NSA UPDATE....Three weeks ago the Bush administration announced that it was ending the NSA's domestic spying program and replacing it with a new, more restrictive program that had been approved by the FISA court. Today, Alberto Gonzales agreed to make both the administration's legal briefs and the court's order available to Congress:

The decision to hand over the documents, which Mr. Gonzales confirmed to reporters today, will allow members of the House and Senate intelligence committees -- as well as select congressional leaders -- to review that court order.

....Administration officials cautioned today that lawmakers would only receive documents related to the most recent FISA court orders, and should not expect documentation related to future wiretap requests.

Two comments. First, this puts the Democrats who see these documents under some genuine pressure. Will they meekly go along with the administration's plans or will they offer up some genuine criticism? I hope for the latter but fear for the former.

Second, if I'm reading this right, the only thing Congress will see is information about the new program. They still won't have any idea what the original program was all about. Apparently we're all going to stay in the dark about that.

ANOTHER SHORT CAMPAIGN FOR JOE BIDEN?....Jason Horowitz writes today about a conversation with Joe Biden, "discussing his rivals over a bowl of tomato soup in the corner of a diner in Delaware." Turns out he thinks Hillary is doomed and Edwards is a lightweight:

Mr. Biden is equally skeptical -- albeit in a slightly more backhanded way -- about Mr. Obama. "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," he said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man."

But -- and the "but" was clearly inevitable -- he doubts whether American voters are going to elect "a one-term, a guy who has served for four years in the Senate," and added: "I don't recall hearing a word from Barack about a plan or a tactic."

I've never really had the animus toward Biden that a lot of people do, but jeebus. He's just a gaffe machine waiting for someone to flip the power switch on. Back to the Senate, Joe.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall suggests that Biden's comment was transcribed poorly. Audio here confirms that he's right. It goes like this:

Biden: I mean, you got the first, sorta, mainstream African-American.

Horowitz: Yeah.

Biden: Who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man.

I still think this comment indicates that Biden has a problem with his mouth (not something likely to provoke much argument, even from Biden), but he really didn't say what the original transcription seems to suggest.

WAR POWERS....For what it's worth, lots of people disagree with my belief that Congress has the power to fund and defund war, but doesn't have the operational authority to do things like set troop levels. Examples abound, but check out Fred Barbash here and Mark Kleiman here.

I'm not sure these arguments hold up, but obviously I'm no constitutional scholar and I may be off base. In any case, I suspect that we're all going to become a lot smarter -- or at least pseudo-smarter -- about this in the next few months.

REAGAN'S FINAL YEARS....In the course of a column advocating that President Bush create several new empire-building agencies, including a Department of Peace (!), Max Boot makes this claim in passing:

These ideas may sound overly ambitious for the final two years of an administration mired in major difficulties. But remember that in his second term, despite the Iran-Contra scandal, Ronald Reagan was able to simplify the tax code and streamline the military chain of command -- major reforms -- by working with a Democratic Congress.

This is not the biggest deal in the world, but for some reason this is a very common claim. Can we please put it to rest?

First: The "last two years" of a presidency surely don't start until, um, the last two years of a presidency. At its earliest, it starts after the sixth year midterm elections. For Reagan, this happened on November 4, 1986. Until then, he had a split Congress (Democratic House, Republican Senate).

Second: the 1986 Tax Reform Act was negotiated in 1985-86 and passed in October 1986. Ditto for the Goldwater-Nichols Act. None of this happened in Reagan's final two years.

Third: News of the arms-for-hostages deal was first reported in the Lebanese press on November 3. So neither of these two pieces of legislation were passed "despite the Iran-Contra scandal."

I'm not sure why this bugs me, but I see it often and it's just wrong. The fact is that Reagan accomplished very little domestically in his final two years, and largely for the same reasons Bush won't: Democrats won the midterms, after November he was mired in scandal, and seventh year presidents are widely considered lame ducks anyway.

That is all. You may now return to the 21st century.

THE VEEPSTAKES....Tom Schaller suggests that Hillary Clinton is already eyeing Evan Bayh as her running mate:

If Hillary wants to knock Barack Obama on his heels, she could put Bayh (or better yet, Iowa's Tom Vilsack?) on the ticket by, say, July 1. Having a running mate during the primary allows her to balance the ticket from the start; doubles the principles (and spouses) who can raise money and campaign; would take some of the spotlight off her; and reduces her risks of burnout or becoming overexposed. Of course, if Obama beats her to the punch ...

I don't know if Bayh or Vilsack are the right guys, but this is an idea that's always intrigued me too. In recent history the vice presidency has been viewed as sort of a consolation prize for one of the losing presidential contenders (Edwards in 04, Bush in 80), but this perception is mostly a myth (Cheney and Lieberman in 2000, Kemp in 96, Gore in 92, Quayle and Bentsen in 88, Ferraro in 84, Mondale and Dole in 76). So why not balance the ticket early, get a second campaigning organization, and improve your fundraising from the start? What's the advantage of waiting?

In fact, since we're tossing off weird ideas here, how about announcing your top cabinet members during the convention? Let's say, State, Defense, and Treasury. It gives people an idea of what your administration would look like, it reduces policy competition on your team, and it provides a bigger dedicated campaigning staff for the general election.

There are downsides, of course. Choosing your team early reduces the number of people who stay in suck-up mode hoping for a cabinet appointment if you win. Your nominees will have enemies as well as friends. A bigger campaign group increases the odds of a fatal gaffe of some kind. And waiting can be helpful. Maybe the campaign itself will produce a new star?

Anyway, just a thought. I've always figured that someday some risk-taking candidate will go this route. Maybe not Hillary, but someone.

UPDATE: Kemp wasn't a losing contender in 1996. I've corrected the text accordingly. And in comments, JoshA says that announcing cabinet members prior to an election would violate anti-patronage laws. Seems silly, but there you have it.

Also in comments, Ken D. reminds me that someone already tried the early VP idea:

Reagan did name a VP (PA Gov. Sen. Schweiker) late in the 1976 campaign for exactly those reasons. It didn't work; Schweiker couldn't swing a single convention vote, iirc, and Ford won the nomination. Part of the problem is that it is hard to name people without their consent, which will be hard to come by unless they have already endorsed you, which drastically limits the pool. The accepted and conventional way of going about this, however imperfect, will be hard to shake.

OBAMA AND THE WAR....Barack Obama introduced legislation on Tuesday to wind down the war in Iraq. Here's his description:

The legislation commences redeployment of U.S. forces no later than May 1, 2007 with the goal of removing all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008....The plan allows for a limited number of U.S. troops to remain as basic force protection, to engage in counter-terrorism, and to continue the training of Iraqi security forces.

I'm glad to see Obama taking an aggressive stand on this, but after reading his entire description I'm left wondering if it's really as aggressive as he makes it sound.

Here's the thing: I know that there's a lot of chatter right now about exactly what Congress's war powers are, but I honestly think that everyone talking about this already knows the basic answer: Congress can declare war, it has certain military rulemaking powers, and it can fund and defund a war. But that's it. Like it or not, Congress simply doesn't have the power to manage specific operational aspects of a war. Big Tent Democrat made the case for this a couple of weeks ago, and I think it's pretty convincing.

Now, this is not a problem. Anyone who seriously wants us to withdraw from Iraq merely needs to introduce legislation defunding the war. Even Dick Cheney agrees that Congress can do this. But Obama's description of his legislation very carefully avoids any mention of funding other than to explicitly say that it "does not affect the funding for our troops in Iraq." (Italics mine.) Without that, he must know that his legislation is almost certainly futile.

I realize that in one sense this is all meaningless since George Bush will veto legislation of any kind that mandates an end to the war, whether it includes a funding cutoff or not. Still, I can't help but get the feeling that this bill is carefully crafted to sound a lot more agressive than it really is. If Obama is serious about getting us out of Iraq, why not include the one thing that everyone agrees is a bulletproof way of accomplishing his goal?

As you may recall, I had the same complaint about his healthcare speech last week. I hope this isn't a trend. Walter Mondale managed to crush Gary Hart pretty thoroughly in 1984 with his slogan "Where's the Beef," and I wonder if Obama is opening himself up to the same kind of attack this year. I'm starting to get a little antsy on this score.

POSTSCRIPT: The more I think about Obama's war legislation, the more I'm genuinely puzzled by it. Am I missing something obvious? Help me out.

THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM....Matt Yglesias reads a recently released essay about the "new anti-Semitism" -- it's new because now liberal Jews are supposedly fueling it too -- but concludes that he's not the real target after all:

When you think about it, things like this essay or Jonah Goldberg's little McCarthyite smears aren't really about convincing people that I'm an anti-semite, or that Tony Judt or Adrienne Rich or Tony Kushner is. The idea, basically, is to scare the goyim who figure that while liberal Jews can take the heat, they probably can't, and had best just avoid talking about the whole thing. And based on my observations of the blogosphere, it works pretty well as a tactic.

Yep. Seems to work pretty well on politicians too. But I thought that right-wingers were supposed to be opposed to race hustling?

M.J. Rosenberg has more here.

THE 50% SOLUTION....I'm afraid I pretty much agree with Mark Schmitt's criticism of Chuck Schumer's new book. As a policy goal, "let's reduce a bunch of random stuff by 50%" is ridiculous, and as a political message it's such an obvious gimmick that I can't believe it's going to have any traction at all with ordinary voters. Even your average couch potato is sophisticated enough to see through this.

CENTCOM FOLLIES....Spencer Ackerman reports from Capitol Hill:

I just got back from Admiral Bill Fallon's hearing to head Central Command, and I've never heard a military officer testify for nearly four hours and fail to exhibit an understanding of even one issue he's about to grapple with.

Here is Fallon's excuse:

"As you know, I've got a full-time job in Pacific Command, and I've tried to stay away from the detail of Central Command until such time as I might be confirmed," he said. "Then I intend to dive into it."

"I'm surprised that you don't have that understanding going in, frankly," said Senator Levin.

Spencer's promised followup post ought to be worth reading.

WHO RULES THE RULEMAKERS?....The most blogged story of the day (from liberals, anyway) is surely Robert Pear's report about President Bush's latest initiative to remove rulemaking from the realm of technical experts and place it increasingly under political control:

In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president's priorities.

....Business groups hailed the initiative.

This move has prompted the usual withering scorn, most of it undoubtedly well deserved. But let's not stop at scorn, people. After all, Bill Clinton was no slouch at consolidating White House control of cabinet agencies himself. Bush has taken this to stratospheric heights -- mainly in a backdoor attempt to gut laws that are too popular to get repealed in a straight-up fight -- but it's hardly an exclusively Republican preserve. What's more, there's a pretty reasonable argument that an elected president should have greater policy control over the rulemakers in our farflung executive bureaucracy.

So let's find out. Are we really opposed to this? This is an executive order, after all, and that means the next president can rescind it at will. So let's get all the Democratic presidential candidates on the record: if you're elected, will you rescind this order? Who's up for this?

CEO PAY....The Wall Street Journal reports on Democratic plans to rein in skyrocketing executive pay packages:

The Senate's likely passage this week of legislation raising taxes on executive pay is just the beginning of a tough look by the new Democratic Congress at big corporate compensation packages.

....It would cap at $1 million a year the amount an employee could place in certain tax-deferred-compensation plans. Currently, there is no limit on how much compensation can be deferred into the plans, allowing executives to put off taxes for years on millions of dollars in pay.

The legislation also would limit the income-tax deductions companies can claim for high-paid executives who left the firm during the year.

I'm a consistent critic of outlandish CEO pay packages, but I doubt that this legislation is going to do much good. It will increase tax revenues a bit (about $100 million a year, according to estimates), but it's not really likely to have a serious impact on the size of executive compensation packages. It's like sticking your fingers in a dike: if you don't do something about the pressure on the other side, eventually you're going to run out of fingers and the dike is going to blow.

In this case, the pressure comes from stagnating wages for the working and middle classes, who have seen their bargaining position in the workplace deteriorate over the past several decades. The rest is just arithmetic: stagnating middle class wages in a growing economy translates to bulging corporate coffers, and that in turn translates to a gigantic pool of money available to bid for top executives. It's a lot like the sports world: Barry Bonds isn't a better athlete than Babe Ruth, but he lives in an era when TV and merchandising rights generate far more revenue than in the past -- and as long as this money is there, it's going to be used. In a free market, nothing can stop this. The same thing is true in the corporate world.

Unfortunately, this is a hard problem, and not one that Congress is anxious to tackle. But it's the core issue, of which growing income inequality and skyrocketing CEO pay is only a symptom. The question isn't how to put our fingers in this dike -- as long as the ocean of money is rising, we're always going to find that we don't have enough fingers to do any lasting good -- but how to increase the bargaining power of ordinary workers. This will increase middle income wages (the main thing we ought to be concerned about anyway) which in turn will lower the sea level of money sloshing around in corporate treasuries and automatically rein in CEO compensation. Unions can't really do this job anymore, and so far nothing has taken their place. Until we find something, though, all we have are fingers in the dike.

THE BATTLE FOR NAJAF....The New York Times reports on the recent battle between Iraqi government forces and the previously obscure "Soldiers of Heaven" that took place in Najaf over the weekend:

Iraqi forces were surprised and nearly overwhelmed by the ferocity of an obscure renegade militia in a weekend battle near the holy city of Najaf and needed far more help from American forces than previously disclosed, American and Iraqi officials said Monday.

....Only a month ago, in an elaborate handover ceremony, the American command transferred security authority over Najaf to the Iraqis.

....Among the troubling questions raised is how hundreds of armed men were able to set up such an elaborate encampment, which Iraqi officials said included tunnels, trenches and a series of blockades, only 10 miles northeast of Najaf. After the fight was over, Iraqi officials said they discovered at least two antiaircraft weapons as well as 40 heavy machine guns.

Over at Outside the Beltway, Dave Schuler comments, "Aren't large pitched battles like this characteristic of insurgencies that believe they are on the upswing? Not particularly good news." I don't know if we can really draw that conclusion from this single action, but it's a thought worth pondering.

THE FUEL ECONOMY SHUFFLE....For reasons that escape me, Gregg Easterbrook has made it his life's work to insist that George Bush is a beacon of environmentalism who just can't catch a break from a liberal establishment that won't give him credit for his good works. I first wrote about this three years ago, and concluded that his misrepresentations and special pleadings on this subject were so egregious that nothing further he said about it should be trusted without independent verification.

Today Easterbrook is at it again, claiming that Bush's recent call for higher mileage standards has been unfairly ignored:

This should have been Page One headline material -- PRESIDENT CALLS FOR DRAMATIC MPG REGULATIONS. Instead, most news organizations pretended Bush's mpg proposal did not exist, or buried the story inside the paper, or made only cryptic references to it.

....Bush proposed that the CAFE standard grow 4 percent stricter per year....Improve on 21 mpg by 4 percent annually for 10 years, and the number rises to 31 mpg. If the actual fuel economy of new vehicles were 31 mpg, oil-consumption trends would reverse -- from more oil use to less.

Easterbrook is right: if corporate average fuel economy rose 4% a year for ten years, that would be a huge improvement and Bush would deserve enormous credit for making it happen. But as always with Bush, the devil is in the details, something that "most news organizations" are well aware of. For your edification, here are the details:

• Bush is insisting that Congress get out of the CAFE business. Instead, the Bush administration itself will set future standards "based on cost/benefit analysis, using sound science, and without impacting safety." Pardon my cynicism, but this doesn't sound like a way of increasing CAFE standards. It sounds like a way of preempting a newly Democratic Congress from setting strict standards and instead allowing the administration to create toothless, industry-friendly rules with lots of loopholes. "Cost/benefit" and "sound science" are movement conservative buzzwords that are usually pretty reliable indicators that the con is on.

• Bush's plan is to switch from average fuel economy standards to "attribute-based" standards. That is, instead of a firm overall target, car manufacturers will have flexible targets for different vehicle classes, along with the ability to trade "CAFE credits" if they don't feel like meeting even those.

• That 4% per year increase in fuel economy? It's an "assumption," not a commitment. "The Secretary of Transportation will determine the actual standard and fuel savings in a flexible rulemaking process."
  

Look. We've been around the block on this kind of stuff before: great sounding promises from Bush followed by little in the way of serious rulemaking/funding/legislative action. I'm not sure why Easterbrook pretends not to know this, but the rest of us should keep our hands on our wallets until Bush unveils firm proposals that put some meat on these bones.

If Bush turns out to be sincere, then I'll be suitably astonished and I promise to eat a healthy helping of crow. But I'm not holding my breath. Even granting John Dingell's longtime aversion to increasing CAFE standards, I'm not willing to turn the CAFE keys over to Bush at just the time that we finally have a Democratic Congress that might turn out to show some spine on this issue. Because Easterbrook is absolutely right about one thing: "Nothing the United States can do in energy policy is more important than an mpg increase."

THE DEATH OF GLACIERS....For some reason, global warming skeptics are fond of claiming that glaciers aren't really shrinking. Usually they do this by cherry picking a single glacier somewhere that's been gaining mass, or by suggesting that the shrinkage is due to purely local problems. But it's not so. A broad look at glaciers throughout the world shows that not only are glaciers shrinking, but the shrinkage is accelerating:

The World Glacier Monitoring Service, which continuously studies a sample of 30 glaciers around the world, says the acceleration is down to climate change.

.... The latest survey, just released, shows accelerating decline. During 2005, this sample of 30 glaciers became, on average, 60-70cm thinner.

This figure is 1.6 times more than the average annual loss during the 1990s, and three times faster than in the 1980s.

More here on MoJo's new environment and health blog, Blue Marble.

"PLAME" vs. "WILSON"....I'm not going to blog obsessively about the Scooter Libby trial since so many other people are doing it far better than me, but here's a snippet from Marcy Wheeler's rough transcript of the prosecution's questioning of Ari Fleischer today:

P: Was anything discussed?

Fleischer: ....What I recall Libby saying to me, reiterated that VP did not send Wilson. Amabssador Wilson got sent by his wife, she works at CIA, works in CPD, I recall that he told me her name. This is hush hush this is on the QT.

....P: Her name, how did he describe her name?

Fleischer: I believe he said Valerie Plame.

This was on July 7, 2003. Four days later Robert Novak wrote a column in which he outed "Valerie Plame" as a CIA operative. Not "Valerie Wilson," the name she used socially, but "Valerie Plame," her maiden name and one that she used only on agency business. Novak says he used that name because he looked up Joe Wilson's biography in Who's Who, discovered Valerie's maiden name there, and for some reason decided to use that name in his column. This was despite the fact that the whole point of his column was that Wilson had been sent to Niger as part of some nepotistic boondoggle arranged by his wife.

I've never believed the Who's Who story because it makes no sense. Why deliberately use someone's maiden name when it's not the name she normally goes by? Rather, I've always figured that somebody in the Bush administration used the name Plame and gave it to Novak, but for some reason Novak doesn't want anyone to know that. And sure enough, Fleischer's testimony makes clear that the name "Plame" was the one known to people inside the White House. If that's the name Libby used, then it's the name everyone else used too.

You can ignore all this if you want. Novak's use of the name "Plame" has always been one of my pet obsessions in this story, and I continue to think it's the key to something. Maybe eventually we'll find out what. Maybe even today.

REVISITING THE SURGE....Remember how President Bush's supporters bitterly complained last month when critics claimed that the "surge" in Iraq was just a desperate ploy cooked up because both withdrawal and doing nothing were politically unacceptable? Remember how they claimed that in reality it was inspired not by political cynicism but by the sober military recommendations of Frederick Kagan and Gen. Jack Keane?

That was then. Here's Frederick Kagan now:

This is not our plan. The White House is not briefing our plan.

Back to political cynicism then? If neither the joint chiefs of staff nor the commanders on the ground in Iraq backed the plan, and if Kagan says Bush's plan isn't the one he and Keane proposed, then whose forehead did it spring from? Dick Cheney's?

CULINARY SLEUTHING....Who invented the hamburger? Apparently it's the bun that's the key to this question, not the meat. Josh Ozersky investigates, and Harold & Kumar will be delighted to learn who deserves the honor. The rest of us, not so much.

IRANIAN APOCALYPSE UPDATE....So how is Iran coming on that nuclear bomb they're supposed to be building? Here's the Telegraph a few days ago:

A senior European defence official told The Daily Telegraph that North Korea had invited a team of Iranian nuclear scientists to study the results of last October's underground test to assist Teheran's preparations to conduct its own -- possibly by the end of this year.

....Intelligence estimates vary about how long it could take Teheran to produce a nuclear warhead. But defence officials monitoring the growing co-operation between North Korea and Iran believe the Iranians could be in a position to test fire a low-grade device -- less than half a kiloton -- within 12 months.

Sounds bad. But here's the Observer on Sunday:

Iran's efforts to produce highly enriched uranium, the material used to make nuclear bombs, are in chaos and the country is still years from mastering the required technology.

....The detailed descriptions of Iran's problems in enriching more than a few grams of uranium using high-speed centrifuges -- 50kg is required for two nuclear devices -- comes in stark contrast to the apocalyptic picture being painted of Iran's imminent acquisition of a nuclear weapon with which to attack Israel. Instead, say experts, the break-up of the nuclear smuggling organisation of the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadheer Khan has massively set back an Iran heavily dependent on his network.

So Iran is either going to test a bomb in a few months or a few years or maybe never. Take your pick.

Meanwhile, in Haaretz, Yossi Melman basically confirms the Observer's story, reporting that Iran has indeed made very little progress installing new centrifuges at its Natanz enrichment plant. However, he proposes two possible explanations:

One view is that Iran is having difficulty manufacturing, operating and controlling the enrichment process....But there is of course another possibility, whereby Iran clandestinely built another uranium enrichment facility in a secret location, where it has already installed the necessary number of centrifuges and verified that they work properly.

Again, take your pick. I think I can guess which one is likely to get more media attention.

THE NOISE MACHINE....Today in the New York Times, David Kirkpatrick runs down the story behind the bogus report of Barack Obama's supposed early education in an Indonesian madrassa. It's mildly interesting (Insight magazine is no longer part of the Washington Times -- who knew?), but it turns out that it's mostly wasted. A single quote from Insight editor Jeffrey Kuhner pretty much tells the whole story:

"I said, 'That is a sexy story, if you can confirm it,' " Mr. Kuhner recalled. After Insight posted the article on Jan. 17, Mr. Kuhner said, he was disappointed to see that the Drudge Report did not link to it on its Web site as it has done with other Insight articles. So, as usual, he e-mailed the article to producers at Fox News and MSNBC.

And that was that. Your media machine at work.

ROGER!....I dunno. I used to think Roger Federer was the best tennis player on the planet, but I'm not so sure anymore. I think he may be the best tennis player in the galaxy.

DO WE SAVE ENOUGH?....Do Americans save enough? Considering that the national savings rate has been declining for decades and is now actually negative, the answer seems pretty likely to be "no." Today, though, the New York Times reports that "a small band of economists" holds the contrarian view that Americans actually save too much. Shazam!

But what a peculiar article. If you read through it, it presents a grand total of three pieces of evidence for this view. Here they are:

• A study of the generation born between 1931 and 1941 "revealed that at least 80 percent had accumulated more than enough wealth for retirement."

  This is absurd. This cohort is one of the most singular generations in American history: they were born during the Depression, had famously high savings rates, came of age during the go-go 60s, often had generous pensions, and had a very high Social Security payout compared to the taxes they paid in. Of course most of them had enough wealth for retirement. This is like studying the NBA and reporting back that Americans are taller than you think.

• Another study found that "88 percent of retirees age 51 and older had adequate wealth."

  Again, this means nothing. Almost by definition, retirees between the age of 51 and 65 are those who have saved enough to retire comfortably. The ones who haven't (the vast majority) aren't retired yet and are automatically excluded from this study. As for the retirees over age 65, they're part of an older generation that we already know had high savings rates. [UPDATE: See below for a correction.]

• Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor, thinks people save too much.

  Why? The article doesn't really say, except to tell us that Kotlikoff has invented his own retirement planning software that he's trying to market. His selling point is that his software produces different results than the calculators used by most financial planning firms.
  

So: two meaningless studies and one guy who's trying to sell a software package. What a ridiculous piece. It's possible that Kotlikoff is right, and I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the retirement industry overstates the savings most people need. Still, the broad evidence suggests that the current generation of American workers doesn't save enough, and this article does nothing to suggest the broad evidence is wrong. Who let this through the copy desk?

UPDATE: The second study is here. It appears that the authors actually say not that 88% of retirees over age 51 have adequate wealth for retirement, but that 88% of all households with one member over age 51 have adequate wealth for eventual retirement. So my initial criticism doesn't apply. Their definition of "adequate wealth" can be challenged, of course, but that's a separate issue.

THE FLEISCHER FILES....So why did Ari Fleischer agree to spill his guts in the Scooter Libby trial in return for immunity from prosecution? Slate's Seth Stevenson reports from the courtroom:

Turns out Fleischer saw a story in the Washington Post suggesting that anyone who revealed Valerie Plame's identity might be subject to the death penalty. And he freaked.

Which just goes to show: sometimes inaccurate reporting has its uses. Monday should be fun.

UPDATE: Swopa corrects the record here. Fleischer may have freaked, he says, but probably not over the prospect of getting the chair.

THE LOBBY....Is New Republic editor-in-chief Marty Peretz one of the most grating writers on the planet? You bet. Is he a grating racist writer as well? It sure seems like it, but since I do my best to avoid reading anything he writes I'm not in the best position to say. However, if you're interested in further opinions on this subject check out Chait, Yglesias, Greenwald, and Klein. And Ogged, who says:

Yglesias deserves a ton of credit for taking on Peretz and people who are quick to charge anti-semitism. Only a smart, tough Jew could have done it, and Yglesias has been up to the task.

Right. But this is kid stuff. Discussing Marty Peretz's personal demons is certainly entertaining for us onlookers, but what started this whole fracas was Matt's original column, which defended Wesley Clark's belief that war with Iran is becoming increasingly inevitable because, even though the broad Jewish community is divided on the issue, "there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to the office seekers." Matt concurs that the Jewish community is divided, and goes on to back Clark on the issue of rich money men as well:

It's also true that most major American Jewish organizations cater to the views of extremely wealthy major donors whose political views are well to the right of the bulk of American Jews, one of the most liberal ethnic groups in the country. Furthermore, it's true that major Jewish organizations are trying to push the country into war.

But is it? It sure seems like a topic that deserves more than some casual drive-by character assassination (e.g., "no offense, but you remind me of Charles Lindbergh," which is very close to a Godwin's Law violation from Jonah Goldberg). If this is really the topic at hand, then let's hear the arguments from all sides. 5,000 words from all contestants by Monday, please.

POSTSCRIPT: I also have a related question. When Clark talked about pressure being channeled to "office seekers," I assume he was making a claim about pressure on Democratic office seekers, who might otherwise be expected to form a stronger counterweight to hawkish Republican policy. Is this everyone else's assumption too?

NO, YOU ARE NOT TRYING OUT FOR A FEDEX COMMERCIAL....This is one of my pet peeves too. At least, it used to be back when I had a job where I got lots of voice mail. Today, not so much. But still.

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING....When I stopped doing weekly catblogging a couple of years ago, the truth is that it was because I had gotten bored of taking new cat pictures every week. That will probably happen again fairly shortly, but in the meantime catblogging is back!

Inkblot and Domino are getting along swimmingly. "Swimmingly" meaning only that they don't go into hysterics at the sight of each other, of course. They now eat dinner together, stare at each other in a curious cat-like way (see picture on left), but otherwise leave each other alone. Inkblot occasionally takes an odd little swipe at Domino, which she treats with a casual hiss and the contempt it deserves (which is exactly how Jasmine treated it too). It's sort of comical, really. Not only does Inkblot outweigh her by ten pounds, but it turns out that Domino's previous owners had her declawed. Inkblot could crown himself king of the household if he wanted, but luckily his little walnut brain isn't up to the task and peace reigns.

A few days after we got her Domino took to sleeping in the crack between two of the cushions on our sofa, which left no place for me to sit. So I went to the store and for ten bucks I bought a little oval cat bed that I put smack in the middle cushion. My goal was to train her to sleep there instead. Cats aren't famously suitable for such training, but in this case it worked out spectacularly well. In fact, now that she's settled in we can barely get her to move from her newfound bed. Last night, though, she apparently became convinced that something was under the bed and knocked it to the ground. Now she's treating it with suspicion. Only temporary, I hope.

KOSOVO....James Joyner comments on the latest from the Balkans:

Fifteen years ago, when then-Yugoslavia was falling apart in a series of ethic civil wars, those of us who opposed American military intervention argued that no significant threat was posed to U.S. vital interests. The caveat was always that, if things got out of hand in Kosovo, we'd have little choice but to jump in to prevent it becoming a regional crisis.

When that did indeed come to pass, the idea that Kosovo's independence would eventually follow would have seemed incredible. Now it's buried on A10 of the Post.

It's more "independence-lite" than actual independence at the moment, and it's not yet a completely done deal: Serbia (obviously) is opposed, Russia is holding out for concessions, and even Spain is nervous about the whole thing. Still, it looks increasingly likely that Kosovo is on track to become an independent country in the near future. More background here.

PSYCHOLOGY AND TORTURE....Here in America, doctors are officially opposed to torture. So are psychiatrists. But psychologists? Not so much. Arthur Levine reports in the current issue of the Monthly:

At around six-foot-eight and clad in combat fatigues, Kevin Kiley, the army surgeon general, cut an imposing figure. It was August 2006, and Kiley was in New Orleans to address the governing council of the American Psychological Association (APA) on the subject of psychology in the war on terror. It was Kiley's job to convince them not to bail out on interrogations.

....Ultimately, APA's governing council passed a blandly worded resolution that, most critically, left the definition of the phrase "cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment" up to current government interpretations.

This wasn't the first time the APA had declined to take a firm position against the administration's interrogation policies. After reports first surfaced in 2004 of psychologists participating in interrogation procedures, many of the APA's more progressive members demanded that the organization take a stand. In response, APA convened a task force to draw up guidelines for members but rejected efforts to ensure that they were specific and enforceable.

Why, then, was the leadership of the APA, an organization representing one of the most liberal professions imaginable, so willing to essentially acquiesce with a conservative administration's efforts to torture prisoners? The answer is that it fell into a classic Washington trade-group dilemma: It became so enmeshed in the gears of the federal machine that it could be influenced by a determined administration and ended up supporting policies that many of its own members opposed.

More at the link.

ESCALATION....The Bush administration has decided to take off the gloves in its fight with Iranian operatives working in Iraq. Our old policy was called "catch and release," but last year it was replaced with a tougher policy:

The new "kill or capture" program was authorized by President Bush in a meeting of his most senior advisers last fall, along with other measures meant to curtail Iranian influence from Kabul to Beirut

Advocates of the new policy -- some of whom are in the NSC, the vice president's office, the Pentagon and the State Department -- said that only direct and aggressive efforts can shatter Iran's growing influence. A less confident Iran, with fewer cards, may be more willing to cut the kind of deal the Bush administration is hoping for on its nuclear program. "The Iranians respond to the international community only when they are under pressure, not when they are feeling strong," one official said.

The twisted logic of escalation and threats is timeless. It virtually never causes anyone to back down, but it's timeless nonetheless. Aviation Week reports:

Iran has converted one of its most powerful ballistic missile into a satellite launch vehicle....The Iranian space launcher has recently been assembled and "will liftoff soon" with an Iranian satellite, according to Alaoddin Boroujerdi, the chairman of the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission.

....Although designed as a technology demonstrator, the planned satellite launch would be a potent political and emotional weapon in the Middle East.

So what's Plan B?

PHASE II....November's election victory seems to have given a newfound spine to Senate Intelligence Committee chair Jay Rockefeller:

Vice President Dick Cheney exerted "constant" pressure on the Republican former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee to stall an investigation into the Bush administration's use of flawed intelligence on Iraq, the panel's Democratic chairman charged Thursday.

...."It was just constant," Rockefeller said of Cheney's alleged interference. He added that he knew that the vice president attended regular policy meetings in which he conveyed White House directions to Republican staffers.

And how's that Phase II investigation going now that Democrats are in charge of the committee? "The administration needs to be held accountable," Rockefeller says. Stay tuned.

MORE WAR....Chuck Schumer:

I think Iraq will not be as strong an issue in the 2008 elections. I think the surge will fail and the president will have no choice but to begin removing troops.

Atrios responds:

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Iraq will certainly be the central issue of the 2008 election.

Please. Explain. This. To. Them.

To which I can only add: And Iran too. Be prepared.

REPUBLICANS ONLINE....Micah Sifry has taken a look at online activism and says that Democratic presidential candidates are way ahead of their Republican counterparts. Part of the reason, he thinks, is that Republicans are clueless about the net:

By and large, none of the Republican presidential candidates appear to be making a serious effort to garner support online through MySpace or Facebook; nor do they appear to have much outreach to blogs going; nor do any of them have a clue about Flickr. In fact, while several of the Democratic sites have front page links to many of those sites (and others), I don't think I saw one on any Republican site. Is entrepreneurial behavior dead in the Republican party?

But even this doesn't explain the massive online imbalance in favor of Democrats. Sifry's conclusion? "The Republican field just isn't generating as much enthusiasm online as the Democrats."

That sounds right to me. Aside from the obvious fact that Democrats are hungrier than Republicans because they've been out of office since 2000, the Republican field is remarkably weak this cycle. Compared to Democrats, who have half a dozen genuinely strong contenders, John McCain is really the only high-profile candidate they've got, and even he's hardly setting the world on fire. It's pretty amazing, really. From being on top of the world a mere two years ago, Republicans are having trouble just treading water these days.

CAMPAIGN RHETORIC....Is soaring campaign rhetoric enough? Atrios says this:

Yes, I'd like to know that Barack Obama was truly committed to a health care plan which matched his rhetoric on the subject, but presidential campaigns, especially this far out, aren't won on policy documents.

I agree completely, but I still think there's an important distinction to be made here between cheap campaign rhetoric and serious campaign rhetoric. Among Republicans, cheap campaign rhetoric includes things like attacks on activist judges or support for a cultur