’t the European Commission or the member state governments. In all probability, they’re the national level data protection authorities.

....While the issues involved touch on national security, SWIFT wasn’t cooperating with the relevant authorities on national security issues (the member states). Instead, it was more or less unilaterally deciding to cooperate with an authority outside the EU — the US Treasury (and through Treasury, the CIA etc). SWIFT had informally told several member state central banks what was going on — but central banks aren’t the relevant authority under any conceivable reading. Thus (and I repeat that I’m not a lawyer), it would seem to me to be to be pretty hard to make the case that this activity would fall under the national security exemption to European data protection law.

....So what’s likely to happen now? There are a number of ways in which this might develop....Most likely in my opinion, is that this is going to result in enforcement action by the EU data protection authorities — and to new laws in the medium term. It seems very unlikely indeed to me that SWIFT’s cooperation with US authorities was legal under European law. The organization could find itself in a lot of hot water.

In other words, although the Treasury Department (probably) didn't break any U.S. laws, it's quite possible that SWIFT did break some European laws — and that they'll be forced to stop providing information to Treasury unless European laws are changed, a process that's both lengthy and uncertain of success. Read Henry's full post for more detail and more nuance.

So does this mean the Times shouldn't have published this story? The arguments cut both ways. On the one hand, it looks like it might have done real damage to an important anti-terrorism program. On the other hand, it looks like the damage is directly related to the fact that the program probably violated the law — clearly a subject of considerable public interest. On the third hand, it was European law involved, not U.S. law, and the original Times story barely even mentioned possible violation of European law as a motivation for running the story.

In any case, that's the state of play. Stay tuned.

WHAT IS THIS "LAW" YOU SPEAK OF, EARTHLING?....Michelle Boardman, a deputy assistant attorney general, had this to say to Congress yesterday: "It is often not at all the situation that the president doesn't intend to enact the bill." Dan Drezner comments:

Getting rid of the double negative, and this translates into, "the president often intends to enact the bill." Not always, but often. Which is great, but I always thought that when Congress passes a law [and the president signs it] — no matter how stupid that law might be — the president is always supposed to implement it.

Silly boy. Laws are for kids. The grownups are in charge now, remember?

WHOLESALE TREASON....The New York Times story that exposed the Treasury Department's terrorist finance tracking program says it relied on "nearly 20" former and current government officials. The LA Times story on the same subject relied on "more than a dozen" sources.

Isn't that an awful lot of traitors in our midst? Why were so many people willing to talk about this? Was it because (a) revealing the program's existence didn't really endanger anything, or (b) they were concerned about its legality? Or both?

THE END OF SATIRE....Michelle Cottle writes today about World Ahead Publishing, a publisher of conservative books that recently launched a children's division called Kids Ahead:

Thus far, the new imprint has only one writer in its stable: Katharine DeBrecht, the pen name of a mother of three whose authorial debut, Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!, generated major buzz — and sold some 30,000 copies — after receiving an on-air plug from Rush Limbaugh. In the wake of DeBrecht's success, Kids Ahead is moving forward with an entire Help! Mom! series. Help! Mom! Hollywood's in My Hamper! hit stores in March, Help! Mom! The Ninth Circuit Nabbed the Nativity! will be out in time for Christmas, with Help! Mom! There Are Lawyers in My Lunchbox! to follow.

Is Cottle serious or is she making a joke? It's hard to tell these days when you read descriptions of conservo-land. And it's hell on satire in liberal-land. I mean, how can you create mock book titles for your next homage to Jonathan Swift if the real ones have titles like that?

Anyway, just for the record, it turns out she's serious: those new titles are genuine.

NEWS YOU CAN USE!....Andy Leipold is guest blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy this week. His subject is the conventional wisdom in the law biz which holds that judges are far more likely to convict defendants of crimes than juries are. You know the rap: juries are easy to confuse, easy to emotionally manipulate, and just generally mushy. Judges, who have seen it all, ignore the BS and look straight at the evidence. If it's there, you're guilty.

Guess what? It's not true. As the chart on the right shows, conviction rates for juries in federal cases have risen from 60% to 85% in the past half century, while conviction rates in bench trials before a judge have declined from 90% to about 50%. But why? Could the type of crime involved — violent, property, drug, etc. — explain the disparity? Leipold says no. Is it because guilty defendants tend to pick jury trials while innocent ones prefer judges? Maybe, but then why the substantial change over time?

Leipold will be blogging about this all week, and his full paper is here. I'm linking to it just in case any of my readers get in trouble with a federal rap and need to decide what kind of trial they want. Apparently the answer is: a bench trial. And I'll bet it's quicker and cheaper too. I hope Rush Limbaugh knows about this.

EXPOSING SECRET PROGRAMS....As long as I'm asking dumb questions, here's another one. No one is going to believe me when I say that I'm not trying to grind any particular axe here, but....I'm not trying to grind any particular axe here. I'm just curious.

OK. So the New York Times has now exposed two anti-terrorist initiatives: the NSA's domestic spying program and the Treasury Department's financial tracking program. The administration says that exposing these programs is bad because terrorists will stop using telephones and international credit transfers now that they know the U.S. government can monitor these activities. Thus, we have fewer ways of catching bad guys.

Fine. That's true. And yet, isn't there an upside too? If the bad guys stop using telephones and bank transfers, doesn't that reduce their effectiveness considerably? No phone calls, no wire transfers, satellites watching you, drones attacking out of nowhere, websites hacked, no one who can be trusted — at some point their whole operation grinds to a halt out of sheer paranoia.

Now, I assume that the people running these programs aren't idiots. If they think that keeping them secret is a net positive, they're probably right. But nobody even mentions the upside of exposing them. Surely there is one, isn't there?

TWO QUERIES....Question for the masses. Jason Zengerle of The New Republic is getting skinned alive in the liberal blogosphere for refusing to burn the source who gave him a fabricated email allegedly from Steve Gilliard. Now, in principle, I agree that sources who provide bad info deserve to be outed, but in practice it never seems to happen. Thus my question: has this ever happened before? Can anyone think of a case in big-time journalism in which a dirty source has been exposed?

Second question: In the LA Times today, editor Dean Baquet defended his newspaper's decision to expose the government's secret program to track global financial transactions. He says, "The decision to publish this article was not one we took lightly," and follows up by explaining that sometimes they decide not to publish important stories: "We sometimes withhold information when we believe that reporting it would threaten a life."

Again, can anyone think of a serious case in the past few decades of a newspaper withholding an entire story like this simply because the government asked them to? Not just a single fact in a story, but an entire story about a secret program of some kind.

Just curious.

UPDATE: On Query #1, the answers so far that fit the criteria are (a) the NYT sitting on the NSA story for a year and (b) the NYT sitting on a story about our ability to listen in on Russian trunk lines in the early 80s. In both cases, however, the Times published the stories a year later.

On Query #2, the only example so far is this column by Jon Alter, where he says he burned Oliver North in 1987 after hearing him testify before Congress about something he himself had leaked.

MONEY!....In the new issue of In These Times, Chris Hayes writes about fundraising for liberal causes:

In progressive circles, it seems the first rule of fundraising is: Don’t talk about fundraising. Call up someone at a major foundation or a development director and their first response is to go off the record. “There’s a deafening silence within the movement around the role of money in movement building,” says Daniel Faber, who teaches sociology at Boston’s Northeastern University.

More than a deafening silence, though, Chris writes that the biggest problem with liberal funding is that too much of it comes from foundations, which want to fund worthy programs, not political movements. I remember that Eric Alterman made the same point to me a few years ago when I interviewed him after the publication of What Liberal Media?:

You talked in the book about funding of think tanks and how important that’s become for conservatives. Is there any hope at all for getting that on the liberal side? Why aren’t there any rich liberal cranks like Richard Mellon Scaife willing to fund liberal think tanks?

There are some good liberal funders, but it’s a very complicated question. The genius of what Scaife and Coors and those people did is, they just threw manure onto a field and decided to see what grew. What Scaife did is, he just gave everybody money, he said, fine, let’s see what grows, whereas liberals are much more focused on programmatic money. They don’t fund things that might turn into something useful that you can’t predict.

You have to able to fund things where you can’t predict how they’re going to work, and liberals don’t do that. They want control, they want reports; they don’t fund basic research, they don’t fund operating expenses. All of the liberal organizations are always begging to keep going, they don’t pay their people very well, and so they’re never going to let a thousand flowers bloom and see which of them is the prettiest.

The good news is that Chris reports that this problem is now widely recognized and liberal funders are starting to change their tunes. Here's hoping he's right.

ADULTS WANTED, PLEASE APPLY AT THE DOOR ON THE RIGHT....I plead guilty to not paying attention. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

But is the United States Senate, the world's self-styled "greatest deliberative body," really only one vote short of passing a constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration? Have they gone completely off their rocker?

No need to answer that, of course. But I wonder if any of these folks have thought about just how much hay countries like Iran will make the first time we toss someone in jail for burning a flag during a political protest?

PASSION vs. ANGER....Ezra Klein passes along some advice from Grover Norquist:

The left, he argued, shouldn't seek to simply mimeograph the right's structure — CAP for Heritage, Media Matters for Media Research Council, etc. "You don't have to have the same weapons in politics because both aren't structured the same." Back in gladitorial days, one warrior would have a sword, the other a trident and net. You play to your strengths, not to your opponent's. I found this to be a remarkably compelling point.

Obviously you can take this point too far. Basic politics is basic politics, and figuring out what to say, who to say it to, and how to say it most effectively is important no matter what side you're on.

But I'll take the opportunity here to agree with Norquist in one particular way. It strikes me that modern American culture rewards conservatives when people are angry and polarized and rewards liberals when people are united and forward looking. (Relatively speaking, of course.) This is why I don't especially think the left needs its own Ann Coulter, or its own Karl Rove. We need effective advocates and smart political operatives, of course, but they need to operate on an entirely different wavelength. Fanning the flames of anger, even in our own cause, produces a political environment that ultimately helps conservatives.

Someday, perhaps, I'll think about this idea hard enough to decide if it's more than passing whimsy, and then I'll write something longer about it. For now, though, I'll throw this out: for the right, anger is more important than passion. For the left, passion is more important than anger. We should act accordingly.

KEEPING IT REAL....Yesterday I had a party for a bunch of local liberal bloggers (plus Susie Madrak, who was in town), and an interesting question arose. It's not a new question, mind you, but still an interesting one. Here it is.

Everyone at the table seemed to agree that the Democratic Party was out of touch with the working class in America, broadly defined. Why? Because Dem leaders are a bunch of college-educated elites who make a lot of money and don't really identify with the problems of people who make $30,000 a year.

OK, fine. Let's suppose that's true. But the Democratic Party in the 30s and 40s was mostly headed by Harvard-educated rich guys, and they seemed to do pretty well on working class issues. FDR wasn't exactly a prole, after all. So what's the difference?

The most common response was: unions. Back in the 30s and 40s (and 50s and 60s), unions were big and powerful and had a seat at the table. Democratic politicians listened to them, and the upper ranks of the party had plenty of people who grew up in union households. Basically, unions kept it real for everyone else.

Today, public sector unions are still powerful, but private sector unions are a shell of their former selves. Result: labor concerns are marginalized, and there's no one to really force party leaders to pay attention to working class issues.

So here's my question: Assuming there's some truth to this, is the answer (a) we need to work to rebuild the size and power of private sector unions in America so that the working class has a powerful champion? Or (b) is this a hopeless task given the realities of the modern economy? Should we instead figure out some completely different way of forcing the party to pay more attention to working class/middle class economic issues?

I don't think anybody liked my question, because the conversation sort of meandered on to other topics at that point. Anybody have any bright ideas?