SURVEILLANCE....Speaking of Nancy Pelosi, here's part of the latest tirade aimed in her direction from desperate conservatives. This is from Thomas Sowell over at National Review:

As regards the war on terrorism and the terrorists’ war against the west, Nancy Pelosi has opposed having international phone calls to and from terrorists monitored by American intelligence agencies.

This is, flatly, a lie. Pelosi, like many Democrats, opposes NSA surveillance of American residents without a warrant. That is all she opposes. Period.

The rest of the piece isn't much more honest. But this business of liberals "opposing surveillance of terrorists" is McCarthyish mendacity of the worst kind. Even National Review should be embarrassed to peddle it.

A SEARING SYMBOL?....The New York Times' Jennifer Steinhauer says that Nancy Pelosi has "emerged as a searing symbol of the country's deep partisan divide." Bob Somerby comments:

The notion that Pelosi “has emerged as a searing symbol of the country's deep partisan divide” is, of course, pure RNC claptrap....Meanwhile, can you think of a single Democrat for whom “Pelosi embodies their raw antipathy for the Republican Party?” Is such a person alive on Earth? Funny — Steinhauer doesn’t name any such person. And no one is quoted saying such things, not even anonymously.

The reason, of course, is that it's solely Republicans who have spent the past few months trying to rally the troops with their laughable Pelosi-as-Grim-Reaper demagoguery. But as Steinhauer knows perfectly well, the truth is that Pelosi is only a symbol of partisan divide to the extent that Republicans have insisted on trying to make her one for their own purely partisan reasons. (Namely, that it's all they've got this election cycle.) In the real world Pelosi has gone to extraordinary lengths to present a moderate face and a moderate agenda. Jon Chait reminds you of that agenda here in case you've forgotten it.

POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of Pelosi, did anyone see the 60 Minutes segment about her a week ago? I read a lot of comments disparaging CBS for "fawning" over her two weeks before the election, but it sure didn't seem like an especially warm profile to me. I didn't write about it at the time, which means my memory has grown dim, but it seemed distinctly unfriendly to me. Am I off base here, or did it strike other people that way too?

NO MORE SEX!....The Bush administration is now in the business of encouraging adults to stop having sex? Seriously? And they accuse liberals of using government power in the service of utopian social engineering?

TIMETABLES....The LA Times reports that high-ranking military officers are warming up to the idea of deadlines and timetable in Iraq:

"Deadlines could help ensure that the Iraqi leaders recognize the imperative of coming to grips with the tough decisions they've got to make for there to be progress in the political arena," said a senior Army officer who has served in Iraq. He asked that his name not be used because he did not want to publicly disagree with the stated policy of the president.

....Some in the military argue that publicizing a timetable for reducing forces is far less damaging to a counterinsurgency campaign than the administration has suggested.

Many officers, particularly those who adhere to the military philosophy of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired Army general who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believe that deadlines are necessary to avoid getting mired in an endless war fueled by enmity between Iraq's long-subjugated Shiite population and the Sunni Arabs who ran the government under Saddam Hussein.

Two years ago, this might have done some good. Today, I'm not so sure, though it's certainly worth a try.

Regardless, it's nice to hear that there are at least a few rumblings among the officer corps. Three decades ago, after the Vietnam War, they swore they'd speak up before they'd allow the civilian leadership to lead them into a ditch again without protest, but that's pretty much what they've done in Iraq. If the Iraq debacle reminds them of that promise, at least it will have accomplished something.

LATEST POLLING....Via Mickey Kaus, here's the latest round of robo-polling from Majority Watch. It suggests Democrats will pick up at least 20 seats, and possibly as many as 38 if they run the table in the "Weak D" districts. For now, I'll stick with my prediction of a 23-seat pickup — though it's starting to look like I might be on the low side.

YO-YO MA....This is way off the beaten path, but take a look at Mark Swed's lead in his review of Yo-Yo Ma's performance in Los Angeles on Friday:

Yo-Yo Ma is the world's most popular cellist. That is not to say that he is the world's finest cellist. The Finnish virtuoso Anssi Karttunen, for one, can more effectively make Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto sound like music than can Ma, although it was written for him. Others play bluegrass, tangos and Kyrgyz traditional music more authentically than he.

I don't know much about classical music, and I know even less about Ma. I certainly don't have an opinion about whether he's the finest cellist in the world or not.

But what on earth was the meaning of that paragraph? A Finnish cellist plays one particular piece better than Ma? There are other cellists better versed in Kyrgyz traditional music (!) than Ma? WTF?

Can somebody knowledgable help me out here? What am I supposed to take away from this?

DEMOCRATS, LIBERALS, AND RELIGION....Scott Lemieux comments about Democrats and religion:

I have a lot of problems with Amy Sullivan's recent piece about the opportunities allegedly presented by David Kuo's new book. First of all, I reject her entire premise that Democratic politicians don't reach out to religious believers, and since she never mentions the names of prominent Democrats who treat believers with contempt it's impossible to evaluate her claims.

You know, I have two diametrically opposed responses to this. The first is that I've long had the same question as Scott about the Democratic Party's supposed religious phobia. Who are these Democrats who are insufficiently zealous in their religious outreach? Can anybody name even one? The plain fact is that every single Democrat in Congress claims to be religious, and none of them ever shows the slightest disrespect toward either Christianity or any other faith. Quite the contrary, in fact.

But my second response is: Give me a break. We all know perfectly well that it's the ACLU that fights every last expression of religion in the public square as if it really were the end times. (And don't even try to pretend the ACLU is anything but a liberal organization. Save it for the gullible.) It's liberals who gripe about "under God" in the pledge of allegiance. It's liberals who cheered when prayer was outlawed in public schools. It's liberals who fight even a nickel of public funding for parochial schools. It's liberals who write books like Kingdom Coming. It's liberals who disparage the anti-evolution crowd as thickwitted neanderthals.

And you know what? I agree with all that. I think the ACLU is great, I don't think government bureaucrats (i.e., teachers) should be pressing religion on little kids, and I have nothing but contempt for the self-righteous blowhards who want to turn high school biology classes into Sunday School. At the same time, I'm not so delusional that I don't realize that a lot of people view these positions as fundamentally anti-religious. I may not agree, but it's not as if this perspective has simply sprung out of thin air.

So let's get real: It's true that Democratic politicians are uniformly respectful toward religion, but it's equally true that the Democratic Party responds to liberal concerns, and that means it's more sympathetic than the Republican Party is to a whole raft of positions that even some moderate believers view as anti-religious. Maybe Democrats should do something about this, maybe they shouldn't. We all have our own take on that. But it's not as if the problem is just a figment of Amy Sullivan's imagination.

ONE WEEK STILL TO GO....From the "Just When You Think They Can't Sink Any Lower" file, Rick Santorum shows that they still haven't hit bottom:

"Bob Casey has invested Pennsylvania pension funds in companies with ties to terrorist-sponsoring states and states that engage in genocide," Santorum said. "Bob Casey is aiding and abetting terrorism and genocide."

I suppose the next step will for Santorum to self-righteously deny that he's impugned anyone's patriotism. At least, that's usually the next step after an attack like this.

Deeper and deeper into the muck. Truly disgusting.

Via Sullivan.

HUGO AND THE VOTING MACHINES....Via Mark Kleiman, I see that an e-voting company based in Venezuela is under investigation:

Federal officials are investigating whether Smartmatic, owner of Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems, is secretly controlled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, according to two people familiar with the probe.

....Concerns about Smartmatic are keen on the eve of the Nov. 7 election, given fears that someone with unauthorized access to the electronic system could create electoral chaos. Some critics believe that if the Venezuelan government is involved, Smartmatic could be a ''Trojan horse'' designed to advance Chavez's anti-American agenda.

My guess is that there's nothing improper going on here. But who knows? What's more, if a minor round of chest-thumping xenophobia and Hugo Chávez bashing is the only thing that will get conservatives to finally pull their heads out of the sand on this issue, I guess I'm willing to pay the price. As Mark says, "Actually, I'm pleased. Maybe this will finally get the black box issue the attention it deserves."

DECONSTRUCTING AL-QAEDA....Marc Lynch has some interesting speculation today about al-Qaeda's war aims. It's based on a posting at a jihadi internet forum that makes the familiar observation that al-Qaeda wants the U.S. to continue bleeding in Iraq:

"Al-Qaeda's Scenario During the Coming Weeks" argues that the coming two weeks....will reveal whether al-Qaeda's leadership believes that this stage of direct combat has served its purpose of weakening America sufficiently. If it does, according to the author, al-Qaeda will remain silent, allowing the Democrats to win the Congressional elections and initiating a new phase of the conflict. If it does not (as the author hopes), it will intervene through a bin Laden tape or an attack on an American ally in order to ensure a Republican victory which will keep the Americans trapped in Iraq longer in order to weaken it more before moving to the next stage.

....The author doesn't know which way al-Qaeda will go, and having delivered his analysis is left sitting back and waiting to see. Total silence from al-Qaeda prior to the election should be read as a signal that its leadership believes that the time has come to move to the next phase. A tape or attack by al-Qaeda prior to the election means that its leaders are not yet satisfied with the American blood and treasure lost in Iraq and want more time before moving to the next stage. And that's where "Al-Qaeda's Scenario" leaves it.

This is interesting not so much for what it says about America's willingness to continually scare itself into doing things contrary to our own interests — that's an old story — but for its emphasis on what al-Qaeda's actions say about al-Qaeda itself. Is the timing and content of al-Qaeda videos the new equivalent of Beijing wall posters and May Day photographs in the Kremlin?

GLOBAL WARMING....A new report released in Britan warns that climate change will be devastating to the world economy if we don't do something about it:

The report warns unless the world moves to cut green house gases it is heading for a "catastrophic climate change" which would create the worst global recession ever seen.

....The review says failure to act early could end up costing between 5% and 20% of global GDP and render large parts of the planet uninhabitable with poor nations hit first and hardest.

Africa is likely to be most harmed by climate change and Sir Nicholas [Stern] says we have a "moral duty" to cut emissions.

Apparently the next step is for Tony Blair to persuade George Bush to help lead the world in a global effort to keep this from happening. Good luck on that, Tony.

THE ACLU AND THE PATRIOT ACT....Thanks to changes in the Patriot Act passed earlier this year, the ACLU has dropped its legal challenge:

The lawsuit [had challenged] the part of the Patriot Act that lets federal agents obtain such things as library records and medical information. The ACLU said the revisions allow people receiving demands for records to consult with a lawyer and challenge the demands in court.

Instapundit links ominously to some guy who's convinced this was done solely for political reasons, because, you know, the ACLU is so famously gunshy about fighting for unpopular causes. And I suppose I might have gotten suckered in by this too if I hadn't spent 30 seconds reading to the end of the story:

The group also said it is continuing its legal fight against a more frequently used provision of the Patriot Act that authorizes national security letters. Such letters allow the executive branch of government to obtain records about people in terrorism and espionage investigations without a judge's approval or a grand jury subpoena.

I guess they haven't given up the fight after all, midterms or no.

LIBERALS AND SOCIAL CHANGE....Over at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg recounts his bloggingheads.tv debate with Bill Scher:

Scher seems to really believe that liberalism — as actually practiced over, say, the last century — doesn't stand for imposing public policies on democratic majorities that don't want them....Having not met a smart liberal who actually believes this in a very long time, I was kind of flummoxed by how to respond to it.

Golly. Bill didn't accept this characterization of liberalism? That's hard to imagine, isn't it?

I don't have the patience to listen to an entire bloggingheads.tv conversation, but this claim struck me as so peculiar that I listened to a couple of minutes of it to see if maybe Jonah had just misrepresented himself in a hastily written post. Nope. He says it directly: "The idea that liberalism in America hasn't been about shoving things down people's throats is just factually untrue."

Well, it's certainly true that liberals, almost by definition, push for social change more than conservatives. And most social change doesn't gain majority support overnight. Still, Jonah's caricature is absurd as a definition specifically of liberalism, as opposed to a definition of anyone fighting for social change, whether progressive or reactionary. Every political movement worth the name starts out trying to convince the public about one thing or another, and sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail. When liberals succeed (civil rights, gay rights), the country eventually comes around. When liberals fail (busing, gun control), the country doesn't.

What's more, several of Jonah's examples don't even make sense. Courts as liberal, anti-democratic creatures? Judges are appointed by the president and confirmed by Congress, and Earl Warren in particular was appointed by a Republican president and confirmed by a Republican Senate. Civil rights? That wasn't imposed by a minority. It was the final victory — after many decades — of a majority finally imposing its will against an obstructive minority. The American with Disabilities Act? It was signed into law by a Republican president. Most of Jonah's other examples (gay marriage, affirmative action, opposition to the death penalty) are liberal positions that have had mixed success precisely because liberals haven't been able to widely impose them on an unwilling populace. Some liberals continue to fight for these things and some don't. That's politics.

And conservatives have some unpopular notions of their own. A ban on abortion? That's not too popular, but that doesn't stop the Christian right from continuing to push for it. Terri Schiavo? Stem cells? The estate tax? Tearing down environmental regulations? Opposition to raising the minimum wage? Pretending that global warming doesn't exist? Privatizing Social Security? In all these cases — just like liberals — conservatives try to use elections to get their way, and if that doesn't work they try the courts, and if that doesn't work they use executive orders. They use every lever of power available to them, just like any political movement.

In the end, though, you have to win elections. If conservatives continue to do that, they'll be able to move the country closer to their vision of an ideal society. If liberals win, they'll try to do the same. I don't really see the problem here.

EXPLAINING INCOME INEQUALITY....It's worth reading Jon Chait's entire article about rising income inequality in the New Republic this week, but for my money here's the most important factoid to lodge firmly in your brain:

Over the last quarter century, the portion of the national income accruing to the richest 1 percent of Americans has doubled. The share going to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent has tripled, and the share going to the richest one-hundredth of 1 percent has quadrupled.

Whenever you hear someone propose an explanation for skyrocking income inequality over the past few decades, try to think about whether it explains the fact that inequality has gotten immensely worse not just between the top 20% and the bottom 20%, but between the top 1% and the 9% just below them. For example:

Greater returns to education? Do you really think that the top 1% are better educated on average than the next 9%?

Greater rewards for technical skills? Do you really think the top 1% have greater technical skills than the next 9%?

Globalization?

More stable families?

Race and gender?

A failure to take account of the growing value of health benefits?

Do any of these things plausibly seem like big differences between the top 1% and the next 9%? Pretty clearly they aren't. So why is the top 1% outpacing even the well-to-do who inhabit the next 9%? What's the big difference between these groups? If you're interested in reading more about this, it's below the fold.

Here's the answer: the top 1% have a lot more money. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader. —Kevin Drum 8:12 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (141)

CARDINAL BLUES....I guess we didn't have to wait very long for a USC loss after all. Four turnovers was just a few too many. Nice comeback try, though.

The pollsters have been itching to demote USC all season long. Now that they've lost, will they even stay in the top ten?

WALL STREET JOURNAL WATCH....Brad DeLong has a long post today about Greg Mankiw's recent Wall Street Journal op-ed endorsing higher gasoline taxes. You should read the whole thing (it's an interesting discussion), but since this is a weekend I just want to highlight the objection raised by the estimable Scott Hodge, President of the Tax Foundation:

The French have some of the highest gas taxes in Europe yet remain 100% dependent on foreign oil.

It's true! There are no oil fields anywhere within the boundaries of the French Republic, which necessarily means that if the French use even a single liter of oil, they will be 100% dependent on foreign oil. For the same reason, the United States remains dangerously dependent on foreign supplies of cocoa beans, bananas, and high-quality Gouda cheese.

Scott Hodge apparently has a low assessment of the IQ of the Wall Street Journal's opinion page readers. The editors of the Wall Street Journal opinion page seem to share this assessment. I wonder if their readers know this?

SINGLE-SEX EDUCATION....So: is single-sex education a good thing or a bad thing? Over at Unfogged, Becks says she likes it:

I went to a single-sex high school and believe I got far more out of it than I would have in a coeducational setting....I'd always been outspoken in class but it wasn't until I was at an all-girls school that I felt my comments were heard and challenged. It's one thing to speak up in class with an opinion and have it ignored or dismissed and entirely another to be engaged and forced to defend it.

Brad Plumer disagrees. He takes a look at what Louisiana wants to do with single-sex schools and thinks the practical result would be grim:

The Louisiana plan would put boys in "competitive, high-energy teams" while girls would be "encouraged to take their shoes off." And so on. (Maybe female students can learn math by counting how many shirts they can iron in an hour.)....Sorry, whatever the academic studies might say, I can't shake the feeling that, in practice, Louisiana officials are pushing this plan in order to steer female students into home economics classes, de-emphasize real learning, and teach girls how to act like "proper" ladies.

As with so many issues in education, my first reaction is that experimentation is a good thing. Give it a try and see how it works. If it turns out as badly as Brad suggests, we can always kill it later.

It turns out, though, that my real fear is just the opposite: what if we try it and Becks turns out to be right? What if it works? Does that mean we just give up on the whole idea of figuring out how to make co-ed education work? I can't be the only one who thinks that would be a bad idea, can I?

There are all sorts of problems of race, gender, class, religion, and so forth that can seemingly be ameliorated by simple segregation. But that just caves in to the problem, essentially declaring it unsolvable, rather than acknowledging it and continuing to search for solutions. I have a hard time believing that this does anybody any good in the long term.

But....still....there's the whole experimentation argument. And it's a strong one. Count me as still on the fence on this one.

JUMPING AT SHADOWS....James Joyner links today to a pair of critics who warn that withdrawing from Iraq would "play into the hands of the jihadist terrorists" (Peter Bergen) and cause al-Qaeda to "rejoice" (Michael Scheuer).

That may be true. But what's missing here is what happens if we stay in Iraq: it will play into the hands of the jihadist terrorists and cause al-Qaeda to rejoice. This is the position that George Bush's blinkered view of national security has gotten us into: al-Qaeda improves its position no matter what happens. If we stay in Iraq, it's a substantive win because it helps recruiting and provides a cause for militant jihadists to rally around. If we leave, Osama & Co. will claim that they caused the mighty United States to leave with its tail between its legs.

So which is worse? A substantive victory for al-Qaeda or a round of theatrical, breast-beating propaganda videos on al-Jazeera? That's actually a harder question to answer than it seems, but it's still not that hard. If our foreign policy is focused primarily on the fear of what our enemies might say about us rather than on the substance of what's really happening, we're helpless. Al-Qaeda will always claim victory, after all.

THE C-WORD....Ramesh Ponnuru, responding to a sensible letter from a reader, gives the stem cell game away. After complaining that Michael J. Fox's ad for Claire McCaskill didn't explain the details of stem cell research in enough detail, he says this:

People don't know much about these issues, and the pro-cloning side has revised the lexicon repeatedly over the last four years to keep people off balance. Everyone doesn't know that Fox is talking about human cloning.

The extremist pro-life forces are bound and determined that no discussion of stem cell research should be allowed unless it includes the word "cloning." Why? Because it's scary. It brings to mind The Boys From Brazil and warehouses stacked with human bodies ready to have their organs harvested.

Needless to say, supporters of stem cell research tend to avoid the word for the same reason. And they should. Therapeutic cloning, in which microscopic groups of cells are duplicated in order to provide embryonic stem cells for research, isn't scary at all. Unless you take the extreme position that a blastocyst is a human person, there's simply no reason to connect this kind of research to reproductive cloning (i.e., the scary kind).

But pro-life extremists want to scare people. So they insist that any discussion that doesn't include the C-word is dishonest. That's horsepucky.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, who are these people who Ponnuru says are opposed to adult stem cell research? This is a genuine question. I've never heard of anyone taking this position.

UPDATE: A reader who's familiar with the stem cell debate writes to explain the origin of the claim that some people oppose adult stem cell research:

It comes from the opposition of some Democrats to the Santorum-Specter bill, introduced at the same time as the embryonic stem cell bill that Bush vetoed earlier this year. Santorum-Specter would have required the NIH to pursue alternative methods of making stem cells without destroying embryos. Ponnuru thinks that because some Democrats opposed Santorum-Specter (and ultimately killed it in the House), that means they're opposed to adult stem cell research. Kathryn Jean Lopez has called it the "embryos-or-nothing" school.

Total bunk. NIH is already free to fund alternative methods of making stem cells. In FY 2005, NIH received $199 million in funding for research on human non-embryonic stem cells, vs. $40 million for work on human embryonic stem cells. There's absolutely no statutory restriction on adult stem cell work, and no one has proposed such a thing. Santorum-Specter was a superfluous earmark, but a convenient way for Republicans opposed to embryonic stem cell research to say they voted for stem cell research.

It's fair for Ponnuru & Lopez to argue that alternative methods are morally preferable to research involving embryos. But it's bizarre and cynical for them to pretend that anyone actively opposes research on adult stem cells. No one does.

More details here.

IDIOCY WATCH....Sam Brownback: doing his best to prove that Jim Inhofe isn't the worst senator in the country. Steve Benen has the details.

THE GRANDEUR OF THE PRESIDENCY....What's the most addle-brained thing George Bush said during his sit-down with conservative columnists on Wednesday? It's a tough choice, so I'm going to let you make it. Here are the nominees:

1. Bush: "Iran empowered Hezbollah, Hezbollah takes the attack, and — which creates an interesting dynamic, and it gives us an opportunity to fashion kind of – an alliance of reasonable people headed toward a clash — all kinds of different ways, by the way — with extremists and radicals."

   Matt Yglesias: It's easy to get distracted by the fact that Bush doesn't seem familiar with the English language and miss the fact that beneath the garbled syntax Bush is making a clear — and utterly incorrect — factual claim here that the upshot of the war was to cement an alliance between the United States, Israel, and moderate forces in the Arab world.

2. Bush: "One of the stories — interesting stories I tell is about the fellow that came here. He got kidnapped and he was rescued pretty early by our Delta team. I said, 'What's it like to be kidnapped, man? It must have been weird — Baghdad, to be kidnapped.'"

   Steve Benen: For some reason, reading this reminded me an episode of The West Wing called, "Posse Comitatus."....

3. Bush: "A lot of people are just saying, 'You're not doing enough to win. We're not winning, you're not doing enough to win, and I'm frustrated, I want it over with, with victory.' And I'm trying to figure out a matrix that says things are getting better. I think that one way to measure is less violence than before, I guess...."

   Byron York: But that, of course, leads back to the president's statement that the enemy gets to define victory by killing people. If the sectarian forces are able to keep up the killing, then they will determine who wins in Iraq. [Kinda weak, Byron. Needs more snark. You can do better. –ed]

4. Bush: "If we do not defeat the terrorists or extremists in Iraq, they will gain access to vast oil reserves, and use Iraq as a base to overthrow moderate governments across the broader Middle East."

   Marc Lynch: This is just idiotic. The Sunni areas in which al-Qaeda would hope to reconstitute a base don't have any significant oil reserves — this is one of the primary problems with most partition or federalism schemes.
   

Leave your vote in comments!

FLIP FLOPPING ON NATIONAL SECURITY....Dan Drezner thinks the national security debate has fundamentally changed in the past couple of weeks:

For the past five years, Democrats have been vulnerable on national security issues. Bush and the Republicans projected a clear image of taking the war to the enemy, and never yielding in their drive to defeat radical Islamists. The Democrats, in contrast, projected either an antiwar position or a "yes, but" position. The former looked out of step with the American people, the latter looked like Republican lite. No matter how you sliced it, the Republicans held the upper hand.

The recent rhetorical shift on Iraq, however, has flipped this phenomenon on its head. If Bush acknowledges that "stay the course" is no longer a statisfying status quo, he's acknowledging that the Republican position for the past few years has not worked out too well. If that's the case, then Republicans are forced to offer alternatives with benchmarks or timetables or whatever. The administration has had these plans before, but politically, it looks like the GOP is gravitating towards the Democratic position rather than vice versa.

If this is what the political optics look like, then the Republicans will find themselves in the awkward position of being labeled as "Democrat lite" in their positions on Iraq. And in elections, lite never tastes as good as the real thing.

The mainstream media has run plenty of stories about the meltdown in Iraq and the administration's resultant flip flopping on timelines and blueprints and so forth. But I've seen very few pieces acknowledging that, in practice, this means the administration is adopting the Democratic position from last year. Why? Because that would mean that Democrats were actually right about a major national security issue and had a more serious response to it at an earlier date than the Republicans did. And that would cause everyone's brain to explode. After all, everyone knows that Democrats aren't serious about national security. Right?

SLEAZY ADVERTISING....Michael Grunwald writes an honest piece today in the Washington Post about the wildly negative campaigning going on in the Republican camp this election cycle. He briefly suggests that "some Democrats are playing rough, too" — and provides a couple of examples — but immediately acknowledges that virtually all Democratic ads have focused on policies and performance. Not so on the other side:

The result has been a carnival of ugly, especially on the GOP side, where operatives are trying to counter what polls show is a hostile political environment by casting opponents as fatally flawed characters. The National Republican Campaign Committee is spending more than 90 percent of its advertising budget on negative ads, according to GOP operatives, and the rest of the party seems to be following suit.

See? It's not so hard to simply report the facts, is it?

ABORTION....Here's a bracing piece on abortion from Zoe Williams in today's Guardian. It's the kind of thing you never see in the mainstream U.S. media, because, as she says, "there are no votes to be won supporting abortion in an ideologically honest way, and lots to be lost."

I suppose so. But I agree with her anyway.

TOO FAST?....Mickey Kaus objects to Andrew Sullivan's claim that New Jersey's Supreme Court "had no logical option but to apply its equal protection clause to everybody" when it unanimously decided that the state couldn't deny gay couples the same benefits that it gives to everyone else:

[T]he breathtaking speed with which this sort of radical cultural change has gone from being unmentioned to being a litmus test for all "logical" people is one of the things that worries ordinary voters and turns them into cultural conservatives.

I dunno. The Stonewall riots happened in 1969. Domestic partnership laws started springing up in the 70s and 80s. Sullivan wrote "Here Comes the Groom," an article for the New Republic that defended gay marriage, in 1989. The Hawaii Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that the state needed to show a "compelling state interest" in order to continue denying gay people the right to marry. Vermont passed a civil union law in 2000. Currently, we're in the year 2006.

Is this "breathtaking speed"? It doesn't seem like it to me, unless you want to make the case that broad social changes literally shouldn't happen until every generation that objects to them has died off. But where would that leave the Feiler Faster Thesis?

HOUSING UPDATE....Sales of new homes took a nosedive last month. By itself that's not a big surprise, but here are the details:

On a regional basis, new home sales in the West fell 13.6% in September compared to same month last year. Sales dropped 6.6% in the Northeast, 36.6% in the Midwest and 7.9% in the South, the Commerce Department said.

Sales in the Midwest are down 36.6%? What's up with that? I'm not surprised to see that the bursting of California's housing bubble has knocked the wind out of sales in the West, but there's been no bubble in the Midwest. In fact, hasn't it been the least bubble-icious region in the country for the past few years?

Very strange. In any case, this comes a day after learning that existing home sales in California dropped 32% last month, and sales for the year are 24% below 2005 levels. Some of this is because people are taking their homes off the market rather than selling them for less than they think they're worth, but I suspect that dam can hold only just so long. There's a certain number of people who don't have a choice in the matter, and eventually most of the holdouts are going to have to get back into the market.

Not looking good. Buckle your seatbelts.

IN DEFENSE OF SLEAZY ATTACK ADS....OK, not really. But just to show how out of touch I am with California politics, I didn't even realize until a few days ago that Dianne Feinstein was running for reelection. The reason for this shocking ignorance is that her opponent is a conservative nonentity who hasn't even held office since 2000, which means there's been essentially no campaign. Feinstein is a shoo-in.

Anyway, Feinstein is finally deigning to run a few ads here in The OC, and they're the most cloying, saccharine, sick-making commercials you can imagine. They star Feinstein and her granddaughter cooing at each other, followed by Feinstein telling us that she's going to continue doing a really great job for all us Californians. You can watch the whole wretched thing here if you dare.

Bah. If that's what a positive, uplifting campaign is like, I'll take the gutter. It may smell bad, but at least you still know you're still alive.

POISON PILL....Ah, the Medicare bill. The three-hour vote in the wee hours of the morning. The attempted bribery of congressman Nick Smith. The Bush administration's deliberate lies about the bill's ultimate cost. The budgetary chicanery that resulted in the infamous donut hole. The millions of dollars funneled to the cause by the pharmaceutical industry, which was desperate to make sure that the bill prevented the government from negotiating drug prices.

Hmmm. The pharmaceutical industry. Who did they funnel all their dough through? You'll be unsurprised to learn that a considerable part of it, at least, was funneled through none other than Jack Abramoff and friends. Barbara Dreyfuss tells the story this month in "Poison Pill":

It’s well known that in his crusade to pass the bill, [Tom] DeLay drew on more than 800 pharmaceutical-industry lobbyists, millions of dollars in campaign contributions, and the efforts of numerous business and healthcare groups. But this grossly flawed legislation could never have passed without the help of the same players who were central to Abramoff’s lobbying operation: Tony Rudy and Ed Buckham. Using a nest of nonprofits flush with corporate cash, the discredited lobbyists played a vital, albeit hidden, role in whittling down congressional opposition to the bill for more than a year before the final vote.

Read the whole thing for all the grim details.

FUNDRAISING, REPUBLICAN STYLE....A reader in Washington recently bought a house from a very conservative elderly man, and apparently the efficient folks at the National Republican Senatorial Committee have now started sending him their fundraising appeals. He sent me a copy of their latest mailing, and I thought I'd share it with you.

Basically, it's a fake survey, with the lucky recipient informed that he's been singled out to represent "all Republicans living in your voting district." Here's the pitch:

So far, it's a fairly standard hard sell direct mail piece, complete with appeals to keep "Union Bosses and other liberal special interests" from destroying our great nation — at which point the recipient is repeatedly hit up to return the survey "along with your generous donation." But the best part is at the bottom:

So that's it. That's their pitch to elderly Republican voters. You MUST return this survey, and by the way, you also need to send us $11 to "cover the cost of tabulating and redistributing" the results. You can see the full mailing here.

I wonder who came up with this scam? How many elderly Republicans end up sending the NRSC $11 because they're convinced they've been specially chosen to represent their district and figure eleven bucks must be a legitimate fee of some kind? Hundreds? Thousands? Does everyone feeble-minded enough to include the $11 payment go into a special chump file for future use?

Do Democrats do stuff like this too? Am I naive to find this kind of thing revolting?

THE 15% LIE....The Wall Street Journal takes a look at Harold Ford's Senate race in Tennessee and wonders if he really has a chance of winning:

Polls have often shown African-American candidates scoring well in the polls only to fail to clinch the election.

....Some political scientists and strategists refer to it as the "15% lie" — when whites, bowing to societal pressure, tell pollsters they intend to vote for a black candidate but fail to do so in the voting booths. Indeed, several political experts believe that despite Mr. Ford's strong showing in the polls, some whites may desert him at the last minute. "We'll get the non-surprise surprise when Ford doesn't get the vote," says Thomas F. Schaller, an associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland and author of a new book, "Whistling Past Dixie," which argues that most of the South is beyond Democrats' reach.

The problem is that even if Ford ends up doing worse than the polls show, there might be other factors at play. I've always suspected, for example, that in close races there's a small but significant number of voters who can't bring themselves to vote against their usual party, even if they planned to do so when they walked into the polling place. Thus, I figure that Republican candidates in reddish states like Tennessee and Missouri are actually doing a little better than the polls show, while Democratic candidates in bluish states like Maryland and New Jersey are doing better than you'd think.

I don't think this effect is anything like 15%, but in a close election even 2-3% is more than enough. This is why I suspect, in the end, Democrats will gain Senate seats this year, but not quite enough seats to make Harry Reid majority leader.

TORTELLINI....A couple of years ago Stephanie Mencimer wrote an article for us called "False Alarm," about the myth of America's "lawsuit crisis." She has since turned the article into a book, Blocking the Courthouse Door, due out in December. (I'll be reviewing it for an upcoming issue.)

As with all good book authors these days, she's created a blog to help promote the book. It's called The Tortellini, and today she tells us about one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's more transparent efforts to pretend he was solving California's budget crisis after his election in 2003. The idea was to skim off 75% of all punitive damage awards to the state, supposedly raising $450 million:

When the so-called "split-recovery" law lapsed in July, it had generated exactly zero dollars for the state coffers. No surprise there. Punitive damages are really rare. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that of the 356 civil trials that resulted in punitive damages in 2001 in the nation's biggest counties, only nine resulted in an award larger than $10 million, and that's before they were appealed. The median award was a mere $50,000. There weren't enough punitive damage awards in the whole country to fill California's budget gap.

That's our out-of-control tort system for you. And as Stephanie points out, everyone who voted for the California measure, Democrats and Republicans alike, knew perfectly well it wouldn't raise any money. But it sells well with the rubes, doesn't it?

ATTACK DOGS....Via Atrios, I see that ABC News is running a story today about right-wing attack ads. The story acknowledges that "the nastiest rhetoric right now is coming from the political right," and Jake Tapper and Greg McCown document this with several examples. Then they end with this:

Democrats aren't necessarily running clean campaigns, though. As the races tighten in the next couple of weeks, the left will likely unleash its garbage as well.

Needless to say, they present exactly zero evidence for this.

I'm not breaking any new ground here when I say that this is, as usual, inexplicable. Sure, neither party is simon pure, but Tapper and McCown know perfectly well that the nauseating and polarized nature of modern American politics is almost entirely a Republican invention. From Lee Atwater to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to Ken Starr to Tom DeLay to the Rove/Bush/Cheney machine, the Republican Party has pioneered a scorched-earth approach to politics that Democrats have never come close to matching. Their destruction of congressional traditions in the service of power has gone immensely farther than anything Democrats did when they were in power. Their deliberate and single-minded fealty to K Street lobbyists makes Democrats look like pikers.

Tapper and McCown know this. But they still insist on acting as if somehow both parties are equally responsible for this state of affairs.

I know I'm a partisan observer. But no one who's followed politics for the past decade or two can pretend not to know how we got where we are today. For some reason, though, they sure do try.

LATEST HOUSE SURVEY....Greenberg Quinlan Rosner just finished a survey of the 50 most competitive House seats currently held by Republicans. Respondents were asked about the candidates in their districts by name, and the results were pretty positive for Democrats:

In the top tier of the most competitive 16 seats, the Democrats have increased their lead to 8 points, 52 to 44 percent; in the second tier of 17 seats, the Democrats have kept their lead of exactly 6 points (50 to 44 percent). In both cases, the named Republican candidate is only getting 44 percent of the vote.

That's 33 seats. Republicans will probably close the gap in a few of those districts over the next couple of weeks, but it doesn't seem likely they're going to close the gap in all of them. At least, no