MACS AND PROGRESSIVES....The conference I was at yesterday was a get-together of various folks from the liberal media (In These Times, The American Prospect, ColorLines, Mother Jones, etc.). We are, of course, preparing to take over the world, and Apple should be very happy at the prospect. Of all the notebooks busily being tapped on during the meetings, I'd say about 70% were Macs. This compares to an Apple market share of around 4% in the real world.

Steve Jobs should be contributing large sums of money to progressive media. I wouldn't be surprised if we rival the graphic arts community in our dedication to the Mac ethos.

MARCHING ORDERS FROM THE HOUSE OF SAUD....Nawaf Obaid is "an adviser to the Saudi government," but his opinions "are his own and do not reflect official Saudi policy." Roger that. With that boilerplate warning out of the way, Obaid takes to the pages of the Washington Post to warn us in no uncertain terms that if we try to withdraw from Iraq, the Saudi monarchy will make us very, very sorry:

Saudi leadership is preparing to substantially revise its Iraq policy. Options now include providing Sunni military leaders (primarily ex-Baathist members of the former Iraqi officer corps, who make up the backbone of the insurgency) with the same types of assistance — funding, arms and logistical support — that Iran has been giving to Shiite armed groups for years. Another possibility includes the establishment of new Sunni brigades to combat the Iranian-backed militias.

....Remaining on the sidelines would be unacceptable to Saudi Arabia. To turn a blind eye to the massacre of Iraqi Sunnis would be to abandon the principles upon which the kingdom was founded. It would undermine Saudi Arabia's credibility in the Sunni world and would be a capitulation to Iran's militarist actions in the region.

To be sure, Saudi engagement in Iraq carries great risks — it could spark a regional war. So be it: The consequences of inaction are far worse.

And while he's at it, Obaid tosses out a warning to Iran the American oil industry that Saudi Arabia might also try to drive oil prices into the ground by increasing production and cutting its own prices in half. Now, as far as I know, Saudi Arabia doesn't actually have much in the way of spare capacity at the moment, so this seems like a bit of an empty threat. For that matter, I have my doubts that the Saudis actually have the capacity to intervene all that effectively with military assistance to Iraq's Sunni community either. But who knows? They can certainly make things worse if they put their minds to it.

In any case, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the lecture the House of Saud delivered to Dick Cheney after they summoned him to Riyadh last week. Not that Cheney was an unwilling listener or anything. Just one more excuse to stay the course, after all.

DO RUMORS REALLY TRAVEL FASTER THAN LIGHT?....How do memes spread across the internet? Fellow Irvinite Scott Eric Kaufman is bringing rigorous blog science to bear on this important question, and needs links to this post to complete his experiment. Lots of links.

So go ahead. Link. It's for a good cause.

A SENSIBLE WITHDRAWAL?....Over at TPMCafe, Reed Hundt mocks Tom Friedman's "10 months or 10 years" choice for Iraq, but then adds his own plan for withdrawal:

A sensible centrist, if you forgive the phrase, alternative would be (a) negotiate with Syria and Turkey and Iran and Saudia Arabia to provide elements of security for Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites (minimum 6 to 12 months), (b) arm the Shiites with tanks and other heavy armor (minimum 8 months), (c) push Iraq into a loose federation of semi-autonomous states (12 months), (d) withdraw about half the American troops over one year, (e) commit to a total withdrawal including a dismantling of the astonishingly large Green Zone and airfield facilities (24 months minimum and not capable of being precisely defined).

That's sure not going to raise centrism's stock in the blogosphere, is it? I can't quite tell if Reed is suggesting these steps all need to be sequential, but it sure sounds like it, and together they add up to a minimum of five years, with the first withdrawals not even starting until 2009. Am I reading this wrong? It sure doesn't sound very sensible to me.

CLICK THE LINK....Here is a complete post from Andrew Sullivan last night:

The Black-White Test Score Gap

It isn't going away. Charles Murray and James Flynn debate why here.

Really? The fact that Charles Murray thinks the gap isn't going away is hardly news, but does James Flynn agree? That would be dispiriting indeed.

But there's no need to give up hope. Here's what Flynn really said:

We analyzed data from nine standardization samples for four major tests of cognitive ability. These data suggest that Blacks gained 4 to 7 IQ points on non-Hispanic Whites between 1972 and 2002. Gains have been fairly uniform across the entire range of Black cognitive ability.

That sure doesn't sound like "it isn't going away" to me. Murray and Flynn aren't just debating "why," they're debating "whether." And Flynn has the better of the argument.

HOW MUCH BROOKS TO BROOK? I have to admit it: I read pretty much every David Brooks column. He's often quite good, honestly. However, as many have pointed out, he also has a unique knack for being infuriating. And it’s easy to get baited into responding each time. (Today, for example, Brooks declares ($) himself to be, in effect, a centrist Democrat, although he concludes with an appeal to Republicans: “[W]e disaffected voters are easy. We want to go home with you if you’ll give us a reason.” That sort of says it all. But I digress.) But I’ve found two things helpful in dealing with my troubles. One is a helpful warning from Michael Kinsley about a similar threat: “If you're not careful, you can squander an entire journalistic career swatting flies from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.” And the other is an awareness of the existence of a natural Brooks Ratio. That would be the ratio of maddening-to-non-maddening columns in the Brooks output, and it's best not to challenge it. For example, my own Brooks Ratio, since I feel my anger growing when reading roughly two out of seven Brooks columns, is 0.29. I can live with that. But I’d be curious to see how others deal with the problem.

METHOD TO THE MADNESS ... Greg Sargent at TPM Cafe calls out George Will for using the delete key in dubious fashion in a column on Jim Webb's uncomfortable exchange with the president. Webb's behavior raised eyebrows, but not for the reasons Will depicts.

One other point: On the campaign trail, Webb rarely talked about his son. He wore his son's boots as a personal reminder, but otherwise deliberately did not talk about him. Towards the end of the campaign, Virginia's Democratic governor Tim Kaine would bring it up for him, aides say. It might seem odd not to exploit the fact of having a son in Iraq on the campaign trail, but that's Jim Webb.

When Bush asked him about his boy, Webb would not take it, in Will's words, as " a civil and caring question, as one parent to another," for obvious reasons, and for some more particular to Jim Webb. —Christina Larson 11:36 AM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (90)

WHITHER OLLIE?... Anniversary stories are the journalistic equivalent of strawberry Pop-Tarts; a steady diet won't do, but in a pinch, they make for reliable, easily-prepared filler. Editors start off the year with a lengthy calendar that reads like a high school history final crib sheet, where the moon landing bumps up against the Battle of Bull Run, and the Reichstag fire shares real estate with the Gulf War. That kind of news predictability is otherwise in fairly short supply, which is why journalists tend to find anniversary pieces pretty addictive. For logical reasons, a good political scandal can generally make the grade in this town, especially on a slow news day: there's usually a lengthy paper trail, and some sort of big-picture morality play at work.

So over at Slate, Timothy Noah has an interesting, obvious query: Where, exactly, is the coverage of Iran-Contra's 20th birthday?

After all, it was two decades ago last weekend that Ed Meese conceded publicly that the White House had illegally sold weapons to Iran to fund anti-government fighters in Nicaragua -- a shocking admission that, at least briefly, triggered impeachment buzz -- yet somehow, so far, the occasion hasn't merited a single major press mention. (Yes, there's a lot going on right now, but as Noah points out, the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend wasn't exactly the busiest of news days.) He comes up with two likely explanations:

1) We like our political scandals simple, involving sex, or money, or (preferably) both; that whole arms-for-hostages tangle was complicated enough the first time around,
and
2) The whole sordid saga upends the current Grand Unified Theory of late Reagan-era officialdom, and the generally-assumed roles thereof (i.e., Bush I as unalloyed statesman, Bob Gates as the Man in the White Hat, etc).

Good, plausible guesses both, to which I'd add:

3) Give it time. There's still the Tower Commission (launched 20 years ago tomorrow), and that presidential apology (20 years next March -- mark your calendars now). My own, admittedly fuzzy, memories of Iran-Contra involve those congressional hearings that pre-empted late-afternoon Little House on the Prairie reruns, and made a star out of Ollie North. If I had to guess right now, I'd predict the first pieces will appear on or around the launch of the first big Iraq investigation of the new Congress.

Any wagers out there as to when Iran-Contra might finally get the big anniversary nod? Make your guesses below; the lucky winner will be compensated in traditional, generous Monthly fashion.

BACK IN THE OC....So, um, the Baker-Hamilton commission is going to propose withdrawing combat troops from Iraq over the next year or so, as well as starting up talks with Iran and Syria. But Cheney and Bush are dead set against both, so I guess that's a dead letter. Apparently, there's still a light at the end of this particular tunnel.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi PM suddenly pulls out of a scheduled meeting with Bush in Jordan, and the Bush team is reduced to pretending that this is really no big deal. Presumably it's also not a big deal that Muqtada al-Sadr has withdrawn from the Iraqi government, thus flushing it irrevocably down the toilet.

What else? Cheney and the neocons still want to bomb Iran, regardless of whether or not the CIA thinks they're building a nuke. But that's old news. Elsewhere, Newt Gingrich wants to pare back the first amendment. And the whole wingnut universe is preparing for another decades-long rerun of Vietnam, in which they pretend that we could have won in Iraq if only liberals and Democrats hadn't poisoned the American will to win.

Is that it? I'm trying to play some quick catchup from the past couple of days before I start blogging again in the morning. Do I have things about right?

COMMISSION OMISSIONS... A couple of people wrote to me about my post yesterday, pointing out that Chris Dodd and Patrick Leahy both have measures in the works addressing the Military Commissions Act, which is true. But I don’t think these efforts will get very far—beyond Dodd, Leahy, Carl Levin and a few others, there doesn't seem to be a strong will among Senate Democrats to push too hard on this one.

Considering that Bush would almost certainly veto any change to the legislation, that’s not unreasonable. But it does sadden me that the removal of habeas corpus, at the very least, isn’t perceived as an issue worth taking up in order to raise its profile and to embarrass Bush by forcing a veto. (The always worthwhile Boston Globe Ideas section had an interesting piece a few weeks ago looking at why civil liberties issues have historically tended to be “political non-starters.”)

It’s worth remembering that until the act was passed, the abuses of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary renditions, and so on, were entirely within the control and knowledge of the executive branch. By insisting on the bill right before a tight midterm election, the administration managed to get Congress to acquiesce in its activities, a fact which has been under-appreciated so far, and which seems unlikely to change anytime soon. And perhaps acquiesce is too light a word: Joseph Margulies, the lead counsel who successfully argued the Rasul case before the Supreme Court, suggested in a talk today that the act grants the President greater powers than he’d claimed before it was passed. Considering that Congress didn’t know exactly what it was actually agreeing to, that seems plausible.

So with a legislative change unlikely, what’s next? A legal challenge to the habeas provisions is already underway, and Margulies believes that “if the court remains as presently constituted, I think we’ll win.” (Hang in there, Justice Stevens!) But any challenge to the commissions themselves will have to wait until someone is tried in one, which, according to Margulies, could take some time.

REBELLION AT THE EPA...This seems like kind of a big deal. From a news release put out by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility:

In an unprecedented action, representatives for more than 10,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientists are calling on Congress to take immediate action against global warming, according to a petition released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The petition also calls for an end to censorship of agency scientists and other specialists on topics of climate change and the effects of air pollution.

NO MORE FRIST? Looks like we'll be deprived of a Bill Frist presidential run in '08. That's a shame, because a politician as entertainingly craven as Frist deserves to have a proper outlet for his talents. I was curious to see how he'd approach a national campaign in light of the midterms. Would he, for example, start attacking the White House for the war in Iraq? Or might he announce he'd changed his mind about end-of-life decisions and go and personally pull some plugs? It promised to be good, whatever it was. But I guess he felt it was going to be too hard to zig after the political winds had abruptly zagged. He's probably right, but I wish he'd have given it a try all the same. For my sake.

VOTING WITH GOD...As we get around to fixing our still-broken voting system, here's another aspect of the problem that perhaps hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.

According to a lawsuit filed today by the Appignani Humanist Legal Center:

"An Illinois member [of the American Humanist Association] voted in a church that displayed a four-foot wooden crucifix right above the election judges. Another member in California was confronted by a large marble plaque dedicated to the 'unborn children' who are 'killed' by abortion, and containing a quote from the Bible justifying the notion that the soul is alive in the womb. And a New York member voted in a room featuring large religious slogans on the wall behind the voting machines."

DEFINING THE PROBLEM ... The Supreme Court will look at whether the EPA should have the power to regulate carbon emissions from new vehicles today. Recently I had a chance to ask Jim Woolsey, former CIA director, whether he thought global warming should be considered a national security threat (given the possibility of increased natural disasters, forced migrations, conflicts over resources). Here's his response:

In a real sense, yes. But not the kind of security threat people that people are accustomed to talking about. I distinguish between malignant and malevolent threats. No one is trying to create global warming; it is not something anyone is planning. In that sense, it is a malignant threat, not a malevolent threat. But it is a real threat.

TAKES ONE... A wartime leader who speaks obvious untruths, surrounds himself with a narrow group of party ideologues who skew the information that gets to him, puts too few boots on the ground, fails to engage the international community, and may now be at the mercy of violent events beyond his control.

George W. Bush? No, it’s Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, as described in a newly-leaked memo by NSC Director Stephen Hadley.

GENERAL INTEREST... The main argument for Wesley Clark's '04 presidential bid was his credibility on national security, the dominant campaign issue that year. There's no reason to think national security won't still be the big issue two years from now, as it was this fall. And so it's good news indeed that the general is sending pretty strong signals that he's running.

MISSION CREEP...Is it just me, or did Bush just ratchet back up our ambitions for Iraq?

According to the Associated Press, "The United States will not withdraw its forces from Iraq before its mission of building a stable democracy is complete, President Bush said Tuesday."

It seemed like in recent months, administration officials had bowed to reality and dropped the democracy talk, saying instead that we'll stay until Iraq has a stable government, capable of defending itself and not acting as a haven for terrorists (goals that could have been achieved, in other words, by not invading in the first place, but whatever.) But now we're again being told that the mission is to create a "stable democracy" and that Bush is not going to "pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete."

Since Iraqi democracy pretty clearly isn't coming any time soon, we're essentially being told that we'll be in Iraq at least until January 2009. Someone better tell James Baker nevermind.

UPDATE: Scratch that. I just checked the transcript of the speech. Bush never said anything about democracy in Iraq. It's just an incredibly sloppy mistake by the AP. I guess this counts as good news.

HABEAS SCHMABEAS... A lot of shameful things went on in the run-up to the midterm election, but to my mind the worst offence was the rushed passage of the Military Commissions Act, with its denial of habeas corpus to detainees. Jeffrey Toobin has a useful primer in the New Yorker this week which a) reminds readers just how bad the legislation is, and b) details Arlen Specter’s role in the sorry affair (Specter had sponsored an amendment that would have restored habeas corpus to the bill, but when the amendment was narrowly defeated, he voted for the bill anyway.)

At the time, I thought Democrats got way too much credit for their handling of this episode—the Times devoted an entire piece to chronicling how Senate Democrats had supposedly found their voice on national security issues. (They were probably heartened by some polling floating around that week from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, which found that Dems tested well when they talked tough on national security.) Admittedly, some Democrats did make some fine speeches. But without any attempt to filibuster the bill or delay it through procedural means, such opposition was only ever really window dressing. (In contrast, Senate Democrats did manage to stall the administration’s efforts to legitimatize its wiretapping activities.)

Unfortunately, as Toobin explains, Democrats seem to be in no rush to repair the damage in the foreseeable future:

“Few Democratic politicians seem enthusiastic about proposing legislation that will principally benefit accused Al Qaeda terrorists, and, in the unlikely event that Democrats passed such a bill, it would face a certain veto from President Bush. The Supreme Court—not Congress—is likely to be the only hope for a change in the law. “This is definitely not going to be the first thing out of the box for us,” one Democratic Senate staffer said. “We make fun of Specter, but we’re basically leaving it up to the Courts, too.”

HERE'S A NUMBER FOR YOU ... Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, tells me he's been trading emails with folks around town -- generals, colonels, Pentagon officials -- who have been looking carefully and analytically for the last two years at what it will cost to reconstitute the military after Iraq. In other words, the bill to bring Army and Navy battalions back to the status they were in before the invasion. That includes training, equipment, replacing Apache helicopters, humvees, tanks, rifles (we have burned them up in Iraq faster than life cycle projections), etc. The current estimate: $50 to $100 billion. "The next president will face a staggering bill," Wilkerson says, not even counting the costs of further efforts in Iraq.

SUMMONING CHENEY... Two days ago, Laura Rozen wondered why the White House was being so cryptic about Vice President Cheney's trip to Riyadh on Saturday to meet with Saudi King Abdullah and Crown Prince Sultan. Today, Robin Wright and Tom Ricks of The Washington Post provide the answer:

Saudi Arabia is so concerned about the damage that the conflict in Iraq is doing across the region that it basically summoned Vice President Cheney for talks over the weekend, according to U.S. officials and foreign diplomats. The visit was originally portrayed as U.S. outreach to its oil-rich Arab ally.

Pathetic. The U.S. government is so weak that the Saudis can summon our veep for a stern talking-to.

Speaking of Laura, looks like she was also right when she reported almost two weeks ago that the administration was debating the merits of throwing its full support behind the Shias as a way to settle the growing violence in Iraq. From the same Washington Post piece today:

But in a sign of the discord in Washington, the senior U.S. intelligence official said the situation requires that the administration abandon its long-held goal of national reconciliation and instead "pick a winner" in Iraq. He said he understands that means the Sunnis are likely to bolt from the fragile government. "That's the price you're going to have to pay," he said.

OFF TO LOS ANGELES....I'll be up in Los Angeles at a conference for the next couple of days, so tomorrow and Wednesday the blog will be manned by the combined forces of the Washington Monthly editorial staff. Be nice to them!

While I'm gone, though, let me recommend some reading material that I just got in the mail: The Best American Political Writing 2006, edited by Royce Flippin. It's got a great selection of liberal political writing from the past year, including a couple of pieces from the Monthly. Some I've read but many I haven't, and I'll be taking this with me to while away the downtime during the conference.

I'll be back on Thursday. Don't start any new wars until I get back.

CARBON DIOXIDE UPDATE....The latest on global warming:

The rise in humanity's emissions of carbon dioxide has accelerated sharply, according to a new analysis.

The Global Carbon Project says that emissions were rising by less than 1% annually up to the year 2000, but are now rising at 2.5% per year.

...."At these rates, it certainly sounds like we'll end up towards the high end of the emission scenarios considered by the IPCC," commented Myles Allen from Oxford University, one of Britain's leading climate modellers.

Well, that should solve the problem of vote count foulups in Florida, anyway.

TIC WATCH....Digby has a corollary to my post earlier today about the centrism tic. It's exactly right.

ANOTHER URBAN LEGEND BITES THE DUST....Following up on a burning question from last month, is it really true that green magazine covers are "newsstand death"? Julia Turner investigates for Slate and reports that (a) this opinion is universally held in the magazine industry, but (b) no one has even a shred of evidence that it's true. If I had a nickel for every story that turned out that way, it would be me handing out billion dollar checks for mass vaccination programs, not Bill Gates.

SAVING WHO WE CAN....Ah, the conundrum that is The New Republic. Today's essays from their "What To Do About Iraq" issue include two pieces, both by political science professors, that are diametrically opposed and yet still manage to contain not a single glimmer of intelligent thought between them. (Your choices: James Kurth suggests we obliterate the Sunnis because they've been such bastards, while Josef Joffe suggests we team up with the Sunnis in order to annoy Iran. Neither writer even remotely explains how we're supposed to accomplish either one of these goals.)

But then there's George Packer, who writes a genuinely thought provoking piece. Iraq is well and truly lost, he says, but a lot of Iraqis who worked with us and trusted us will die hideous deaths if we abandon them:

Those Iraqis who have had anything to do with the occupation and its promises of democracy will be among the first to be killed: the translators, the government officials, the embassy employees, the journalists, the organizers of women's and human rights groups.

....If the United States leaves Iraq, our last shred of honor and decency will require us to save as many of these Iraqis as possible. In June, a U.S. Embassy cable about the lives of the Iraqi staff was leaked to The Washington Post. Among many disturbing examples of intimidation and fear was this sentence: "In March, a few staff approached us to ask what provisions would we make for them if we evacuate." The cable gave no answer. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad does not issue visas.

....We should start issuing visas in Baghdad, as well as in the regional embassies in Mosul, Kirkuk, Hilla, and Basra. We should issue them liberally, which means that we should vastly increase our quota for Iraqi refugees. (Last year, it was fewer than 200.) We should prepare contingency plans for massive airlifts and ground escorts. We should be ready for desperate and angry crowds at the gates of the Green Zone and U.S. bases. We should not allow wishful thinking to put off these decisions until it's too late. We should not compound our betrayals of Iraqis who put their hopes in our hands.

On moral grounds, it's hard to conceive of any argument against Packer. The only question is: Is it practical? Can we actually do what he suggests? How would we address the obvious security problems inherent in a relocation program?

The only way to know is for people with experience to study the issue and create a plan. But what are the odds that anyone in the Bush administration will ever allow this to happen?

CENTRISM....Yes, centrism can be a tic. Yes, it's often favored by DC pundits who automatically assume that bipartisanship is an inherent good regardless of its outcome. Yes, it can sometimes be a substitute for real thought.

That said, I hope the liberal blogosphere doesn't get into the habit of automatically trashing centrist positions simply out of pique against some of centrism's more annoying practitioners. After all, trying to govern solely via populist intuition won't work any better than relying on a bunch of blue ribbon commissions.

On this score, it's worth keeping in mind that the biggest problem with the Bush administration was never its doctrinaire conservatism, which wasn't all that doctrinaire in the first place, but its insistence that it could govern by gut instinct without recourse to serious policy analysis. John DiIulio figured this out after only a few months in the White House, and later told Ron Suskind that "the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking."

Gut instinct won't get the job done for liberals, either. Your mileage will vary depending on the issue, but I'd argue, for example, that good analysis supports a fairly extreme view on Social Security (just leave it alone for now) but a centrist position on trade. The populist impulse on trade points us in the right direction, but a Lou Dobbsian solution (stop making trade deals, shut down the border) is nuts. Trade really does improve the economy after all, and the right answer for its ill effects on the working class is going to be found by agreeing on the populist goal and then letting the technocrats figure out smart policies to get us there. That's technocratic populism (an apparent oxymoron that confused a bunch of you when I first used it a couple of weeks ago).

The problem is not that smart policies aren't out there, the problem is that we've never built up the political will to insist that they be implemented. So let's work on that. And let's judge those policies on their merits. If a lefty solution works, that's great. But sometimes it doesn't, and if a wonky centrist solution works better, then that's what we should rally around. Whatever else we do, let's be sure to keep our eyes firmly planted in reality. The era of gut instinct is, hopefully, drawing mercifully to a close.

SOCIAL SECURITY DRECK....I don't really have the heart to wade back into the Social Security debate at the moment — click here for the short version of how I feel about the whole thing — but this paragraph from Sebastian Mallaby today really can't go without rebuttal:

During the 2005 debate, President Bush endorsed an idea that would inflict no cuts whatsoever on low-income workers and would allow the value of middle-class retirees' benefits to rise, albeit less quickly than now scheduled. Because this formula (devised by a Democrat named Robert Pozen) spreads the burden fairly, Democrats who worry about rising inequality should be open to it.

Just in case anyone is interested, I don't think there's a Democrat on the planet who worries about income inequality among the ranks of Social Security retirees. And Mallaby's "less quickly than now scheduled" is just a cute way of saying that under the Pozen plan middle class retirees of the future would receive a smaller percentage of their average earnings than they do now. I don't think I'd have to take off my shoes to count the number of progressives who think that's a good idea.

HOUSE INTELLIGENCE UPDATE....In the soap opera that is the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee, the latest chatter is that instead of selecting compromise candidate Silvestre Reyes, perhaps Nancy Pelosi should dig even deeper and select compromise-compromise candidate Rush Holt. Over at Ezra's site, Neil comments:

I have nothing against Reyes, but I'm drawn to Holt by the sort of identity politics that I'm the most susceptible to. He's the former assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, giving rise to "My Congressman is a Rocket Scientist" bumper stickers in his New Jersey district. I have an immediate trust in skilled academics from rigorous fields of study. There's also the point that he's a really smart guy.

It would also be cool for Pelosi to make the point that doing your job well — that is, being right about which countries have WMD and which don't — can trump seniority in making you a committee chair.

Holt is a good guy, and his reasons for opposing the war resolution showed good judgment. He'd probably do fine as chair of the Intelligence Committee.

However, if Holt made any firm statements questioning the existence of Iraq's WMD programs back in 2002, I haven't been able to find them. He appears to have believed Iraq had an active WMD program as much as anyone, which shouldn't be a surprise since this belief was shared at the time by virtually every intelligence agency in the world, including the CIA. (Yes, the Bush administration exaggerated the CIA's finding, but the CIA did clearly report their belief that Iraqi WMD programs were active and dangerous.)

There also seems to be more than a whiff of retribution here against any Democrat who supported the war resolution, and that strikes me as pretty counterproductive. After all, nearly half the Democratic caucus supported the resolution, and we really don't want to declare every one of these folks persona non grata on all issues related to national security. Karl Rove would have a field day with that, wouldn't he?

In any case, it sure seems to me that Nancy Pelosi should make a decision about this ASAP, if only to keep idle fingers like mine and Neil's from chattering about this stuff endlessly. For better or worse, she ought to put this to bed.

CIVIL WAR.....Via Taegan Goddard, I see that NBC News has announced a change in policy:

For months now the White House has rejected claims that the situation in Iraq has deteriorated into a civil war. And, for the most part, news organizations like NBC have hesitated to characterize it as such. But after careful consideration, NBC News has decided a change in terminology is warranted — that the situation in Iraq with armed militarized factions fighting for their own political agendas — can now be characterized as a civil war.

Meanwhile, Niall Ferguson belatedly explains the dynamics of civil war to LA Times readers:

The majority of conflicts in our time have been within civilizations, not between them — civil wars, not holy wars....The bad news, as James D. Fearon of Stanford University explained to members of Congress in September, is that withdrawing American troops from Iraq will only accelerate Iraq's descent into the abyss. The worse news is that increasing troop numbers may only slow the descent. The worst news is that civil wars like these tend to last a long time. Of 54 major civil wars since 1945, half lasted more than seven years. And most such wars don't end with power-sharing agreements but in victory for one side or the other — often as a result of foreign intervention.

Does Ferguson then take the obvious next step and suggest that the United States ought to leave Iraq since it can no longer influence events in any significant way? No, he does not.

BAKER/HAMILTON UPDATE....Jim Henley reads about the Baker/Hamilton commission so you don't have to. Click here for the 30-second summary.

I think Jim has it about right. When push comes to shove, the commission members are going to have a hard time finding a consensus because (a) at least some of them will insist on an honest analysis, but (b) Baker will be unwilling to endorse a report that President Bush is likely to reject. There's not much middle ground there.

In any case, the two proposals getting the most flagpole time at the moment include talks with Syria and Iran (opposed strenuously by Dick Cheney) and the temporary addition of 20,000 soldiers in Baghdad (pretty much dismissed by the military brass as either impossible or useless). The only other alternative is withdrawal, but virtually no one is willing to sign up to that since it would mean expulsion from the Sober Sensible Analyst club. It's just too hard for most of these guys to break ranks and admit in public that the fate of Iraq is no longer something we can control.

So the Kabuki dance continues.

MEDICARE DRUG PRICING....For some reason, this has been "Democrats Are In A Fix Over Medicare" weekend, with nearly identical stories in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the LA Times explaining that Democratic promises to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices are shaping up to be trickier than anyone thought. Oddly, though, none of the pieces really explains what the problem is. They just repeat complaints from the pharmaceutical industry that Medicare is so big that "negotiation" is tantamount to price controls, and that's a bad thing.

And so it is. But there's a fairly simple solution to this, one that only the Wall Street Journal even bothers to mention:

[An] approach Democrats could try would be requiring drug makers to give Medicare beneficiaries their lowest price, as companies must for Medicaid, the state-federal health-insurance program for the poor and disabled.

This, of course, is common practice in the business world, where large buyers routinely negotiate "most favorable pricing" clauses into their contracts. It also addresses the most infuriating aspect of current pharmaceutical policy: the bulk of the companies and the bulk of the R&D in the pharmaceutical industry are done in America, but for some reason consumers in every other country in the world get lower-priced drugs than Americans.

An MFP clause with appropriate exceptions takes care of this, and it's something the federal government already knows how to do since Medicaid currently operates this way. It's not price control, since pharmaceutical companies wouldn't be required to supply drugs at any particular price, but if they did supply them at a price to anyone else — or any other country — then they'd also be required to offer the same deal to Uncle Sam. This is pretty standard practice when you're the biggest buyer in an industry. Just ask Wal-Mart.

And if it turns out that giving Americans the Canadian/French/German/whatever price prevents pharmaceutical companies from making money, then they'll have to raise prices in other countries. But that's OK. There's no reason American taxpayers should be subsidizing healthcare for the rest of the world, after all.

DIGGING INTO McCAIN....The redoubtable Matt Welch does the unconscionable today: he writes an op-ed for the LA Times in which he examines John McCain's actual views on the issues. He's not impressed:

McCain, it turns out, wants to restore your faith in the U.S. government by any means necessary, even if that requires thousands of more military deaths, national service for civilians and federal micromanaging of innumerable private transactions. He'll kick down the doors of boardroom and bedroom, mixing Democrats' nanny-state regulations with the GOP's red-meat paternalism in a dangerous brew of government activism.

....If his issues line up with yours, and if you're not overly concerned by an activist federal government, McCain can be a great and sympathetic ally. But chances are he will eventually see a grave national threat in what you consider harmless, or he'll prescribe a remedy that you consider unconscionable. Nowhere is that more evident than in his ideas about the Iraq war.

McCain has been banging the drum from nearly Day One to put more boots on the ground in Iraq. "There are a lot of things that we can do to salvage this," he said on "Meet the Press" on Nov. 12, "but they all require the presence of additional troops." McCain is more inclined to start wars and increase troop levels than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. He has supported every U.S. military intervention of the last two decades, urged both presidents to rattle their sabers louder over North Korea and Iran, lamented the Pentagon's failure to intervene in Darfur and Rwanda and supported a general policy of "rogue state rollback."

Hear hear. This doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves, but despite his soothing speaking style McCain may literally be in the 99% percentile of hawkishness. That is, he may be more hawkish than every single one of his fellow senators. Some "centrist."

McCain has been the focus of some moderately bad press lately because of his notable lack of straight talk ever since he got serious about running for president in 2008: pandering to Jerry Falwell, switching his views on Roe v. Wade, caving in on the torture bill, and abandoning his long-held views on campaign finance reform. And that's all well and good. He deserves to get beaten up for this stuff the same as ordinary mortals do.

But his flip-flops get a lot of attention mainly because they're easy to find and satisfying to point out. Actually looking past his occasionally "maverick" views is far more important, and it reveals a man who has seemingly learned nothing from the Iraq debacle and who is decidedly out of step with the views of at least two-thirds of the country. I suspect that many people find him more palatable than Geo