#376 IN THE PARADE OF PEOPLE TRYING TO DRIVE ME INSANE....And today's winner is: David Broder, discussing the vast unfairness of not allowing New Hampshire to single-handedly choose the Democratic nominee for president. Here's my favorite part:

Voters there — in both parties and especially among the numerous independents who also vote in the primary — take their role seriously. They turn up at town meetings and they ask probing questions. So do the interviewers at local papers and broadcast stations. So do high school students.

New Hampshire voters don't need — or particularly want — guidance from Iowa, and frequently they ignore the Iowa results. But they are stuck with Iowa. Now, thanks to the Democrats, they may be stuck with Nevada as well, and crowded from behind by South Carolina.

Oh, the humanity! To hear Broder tell it, you'd think that New Hampshire's role in anointing frontrunners had been handed down on a stone tablet to Moses. Sheesh.

POSTSCRIPT: I grew up in California and have voted here since 1976. In my entire life, I haven't once cast a primary vote for president that wasn't completely meaningless. How about writing a column on the unfairness of that?

REVENGE OF THE STRAW MEN....Via Steve Benen, the Washington Post's Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei get it right in a front page story today about the desperate fever swamp rhetoric emanating from conservative quarters lately:

Bush suggested last week that Democrats are promising voters to block additional money for continuing the war. Vice President Cheney this week said critics "claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone." And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, citing passivity toward Nazi Germany before World War II, said that "many have still not learned history's lessons" and "believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased."

Pressed to support these allegations, the White House yesterday could cite no major Democrat who has proposed cutting off funds or suggested that withdrawing from Iraq would persuade terrorists to leave Americans alone. But White House and Republican officials said those are logical interpretations of the most common Democratic position favoring a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

Italics mine. This ought to be standard procedure when quoting any of the absurd "some say" or "many believe" lines coming out of the White House. It's about time the straw men started fighting back.

ISLAMOFASCISM....David Weigel quotes Jack Reed on George Bush's newfound infatuation with the ridiculous neologism "Islamofascism":

And again, I think it goes to the point of that their first response is, you know, come up with a catchy slogan, and then they forget to do the hard work of digging into the facts and coming up with a strategy and resources that will counter the actual threats we face.

Preach it, brother. The modern Republican Party has mastered the art of winning elections by beating culture war campaign tropes to death in 30-second ad spots, and they seem to think that you can solve actual real-world problems the same way. Sadly, it isn't true. With any luck, the American public will finally figure that out this year.

PLAYING NICE WITH OTHERS....Over at the LA Times, the Matt Welch-inspired Reason-ification of the op-ed page continues apace. Today, Nick Gillespie complains about the taming of Chicago:

Over the last year, the Associated Press recently reported, Chicago snuffed out smoking "in nearly all public places" and pulled the plug on using cellphones while driving. This April, the "Hog Butcher for the World" (Sandburg again) became the first city in the country to ban the sale of foie gras, on grounds that force-feeding geese to make the tasty treat is more cruelty than Al Capone's adopted hometown can bear.

....More recently, the council passed a "living wage" ordinance requiring big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target to pay a minimum of $10 an hour plus benefits by 2010 or face draconian penalties (perhaps a deep-dish plate of a kinder, gentler foie gras, or repeated showings of that old Sears Tower promotional film?).

....In years gone by, people poured into cities to escape the conformity and monotony of life on the farm or in the small town. Now they go there to frown at aberrant behavior and pick up after their dog. In this, alas, Chicago is truly America's third city — and sadly, not the last.

At the risk of being deluged with angry email from PETA members, I'll give Nick the foie gras thing. But the rest of this is kind of silly, no? I mean, object to nanny-state regulations if you want, but suggesting that cities — cities! — have been blissfully regulation free in the past is a little much. For as long as humans have congregated in large numbers, they've understood that large numbers can only live together without killing each other if their behavior is more circumscribed than it was when they were down on the farm with their nearest neighbor a long hog call away. Thus zoning laws, noise laws, parking laws, leash laws, health inspection laws, jaywalking laws, satellite dish laws, and tossing-pails-of-shit-out-your-window laws.

Face it: if you want to be a libertarian, rural Idaho is the place for you. But if you want to live in close proximity to millions of your fellow citizens, be prepared for some restrictions. I'll bet there's even an old Hittite saying for this.

GLOBAL WARMING....California is on the verge of passing a law that would mandate modest but meaningful reductions in greenhouse gases:

Leaders of the state legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a deal yesterday under which California will mandate a reduction in the state's emissions of gases contributing to global warming to 1990 levels by 2020....California, the world's sixth-largest economy, accounts for only about 2% of the world's annual global-warming emissions. But California leaders made clear their intent is to spur other states, and ultimately the federal government, to follow the state's lead. That has happened with a string of past environmental regulations, notably restrictions on automotive pollution.

....The Bush administration — which has rejected the international Kyoto Protocol emissions-reduction treaty — reacted tepidly to word of the California push. "The states are free to make their own decisions about their policies," said Kristen Hellmer, a spokeswoman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. But she reiterated the administration's philosophical opposition to global-warming caps, saying a cap imposed in one state or country simply causes industry to move to another location. "They're going to still produce greenhouse gas," she said.

As usual, Bush has his head in the sand over this. As he knows very well, we could prevent industries from moving to other states by adopting national standards, something he's dead set against.

Still, this is a good first move, and I'll bet all comers that not only does it not have a negative impact on California's economy, it will have a noticeably positive impact. It will spur R&D in new technologies, it will motivate businesses to become more efficient, and it will make California a better place to live. And as for businesses moving out, I'll bet against that too. Moving heavy industrial plants to new states is a lot less appealing than it sounds, and if it does start to happen I'll bet other states will follow California's lead. After all, what state wants to be the dumping ground for all the poor corporate citizens who are moving out of California because they want to relocate somewhere that doesn't mind them belching tons of pollutants into the air?

But liberals need to get on board with a few things too. California's legislation allows the rulemaking authorities to implement a cap-and-trade system, and this is something we should embrace. It's a system that works well for things like greenhouse gases that disperse widely (i.e., local hotspots aren't an issue), and it allows the business community to adapt to new rules in the least painful and most efficient way possible. And that's a good thing: "more efficient" means we get the biggest bang for our limited bucks; it means less resistance from the business community; and it makes it easier to create a consensus for more stringent rules in the future if we need to. There's no reason to get upset about individual businesses buying their way out of the new regulations as long as we achieve our overall goals. We should take their money and run.

But the main reason this is good news is California's well known role as a bellwether state. If California implements this new law efficently and fairly, other states will follow. And if other states follow, maybe other countries will too. Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.

GREEN CHEESE....Bruce Moomaw draws my attention to a speech given a few months ago by George Bush's science guy, John Marburger. He's explaining why Bush is so hot and heavy on manned lunar exploration:

The greatest value of the Moon lies neither in science nor in exploration, but in its material....The production of oxygen in particular, the major component (by mass) of chemical rocket fuel, is potentially an important Lunar industry.

....Where does Mars fit into this picture? At the present time, much commentary to the contrary, we do not know how to send humans to Mars and return them safely within a reasonable cost envelope....There is no question, however, that the expense of such a mission would be vastly reduced if the bulk of its fuel and massive components could be obtained from materials, and manufactured, outside Earth orbit. The Moon is a logical place to do this. As to the motivation for a human expedition to Mars, there is an obvious prestige value for a nation that leads the first human to Mars mission. A more pragmatic objective is to establish on Mars the same kind of industrial infrastructure that I described for the Moon. What makes the Moon operation economically viable are the Earth-oriented markets. That is not likely to be the case for a similar operation on Mars unless economically attractive materials are found on Mars itself or among the asteroids. Consequently, a Mars operation complex enough to warrant human oversight will have to be fully subsidized by governments during a long period of robotic exploration beyond Mars orbit.

Let me see if I have this straight. Marburger's best excuse for creating a massive lunar manufacturing base is to produce oxygen for rocket fuel. Despite the peculiar talk later on about "Earth-oriented markets," it's plainly absurd to produce oxygen on the moon for use on earth, so Marburger is proposing instead that it be produced to lower the cost of fuel for a mission to Mars. And what's the point of this Mars mission? Nothing he can think of, since there's clearly no economic benefit and "robotic exploration beyond Mars" doesn't require a manned Mars base.

Question: what happens to people who are hired into the Bush administration? Do they just shrug their shoulders and agree to spout crazy stuff because that's the price of working in the White House? Does Cheney have some kind of diabolical mind ray that actually makes them believe this stuff? Or what?

BLACK GOLD....Spencer Ackerman reads Peter Baker's Washington Post story about the upcoming visit of Kazakhstan's president and notes that Baker is oddly reticent about mentioning Kazakhstan's vast oil wealth as a motivating factor for playing nice with them:

Similarly, early in the piece Baker notes that other moderate-to-serious tyrannies receiving Bush's thumbs-up are Azerbaijan and Equitorial Guinea, and he also points out Dick Cheney's recent Caspian Sea excursion. But he does this all without mentioning that what all these nations have in common is possession of or access to quite a lot of a certain black, viscous substance that greases the wheels of the global economy and international relations.

....Look: There's a certain ridiculous tap dance in politics and in the media about talking about oil, as if the simple recognition that oil influences foreign policy is somehow a gauche or extreme statement. That doesn't mean that everything reduces to a question of who has oil and who doesn't. But what good does it serve to strenuously pretend that oil has only a trivial impact on U.S. decision-making?

Spencer is right, and this is one of the reasons that Americans are so clueless about how the rest of the world views us. I can understand a reluctance to be associated with the fever swamps of oil-based conspiracy mongering, but the plain fact is that a great deal of American foreign policy is driven by concerns over the stability of our oil supply. The rest of the world is well aware of this, and our blithe pretense that we're not concerned with such grubby issues — it's all about democracy! — is one of the reasons so many non-Americans don't believe a word we say on other issues as well. They probably can't figure out if we're in genuine denial about our own motivations or just being mendacious about them, but does it matter?

On our end, of course, most Americans just end up being perplexed. Why do foreigners think we're after everyone's oil? How can they believe such a thing about us? The answer is easy: they believe it because there's a lot of truth to it. But you'd hardly know it if you read nothing but the American press.

LOSING THE WAR THE RUMSFELDIAN WAY....I guess one way of viewing Don Rumsfeld's speech to the American Legion yesterday is that it was nothing more than garden variety election-year political pandering. Iowa farmers want to hear you swear undying fealty to ethanol subsidies and WWII vets want to hear paeans to blood and guts. Usually, they both get what they want.

Alternatively, and more persuasively, it's one of the opening shots in the ongoing Dr. Strangelove-ification of this year's midterms. In the same way that TV shows have to become ever more violent and risque in order to shock audiences who have seen it all before, Republicans must figure that the only way to make the terrorism card pay off yet again is to amp up the wingnuttery for an obviously skeptical and jaded public. And since terrorism is all they've got, that's what they're going to do. What other choice do they have?

However, at the risk of being suckered into responding to something that's obviously meant as little more than crude base pandering, let's take a look at one thing Rumsfeld said. In between the counterculture bashing that brought back memories of William Safire speeches written for Spiro Agnew, Rumsfeld asked this:

With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased?

Why, no, we can't. And needless to say, no one believes this. Not Democrats, not Republicans, not anybody. Osama and his pals are fanatics, and negotiating with fanatics is pointless.

But Rumsfeld's speech was never meant to be taken seriously. It's just crude agitprop designed to keep the proles from wondering if the Cheney wing of the Republican Party is actually doing anything to make the world a safer place. The question has never been whether we should open talks with al-Qaeda, it's been what we should do to stop them from killing us. Should we fight a war in Iraq that's served primarily as a recruiting bonanza for radical jihadism? Should we refuse to talk to the Middle East's biggest regional power because we think that merely being in the same room with them is a sign of weakness? Should we encourage Israel to fight a fruitless war against Lebanon while simultaneously egging on American hawks who think a bombing campaign against Iran will fix all our problems? Should we spend homeland defense money on dumb projects in loyal red states instead of taking port security seriously?

Let's see. How about no, no, no, and no? But those are questions Rumsfeld would prefer not to address since they put the spotlight on the fact that the Bush administration has accomplished nothing over the past five years except to make a bad problem even worse — which is a pretty remarkable record when you consider how bad the problem was to begin with.

But al-Qaeda won't be beaten by fighting a bunch of aimless proxy wars in the general vicinity of the Middle East. It will, eventually, be beaten when the non-terrorist population of the region decides to turn against al-Qaeda and its jihadist allies and deny them the support and shelter they need in order to function. Encouraging that to happen is the biggest foreign policy challenge of the 21st century, and because they've failed so miserably at it, it's the one thing the Bushies most want to avoid talking about.

Which is, of course, precisely why we should talk about it. Loudly and relentlessly. It's good policy and good politics.

THE BEST CARE ANYWHERE....Thanks to innovations introduced during Bill Clinton's administration, VA healthcare is now among the nation's best. It's cheaper than either private healthcare or Medicare, the quality is top notch, and it operates according to strict performance standards. Sounds like a great model, doesn't it? So how about saving the feds money by allowing vets on Medicare to switch over to the VA? Time magazine says it's no dice:

Conservatives fear such an arrangement would be a Trojan horse, setting up an even larger national health-care program and taking more business from the private sector. Congress has no plans to enlarge the scope of veterans' health care — much less consider it a model for, say, a government-run system serving nonvets. But it's becoming more and more "ideologically inconvenient for some to have such a stellar health-delivery system being run by the government," says Margaret O'Kane, president of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, which rates health plans for businesses and individuals. If VA health care continues to be the industry leader, it may become more difficult to argue that the market can do better.

It might indeed become difficult. But not impossible! Give 'em time and I imagine that Bush will do the same thing to the VA that he did to FEMA, another Clinton bureaucratic success story.

It turns out that the reasons for the VA's success are pretty straightforward: there are inherent advantages to managing all of a patient's healthcare needs over a long period, something that simply doesn't happen in the pseudo-private market that most of us deal with. Phil Longman wrote about the VA miracle for the Washington Monthly last year and explained the problem with our current healthcare model this way:

As Lawrence P. Casalino, a professor of public health at the University of Chicago, puts it, “The U.S. medical market as presently constituted simply does not provide a strong business case for quality.”

....Suppose a private managed-care plan follows the VHA example and invests in a computer program to identify diabetics and keep track of whether they are getting appropriate follow-up care. The costs are all upfront, but the benefits may take 20 years to materialize. And by then, unlike in the VHA system, the patient will likely have moved on to some new health-care plan. As the chief financial officer of one health plan told Casalino: “Why should I spend our money to save money for our competitors?”

....For health-care providers outside the VHA system, improving quality rarely makes financial sense....Investing in any technology that ultimately serves to reduce hospital admissions, like an electronic medical record system that enables more effective disease management and reduces medical errors, is likely to take money straight from the bottom line. “The business case for safety…remains inadequate…[for] the task,” concludes Robert Wachter, M.D., in a recent study for Health Affairs in which he surveyed quality control efforts across the U.S. health-care system.

As it happens, the VA model isn't the one I'd choose if I were inventing a national healthcare system for the United States. But it would probably be one component of it. And it demonstrates pretty conclusively that even in an older, sicker population, a national healthcare system can provide low-cost, high-quality service. We could do the same for every person in the country if we only had the will.

LIE BY LIE....Mother Jones has rolled out a nifty timeline tool tonight called "Lie by Lie: Chronicle of a War Foretold." It takes a few seconds to load, but once it's up it provides a comprehensive collection of statements made by Bush administration folks and others all the way up to the start of the war in 2003. You can search by date, by keyword, or by topic to create your own personalized timelines. It's fun for the whole family!

"SURPRISINGLY RELAXED"....David Ignatius is in Tehran and files an interesting report today. It's interesting mainly because its tone is so different from most of what you hear about Iran these days, even from liberals:

With a Thursday deadline looming on the nuclear issue, you might expect that Tehran would feel like a garrison town. But it's surprisingly relaxed, and I think that's because most Iranians expect the crisis will be defused somehow. The regime has been putting on a show of defiance as the U.N. deadline approaches, shooting off new missiles in Persian Gulf war games, opening a new heavy-water reactor and festooning downtown streets with banners of Lebanon's Hezbollah leader, Hasan Nasrallah. But this isn't a militarized country, and it certainly isn't eager for confrontation with America.

....Perhaps the most interesting fact of life in Tehran this week is that you can't find anyone who is opposed in principle to dialogue with the United States. Even a few months ago, that topic was almost taboo, but now here's Ahmadinejad himself calling for a public debate with Bush. "The golden key to being popular here is to normalize relations with the U.S.," says Shahriar Khateri, a former member of the Revolutionary Guards who is now a doctor and a participant in a joint project with American scientists to study the effects of chemical weapons.

Even now, it's not too late to talk to Iran. There are things they want and things we want. If we take a toughminded approach to negotiation, which includes a starkly realistic assessment of what concessions we can afford to make and what concessions from Iran we genuinely can't live without, there's a chance we could make real progress. It's no panacea, but it's better than the alternative.

MEDICARE UPDATE....A reader who works for the Department of Health and Human Services emails to tell me that the government's plan to shut down Medicare payments for the last nine days of the federal fiscal year isn't as sinister as it seems:

HHS is actually bringing a new financial system online (UFMS), to replace and modernize all the old clunky legacy systems the different HHS branches operate on. That is a chaotic process that involves shutting down the old system and bringing the new one online. This is why no one will be reimbursed for those off-days. We've been notifying everyone we do business with about that shutdown since it was decided back in March. It's painful, but unavoidable unless we want to keep the old financial systems forever, and it's much better to do it now than to try to make it happen right in the middle of a fiscal year.

This sounds disturbingly plausible. Unless I hear some convincing evidence to the contrary, I'm hereby retracting my earlier outrage and declaring this a nonevent.

UPDATE: OK, I take it back. It appears that the 9-day hold was mandated by the Deficit Reduction Act of 2006 as a way of saving money. Section 5203 is the culprit. Page 60 even spells out the exact savings: $5.2 billion in FY2006, followed by -$5.2 billion in FY2007.

Consider my outrage back in force. These guys are idiots.

WELFARE REFORM....As long as we're looking at charts from the Census Bureau's latest income survey, here's an excerpt from the chart showing the poverty rate. I've helpfully annotated it.

Now, I don't really know anything about welfare reform. It's just one of those issues that I've never taken a close look at. Still, looking at this chart, it's sure hard to convince myself that welfare reform had any effect at all on actual poverty rates. The poverty rate started going down in 1994, went down for three years, went down again the year welfare reform took effect, kept going down for three more years after that, and then started going up during the Bush presidency.

I dunno. Maybe welfare reform had other beneficial effects. But it sure would have been nice if all those people who put so much energy into getting people off welfare had been able to work up the same level of energy to lift the poor out of poverty once they got back to work. It's funny how the second part of these bargains never quite seems to materialize, isn't it?

THIS JUST IN!....THE RICH ARE GETTING RICHER!....Just thought you'd all like to see the latest income report from the Census Bureau. The good news is that women are now making 77% as much as men, slightly higher than last year. The bad news is that this is only because the median income of women fell at a slightly lower rate (-1.3%) than the median income of men (-1.8%). Yipee.

Needless to say, per capita income increased by 1.5%. In other words, the total money income of the United States increased last year by more than $100 billion, and yet the incomes of the average worker went down. So where do you think that $100 billion went?

BLAMING THE MEDIA....I was watching our local news last night and the anchorman was in high dudgeon about how badly the media screwed up by giving so much attention to John Mark Karr. This morning, I see that Howard Kurtz is saying the same thing ("Aren't the TV types who pumped up this empty balloon just a little bit ashamed?"). Without looking, I have a feeling that a lot of other people are singing out of the same hymn book.

Color me confused. Sure, the collective TV news Borg embarrassed itself with its obsessive JMK coverage, but what else is new? I don't quite get why they should be especially embarrassed over this particular feeding frenzy. Is it because it turned out he didn't do it? But that wasn't their fault: half the cops and district attorneys in Colorado we're saying he was the guy. Were the news hounds supposed to just ignore them?

Look. Any news channel that didn't cover JMK 24/7 would have seen its audience defect en masse to a channel that did. Any media star that ignored the story would have seen the public stampede to a competitor who was covering it. Blaming the media is a little disingenuous, no? The fault, dear readers, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves. If we're gong to bash the media, let's at least pick a topic where the media itself is more to blame than we are ourselves.

TOO CLEVER BY HALF....Guess what? The end of the federal government's fiscal year — September 30 — is rapidly approaching, and George Bush's minions have had a brainstorm: federal bureaucrats should put off as many purchases as possible until October so that this year's spending looks nice and frugal. After all, we don't want any headlines about skyrocketing government spending just before the midterm elections!

Alternatively, if no actual purchases can be delayed, just delay payment for services already rendered. Like, say, for Medicare services:

The bureaucratic brainstorm was straightforward — simple-minded is, perhaps, a more appropriate description — don't pay doctors, hospitals and their army of auxiliaries tending to indisposed old folks and the afflicted disabled for their labors in the last nine days of the current fiscal year. Instead, send them a check for what you owe them, sometime after the first of October, the start of the government's fiscal '07. In essence, those doctors, hospitals et al. are making an involuntary loan of nine days' pay without interest.

That way, point out the gleeful budgeteers and Medicare pooh-bahs, all of whom presumably are glowing with health, Uncle Sam's Medicare tab this fading fiscal year will be $5.2 billion less than it otherwise would have been. Or at least would seem to be $5.2 billion less — in Washington, as we all know, appearance and reality are not invariably the same phenomena.

Apparently, these people genuinely think that no one has ever thought of this trick before. And they're right, as long you don't include every sales manager and CFO who's ever lived. Needless to say, that $5.2 billion will get tacked right onto next year's budget, so it's not like we're saving anything. It's just that we don't have any elections next year.

Honest to God, every time you think these guys can't get any more puerile, they do. It's like having a bunch of scheming high school freshmen running the country.

Via Barry Ritholtz.

UPDATE: It looks like my outrage may have been misplaced. See here for a more mundane explanation for the shutdown.

UPDATE 2: My outrage turns out to be well deserved after all. The payment delay is indeed mandated by law, not by a squirrely computer system.

BLINDED BY SCIENCE....Just in case you chose today to feel a wee bit of optimism in an otherwise gloomy world, the Guardian sends along the following bracing news:

Philosophers, scientists and other intellectuals close to Pope Benedict will gather at his summer palace outside Rome this week for intensive discussions that could herald a fundamental shift in the Vatican's view of evolution.

There have been growing signs the Pope is considering aligning his church more closely with the theory of "intelligent design" taught in some US states. Advocates of the theory argue that some features of the universe and nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say it is a disguise for creationism.

A prominent anti-evolutionist and Roman Catholic scientist, Dominique Tassot, told the US National Catholic Reporter that this week's meeting was "to give a broader extension to the debate. Even if [the Pope] knows where he wants to go, and I believe he does, it will take time. Most Catholic intellectuals today are convinced that evolution is obviously true because most scientists say so."

Sigh. One step forward, two steps back.

IRATE MODERATES....Sebastian Mallaby has a column in the Washington Post today that's so relentlessly misguided that I just don't have the energy to take it on. But I do want to say one thing about it, because it fits into the "irate moderate" theme that I was talking about a few days ago.

The column is about Wal-Mart, and Mallaby is complaining that although moderate Dems got out of the corporation-bashing business in the late 80s, they've since lost the religion. Every single moderate Dem — even Joe Lieberman! — is now bashing Wal-Mart. "How can supposedly centrist Democrats defend this betrayal of their principles?" he asks sadly.

Well, here's the thing. When every single moderate Dem starts attacking Wal-Mart, maybe nobody's betraying any principles at all. Instead, maybe they've figured out something that Mallaby hasn't: it's not the 80s anymore and things have changed. And one of the things that's changed is that Wal-Mart has gotten a lot bigger, unions have continued shrinking, working class wages have stagnated, and corporate power has grown tremendously. It's perfectly rational for even moderate, pro-business Dems to look at the record of the past couple of decades and conclude that things have gotten pretty far out of whack and that Wal-Mart is a good symbol of this imbalance.

In other words, reality matters, not just politics. At one of my panel sessions this weekend, a member of the audience asked if reading blogs for the past four years had made me less willing than before to give George Bush the benefit of the doubt. I answered that it would be silly to pretend that reading people like Digby and Atrios hadn't affected my political views, but that something much more important had happened during my time reading blogs: George Bush had mismanaged the country for four years. Anyone sentient who has simply watched Bush govern during that time would be less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Hell, even conservatives feel that way.

The same is true more broadly. There's a reason that so many former moderates are so irate these days, and it's not because they aren't moderates anymore. It's because moderates should be irate over the events of the past decade. People like Mallaby seem unable to figure that out, and therefore assume that any change of heart is motivated not by events, but by a "betrayal" of principles.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The American economy has changed for the worse over the past couple of decades if you're part of the working or middle class, and over the same period the Newt Gingrich-inspired Republican Party has changed the nature of partisan politics into a scorched earth cultural bloodbath. Of course moderates are pissed. Of course they've changed their views. They'd be nuts not to.

POSTSCRIPT: But I will (partly) concede one point to Mallaby: it's foolish to paint Wal-Mart or the broader business community as "evil." They aren't, any more than ordinary human beings are evil. It's just that, left to their own devices, both humans and corporations tend to act solely in their own self-interest. That's why we have laws to control human behavior, and it's why we need laws and regulations to control corporate behavior. I prefer a society in which people don't gun each other down in the streets, and I also prefer a society in which middle class workers prosper when the economy grows. I support laws that encourage both.

MISTAH KURTZ, HE CRAZY....I'm usually willing to take on any conservative commentator if he or she happens to say something that I feel like arguing with. But there are a few — in fact, three — who are so fundamentally nonserious and/or insane that they're on my permanent "ignore" list no matter what the provocation. These are stictly personal choices, of course, and I mentioned a few days ago that Ann Coulter is one of them. David Horowitz is the second.

Note to David Weigel: Stanley Kurtz is the third. I recommend you update your personal blacklist.

HOUSING BUBBLE NEWS....James Joyner comments on the housing bubble in the Washington DC area:

Our current house sold for about 87% of what it likely would have sold for one year ago–but 140% of what my wife paid for it a little over three years ago. Conversely, our new house sold for 79% of what it would likely have garnered a year ago, but 238% more than the owners paid ten years ago.

Oddly enough, James uses this as evidence that "the market is softer than it once was but hardly plummeting." Really? His house (he says) has dropped in value 13% since last year and the house he moved to had dropped 21%. In my book, that's a fairly dramatic bubble bursting, especially since pretty much everyone thinks the housing downturn has only barely gotten started.

I hope James is wrong in his estimates. If housing prices in the DC suburbs have already dropped 15% with worse yet to come — thanks to the ARMs he's a fan of because "most people will sell their home and move well before the rates become variable or they’re forced to refinance" (!) — the end of the bubble could be worse than I've suspected.

PLAME AND ARMITAGE....Catching up with the weekend news, I see that David Corn and Michael Isikoff have definitively named former State Department #2 Richard Armitage as the guy who leaked Valerie Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak three years ago. Apparently it happened on July 8, 2003, two days after Joe Wilson published an op-ed in the New York Times about his prewar trip to Niger to investigate the "uranium from Africa" story.

This opens up a can of worms, no? In one sense, it's no surprise, since Armitage has been on the short list of suspected leakers for quite a long time (see this from November 2005, for example, though suspicions about Armitage go back well before that). And it certainly doesn't bolster the argument that the leak was part of a White House conspiracy to punish Joe Wilson, since Armitage was relatively dovish on the war and has never been considered a hardnosed, Rovian political player. As Isikoff and Corn put it, he was just a "terrible gossip."

And yet, there are still some pretty crucial questions remaining:

• Who gave Novak the name "Valerie Plame"? This has always been at the heart of the mystery, and it still is. You see, Armitage apparently learned about Joe Wilson's trip to Niger on July 7 from a State Department memo that (incorrectly) suggested he had gotten the assignment because his wife, a CIA analyst, had recommended him. But that memo referred to Wilson's wife as "Valerie Wilson," not Valerie Plame.

  So why did Novak call her by her maiden name, despite the fact that she used her married name routinely? Did Armitage give it to him? That seems unlikely if he had only learned of her existence from a memo the day before. Was it Karl Rove, Novak's second source? The evidence suggests not.

  So it's somebody else. But who? Judith Miller wrote Plame's name in her notebook weeks before Novak's column appeared, but says she can't remember who gave it to her. Novak isn't talking either. But it's a key part of the mystery. Whoever gave up Plame's name not only knew about the Niger trip, but also knew that she used her maiden name when she was engaged on CIA business and deliberately leaked that name. There was malice of some kind involved in that.

• When did Armitage realize he had screwed up? Isikoff reports that Armitage realized he was Novak's source after Novak wrote a second column on October 1 claiming that his original source was "not a partisan gunslinger." Isikoff says that after Armitage read this second column, "he knew immediately who the leaker was.....'I'm sure he's talking about me.'"

  Give me a break. Armitage talked to Novak on July 8 about Plame, a week later Novak's original column hit the street, and Armitage didn't realize then that he was probably Novak's source? That hardly seems likely.

• Why didn't Armitage fess up earlier? Even taking Armitage's claim at face value, why didn't he go public in October about his role in the Plame case? The Justice Department had only barely started its investigation and a special prosecutor was still months in the future. Armitage could easily have spun his role as innocent, and it might have spared the White House its past few years of turmoil. Why the silence?

  The obvious answer is that Armitage is hardly the end of the story. Whether his gossiping was innocent or not — about which I remain agnostic — the fact remains that several other people were also aggressively talking to multiple reporters about Plame's role at the same time. If Armitage really didn't have any malicious intent, it's a helluva coincidence that he happened to be gossiping about the exact same thing as a bunch of other people who did have malicious intent.

• When did Corn and Isikoff learn all this? Hey, we all have to make a living, but Armitage's name was swirling around the rumor circuits just a couple of months ago. Being magazine reporters and all, shouldn't they have written about this at the time instead of saving it up to help promote their book? Just asking.
  

That's it for now. I'll probably think of more questions later. But the bottom line is that this case is far from closed.

I'M BACK....Many thanks to Laura Rozen and Suzanne Nossel for filling in for me this weekend while I was ignoring the news and hanging out with science fiction geeks at the World Science Fiction Convention. If you liked their stuff, you can find Laura at War and Piece and Suzanne at Democracy Arsenal. They're both great sites.

Before the weekend slips completely away, though, and we return to weightier subjects, I'm sure you're all wondering how things went at the WorldCon. The answer is: it was lots of fun and the panels went fine. The 2007 con is in Yokohama, so I don't think I'll be going again next year, but 2008 will be in Denver. Maybe I'll give it another go then.

And who did I meet? Aside from fellow panelists, I got to meet Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden in the flesh for the first time, which was cool, and via the Tor party I also met John Scalzi, who went on to win the John Campbell award for best new writer (as well as third place in the Hugo voting for his novel Old Man's War); James Patrick Kelly, who took third place in the novella category for "Burn"; Cory Doctorow, who took second place in the novelette category for "I, Robot"; and Kim Stanley Robinson, who wasn't up for anything this year but has won plenty of Hugos in the past. For those who are interested, here's the complete list of Hugo winners this year:

• Novel: Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson
  

• Novella: "Inside Job," by Connie Willis
  

• Novelette: "Two Hearts," by Peter S. Beagle
  

• Short Story: "Tk'tk'tk," by David D. Levine
  

• Related Book: Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers' Workshop, by Kate Wilhelm
  

• Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Serenity
  

• Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Who ("The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances")
  

• Professional Editor: David G. Hartwell
  

• Pro Artist: Donato Giancola
  

• Semiprozine: Locus
  

• Fanzine: Plokta
  

• Fan Writer: Dave Langford
  

• Fan Artist: Frank Wu
  

• John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: John Scalzi
  

That's it for science fiction for the moment — though if anyone happens to know why Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys was withdrawn from consideration in the novel category, I'd be interested in hearing the story.

I'll be back Monday morning with the usual serious stuff. See you then.

BEFORE KEVIN takes away the keys, let me thank him and Washington Monthly readers for the chance to post here. It's among my most favorite and frequently visited sites, and I'm looking forward to typing in the url and getting Kevin's take on the news again, as no doubt, is everybody else. I also wanted to point out what an admirer I am of what Suzanne Nossel and her co-foreign policy practitioners at Democracy Arsenal do at their home site -- until she launched it, one did not have the chance to read the frequent, first person blog style thoughts of people like Suzanne who worked for Richard Holbrooke at the UN at a fairly senior level; the issues she raises about the viability of the UN Security Council as a forum for the US to try to resolve foreign policy problems such as Iran's nuclear ambitions are ones that any US administration - Democratic or Republican - has to face. That's just reality. It was true of the Clinton administration trying to deal with the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts as well.

In any case, you can find me at War and Piece, and keep up with my latest published work at the left tab. Thanks again.

Maureen Freely, the translator for among others Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, writes in the (August 13th) NY Times book review about Turkish writers on trial:

To date, there have been more than 60 cases brought against [Turkish] novelists, publishers, journalists, scholars, politicians and cartoonists. Hrant Dink, the editor of the Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos, currently has two cases against him open. The publisher Fatih Tas is on trial for publishing a book (by the political scientist John Tirman of M.I.T.) that takes a critical look at the Turkish Army. Two eminent professors faced charges for saying, in a never-published government-commissioned report, that Turkey’s treatment of its minorities fell short of European standards, while the magazine Penguen and one of its cartoonists were prosecuted for portraying the prime minister as a kitten and an elephant, among other animals.

So far, no one has been sent to prison. Some defendants have been acquitted; others, like Pamuk, have seen their cases dropped on technicalities, while many have been given suspended sentences that were then converted to fines. But to assume that writers have nothing to fear is to underestimate the forces behind these prosecutions.

It is still not clear how Article 301 found its way into the new penal code, but the Unity of Jurists, an ultranationalist lawyers group, is behind most of the high-profile prosecutions. Its main spokesman is a lawyer named Kemal Kerincsiz. His rabidly xenophobic sound bites have turned him into a national celebrity, and his words are echoed by the thugs who have taunted, assaulted and insulted defendants and observers in the corridors of the courthouses, denouncing them as traitors and “missionary children” (a reference to the foreign schools many of the defendants attended) and spouting racist slogans that call to mind Berlin in 1935, while the riot police look on. ...

This is not a tug of war between East and West as the West likes to understand it: while some of Turkey’s new ultranationalists are Islamists, most are old-guard, die-hard secularists. The battle is about democracy, with supporters of European Union membership hoping for peaceful change and opponents hoping for a return to authoritarian rule.

This morning Iran opened up a plant that produces heavy water, in blunt defiance of UN insistence that it stop its nuclear weapons production activities. They did so just days ahead of an end-of-August deadline imposed by the UN Security Council. Kofi Annan is now en route to Tehran to try to forestall a deepening crisis.

The US's fellow UN members have in recent years accused us - rightly at times, of sidestepping and denigrating the world body. But if Russia and China do not stand by the UN's resolution and back up the offer of incentives dangled before Iranian President Ahmadinejad with penalties now that the overture has been rebuffed, it is they - not the US - that will undermine the United Nations. Some months ago, the second highest ranking UN official, Mark Malloch Brown ignited a firestorm when, at a conference sponsored by the Security and Peace Initiative, he laid into the US for failing to adequately back the UN.

If Russia and China back away from concerted and forceful UN action on Iran (I realize I am sidestepping what the nature of such action would be and the questions I raised last night about whether and how sanctions can be made effective, but unity and the perception of forcefulness may ultimately be what matters most here), they will deserve at least equivalent criticism.

GOP CAMPAIGN PLAYBOOK: IRAN AND JUDGES. Just over two months to go, and the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes writes that prospects for the GOP in November have improved in recent polls, but not enough. Where can President Bush start to rouse Republicans to get to the polls? Barnes: "The place to start is Iran." Here's more:

So bring on the midterm election, right? The answer is an emphatic no. As favorable as recent trends have been, they are not nearly enough to spare Republicans a nasty defeat, including the loss of the House and perhaps the Senate. The country is in a disagreeable mood and ready for a change. The Republican base is grumpy and apathetic. Bush may be America's choice to fight terrorism, but he falters on other issues. His boost in the polls doesn't mean he's now popular. He's merely less unpopular. And the August bounce may prove to be ephemeral, as earlier upticks have.

There's much to do. Standing pat and expecting terrorism to dominate the campaign would be foolhardy. ... It's Bush's actions, not his words, that will matter. Americans want to see him fighting for America's security. ...

The place to start is Iran. The diplomatic option is exhausted. No one expected the mere possibility of economic sanctions to cause Iran to halt its program to build nuclear weapons. And it hasn't. Now Bush must brook no dissent in pursuing stern sanctions. Russian and Chinese leaders have personally assured him they would back sanctions if Iran refused (as it has) to stop uranium enrichment. The president must hold them to their word, warning that their relations with America will be jeopardized if they balk. It's also time to make clear to Iran that the military option is indeed an option. ....

Sixty-three percent of Israelis reportedly want Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to resign in the wake of what's perceived to be a failed operation in Lebanon. They're outraged that Israel's revered military somehow faltered in dislodging Hezbollah's leadership and securing the return of two captured soldiers.

One interesting point of comparison is to President Bush - we've now been in what a majority of Americans have perceived for some time to be a failed military operation, yet no majority has coalesced in favor of the President's stepping down. In fact, Bush was reelected nearly two years ago despite serious signs that the Iraq mission was going poorly.

Why the differences?

- The Iraq Operation did get rid of Saddam Hussein

- Part of its